Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel

by Tori Whitaker

  Was he counting the missing tablets in the bottle? He surely didn’t think anyone else in my situation could manage any better. Did he? Look at all that’d happened to me!

  My head sank between my shoulders.

  “I telephoned the nurse.” My voice was shaky. Maybe I slurred.

  Dennis lowered his own head, stroked the curve of his ear. He raised his head and faced me again with a tolerant expression, soundless. His calm frightened me more than if he’d yelled. But I had to go on. I told him everything from the beginning, from my wavering about calling the nurse to my dialing her number, to our baby sucking her thumb, to the doctor drunk with booze.

  Then I spoke the words: “The doctor dropped her.”

  Anguish and disbelief crushed in on Dennis’s face. A guttural groan came from deep inside his core.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, and I cupped my hands to my face. I cried, letting out my pain and my guilt, my anger and remorse.

  Dennis rose and paced the floor. He couldn’t stop shaking his head no, nor rubbing his face. I should have kept this all inside. I should have spared him this pain.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again and again. He sat back beside me.

  “Look at me,” he said, tilting my tearstained face up by my chin. “Nothing’s changed. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I did. It’s all my fault,” I said. I was a horrible mother.

  “No, no. It’s not your fault. Nothing you do or say or think will ever make this your fault.” He took me into his muscular arms. I didn’t recall the last time he’d held me so tight. It gave me life—I breathed freer in his hold—but I was undeserving.

  “But it is my fault, all my fault,” I said again, meaning it.

  “It’s not. But if it were your fault,” he said, his eyes meeting mine, “I would forgive you.”

  Those were the sweetest words I’d ever heard—sweeter than Opa telling me I was his favorite girl, more than Dennis saying I was the prettiest girl a guy ever got. His forgiveness filled my soul with sugar. He truly was his mother’s son. So kind and fair and loyal.

  He would forgive me. Perhaps I had judged too harshly his stoic manner in the past.

  I bawled, deep, wrenching sobs. Then I considered: Did he feel the anger I felt, a corrosion in the belly like acid, the anger aimed at the doctor to the degree I did? Would I ever know?

  I asked him to tell me about Kathy. “I’m ready.”

  He reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. His face looked more aged, more like his father’s, and there was a slump to his shoulders that I didn’t recall. He tapped one cigarette a few times on his silver metal lighter. It took him three times to get the Zippo’s flint to catch, trembling as he was. He took a long, deep drag and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

  “I came into your surgical room just after the nurse told you we lost her, the baby. You were only awake for the shortest time. You were on serious painkillers. I’d already been told Kathy was gone.

  “At that point, Kathy was in your room on a metal tray with wheels, fully covered in a white sheet. When the nurse raised the sheet, I thought Kathy looked like a papoose wound in blankets.

  “She had the longest lashes and perfect lips like her sister’s. Her head was swollen on one side. Purple. Earlier, when I’d first picked her out in the viewing window, I’d seen a bruise there, a bump. I assumed it was done by the forceps. But by the end, in your room, the spot had doubled in size.” Dennis’s voice cracked.

  “I told the nurse, ‘I have to hold her.’ She looked around and said, ‘It’s against the rules of the ward.’ But then she agreed. So I picked Kathleen up. Her skin was cold, but she smelled like a perfect little baby, like Janie. I said into her ear, ‘We love you.’”

  I whimpered at Dennis’s words. I hadn’t had the honor of seeing or holding our daughter, and I was jealous. But I thanked God for letting her be held by her father. Even if she was already gone.

  Dennis cleared his throat. His nostrils quivered as he fought hard not to cry. “After I went to the men’s room and splashed my face, I came back, and Kathy had already been wheeled away.”

  Dennis and I held each other. Never had I needed to be embraced by the arms of this man so badly.

  We made love that night for the first time since our loss six months before.

  By the time it was done, I could see that our act was not driven by lust or love or tenderness, nor was it fueled by power or control or someone being right and the other being wrong. It wasn’t a means of making up. It was driven by our unspoken, single-minded mission to bring hope back into our lives. Another child.

