by Peter Geye
Rebekah woke to Thea’s screams and the light of morning. Her eyes flashed open and the first thing she saw was Thea thrashing in her bed, kicking and tearing at the bed linens. “Odd! Odd! Odd!” she said, her voice shrill and piercing.
Rebekah threw her covers back and jumped from bed, not remembering her antics in the middle of the night before. They reached the bassinet at the same moment and looked together into its emptiness.
Thea hollered as she ran from room to room in the flat, her panic rising alongside her shouting, Rebekah trailing the desperate mother.
By the time Thea reached the second floor her shouting had given over to sobs. She went down the hallway from door to door, stepping into each room to check for the boy. It was in the fourth room, in the surgery, that she found him, lying on the table, Hosea standing above him with a pair of eight-inch nickel-plated shears in his hand. On a tray next to the boy lay a pile of bloodstained gauze and a long needle and syringe. The boy was naked and wailing.
Rebekah managed to get her arms around Thea before she reached the table. Before she reached her boy. Thea’s cries mixed with Odd’s and Rebekah hugged her tight.
Hosea spoke. “Dear child, there’s nothing amiss.” He set the shears on the table, turned and reached out for Thea, took her hands in his, and tried to pull her to him.
"My boy! “Thea shrieked, fighting to free herself from both Rebekah and Hosea. They held her tight. Her crying had sapped her breath and she went limp in their arms and could only muster a whisper as she said, “Good Lord, my boy."
Hosea ushered her to a chair and urged her to sit. To Rebekah he said, “Apply an ample dose of Vaseline to the boy’s prepuce and wrap him up.” Turning to Thea he said, “Miss Eide, listen to me.”
Thea seemed to have no breath left in her.
“Miss Eide!” Hosea shook her by the shoulders. “Miss Eide, listen to me. Odd is fine. I gave him an examination this morning, I circumcised him. There’s nothing wrong with the boy that a little nap won’t cure. You’ve nothing to worry about. These are things the child must have done. Do you understand me?”
Of course she did not.
On the table on the other side of the room Rebekah had wrapped the boy’s bottom, had dressed him in his layette and his knit hat. In her clumsy way she picked him up and carried him to Thea, who pushed Hosea out of the way and stood and took her boy in one motion. Odd stopped wailing as soon as he was in his mother’s arms. Thea hurried from the surgery, ran up to her bedroom, and closed the door behind her.
Hosea and Rebekah stood in the surgery, looking at each other, shocked though they ought not to have been.
After a moment Hosea said, “There’s no use denying it any longer. She’s suffering badly. Postpartum melancholia. Worse than I’ve ever seen it.” He looked at Rebekah and said softly, “Will you check on Thea?”
Hosea read deep into the night, consulting his old medical journals and further chapters in Fox’s Psychopathology of Hysteria. Around midnight he’d decided there was but a single course of action: He must remove her ovaries to quell the madness. It was a decision that greatly eased his concern, and after he reread Battey’s “Oophorectomy: A Case Study” in the British Medical Journal he made notes in his surgeon’s journal. Before he retired for the night, he wrote a long explanation in Norwegian and practiced it twice.
Early the next morning, after only two hours’ sleep, as soon as he heard stirrings in Thea’s bedroom, he knocked quietly on the door.
He knocked, put his ear to the door, and listened to her feet hurry
ing softly across the floor. “Miss Eide?” he said quietly. He knocked again when she did not answer. “Miss Eide, I must speak with you. May I come in?”
When she failed to answer again he pressed the door open. She sat on the bed, Odd clutched in her arms. She had the look of a cornered animal.
“Thea, dear, what do you think I’ve done? Do you not understand that I took Odd yesterday only to perform perfunctory and essential examinations? That if I’d failed to perform those examinations I would have been in breach of the code of ethics by which my profession is governed?”
He’d intended to spare her his lecture on professional ethics, to cut right to the matter at hand, but he couldn’t help himself.
She only looked at him fearfully.
