Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  The storm windows were still sealed for the winter, but there was one on the far side of the curio cabinet close enough to the front steps that I could sit beneath it and hear clearly the adults' conversation through the two layers of glass.

  I sat against the wall with my ice milk in my lap, careful that my head remained below the sill.

  "What makes you think this thing might not go to trial?" my mother asked as I settled in.

  "We just might not have to."

  "Of course we will."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "I've delivered too many babies over the years, and pissed off too many doctors. They're not going to let me off the hook."

  "First of all, Bill Tanner has a spine. He's not proceeding because some ob-gyn has a grudge against you--"

  "We're not talking about some ob-gyn, we're talking about lots of them. We're talking the entire medical board."

  "I understand that. I know there are some doctors who don't approve of home birth--"

  "Or of midwives."

  "Or of midwives. But whatever else I think or don't think about Bill Tanner, he's not the type who would proceed unless he honestly believed a crime had been committed. He's not doing all this just because you've pissed off some doctors."

  "But that's a factor."

  "At best, a small one. They may have alerted him on some level that in their eyes there's a problem, but it's his decision to go forward."

  "Then why do you think we might not have to go to trial?"

  "Perhaps we can settle things ahead of time."

  The conversation went quiet, and I held my spoon in the air. I was afraid they knew I was listening, and I didn't want the sound of the spoon on the bowl to give me away. But then my mother spoke, and I realized she was just digesting the idea of a settlement.

  "What does that mean?" she asked. "I pay a fine and I get on with my life?"

  "No, it's more complicated than that."

  "Tell me."

  I heard Stephen laugh, a sort of self-deprecating chuckle. "You want to know too much too soon. You're moving too fast for me."

  "I want to understand my options."

  "It's too soon. I don't even know your options. It depends on what kind of case the State has. What kind of case we have."

  "Give me an example, then."

  "An example? An example of what?"

  "A settlement."

  "Settlement's a civil term. Not a criminal one."

  "You used it, Counsel."

  "If I did, I'm sorry. But I think I only said settle."

  "You lawyers are all alike," my mother said lightly. "You'll argue over the smallest points."

  "God, I hope you haven't had to deal with that many lawyers in your life that you can generalize with accuracy."

  "Oh, a few. But it's usually just been to defend me those times I've killed people by mistake."

  "Seriously, have you ever needed a criminal lawyer before?"

  "I told you the day we met that I hadn't."

  "I only asked if you had any prior convictions--not if you'd ever used a criminal lawyer."

  "Good Lord, of course I haven't! When would I have needed a criminal lawyer?"

  "I don't know. That's why I'm asking."

  "No, Stephen, this is a new experience in my life, I assure you."

  "I'm your first."

  "You're my first."

  "I'm flattered."

  "An old lady like me can flatter you? God, you've been divorced too long."

  "How old are you?"

  "Thirty-four."

  "A mere babe in the woods."

  "Oh, I don't think so. I'm definitely too old to throw around expressions like 'old lady' and 'old man' the way I once did."

  "I think it's the expressions that have aged badly. Not you."

  "You're biased."

  "Because I like you?"

  "Because you weren't exactly a part of the counterculture."

  "You don't think I was a revolutionary?"

  "No way."

  "A hippie?"

  "Isn't that word awful? I can't believe we ever used it seriously."

  "We didn't, Sibyl. At least I didn't."

  "I'll bet you were a real hippie-hater back then. I'll bet we drove you crazy."

  "I didn't hate hippies! I didn't even know any hippies. Why would you think I'd hate them?"

  "Because you're so unbelievably uptight. Look at your shoes."

  "I'm not uptight."

  "You think so?"

  "I do."

  "Okay, let's see. Ever smoked grass?"

  "Yes."

  "A lot?"

  "I didn't like it. So I didn't do it again."

  "So you did it once."

  "Or twice, maybe."

  "In Vietnam or Vermont?"

  "Vietnam."

  "That doesn't count."

  "Why?"

  "I've always envisioned that place as so totally horrible you had to smoke dope like air just to survive."

  "It was horrible if you were in the jungle. I wasn't."

  "So you didn't have to smoke dope?"

  "Well, at least not to survive."

  "But you didn't want to either."

  "It seems to me, Mrs. Danforth," he said with professorial gravity, "that any movement that uses an illegal drug as its principal criterion for membership or inclusion is a movement not worth joining."

  "Okay. Here are some easy ones. Ever spent a week in a commune?"

