“Can they wait until my husband gets here?”
“It’s too dangerous,” said Eva. “It has to be done. I’ll stay with you.”
The drug made her hot and flushed, and brought her blood pressure straight down. For the next hour, Freddie tried to sleep. She had never been so tired. Eva brought her cracked ice to suck on and a cool cloth for her head. The baby wiggled and writhed, and the fetal-heart monitor recorded its every move. Finally, Grey and Jordan Bell were standing at the foot of her bed.
“O.K., Freddie,” said Jordan Bell. “Today’s the day. We must get that baby out. I’ve explained to Grey about the mag sulfate. We both agree that you must have a cesarean.”
“When?” Freddie said.
“In the next hour I have to check two patients and then we’re off to the races.”
“What do you think?” Freddie asked Grey.
“It’s right,” Grey said.
“And what about you?” Freddie said to Eva.
“It has to be done,” Eva said.
Jordan Bell was smiling a genuine smile and he looked dashing and happy.
“Why is he so uplifted?” Freddie asked Eva after he had rushed down the hall.
“He loves the O.R.,” she said. “He loves deliveries. Think of it this way: you’re going to get your baby at last.”
FREDDIE lay on a gurney, waiting to be rolled down the hall. Grey, wearing hospital scrubs, stood beside her, holding her hand. She had been prepped and given an epidural anesthesia, and she could no longer feel her legs. “Look at me,” she said to Grey. “I’m a mass of tubes. I’m a miracle of modern science.” She put his hand over her eyes.
Grey squatted down to put his head near hers. He looked expectant, exhausted, and worried, but when he saw her scanning his face he smiled. “It’s going to be swell,” Grey said. “We’ll find out if it’s little William or little Ella.”
Freddie paced her breathing to try to breathe away her fear, but she thought she ought to say something to keep up the side. She said, “I knew we never should have had sexual intercourse.” Grey gripped her hand tight and smiled. Eva laughed. “Don’t you guys leave me,” Freddie said.
Freddie was wheeled down the hall by an orderly. Grey held one hand, Eva held the other. Then they left her to scrub.
She was taken to a large, pale-green room. Paint was peeling on the ceiling in the corner. An enormous lamp hung over her head. The anesthesiologist appeared and tapped her foot. “Can you feel this?” he said.
“It doesn’t feel like feeling,” Freddie said. She was trying to keep her breathing steady.
“Excellent,” he said.
Then Jordan Bell appeared at her feet, and Grey stood by her head.
Eva bent down. “I know you’ll hate this, but I have to tape your hands down, and I have to put this oxygen mask over your face. It comes off as soon as the baby’s born, and it’s good for you and the baby.”
Freddie took a deep breath. The room was very hot. A screen was placed over her chest.
“It’s so you can’t see,” said Eva. “Here’s the mask. I know it’ll freak you out, but just breathe nice and easy. Believe me, this is going to be fast.”
Freddie’s arms were taped, her legs were numb, and a clear plastic mask was placed over her nose and mouth. She was so frightened she wanted to cry out, but it was impossible. Instead, she breathed as Katherine Walden had taught her to. Every time a wave of panic rose, she breathed it down. Grey held her hand. His face was blank and his glasses were fogged. His hair was covered by a green cap and his brow was wet. There was nothing she could do for him, except squeeze his hand.
“Now, Freddie,” said Jordan Bell, “you’ll feel something cold on your stomach. I’m painting you with Betadine. All right, here we go.”
Freddie felt something like dull tugging. She heard the sound of foamy water. Then she felt the baby being slipped from her. She turned to Grey. His glasses had unfogged and his eyes were round as quarters. She heard a high, angry scream.
“Here’s your boy,” said Jordan Bell. “It’s a beautiful, healthy boy.”
Eva lifted the mask off Freddie’s face.
“He’s perfectly healthy” Eva said. “Listen to those lungs!” She took the baby to be weighed and tested. Then she came back to Freddie. “He’s perfect, but he’s little—just under five pounds. We have to take him upstairs to the preemie nursery. It’s policy when they’re not five pounds.”
