Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  "Do you think she should?" I asked.

  "I don't know. Maybe. Get her side out there."

  "Her side? What do you mean her side?"

  He slipped an album back into the line of records wedged between the wall and one of the speakers, and clasped his hands behind his neck.

  "Look, Connie, I don't know much about any of this stuff. I can't even fake it when it comes to lawyers and newspaper people. So I could be completely wrong about all this. But here's the thing: A lady's dead. And she died having a baby. She didn't die because she was hit by lightning, or because she crashed her car into a rock, or because her house burned down in the middle of the night. She didn't die because she was too fat for her heart, or because she broke her neck on a snowmobile. She's dead because of something that happened while she was having a baby."

  "So?"

  "So, they're going to have to blame someone. Look at all the reporters who've started calling already."

  I heard the robin outside the kitchen window, back to beat up on his reflection. I tried to focus for a moment on what Tom was saying, but I kept coming back to his cousin and the time the fellow spent in the state prison in Windsor. The sentence kept forming in my mind like a word problem in a math class:

  If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth?

  "Who was your cousin's public defender?" I asked.

  "I don't remember his name."

  "But it was in St. Johnsbury?"

  "Yup."

  If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth? The man is drunk, the midwife is sober.

  "Not Newport?"

  "Not Newport."

  "Think Newport has its own public defender?"

  "It's a different county. Probably."

  If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth? The man is drunk, the midwife is sober. When you do the math, don't forget that the midwife cut open the mother after she died.

  "Mrs. Bedford died up in Lawson. The people who went by their house yesterday morning were all from Newport."

  "Look, I'm sure the Newport guy's good, too."

  "I hope so."

  "Besides, even if your mom does end up needing a lawyer, your parents are the type who'll shop around. They'll probably use one of the guys they meet today."

  "And that's if my mom even needs one," I added hopefully, echoing his earlier words.

  He nodded his head and murmured, "Yup, that's right: if. If she even needs one," but I could tell that deep down he was convinced that she would. Behind us the phone rang again, and this time Tom didn't even look up. He just kept staring at the knees of his blue jeans, as yet another unfamiliar voice asked my mother to call him back when she returned.

  Chapter 9.

  Fifteen years ago, I always expected I'd be arrested one day. I marched against the war, I called police officers "pigs," I smoked more than my share of pot.

  But I guess I never got mad enough or wild enough or stoned enough to do something really crazy. Maybe I would have if I hadn't been blessed with Connie. I knew plenty of girls then who would give a trooper the finger while holding their baby in their other arm, but that wasn't me. My baby was always too precious to me to screw around like that.

  I remember that Rand was picked up once and herded into a wagon. He was one of dozens and dozens of guys arrested in a Washington, D.C., protest, and I probably would have been with him if I hadn't been five months pregnant at the time. But I was carrying Connie, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend a day in a cramped van driving from Vermont to Washington, and then another day standing around in the D.C. heat, screaming my lungs out with thousands of really, really angry people.

  I think Rand only spent a night in the jail, and he was never charged with anything.

  And unlike me, he never had to wear handcuffs.

  This afternoon when Stephen was making sure I didn't have to go to jail, the judge and the state's attorney--Tanner--made me feel like I'd shot someone while robbing a house. Stephen said it was all a formality, but I don't think anyone who's ever had state troopers show up at her house and arrest her would call "handcuffs" a formality. And while I was expecting the troopers, I certainly wasn't expecting the handcuffs.

  "Now, I don't really think that's necessary, do you?" Stephen asked the two officers.

  "We don't have a choice, Stephen, you know that," the fellow with the mustache said, the one who I think is named Leland.

  And so right there on my own front porch, they made me put out my arms so they could "cuff me."

  I just don't know how criminals ever get the hang of handcuffs. They really weren't that tight, but I guess I don't have much flesh or fat around my wrists. Every time I wiggled my thumb, the bones in my wrist rubbed against the steel. If I did it enough, I think it would have started to peel the skin.

  The weirdest thing about the handcuffs was this rubber guard someone put around the chain between the bracelets. It was like a five- or six-inch length of clear garden hose. Here they design these scary, ugly, painful metal shackles for people's wrists, and then they put a rubber sleeve around the chain.

  It struck me as the most surreal part of a completely surreal experience. There I was, sitting in the backseat of a state police cruiser in this spring dress covered with blue irises, with my hands folded demurely in my lap because I was wearing handcuffs in a garden hose.

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  STEPHEN HASTINGS HAD NOT had many defendants in our cold, remote corner of the state. He usually worked in Burlington, where the sorts of crimes that might result in the need for a high-powered--by Vermont standards, anyway--attorney were most likely to occur. Stephen had defended the power company executive who was accused of drowning his wife in Lake Champlain, and the high-school English teacher who was charged with having sex with two fifteen-year-old girls from one of his classes. With Stephen's help, they were both found not guilty.

