We were getting closer to being ready, and this bonded Dennis and me together despite my frustrations. There was time enough to fix those. We were married. And our marriage was more than a series of business decisions. Dennis and I had our baby’s names picked out. If Janie got a brother, his name would be Dennis Junior—Denny—and if she got a sister, her name would be Kathleen, and we’d call her Kathy. I imagined it would come out Kitty when little Janie tried to say her sister’s name. Dennis and I were head over heels excited for our expanding family.
I peeked in on Janie in her crib. After cooing and playing with her toes for some time—a by-product of “This little piggy went to market; this little piggy stayed home”—she had at last turned on her side and dozed off.
Tea was steeping in my kettle, and I poured myself a cup to soothe my nerves from the day before. I turned the radio on with the volume down low to listen to The Guiding Light. I tuned in just in time for the opening message from the sponsor: “Duz, for bright-white washes, without red hands.” During every episode, I mused about how every time a housewife bought that detergent, it put cash in Bob and Pauline Irving’s pockets. What was good for Procter & Gamble was good for our city—and good for my best friends.
With some effort, I lowered my walrus-like body into our red wool womb chair and heaved my swollen feet onto its matching red ottoman. Fifteen days left to go.
On the side table I’d laid the baby album I’d received at my shower. Its dimensions were smaller than a sheet of typing paper, and it was an inch thick. I removed it from its box, and it smelled of bindery glue. The cover was padded in pink satin with embossing in baby-boy blue. The Story of Our Baby.
I enjoyed wandering its pages, eager for the day to come when I’d fill them in with ink beginning on page one: “Baby’s Arrival.” There were decorative spaces for the name, the date of birth, the baby’s weight, the length, and more. There were cartoons of sweet cherubs with long, colored ribbons, pictures of lambs and puppy dogs, too.
Yes, I was ready to have this child. I was constipated. My back had had enough. My wedding band was so snug I’d have to use Ivory soap to get it off so my finger would quit hurting. My suitcase was packed for the hospital.
Dennis was ready as well. He kept the Chevy’s gas tank full. He stayed within earshot of a telephone as much as he could. And he’d bought a box of cigars to pass out to the guys.
Baby Glenn kicked. I lifted my top and watched him or her lean far to my right. Then Baby Glenn leaned back, getting comfortable. How I loved these moments. I caressed the stretched skin of my tummy so the baby would feel my energy. I hummed a lullaby, as I did every day, so he or she would know my voice. I cradled my baby inside my womb, so it would know I already loved it.
My date for admission was two weeks and one day away, unless this baby wanted to be introduced to the world ahead of schedule.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
March 1951
Baby Glenn was determined to be the early bird. It was past noon on March 23, and contractions were twenty-five minutes apart. I wasn’t scheduled for surgery for another three days. I had yet to track down Dennis. Pauline was getting her hair cut. Mother Glenn had hopped in the truck as soon as I phoned and was on her way to take care of Janie. Per Dr. Collins’s instructions in this case, I was to call his office at my first sign of labor.
“Dr. Collins is at the hospital,” the nurse on the telephone said. “Several other patients are in labor there already, and we’re short-staffed.”
“What should I do?” I said.
“I’ll alert the hospital so a bed can be reserved for your surgery. Prepare to go immediately, but await my return call.”
But Dr. Collins had drummed into me that if I didn’t have the operation early in my labor, my uterus could rupture. Was it my imagination, or had my last contraction felt stronger?
“I’m worried,” I told her.
“As I said, I’ll reach the doctor,” the nurse said, “and phone you back within fifteen minutes to confirm all is ready.”
I tried Dennis’s office again. My finger trembled as I cranked the rotary dial. Six, four, one, six.
Ring, ring, ring. Answer, please answer. But nothing.
“Tot, Ma, tot,” Janie said, and latched on to my leg. She wanted me to play “Trot, trot to Boston,” something Dennis usually did, bouncing her up and down on his crossed leg, while he sang a silly ditty. I hadn’t had the strength to play that game in a month.
