The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  Still no one came; another three minutes had passed. She thought of Sloan, who would be in the Visitors’ Lounge with her mother and Bill Edris, talking and enjoying himself; it was against the hospital rules for the husband to watch the mother nurse, and this was one rule that Sloan did not care to break. Perhaps a passing interne would notice her light. She raised her arm to look at her watch again; two more minutes gone. She felt as though she and Stephen were marooned together in eternity or tied together like prisoners in some gruesome form of punishment. It was useless to remind herself that this frightening bundle was her own child and Sloan’s. Rather, she felt, to her shame, that he was a piece of hospital property that had been dumped on her and abandoned—they would never come to take him away.

  Just then Stephen woke. He gave a long sigh and turned his head, burying it in her breast, and at once went back to sleep again. Priss could feel his nose pressing against her shrinking skin, and the idea that he might suffocate made her suddenly cold with fear. That was always happening to babies in their cribs. Maybe he had already suffocated; she listened and could not hear his breathing—only the loud noise of her own. Her heart was pounding with a sort of stutter. She tried to move his head gently, but again he resisted, and she was afraid of accidentally touching the soft part of his skull. But at least he was still alive. Gratefully, she tried to collect herself and make an intelligent decision. She could telephone down to the switchboard and get them to send help. But two things deterred her: first, her shyness and dislike of being a nuisance; second, the fact that the telephone was on the right side of the bed and she would have to move Stephen to reach it, but moving Stephen was just the problem. She was scared to. Scared of what, she asked herself. Scared that he might cry, she answered.

  “Priss Hartshorn Crockett!” she said sternly to herself. “Are you ready to let your newborn baby die of suffocation because you’re shy and/or because you can’t bear to hear him cry? What would your mother think?” Determined, she half sat up, and this abrupt movement dislodged the baby, who slipped to her side in a little heap, woke up and began to cry furiously. At that moment, the door opened.

  “Well, what’s going on here?” exclaimed the student nurse, who was Priss’s favorite; she was glad it was not the other one, at any rate. The girl, in her blue-striped uniform, picked up Stephen and cuddled him in her arms. “Have you two been having a fight?” Priss replied with a weak chime of laughter; humor was not her strong point, but now that she saw the baby safe in the nurse’s strong bare arms, she laughed with relief. “Is he all right? I’m afraid I lost my head.” “Stephen’s just plain mad, isn’t he?” the girl said, addressing the baby. “Does he want to go back to bed?” She picked up his blanket and wrapped him in it; she patted his back to “bubble” him. “No, no!” cried Priss. “Give him back, please. He hasn’t finished nursing. I let him go to sleep in the middle.”

  “Oh, my!” said the girl. “You must have been scared, all right. I’ll stay with you this time till he finishes.” The baby belched, and the girl unwrapped him and laid him, under the covers, on Priss’s breast. “Somebody should have come in to bubble him,” she said. “He swallowed a lot of air.” She gently slid the nipple into his mouth. The baby pushed it away and began to cry again. He was evidently angry. The two girls—Priss was the older—gazed at each other sadly. “Does that happen often?” said Priss. “I don’t know,” said the girl. “Most of our babies are bottle babies. But they do that sometimes with the bottle if the holes in the nipple aren’t big enough; they get mad and push the bottle away.” “Because the milk doesn’t come fast enough,” said Priss. “That’s my trouble. But I wouldn’t mind if he pushed a b-bottle away.” Her thin little face looked rueful. “He’s tired,” said the student nurse. “Did you hear him this afternoon?” Priss nodded, looking down at the baby. “It’s a vicious circle,” she said gloomily. “He wears himself out crying because he’s famished and then he’s too exhausted to nurse.”

