by Ann Leary
At UCH, I discovered, the only nursery is the neonatal unit. When a woman has a healthy newborn, the baby is her responsibility, even if she needs to stay on in the hospital to recover from the birth. When the mother has to use the telephone or bathroom, she asks another mother to keep an eye on her baby’s “cot,” just in case a crazed baby abductor should wander through the ward at exactly that moment.
Our ward was quite chilly at night, and I asked Sophie if they kept the postnatal ward warmer for the babies.
“No,” said Sophie, “but they tuck the babies into our beds with us, and they stay warm that way.”
I told her that American hospitals, in an effort to avoid expensive lawsuits, had pretty much done away with the practice of allowing babies to be carried around by their mothers, and the thought of allowing a baby to sleep in a bed with a grown woman would be considered lunacy.
Sophie wheeled in her baby’s tiny cot, and I felt almost like a normal mom, just watching another mom’s baby while she took a shower.
An Orthodox Jewish woman was admitted to the ward over the weekend. Her husband was with her, as was an older woman who appeared to be the pregnant woman’s mother. I noticed that I wasn’t the only other patient who stole glances at the family, not only because of the women’s wigs and the man’s black suit but also because they were all speaking on cell phones. It’s hard to imagine now, only thirteen years later, that a time existed when a person carrying a telephone around in a pocket was a source of fascination. Later that evening, when visiting hours were over, the Orthodox woman removed her wig, then touched her belly, as we all did when our babies moved, and I felt instantly that she had more in common with us than with the family who had brought her. I thought of a documentary I’d once seen about a primitive tribe in South America or Africa. In this tribe women leave their families before they give birth and stay in a birthing hut, where no men are allowed. They remain in the hut with other expectant mothers until, a month later, they emerge with their babies. During the evenings, after the men had left, the antenatal ward felt a little like a birthing hut. In the middle of the night, I would awaken to hear one of my roommates turning restlessly in bed, her labor beginning. A sister would arrive with a fetal monitor and strap it around the woman’s belly, and I would listen to the sounds of her baby’s heart beating, many fathoms deep. Sometimes more than one monitor would be going, the dueling heart sounds rising and falling. I would touch my belly, my baby would roll leisurely against my hand, and it was hard to imagine then that a world existed outside that room.
I WAS ABLE to fall asleep each night when the lights were lowered in the ward, but I usually awoke with a start several hours later. A shaft of gray light from the hall always shone through the center of the room, illuminating only the bottom half of each bed, and from the mysterious region beyond the ward could be heard the sounds of urgent footsteps on hard tiled floors. Though the nights were cold and damp, the windows were usually cracked open. From the streets below rose the sounds of a foreign city—distant sirens and the occasional diluted hollering of a drunk—and it always took me a few moments to recall that I was in a London maternity hospital. Then, once again, my self-interrogation would begin. Why did I get on that plane? Did I lift something too heavy? Why hadn’t I stayed home and rested, instead of trotting halfway across the globe, jeopardizing my poor baby’s life? Sometimes a pair of nurses would enter the room and stand whispering at the foot of one of the beds, and I would close my eyes and force myself to breathe slowly and feign sleep.
From the moment I was admitted to UCH, I was filled with remorse and fear and dread, but I desperately tried to hide it from the attending nurses and physicians. I knew that the British expected a stiff upper lip in situations like this, and I knew it because of a favorite piece of reading material that I’d cherished as a young teen.
I found the manual while baby-sitting for the Gardner children. Ever since I had discovered Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus at another baby-sitting job, I made it a habit to inspect all employers’ bookshelves after the children had gone to bed. The Gardners’ bookshelves were initially a big disappointment. There was no erotic literature, only a few volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed novels, a series of Time-Life books on home repair, some hunting guides, and a thick pamphlet that, when I pulled it off the shelf, I discovered was a poorly photocopied military manual that had been written by senior officers of the Royal Air Force, and its purpose was to teach younger enlisted men survival techniques. I’m not sure how Mr. Gardner had obtained this pamphlet, but he was a gun aficionado and a Vietnam vet, and I have a feeling that his wife and kids have since left him and he is at this very moment holed up in a cabin in Montana, awaiting an armed standoff with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Anyway, I read this pamphlet from cover to cover. I read it again each time I baby-sat. I read it with the same degree of fascination and horror with which I had read Delta of Venus, and I fantasized about someday finding myself in a life-or-death situation where I might have to use some of the techniques I had learned in this incredible manual, hopefully with a British air force officer at my side.
