Janie was bawling. The framed picture of our family fell from the wall as her father slammed the door on his way out.
As soon as Dennis left, I changed Janie out of her pj’s and fastened her into her bouncy seat. I gave her the sippy cup. None of the bad things were my precious baby’s fault. I would protect her.
I took another pill. I had to think, think.
Dennis had stunned me with his repudiations. He actually looked righteous. Sounded offended. But every time I recalled his signature, I wanted to pound his chest with both fists and scream.
And beneath all my anger I was the saddest I’d ever been.
I took another pill.
It was Wednesday. Dusting day. I would pretend my time here was not through until Pauline came and left and I decided where to go. I scribbled the words why, why with my fingertip in the dust on the coffee table. Then I sprayed furniture polish and wiped it so clean with a cloth, I could see my face like on a TV commercial. But mine was not a happy-homemaker face.
Dennis and I had never had a fight this bad. I’d never known couples could slide this far. I never knew he could betray me. Didn’t know I could resent him so much.
By afternoon my jitters had eased. Pauline dropped by with Tommy as I knew she would. She was my best friend. While our children played with their wooden puzzles and barnyard set in the living room, tussling over the occasional cow or horse, we mothers spoke in low tones in the kitchen.
“Horrible. Just horrible,” Pauline said of what I’d learned. She was pale and wide-eyed. She shook her head. “You poor thing.”
“Pauline, do you know what kills me most?”
“Dennis betraying you? And then denying it?” She paused, the steam of her coffee curling in front of her lips. “Or else somewhere deep inside . . . you think he’s telling you the truth? That despite the evidence, you believe him?”
What? “The thing that kills me most is I’ll never have another baby,” I said. “I’ll never hold a sleeping newborn of my own again. I’ll never get to dress Janie up in matching outfits with a little brother or sister. I’ll never walk down the sidewalk with one child at my side and another in a buggy. I always wanted more children. I still do.”
It was so unfair. A waste. My choice over my own body: obliterated.
“I wish there were something I could say or do to help,” Pauline said, her face filled with agony. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to leave him.”
Pauline’s mouth fell open. “No one we know has ever gotten divorced. But if Dennis did that, I can’t say I blame you for feeling this way.”
I didn’t think I’d ever met a divorced person.
Raggsie jumped into my lap and licked my chin as if he sensed I was hurting. I held him close and nuzzled him. “I need another pill,” I said.
“Honey,” Pauline said, “I’m only saying this because I love you like the sister I never had. And I can’t imagine anything worse than what you’re going through. But I can’t help but think—that is, I’m unsure whether the pills help you.”
First Dennis, now her?
I’d let her comments pass. I saw no need to curb my pills. They helped me get through the day.
“Whether you stay with Dennis or whether you leave, you’ve got to have a clear head. These pills—”
“What I put in my mouth is none of your business,” I retorted. I covered my lips as soon as I saw rejection glint in her eyes.
“You don’t mean that,” she said, tears welling.
The telephone rang, and we jumped. We stared each other down, and on the third ring Pauline said, “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“No. Don’t you bother either. There’s no one I wish to speak to.”
Finally the shrill sound of the ring waned. For several long moments Pauline and I sat quiet. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it. Everything about me is your business.”
“I know.” She covered my hand with hers. She was the friend I didn’t deserve.
I said, “You think it’s possible Dennis isn’t lying?”
Pauline gave an ever so faint shrug of one shoulder. “If you’re having doubts,” she said, drumming her nails on the side of her cup, “there’s one person who knows for sure.”
The phone rang again and scared the wits out of us. By the fourth ring Pauline couldn’t stand it and hopped up to answer. But it was too late. There was no one there.
2015
I was abruptly aware—in the way we awaken from nightmares and find ourselves safely in bed—that the three of us, Jane, Kelsey, and me, formed a quasi-circle beside a bonfire out back at night after the biopsy that day. Our hands were clasped in a chain. My granddaughter had been in a patio chair on the opposite side of the raised steel pit. The fire had been her idea. At some point, though, Kelsey had come to kneel in front of me, her gently bent elbows resting atop my thighs, the light of the flames flickering in her face.