  Hope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  October 1951

  I sat stiffly in a worn brown leather chair with bent metal arms in old Dr. Welch’s tidy little office, he on the swiveling stool by my knees. I didn’t think he and his nurses begrudged me for having snubbed them with my last baby. The desk nurse asked about all the Glenns and their kiddies. My charts and records had been sent back to this practice by Dr. Collins.

  Dr. Welch performed my six-month post-op checkup with ease. After I got dressed, he said, “You’ve healed remarkably well. Your incisions show no signs of infection.”

  No matter how this doctor had condescended to me at times, our next baby would come into this world with the trusty hands of this man who’d safely delivered my Janie. He closed the chart, propped his glasses up on his nose, and said, “You won’t need an appointment for another six months.”

  I smiled. “I’m hoping to return sooner than that.”

  He shook his head. Here it came. He was going to warn me again of how another birth would be “hazardous to the mother.”

  “You and Mr. Glenn are having relations again?”

  I blushed and stammered.

  “As well you should,” the doctor said kindly. Dennis and I had experienced more than a physical act. Our days had found a peace as well. Togetherness.

  “And,” I said, “we hope to be expecting again right away.”

  “Mrs. Glenn,” he said sternly. “You’ll recall what we discussed after your first baby was born. Two cesareans is the limit I advise.” He rubbed his scalp. “But it’s a moot point, isn’t it?”

  “I know what you’d said before. But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, is it?”

  “I’d gathered from your medical records that authorization forms had been signed for a tubal ligation. Consistent with having had two surgeries, I thought that was wise.”

  “Check my records again.” I kept my voice modulated, but I didn’t want to deal with his old-fogey runaround. “I didn’t have the procedure.”

  “That’s quite irregular.” He opened my file back up, looking confused.

  The doctor switched on a green glass lamp on his desk. I watched, beginning to perspire as his finger traced the front and back of sheets one after another. Yet I was certain Dr. Welch would look up from his study and conclude I was right. I saw his brows knit.

  “You are correct, Mrs. Glenn.” He didn’t look up at me. “Dr. Collins inked in a notation on the bottom of this page. It says that in December of last year he’d advised you to have the procedure after the birth, but that you and Mr. Glenn would not sign the forms.”

  I sighed with audible relief, though I’d known I was right all along.

  “But there must have been some misunderstanding,” Dr. Welch said, licking his thumb and rapidly paging through my file. He slid out another sheet, one with a red ink stamp in the top corner.

  “You see here,” he said, pointing. “I’m afraid the procedure did go through. Dr. Reynolds severed your fallopian tubes.”

  My heart stopped beating. Then it spiked hot blood from my scalp to the arches of my feet. Dr. Welch handed me this new page with the red ink stamp. I pinched it between my fingers and thumb, and with the paper shaking in my grasp, I heard it rattling.

  “There’s been a mistake,” I said. I tossed the paper back at him. I jolted to my
feet, shaking my hands. I couldn’t believe it.

  “No mistake, Mrs. Glenn,” he said, stuffing the papers away as if to signal my appointment was nearing its end. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

  My mind raced to find a logical explanation. “But, but. I still get my periods,” I said.

  “You’re normal.” Dr. Welch sounded exasperated. “Women’s monthly courses are not curtailed by the tubal ligation procedure.”

  “This can’t be,” I said. It was as if a furnace had been stoked inside of me. “This simply cannot be right.” I leaned my face into his. “I am going to have another baby, Doctor, I assure you of that.”

  He pushed up the bifocals on his ruddy nose. “I think you should sit down,” he said. “Here is another sheet where your husband authorized the tubal procedure himself, on the day the baby was born.”

  “Are you crazy? My husband would never do that.” I plopped into the chair. My knees started bouncing up and down. “Never.”

  Dr. Welch insisted I read the page, but I batted it away. “Get that thing away from me. It’s lies,” I said. “All lies.”

  The cubic space of the room seemed to compress and suck the air out with it. My mind must have been playing tricks on me. I started to weep.

