“You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first but sometimes they’re not. When they’re not they make a lot of trouble for everybody. Maybe I’ll have to operate on this lady. We’ll know in a little while.”
When he was satisfied with his hands he went in and went to work. “Pull back that quilt, will you, George?” he said. “I’d rather not touch it.”
Later when he started to operate Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still. She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, “Damn squaw bitch!” and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him. Nick held the basin for his father. It all took a long time.
His father picked the baby up and slapped it to make it breathe and handed it to the old woman.
“See, it’s a boy, Nick,” he said. “How do you like being an interne?”
Nick said, “All right.” He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing.
“There. That gets it,” said his father and put something into the basin.
Nick didn’t look at it.
“Now,” his father said, “there’s some stitches to put in. You can watch this or not, Nick, just as you like. I’m going to sew up the incision I made.”
Nick did not watch. His curiosity has been gone for a long time.
His father finished and stood up. Uncle George and the three Indian men stood up. Nick put the basin out in the kitchen.
Uncle George looked at his arm. The young Indian smiled reminiscently.
“I’ll put some peroxide on that, George,” the doctor said.
He bent over the Indian woman. She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale. She did not know what had become of the baby or anything.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” the doctor said, standing up. “The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and she’ll bring everything we need.”
He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.
“That’s one for the medical journal, George,” he said. “Doing a Cæsarean with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.”
Uncle George was standing against the wall, looking at his arm.
“Oh, you’re a great man, all right,” he said.
“Ought to have a look at the proud father. They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs,” the doctor said. “I must say he took it all pretty quietly.”
He pulled back the blanket from the Indian’s head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets.
“Take Nick out of the shanty, George,” the doctor said.
There was no need of that. Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian’s head back.
It was just beginning to be daylight when they walked along the logging road back toward the lake.
“I’m terribly sorry I brought you along, Nickie,” said his father, all his post-operative exhilaration gone. “It was an awful mess to put you through.”
“Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?” Nick asked.
“No, that was very, very exceptional.”
“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”
“Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?”
“Not very many, Nick.”
“Do many women?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Don’t they ever?”
“Oh, yes. They do sometimes.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“Where did Uncle George go?”
“He’ll turn up all right.”
“Is dying hard, Daddy?”
“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick, It all depends.”
They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Missis Flinders
TESS SLESINGER
HOME you go!” Miss Kane, nodding, in her white nurse’s dress, stood for a moment—she would catch a breath of air—in the hospital door: “and thank you again for the stockings, you needn’t have bothered”— drew a sharp breath and turning, dismissed Missis Flinders from the hospital, smiling, dismissed her forever from her mind.
So Margaret Flinders stood next to her basket of fruit on the hospital steps; both of them waiting, a little shame-faced in the sudden sunshine, and in no hurry to leave the hospital—no hurry at all. It would be nicer to be alone, Margaret thought, glancing at the basket of fruit which stood respectable and a little silly on the stone step (the candy-bright apples were blushing caricatures of Jean; Jean’s explanation that he was a good boy: Jean’s comfort, not hers). Flowers she could have left behind (for the nurses, in the room across the hall where they made tea at night); books she could have slipped into her suitcase; but fruit—Jean’s gift, Jean’s guilt, man’s tribute to the Missis in the hospital—must be eaten; a half-eaten basket of fruit (she had tried to leave it: Missis Butter won’t you . . . Missis Wiggam wouldn’t you like. . . . But Missis Butter had aplenty of her own thank you, and Missis Wiggam said she couldn’t hold acids after a baby) —a half-eaten basket of fruit, in times like these, cannot be left to rot.
Down the street Jean was running, running, after a taxi. He was going after the taxi for her; it was for her sake he ran; yet this minute that his back was turned he stole for his relief and spent in running away, his buttocks crying guilt. And don’t hurry, don’t hurry, she said to them; I too am better off alone.
The street stretched in a long white line very finally away from the hospital, the hospital where Margaret Flinders (called there so solemnly Missis) had been lucky enough to spend only three nights. It would be four days before Missis Wiggam would be going home to Mister Wiggam with a baby; and ten possibly—the doctors were uncertain, Miss Kane prevaricated—before Missis Butter would be going home to Mister Butter without one. Zigzagging the street went the children; their cries and the sudden grinding of their skates she had listened to upstairs beside Missis Butter for three days. Some such child had she been—for the styles in children had not changed—a lean child gliding solemnly on skates and grinding them viciously at the nervous feet of grownups. Smile at these children she would not or could not; yet she felt on her face that smile fixed, painful and frozen that she had put there, on waking from ether three days back, to greet Jean. The smile spoke to the retreating buttocks of Jean: I don’t need you; the smile spoke formally to life: thanks, I’m not having any. Not so the child putting the heels of his skates together Charlie Chaplin-wise and describing a scornful circle on the widest part of the sidewalk. Not so a certain little girl (twenty years back) skating past the wheels of autos, pursuing life in the form of a ball so red! so gay! better death than to turn one’s back and smile over one’s shoulder at life!