The girls knew what the doctor had done. With the baby. And with the procedure that I hadn’t authorized. After all this time I’d had to let that out, and it felt liberating, therapeutic.
But I didn’t tell them about the paper bearing Dennis’s signature nor of its aftermath, our fight—and what happened next. He was Jane’s father. I was her mother. What was the purpose of letting her know our personal betrayals?
Weren’t there some things a parent did that a child need never learn?
“I can’t believe a doctor did that to you,” Kelsey said. “Taking away your ability to have a baby, without permission, is too terrible.” Her voice was pitched high as if it took all her mettle to speak without breaking down. She was trying to stay strong for me.
“Did you sue the sons-o’-bitches?” That was my daughter.
“No,” I said, my back straightening and voice firm. “You have to understand. Doctors were gods in those days.”
Kelsey said, “I don’t think medical malpractice suits were a thing until the sixties. Aaron would know.”
“It’s so unfair,” Jane said.
In my left hand was Jane’s dry hand, her pinkie finger kinked at a knuckle. It was a precursor of what was to come—that’s how my arthritis began. And in my other hand was Kelsey’s petite, youthful hand of satiny-supple skin. My hands had once been smooth and clear like hers, and then age spots had appeared here and there until one day I saw my skin darkly mottled. It’d all happened so fast—as quickly as bananas get spots and then blacken and rot in a basket. To the girls my hands must have felt like a first step toward my grave . . . bony, veiny, skin papery thin and brittle.
“I remember,” Jane said warily, “being at a big Glenn family shindig at the farm. I was around six. All my cousins were running around having fun, and I said, ‘Mommy, I want a sister. I want one right now.’ You looked stricken with panic and didn’t utter a sound. Aunt Abbie jumped in and said, ‘Sweetheart, maybe instead you could get a new kitty.’ I guess she knew and tried to help. A moment of grace for her?”
I remembered that day, too. It wasn’t Abbie’s grace. It was another example of words spilling out of her mouth that sounded considerate on the surface but that grated on my nerves, or rather, hurt my feelings. When Abbie had said the word kitty, memories had spilled back to my wedding reception. I’d always wondered if Abbie had overheard what Mama said. Not all women have babies the way alley cats squirt out kittens. I suspected Abbie had heard it and was throwing up a subtle dig.
As the fire died Kelsey said, “It’s been a long day.”
It had.
“Thank you for listening,” I said. Thank you for not deserting me when I finished.
I walked them to the driveway. Jane hugged me, and it was good. I thought I would sleep.
I folded myself into my cavernous king-size bed that night, covered in a sheet and two quilts. My mother-in-law had fashioned them with scraps of old dresses and swatches of fabrics. Nothing kept me warmer when I lay all alone. As I drifted in and out, the peace of slumb
er beckoning but eluding me, a memory pounded, pounded, pounded—it would not be dismissed until I’d suffered its images again.
“Nurse Breck,” I had said on the phone decades before—right after Pauline left my kitchen when I was reeling from Dennis’s betrayal. I had kept the napkin bearing the nurse’s number. “I have one more question.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you, Mrs. Glenn.”
“You have?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid there’s more I haven’t told you.”
Was it she who’d been phoning that day in my kitchen when I’d let it ring? I’d thwarted Pauline from answering too?
“Why didn’t you tell me that I was barren?” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me that my husband had signed the tubal ligation consent form?”
I heard her ragged exhale. “That’s why I’ve tried phoning you. Because I couldn’t live with myself,” she began. “I couldn’t sleep knowing how you would wait every month for the next ten years, hoping you’d conceived.”
I felt grateful and fitful all at once, my head throbbing.
“But let’s be clear,” she said. “Your husband didn’t sign that paper.”