  The door opened again. “You left Mrs. Crockett’s light on,” the older nurse chided the student. “You should remember to snap it off when you come in. What was the trouble here, anyway?” “He won’t nurse,” said Priss. The three women looked at each other and sighed jointly. “Let’s see if you have any milk left,” said the old nurse finally, in a practical tone. She moved the baby’s head slightly to one side and squeezed Priss’s breast; a drop of watery liquid appeared. “You can try it,” she conceded. “But he’ll have to learn to work for his supper. The harder he works, of course, the more milk you produce. The breast should be well drained.” She squeezed Priss’s breast again, then clapped “Baby’s” head to the moist nipple. While both nurses watched, he sucked for another minute, for two minutes, and stopped. “Shall we prime the pump again?” said Priss with a feeble smile. The older nurse bent down. “The breast is empty. No sense in wearing him out for nothing. I’ll take him now and weigh him.”

  In a moment the student nurse was back, breathless. “Two ounces!” she reported. “Shall I tell your company they can come back?” Priss was overjoyed; her supper tray appeared while she was waiting for her family to return, and she felt almost hungry. “We’ve heard your vital statistic,” announced Mrs. Hartshorn. “Is two ounces a lot?” asked Allen dubiously. An excellent average feeding, declared Sloan: Priss’s milk was highly concentrated, though the volume was not large; that was why the baby was gaining steadily, despite the little fuss he made before meals. Then they all trooped out for the evening, to let Priss have her supper in peace. Sloan was carrying the cocktail shaker; they would not need it any more in the hospital, for next weekend Priss would be home.

  Priss picked up the last number of Consumer Reports; she was hoping they would have an article on bottled baby foods. She knew she was letting herself slip, mentally, in the hospital; she lived on the bulletins the nurses brought her of how many ounces Stephen had taken—they weighed him before and after each feeding. If the nurse forgot to come and tell her, she nearly died, imagining the worst and not having the gumption to ring and ask. The other important event was the regular morning weighing, before his bath, which showed his over-all gain for the day. Nothing but these figures and her own fluid intake interested Priss now; she was always having to ring for the bedpan because of the gallons of water she imbibed. The nurses were awfully co-operative, though they disapproved, she knew (except the student), of her breast-feeding Stephen. They thought Sloan and her obstetrician, Dr. Turner, were balmy. But they too were impressed, nolens volens, by the evidence of the scales. The child was growing.

  If it had not been for the bulletins, Priss would certainly have lost faith. Sloan and Dr. Turner did not have to hear Stephen crying. The nurses and Priss had to hear it. At eight o’clock that night, right on the dot, down in the nursery Stephen started to cry. She knew his voice—the whole floor knew it. Sometimes he would whimper and then go back to sleep for a while, but when he began noisily, as he was doing now, he might cry for two solid hours—a scandal. It was against the rules for the nurses to pick him up; they were allowed to change him and give him a drink of water, and that was all. The babies were not supposed to be “handled.” And if they gave him a second drink of water, he might not nurse properly when feeding time finally came.

  Sometimes merely changing him would quiet him for the time being. Often the drink of water would quiet him. But not always. A lot depended, Priss had discovered, on when he got the water; if they gave it to him too soon, he would sleep briefly and wake up again, howling. If he woke up midway between feedings, the nurse usually let him cry, after changing him, for an hour, and then gave him the water, so that, tired from crying and with a deceptively full stomach, he would often sleep through until the next feeding. That was the best, for then he was fresh when he was brought in to nurse and would draw with might and main from the nipple. But if he woke up shortly after a feeding, it was horrible: after an hour’s cry, he would get his water, sleep, wake up and cry again without stopping—his
record, so far, was two hours and three-quarters.

  Priss’s ear was attuned to every detail of this routine; she could tell when he was getting his water, when the nurse was just changing or turning him over. She could tell when he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, by the way his cries subsided and finally trailed off. She could recognize the first sleepy whimperings, and her imagination shared the nurse’s hesitation as to whether to pick him up and change him at once or whether to leave him alone, hoping that he would not wake fully. She knew too that one of the nurses (she was not sure which) used to break the rules and pick him up and rock him in her arms; this was indicated by a sudden respite, a fairly long silence, and then a fierce renewal of crying as he was set back in his basket again. She could never make up her mind how she felt toward the nurse who did this: thankful or disapproving.

