“Ah,” she said, rounding the left side of me. “There ’e is. See,” she said, and put my hand in place of hers. “There is his back, on the left. A good place. Easy to get down. His head is down here. He’s getting ready.” Then she got out the stethoscope with the attached speaker and found the old-time radio coconut-shell horse hooves of his heartbeat. “Very good,” she said. “You hear? Tout est parfait.”
Later that day I felt my stomach. There it was, the hard fact of his back, a sweet, dorsal, infant curve. I had always loved the sentimental science of the ultrasounds, seeing the screen, his bodily essence paradoxically disembodied, his bones decisive, the little snub nose, the lump where Dr. Bergerac had typed boy, the heart working away in all of its miraculous clockwork gadgetry. But there was always something Ground-Control-to-Major-Tom about the experience. Deep down, I believed, in the way of moon-landing deniers, that it was all well and good to show me this dim grayscale picture on a screen, but you call that proof? Surely it was a hoax, it had to be a hoax: it was easier to believe it was fake than to accept it was possible, real, done.
Now: my hand, my stomach, his back. A human being. A boy baby. Pudding himself.
The problem was that Claudelle didn’t deliver babies anymore: her children had complained about the hours she’d had to keep. Still, she knew a midwife in Bordeaux who did. She called Sylvie and made the appointment for us, since Sylvie didn’t speak English. (“The important word is the same,” Dr. Bergerac had pointed out. “Poussez, madame.”) The next week we drove to Sylvie’s office in Bordeaux. Like Claudelle’s office, it felt more like the living room of a graduate student in Women’s Studies than anything medical.
Sylvie herself was energetic and full of metaphors. Upon checking my cervix, for instance, she announced, The door is closed! The baby is upstairs! When she asked me about pain relief and I said that I’d rather forgo everything, she said, in English, “Strong woman!” and showed her biceps. Best of all, she was willing to come to Savary and pick us up and drive us to the hospital in Bordeaux.
She even said we could have a home birth. I mulled the idea over. To give birth in a farmhouse seemed appealingly Little House on the Prairie. “You are almost forty!” my friend Wendy told me when I asked what she thought. “It’s your first pregnancy! You are not allowed to have a home birth!”
She probably had a point.
I told my mother, “So I’m going to have a midwife deliver the baby, but in the hospital.”
“Are there doctors in this hospital?” my mother wanted to know.
“Of course.”
“Why doesn’t one of them deliver the baby?” she asked.
But I loved Sylvie’s optimism. Why not be optimistic? Everything was going so well. My friend Patti told me I should be the poster girl for Advanced Maternal Age pregnancies. I felt great. I ate intelligently, if a little heavy on the chocolate mousse. My major problems were a touch of sciatica, a touch of pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. I got more and more pregnant, blew past my American due date, which was April 18, but the midwives weren’t worried: my French due date wasn’t until April 27. I paid out of pocket for everything and submitted bills to my American health insurance, and at the end of every appointment, when I was asked for fifteen, or twenty-five, or thirty euros, I wanted to say, “That’s adorable!”
Sylvie came to Savary for a last visit. She arrived with a plush stuffed pelvis and a slightly soiled baby doll to act out Pudding’s escape route. “Voilà,” she said, threading the doll through the pelvis: delivering a baby was like uncorking a bottle of champagne, sometimes you had to twist this way and that before it came free. Then she hooked me up to heart rate and contraction monitors and handed me a game-show-like button on a cable, to press when I felt Pudding move.
“Tout est parfait,” said Sylvie. The door was still closed. The baby was still upstairs.
Why worry about due dates? I wasn’t even impatient. A neighbor had told us a nightmare story of an alcoholic woman in Ireland she’d known who went two weeks past her due date without telling her doctors, and her child died: starved to death inside of her, really, because her placenta had stopped functioning and no one had noticed. That wouldn’t be my problem. In the past week I’d had a fetal monitor strapped to me, and a sonogram, and even an impromptu pelvic X-ray that seemed to be for a good reason.
We were ready for Pudding.
And then the calamity.
14
Every day of my second pregnancy, I thought of Pudding, of course. But I tried not to think of the exact circumstances of his death. At first I was worried I’d stay in bed weeping, and then I thought: If I remember everything, I’m done for. If I remember, I will walk to the nearest hospital and ask for a nice bed in the psychiatric wing, I promise to be quiet, I promise I will not ask for narcotics, just keep me, nurse, for a few months. In May you can transfer me please to maternity. I am not crazy, but I am being carefuclass="underline" I am not crazy, but if I’m not careful I will take a wrong step and end up in the forest. Sometimes I can feel it happening: my memory, my bad memory, my untrained memory. It creeps toward that time, the end of April 2006, a child warned away from dangers and therefore obsessed by them. Help me. We need to grab it by the scruff of the neck: not yet.
Not yet.
15
It was Maud who told me the story of that tragic drunk woman, and Maud who put me off the close by hospital in Marmande: her son, Finn, was born there black-and-blue from a hard delivery. Maud, who our landlady paid to look after Savary, was our social life, along with her Anglo-Irish boyfriend, known at the bar where they drank as Jack the Irish Two — there were so many Jack the Irishes that they needed to be numbered. Maud’s father, who sometimes visited, was Jack the Irish Three. Jack and Maud lived ten minutes away from us in an old presbytery with Maud’s four-year-old daughter, Madeleine, and two-year-old Finn; a lovely lemonade yellow, lion-headed retriever; and a cat named, by Madeleine, Two-Dogs.
Maud was in her late twenties, with messy boy-cut blond hair and a wicked sense of humor. Jack was about fifty, tall and thin and ponytailed: he looked like the bass player of some band that had been medium big in the 1970s. They both drank a lot. We called them the Sots. They invited us over to dinner parties with their other Anglophone friends: a plumber named Eric and his sad wife, Marie; straw hatted Ted and his wife, Elaine, who were older and more cheerful; and a voluble, chubby, sexy woman named Lola, who had a Greek boyfriend named Pete. Lola’s father was Indian and her mother English; she had caramel skin, striped hair, and an extensive wardrobe of colored contact lenses. The blue ones made her look as though she were developing cataracts, and the green ones as though she were about to turn into the Hulk. Her boyfriend, Pete the Greek, spoke scarcely any English but liked to deliver long monologues about hunting and what he’d learned about American police by watching Cops: “America? Gun. Security. Boom: no problem. Person? In house? Gun. Look up. Boom. Fox? No good. So, boom. No dead. Black. Pig. Me, friend, boom boom. No dead.” Lola spoke to him in Greek. She was fluent but had such a thick cockney accent that I swore I was always about to understand her — it sounded as though she were saying, “Acropolis Demetrius where to, Guvnor? Sophocles Melanoma, ’ave a pork pie.”