Goose bumps swarmed my arms. “I saw his signature with my own two eyes,” I said. His big D had been as legible as could be. But now I felt sickened to the marrow of my bones. Had I misjudged him?
“I came back to your room after taking the baby to the nursery for viewing,” Nurse Breck said. “This was before you awoke. The doctor was washing his hands. Nurse Tibbers indicated he’d finished the tubal procedure. Alarmed, I said, ‘But there was a notation of record. No tubal was to be performed.’ When the doctor was done drying his hands, he swiveled and looked at me, a mix of confusion and accusation. He said Dr. Collins’s patients always had their tubes severed if they’d had two cesareans. Nurse Tibbers concurred. ‘But the documentation,’ I said. Dr. Reynolds barked at me: ‘Bring me a consent form.’ I balked. ‘That’s an order,’ he said. I refused. He nodded his head at Nurse Tibbers. He rifled through other papers while she stepped away, studying one in particular. I believe it was the admissions document your husband had signed earlier. What I’m getting at is this: I was three feet away from the man who signed your husband’s name. Dr. Reynolds forged an updated consent form for the files.”
Sweat broke out at my hairline. I thought I might faint. “It’s so unfair!” It was not a whisper. It was a bellow. “He forged my husband’s name. He took away my womanhood!”
And because of that, my lack of faith was on the brink of ruining my marriage.
“I almost told you that day in the park,” she said, her words filled with sympathy. “But you were suffering so badly already.”
“I understand,” I told her. I quietly placed the phone receiver back in its cradle without saying goodbye. I had to lie down quickly.
She had explained before how she’d been fired for questioning the doctor’s drunkenness, but she hadn’t told me the extent of her insubordination to him in that ward. Again this woman had taken a stand on my behalf. She was a good person.
I curled up in the fetal position on the couch. Had I possessed Nurse Breck’s strength of character and conviction, I might not have destroyed Dennis. I might not have thrown our marriage away. Was it too late to save us?
He wouldn’t return from corporate Gunnison for two days. I had forty-eight hours to let my remorse fester. To think: I’d almost left him. Well, he might throw me out now.
I had to atone. And I had to do it in person. I had two days until my act of contrition.
That was good, because I was boiling over with anger, too. But not at him. I slid out the kitchen drawer where we kept the telephone book. I opened the pages of the weighty volume, so thick that Pauline had used it as a booster seat when she came, since Tommy had outgrown the high chair.
I flipped on a light and thumbed through, madly searching for names beginning with R.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
October 1951
The next day I took a train to the northern suburbs and then walked more than a mile. I did not drive my car. I did not have someone drive me. I wanted anonymity.
We’d had our first frost the week before, but a sunny warm spell had arrived that morning. Indian summer. The air would hit seventy by midafternoon, and by the time it all passed, we’d know winter was coming to stay.
I owed Pauline two mommy times in future weeks, but I’d said I had to get out of the house. Dennis would return the next day. I would face him then. But I couldn’t stay cooped up watching the teapot clock tick. Pauline understood. I’d told her how wrong I’d been—how my husband hadn’t lied. I was teeming with pent-up energy. Rage. I couldn’t fix things with him yet. But I couldn’t sit around waiting for what was coming: my confession . . . my fight to save our marriage. I had to escape for a couple of hours; there were other things I had to do. Pauline didn’t know where I was headed. Could be the cemetery. The library. The church. It was my time. She wished that I could be downtown trying on new dresses, getting a pedicure, and stopping for a malted milk at Newberry’s lunch counter. But even she knew that was a pipe dream.
Instead I was in Mariemont, Ohio, an upper-crust suburb of Cincinnati. It was close enough that corporate barons commuted to their skyscrapers, but far enough out that a town crier still wandered its square—yes, a town crier in the 1950s, calling out news of the day. He wore a tricorn hat and a red waistcoat; visiting Mariemont was like stepping back in time. Taking one last glance at the memo sheet in my purse, I confirmed that I was within two blocks of the house: the home of Dr. Lawrence T. Reynolds, OB.