  The nights were the worst. There were nights when, hearing him start at three or four in the morning, she would have welcomed anything that would let him stop and rest—paregoric, a sugar-tit, any of those wicked things. During her pregnancy, Priss had read a great deal about past mistakes in child rearing; according to the literature, they were the result not only of ignorance, but of sheer selfishness: a nurse or a mother who gave a crying child paregoric usually did it for her own peace of mind, not wanting to be bothered. For the doctors agreed it did not hurt a baby to cry; it only hurt grownups to listen to him. She supposed this was true. The nurses here wrote down every day on Stephen’s chart how many hours he cried, but neither Sloan nor Dr. Turner turned a hair when they looked at that on the chart; all they cared about was the weight curve.

  Sloan had warned Priss repeatedly against listening to the nurses: they meant well but they were in a rut. They also liked to think they knew better than the doctor. It irritated him to have Priss dwell on how long Stephen had “vocalized.” “If it bothers you so much,” he had said to her sharply the other day, “you can get them to give you some cotton for your ears.” That was not Priss’s point, but she had considered doing what he said because she knew that worrying was bad for her milk supply; the nurses were always telling her that. But she was too much of a liberal to “turn a deaf ear” to a hungry baby; that would be like those people who were blind to bread lines and picket lines. If Stephen howled, she wanted to know it. Moreover, being a worrier, she would imagine that Stephen was crying if she had ear stoppers in. Sloan replied that this was ridiculous, but that since she refused to be rational, she would have to suffer.

  Poor Sloan was impatient with suffering; that was why, probably, he had become a doctor. But he hid his idealism behind an armor of hardness; otherwise, he could not go on practicing, seeing all the pain he saw. She had often formulated this theory about Sloan when they had words about crossing a picket line or boycotting Spain and Japan (“Little Captain Boycott,” he called her, to their friends), but now, in the hospital, it struck her as peculiar that nurses, who heard more crying than doctors did, did not develop an armor against it. And she did not think that it was only for their own peace of mind that the nurses had begun muttering among themselves (she had heard them) that they would like to see Dr. Turner spend just one night in the patient’s place.

  They blamed Dr. Turner, because he was Priss’s doctor, but it was really Sloan who had the bee in his bonnet. Lying in bed tensely listening to Stephen’s mournful cry, Priss suddenly did not understand why Sloan was so strong for breast-feeding. Was it entirely for the reasons he gave—the medical reasons? Or because he had a stubborn streak and felt that Mrs. Hartshorn, the nurses, and Priss were all against him? Or was it something worse? It crossed her mind that Sloan, who was just starting in practice, might regard her nursing Stephen as a sort of advertisement. He liked to make a point of his differences with dear old Dr. Drysdale, who had taken him into his office and who had practically introduced the bottle into New York society. Dr. Drysdale prided himself on being ultra-scientific, but Sloan said that all that boiling and sterilizing was inefficient and wasteful (not to mention the cost of the equipment), when you could tap nature’s resource; the baby could be weaned from the breast directly to the cup. Any mother could nurse, he maintained, just as any woman could keep her weight down during pregnancy—Mrs. Hartshorn had been astonished at how little Priss had gained, even with being on the sofa. Priss had been proud of keeping her girlish figure and proud as Lucifer of nursing Stephen, but now her pride was deflated by the thought that Sloan was using her to prove his theories, like a testimonial in a magazine. And it was true that the tale of her nursing had spread far and wide: everybody and his brother in this wing of the hospital seemed to have heard that poor little Mrs. Crockett, a chestless wonder, was breastfeeding; outside, in the Cosmopolitan Club, her mother’s circle were all talking about it. “Well, you’ve certainly started something!” Kay Strong Petersen had commented. “Every pregnant alumna who’s heard about you wants to nurse.”

