Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

The nurse, wide face placid as a soup bowl, coos a low “Honey, hon—they’re fine.”

  “But it’s early!” Cliff says. There must be some other word, but he can’t find it.

  With regard to expectant fathers, the nurse has, of course, seen it all. “It always feels too soon, honey, but a baby’s ready when it’s ready. Why don’t you try sitting down awhile? Rest.”

  “But she’s not . . .” Cliff gets hold of himself. “It’s not supposed to come for months.”

  The nurse’s chin lifts and her moon face ripples in a smile. “Maybe time to double-check that math.” She winks. “Your baby’s getting born,” she says, but this daddy-to-be is not letting up. Nurse looks to her clipboard. “Mr. Johnston, tell you what.” Now she’s flirting—sometimes it helps these guys. “Soon as he can, I’ll have Dr. Maakestad out here to talk to you, ’kay? You might just’ve been a little bit off. Nothing to worry.” She’s smiling; he’s not. She musters her professionalism. “Mr. Johnston, it’s fine. You have a seat. Doc’ll be out just as soon as he can.”

  Cliff’s head spins as he returns to Vida, singing hymns to herself now: “For the day is approaching, it must come to one and all, when the sinners’ condemnation will be written on the wall . . .” Cliff sinks to the chair beside her, pinching his eyes shut, counting on his fingers, nodding his head along. “December, January, February, March, April, May . . .” Eyes open, he turns to Vida. “Nine, right? Don’t laugh at me—just tell me it’s nine months you count, right?”

  Vida wouldn’t dream to make fun now. “Yes, son,” she tells him soberly, “nine,” and as he shuts his eyes again to resume counting, Vida makes her voice newly grave. “Clifford, I need to say something, son.” She’s losing faith he’ll make the connections on his own. “I don’t mean nothing against Brendada, but I need to ask: could she of had another boyfriend, from before you and her—?” Cliff cuts her off: “No! What’re you . . . ?” And oh, it’s painful for Vida to watch this revelation enter her son’s head, apparently for the first time. “Cliff,” she says, softer now. “You never did meet her people, did you, son?”

  “How’m I supposed to meet dead people?” he asks, but he’s riffling through layers in his brain. “She had a big family before the war . . . one sister dead . . . a brother, too . . . and someone in a hospital, I think. Her father got sent to some work camp. She’s the only one was left.” Cliff’s breaking up now—and in front of Vida, who’ll probably smack him for it—at his own story, how he found Bernadette, alone in that pitiful place, and saved her, and the baby, too. He’s a savior!

  “Clifford, now, nothing against it, but . . . they was in camps? German camps?” and Cliff’s nodding, eyes straight ahead. “Son, you heard the news, haven’t you? Those camps is where they put the Jews, son. Where they sent the Jews.” Cliff’s nod, Vida sees, is winding down, like a toy. “Do you think maybe she’s not what she says, son?” This, Vida realizes, is all beginning to sound like the best story anybody in Deacon, Iowa, ever had to tell. “Son, you’re a war hero and a good, trusting boy. But trusting too much can get you in trouble. Ever since you and her first got off of that train, I been scared she’s lying, saying another man’s baby was yours. She’s one of them Jews, Cliff, a Jew girl, telling lies because you got a giving way about you, and she took advantage.” Vida’s voice is growing angry, a raspy whisper. “She got you to marry her—if you’re all even married for real—and risk everything you fought that war for.” Is she going too far? She’s already got him: slunk down, head in hands between his spread knees. Vida’s story is nearly done, crystallizing from could of been into was, past tense, no conditional. “Son, she lied.”

  This, of course, is when the swinging doors slam open and a doctor emerges, smiling, bulbous-nosed, bespectacled. Cliff’s and Vida’s faces are expectant, like so many Dr. Maakestad’s greeted in his career. A half-century in obstetrics, and still such a pleasure to say, “It’s a boy!”

  Cliff can’t speak. Vida either. This is usual. Dr. Maakestad says, “Come see your son.”

  Cliff’s voice is a squeak: “It’s alive?”

  “Alive?!” cries the doctor. “Well, of course he’s alive, Mr. Johnston. Quite so. And that’s one brave little lady. Eight pounds, fourteen ounces. Haven’t seen many bigger in all my years.”