I pried her arms off my calf and padded across the kitchen. “Here, baby. Want a treat?”
She worked her fingers as if making number fives over and over. “Pig noo, pig noo.” She confused the word fig with the pigs at the farm. I gave her a Fig Newton torn in two, one half for each hand. Let the crumbs fall where they may.
Janie was an advanced talker. I’d sit her on my lap and say, “Baby, baby,” and point to my belly, letting her know she’d soon be a big sister. She was too young to get all that, but she wandered the house saying, “Bah, bah, bah,” like a sweet little lamb.
The phone rang. I reached over the counter and grabbed it on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Hi, Millie.” It was Abbie. Oh my gosh, no. “Just checking on you. Heard Mother Glenn is on her way.”
“Abbie, I’m going to hang up now so Dennis can call me.” Click.
The phone instantly rang again. I prayed it wasn’t her calling back.
“I’m home.” It was Pauline. “Right next door if you need me.”
I inhaled deeply and let it all out. Relief. And then a contraction kicked in. Mild. “Guess what,” I said.
“What? No, no, Tommy, honey. Don’t play in the plant dirt.”
“This baby is coming.”
“Oh my gosh. Millicent, you need to get to the hospital.”
What I needed to do was get off the telephone, in case the nurse or Dennis was trying to call me back. So I did.
I checked the teapot-shaped clock above the refrigerator. Pauline could watch Janie or rush me to the hospital if need be. But I expected Mother Glenn in twenty minutes. I thought about arriving at the hospital, climbing into a wheelchair, being rolled by a nurse onto an elevator, and riding up to the floor with the big black letters: MATERNITY WARD. But I’d be in surgery instead of a single room with twenty women laboring at once. There would be the metal table on rollers, lined with a crisp, white sheet and sterile implements arranged neatly in a row: clamps and forceps, scissors and scalpels.
But it would all be worth it. I would come home with another beautiful baby. For that I’d go through it all again. And again. And again.
“You’re a star patient,” Dr. Collins had said just this week at my checkup. A star patient.
The telephone rang again. I didn’t know who I wanted it to be more—the nurse or my husband.
Dennis. I was so relieved. He’d just returned from meeting with a customer.
“I’m out the door,” he said in a rush. “Hang tight. Love you.”
And I loved him. We were on the cusp of being parents for the second time. I slipped the receiver back into its cradle and prayed for it to ring again. I was afraid to go to the bathroom for fear I’d miss the nurse’s directive.
Strangely, I remembered in that moment the carefree days of dating Dennis. When I lived with Mama and Opa, Dennis had had to call the Fischers upstairs—the only family in our building with a telephone—and little Adeline Fischer would come running down two tiers of stairs to get me, and I’d go running back up. Because of the party line, we never knew who else in the city was listening. Our calls were short and clipped.
How I needed a short, clipped call right now—public or private, I didn’t care—just a call from the nurse.
By twenty minutes to four, Dennis was helping me from the car under the hospital overhang. Mother Glenn had Janie at home, so I need not worry about that. I tottered inside the building with Dennis at my arm. He would park later. An orderly greeted us and apologized—they’d been s
o busy, no wheelchairs were available. We’d have to wait.
Soon I reclined on a rolling bed with metal tubing at head and foot alongside a wall in the wide, brightly lit beige hall of the ward. My bed was one in a row of beds positioned end to end, each filled with a woman whose stomach rose up out of the sheets like a whale.
Over an intercom a woman with an official voice called for doctors: “Code Blue in room fifteen.” Nurses in white dresses and hosiery, some with navy sweaters, whizzed by. I wondered how they kept their caps from slipping off, perched on the backs of their heads rather than on top.
I suddenly wanted to go back home. No, I wanted to be in the rose-floral bedroom at the farm. Safe in the Glenns’ old sleigh bed with piles of handmade quilts.
“My sister told me,” said a red-haired woman with a gravelly voice in the bed at the foot of mine, “that her hospital in Texas was equipped to deliver sixteen hundred babies last year, but their births topped six thousand.”