The manual was divided into chapters that covered the most common military survival situations. One chapter was devoted to surviving enemy prison camps, while others discussed survival at sea, in hostile enemy territory, and in the desert. These chapters contained many anecdotes about the actual wartime experiences of the authors, and each one commanded a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality that spoke volumes about the resourcefulness (and lack of tolerance for whiners) of the British.
The prison-camp chapter was my favorite. I was raised on daily doses of Hogan’s Heroes, and The Great Escape is one of my favorite movies. For me, the wartime prison camp ranked just below the western cattle ranch in favorite fantasy destinations, and when you’re in junior high school, you need someplace to go during Algebra 1. Sure, the accommodations aren’t luxurious, but the adrenaline-pumping danger combined with the built-in romantic possibilities gave me endless material to occupy my mind throughout most of my school day.
According to the manual’s prison-camp chapter, the most important thing a POW must do is eat. The problem is that the food is usually so rancid that flies and maggots are already eating it. The authors explain that the fatal error committed by many is to refuse the food. The food must be eaten, maggots and all. Maggots, it turns out, are an excellent source of protein. Not only that, the best thing for a fresh wound, lacking iodine or sutures, is the maggot, who will eat only the dead and decaying flesh and thereby help prevent infection. I think you’re starting to get the picture here.
My favorite character—in my opinion the hero of the manual—was the British officer in the chapter about survival tools. This chapter was devoted almost entirely to the knife. Leaving your knife at home, according to RAF officers, is tantamount to swallowing cyanide. A knife can be fastened to a branch and used as a spear to hunt food. It can cut a bullet out of your thigh or slit the throat of your captor. In fact, one of the authors asked the reader what a colleague of his would have done without his knife when he stepped on a land mine in France. Not only did this man use his knife to amputate his leg, but he was then able to whittle a crutch from a tree limb and make his way back to his unit.
It was compelling reading, impossible to put down, and now that I found myself imprisoned in a foreign hospital, I took solace in recalling the mettle of those British soldiers and was determined that nobody find out what a wuss I really was.
FIVE
MY MOTHER’S HUSBAND, Stephen Howe, is a devoted Anglophile, and the year they married, he took my mother on her first trip to England. Although they were there for only a week she returned with a slight British accent and an alarmingly transformed vocabulary. Pants had become trousers. My mother now rode the lift, not the elevator. Her car ran on petrol, and when she needed the loo—say, at the cinema—she would sometimes have to queue up. “Is this the queue?” she w
ould ask the others in line at the local multiplex, and they would shrug and shake their heads in confusion. My sister, Meg, and I teased her about this mercilessly.
“’Ow about a nice cuppa tea, Mum,” I’d say when she told us that she and Steve had “hired” a video the night before.
“Blimey!” Meg would say. “It’s teatime already, is it? I’ll get the jam from the cupboard.”
“Is the guv’nor about?” I’d ask. “I’d like to say ’ello to old Steve. Then I’m off to the pub with me mates.”
“I fancy a nice pint meself,” Meg would say, and we would carry on like that until one of us had wet our trousers. Meg and I consider ourselves screamingly funny and can whip each other into a state of crying, peeing hysteria in a matter of minutes. My mother would insist that she had no idea what we were talking about. “I’ve always said ‘hire,’” she’d insist. “That’s not a British word.”
