by E. J. Levy
“Being right.”
“There’s always a first time,” he said.
“He’d have ruined you if he’d known the governor’s physician was carrying the governor’s child.” I hadn’t meant to say it.
Lord Somerton seemed not to hear me; at least he made no response, staring into the fire.
“You were pregnant,” he said. “With my child.”
“Yes.”
“And where, pray, is my child now?” He did not look at me.
“I do not know.”
Was it to repay the hurt I’d felt, that I told him that night? Was it simply too hard to bear the secret alone? Or was it that I hoped somehow that by telling him then, before we left Africa, we might find a way, if not to stay, then at least to find the child and bring him with us? Mad hope. I see that now.
“You do not know.” His voice was very quiet.
I knew he would not ask me more.
“A son,” I said. “Adopted by a provincial officer, presumably…”
“You didn’t bother to find out.” He looked at me but didn’t seem to see me. “What sort of unnatural monster…”
“I tried to get him back,” I said, “but I was ill, far too ill, there was cholera; I thought we might manage it together, once I returned to the Cape, find him, but of course when you returned with Lady Somerton, it seemed—. Well. The subject did not come up.”
For a long time we sat by the fire silently looking into the embers, each in his own thoughts, listening to the sap snap as the logs turned to charcoal, then ash.
“My son,” he said.
“Our son,” I said.
I who had calculated so much and so well miscalculated this. There was one thing more valuable than name, honor, wealth, horseflesh to my friend—family. How had I overlooked so obvious a fact? But I had. Until now. His pallor alarmed me.
“You must take care for your health,” I began.
He raised a hand to silence me.
For a long time he was quiet, before he said gently, “Please leave.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant for me to quit his presence or Newlands or the Cape itself; I felt sure I’d know soon enough. I rose.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I was. I am. Even as I could have made no other choice.
We like to think that there is nothing that cannot be forgiven, no act that cannot be redeemed by love and contrition—that is what religion would teach us—that love and understanding, reason and remorse can be a kind of cure. But we are wrong. There are irredeemable choices. There are unforgivable acts.
The next morning we spoke little. Only this:
“I would have married you.”
“I know.”
“Then why? Was your name so much more important?”
How could I admit that my name was all I was, all I’d ever had, since my mother’s death? There was no one else.
“Words are all we have,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You’re wrong. They’re just the echo.”
It’s ironic, really. My name: Perry. Parry. The unintended pun of it. All that would be destroyed in my attempt to parry harm, evade it, so I might live: my past, my sex, my mother, my child, love itself. Parry, indeed. From the French parer, “to guard, ward off,” from the Italian parare, “to shield.” From the Latin parare, meaning “to prepare.” Nothing, of course, could have prepared me for this. All that I would lose.
It was impossible, of course, another choice. I would have lost everything if I had kept the child: my work, my reputation, my very name. Everything I was. Everything I am. But I understood in that moment that I had lost everything there, in Mauritius, when I gave away the child.
Giving birth, I had felt the thing I’d never felt in all of my labors, all of my years, from Cork to London, Edinburgh to the Cape: I had felt joy settle on me like sunlight through the open windows. I was stunned by the pure pleasure in its aftermath, the honeyed lethargy, drenched in the sweetness; its milky breath, its deep and trustful sleep, how good it was to have it cry and know I could provide all it needed. I had known the deep expansive pleasure of intellectual pursuits, absorption in thought and study, the warmth of friendship, the urgent release of sex, but this was different from all of them. I could spend the rest of my life with my nose buried in the soft dark down of his head, my lips on his tiny ear, his mouth on my nipple, sleeping in my arms, I’d have been content.
It was not for my good name, my reputation, that I sacrificed the child, not for vanity or pride or professional ambition, not even for fear of what Lord Somerton might do if presented with a son he had not known he’d sired, no. I did not choose renown or rank over my child, my son; delirious as I was with fever in those postpartum days, I knew, clear as I know it now, that it would have been a lie had I tried to claim after everything and all those years that I was Margaret Brackley, not Dr. Jonathan Mirandus Perry; that to do so would not have been a revelation; it would have been a murder. A suicide.
What are we after all: the accumulation of our works? Our name? The sum of our actions? I am what I have made myself, what I have done, no more, no less.
I should not have been surprised to receive notice that the Somertons would be departing for London without me; the ship, The Atlas—I was informed by runner—was unexpectedly filled to capacity by the governor’s own cargo. Surely I would understand.
I understood.
It was awkward, of course, to have sold off all my furnishings months before, to be left like the less-good horses or extra baggage on the dock. I explained away the sale of my possessions by saying that we were no longer in need of such luxury, now that elegance itself had departed the Cape.
It was a story; it would serve.
Despite thick mist that pressed against the windows of Government House that morning of March 5, 1826, the gravel drive out front was filled with cloaked men on horseback trotting past and slow carriages, visitors eager to bid Lord and Lady Somerton farewell before they set sail for England. Inside all was surprisingly calm, subdued, the bags packed, the carriages being loaded; we were somber as we took breakfast for the last time together in the dining room.
