Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel

by Tori Whitaker

  Had my mother suffered this medical complication? Not all women have babies the way alley cats squirt out kittens.

  I felt my baby flutter. It was the most wonderful sensation in all the world.

  Had Mama ever lost a baby midterm? Or, heaven forbid, delivered a stillborn?

  2015

  Jane crumbled saltines into a hot bowl of vegetable soup. Kelsey and I had convinced her to stop back at my place for lunch after water aerobics. How could Jane decline when I’d made vegetarian vegetable soup, without the beef, just for her? I’d stirred up the batch the night before just in case we all got together. Mother Glenn had taught me that second-day soups always tasted better.

  “You guys,” Kelsey said, her hand on her stomach. “I feel flutters.”

  It was still too early for Jane or me to see or feel the movements by touching. But it was wonderful to know this grandchild was alive and kicking.

  “The baby likes your soup, too,” Jane said to me. Sweetness. We both had a baby to look forward to—providing nothing drastic happened to Jane.

  “Mom,” Kelsey said to Jane, trying to keep the tone upbeat. “I believe you’re going to be fine. I really do. But you need to get a mammogram. Fast.”

  “Honey, you just focus on your own well-being. You already have one other person to care for. I’m capable of handling myself.”

  “You just moved here,” I said. “Do you even know where to go?”

  Jane glared. I flinched. I couldn’t take confrontation right now. I couldn’t.

  Kelsey got her cell phone out and started tapping with two thumbs. “There’s an imaging center in the women’s health complex where I get my annual pap.”

  “I told you,” Jane said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Mom, seriously? Let’s just give these people a call. I’m not leaving until you have an appointment.”

  Jane put her spoon in the bowl with a clang. “Wasn’t it you the other day who said you didn’t want to go anywhere near a hospital? Nor machines? Now you’re cramming doctors down my throat?”

  “Jane, she’s just—”

  “I know what she’s doing, Mom.”

  Jane took her bowl to the sink, leaving half of her soup untouched. My own appetite fizzled.

  Kelsey keyed more numbers into her phone. “Hello, I’d like to make an appointment,” she said. Jane folded her arms across her chest. “For my mother.”

  Jane returned to the table, stiff, once Kelsey had hung up. Jane said, “Aren’t I the one who’s supposed to be helping the aging mother? Not the other way around, with my own daughter helping me?”

  I bristled at the word aging. But I agreed. Jane shouldn’t be the one we were all worrying about. “So what’d they say?” I asked Kelsey.

  “They won’t give her a screening mammogram, not since she’s already found a lump. She needs a diagnostic mammogram, and that takes a doctor’s order first. I’ll make an appointment for her with my doctor.”

  “Hello, I’m right here! You two are talking about me in the third person?”

  Her protest resonated; I’d never liked when someone did that to me.

  Jane pushed away from the table again and stormed to the front door. “How did I manage to take care of myself for twenty years in Georgia without you two hovering around? Next thing you know, you’ll be whipping out the Vicks VapoRub or hot mugs of Ovaltine.” The door slammed.

  My eyes locked with Kelsey’s. “She won’t be gone long,” Kelsey said. “She didn’t take her purse or her keys.”

  “Or her coat,” I said. “She’s going to need her coat or she’ll catch her death of cold.”

  Jane was sitting on the stoop by my mums when I found her. Pitiful thing. It’s hard to see your child look so alone. Downcast. It’s worse knowing you pretty much put her there. She slipped on her coat.

  “What do you say you and I go for a walk?” I said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Would I kid about that?”

  She reluctantly agreed. Jane and I hadn’t strolled this neighborhood together in many years. It had been 1955 when Dennis built the ranch house in which I still lived. There were Gunnison prefabs that he had built on our street, but our house was the first custom home we’d designed. Janie had been five. Dennis had later transitioned the business from all prefabs to Custom Homes by Glenn. He would have loved to have built other houses for us, too, but I’d resisted it. I wouldn’t shuffle Janie around as I’d been shuffled as a child. And I hadn’t needed anything bigger or fancier in a home. I had needed stability.