Upstairs Missis Butter must still be writhing with her poor caked breasts. The bed that had been hers beside Missis Butter’s was empty now; Miss Kane would be stripping it and Joe would come in bringing fresh sheets. Whom would they put in beside Missis Butter, to whom would she moan and boast all night about the milk in her breasts that was turning, she said, into cheese?
Now Jean was coming back, jogging sheepishly on the running-board of a taxi, he had run away to the end of his rope and now was returning penitent, his eyes dog-like searching her out where she stood on the ho
spital steps (did they rest with complacence on the basket of fruit, his gift?), pleading with her, Didn’t I get the taxi fast? like an anxious little boy. She stood with that smile on her face that hurt like too much ice-cream. Smile and smile; for she felt like a fool, she had walked open-eyed smiling into the trap (Don’t wriggle, Missis, I might injure you for life, Miss Kane had said cheerfully) and felt the spring only when it was too late, when she waked from ether and knew like the thrust of a knife what she had ignored before. Whatever did you do it for, Missis Flinders, Missis Butter was always saying; if there’s nothing the matter with your insides—doesn’t your husband . . . and Won’t you have some fruit, Missis Butter, her calm reply: meaning, My husband gave me this fruit so what right have you to doubt that my husband. . . . Her husband who now stumbled up the steps to meet her; his eyes he had sent ahead, but something in him wanted not to come, tripped his foot as he hurried up the steps.
“Take my arm, Margaret,” he said. “Walk slowly,” he said. The bitter pill of taking help, of feeling weakly grateful stuck in her throat. Jean’s face behind his glasses was tense like the face of an amateur actor in the role of a strike-leader. That he was inadequate for the part he seemed to know. And if he felt shame, shame in his own eyes, she could forgive him; but if it was only guilt felt man-like in her presence, a guilt which he could drop off like a damp shirt, if he was putting it all off on her for being a woman! “The fruit, Jean!” she said, “you’ve forgotten the fruit.” “The fruit can wait,” he said, magnanimously.
He handed her into the taxi as though she were a package marked glass—something, she thought, not merely troublesomely womanly, but ladylike. “Put your legs up on the seat,” he said. “I don’t want to, Jean.” Good-bye Missis Butter Put your legs up on the seat. I don’t want to—better luck next time Missis Butter Put your legs I can’t make out our window, Missis Butter Put your “All right, it will be nice and uncomfortable.” (She put her legs up on the seat.) Good-bye Missis But. . “Nothing I say is right,” he said. “It’s good with the legs up,” she said brightly.
Then he was up the steps agile and sure after the fruit. And down again, the basket swinging with affected carelessness, arming him, till he relinquished it modestly to her outstretched hands. Then he seated himself on the little seat, the better to watch his woman and his woman’s fruit; and screwing his head round on his neck said irritably to the man who had been all his life on the wrong side of the glass pane, “Charles Street!”
“Hadn’t you better ask him to please drive slowly?” Margaret said.
“I was just going to,” he said bitterly.
“And drive slowly,” he shouted over his shoulder.
The driver’s name was Carl C. Strite. She could see Carl Strite glance cannily back at the hospital; Greenway Maternity Home; pull his lever with extreme delicacy as though he were stroking the neck of a horse. There was a small roar—and the hospital glided backward: its windows ran together like the windows of a moving train; a spurt—watch out for those children on skates!—and the car was fairly started down the street.
Good-bye Missis Butter I hope you get a nice roommate in my place, I hope you won’t find that Mister B let the ice-pan flow over again—and give my love to the babies when Miss Kane stops them in the door for you to wave at—good-bye Missis Butter, really good-bye.
Carl Strite (was he thinking maybe of his mother, an immigrant German woman she would have been, come over with a shawl on her head and worked herself to skin and bone so the kids could go to school and turn out good Americans—and what had it come to, here he was a taxi driver, and what taxi drivers didn’t know! what in the course of their lackeys’ lives they didn’t put up with, fall in with! well, there was one decent thing left in Carl Strite, he knew how to carry a woman home from a maternity hospital) drove softly along the curb . . . and the eyes of his honest puzzled gangster’s snout photographed as ‘Your Driver’ looked dimmed as though the glory of woman were too much for them, in a moment the weak cruel baby’s mouth might blubber. Awful to lean forward and tell Mr. Strite he was laboring under a mistake. Missis Wiggam’s freckled face when she heard that Missis Butter’s roommate . . . maybe Missis Butter’s baby had been born dead but anyway she had had a baby . . . whatever did you do it for Missis Mind. “Well, patient,” Jean began, tentative, jocular (bored? perturbed? behind his glasses?).
“How does it feel, Tidbit?” he said in a new, small voice.
Hurt and hurt this man, a feeling told her. He is a man, he could have made you a woman. “What’s a D and C between friends?” she said. “Nobody at the hospital gave a damn about my little illegality.”
“Well, but I do,” he protested like a short man trying to be tall.
She turned on her smile; the bright silly smile that was eating up her face.