He proceeded in Norwegian, reading from the notes he’d prepared late the night before, notes he hoped would convey not only his sense of urgency but his profound affection for her and her boy. “Miss Eide, I am your friend. I have tried to help you. And your boy.” He paused, judged the look on her face, and took a step closer.
“Thea, I was helping your boy yesterday.” He paused again, looked at his prepared remarks, looked at Thea, still clutching Odd on the bed, her eyes swollen with tears and lack of sleep, and thought he loved them both. He wished he could tell her, wished he could convey the honesty of his feelings. Instead he returned to his remarks.
“Thea, you are sick. Postpartum melancholia. You must get well. If you don’t, you will be unable to care for the boy.”
This last made her clutch Odd tighter still.
“I would like to perform a surgery called Battey’s Operation to remove from your body what’s causing your morbid condition. I will remove your ovaries. It will cure you. Do you understand what I’m proposing?”
She only looked more frightened.
“Miss Eide, without this surgery, you will go insane.” This last he said in English as he shook his solemn head.
And so two days later Hosea Grimm held a sponge to Thea Eide’s nose. She breathed in the chloroform and went into a catatonic sleep and he, with his sure hands, removed his scalpel from a bath of carbolic solution, took measure of her linea alba, and made a small incision from which he removed the first of her ovaries. He stanched the flow of blood and stitched the incision. He gave her another dose of chloroform and made a matching incision on the other side of her abdomen and repeated the procedure within and without. An hour later, after Thea woke vomiting and feverish, he injected a dose of morphine into her thigh and set a cold compress on her forehead.
He stood back, wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and believed honestly that his methods were sound and that Thea Eide, asleep again on the table, awaited a kinder fate thanks to his steady surgical hand.
If Thea had spent her life in prayer and devotion in hope of finding God’s grace, and if God’s grace meant everlasting life in heaven’s gentle glow, then what she found in her fever dreams those ten days after her surgery were her hopes dashed. Whatever bacillus took root in her womb was swift and voracious. A riotous fever set in, and in her delirium there were no trumpets, no bronze altars, no jasper and carnelian, no unapproachable light. There was only the Cimmerian wilderness of her fever and Odd’s howling. She wanted to reach for him, wanted to take away his sorrow, but she was too weak to say so, much less do it.
Odd’s care had fallen to Rebekah. And Eleanor Riverfish, who became Odd’s amah, and who visited five times a day to nurse the boy. It was in this way that Odd Einar Eide and Daniel Joseph Riverfish became brothers, and it was in Eleanor’s arms that he forgot the warmth of his mother’s lap and the soothing sound of her singing voice.
The only song that remained was the dirge of her final hours. She sang in time to her slowing heart her last true words: My boy, my boy, my love. Odd would never hear those words, though one day he’d learn them in his own way.
Finally her fever boiled and her brain burst and she left him. She left all the world. And wherever else her sorrow scattered in the hereafter it went first to Odd’s infant heart and found shelter there.
XXVI.
(June 1921)
The first time Odd saw Rebekah with the child, he read the end of their story in the look on her face. Her gaze rested on the boy with the same vacant ambivalence she used to train on butchered capons before roasting them. The child lay in her arms, stunned, staring through the slits of
his own eyes upon a mother he would never know.
Odd had been at work, finished with lunch and back at the steam box bending planks for the lapstrake hull he was working on. During his time at the boatwright his responsibilities had grown, and now, seven months later, he was as close to a foreman as the shop had.
Sargent was in the chandlery office when the call came. Odd could see him talking into the telephone mouthpiece, could see him turn quickly and motion with his elbow. Odd pulled one of his mates to the steam box and hurried to the chandlery office as Sargent put the telephone earpiece back on the hook.
“Grab your lunch pail, Mister Eide. Your wife is in labor.”
Odd stood there dumb.
