She sinks onto a damask, pillow-festooned love seat. She shuts her eyes. Not that she wants to kill the messenger, but she’d gladly obliterate the message that has arrived in the guise of her best friend.
Don’t worry in advance, her father—the unrevised first-edition Henry Stevens—used to warn. As if it’s a prescription she could fill. Funny, Sam’s developing a social life, going out, learning a new skill, following her directions in the manual. The manual he has never read. Will never read. Maybe the words in her underwear drawer transferred themselves to Sam’s brain subliminally while he was asleep on the other side of the room. She pictures winged paragraphs perching along Sam’s neurons like birds on a cable strung between telephone poles.
And the new hire? What a ridiculous term, conjuring up images of a cowgirl in a crappy western, pushing through the saloon doors with a Howdy, pardner and ordering a sarsaparilla. It’s a twist that even the ever-suspicious Ursula didn’t anticipate. But she’s young, she’s pretty, she’s flirting with Sam, to the extent that Megan felt compelled to tell her mother—and she has a small child. Would Sam be tempted? Would the new, improved Sam choose another woman because of a dowry that includes a ready-made kid? Perhaps she doesn’t know her husband as well as she thinks she does.
In her mother’s bedroom, she finds the card Dr. Albright’s nurse filled out, the card Ursula insisted on keeping. She dials the number for the fertility specialist. “Dr. Feld’s office,” a voice answers, “please hold.”
She holds. Music blasts her ear. “Tea for Two.” Followed by “God Bless the Child.”
She doodles on Ursula’s notepad, engraved with her name above the masks of comedy and tragedy. She draws sundaes and sandwiches, sperm and eggs, and a rough sketch of the combi until she hears a click, followed by Your call is important to us and will be answered in the order in which it was received.
“Time is of the essence,” she yells into the receiver. Since it’s impossible to leave tonight unless she charters a private jet—absurd even for Ursula, who would have to be the mistress of a Greek shipping magnate—she hopes to be squeezed in during morning hours before train, bus, car, plane, sled, or wings of a dove deposit her where she’s meant to be.
Your call …
“Fuck,” she shouts. She’s covered four pages of Ursula’s notebook with sandwich designs, added mustaches to comedy and tragedy, and trimmed her cuticles by the time an actual human being finally breaks in on “Sweet Child of Mine.”
“May I help you?” the voice asks.
“Yes, this is Arabella Stevens-Strauss. I’d like to switch next week’s appointment to tomorrow morning, if at all possible. I’ve been called out of town on an emergency.”
The voice drops several degrees in temperature. “Do you have any idea?”
“Any idea what?”
“How people wait years to see Dr. Feld. They travel from all over the world. From Thailand. From China. From Saudi Arabia. From New Zealand. The doctor is booked solid well into next spring.” She clicks her tongue. “And beyond!”
Beyond what, Annie wants to ask, the great beyond? Instead, she clamps her mouth shut. To explain she has to hurry home to save her marriage will not cut any ice with Miss Icicle.
The voice rustles some papers. “Ah, I notice you were referred by Dr. Albright and that you’re the daughter of … never mind.” Apparently, any blood ties to Ursula Marichal are not enough to win an earlier appointment with Dr. Feld when the wife—wives—of a Saudi prince must wait a year to put their legs up in stirrups on Dr. Feld’s paper-covered examining table.
Now Annie hears the tapping of a keyboard. “Well”—the receptionist’s voice warms slightly—“because you were sent by a renowned colleague, perhaps Dr. Feld can turn you over to a physician he trained.”
“Oh, that would be wonderful,” Annie gushes, eating crow. “Would Dr. Feld be able to recommend someone in Maine?”
The voice sniffs. “Maine? How … unusual. I’m going to put you on hold.”
Annie has nearly finished the New York Times crossword by the time the voice comes back. “You’re in luck. Dr. Feld supervised a brilliant OB-GYN who’s an ace at high-risk pregnancy and fertility. He now practices at the Maine Medical Center in Portland. I’ve secured you an appointment for tomorrow afternoon.”