  I still did. Jane and I walked in silence, but we were together.

  We passed Pauline’s old house next door, and I got a pang. The Irvings had relocated here, too. A young family had moved in after my friend died. Farther up was an early Gunnison house, now painted yellow, and the owners had added on a sunporch a couple of years back. It favored their huge rear yard with old trees. Dennis would be pleased. Up a little ways more was another house I remembered him building as if it were yesterday—it had what Gunnison called the wind-o-wing that extended the space in the bedroom. One thing I loved about my neighborhood of Terrace Park was the variety of homes families here shared. Homes from before the 1920s. Homes that were updated or modern. As Jane and I walked slowly without speaking, I imagined I heard the trumpeting of elephants in the way she and I had pretended to do years ago.

  “Do you still hear the elephants out here?” Jane said, breaking our silence. I laughed out loud.

  “I do. Just now, as a matter of fact.” In the late 1800s a traveling circus had wintered here. The Terrace Park Historical Society had black-and-white photos of elephants roaming the fields before the neighborhood grew up.

  “I thought so. I heard them too,” Jane said. I caught a glimpse of her smile. We’d connected, and I breathed that feeling in. “Looks like it might rain,” she said.

  “Remember those black-and-red rubber boots you used to have?” I said.

  “Ha. The ones I left on the school bus because no other kids’ moms made them wear galoshes?”

  “You’ve always hated having to bundle up in the rain and cold.”

  “Or maybe we’ve just had issues over boots. You weren’t wild about my Nancy Sinatra go-go boots in high school either.”

  “No, I wasn’t. Nor the miniskirts you wore with them.” And my, that girl had had the legs.

  In the midst of this shared glimpse of lightness between us, it scared me more than I could measure to think that, in months ahead, all I might have left of her were my memories. And my regrets.

  We walked to the end of the block and turned back around. Quiet. Jane had been glib when she’d told us about her breast. But underneath she was frightened. Who wouldn’t be?

  “Janie—I mean, Jane. Sorry. You are going to be fine.” She needed to hear a positive outlook. I could do that for her.

  “I know. I know.” Her voice sounded hoarse. I hooked an arm through hers and was relieved that she let me.

  “Breast cancer doesn’t run in our family,” I said. “On either side.” I think I said it as much to reassure myself as to reassure her.

  “I’ve done a little research on my own,” Jane said. “Heredity isn’t a requirement. But, as Kelsey said, most lumps are, in fact, benign.”

  A car passed. The neighbors waved. For a split second I was deceived into everything feeling normal.

  “But in women over sixty years old,” Jane said, and I felt her arm tense up, “the chance of a lump being cancerous is higher.”

  I felt sick, the way I had one day long ago: I had heard bad news outdoors that day—in Eden Park, not here in my neighborhood—but I had lost control and vomited over and over right there in the grass.

  I held myself together now. I did it for Jane.

  “Mom, you know what bothers me even more than the fact that Daddy didn’t survive his cancer, and I—”

  “That was years ago,” I said, cutting her off. “They’ve come so far
with treatments since then, especially with breast cancer.” I tried to keep my optimistic front, but inwardly I was scared to death.

  “I don’t want to waste away to nothing the way Daddy did,” Jane said, a hint of her Southern twang coming out. “That’s for sure. But that’s not what I’m really afraid of. And it’s not so much that I’m scared to lose my breasts.” She stopped and turned to me, a sudden wind making her thickly lashed eyelids flutter.

  “What if I don’t live to see my grandchild grow up? What if I die before Kelsey’s baby is even born?”

  I shook my head no, no. “That can’t possibly happen,” I said decisively, as if it were scientific fact. But I was frightened for her. Bad things happened all the time.

  CHAPTER SIX

  August 1949

  I was ready to tell Dennis of my complication. I’d read up on pyelitis in a maternity manual and accepted its treatment. I knew it might mean hauling myself out of bed to urinate three times a night. The part about slowing down was another thing. I wouldn’t broach that topic.

  Dennis took the news without much alarm, based in part, I’d believed, on how smoothly I’d delivered it.

