Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  Grey had taken off his jacket and he felt a wet place where Freddie had laid her cheek. He did not know how to comfort her.

  “I thought nature was supposed to take over and do all this for us,” Freddie said into his arm.

  “It will,” Grey said.

  Visiting hours began at seven o’clock. Even with the door closed Freddie could hear shrieks and coos and laughter. With her door open she could hear champagne corks being popped.

  Grey closed the door. “You didn’t eat much dinner,” he said. “Why don’t I go around the corner to the delicatessen and get you something?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Freddie said. She did not know what was in front of her, or how long she would be in this room, or how and when the baby would be born.

  “I’ll call Penny and have her bring something,” Grey said.

  “I already talked to her,” Freddie said. “She and David are taking you out to dinner.” David was Penny’s husband, David Hooks.

  “You’re trying to get rid of me,” Grey said.

  “I’m not,” Freddie said. “You’ve been here all day, practically. I just want the comfort of knowing that you’re being fed and looked after. I think you should go soon.”

  “It’s too early,” said Grey. “Fathers don’t have to leave when visiting hours are over.”

  “You’re not a father yet,” Freddie said. “Go.”

  After he left, she stood by the window to watch him cross the street and wait for the bus. It was dark and cold and it had begun to sleet. When she saw him, she felt pierced with desolation. He was wearing his old camel’s-hair coat, and the wind blew through his wavy hair. He stood back on his heels as he had as a boy. He turned around and scanned the building for her window. When he saw her, he waved and smiled. Freddie waved back. A taxi, thinking it was being hailed, stopped. Grey got in, and was driven off.

  EVERY three hours a nurse appeared to take Freddie’s temperature, blood pressure, and pulse. After Grey had gone, the night nurse appeared. She was a tall, middle-aged black woman named Mrs. Perch. In her hand she carried what looked like a suitcase full of dials and wires.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Mrs. Perch said. She had a soft West Indian accent. “It is only a portable fetal-heart monitor. You get to say good morning and good evening to your child.” She squirted a blob of cold blue jelly on Freddie’s stomach and pushed a transducer around in it, listening for the beat. At once Freddie heard the sound of galloping hooves. Mrs. Perch timed the beats against her watch.

  “Nice and healthy,” Mrs. Perch said.

  “Which part of this baby is where?” Freddie said.

  “Well, his head is back here, and his back is there, and here is the rump, and the feet are near your ribs. Or hers, of course.”

  “I wondered if that was a foot kicking me,” Freddie said.

  “My second boy got his foot under my ribs and kicked with all his might,” Mrs. Perch said.

  Freddie sat up in bed. She grabbed Mrs. Perch’s hand. “Is this baby going to be all right?” she said.

  “Oh my, yes,” Mrs. Perch said. “You’re not a very interesting case. Many others much more complicated than you have come out fine, and you’ll be fine, too.”

  At four in the morning, another nurse appeared—a florid Englishwoman. Freddie had spent a restless night, her heart pounding, her throat dry.

  “Your pressure’s up, dear,” said the nurse, whose tag read “M. Whitely.” “Dr. Bell has written orders that if your pressure goes up you’re to have a shot of hydrolozine. It doesn’t hurt baby—did he explain that to you?”

  “Yes,” said Freddie groggily.

  “It may give you a little headache.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all,” Miss Whitely said.

  The shot put Freddie to sleep, and she woke with a pounding headache. When she rang the bell, the nurse who had admitted her appeared. Her name was Bonnie Near, and she was Freddie’s day nurse. She gave Freddie a pill and then taped a tongue depressor wrapped in gauze over her bed.

  “What’s that for?” Freddie said.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “I want to know.”

  Bonnie Near sat down on the end of the bed. She was a few years older than Freddie, trim and wiry, with short hair and tiny diamond earrings.