“I am so grateful,” Annie genuflects. She adds the name and address to her scribbled transportation notes.
She’s about to book herself on a plane to Portland at a last-minute inflated premium rate and figure out the connections later when she hears Ursula’s key turn in the lock.
“Bonjour, darling,” her mother says, Bergdorf’s bags dangling like ornaments off a Christmas tree, “I’ve had a most satisfying little shopping expedition—” She stops, studies her daughter. “Is something wrong?”
A litany of what’s wrong pours out in a mishmash of choked sobs: Joe’s Mary who died, the combi, Sam’s entreaties devolved into disdain, Rachel’s call, the new hire, the canceled appointment, the urgency to get home …
She’s sure Ursula will advise her to reinstate the appointment, provided the next wait-listed candidate isn’t already on a plane from Beijing. What’s a few more days, she’ll point out, when you’re granted an audience with the guru of gynecological excellence? A New York guru. But her mother surprises her. She drops her bags at her feet and rushes to the phone. “Of course you must go home, darling. ASAP. One lesson I learned from your father is absence does not make the heart grow fonder. I’ll be damned if I’ll see my own marital history repeat itself with you and Sam. Ever since that enchanting wizard of a technician put the car service on my speed dial, I find it requires only seconds to make arrangements. Let me engage a driver to take us to Portland and then on to Passamaquoddy.”
“Us?” Annie asks.
“Naturally. What kind of a mother would leave you on your own at such a critical time?”
She’s about to reply the Ursula kind of mother. She’s about to add I can’t have a houseguest in the room down the hall when my marriage is under threat, but Ursula is already a step ahead. “I’ll stay with Ambrose, darling. Perfectly proper,” she appends, “as it’s hardly our first date.”
* * *
The car pulls up to the medical building on Congress Street with fifteen minutes to spare before her scheduled appointment. The driver parks in the loading zone, where he opens up his copy of the Wall Street Journal. No doubt he’s a man with ambitions beyond chauffeuring aging actresses and anxious daughters across three state turnpikes.
Just inside the lobby, Annie and Ursula find the directory for Reproductive Medicine and Fertility Care Associates. Given her reprieve from lung cancer, is it greedy to tempt the gods by asking for more? Why can’t she just return to the way things used to be: her solid marriage, her endearingly clueless husband, her fraught mother-daughter relationship, the unchanged and perfect Bunyan formula, the sad yet hard-won five-stages-of-grief acceptance of her childlessness?
When the elevator stops at the third floor, Annie freezes.
“Arabella,” Ursula coaxes, her voice a mixture of familiar impatience salted with a new, unfamiliar layer of compassion.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“Perfectly understandable. You’re scared.”
“More like catatonic.”
“Nonsense,” Ursula protests. “Without dismissing your genuine concerns … we’ve come this far; we cannot stop now.”
It’s the we that comforts Annie. The plural that tells her she’s not alone. Now Ursula’s firm push between her shoulder blades propels her over the threshold and toward whatever waits along the fluorescent-blazed green-and-white checkered corridor.
* * *
Nobody makes eye contact in the waiting room. They’re here for similar failures: failures in reproduction, failures at motherhood, failures of biology, when all over the world sperms are fertilizing eggs and babies are populating continents. They want what for most of the
ir sex is easy, intrinsic, ordained by nature. They are the small percentage excluded from the nursery, the playground, the PTA. They are the untouchables.
And she’s one of them.
All her medical records have been faxed ahead—Dr. Albright, Ambrose, the hospital accounts of her miscarriages, of the stillborn Baby Girl Stevens-Strauss. It’s a chronicle of catastrophe, a bad report card, an F in pregnancy, an F in childbirth. And, who knows, an F in good-wifery as well.
She studies the pictures on the wall: sailboats, rainbows, gardens, beaches—intended to comfort those who can’t be comforted. Her eyes stop at a painting of a saint. St. Gerard Majella notes a plate attached to the frame. His golden-haloed head lifts toward heaven; lilies festoon his feet, and he clutches, instead of the expected cross, a white handkerchief. An odd image to adorn a doctor’s office, but perhaps it’s a reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in medical philosophy.
