Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  During that unusually hot, arid summer--a July that wilted flower gardens early and stunted the corn, and an August that dried up a good many of our neighbors' wells--the case never lost what Stephen had referred to once around my mother as its "prosecutorial energy."

  If anything, that person named Tanner seemed to me more rabid than ever as autumn arrived, as interested in persecuting my mother as he was in prosecuting her. And while in hindsight I know this was largely the perception of a teenager who didn't understand that "deposition" is merely a lawyer's term for court-sanctioned harassment, or the ways both the defense and the prosecution leverage court appearances for pretrial publicity, I know also there was some validity to my paranoia: Bill Tanner really was furious, Bill Tanner really was out for blood.

  Neither Tanner nor his staff could believe that my mother had rejected the State's offer of a mere year in jail (of which she'd probably only serve six or seven months) and six years of probation in return for a guilty plea on the charge of involuntary manslaughter. If six years on probation sounded like a long time, they still thought it was a tremendously magnanimous and merciful offer: Despite the fact that Charlotte Bedford was dead, my mother would go to prison for barely half a year. Yes, she was expected to give up midwifery, but to them, that was a small price. It just didn't get any better than this, they must have thought; a deal couldn't get much sweeter.

  Meanwhile, when the rumor of Tanner's offer circulated throughout the medical community, many doctors--especially obstetricians--were livid. Absolutely livid. The whole idea that a hippie midwife had killed some woman with a bedroom C-section (and in their diatribes, this was indeed the essential scenario) and might only go to jail for a few months had a good number of physicians enraged beyond reason. It seemed to me that some of them were spending more time writing editorials or letters to newspapers than they were practicing medicine, and Stephen took to calling the State Medical Board "the Furies," a shorthand reference even I understood.

  Looking back, I still find it astonishing that so many doctors were so clearly unwilling to heed their own advice about stress.

  From the window in my parents' bedroom, the one that faced our backyard and--in the far distance--Mount Chittenden, I watched my mother and Stephen sit back in two Adirondack chairs in the corner of the lawn by the porch. They'd moved the chairs so they were side by side and they could see the sun set through the damp fall air.

  "Being pretty can be a disadvantage with a jury," Stephen was saying, and he stretched his legs through the leaves on the ground by his feet.

  "You think too much. You think too much about the damnedest things."

  "That's my job."

  "Well, I don't think we need to worry that I'm so pretty we're at a disadvantage."

  "It will be a factor in the voir dire. That's all I'm saying."

  "The what?"

  "The jury selection."

  "The way your mind works. Unbelievable."

  "I hope that's a compliment."

  "I'm not sure. I just find it incredible."

  "My mind?"

  "This process. The very idea that because you think I'm pretty--"

  "It's the idea that the jury will think you're pretty. What I think is irrelevant."

  "Hah!"

  "They will, Sibyl. You are an undeniably pretty woman. Undeniably. And with some jurors that will be an asset. With others, it will be a problem we'll have to overcome."

  My mother and Stephen dangled their arms over the sides of their chairs, and their fingers picked at the grass just this side of dormancy and the fallen leaves that had begun to dry. Sometimes the tips of their fingers touched, occasionally the backs of their hands grazed. I wondered if they were savoring those brief, brief seconds when their skin brushed together.

  "You're really going to let Connie watch?" my grandmother asked my mother one Saturday in mid-September, as if I weren't there having lunch with the two of them at our kitchen table.

  "We're really going to let Connie watch," my mother said.

  I imagine in her younger days my grandmother had been an extremely tolerant woman. Her daughter, after all, had dropped out of Mount Holyoke to live with an older man on Cape Cod, and then spent a winter with the Black Panthers in Boston. When Sibyl had finally returned to Vermont, she got pregnant before she got married, and she'd done both very young. And even if this had been "the sixties"--an umbrella rubric for a variety of excesses and an excuse for all sorts of otherwise antisocial behaviors--one might have expected a certain amount of mother-daughter tension. But they always insisted there had been none, a point of family history my father says he can corroborate from at least the moment he entered my mother's life.

  By the time Charlotte Fugett Bedford died, however, my grandmother had grown more conservative. Her own husband, my grandfather, had died ten years earlier, and a decade of living alone had made her slightly skittish, wary, and quick to frown or find fault. And, of course, the woman who watched her daughter on trial was considerably older than the woman whose daughter had dropped out of college: She had aged from her early fifties to her mid-sixties, and she was no more exempt from the anxieties of age than anyone else.

  Nevertheless, my Nonny--my name for her, even at fourteen--was still a warm and energetic woman when I was growing up. My mother's tendency to hug friends on sight was at least partly genetic, and I'll never lose my love for the vaguely floral, vaguely antiseptic smell of my Nonny's hair spray: I'd get a strong whiff of it with every embrace.