As dawn came on we mounted our horses, Lord Somerton and I together in front, as we had been when we had set out for the East years before, flanked by officials, a dozen supporters behind us—the ladies following in carriages—and we rode through the thoroughfares of town, the streets lined with the governor’s admirers cheering as we passed.
I was grateful to be included in the first boat with Lord Somerton and his family, where I stood in silence in the prow beside my friend. Behind us, two boats carried those who had hounded him from his post. We boarded the ship, stood at the rail together, looking back at the town.
“We will see you in London, I trust,” said Lady Somerton.
“I will never return to England,” I said. “My home is here.”
We lingered as long as we could on board ship, until the captain announced the ship was under weigh, and we departed from it.
The shore thronged with spectators; the light bright on the bay through the clouds. At a quarter past eleven, just as Lord Charles set sail on the Atlas, the sun that had been obscured for much of the morning shone forth, as one observer would later report, “with more than usual brightness like the fame of an upright man which the floating breath of calumny may dim but cannot tarnish.”
I did not weep that day. But a chill took hold of me that no measure of tropical sun could warm. It would last for years. It possesses me even now. Two years later, on September 26, 1828, I would leave the Cape as well, with Dantzen and Psyche, to join the garrison at Mauritius as Staff Surgeon. Never to return, I hoped.
What lasts? A plank of sunlight on a wood floor. The taste of ginger in my morning coffee. The crunch of sugar. The shock of a cold wave against my calves. My beloved’s skin against mine. Waking to watch my son’s tiny face, his eyes opening to mine with an inhuman gaze, as if he saw what was to come, unforgiven. T
he incomparable sweetness of his tiny fists at my breast, mouth at my nipple, to live, to live. What lasts? What is honor compared to this: the capacity to create life itself. If men had that faculty they’d consider themselves gods. As it is, most do. Perhaps this is why they disparage women’s bodies that work such magic, possess such power.
Strange what we remember, what we forget. What’s worth recalling? What will be recalled of me? If I am remembered in future it will be, I imagine, for saving a single life. When I arrived that night, it seemed I’d been called to certify a death.
There are so many ways to leave this life. Few ways to enter it. There is little to say of those final years in Cape Town, but there is this. Not long after Lord Somerton’s departure from the Cape, I was summoned in the middle of a July night to attend the labor of a wealthy tobacco merchant’s wife, who was dying in childbirth.
I rode through the winter rain till I reached the stucco house, illuminated as if for a party by candlelight and oil lamps. I did not bother to knock; I followed the sound of screams to a bedroom where Mrs. Wilhemena Munnick lay moaning, pale, near to death on the bloodied bedding. The room was crowded and close, reeking of mud and cigars, shit, wet wool and fear, as packed as a country dance with female family, friends, and household staff. I cleared the room of all but the midwife and Munnick himself, who—despite propriety and custom—admirably insisted on remaining by his wife’s side.
I rinsed my hands at the water stand on the bureau using the bleach that I always carried then, impatient as the midwife recounted the progress of the labor that had begun well at dawn, gone awry by sundown. I asked questions about the position of the foetus, her treatment; I could guess what had happened, had seen it before. I told her to hold the lamp close as I lifted the sheet that tented Mrs. Munnick’s legs. I gently prised apart her knees, which were clenched together in evident pain, her condition worse than I’d imagined. When I slipped my hand into the vaginal canal to see if the child might be extracted with my help, I felt a tiny foot, a leg, only one, the other tucked up in the womb. It was instantly clear: breach, half born. Her water long ago broken, her energy spent on hours of fruitless labor, worsened by the tonics applied to ease her pain. I pressed the leg back inside the uterus, then retracted my arm.
I ordered the strongest liquor in the house, which proved to be good Jamaican rum, and boiling water. Told the maidservant to scrub down the kitchen table with the water and bleach and to give Mr. Munnick a shot of rum.
“Get her to the kitchen,” I said.
“Should she be moved, Doctor?” Munnick asked.
“No,” I said. “But she will surely die if she is not.”
He nodded, not understanding what risks he took or I did.
“She may die in any case, Munnick,” I said. “You must understand that. She likely will. And the child. There is a chance of saving one of them, by surgery. A slim chance, but a chance.”
Later I would be asked if I hadn’t worried that I put my reputation at risk by attempting the lethal operation; it didn’t occur to me. I could not let a woman die to protect my name.
As a dresser at St. Thomas’ Hospital, I had observed the caesarean operation performed with success, the belly slit down the midline, along the linea alba, then opened to reveal the protuberant uterine wall, which—once split—allowed for removal of the amnion sac and child. But at St. Thomas’ there had been no risk, as mother and child were already dead.
The caesarean was rare for good reason: it almost always failed, or rather it almost always succeeded in killing both mother and child. I could count on a single hand the successful performance of the procedure in the last thousand years. A Swiss sow gelder had reportedly saved his wife by such means in 1500. Two surgeons—one in France and one in Holland—had claimed success in the last century, as had a single midwife in 1738 in England. But there was no proof, and such tales were held to be little better than fantasy. This much I knew: no one had successfully performed it in Africa.