  It was unlike Priss to be bitter, but it galled her to feel, as she did tonight, that she was a party to a gross deception—one of those frauds on the public that the government Bureau of Standards was always out to uncover. At nine o’clock, when the maid brought in her fruit juice, Stephen was still crying, steadily, like a buzz saw; Priss was trying to do a crossword puzzle but could not concentrate. At the opening of the door, the screams from the nursery came louder; a weaker voice had joined Stephen’s. The idea that her child disturbed the other infants greatly troubled Priss, though the nurses tried to reassure her: newborn babies, they said, quickly got accustomed to a familiar noise. Still, Priss could not refrain from framing an apologetic sentence to the maid. “Oh, dear, Catherine,” she said (she had made a point of learning the maids’ names), “do you hear him? He’ll wake up the whole hospital.” “Hear him?” replied Catherine, who was Irish. “He’ll wake the dead. When are they going to let him have a bottle, for God’s sake?” “I don’t know,” said Priss, closing her eyes in pain. “Ah, don’t take it so hard,” the maid said jauntily, straightening Priss’s covers. “He’s exercising his lungs.” Priss wished everyone would not say that. “It’s not my place to ask,” said Catherine, moving closer to plump Priss’s pillows, “but I’ve been wondering. What put it into your head to nurse?” Priss felt her neck redden. “Im-m-mun-ities,” she stammered. The maid looked at her curiously. “You know,” said Priss. “Like vaccination. He can’t get any diseases I’ve had, like mumps or chicken pox or measles.” “Always something new,” said Catherine, shaking her head. She poured Priss fresh water. “They’re always inventing something, aren’t they?” Priss nodded. “Would you like your radio on, now? A little music? You won’t hear him, over the music.” “No, thank you, Catherine,” said Priss. “Can I crank you up a bit, Mrs. Crockett?” “No, thank you,” Priss repeated. The maid hesitated. “Good night, then, and cheer up. Look on the bright side. They used to say it developed the bust.” Priss could not help treasuring this last remark; she saved it to tell her mother tomorrow, in the brogue, if she could without stuttering. At the same time she had to admit that she had been secretly hoping that Stephen would be a bust-developer and she had made Dr. Turner laugh when she asked him anxiously whether she wouldn’t need a nursing brassiere. Her mood lightened; outside, silence reigned—Stephen must have had his drink of water while she and the maid were talking.

  The calm was broken by the head floor nurse, Miss Swenson, who was going off duty. She came in and closed the door. “I want to tell you, Mrs. Crockett, that I’m going to speak to Dr. Turner in the morning. To recommend that Stephen be given a supplementary bottle.” The nurse’s casual tone did not fool Priss. A supplementary bottle—the phrase sounded horrid, as if Miss Swenson had said, “I’m going to recommend a dose of strychnine.” The very word bottle made Priss bristle, no matter what adjectives were attached. She braced herself against her pillows and prepared to give battle. Miss Swenson went on smoothly, as if she had not noticed the effect of her announcement on Priss. “I know this will be a great relief to you, Mrs.
Crockett. We all understand what you’ve been going through. You’ve been a wonderful patient, a remarkable patient.” Even in her shock, Priss recognized that Miss Swenson, whom she had always liked, was speaking with real earnestness. “But why?” she brought out finally. “The scales …”

  Miss Swenson, who was in her thirties with blond hair in a bun, came to the bedside and took her hand. “I know how you feel, my dear. Torn. Most nursing mothers cry when I have to tell them that I recommend a supplementary bottle. Even when the child is failing to gain weight. They want to keep trying. You’re exceptionally brave not to break down.” “You mean this happens often?” asked Priss. “Not very often. But we have one or two younger doctors who like to have the mothers nurse as long as they’re able. Not all the mothers agree, of course. There’s still a prejudice against breast-feeding, especially—and this will surprise you—among ward patients. They feel that a bottle baby is socially superior.” “How interesting!” Priss exclaimed. “And we see that same attitude with our Jewish private patients. Even when they have plenty of milk, and the doctor encourages it, they don’t want to nurse; they have the idea it’s lower East Side.” “How interesting,” Priss repeated thoughtfully. “Oh, being a nurse one sees a great deal. And the class differences are quite extraordinary. For example, on a surgical floor you’ll find that all the female private patients and many of the male private patients after an abdominal operation have post-operative urinary retention. While in a ward of Negro men you won’t get a single case. It’s simply a question of modesty; the upper class has been trained to feel embarrassment about the lower part of the body and after an operation when the abdomen has been opened, their inhibitions get to work and they can’t urinate.”