  Cliff can’t move. Shock is nothing new to Maakestad, but here’s where the story diverges from anything the doctor’s yet seen. Cliff Johnston, in a tremulous death rattle, asks, “It a Jew?”

  Clearly Dr. Maakestad misheard. He begs pardon. “Come again?” But Cliff’s shaking his head, seeing the wrongness of his question, its unanswerableness; he won’t repeat himself.

  But Vida can control herself no longer. She stands and, for the benefit of the doctor and anyone else in range, declares: “It’s not his baby. That girl, she tricked him. He never even met her before December. Met her in December and a few months later she’s saying it’s his baby, but my son never even had known her when she got herself in trouble. My son’s a hero.” She feels righteous, but her speech is backfiring: Cliff’s standing, disregarding her, striding purposefully toward the doctor. Maakestad fears the man’s coming for him, but then sees in the distant aim of Johnston’s eyes that he wants to be led to the woman and the child, whoever they may be, so Maakestad takes him down the hall. The doctor knocks, peers in, a bit fearful. “Hello there,” he calls to the tired new mother, infant swaddled in her arms. Then Johnston pushes in, and Maakestad’s got a sudden vision of him raising a Luger stolen off a German corpse—he’s going to kill them all! But then Johnston goes shy, drops his head, neck cords taut and pulsing.

  Bernadette knows it’s gone bad. Could she really have expected otherwise? Cliff’s yelling now: “You lied! You—I don’t know what—liar! Jew whore! You—” And then that’s it, that’s all Cliff Johnston’s got in him. He turns and leaves, and Bernadette will never lay eyes on him again. She’ll never know how he and Vida explain things back in Deacon. Maybe they’ll say the baby died. Bernadette, too, and they had them cremated, sent the ashes back to France. But it’s hard to imagine Vida keeping mum about a story that makes her come off as smart as this one does, how she figured it all out long before Cliff could see it for himself. Once Cliff’s married to Becky, with kids of their own, and the whole thing’s over and done, people might tell how Cliff Johnston was so nice of a guy he brung a pregnant Jew back after the war, told them at immigration it was his wife and baby. He was practically Oskar Schindler, Clifford Johnston was, practically.

  It’s Dr. Maakestad—and his wife, also Dr. Maakestad—who give Bernadette bottles, diapers, and a small wad of bills, and put her and the baby on a bus to River City. She carries the cardboard suitcase of baby clothes and her sewing bag, in it the photograph of three little girls, and one of a young, handsome man. Also the list, and the ring. They’re all she has: these things and Michel, named for the young man in the photo. “How about Michael?” Dr. Maakestad suggests. “He’s an American baby, after all, you know? How about an American name?”

  The good Drs. Maakestad arrange for the nun who greets them at the River City station, takes Bernadette and Michael to the County Home for Unwed Mothers, run by the sisters of Our Lady of the Prairie. Registered as Bernadette Maakestad, that’s who she’ll remain. And grateful as she is to those good sisters, even they cannot draw Bernadette to God. She pities them their naive faith, even as she envies the comfort and consolation it brings them. But Bernadette has a child to care for, and God does not change diapers or strain peas. It’s skilled work, not faith, that earns money, and she needs money, and she has skills. The sisters find her a job at the university, sewing parachutes for the troops. After V-J Day, when the war is finally over and normal life resumes at U of I, Bernadette is relocated to the Theater Department, where she’ll stay forty years, moving up from seamstress to costume mistress, all the while keeping quiet, learning English, raising her boy, honing her story, making it his, and ours.

  5
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  NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  “Lead a simple life,” the neurologist advised. “Not that it makes any difference we know about.”

  —Joan Didion, The White Album

  OUR CHICAGO LANDING’S going to be a bumpy one, folks,” the flight attendant announced. We were dipping and swaying. Nausea roiled through me, and I was Bena, pregnant, on that crossing with Cliff. Or maybe it was later, and she—I?—was somehow going back, returning to France. But where was the child? Where was Michel—Michael? “The captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign. As you can . . . feel, we’re experiencing some turbulence.” Static cracked. “We should be on the ground shortly.” I hate when they say that: should. A crashing airplane’s clearly not behaving as it should. “Please make sure your personal items are stowed under the seat in front of you.” The plane bucked. We jounced blindly through the cloud cover, dark and gray as ash, the plane jumping and falling. The noise was tremendous—thundering, groaning, the aircraft creaking as if it were about to break apart at the seams, the wind or the engines or my ears howling ferociously. I couldn’t hear people retching, but I smelled it. I have little doubt but that bowels were voided on that descent. The plane careened through the storm.