Next to her, Ursula pretends to study a script, though she hasn’t moved beyond the single page her flamingo-colored fingernail marks. Annie takes out her phone and Googles Saint Gerard Majella. No surprise—he’s the saint of happy childbirth. A few months before he died, he dropped a handkerchief in the house of family friends. When the daughter tried to return it, he told her to keep it, that she might need it someday. Lo and behold, years later, close to losing her baby and her own life, she called for the handkerchief. Abracadabra! All pain disappeared, and she gave birth to a healthy child.
Annie clicks on the link to the Saint Gerard Store where she can buy an embroidered linen Hope Faith Prayer facsimile for seven dollars plus tax. She’s just about to enter her Mastercard numbers when her name is called.
Ursula marches into the doctor’s office ahead of her. Her mother’s wish to be present for such a personal and private appointment is not subject to negotiation but, in Ursula’s opinion, a fully ratified constitutional right.
The baby specialist, Dr. Revere, has a baby face—bright, open, red cheeked, blue eyed. His hands are as pink and dimpled as those of the Doughboys, setting Annie off on a mental tangent of awkward analogies between sandwich making and gynecological inspection. She forces herself to stop. What matters is skill and knowledge. She’ll have to trust that Dr. Feld trained his infant protégé well.
Dr. Revere stands up and introduces himself. He shakes her hand in a strong, firm clasp. He smiles, displaying a set of grown-up, chunky chipmunk teeth.
“I really appreciate your fitting me in,” Annie says.
“No student, past or present, of Stanley Feld’s would ever dare refuse his request.” He nods at Ursula.
“This is my mother, Ursula Marichal,” Annie says.
“You look familiar.” He checks the folder on the desk in front of him.
“My mother’s an actress,” Annie explains. “Maybe you saw her on the stage?”
“I imagine you’re far too busy saving people’s lives,” Ursula offers.
“That’s rather a grand way of putting it. Unfortunately, it’s true, a doctor’s schedule doesn’t leave much room for such pleasures.” He slicks down a cowlick, which pops right back up. “Of course, big cities offer more distractions than Maine. The reason I chose to live here.”
Ursula points to a photo of five towheaded children in a silver frame. “Are these yours?”
He grins. “Guilty as charged.”
Annie remembers Dr. O’Brien’s fourth baby, the Pez dispenser analogy. Are doctors more fertile than the normal population? Scientists should do a study on this phenomenon. She wonders if it’s unseemly to display photos of five children when his patients struggle for just one. Unless his wife had issues of her own and the kids are the happy-ending evidence of a cure.
“Such enchanting little faces,” Ursula trills. “And what could be a better advertisement for your practice.”
“Talk about a handful.” He smiles, then steers them to a cluster of seats by the window. Annie perches on the chair, the supplicant before the altar, the beseecher of St. Gerard, hoping for a miracle-producing handkerchief that not just anybody can purchase with a Mastercard.
Through the mullioned panes, she can see gulls circle. She spots boats in a harbor and a man in a yellow slicker hosing down a dock. There’s a world beyond these walls, she reminds herself, even though, right now, their little triumvirate feels vacuum sealed.
The doctor grabs a fat folder from the desk and sets it on his lap. “You’ve accumulated quite the file.”
She sighs. If only she were medically uninteresting.
Now Dr. Revere executes a getting-down-to-business flurry of throat clearing. “I’ve gone through your reports and tests, but I prefer to hear your history in your own words.”
Annie points to the file balanced on his knees. “Isn’t it all in there?”
“I find I learn the more crucial data from the patient herself.” He tilts his chin in Ursula’s direction. “If you’d rather your mother …”
Ursula huffs. “My daughter does not keep secrets from me.”
Annie is not about to turn on the one person who made it possible for her to come this far. It is comforting to have a familiar ally in unfamiliar territory. In an uninflected, un-Ursula voice, Annie narrates her most recent medical challenges: the lung biopsy, the diagnosis, the disappeared masses; then the pregnancies, miscarriages, the dashed hopes, the stillborn child.