  Then the image of Nurse Breck came into focus. Was the tubal procedure the real “one more thing” she had referred to back at the park? Had she wheedled out of giving me the full picture when she’d merely said she’d been fired? Perhaps Nurse Breck had come close to telling me the truth but then became concerned with how I’d receive it—with how I’d react to learning of my husband’s duplicity.

  The doctor still held out the page. Reluctantly I accepted it. I was determined to find him wrong. I studied the page. I didn’t want to believe it. My eyes were blurry with tears. But it was Dennis’s signature all right—with his trademark large capital D.

  How could my husband have betrayed me?

  I was sterile. Barren. Spayed. And he’d never told me. No one had.

  “It’s not fair,” I said. “It’s not fair.”

  I flung the page on the floor and stamped on it with my shoe. “Dr. Reynolds butchered me,” I said. Dr. Welch’s mouth gaped.

  “No need to get hysterical,” he said.

  “I’m not hysterical,” I shouted in a tone that could only be labeled hysterical. The doctor’s head jerked as if my voice had smacked his face. No one spoke to doctors, gods, in this manner. Then a new fear hit me: What if the nurses in the outer office heard me? I didn’t want anyone to know. I couldn’t let anyone—Abbie Glenn and all the others—get wind of my causing a ruckus. I had to get my wits about me.

  I scowled at the doctor. “And please tell your staff not to say anything of my affairs to anyone. Keep these facts to yourselves. No one is to know,” I told him. “This is a private medical matter and—”

  “Again, I’m sorry to be the unwitting messenger of disturbing news—news about a procedure your other doctor performed, may I remind you.” His voice was hard. “I assure you I operate a practice that’s held in the highest regard. Given the unfortunate circumstances and your state of mind, shall we telephone a member of your family to drive you safely home?”

  Had he not listened to a word I’d said? We’d not be sharing this news with them. I wouldn’t let others know of my loss or my frenzy.

  I wouldn’t let them know of Dennis’s deceit.

  “I have my own car.” Like the Irvings, we were a two-car family by then. “I’ll see myself home.” The way my knees were buckling as I stood, I had no idea how I’d manage. But I would.

  He rose and opened one of his glass-doored cupboards and shuffled about inside until he removed a medicine bottle. He handed the bottle to me and described the remedy’s calming effects for anxiety.

  More barbiturates. These pills apparently cured ailments as simply as sticking a pacifier in a baby’s mouth. The doctor advised plenty of bedrest. Bedrest and more pills—as if they could cure my disintegrating life.

  Outside, the skies were gray going to black. Thunder clapped and lightning struck, scaring me half to death. I yanked the car’s gearshift into reverse and backed out with a jerk, praying I didn’t run into someone. I maneuvered the vehicle onto the street. There weren’t many cars. Where do I go? I asked myself, disoriented. Oh, oh, yes, I see the turn-off ahead. The tires screeched as I slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel right. Then I drove straight for, I don’t know, a mile, two? Then my car slid off the road onto a berm, kicking up gravel and pelting the chassis underneath. I gripped the steering wheel tighter to regain control, to maneuver the vehicle back onto the pavement. I swerved as an oncoming car blinked its headlights and blared its horn at me. I was frantic. I was lost. I wanted to claw my nails down someone’s face.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a five-and-dime, and out front there was a telephone booth. Big, fat drops of water splashed on the windshield, and I feared the roads would turn slick. I stopped the car. I yanked a scarf out of my purse, covered my head, and ran to the louvered door of the clear glass telephone booth, my purse tucked under my chin. More thunder. I quaked.

  I struggled to open my pocketbook. I rifled inside for my change purse. I squeezed it open, and my coins spilled, pinging as they dropped to the metal floor. I crouched to pick up one dime and managed to slip it into the telephone slot. Pauline’s number was engraved in my head, as deep as my own middle name. I cranked the rotary dial one numeral at time. The rain was now a bucketing downpour. Answer, answer. Please answer. My friend was the only one I trusted. I didn’t know how I’d cope with this—another tragedy. And my husband’s disloyalty. I didn’t understand. He’d been so open when he’d told me of how he’d held Kathy. This was as bad as my baby being dropped. No . . . it was worse. This was my Dennis. Hate rose up and tasted bitter in my mouth. I spit on the floor. As I sat on the round metal stool in the phone booth, waiting for Pauline to rescue me, the skies opened up so loud, so dark, but I was hidden.