  Or so I’d thought.

  “Honey,” he said as he’d crumbled a thick leftover square of corn bread into a glass of cold milk. “I’ve been thinking.” He dunked his spoon into the milk mixture, gave it a stir, and stuck a sloshy spoonful into his mouth. Corn bread and milk was a favorite among all the Glenns. They ate it like late dessert. I didn’t care for soggy food.

  “Thinking about what?” I said, scraping the remnants of macaroni and cheese off his dirty plate onto mine, preparing to clear the table.

  “Maybe you should cut back,” he said. “Let me take over the paperwork duties for Gunnison. You can rest more. Reserve your energy these last three months before the baby comes.”

  I felt my blood pressure hike. I was unprepared for the suggestion, no matter how reasonable my cutting back on work might sound. There were plenty of duties I could handle from home anyway. There were calls to make. Ledgers to manage. Bills to pay. I accidentally let the fork I’d been scraping with clang to the plate. He startled.

  “Sweetheart, I’m fine. Dr. Welch did suggest I slow down a bit,” I admitted, “but he doesn’t really know what I’m capable of. You do. Yes, I’ve had a little heartburn and whatnot, and now this new hiccup. I’ve done some research. It’s not as if we learned our baby is breech.”

  “Just think about it,” Dennis said. He looked thoughtful. “Especially given that the doctor recommended it. I can let the girl answering the phones help more with something. You could show her a few of your tricks.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I was more angry or hurt. I felt as if the king had just told the queen that her lady’s maid might suit better, and he’d next be announcing to his kingdom—about his queen—“Off with her head.” I stared him down. Taking care of the Gunnison Homes by Glenn accounts was my work.

  “Dennis, I’m fine. I’ll stay fine. I’m pregnant, that’s all,” I said. “Your mother worked through every pregnancy. Remember? Have you seen any slips in my output?”

  “Of course not. I was only trying to help, honestly.” He leaned to kiss me. “Please don’t be sore.”

  We never spoke of the complication or my work again. Until we had to—after my hospital stay.

  Among other manuals for mothers, Pauline and I had read British Dr. Grantly Dick-Read’s groundbreaking book about “natural childbirth”—about how women shouldn’t fear labor, for it was never intended to be painful. Partly rooted in Darwinian theories and partly on primitive societies, the doctor advocated relaxation methods and controlling one’s emotions to improve the birthing experience.

  But in the end, there was nothing “natural” about either Pauline’s or my first deliveries.

  She had gone the “I don’t want to feel a thing” route—Demerol, scopolamine, forceps, and all.

  Less than three months later, it was my turn.

  When I arrived at the hospital that November of 1949, a nurse asked me to sit in a wheelchair. Dennis kissed me goodbye and rubbed his hand over my hair, his face nervously hopeful. He would get me admitted and go from there to the lounge where fathers gathered to wait. My contractions were six minutes apart. I had five or six minutes left until the next one. As I rode up that elevator with the quiet, middle-aged nurse—one floor, two floors, three floors with the elevator’s screeching of cables—I thought: This is it. No turning back. The time has come, and one way or another, this baby is on its way out.

  A bell rang, and the doors rattled open. I smelled cleanser and the wax on the spotless, shiny floor, and I heard an infant cry. Directly across was a sign with big, black, bold letters: MATERNITY WARD. There were no pictures of bunnies or duckies or teddies. The tiled hall was like a hall in high school, only with nurses in their starched white dresses and white stockings passing by, instead of teachers in suits and ties.

  “How are you doing?” the nurse asked.

  “I’m great,” I said, for as scared as I was—and I was scared—the only way I could answer was great, because the next time I would be in this chair, I knew I’d be heading back to the elevator, my arms cradling an infant boy or girl.

  The nurse rolled me to a single laboring room, but she said, “You’ll be in this room long enough to get prepped. That’s it.”

  My next contraction came, and it was a doozy. My head went back, my jaw tightened, my legs locked, my hands clutched the wooden arms of the chair, and my whole abdomen and buttocks and lower back tensed, tensed, tensed. I came out of it huffing.