“Give him to me,” Freddie said. She tried to free her hands, but they were securely taped.
“I’ll bring him to you,” Eva said. “But he can’t stay down here. He’s too small. It’s for the baby’s safety, I promise you . . . . Look, here he is.”
The baby was held against her forehead. The moment he came near her he stopped shrieking. He was mottled and wet.
“Please let me have him,” Freddie said.
“He’ll be fine,” Eva said. Then she took him away.
THE next morning Freddie rang for the nurse and demanded that her I.V. be disconnected. Twenty minutes later she was out of bed and slowly walking.
“I feel as if someone had crushed my pelvic bones,” Freddie said.
“Someone did,” said the nurse.
Two hours later, she was put into a wheelchair and pushed by a nurse into the elevator and taken to the Infant Intensive Care Unit. At the door, the nurse said, “I’ll wheel you in.”
“I can walk,” Freddie said. “But thank you very much.”
Inside, she was instructed to scrub with surgical soap and to put on a sterile gown. Then she walked very slowly and very stiffly down the hall. A Chinese nurse stopped her.
“I’m William Delielle’s mother,” she said. “Where is he?”
The nurse consulted a clipboard, and pointed Freddie down a hallway. Another nurse in a side room pointed to an isolette—a large plastic case with porthole windows. There, on a white cloth, lay her child.
He was fast asleep on his stomach, his little arm stretched in front of him—an exact replica of Grey’s sleeping posture. On his back were two discs the size of nickels, hooked up to wires that measured his temperature and his heart and respiration rates on a console above his isolette. He was long and skinny and beautiful.
“He looks like a little chicken,” said Freddie. “May I hold him?”
“Oh, no,” said the nurse. “Not for a while. He mustn’t be stressed.” She gave Freddie a long look and said, “But you can open the windows and touch him.”
Freddie opened a porthole window and touched his leg. He shivered slightly. She wanted to disconnect his probes, scoop him up, and hold him next to her. She stood quietly, her hand resting lightly on his calf.
The room was bright, hot, and busy. Nurses came and went, washing their hands, checking charts, making notes, diapering, changing bottles of glucose solution. There were three other children in the room. One was very tiny and had a miniature I.V. attached to a vein in her head. A pink card was taped on her isolette. Freddie looked on the side of William’s isolette. There was a blue card, and in Grey’s tiny printing was written “WILLIAM DELIELLE.”
LATER in the morning, when Grey appeared in her room, he found Freddie sitting next to a glass-encased pump.
“This is the well-known breast pump. Electric. Made in Switzerland,” Freddie said.
“It’s like the medieval clock at Salisbury Cathedral,” Grey said, peering into the glass case. “I just came from seeing William. He’s much longer than I thought. I called all the grandparents. In fact, I was on the telephone all night after I left you.” He gave her a list of messages. “They’re feeding him in half an hour.”
Freddie looked at her watch. To begin with, she had been instructed to use the pump for three minutes on each breast. Her milk, however, would not be given to William, who, the doctors said, was too little to nurse. He would be given carefully measured formula, and Freddie would eventually have to wean him from the bottle and to herself. The prospect of this seeme
d very remote.
As the days went by, Freddie’s room filled with books and flowers, but she spent most of her time in the Infant I.C.U. She could touch William but not hold him. The morning before she was to be discharged, Freddie went to William’s eight o’clock feeding. She thought how lovely it would be to feed him at home, how they might sit in the rocking chair and watch the birds in the garden below. In William’s present home, there was no morning and no night. He had never been in a dark room, or heard bird sounds or traffic noise or felt a cool draft.
William was asleep wearing a diaper and a little T-shirt. The sight of him seized Freddie with emotion.
“You can hold him today,” the nurse said.
“Yes?”
“Yes, and you can feed him today, too.”
Freddie bowed her head. She took a steadying breath. “How can I hold him with all this hardware on him?” she said.
“I’ll show you,” said the nurse. She switched off the console, reached into the isolette, and gently untaped William’s probes. Then she showed Freddie how to change him, put on his T-shirt, and swaddle him in a cotton blanket. In an instant, he was in Freddie’s arms.