  "Thankfully not."

  "Slept in a van?"

  "Nope."

  "Been barefoot?"

  "Of course."

  "For days at a time?"

  "Hours. Maybe."

  "Worn beads?"

  "Not a prayer."

  "That's fine. Let's get a little more serious: Ever tried to connect with the Black Panthers? Maybe help set up a volunteer breakfast program for hungry families in Boston?"

  "You did that, I suppose?"

  "I did. Ever put together prenatal information pamphlets for poor Vermont women, and then gone house to house and trailer to trailer for days to make sure people got them?"

  "Did that too, eh?"

  "I did. Or how about just feeling the most incredible, awesome love for people--all people--just because they're human and therefore amazingly magic? Ever felt that?"

  "Probably not sober."

  "Or just wanting the world to stop caring about things? Possessions? Status? Wanting us all to stop judging each other by what we own?"

  "I like what I own, Sibyl," Stephen said, trying to make light of her passion, and then I heard him yell in mock pain.

  "Do you always hit your lawyers?"

  "That didn't hurt," my mother said, and she was laughing.

  "Trust me, it did."

  "I did those things, I felt those things," my mother said, ignoring him. "I was with people like Raymond Mungo and Marshall Bloom. I really believed the war was wrong."

  "I believe you did."

  "I grew up in Vermont--not Westchester County or some town-house in Back Bay. I actually knew boys who went to Vietnam. A lot of them. Most of the boys in my high-school class went there. For me, the war wasn't just some trendy thing to protest against. I was worrying about boys I knew well--sometimes very well--as well as villagers I'd never met."

  "Boys like me."

  "Yes, boys like you. Being a hippie wasn't just about bouncing around without a bra, or having a lot of sex with boys you barely knew. It's really easy today to look back on those years and make fun of us for our clothes or drugs or silly posters. But at its best, the whole ... era was about trying to make the world a little less scary."

  A floorboard squeaked as one of the adults outside stood up. A shadow passed across the sill, and Stephen's voice grew closer.

  "I didn't mean to make fun of the things you did," he said.

  "You didn't make fun of anything. I was just telling you."

  I then heard the wood shift under my mother's weight
as well, as she stood up beside him. The two were silent for a long moment and I envisioned them watching the sun set, or staring into the shadows shaped like ice cream cones that were cast by the line of blue spruce at the western edge of our lawn.

  "You never told me how we might settle," she said finally.

  "I didn't, did I?"

  "No."

  "Okay, let's see," Stephen began, those first words offered at the end of a long sigh. "Here is where the idea of small-town Vermont has always been most real to me. Bill and I know each other, and we know the system. When I used the word settle, I meant negotiate. Or bargain. Depending on what the State has or doesn't have in the way of a case, I can imagine me sitting down with Bill at some point this spring and saying to him, 'Bill, we both know we can settle this thing now, or we can make all our lives unduly hard in six months with a trial.'"

  "What would we be negotiating?"

  "It might be the charge. And if we agree on that, it might be the sentence."

  I flinched at the word sentence, and clearly my mother had, too. "The sentence?" she said, a tiny but unmistakable sliver of panic shooting through her voice. "I haven't done anything wrong!"

  "Everything I'm saying here is conjecture, Sibyl. This is all just ... just talk. Okay?"

  "I don't think I like this kind of talk."

  "Well, a sentence may not even be an issue. So let's not talk about it now. Fair enough?"

  "No, I want you to go on."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Of course I'm sure. The idea that we're already sentencing me freaked me out there for a second, but I'm fine now."

  "Okay. Here's one way we might settle this thing. We plead guilty to a charge of practicing medicine without a license--a misdemeanor--and we pay a fine. No big deal, at least not in the greater scheme of things. Then on a charge of involuntary manslaughter, we accept a deferred sentence. Let's say two or three years and another small fine, but no conviction at the end of the deferment. How does that sound?" Stephen asked, and I could tell that he thought he had just painted a wonderful scenario for my mother, one that he believed would restore her confidence and mood.

  "Tell me what a deferred sentence is," she said simply.

  "You plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter. Usually, that would mean imprisonment for one to fifteen years. Not in this case. A deferred sentence is a postponement of the sentencing by--in my example, anyway--two or three years. If at the end of that time you've met all of the conditions for the deferment, there's no jail time and no record. Just the fine."

  "What's a condition? Something like house arrest?"