  No one could see me banging the telephone receiver into the machine when Pauline didn’t answer, nor see my wailing through the deluge of rainwater. No one could hear my screams of pain and outrage.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Pauline said. Her voice was low and revolted.

  “Believe it.”

  I’d managed to make it back to her house and changed out of sopping wet clothes. Janie and Tommy were napping at Pauline’s. I had called Pauline again when the rain let up, and she’d answered; she had begged me to let her come for me with the children, but I’d been incapable of telling her exactly where I was. I’d floundered and found my way back.

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “Do?” I said, so furious I could speak only in clipped words. “Suffer.”

  But I’d leave him. I’d pack my bags, take my jug money, drain my savings, take a cash withdrawal from our business, load up Janie, and leave him as soon as I figured out where to go. I’d get a job. I’d tell Mother Glenn what her son had done—tell Papa Glenn, too. Tell how their son had betrayed me even as he was granting me forgiveness and shooting his seed between my legs. One betrayal was as bad as the other. He wasn’t the man I married.

  I was in bed, thankfully, by the time Dennis returned late from Dayton, where he’d been to bid two homes. I wasn’t ready to confront him yet. I had to plan. I couldn’t sleep, but I was exhausted. Janie was tucked in and dozing. It took all my willpower to pretend that I slept—to relax my shoulders, keep my breathing in check, and keep my eyelids from fluttering, given the scenes that raced through my mind. He tiptoed into our room and kissed me softly on the cheek. I inwardly recoiled.

  I wasn’t ready to face him. I had to be alert. I would wait until morning.

  At some point the first of the doctor’s pills must have kicked in, for when I awoke well after the break of day I had to scramble to cook breakfast. I flipped Dennis’s pancakes with such force the batter splattered onto the backsplash behi
nd the stove. I didn’t make smiley faces. I didn’t warm the syrup and transfer it to tiny pitchers. Dennis got cold syrup served straight from the bottle.

  When he came in from his shower and asked how my appointment had gone with Dr. Welch, I was wiping syrup off Janie’s face, and I gave a direct quote from the doctor: “He says my body has healed remarkably well.” I smiled, baring my teeth.

  “That’s great,” Dennis said. He needed to rush out in a flurry. He was to receive some commendation at Gunnison headquarters. In Indiana. An award.

  I threw the spatula in the sink. “If only you hadn’t consented for me to be sterilized, I’d be pregnant by now.”

  He gawped at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Janie started to cry. Our nasty voices had scared her. But I couldn’t stop.

  “Don’t you play dumb with me, Dennis Glenn,” I said. “Don’t lie. From the very beginning you thought the procedure should go through. I guess having a bigger family wasn’t as important to you as it was to me. You’d already had that growing up. So you decided. There I was, lying helpless in a bed with morphine pumping into my veins, and you just had to scrawl your big old John Hancock all over the dotted line. Now I’m barren. It’s all your fault. You showed me who’s boss, didn’t you?”

  A fat blue vein had protruded on his forehead like I’d never seen. His face and neck were wildly inflamed.

  “For crying out loud, Millie, I don’t know what you think you heard or saw or read, and I don’t know what kind of shit is going on in that head of yours.” He looked completely boggled. “But I’m going to take it that you’re still grieving and concerned that you’re not pregnant again. Or that all the pills you pop are, I don’t know, getting to be too much, maybe, huh?”

  His words gave me whiplash.

  “I’m barren, I tell you.”

  “Just hear this: I did not sign any papers. I thought we were still trying to have a baby, despite the advice of two physicians. Because you wanted it so badly. Don’t you ever—ever, you got that?—don’t you ever accuse me of doing something that dishonorable to you. And do not bring this up again. I’m serious. When I come home, I’d better find the girl I married.”