The occasional orange and brown and bloodred leaves dotted the manicured yards on Dr. Reynolds’s street. The homes had been erected in the 1920s. Lots of Tudors in brick and white stucco. I might have been traversing an old English village.
I wore my ballet flats, a casual skirt, and a lightweight cinnamon-brown sweater tucked in. I might have been a homemaker out for a stroll. A neighbor. I waved to old men and said hello to some teens. I tipped my head at the postman. I dodged the hobbyhorse that a child had left on the walk.
I regarded the right side of the street with apparent nonchalance but kept an eye on the even-numbered addresses opposite. Eighteen fifty-four, eighteen fifty-two, eighteen fifty. Ahead, children were playing in a yard. I was close now, looking for eighteen thirty-six.
All last night I had envisioned this moment. I’d go to the door, bang its brass knocker, ask for Mrs. Reynolds. That was what doctors’ wives were called, wasn’t it? Mrs.? If doctors were gods, did that make her a goddess? Mrs. Reynolds the goddess would come sashaying through her grand foyer carrying an old-fashioned in the middle of the day, wearing her ruffled apron, her hair freshly coifed from the salon. She’d have handsome young rascals in cowboy hats and tutu-clad princesses—a whole blissful, healthy brood of them. Enough for a birthday party.
I would see that Mrs. Lawrence T. Reynolds knew what her husband had done. I would pitch a rock at her Rockwell-esque life. Hadn’t that man’s actions ruined my own life and led to my marriage’s downfall?
Eighteen forty-two. Eighteen-forty.
Then came the doctor’s house. On the lawn, two little girls with barrettes in their hair were playing. One older, one younger. Squealing with their wagon and their trikes. Calling, “Mommy, Mommy.” The front door was ajar. I was certain the woman of the house was not far.
I’d come to the prettiest home on the street. Eighteen thirty-six. The doctor had two daughters. Beautiful, angelic creatures with blonde, bouncy curls. They must have been about three years apart.
The doctor’s home was traditional Tudor with its peaks and roof pitches, stucco with diagonal exposed-wood beams. There was fieldstone on one face with its mullioned window up high where the girls probably slept in canopied beds; an arched opening onto the porch and light glinting off the panes. It was as if the family had uprooted these trees from the Old World
and replanted them, so charmingly did they frame this house in its setting. And the sun: sunlight glistened behind the small manse, throwing it in relief against a golden sky.
The girls waved at me and called hello. They had their dollies and played on the yard’s tiny slope, wearing their matching smocked dresses and anklets.
Two precious daughters. One. Two.
Mrs. Reynolds possessed what rightfully belonged to me: the perfect family. It wasn’t fair that her husband had stolen that from me. I wanted to hurt him the only way I could. I’d strip him from his godlike throne. His wife would see the real man.
I took the first step up. It was the hardest one, I found—no turning back. The second step invited me to ascend toward the private sidewalk, the next of four large flagstone steps. I accepted the invitation without hesitation. Kathleen deserved for me to advance.
“Girls,” a woman called.
I stood still as a statue—the way Dennis would have me do if being attacked by a bee. I smiled. I lifted my right hand, my fingers loose and friendly.
“Hello,” I said.
The woman I presumed to be Mrs. Reynolds had the expression we might all have—all of us mothers. One that was at once approachable, as if perhaps she knew me but couldn’t place my face, and on guard in case I meant her children harm. I pushed the thought away. I didn’t want to relate to this woman. Her girls dropped their toys and ran to their mother.
“Mrs. Reynolds?” I said. We were on equal levels of the yard now, on the main flagstone walk between the lamppost and house.
“Yes, that’s me. I’m sorry,” she said, looking perplexed. “But you’re . . .”
Her face was radiant. The woman had iridescent skin like Grace Kelly. She wore a pleated skirt, a white blouse, and a robin’s-egg-blue sweater tied casually about her shoulders.
Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel Page 24