  And while he lost as many visible cases as he won, the fact that he won any at all made him a lawyer in some demand. After all, no one thought he had a chance with the hospital administrator who virtually decapitated the bookkeeper who had apparently figured out he'd been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars. ("The means and mere gruesomeness of the death suggested premeditation," Stephen told us the judge had remarked to him one evening when that trial was finished.) Everyone in the state knew a particular motel owner in Shelburne would be convicted of trafficking drugs, and the woman who left her infant twins to freeze atop Camel's Hump would be found guilty of first-degree murder.

  Although Stephen's murder, rape, and drug trials garnered the most ink, he had also defended a bank president who had doctored his institution's reported assets and liabilities, an entrepreneur who had stolen from her investors, and a pair of Vermont officials who had accepted bribes from a construction company bidding on a state office complex. Vermont rarely endures more than a dozen murders a year, and most of those are the sorts of drug-related homicides or domestic nightmares that wind up with the public defender. Consequently, it was only natural that a firm like Stephen's--and Stephen himself--would handle all sorts of less visible (and less grisly) white-collar crime as well.

  While Stephen may have rarely wound up in the Orleans County Courthouse in Newport, he still knew the county's state's attorney fairly well. Vermont is a small state, and Stephen and Bill Tanner ran into each other at formal bar association functions in Montpelier, and informal receptions at the law school in Royalton. They had mutual friends in Burlington and Bennington, and once spent a Saturday skiing together at Stowe, when they ran into each other in a lift line early that day.

  Consequently, the scene I inadvertently witnessed one morning during the trial shouldn't have surprised me. Bu
t of course it did. I viewed Bill Tanner as an almost psychotic sort of villain, a fellow bent upon the destruction of my mother and my family for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom. He was, in my mind, especially menacing because he was so unfailingly mannered.

  In any case, one morning before the trial began for the day, I was standing outside the two lacquered wooden doors that led from the courthouse hallway into the courtroom itself. It was still very early, but through the porthole glass windows I could see that Stephen and Tanner and Judge Dorset were already inside. Dorset wasn't wearing his robe, and his necktie hung loose around his neck like a scarf: He had not even begun to tie it.

  Tanner was eating a banana and Stephen was munching on dry cereal, his whole hand and part of his arm disappearing periodically inside the large cardboard box. The three men were hovering around the defense table, and Tanner was actually sitting in the chair that usually belonged to my mother. The jury had not yet been brought in, nor had the bailiff or the court reporter arrived. The newspaper writers hadn't struggled in, nor had most of the other spectators who filled the courtroom during the trial: my mother's friends and supporters, curious members of the State Medical Board, and Charlotte Bedford's family--a small group at once inconsolably sad and unmollifiably angry. The only two people I saw in the gallery that moment were the two young adults who--based upon the thick books of state statutes they were reading, and the yellow markers they used to highlight passages in their dense law journals--I assumed were law students.

  My mother was in the women's room on another floor of the building at that moment, and my father was with her--probably pacing the corridor just outside the bathroom.

  Something about the sight of the two lawyers and the judge together prevented me from plowing into the courtroom as planned. The acoustics in the courtroom were sound, and through the thin crack between the double doors I could hear their conversation.

  "Oh, God, I almost laughed out loud when I saw the paper this morning," Tanner was saying, chuckling just the tiniest bit.

  "Was Meehan at the same trial we were?" Stephen said, and it took me a moment to remember why I knew the name Meehan. And then it clicked: He was the gaunt, blond fellow covering the trial for the Montpelier Sentinel, the man who always looked so tired.

  "I just had no idea it was going so damn well, Stephen," Tanner continued, pressing the yellow and black peel from his banana into an empty Styrofoam coffee cup.

  "Meehan's an idiot," Dorset said. "You both know that."

  "Maybe. But if the jury has seen it so far the way he has, I have really screwed up here," Stephen said.

  "No one sees things the way Meehan does," Dorset said.

  "I hope so. Otherwise, it's going to be a very long couple of days for my friend Sibyl," Stephen said, shaking his head with mock drama.

  "But a very short deliberation," Tanner quickly added, and he punched Stephen lightly on the arm.

  I think what distressed me most at that moment wasn't the idea that Stephen feared the trial was going badly, although I'm sure that contributed to the queasiness I felt most of the morning. It may not even have been the way the attorney who was supposed to protect my mother and preserve my family was fraternizing with the enemy that I found so disturbing.

  No, looking back, what I believe upset me the most that day was the casual, lighthearted way the three men were bantering. This trial had become everything for my family, it was our lives; it was in our minds every moment we were awake, and I can't imagine my mother escaped it in her dreams. I know I didn't. The penalty for involuntary manslaughter was one to fifteen years in prison, and Tanner's relentless attacks on my mother had made it clear to us all that should she be found guilty, the State would press hard for the maximum penalty. (I had done the math instantly the morning the charges were brought against my mother: If she was found guilty and sent to prison for a decade and a half, I would be twenty-nine years old by the time she got out, and my mother would be close to fifty.)