“Hurry, now. I’ll drive you.” Then Sargent put his head into the workshop, “Willy! Get over here, man the chandlery while I bring Odd to the hospital.” He turned back to Odd, put his hands on his shoulders, and said, “The Lord has blessed you this day.” There appeared almost to be tears in his eyes. “Now, let’s go. You’ll want to be near your wife.”
They climbed into Sargent’s flatbed — the same truck Hosea owned — and started up Raleigh.
Sargent said, “Would you like to pray?”
“You pray for me,” Odd said. “Pray for Rebekah and the child, too.”
So they drove in silence across town.
Sargent parked the Ford on the street in front of the hospital. Together they hurried up to the third floor, where Doctor Crumb’s office and Odd’s fate awaited. Sargent sat in the reception room while a nurse led Odd into the surgery. It was there he found Rebekah and the child, there he saw the look on her face.
It was Doctor Crumb who spoke first. “Mister Eide, meet your son.”
Odd stood where he was, looking now on the child. “My son,” he said or thought, he didn’t know which.
“He’s big as a bear, Mister Eide. I’ve never seen one bigger.”
Odd took a pair of unsteady steps toward the surgery table, toward Rebekah and the big boy. A boy.
“He’s well?” Odd finally managed.
“I’m surprised the lad didn’t come out with teeth. Or hair on his chest. He’s nine even pounds according to my scale. And he’s fine, way ahead in the race and only just in it.”
Odd walked to Rebekah. “And you?” he asked, knowing with unwelcome certainty the answer to his question.
Rebekah, confirming all, said nothing, only lifted the baby to Odd’s hands.
He’d never held a child before, never suspected that something that had weighed so heavily in his mind could be so light in his hands. But as he looked down on the boy, on his puckered lips and pale skin, Odd felt a preternatural strength rising in him. He felt as though someone could have handed him a bowl with all the water of Lake Superior in it and he would still have been able to bear it.
“I’ve a few details to attend to,” Doctor Crumb said. “If you’ve a name for this one, the time to tell me is now.”
Odd kept his eyes on the boy, said to Rebekah, “Any ideas?”
“He’s your son. You name him.”
Her words felt like a punch, but he’d been sure of the boy’s name for months. “We’ll call him Harald Einar Eide.”
Doctor Crumb said, “He’ll live up to his stature with a name like that.”
“I hope so,” Odd said.
Odd walked the boy to the window. It was late afternoon and the summer sky was squally. Odd knew surely there was a thunderstorm up there, might have been able to say the exact hour at which it would begin to rain. He whispered to the boy, “Look up there, son. You see? That’s a thunderhead. Means rain.”
Together they stood at the window looking at the weather. Odd pictured his own mother, recalling that photograph on the windowsill in the brownstone. The picture of him in his mother’s arms. He saw that beatific look in her eyes and knew the same look came now from him. From his good and his bad eye both. After a few minutes Odd returned to Rebekah’s bedside and looked down on her with all the courage he had to spare.
Five days later Rebekah and little Harald came home from the hospital. It was a hot and low-down day, the first heavy weather of summer. The humidity stuck for a week, and whether it was because of the atmosphere or Rebekah’s disposition, the first few days of having the baby home were some of the unhappiest of Odd’s life. The only sounds that made their way around the flat were the hungry yowls of the boy and Rebekah’s sullen sighs. She seemed to have a complaint for everything. Her sincerest and most regular grievance came whenever it was time for the boy to eat. Her breasts were sore and engorged, her nipples cracked, and Harry, unnaturally big as he was, demanded regular suck.
The looks she cast on that boy. His hunger, his fear and vulnerability, all of it like a badge he wore. And still she looked at him as though he were a cancer. He’d spit her nipple, grab at her breast, wail. And Rebekah with that poisonous and unforgiving stare would scold him. Odd wanted to help, would have done anything, but was always in the way, making Rebekah more agitated.
On the occasions Rebekah could slake the boy’s hunger, he’d fall into a heavy infant slumber. Rebekah would call Odd, hand Harry to him, and lie down on the davenport, shielding her eyes from everything with her arm.