He was still asleep, but he made little screeching noises and wrinkled his nose. He moved against her and nudged his head into her neck. The nurse led her to a rocking chair, and for the first time she sat down with her baby. All around her, lights blazed. The radio was on and a sweet male voice sang, “I want you to be mine, I want you to be mine, I want to take you home, I want you to be mine.”
William opened his eyes and blinked. Then he yawned and began to cry.
“He’s hungry,” the nurse said, putting a small bottle into Freddie’s hand.
She fed him and burped him, and then she held him in her arms and rocked him to sleep. In the process, she fell asleep, too, and was woken by the nurse and Grey, who had come from work.
“You must put him back now,” said the nurse. “He’s been out a long time, and we don’t want to stress him.”
“It’s awful to think that being with his mother creates stress,” Freddie said.
“Oh, no!” the nurse said. “That’s not what I mean. I mean his isolette is temperature-controlled.”
ONCE Freddie was discharged from the hospital she had to commute to see William. She went to the two morning feedings, came home for a nap, and met Grey for the five o’clock. They raced out for dinner and came back for the eight. Grey would not let Freddie stay for the eleven.
Each morning, she saw Dr. Edmunds, the head of neonatology. He was a tall, slow-talking, sandy-haired man with horn-rimmed glasses.
“I know you will never want to hear this under any other circumstances,” he said to Freddie, “but your baby is very boring.”
“How boring?”
“Very boring. He’s doing just what he ought to do.” William had gone to the bottom of his growth curve and was beginning to gain a little. “As soon as he’s a bit fatter, he’s all yours.”
Freddie stood in front of William’s isolette watching him sleep. “This is like having an affair with a married man,” Freddie said to the nurse who was folding diapers next to her.
The nurse looked at her uncomprehendingly.
“I mean you love the person but can only see him at certain times,” said Freddie.
The nurse was young and plump. “I guess I see what you mean,” she said.
At home, William’s room was waiting. The crib had been delivered and put together by Grey. While Freddie was in the hospital, Grey had finished William’s room. The Teddy bears sat on the shelves. A mobile of ducks and geese hung over the crib. Grey had bought a secondhand rocking chair and had painted it red. Freddie had thought that she would be unable to face William’s empty room. Instead, she found that she could scarcely stay out of it. She folded and refolded his clothes, reorganized his drawers, arranged his crib blankets. She decided what should be his homecoming clothes and set them out on the changing table along with a cotton receiving blanket and a wool shawl. But even though he did not look at all fragile—he looked spidery and tough—the days were very long and it often felt to Freddie that she would never have him. She and Grey had been told that William’s entire hospital stay, from day of birth, would be ten days to two weeks.
One day when she felt she could not stand much more, Freddie was told that she might try nursing him.
She was put behind a screen in William’s room, near an isolette containing an enormous baby who was having breathing difficulties. She was told to keep on her sterile gown, and was given sterile water to wash her breasts with. At the sight of his mother’s naked bosom, William began to howl. The sterile gown dropped onto his face. Freddie began to sweat. All around her the nurses chatted, clattered, and dropped diapers into metal bins and slammed the tops down.
“Come on, William,” Freddie said. “The books say that this is the blissful union of mother and child.”
But William began to scream. The nurse appeared with the formula bottle, and William instantly stopped screaming and began to drink happily.
“Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “He’ll catch on.”
At home at night she sat by the window She could not sleep. She had never felt so separated from anything in her life. Grey, to distract himself, was stenciling the wall under the molding in William’s room. He had found an Early American design of wheat and cornflowers. He stood on a ladder in his bluejeans carefully applying the stencil in pale-blue paint.
One night Freddie went to the door of the baby’s room to watch him, but Grey was not on the ladder. He was sitting in the rocking chair with his head in his hands. His shoulders were shaking slightly. He had the radio on, and he did not hear her.
He had been so brave and cheerful. He had held her hand while William was born. He had told her it was like watching a magician sawing his wife in half. He had taken photos of William in his isolette and sent them to their parents and all their friends. He had read up on growth curves and had found Freddie a book on breast-feeding. He had also purloined his hospital greens to wear each year on William’s birthday. Now he had broken down.