Missis Butter would be alone now with no one to boast to about her pains except Joe who cleaned the corridors and emptied bedpans—and thought Missis Butter was better than an angel because although she had incredible golden hair she could wisecrack like any brunette. Later in the day the eight-day mothers wobbling down the corridors for their pre-nursing constitutional would look in and talk to her; for wasn’t Missis Butter their symbol and their pride, the one who had given up her baby that they might have theirs (for a little superstition is inevitable in new mothers, and it was generally felt that there must be one dead baby in a week’s batch at any decent hospital) for whom they demanded homage from their visiting husbands? for whose health they asked the nurses each morning second only to asking for their own babies? That roommate of yours was a funny one, Missis Wiggam would say. Missis Wiggam was the woman who said big breasts weren’t any good: here she was with a seven-pound baby and not a drop for it (here she would open the negligee Mister Wiggam had given her not to shame them before the nurses, and poke contemptuously at the floppy parts of herself within) while there was Missis Butter with no baby but a dead baby and her small breasts caking because there was so much milk in them for nothing but a. . . . Yes, that Missis Flinders was sure a funny one, Missis Butter would agree.
“Funny ones,” she and Jean, riding home with numb faces and a basket of fruit between them—past a park, past a museum, past elevated pillars—intellectuals they were, bastards, changelings . . . giving up a baby for books they might never write, giving up a baby for economic freedom which meant that two of them would work in offices instead of one of them only, giving up a baby for intellectual freedom which meant that they smoked their cigarettes bitterly and looked out of the windows of a taxi onto streets and people and stores and hated them all. “We’d go soft,” Jean had said; “we’d go bourgeois.” Yes, with diapers drying on the radiators, bottles wrapped in flannel, the grocery man getting to know one too well—yes, they would go soft, they might slump and start liking people, they might weaken and forgive stupidity, they might yawn and forget to hate. “Funny ones,” class-straddlers, intellectuals, tight-rope-walking somewhere in the middle (how long could they hang on without falling to one side or the other? one more war? one more depression?); intellectuals with habits generated from the right and tastes inclined to the left. Afraid to perpetuate themselves, were they? Afraid of anything that might loom so large in their personal lives as to outweigh other considerations? Afraid, maybe, of a personal life?
“Oh give me another cigarette,” she said.
And still the taxi, with its burden of intellectuals and their inarticulate fruit-basket, its motherly, gangsterly, inarticulate driver, its license plates and its photographs all so very official, jogged on; past Harlem now; past fire escapes loaded with flower pots and flapping clothes; dingy windows opening to the soot-laden air blown in by the elevated roaring down its tracks. Past Harlem and through 125th Street: stores and wise-cracks, Painless Dentists, cheap florists; Eighth Avenue, boarded and plastered, concealing the subway that was reaching its laborious birth beneath. But Eighth Avenue was too jouncy for Mr. Strite’s precious burden of womanhood (who was r
eaching passionately for a cigarette); he cut through the park, and they drove past quiet walks on which the sun had brought out babies as the fall rains give birth to worms.
“But ought you to smoke so much, so soon after—so soon?” Jean said, not liking to say so soon after what. His hand held the cigarettes out to her, back from her.
“They do say smoking’s bad for childbirth,” she said calmly, and with her finger tips drew a cigarette from his reluctant hand.
And tapping down the tobacco on the handle of the fruit-basket she said, “But we’ve got the joke on them there, we have.” (Hurt and hurt this man, her feeling told her; he is a man and could have made you a woman.)
“Pretty nice girl, you are,” Jean said, striking and striking at the box with his match.
“This damn taxi’s shaking you too much,” he said suddenly, bitter and contrite.
But Mr. Strite was driving like an angel. He handled his car as though it were a baby carriage. Did he think maybe it had turned out with her the way it had with Missis Butter? I could have stood it better, Missis Butter said, if they hadn’t told me it was a boy. And me with my fourth little girl, Missis Wiggam had groaned (but proudly, proudly); why I didn’t even want to see it when they told me. But Missis Butter stood it very well, and so did Missis Wiggam. They were a couple of good bitches; and what if Missis Butter had produced nothing but a dead baby this year, and what if Missis Wiggam would bring nothing to Mister Wiggam but a fourth little girl this year—why there was next year and the year after, there was the certain little world from grocery store to kitchen, there were still Mister Butter and Mister Wiggam who were both (Missis Wiggam and Missis Butter vied with each other) just crazy about babies. Well, Mister Flinders is different, she had lain there thinking (he cares as much for his unborn books as I for my unborn babies) ; and wished she could have the firm assurance they had in “husbands,” coming as they did year after year away from them for a couple of weeks, just long enough to bear them babies either dead ones or girl ones . . . good bitches they were: there was something lustful beside smug in their pride in being “Missis.” Let Missis Flinders so much as let out a groan because a sudden pain grew too big for her groins, let her so much as murmur because the sheets were hot beneath her—and Missis Butter and Missis Wiggam in the security of their maternity-sorority exchanged glances of amusement: SHE don’t know what pain is, look at what’s talking about PAIN. . . .
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 21