  And then we slipped from the clouds, just plopped right out, like a scratched cue ball, returned. The noise changed, as if someone had flipped the station, sounds more abstract, farther away, somehow once-removed. We got spit from the clouds, and the plane banked so sharply I thought we were nosediving. I closed my eyes and prayed, and thought of Erica Jong: “There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.” And then, plunk, we hit land, and went screaming across a tarmac that was presumably beneath us, rain sheeting at one side of the plane, falling horizontally, the pilot pulling hard against it. Wind screamed, brakes skidded, wheels fishtailed. I braced for the slide from asphalt to grass, to pebble and rubble, waiting for a wing to hit something solid—tree, truck, terminal—and send us flipping toward explosion. My ears popped so violently I thought I was having an aneurysm. The plane, miraculously, slowed. I opened my eyes. The plane slowed some more. A smattering of applause, a small hoot, a laugh. People sobbed.

  We deplaned in a haze—shock, probably—like we’d just been born, or given birth. We’d come through a traumatic rite of passage, but now the cabin lights glowed warm, and everyone was extraordinarily respectful, helping others, making way. A flight attendant gripped my hand with both of hers and wished me well, sent me up the jetbridge, cut loose, free.

  Inside the terminal, the world seemed on fast-forward. Someone clasped my arm; I flinched. Then a warm female voice said, “Connecting?” I thought she was asking if my body and brain had synced themselves again. I didn’t know the answer. She said, “Are you connecting from O’Hare today, ma’am?” I must have told her yes, and where to, because suddenly I was on one of those elongated golf carts beep, beep, beeping to a gate where a plane to Cedar Rapids was boarding, and then we were up, and then we were in Iowa. Home.

  The airport shuttle van dropped me at the Yoders’, where someone stood leaning on the porch rail, back to the road, someone I couldn’t place. Someone with cropped hair shorn uneven as a horizontal collaborator’s. I called “Hello,” and the person turned, and it was Eula, her hair cut short as a man’s. She was stunning. “Eula!” I cried. “You’re beautiful!”

  Oren in one arm, Eula lifted a hand to her head for one instant of vanity, then waved to dismiss the compliment. “Phillipa—” She sounded anxious, unlike herself, speaking as if tending to a task she’d sworn to remember. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said. It took me a second to understand she meant Bernadette, who seemed, just then, not lost at all. Far from it! Bernadette had cheated death, a Jew who’d conned her way out of certain extermination. Or a French collaborationist’s daughter, escaped to Iowa to raise her bastard Nazi son.

  “Phillipa,” Eula was saying, “I’m sure everything is going to be okay.” And then, of course, I was present, instantly apoplectic, saying “What? What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  “Ginny and Silas have gone to the hospital, to the—”

  “Hospital? Why the hospital?”

  “Not the hosp—the infuse . . . infusion—infusion center.”

  “The infusion center? What is that? What’s—?”

  Eula grabbed the reins at last: “It’s all right. Ginny’s become . . . de-hydrated?” She said it like a foreign word, stressed in the wrong place. “The doctor wants to give her fluid?”

  “Why does she need fluids? Why is she dehydrated?” I felt I was falling, grabbing.

  “The vomiting,” Eula said. “She’s been vomiting.”

  “On purpose?”

  Eula looked at me uncomprehendingly. “She’s been ill,” she tried. “Sick to her stomach?”

  Disoriented, jet-lagged, probably truly in shock, I put down my bags, found my car keys, and drove to River City, to Ginny. Silas hadn’t yet navigated her through the health care labyrinth. The Sheibels’ nursery job had no benefits; Michael and I paid for Ginny’s very rudimentary coverage. Silas had nothing. The Amish care for their own—though not their own lapsed.

  THE INFUSION CENTER is apparently where cancer patients go for chemo drips. Ginny had gotten fluids in the ER and the psych ward, but hadn’t been here before. The place had a lazy feel to it; everyone appeared to be dying, but slowly. It smelled like a cafeteria steam tray: bleach and boiled plastic. On vinyl loungers amid hulking beige bunkers, bald and turbaned people strung with tubes lay hooked to medi-bagged concoctions and watched TV or slept as their potions dripped and exhausted caregivers worked crosswords under ticking fluorescent lights.