She made a noise coming into the room, and then bent down and stroked his hair. He smelled of soap and paint thinner. She put her arms around him and she did not let go for a long time.
THREE times a day, Freddie tried to nurse William behind a screen and each time she ended up giving him his formula. Finally, she asked a nurse, “Is there some room I could sit in alone with this child?”
“We’re not set up for it,” the nurse said. “But I could put you in the utility closet.”
There, amidst unused isolettes and cardboard boxes of sterile water, on the second try, William nursed for the first time. She touched his cheek. He turned to her, just as it said in the book. Then her eyes crossed. “Oh, my God!” she said.
A nurse walked in. “Hurts, right?” she said. “Good for him. That means he’s got it. It won’t hurt for long.”
At his evening feeding he howled again.
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said Grey. He and Freddie walked slowly past the Park on their way home. It was a cold, wet night.
“I am a childless mother,” Freddie said.
Two days later William was taken out of his isolette and put into a plastic bin. He had no temperature or respiration or heart-rate probes, and Freddie could pick him up without having to disconnect anything. At his evening feeding when the unit was quiet, she took him out in the hallway and walked up and down with him.
The next day she was greeted by Dr. Edmunds. “I’ve just had a chat with your pediatrician,” he said. “How would you like to take your boring baby home with you?”
“When?” said Freddie.
“Right now, if you have his clothes,” Dr. Edmunds said. “Dr. Jacobson will be up in a few minutes and can officially release him.”
She ran down the hall and called Grey at work. “They’re springing him. Come and get us.”
“You mean we can just walk out of there with him?” Grey said. “I mean just walk out with him under our arm? He barely knows us.”
“Just get here. And don’t forget the blankets.”
A nurse helped Freddie dress William. He was wrapped in a green-and-white receiving blanket and covered with a white wool shawl. On his head was a blue-and-green knitted cap that had been Grey’s. It slipped slightly sideways, giving him a rather raffish look.
They were accompanied in the elevator by a nurse. It was hospital policy that a nurse hold the baby, and hand it over at the door.
It made Freddie feel light-headed to be standing out-of-doors with her child. She felt she had just robbed a bank and gotten away with it.
In the taxi, Grey gave the driver their address.
“Not door to door,” Freddie said. “Can we get out at the avenue and walk down the street just like everyone else?”
When the taxi stopped, they got out carefully. The sky was full of silver clouds and the air was blustery and chill. William squinted at the light and wrinkled his nose.
Then, with William tight in Freddie’s arm, the three of them walked down the street just like everyone else.
[1985]
JONATHAN FRANZEN
THE FAILURE
DOWN THE LONG CONCOURSE they came unsteadily, Enid favoring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time. To anyone who saw them averting their eyes from the dark-haired New Yorkers careering past them, to anyone who caught a glimpse of Alfred’s straw fedora looming at the height of Iowa corn on Labor Day, or the yellow wool of the slacks stretching over Enid’s outslung hip, it was obvious that they were Midwestern and intimidated. But to Chip Lambert, who was waiting for them just beyond the security checkpoint, they were killers.
Chip had crossed his arms defensively and raised one hand to pull on the wrought-iron rivet in his ear. He worried that he might tear the rivet right out of his earlobe—that the maximum pain his ear’s nerves could generate was less pain than he needed now to steady himself. From his station by the metal detectors he watched an azure-haired girl overtake his parents, an azure-haired girl of college age, a very wantable stranger with pierced lips and eyebrows. It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit. Chip was a tall, gym-built man with crow’s-feet and sparse butter-yellow hair; if the girl had noticed him, she might have thought he was a little too old for the leather he was wearing. As she hurried past him, he pulled harder on his rivet to offset the pain of her departure from his life forever and to focus his attention on his father, whose face was brightening at the discovery of a son among so many strangers. In the lunging manner of a man floundering in water, Alfred fell upon Chip and grabbed Chip’s hand and wrist as if they were a rope he’d been thrown. “Well!” he said. “Well!”
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 20