Every year after that first trip, my mother and Steve returned to England in June to visit their friends the Thwaites, who live in Henley-on-Thames. Each year they attended the races at Royal Ascot and sat in a special box situated quite close to the queen herself. My mother had been all over London. She’d been to Harrods and to Covent Garden. She knew her way across Hyde Park to Buckingham Palace, where she had viewed the changing of the guard. She had visited the Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London. It would be very easy for her to come and be with me, she said to me now, as I lay in a maternity ward in Central London. She said that London was like a second home to her, but I suspected that the London my mother knew was slightly different from the London where I now resided.
* * *
I WAS AWARE of my mother’s arrival at UCH long before I laid eyes on her. Nobody wears high heels in hospitals, but, given the opportunity, my mother would wear high heels on a hike across the Sahara. I heard the familiar strike of her heels as she approached. I heard them growing louder, coming nearer, and suddenly there she was.
Now that I have children of my own, I know that it’s normal for them to go through a stage when they’re embarrassed by their parents. My kids are firmly entrenched in this stage now, and although I’m told they’ll grow out of it, I have my doubts, because I never did. If it had been somebody else’s mother who arrived that afternoon dressed in a tailored blue suit, sporting a jaunty hat, and laden with Harrods bags, I would have thought her charming. But this was my mother, and in my mind she’d just arrived in the ward wearing nothing but a neon placard with the word “Yankee” emblazoned upon it. Again, regressing to about the fifth grade, I thought simultaneously, Thank God, Mom’s here and I hope nobody figures out she’s my mom.
“HI, ANNIE!” she called from the door. I gave her a feeble wave. She clicked her way across the floor and waved and said hello to the other women in their beds, who were trying not to stare. When she reached my bedside, she gave me one of her careful, tentative hugs, then sat down on a chair beside me.
“I WOULD HAVE COME EARLIER, BUT I WANTED TO STOP AND GET YOU A FEW THINGS, DARLING. HOW ARE YOU FEELING?” she said, and as she continued with questions about my condition and the baby’s, I wondered if she had always spoken this loudly. How was it possible that she had learned all those British words but had not picked up on the fact that British people speak very quietly in public?
“Mom,” I whispered, “we’re supposed to keep our voices down. There are babies sleeping in some of the other rooms.”
“Was I being loud?” my mother asked. Then she said, “I spoke to Joan Thwaites. She says this is an excellent hospital.”
“I know,” I said.
“She said you’d be crazy to GO TO A PRIVATE HOSPITAL—”
“Shhhh!” I hissed.
“What?” my mother said.
“I don’t know, maybe your ears are filled from the flight over. You’re talking really loudly,” I said, and immediately I hated myself for caring what the others thought. I have always been my mother’s worst critic. When I was a child, living in Michigan and Wisconsin, all my friends were envious of my mother. “She’s so cool and pretty,” they’d say. Or “I wish my mom could wear hot pants.” These girls had mothers whose thighs required polyester stretch pants. Moms who frosted their own hair, served Hamburger Helper for dinner, and in the evenings watched Hee Haw with Dad.
My mom was slender and stylish and clever. She would admire a caftan worn by Lauren Hutton in Vogue and sew one up for herself that very day. She had the ability to walk into a Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and walk out with the ingredients for moules au beurre d’escargots, which she would prepare that evening for dinner, just for the family. She read Russian history, hated midwestern accents, smoked More cigarettes (the long, thin brown ones that look like effeminate cigars), and absolutely loved a good party. All my childhood friends were mortified by their own mothers, and they thought mine was the best, but at times, as a child, I secretly coveted theirs—the mothers with doughy arms, twinkly smiles, and arsenals of homespun wisdom such as “The proof is in the pudding” and “Pretty is as pretty does.”
On her second day in London, my mother arrived at my bedside with the International Herald Tribune. She pulled her chair up close to my bed and, opening the paper, showed me the New York Times crossword puzzle. I was seized with panic.