“My breasts feel like they’re going to catch right on fire,” she said one June evening after Harry had eaten and was sleeping in his papa’s arms.
“I sure am sorry, Rebekah.”
She looked up at him from under her arm. “What are you sorry for?”
“Sorry you’re not feeling well. Sorry you’re so tired. All that stuff.”
“All that stuff…”
Odd had walked Harry to the window. Together they stood looking at the Norway pines on the side of the house.
“It was so easy for your mother. When you were a baby. To feed you. You latched right on and ate like there was no tomorrow.” She might have groaned, Odd couldn’t tell. “I can’t stop thinking what a twisted-up thing this is.”
“Haven’t we about covered that?” Odd asked from the window, not even turning to look at her.
“Oh, sure, we’ve covered it. Or you have. Mister Everything Will Be All Right. Mister We Don’t Need No One. You’ve covered it, all right.”
“What the hell do you want me to say, Rebekah? What in fuck’s name is going to get the sulk out of you?”
She didn’t say anything, only lay there on the davenport with her arm over her eyes. Odd and Harry still stood at the window, Odd whispering to Harry an account of a gray squirrel husking a pinecone on the bough of a tree.
“That first day her milk came in, and you ate and then filled your diaper and slept for six straight hours, she held you the whole time. She always held you. Sang those fool songs.” Her words trailed off. Odd turned to look at her.
“I want to understand, Rebekah. I do. But I don’t see your unhappiness. It doesn’t make sense.”
She looked at him for a long time. Eyes as vacant as two stones. She might have been dead for all the life in her.
Odd kept at it. “He’s a hundred percent perfect, this one. Sure, he’s hard to get fed. I know that. And I know it’s you suffering his temper tantrums when he’s at the teat. But he’s brand-new to this business. Might you give him an inch of rope?”
If it was possible, the look on her face went even more expressionless. Still she would not look away from him.
“Some things just aren’t meant to be understood,” she said. “Some things are just invisible and out of reach.”
Odd crossed the room, offered her Harry. “He ain’t out of reach. He’s right goddamn here. Take him.”
She put her arm back over her eyes. “Your mother,” Rebekah began before Odd could say more, “she was real sad after you were born. Melancholy’s what Hosea called it. Said she had the sadness disease. But still she wouldn’t set you down. She wouldn’t stop ogling you. She was more in love with you than she could even imagine.”
Odd had cradled Harry back in his arm. Now he
sat on the end of the davenport.
Rebekah tucked her feet up beneath her to make room for him. “Hosea had a way to get the sadness out of her,” she continued. “Cut it right out of her, that’s how he described it.” She shook her head under her arm.
“What are you talking about, cut it right out of her?”
“He did an operation. An ovariotomy, he called it. He cut the sadness out of her.”
“Maybe there’s a way to cut the sadness out of you.” He couldn’t help feeling hopeful, still clung to some thought they could all three of them be a happy family.
She looked at him under her arm. “Sadness has no hold on me, Odd. It’s something else. Besides, when Hosea got the sadness out of her, he got everything else, too. The whole life of her.”
Odd sat up. “What do you mean the whole life of her? What are you talking about?”
“After the operation. She got sick.”
“You always told me it was a fever she died of.”
“She did. A fever he conjured up, I suppose.”
Now Odd stood. “What’s that mean?”
“Your mother didn’t have any sadness in her, Odd. That’s what I was telling you. She was the happiest person I ever saw in those days after you were born. She needed that operation like the lake needs more water.”
Odd stood there trembling. He’d always been led to believe that his mother had died naturally. A simple fever that had got the best of her. “Are you telling me she got the fever because of Hosea?”
“I don’t know why she got the fever, but it came a day after the surgery.”
“He killed her?” he whispered. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“How could I know?”
Odd looked down at Harry. For a long time he just looked at the boy sleeping in his arm. “How come you never told me before? Why didn’t anyone do anything?”