  I stood at reception, scanning the patients until the desk nurse pointed me to a semiprivate enclosure with frosted-glass half-walls. As I approached, Silas emerged. He doesn’t dress traditionally anymore, but his clothes are still plain: work pants, a T-shirt or long underwear top, a work shirt, maybe an old Shetland sweater in winter—always shrunken-looking, boiled, the sleeves too short, hem stretched wide. His tawny hair is wispy—he’ll be as bald as Lucius by thirty—and he wears a few days’ worth of blond beard. His face is deeply creased for such a young person, with crow’s-feet and smile lines, and he’s small, wiry with muscle, his eyes warm and lively. I could be describing Lucius, I realize, though I’m not struck in person by their resemblance.

  Before he could greet me, I said, “Silas, what’s happening? Is she okay?”

  “Eula didn’t tell . . . ? Oh, no—you’d left already when I called.” A shy grin was breaking over his face. “We’re . . .” He laid a hand on his stomach. “We’ll be expecting a baby.”

  “She’s not—it’s just . . . it’s just morning sickness?” Did the Amish say that? “Sick from the baby?” Silas looked uncomfortable. “Congratulations?” I offered. I was thinking that unless female fertility had been deemed a preexisting condition, this care would be covered.

  Silas thanked me. He looked tired. “She has an IV now, with medication for the nausea.”

  Just then, from behind the partition, Ginny cried out, a horror movie scream, and Silas and I flew to her. Contorted in a lounger reclined as far as it could go, Ginny writhed and kicked, her face red and wet. A blanket and pillows had been flung to the floor. She wore a sweatshirt, hood up and tied, but she was clawing at the strings like she was choking, moaning as if she were in labor. “I can’t move my limbs,” she cried. “It’s like I can’t stretch . . . I can’t . . . they’re—” She thrashed in the chair, then shook violently, smacking the armrests.

  Silas pushed the call button, then steadied Ginny, undid her hood, and helped her out of the sweatshirt. When he raised her arms, she began to gag. I grabbed a bin—there were already clots of spit and bile at the bottom—and tried to get it under her mouth, but she was thrashing, gulping for air, pushing everything out of her way, yanking her shirt collar away from her throat. “I’m scared,” she kept saying. “My limbs. I can’t—” S
he heaved, but there was nothing in her. “They’re trapped. In my skin. I can’t push out. I’m so scared—”

  A nurse strode in, elbowed me and Silas aside with unflappable nursely efficiency, checked Ginny’s tubes and connectors, and took her vitals. Though she did it all quickly, nothing felt urgent enough. I wanted her to call in reinforcements, to bark Stat!, rip things off, jab things in. But she just went through her maneuvers like she was completing the Stations of the Cross—or whatever you do at the Stations of the Cross. I clutched the plastic bile bin. Ginny gripped Silas’s hand as he stroked the damp hair from her forehead. The nurse said, “You’re fine.”

  We waited for more. It didn’t come. “She’s got pain in her limbs,” I said.

  “Not pain,” Ginny moaned.

  Silas intervened. “Her arms and legs are . . . cramped?” He looked to Ginny.

  Her voice quavered: “I can’t stretch them. They’re too big for my skin—” Midsentence, she began to heave. My own gag reflex kicked in and I had to look away.

  The nurse nodded but didn’t seem to be listening. “Side effect of the Reglan, probably—paranoia, panic, anxiety . . . I’ll check. Be back with more water.” She turned and left.

  “Probably a side effect?” I looked to Silas. “Paranoia and panic? What’s the drug she said? Regulan? Do they know anything about Ginny? About her history?”

  Ginny sobbed, then heaved, which set off more of the same. “Oh, God, I can’t do this—” She convulsed. I couldn’t watch; I wanted to cover her body with my own. Silas tried to hold her, but she bucked in the lounger, then began to shudder. “The blanket,” she begged. I tucked it around her as best I could. Her teeth chattered. “I’m so cold. I was so hot—now I’m—”

  “This is insane,” I said. “They have to do something.” I ran to reception. Two nurses stood chatting, one absently flexing a stethoscope’s pincers like a stress-relieving device; the other dangled Ginny’s water pitcher in her hand. “My daughter”—I gestured, frantic—“is having a bad reaction to meds. Is there a doctor around? Who’s prescribing the—what is it? Rogaine?”