  “It’s hospital policy,” she said. “The hydrolozine gives you a headache, right? You ring to get something to make it go away, and because you have high blood pressure everyone assumes that the blood pressure caused it, not the drug. So this thing gets taped above your bed in case of the one chance in about fifty-five million you have a convulsion.”

  Freddie turned her face away and stared out the window.

  “Hey, hey,” said Bonnie Near. “None of this. I noticed yesterday that you’re quite a worrier. Are you like this when you’re not in the hospital? I would tell you if I was worried about you. I’m not. You’re just the common garden variety.”

  EVERY morning Grey appeared with two cups of coffee and the morning paper. He sat in a chair and he and Freddie read the paper together as they did at home.

  “Is the house still standing?” Freddie asked after several days. “Are the banks open? Did you bring the mail? I feel I’ve been here ten months, instead of a week.”

  “The mail was very boring,” Grey said. “Except for this booklet from the Minnesota Loon Society. You’ll be happy to know that you can order a record called ‘Loon Music.’ Would you like a copy?”

  “If I moved over,” Freddie said, “would you take off your jacket and come next to me?”

  Grey took off his jacket and shoes and curled up next to Freddie. He pressed his nose into her hair and looked as if he could drift off to sleep in a second. “Child World called about the crib,” he said sleepily. “They want to know if we want white paint or natural pine. I said natural.”

  “That’s what I think I ordered,” Freddie said. “They let the husbands stay over in this place. They call them ‘dads.’”

  “I’m not a dad yet, as you pointed out,” Grey said. “Maybe they’ll just let me take naps here.”

  There was a knock on the door. Grey sprang to his feet, and Jordan Bell appeared. “Don’t look so nervous, Freddie,” he said. “I have good news. I think we want to get this baby born if your pressure isn’t going to go down. I think we ought to induce you.”

  Freddie and Grey were silent.

  “The way it works is that we put you on a drip of pitocin, which is a synthetic of the chemical your brain produces when you go into labor.”

  “We know,” said Freddie. “Katherine went over it in childbirth class.” Katherine Walden was Jordan Bell’s nurse. “When do you want to do this?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jordan Bell said.

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  “It usually does,” said Jordan Bell. “If it doesn’t, we do a second-day induction.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “It generally does. If it doesn’t, we do a cesarean section, but you’ll be awake and Grey can hold your hand.”

  “Oh, what fun,” said Freddie.

  When Jordan Bell left, Freddie burst into tears. “Why isn’t anything normal?” she said. “Why do I have to lie here day after day listening to other people’s babies crying? Why is my body betraying me like this?”

  Grey kissed her and then took her hands. “There is no such thing as normal,” he said. “Everyone we’ve talked to has some story or other—heads that are too big, babies that won’t budge, thirty-hour labors. A cesarean is a perfectly respectable way of getting born.”

  “What about me? What about me getting all stuck up with tubes and cut up into little pieces?” Freddie said, and she was instantly ashamed. “I hate being like this. I feel I’ve lost myself and some horrible, whimpering, whining person has taken me over.”

  “Think about how in two months we’ll have a two-month-old baby to take to the Park.”

  “Do you really thin
k everything is going to be all right?” Freddie said.

  “Yes,” said Grey. “I do. In six months we’ll all be in Maine.”

  FREDDIE lay in bed with her door closed reading her brochure from the Loon Society. She thought about the cottage she and Grey rented every August in Jewell Neck, Maine, on a lagoon. There at night, with blackness all around them and not a light to be seen, they heard great horned owls and loons calling their night cries to one another. Loon mothers carried their chicks on their backs, Freddie knew. The last time she had heard those cries she had been just three months pregnant. The next time she heard them, she would have a child.

  She thought about the baby shower Penny had given her—a lunch party for ten women. At the end of it, Freddie and Grey’s unborn child had received cotton and wool blankets, little sweaters, tiny garments with feet, and two splendid Teddy bears. The Teddy bears had sat on the coffee table. Freddie remembered the strange, light feeling in her chest as she looked at them. She had picked them both up and laughed with astonishment.