  For Stephen Hastings and Bill Tanner, however, for Judge Howard Dorset, this trial was merely their job. It was, in fact, just one of the many jobs they would have in their lives. One more house for a home builder. One more flight for an airline pilot. One more baby for an obstetrician or a midwife. The stakes may have been high for my family, but for the men arguing about my mother's character and capabilities, it was just another morning out of the office, another afternoon in court.

  I didn't have a crush on Stephen Hastings, but it would have been understandable if I had. I imagine a lot of girls in my situation would have fallen madly in love with the fellow, given the fact that he was about as close as our family was going to get to having a white knight or cavalry officer ride into our lives and rescue us. And, of course, my hormones were the chemical mess that everyone's are at thirteen and fourteen years old, an explosive combination of elements with a tendency to combust--at least here in Vermont--in the damnedest places. A pickup truck with a pile of clothes or old blankets tossed casually in the bed. The mossy, hidden crevices that dot the rivers as they switchback through the woods. Cemeteries.

  Perhaps because so much granite is pulled from quarries in Barre and Proctor, a lot of teenage boys in Vermont come to believe adamantly (albeit mistakenly) that graveyards and tombstones affect teenage girls like aphrodisiacs.

  Rollie often teased me that I had a crush on Stephen, but I think that was because she herself was so attracted to the man. That didn't surprise me then; it doesn't surprise me now.

  Stephen was my father's age the summer and fall he defended my mother, and two years older than Sibyl. The men around me that year were thirty-six, the woman who was my world was thirty-four.

  I didn't read newspapers much before my mother's name started to appear in them on a regular basis, so I had never heard of Stephen before he entered our family's life, but I realized quickly that most adults around me had. If they didn't know his name, often they recognized his face once they met him. He was photographed frequently. Back then cameras weren't allowed into courtrooms when trials were in progress, so the typical Stephen Hastings pictures were what he once referred to around me as either "grip and grins" with a defendant on the courthouse steps after he had won, or "solo frowns of righteous indignation" when he was announcing the inevitable appeal after a defeat.

  His hair was just beginning to gray along his temples and across the pair of graceful boomerangs that served as eyebrows. It was more black than brown, and he kept it combed and trimmed with the discipline one might expect from an air force veteran. Small wrinkles had begun to wave from the corners of his mouth, but otherwise his face was lean and sharp. Since I saw him most of the time in the late afternoon or evenings, he always had a shadow of stubble, a dark and natural makeup that in my memories suggests he was especially hardworking and wise.

  He was about my father's height, an inch or so short of six feet, and he was slightly heavier--not fat, not even meaty, but he'd never lost the muscles he'd found while training for Vietnam.

  He was recently divorced when he met my mother and father, but the marriage hadn't lasted very long or led to any children. My mother said that when he was especially preoccupied, he sometimes rolled the thumb and index finger on his right hand around the finger on his left where he had once worn a wedding band, but I never saw him do it myself.

  Perhaps because I was a teen with a fairly predictable interest in clothing, I noticed that Stephen always seemed to be dressed slightly better than the men around him: If he was surrounded by attorneys in blazers and slacks at a Tuesday-morning deposition, he would be wearing a suit; if the gentlemen around him at a Saturday-night cocktail party were wearing khaki pants, his slacks would be gray; even one Sunday at a picnic that summer, before which the adults must have decided en masse that they would all appear in blue jeans, he alone chose to wear chinos--twilled, yes, but ironed and crisp and beige.

  "One click above," he explained that day to my father and me, rolling his eyes and laughing
at himself, after my father had made some comment about his habit of always dressing a tad better than the world around him. "To win at what I do--and let's face it, charge what I charge--demands dressing exactly one click above everyone else. Not two clicks, because then I look like an idiot. One. One click makes me look pricey. And, I hope, worth it."

  "I hope so, too," my father agreed, the tone belying a tension otherwise veiled by his words.

  Stephen never treated me like a child, which at that age meant a great deal to me. Twice he brought me punk albums from a record store in Burlington that wouldn't find their way to the Northeast Kingdom for months. Once after he heard Tom Corts expressing an interest in the American West, he brought him a paperback monograph of Ansel Adams prints. He always seemed enormously interested in my father's work, and I think by the time the trial began he knew so much about home birth he could have delivered a breech in a bedroom by himself.

  I know that sometimes my father felt Stephen had become too much a part of our family's life, but that seemed to me a reasonable price to secure my mother's acquittal. Looking back, I think Stephen simply decided that--or as in actuality these things tend to work--discovered that he cared for my mother, and he wanted to be around us all as much as he could. His gifts, in my mind, were always genuine, his embraces avuncular and sincere.