“Those poor mothers,” I said, with a mental image of women giving birth in the halls.
“You have to wonder,” said the redhead, “how many of those Texan babies might have gone home with the wrong mothers.”
We both laughed. But it wasn’t funny.
There was a hubbub in a room near where I’d been parked. Snippets of women’s voices floated from the delivery room to my ears:
“Lie still.”
“That pinches.”
“Calm down.”
“Please, you’re—”
“Control your hysterics now, Mrs. Lutz. Or do you want to give birth to a misfit?”
Silence.
That poor woman.
Click, click. Click, click.
A man’s dress shoes were coming my way from behind. Not the quiet, rubber-bottomed, white-polished shoes of a nurse.
The doctor wore a spiffy white coat, his name embroidered beneath the left front lapel in official blue letters. He was clean-shaven and deep-voiced.
“Nurse, what is this patient doing planted here?” He was talking to her while pointing to me.
“I’ll move her. Right away, Doctor.”
“And slow this patient down. Speed that one up. We can deliver only so many at a time.”
I didn’t appreciate the way this doctor ordered people around. But I was equally concerned that my own doctor, Dr. Collins, was nowhere in sight.
2015
Jane and I still waited in the doctor’s dimly lit office. She had welcomed the chance to get the ultrasound behind her on the same day. So had I.
“The weird thing about waiting,” Jane said matter-of-factly, “is how every minute you think: this could be it. This could be the day, the hour, the very minute I learn I’m going to die.”
Her words stabbed me. I felt the weight of every ticking minute, too, and I ached for her. I wanted to reach out and heal her with the palms of my hands and calm her innocent pinked face. This was the most revealing she’d been since we’d arrived. She trusted me to hear it, and the irony was that it made me feel closer than we’d been in years.
Yet what was I to say? Helpless with a capital H: that’s what I was. When Dennis was ill, I felt as if I were losing half of my own being. With Jane it felt as if I were losing all of myself. But I could not tell her that.
“My dear Jane, darling girl,” I said instead. “I love you so much.”
“I know you do,” she said quickly, warmly. And that meant more to me than had she said she loved me back. She turned to me then and added, “I know you do in your own way.”
My heart dropped. In my own way? Did that mean my love for her was lacking in someone else’s way? In hers?
I’d gone wrong somewhere with her. If I knew where, I’d have fixed us years ago.
Did our deeply rooted rift begin when she was a young girl? She’d lived through the worst part of my life without even knowing it. Yet my memories were filled with my being a good mother to her. Rare were the times I’d failed her, or so I thought, but given our unstable history it seemed that her bad memories held the most weight. Had the downfall between my daughter and me occurred when she was a teen? Or during her twenties, when she lived in the commune, before she brought Kelsey home? No, it was earlier than that. Had to be. In her midteen years our relationship became rocky, but Pauline had assured me it was common for mothers and daughters to squabble. But was it?
At age seventeen Jane ran away with a flock of flower children. She was in San Francisco in 1967 during the infamous Summer of Love. Dennis and I, beside ourselves with worry, had flown out to hunt her down. Save her. After two frantic weeks we’d spotted her while we rode the Gray Line bus—on the sightseeing company’s special hippieland tour. She was braless in a white blouse with long, flared sleeves, beads strung from her neck to her navel, and wide, bell-bottomed jeans with the hems ripped out, frayed and dragging the ground with filthy, shoeless feet. A long-haired guy nearby wore a tie-dyed shirt and held a protest sign that read, MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR. With a crown of daisies in her own hair, our daughter had proclaimed on that day that she was no longer Janie like a baby. She was to be called Joan, “like Joan Baez or Joan of Arc.” But I had laid down the law: “You’re seventeen. You’ll return with us, and you’ll return to school until I say otherwise, which is at least until your next birthday.” She’d looked to her father’s nod of concurrence and fumed. But Dennis’s soft touch had eventually convinced her to shorten her name to Jane, not change it altogether.
In the end something had changed. She had changed. And something had changed between us.