  At a red light on the way home in a taxi, surrounded by boxes and bags of baby presents, she saw something that made her heart stop: a man in a familiar tweed coat and a long paisley scarf walking down the street. It was James Clemens, who for two years had been her illicit lover.

  With the exception of her family, Freddie was close only to Grey and Penny Stern. She had never been the subject of anyone’s romantic passion. She and Grey, after all, had been fated to marry. She had loved him all her life. But James had pursued her; no one had ever pursued her before. He had two grown sons and had prematurely retired from his investment banking firm to write a book on economics and architecture. He behaved as if he had little else to do in life than be amused by Freddie.

  The usual signs of romance were as unknown to Freddie as the workings of a cyclotron. Crushes, she felt, were for children. She did not really believe that adults had them. One day when James came to visit wearing his tweed coat and the ridiculously long paisley scarf he affected, after many visits, lunches, and meetings Freddie had believed to be accidental, she realized with despair that she loved him.

  The fact of James was the most exotic thing that had ever happened in Freddie’s fairly stolid, uneventful life. He was as brilliant as a painted bunting. He was also, in marked contrast to Freddie, beautifully dressed. He did not know one tree from another. To him all birds were either robins or crows. He was avowedly urban and his pleasures were urban. He loved opera, cocktail parties, and lunches. They did not agree about economic theory, either. Nevertheless, they began to spend what now seemed to Freddie an amazing amount of time together. She learned that a pair of lovers constitute an entity not unlike a primitive society, with rules, songs and chants, taboos, and rituals. When she fell in love, she fell as if backward into a swimming pool. In the end she felt her life was being ruined.

  She had not seen James for a long time. In that brief glance at the red light she saw his paisley scarf. She could see its long fringes flapping in the breeze. It was amazing that someone who had been so close to her did not know that she was having a baby. As the cab pulled away, she did not look back. She stared rigidly forward, flanked on either side by presents for her unborn child.

  The baby kicked. Mothers-to-be should not be lying in hospital beds thinking about illicit love affairs. Of course, if you were like the other mothers on the maternity floor and had never had an illicit love affair, you would not be punished by lying in the hospital in the first place. You would go into labor like everyone else, and come rushing into Maternity Admitting with your husband and your suitcase. By this time tomorrow she would have her baby in her arms, just like everyone else.

  AT SIX in the morning, Bonnie Near woke her. “You can brush your teeth,” she said. “But don’t drink any water. And your therapist is here to see you, but don’t be long.”

  The door opened and Penny walked in. “And how are we today?” she said. “Any strange dreams or odd thoughts?”

  “How did you get in here?” Freddie said.

  “I said I was your psychiatrist and that you were being induced today and so forth,” Penny said. “I just came to say good luck. Here’s all the change we had in the house. Tell Grey to call constantly. I’ll see you all tonight.”

  Freddie was taken to the labor floor and hooked up to a fetal-heart monitor, whose transducers were kept on her abdomen by a large elastic cummerbund. A stylish-looking nurse wearing hospital greens, a string of pearls, and perfectly applied pink lipstick poked her head through the door.

  “Hi!” she said in a bright voice. “I’m Joanne Kelly. You’re my patient today.” She had the kind of voice and smile Freddie could not imagine anyone’s using in private. “Now, how are we? Fine? All right. Here’s what we’re going to do. First of all, we’re going to put this I.V. into your arm. It will only hurt a little, and then we’re going to hook you up to something called pitocin. Has Dr. Bell explained any of this to you?”

  “All,” said Freddie.

  “Neat,” Joanne Kelly said. “We like an informed patient. Put your arm out, please.” Freddie stuck out her arm. Joanne Kelly wrapped a rubber thong under her elbow. “Nice veins,” she said. “You would have made a lovely junkie.

  “Now we’re going to start the pitocin,” Joanne Kelly said. “We start off slow to see how you do. Then we escalate.” She looked Freddie up and down. “O.K.,” she said. “We’re off and running. Now, I’ve got a lady moaning and groaning in the next room, so I have to go and coach her. I’ll be back real soon.”