  In any case, when it was clear that the charges against my mother would not be settled without a trial, Nonny tried hard to convince my parents to keep me away from the courtroom. She thought it would be a scarring experience, and while there were certainly people attending the trial who would have agreed with her--especially in light of my eventual breakdown--my parents knew how desperately I wanted to be there. Moreover, I think they realized that it would be equally scarring for me to hear important details second-hand in the girls' bathroom at school. And so it didn't matter that I'd miss two (and perhaps three) weeks of classes; it didn't matter that I'd see all sorts of frightening pieces of evidence; it didn't matter that I'd hear truly terrible things said about my mother, or have to watch a variety of witnesses in all likelihood sob on the stand.

  No one, after all, expected Asa Bedford to keep his composure throughout the entire proceedings, or Anne Austin to endure without tears what Stephen himself said would be a "withering search-and-destroy, free-fire, relentlessly savage" cross-examination. And I think both my father and Stephen had begun to wonder by September how even my mother would do. We could all see she was growing quiet and morose--not so much gloomy, as tired beyond the rejuvenating powers of sleep--and in their own ways they were constantly trying to rally her spirits.

  Yet absolutely none of this mattered, because my parents understood how badly I wanted to attend the trial. It seemed to me I had a moral responsibility to be present; in my mind, my appearance was an important show of solidarity with my mother.

  Besides, Stephen wanted me there.

  "Stephen thinks Connie here will be very helpful," my mother said to her mother, and she gave my arm a small squeeze. Don't you worry about Nonny, that squeeze said: You're going.

  "Helpful? Helpful how?"

  "Connie will be a constant reminder for the jury that I'm not just some faceless defendant. I'm not just some midwife. I'm a mother. I have a daughter, a family."

  Nonny had turned the last carrots from her vegetable garden into a salad with raisins and walnuts, and while the carrots were supposed to be shredded, the blender my grandmother used was older than I, and the salad still had a great many large orange chunks. I watched Nonny methodically chew one of those pieces while she thought about my mother's explanation, and noticed there was some dry dirt on the cuffs of her light-blue cardigan. From her garden, I thought. She'd probably harvested the carrots we were eating that very morning.

  Her voice more quizzical than
dubious, more puzzled than angry, Nonny finally said, "And that means they'll have mercy?"

  "This is not about mercy!" my mother snapped back.

  "It's about--"

  "I don't need mercy."

  "Then what does that lawyer of yours mean? Why does he want Connie there so badly?"

  "'That lawyer of yours'? Mother, must you put it that way? It sounds horrible. It sounds like you think he's some sort of charlatan."

  Nonny sighed, and rubbed the arthritic bulbs of her long fingers. My mother and I both knew that Nonny did not think Stephen was a charlatan. How could she? If she meant anything at all by her diminution of Stephen Hastings to "that lawyer of yours," if there was anything at all behind the remark, it was probably a vague apprehension triggered by the way my mother's voice seemed to rise whenever she said the word Stephen, the way the word was tinged with promise and colored by hope when it came from her lips.

  "I just don't think Connie should be there," Nonny said after a moment, wrapping her hands together in her lap. "If you don't need ... mercy or sympathy or something, I don't see why you should bring a fourteen-year-old girl into that courtroom."

  "It makes Mom a real person," I chimed in, paraphrasing a remark I had overheard Stephen make to my parents earlier that week. "And that makes it harder to convict her. Juries don't like to convict the kind of real people who might be their neighbors."

  Both of the adults turned toward me.

  "You weren't doing your homework Wednesday night, were you?" my mother said, trying hard to look stern.

  "I did my homework Wednesday night."

  "Yeah, after Stephen left you did your homework," she said. She then turned to my grandmother and continued, "Connie will be with me because I love her and I want her there--as long as she wants to be there. She's come this far with us, she may as well see it through."

  I woke up in the middle of the night a few days before the trial began, and through the register in the floor I could see the light on in the den below. It was almost two in the morning. For a moment I assumed my mother or father had simply neglected to turn off the light before coming upstairs, and while that would have been uncharacteristic behavior from either of them, these were unusual times. We all had a great deal on our minds.

  I rolled over, hoping to fall quickly back to sleep, but I thought I heard something in the den. Something as intangible as a rustle, as imperceptible as a draft. An eddy, perhaps, whorled, drifting up from the basement through the cracks between the floorboards. Had the curtains merely shivered? Or had someone exhaled, a faint tremor in his or her breath?

  I climbed out of bed and crouched by the register in my nightgown. If there were people in the den, they were not on the couch, which--along with the coffee table and a part of the woodstove's hearth--was about all I could see through the wrought-iron grate.

  I was neither frightened nor cold, but when I decided I'd go downstairs, I started to tremble: Connie Danforth, just like a heroine in one of those ridiculous slasher movies my friends and I were always watching, that idiot camp counselor who went alone into the woods at night, shining her flashlight before her as she practically beckoned the psycho killer in the hockey mask to come get her.

  The stairs remained silent as I walked upon them, largely because I knew exactly where to step to avoid their idiosyncratic creaks and groans. I told myself I was going downstairs to get a glass of milk. If anyone asked what I was doing--and why would someone, it was my house--I would say just that: I'm getting a glass of milk.