My mother does the Times crossword puzzle every day. On Mondays she can do the puzzle in ten minutes while talking on the phone. As the week progresses and the puzzle becomes more challenging, it takes up more of her day, and by Saturday she sits surrounded by dictionaries and encyclopedias and solves the puzzle with the single-minded determination of a scientist unraveling the mysteries of DNA. On weekdays there’s nobody around to admire her acuity with the English language, so on Sundays, when her husband and, often, one or more of her children are present, she tries to turn what should be a solitary diversion into a one-woman performance piece designed to showcase her superior intellect.
She usually waits until we’re all seated in the family room reading the Sunday papers, and then she innocently settles herself into her favorite armchair. She works quietly for a few moments, then sighs and says, to no one in particular, “I’m having the hardest time with today’s puzzle.” In response we all shake our papers and squint fiercely at the pages, trying to convey the seriousness of our reading and the imperviousness of our concentration. This is lost on my mother, who then scans the room looking for her first victim.
“Denis,” she said one Sunday years ago, when Denis was still concerned with making a good impression, “you’ll know this…. I need a Revolutionary War general.”
Denis, naïve to the tyranny of the puzzler, good-naturedly tried to get in the spirit of things.
“George Washington!” he announced proudly.
“No,” my mother said. “There are only four letters.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Mom,” I said, trying to rescue Denis.
“C’mon,” my mother said. “You should know this, Annie. Steve … darling … a Revolutionary War general?”
Steve looked up from his paper and, frowning, said the first thing that came to his mind:
“Paul Revere.”
Then he looked back at his paper.
My mother tried to suppress her laughter. “Are you serious?” she asked.
Steve continued with his reading.
“Darling,” she said, “you must be joking. Paul Revere was a member of the militia and not a general.” Then she looked at us and rolled her eyes, sighing.
Steve is an attorney and, thus challenged, was compelled to defend himself.
“Of course Paul Revere was a militiaman. You don’t think the militia had ranks, had officers?” Steve said this sternly, in the hopes that it would dissuade my mother from pursuing her line of questioning, but he should have known better, as she responded, “Well, I’m certainly aware that the militia had ranks, but they didn’t have generals or colonels, per se—isn’t that right, Denis?”
&
nbsp; “Ummm …,” Denis said. “What are the other letters?”
“Well, that’s the problem,” my mother said. “I have the first letter as G. I know that’s right, because it’s from eight down—Giza, which is a Cairo suburb. So of course I thought Gage, as in Thomas Gage, the famous British general. The problem is, if it’s Gage, the A doesn’t work … wait a minute, I was looking at the wrong clue for twenty-six down. ‘Lethargic feeling’ is the clue. That would be ‘malaise,’ right, Annie?”
“What?” I said, looking up from my paper.
“‘Malaise.’ That works. Okay, Steve, here’s one you’ll love: ‘Stow on a boat.’”
Steve was now forced to feign deafness. He moved his paper closer to his face and frowned thoughtfully at his news.
“Steve.”
“Hmmm?”
“‘Stow on a boat.’”
“I think the word is ‘stow.’”
“‘Steeve.’ The word is ‘steeve.’ With two es. You really should have known that, Steve!” my mother said, laughing. “Now we’re getting someplace. Annie, here’s one for you: ‘Monkey Trial locale,’ six letters.”
“Africa,” I said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Annie. The Scopes Monkey Trial?”
“Darrow!” Denis announced triumphantly. “Darrow, Tennessee.”
“Oh, that’s right!” I said, thinking, Take that! My boyfriend’s not as dumb as he looks.
“Darrow, Tennessee! Too funny!” my mother exclaimed. “Clarence Darrow was the lawyer for the evolutionist on trial! The trial was in Dayton, Tennessee! This is great fun, isn’t it?”
And so she continued throughout the day, until the puzzle was done and the entire family was suitably demoralized by the fresh evidence of our staggering stupidity.
Denis is fiercely competitive and grew to resent the puzzle more than the rest of us did. “You know,” he said to her once, when she’d asked him to name a San Joaquin Valley city, “if I liked crossword puzzles, I’d do them myself.” To which my mother replied, “Crossword puzzles are meant to be done as a group!”