  The nurse told me that before my next contraction I should have time to remove all my clothes, put on the nursing gown, use the toilet, and climb into the bed and lie on my back. Then she left the room.

  I followed her instructions with no time to spare.

  The pillow was cold, the top sheet crisp, the mattress hard. There was no blanket; I wouldn’t be here long enough for that, I supposed. I snuggled under the sheet. The walls were beige. The light dim. A ladder-back chair stood beside the bed, and I wished that Dennis, or Mama, was in it.

  The nurse returned and flipped on the bright ceiling lights. For what she planned to do to me next, she’d need better light to see.

  Pauline had warned me about the full shave. This hospital was a different one than hers, mine being outside of the city. I’d like to say that the shave wasn’t as bad as she said it would be. But it was. The nurse slid the sheet down to my knees. She slipped my airy cotton gown up over my hump, letting it puddle on my tender, swollen nipples and exposing parts of me below that no one but Mama and Dennis and Dr. Welch had ever seen. Goose bumps formed on my thighs with the chill. The tight skin of my belly felt warm to my hands, though, as I cradled my baby inside me.

  “Spread your legs apart, Mrs. Glenn,” the nurse said, “until I tell you to stop.” She wore white rubber gloves—which somehow made it easier on me than her touching me skin to skin—and she guided my legs by holding on to my knees.

  Another contraction came. “We’ll wait,” she said, and slipped the sheet back up to cover me. My gown stayed pooled on my breasts. And though she had covered me back up, I felt humiliated to shudder and rock with the pain with her beady eyes watching me. Afterward she pushed the flimsy sheet down again.

  “This is going to be a bit cold. Hold still,” she said. She applied lather while I stared straight up to the ceiling. “Now it’s important that you don’t move, Mrs. Glenn. I know it’s not comfortable, but no different than when you shave your legs.” I glanced at her then, and all I saw was the glint of the light on the blade that was four inches long and half an inch wide. That’s not something I’d ever take to my calves, I thought. I closed my eyes again and heard the swipes as much as I felt them—one swipe, two swipes, three swipes, and so forth. She removed the razor and dabbed me with a cool, wet cloth.

  “After your next contraction, it’s time for the enema,” she said.
I gritted my teeth through my next wave, while hearing her stir up the soap suds.

  When the prep was finally over, I was put in a rolling bed and pushed through the halls with merely a sheet covering me. Another bed passed coming from the opposite direction, the woman in it drenched in sweat and her hair a big tangle. At least a blanket covered her. I heard the labor room before I saw it—with its low murmur like that of the crowd when Dennis and I had approached the V-J Day celebration from blocks away. The nurse swung open the door, and I raised my head up to behold a large room, a ward in itself, with lights dipping from the ceiling at equal intervals—a room that, as I was soon to learn, held twenty laboring women.

  “Why is this room so crowded?” I asked.

  “It’s been like this since the war,” the nurse said. “So many babies, we can scarcely keep up.”

  There were two rows of narrow beds that faced each other end to end, but with an aisle running up the middle. Two men awkwardly slid my bed into a slot at the center of one row. One dropped a folded blanket on my feet. All the women’s heads backed to the walls. My metal-framed bed was less than four feet from the women on either side, where one of them wrenched in anguish, squealing as a contraction gripped her. I had no sooner shuffled under the welcome navy felt blanket than my own contraction took over.

  A different nurse came to my side. “I need to examine how far you’ve dilated,” she said in the manner of a gasoline attendant filling a tank. Then she proceeded to slip her gloved fingers under the covers, between my legs, and deep into my most private place.

  Over the course of ensuing hours, doctors went up and down both rows giving shots to the women. Nurses told us over and over to keep quiet. But there was a steady stream of moans and cries. I tried to follow the rules. But it hurt. We watched as every so often they wheeled an expectant mother away to a sterile delivery room. And a fresh patient was brought in. The maternity ward was an assembly line for newborns—the laboring women rolled along from station to station to station while doctors and nurses mechanically took their turns with the women to get the product out. A baby factory. Had Henry Ford still been alive, he would have patted himself on the back.