More common was to kill the child to save the mother, extracting the foetus by forceps, piecemeal, so the mother might live; if she were too far gone, one waited for her to die, then cut her open to save the child. But I could not let either die while I stood by.
Mrs. Munnick was delirious with pain and beyond comprehending as we lay her on the kitchen table, which the midwife had scrubbed with hot water and bleach; her pelvis raised on cushions, her legs held wide by maids, her husband—abashed but compliant—grasped her arms and chest in his strong farmer’s embrace to prevent her from wrenching away as I cut. I had nothing to give her save for a vial of laudanum—hardly enough to quell a toothache. But it stilled her some and proved tonic for her husband, who could believe she did not feel great pain. I told him to hold her firm as I put the blade to her belly to begin the long midline incision. At the first cut, as the knife split her skin, Mrs. Munnick screamed and tried to rise, but her husband held her down. She collapsed onto the table.
“Is she dead?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “Keep her still and she might not be.”
He turned away, but the midwife held a lantern close to where I worked. I moved quickly, with an assurance I did not feel. My cutting kit set on a chair beside the table. I proceeded through the geologic layers of the body: each layer like a page in the textbooks I had studied a dozen years before now reappeared before my eyes. It was like moving through a country I had lived in long ago.
I worked quickly, drawing down the knife, cutting from xiphoid to pubis, avoiding the rectus muscles, then down through fasciae and muscle, grateful the gravid uterus had displaced the abdominal viscera, so I could see clearly the rose-pink glossy sack of the uterine wall and make a small incision there, through which I slipped a finger to guide the knife as I cut along the surface, making another vertical incision, until the uterus split open and the fetus was revealed. Sacrum posterior, as I’d feared—head up toward the mother’s heart, face forward. I slipped a hand inside until my fingers found the infant’s legs, then working my way by feel, I located its feet to ensure they were free of the vaginal canal, then took both legs into my hand; I attempted to lift the infant’s body from the flesh cavern, but it was stuck, held firm. I tried to turn its body but to no avail; it was too large, too closely fitted to the space. I feared cutting further, feared the damage I might do—that she might bleed out and die before the child had been birthed. There on the table, my hands inside her, the child there too, delivering her unto death. The infant was stuck fast. Blood seeped around the cuts I’d made; my pulse pounded in my ears.
“You may feel some pressure,” I said to the unconscious woman on the table. “Hold her firm!” I shouted to her husband. I stepped up onto a chair and braced the heel of my hand against her sternum, and with my other hand I grasped again the infant’s legs and lifted them up and pulled for all I had.
Mrs. Munnick groaned and her body rose from the table before I relented.
I braced my bootheel against the table’s edge, and placed a palm once more against her sternum, the infant’s legs clasped firm in my other hand, and with all my strength hauled back. I felt the mother’s body rise again, felt a shift inside her bowels as if I were disemboweling her, which I feared I might just do. A line from the Iliad came into my mind: planted a heel / against his chest, wrenched the spear from his wound / and the midriff came with it—
Her face was grey-blue in the candlelight; she was dying; what choice was there but to continue? My palm against her sternum, I pulled again and felt the child shift. I reached inside the fundus, my free hand seeking the cranium now, the infant’s feet cupped firm in my right. Then I lifted the baby’s legs, somersaulting them toward the mother’s chest, and felt the cradled head at last slip free as I raised the infant into the air, bloody and purple-blue, slicked with amniotic fluid, the umbilicus hanging like glistening rope or ribbon.
We stood amazed.
I slapped the child and it screamed, then I cut the umbilicus and
knotted it before I held the infant out to Munnick—his, face pale with strain, glassy-eyed, sweat-glazed—and said, “You have a son.”
I stitched up Mrs. Munnick and saw her settled into her now-clean room, before I left strict instructions for the care of the patient and the wound, ensuring the most sanitary conditions for her convalescence. Then I accepted a glass of brandy in the parlor. I sank into a chair by the fire.
“How can I thank you, Doctor?” Munnick said. His face glistened with tears and sweat.
“Take care of your wife and son,” I said.
“Please,” he said. “Accept our thanks.” He pushed into my hand a wad of notes—a fat packet of rix-dollars—money I badly needed since my demotion the prior year.
But I declined. “You’ll need it for your family, more than I, who have none.”
“Is there nothing we can offer you?”
“Invite me to the christening.”
“Surely there is something you desire?”
There was so much that I wanted, hoped for, wished: to have my friend back, my good name restored, above all a wish too dear even to name or think.
“There is one thing,” I said, “that would mean a very great deal to me.”
“Name it, and it’s done,” Munnick said incautiously.
“I would be honored if the boy might take my middle name as his own. As I have no children.”
I could not know if the child I bore still lived, or if he did what name he bore; I could be sure only that it was not my own. I had had no right to name him or even to know what name was his, or even if he lived; I had given up that right when I had given him up. I had been so habituated to loss that it came more easily than love, than fighting to keep those I loved.
“I’ll do better than that,” Munnick said. “We’ll name him after you.”
On 20 August 1826, Jonathan Perry Munnick—my godson, my namesake, my almost consolation—was baptized at the Evangelical Lutheran Church.