  Freddie lay looking at the clock, or watching the pitocin and glucose drip into her arm. She could not get a comfortable position, and the noise of the fetal-heart monitor was loud and harsh. The machine itself spat out a continual line of data.

  Jordan Bell appeared at the foot of her bed. “An exciting day—yes, Freddie?” he said. “What time is Grey coming?”

  “I told him to sleep late,” Freddie said. “All the nurses told me that this can take a long time. How am I supposed to feel when it starts working?”

  “If all goes well, you’ll start to have contractions, and then they’ll get stronger, and then you’ll have your baby.”

  “Just like that?” said Freddie.

  “Pretty much just like that.”

  But by five o’clock nothing much had happened. Grey sat in a chair next to the bed. From time to time, he checked the data. He had been checking them all day. “That contraction went right off the paper,” he said. “What did it feel like?”

  “Intense,” Freddie said. “It just doesn’t hurt.”

  “You’re still in the early stages,” said Jordan Bell when he came to check her. “I’m willing to stay on if you want to continue, but the baby might not be born till tomorrow.”

  “I’m beat,” said Freddie.

  “Here’s what we can do,” Jordan Bell said. “We can keep going or we can start again tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Freddie.

  SHE woke up exhausted, with her head pounding. The sky was cloudy and the glare hurt her eyes. In the night, her blood pressure had gone up. She had begged not to have a shot—she did not see how she could go into labor feeling so terrible—but the shot was given. It had been a long, sleepless night.

  She had been taken to a different labor room, where she lay alone with a towel covering one eye, trying to nap, when a new nurse appeared by her side. This one looked very young, had curly hair, and thick, slightly rose-tinted glasses. Her tag read “EVA GOTTLIEB.” Underneath she wore a button that said “EVA: WE DELIVER.”

  “Hi,” said Eva Gottlieb. “I’m sorry I woke you, but I’m your nurse for the day and I have to get you started.”

  “I’m here for a lobotomy,” Freddie said. “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I’m going to run a line in you,” Eva Gottlieb said. “And then I don’t know what. Because your blood pressure is high, I’m supposed to wait until Jordan gets here.” She looked at Freddie car
efully. “I know it’s scary,” she said. “But the worst that can happen is that you have to be sectioned and that’s not so bad.”

  Freddie’s head throbbed. “That’s easy for you to say,” she said. “I’m the section.”

  Eva Gottlieb smiled. “I’m a terrific nurse,” she said. “I’ll stay with you.”

  Tears sprang into Freddie’s eyes. “Why will you?”

  “Well, first of all, it’s my job,” said Eva. “And second of all, you look like a reasonable person.”

  Freddie looked at Eva carefully. She felt instant, total trust. Perhaps that was part of being in hospitals and having babies. Everyone you came into contact with came very close very fast.

  Freddie’s head throbbed. Eva was hooking her up to the fetal-heart monitor. Her touch was strong and sure, and she seemed to know Freddie did not want to be talked to. She flicked the machine on, and Freddie heard the familiar sound of galloping hooves.

  “Is there any way to turn it down?” Freddie said.

  “Sure,” said Eva. “But some people find it consoling.”

  As the morning wore on, Freddie’s blood pressure continued to rise. Eva was with her constantly.

  “What are they going to do to me?” Freddie asked.

  “I think they’re probably going to give you magnesium sulfate to get your blood pressure down and then they’re going to section you. Jordan does a gorgeous job, believe me. I won’t let them do anything to you without explaining it first, and if you get out of bed first thing tomorrow and start moving around you’ll be fine.”

  Twenty minutes later, a doctor Freddie had never seen before administered a dose of magnesium sulfate.

  “Can’t you do this?” Freddie asked Eva.

  “It’s heavy-duty stuff,” Eva said. “It has to be done by a doctor.”