  The lights were off in the dining room and the kitchen; I saw the mudroom was dark. Perhaps my parents really had simply left the light on. Perhaps I had heard nothing more than one of the strange breezes that blow through an old Vermont house as the seasons change or the northern air grows cold.

  I paused outside the kitchen entrance to the den, my back flush against the refrigerator, and felt its motor vibrate against my spine. I half-expected to hear a voice call out to me. I wondered if I'd hear, suddenly, an exchange between people in that room. Hearing neither, I pushed off the refrigerator with the palms of my hands and turned toward the den.

  There I saw my father, alone with easily a dozen small stapled packets of papers scattered around him on the floor in one corner. Xeroxes of some sort. He was still wearing the business shirt he had worn to his office that day, and the same light-gray slacks. He was sunk deep into the rocking chair by the brass floor lamp.

  "What are you doing up, sweetie?" he asked when he saw me in the doorway. He looked worried that I was awake.

  "I'm getting a glass of milk."

  "Couldn't sleep?"

  "No. I mean, I woke up. And I decided I wanted a glass of milk."

  He nodded. "Know what? I think I'll have one with you. Then I should probably go to bed myself."

  "Is that work?" I asked, motioning toward the clusters of papers surrounding him on the floor.

  "These? No, not at all. They're precedents. Legal precedents. They're some of the cases your mom's lawyer had researched while putting her defense together."

  I picked up one of the stapled packets, a sheaf of nine or ten pages titled "State v. Orosco." I skimmed the lengthy subtitle, an incomplete sentence that seemed to me a study in gibberish: "Certified questions as to whether information and affidavit in involuntary manslaughter case were insufficient following denial of motions to dismiss and to suppress statements."

  "You've been reading these?" I asked, astonished that he would punish himself so.

  "Yup."

  "Why?"

  He shrugged. "Because I love your mother. And I want to understand what Stephen's doing to defend her."

  He stood and led me to the kitchen where I'd been only moments before, my mind rich with unspeakable suspicions, and pulled from the refrigerator a cardboard container of milk.

  Chapter 15.

  I didn't think I'd be scared once this thing began, but I am. I thought I'd get over it once I got here, once I was settled down in my chair. I was wrong. Or maybe I was just kidding myself the last few weeks.

  All day long I tried to focus on the little things in the courtroom to take my mind off the big ones, even though I know I'm supposed to be paying attention like there's no tomorrow.

  "No tomorrow." I wish I hadn't thought of that expression. It's hateful.

  But there were times I couldn't do it, times I just couldn't pay attention. Or maybe I should say I wouldn't--there were times I just wouldn't pay attention. Some moments, I just found it easier to think about nothing but the incredible chandelier this courtroom has than the idea that I might be in prison somewhere when my sweet baby is in college or when she has her first baby.

  I want to be there when she has her first baby so much.

  I want to be there when she has all her babies.

  And when the idea that I might miss out on something like that crossed my mind today, I'd zone out as fast as I could and focus on something else. Anything else. Like that chandelier. I'd seen the courtroom before when I was charged back in the spring, but I hadn't looked around that day and so I hadn't noticed the chandelier. After all, all I'd really done that morning was breeze in in my little spring dress while Stephen said, "Not guilty, Your Honor." Took about two seconds.

  But I saw the chandelier today, I couldn't miss it. And it's a beauty, it really is. A huge wrought-iron thing that hangs down from smack in the center of the ceiling. The bulbs sit inside these delicate glass tulips, and the metalwork is a series of the most amazingly graceful curlicues and swirls. A lot of times, it was just so much easier for me to get a picture in my head of those tulips or those swirls than the faces of the people being asked all sorts of questions about home birth and midwifery. Stephen and Bill Tanner must have talked to thirty or thirty-five people today, and they still haven't agreed upon who will be on the jury and who won't.

  So, as Stephen said, "We get to do this again tomorrow." I just can't believe it.

  I think there were four or f
ive people up there today who hated me without even knowing me. That wouldn't have bothered me once. Before Charlotte died, I don't think it fazed me a bit when I came across a person who hated me for what I did. I think I viewed it as their problem, not anything I needed to lose sleep over. It was like, "Hey, you deal with it. That's your trip, not mine."

  But it really freaked me out today. It really frightened the hell out of me.

  From where I sit, I can see Lake Memphremagog, and every so often this afternoon when a possible juror was explaining how all of his children had been born in a hospital because it's safer, I'd try to get a picture of the water in my mind. Then I could stare at the guy and look like I was listening, when all I was seeing was the lake.

  I'll bet that water's cold right now, incredibly cold.

  This just isn't a good time of the year for a trial like this. At least for me. Everything's dying, or going brown. I didn't used to mind the fall. I do this year. That's another thing that seems to be different with me since Charlotte died. Suddenly I dislike the fall.