All I knew now was that we had to get Jane well. And she had to know my secret. I was more convinced than ever. She would never comprehend the fierceness of my love nor the depth of my devotion until she’d heard it.
Time. We needed time. Would the moon and the stars and the sky contrive to provide it?
I dipped into my handbag for a pack of mints and asked Jane to unwrap one for each of us. I’d woken up with my arthritic knuckles sore. With the nerves I had vibrating now, I couldn’t have opened the pack on my best day.
The new medical technician entered, and I watched her prepare the equipment. “Now, honey,” she said to my daughter, sounding as if she’d grown up in the South, where Jane had lived for a time. “This is going to feel a little bit cold at first.” Her “cold” had two round syllables. She applied gel to my daughter’s goose-pimpled skin so that the transducer could glide over easily. “Just relax. We’re only gonna do your left side. You can watch everything right up there.” She pointed to a computer screen on the wall.
The tech rolled her slick instrument from one place on Jane’s breast to another slowly, letting it rest in a few spots for longer periods, and I pondered what each pause meant. Had she come upon something? A spot? A mass? She studiously monitored a smaller screen beside Jane’s shoulder as she went back and forth as if stirring a pudding.
I honestly couldn’t interpret a thing.
Soon Jane got wiped up, and again we waited. Jane had been right. Every minute of every hour we waited for the ax to fall. But surely there was equal chance that the lump could be benign. Dear Lord God, help us focus on the positive.
The loud tinkling of a text on Jane’s phone startled us. It was Kelsey checking in. Jane texted back that she was still waiting.
There was a faint knock at the door. It was Dr. Patel. I could feel Jane and me both tensing up, our bodies shrinking as if we were lilies in snow. Was this to be the minute?
“That wasn’t bad, was it?” the radiologist said. “I have a couple of conclusions for you. First, we’ve confirmed the lump you felt is an ordinary cyst. Lots of women have them. They’re noncancerous. So is yours. This is a good thing.”
“Hooray!” I blurted. I dug my fingers into Jane’s thigh as she wiped her hand across her mouth roughly from cheek to cheek. Then she thrust her head between her knees. When she raised it, her face was flushed and puffy—but relief radiated from her glistening eyes in the
dim light of the room. She took my hand and smiled at me.
My eyes shifted back to the doctor. Time stopped. I wanted Dr. Patel to smile more broadly.
“I recommend we aspirate the cyst,” the radiologist went on. “It’s a matter of inserting a needle to withdraw the fluid. You’ll be numbed and hardly feel a thing, much like having your blood drawn. We can take care of that now, or you can come back when it’s more convenient.”
“It’s a no-brainer,” Jane said. “Let’s get it over with.”
“No problem,” the doctor said. Then she looked contemplative as if she was thinking, hmm.
“Dr. Patel,” I said hesitantly, “you mentioned ‘a couple’ conclusions. Is there more?”
Jane’s hand squeezed mine. Or was it mine squeezing hers?
“Yes. While the lump that brought you both here turns out to be nonproblematic, the tests reveal another abnormality. It’s called calcifications. Now, again, these are very common, and you could go the rest of your life never knowing they’re there. You won’t detect them in a monthly self-exam.”
“Then why are we talking about them?” That was Jane.
“We still cannot determine the result of your condition, so we require further workup. I’m going to order a biopsy for you. A nonsurgical biopsy.”
My heart sank all over again for Jane. I hadn’t wanted to hear that word: biopsy. I was sure she hadn’t either.
“These calcifications could be cancerous?” my daughter asked.
“Could be. But could very well not be.” The doctor’s eyes and tone were kind. “We don’t want to make assumptions or take any chances.”
I realized my body was trembling, not for the first time since we’d arrived.
“Will you do the biopsy while we’re here today too?” Jane asked. Good question.
“I’m afraid not,” the doctor said. “I’ll have to send you over to the breast center for that. It’s state-of-the-art. You’ll meet with a breast doctor, and he’ll perform the further evaluation. My staff can arrange the appointment over there within a week. You won’t be left hanging for long.”
Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel Page 14