  "God, no! You'd come and go as you pleased, your life would be completely normal. Maybe you'd do some community service. But mostly you'd just be expected not to break any laws during the deferment or--and I think this is inevitable--work as a midwife."

  "And after two or three years?"

  "It would be like nothing happened."

  "It will never, ever be like that. Not under any circumstances."

  "I mean in the eyes of the law."

  "So if I give up my practice for a few years, the State will back off? Is that right?"

  "That's one ... possibility."

  "And there'd be no record?"

  "On the charge of involuntary manslaughter. In the stew I just cooked up, you've pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license."

  "And that's a misdemeanor?"

  "Astonishingly, yes."

  "Is this ... stew likely?"

  "I don't know yet."

  "But you don't think so, do you?" my mother said. We had both heard the doubt in Stephen's voice.

  "Sibyl, I just don't know. For all I know, it's possible. Maybe probation is possible--"

  "Probation?"

  "Let's suppose the State has an airtight case, a case we just can't win. There's no way. In return for no jail time we plead guilty, and you get a suspended sentence and a couple years' probation. Again, your life goes on more or less as it always has, except there's this probation officer you see every so often, and you give up midwifery."

  Slowly, sounding at once oddly drugged and unshakably determined--each syllable in each word a declaration itself--my mother said, "That's not an option, Stephen. I could never give that up. I never will give that up."

  The sun was well below the evergreens now, and the room around me was growing dark.

  "I doubt it will even come to that," Stephen murmured after a minute.

  "You don't believe that. You believe that it will."

  "I don't know. And I won't know for months."

  "Months ..."

  "Perhaps even longer. Like I said, delay helps us a lot more than them."

  "I don't want this to drag on."

  "I understand."

  "And I won't stop birthing babies."

  I heard the sound of my father's Jeep as he pulled into our driveway and then turned off the engine.

  "I think you'll have to, Sibyl. At least for a while."

  "Until the trial?"

  "Or until we settle with the State."

  "And you say that could be months."

  "At the very least."

  The Jeep's door slammed, and I saw the shadow of my mother's arm as she waved at my father.

  "Please, Stephen," she said, her voice not loud enough for my father to hear, "get this over and done with fast. As quickly as possible."

  "The longer it--"

  "Please, Stephen," she said again. "Fast. For the sake of me and my family: Get this over with fast."

  Years later when my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer--an adenocarcinoma, the sort a nonsmoker's most likely to get--I saw my father become an exquisite caregiver. I saw a tender person inside him emerge and purchase a Vita-Mix blender, and prepare her broccoli shakes and carrot juice in the middle of each afternoon. My mother told me he did all the laundry and the grocery shopping when she became unable, and I saw how he filled the house with fruit. I know he drove often to the department store in Burlington to buy my mother turbans and hats and scarves. And, toward the end, on occasion I saw him sitting patiently beside her as she did crossword puzzles in bed, keeping her company as a listener at once active and serene. Sometimes that bed was in their bedroom, sometimes it was in the hospital.

  He was, I can write without reservation or qualification, an exceptional cancer coach: part nurse, part dietitian, part partner and soul mate. Part Knute Rockne.

  But, of course, my mother was not diagnosed with cancer in 1981, she was charged with a felony. She was accused of taking one life when she was supposed to be facilitating another's arrival.

  Consequently, my mother didn't need a nurse or a dietitian or a cancer coach, she needed a lawyer. And so I think it was natural that to a large extent that role of caregiver fell more upon Stephen Hastings's shoulders than upon my father's, and that my father was jealous: He wanted to help. He wanted responsibilities. He wanted more things to do.

  I watched my parents carefully the night Stephen stopped by with his news, and it was clear that my mother had lost sight of the good tidings he'd brought her behind the bad. Undoubtedly she was relieved that in all likelihood the State would charge her with involuntary manslaughter instead of second-degree murder, but this information had been overshadowed by the idea that she would have to stop birthing babies for some period of time. Perhaps forever.

  Looking back, I realize my mother's reaction probably shouldn't have surprised me: A criminal charge was an abstract thing to her, something she couldn't fully comprehend. But midwifery was her calling, it was what she had chosen to do with her life. The very notion that she'd have to close her practice--even temporarily--caused her more anxiety than her lawyer's news about the charge brought relief.

  "What am I supposed to do, tell someone like May O'Brien that I can't help her have her baby?" she asked my father that night as she picked at the food on her plate.