Though she’s determined not to cry, it’s hard to ignore the boxes of Kleenex on the doctor’s desk, on the table between their chairs, on the shelf that bears the portrait of his kids. What better testament to all the tears these walls have witnessed. It must be the power of suggestion, because she starts to sob, triggering a chain reaction as Ursula herself turns into a veritable Niobe, outweeping her daughter and infuriating her.
Hey, I’m the patient here, Annie wants to shout. She remembers her father’s funeral, how Ursula demanded all the comforting even though she was no longer married to Henry, even though Annie was the only daughter and real mourner. For a time, I truly loved Henry Stevens, Ursula had written in her journal. Was she playacting the grieving widow, or did her mother, in her own Ursula way, also feel bereaved?
Dr. Revere waits a few tactful moments, then taps the folder. “It is a very good sign you were able to get pregnant,” he says. “A very good sign. It tells us that so many things are actually working.”
“What a refreshing point of view,” grants Ursula, daubing at her streaked mascara and blotched rouge.
“I need to do a pelvic exam. Would you mind waiting for your daughter here, Ms.—Miss—Mrs.—”
“Marichal!” Ursula harrumphs.
“Yes, Mrs. Merryshaw. She’ll be in the next room.” He points to a half-open door.
“My daughter requires my support.”
The doctor raises a questioning brow.
Annie shakes her head.
“Once my nurse comes in to assist, it might get a little crowded,” Dr. Revere explains. “I can send for some coffee, if you’d like.”
“My mother would love a cup of coffee.”
“Espresso?” Ursula asks.
“It can be arranged.”
Not that Miss Ursula Marichal (slash Merryshaw!), member in good standing of the Actors’ Equity, would ever tolerate plain old American java bubbling in an ordinary percolator. Still, espresso must seem like a small request compared to what Dr. Revere’s mentor might feel obliged to supply—a whole lamb on a spit or bowls of Beluga caviar.
Ursula turns to her daughter. “Even when you were a child, Arabella, you never wished me to give you a bath; you were that modest.”
Annie doesn’t point out that it was her father or the babysitter or the nanny who gave all baths. Could she imagine her mother toweling dry a dripping, howling two-year-old?
Ursula continues. “Of course, we theater nomads are used to sharing dressing rooms, walking around half-naked while the dresser straps us into a corset or a slinky slip. We view the
body as just one of our many instruments.”
“Yes, well, I wouldn’t know about such things”—the doctor smiles—“though maybe I should. At any rate, I’ll perform the exam and send your daughter for blood and urine tests. The labs are just down the hall. She’ll be out shortly.”
Dr. Revere is quick and efficient. Annie watches him through the crevasse of the mountain made by her knees while he wields his nearly painless speculum with a maestro’s grace. “Okay. All done. Why don’t you change back into your clothes and we’ll have a chat. Your mother will be just fine in the waiting room.”
Dressed, she sits in the chair in front of his desk like a penitent schoolgirl while he writes notes in that kind of scrawling penmanship peculiar to doctors—sentences she couldn’t decipher even if she could read upside down.
He poises his pen above his notepad. “A couple more questions. Have you ever observed a lacy rash on your wrists or knees?”
“Actually”—Annie touches her father’s watch, its restoration a tenth-anniversary present from Sam—“wristbands and bracelets tend to irritate my skin. I do get rashes, though I’ve never paid that much attention to the shape.”
“Any swelling in your legs or arms?”
“Not really. Well, maybe a bit from being on my feet all day.” She looks at his bright eyes, his dimpled hands, his neat desk, her fat folder into which he is now tucking his notes, the two rows of diplomas on the wall behind him. “Do you have any idea what’s wrong with me?”
“Whatever ideas I might have will need to be confirmed by the tests. There are some syndromes—one in particular—that fit your situation and are treatable. There may be hope.”
Her breath stops. “You mean …?” It is all she can do not to leap up from her chair and grab the doctor’s arm, snatch his notes, plead with him to reveal his thoughts. Hope. Wouldn’t it be the height of medical malpractice to grant hope to a patient when there is none? Especially without the saintly intervention of a handkerchief?
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