The man leaned down again. This was not my own doctor but one, I recalled, brought in sometime in the last few hours or days, red-faced, imperious, with abrupt, impatient hands. “A little pain now,” he said, “for a good outcome later. For your baby.” A good outcome.
A bitter drop of his perspiration fell on my lip, and then he leaned across me and his white chest absorbed like cotton the black wash of my pain. He was going to smother me, the only antidote, of course, for my suffering. Fool that I had been to think otherwise. No other relief but dying, letting go of this poor body at last, sloughing it off, a shell, a doll. They could stuff it with horsehair. I would make no more entreaties: I would fall effortlessly against the solid and unyielding door.
They tore me in two. Later, making a joke of it, I said I was run over by the Coney Island Express, the parameters of the pain, from breast to thigh, just about the distance between the black steel of the subway tracks. The odor of blood that filled the crowded room like the underground scent of hollowed rock and cold steel. I heard, in fact, the walloping, beating rhythm of passing subway cars just as the red-faced doctor sliced me apart without sufficient anesthesia, without any at all, I was certain. And pulled the baby out. And sewed me up again so that I felt every stitch. Pain like the walloping beat, light and dark and pounding air, of a passing train, steel against bitter steel, a train passing over me, cracking my hip bones and rattling the teeth in my china skull.
“Unnecessarily withheld,” two of the nurses said later as they bathed me and changed my dressing and returned my limp body, still mine, it seemed, to a bed on the ward. They spoke softly, looking over their shoulders to the door and the hallway outside. “He had his training in the army,” they told me. “He had a bad war.” “Cruel,” they said of him. “Brutal.” They said, “He thinks women need to be more stoic about these things.”
But when the doctor came into the room again, they only smiled and bowed and then scattered like pigeons when he shouted his demands.
I saw my mother in a chair by the window when I opened my eyes again. My mother wore her hat and her pale broadcloth summer suit, and she held her purse on her lap. The slatted sunlight had washed her of all color. I thought for a moment that we might both have died during the long days and nights of my ordeal, not because of the pale light in the blank room, but because of the sweet assurance I felt, waking and seeing my mother there, that I was loved, cherished beyond all reason. The peace of this, the stillness of the room, the temporary suspension of pain, seemed evidence enough that I had come to the end of time. I felt a strange elation. And then I closed my eyes and slept again.
It was evening and the light was low and Tom was in the chair when I next opened them. And then a parched morning, the sound of trays and rolling bassinets and babies crying here and there, the sound of the nurse’s voice as she leaned over me, all of it furred and fiery. I had an unshakable image of red-flocked wallpaper growing like fungus over my tongue and down my throat. They threw whatever covered me aside, but there was no relief in the chill I now felt on my damp skin.
The wide bandages were ripped from what was left of the poor pale flesh suspended between the thin bones of my hips. There was the sweet, pungent odor of pus. There were barked orders from the military doctor, or perhaps this was another one. More indifferent hands running over my flesh; no indignity in it anymore, I had grown so accustomed to it now. A broad nurse with gold curls beneath her cap washed my naked body with a large sponge, running the thing up and down over my extended arm—extended because the nurse had lifted my hand and clamped it under her own armpit, in the casually efficient way a busy woman hanging clothes holds a clothespin in her mouth. She ran the sponge up over my shoulders and between my breasts. The nurse wore a damp apron over her uniform, and her fat arms were as cool and solid as gray marble. There was the faint smell of vinegar in the air.
Later I heard my mother’s voice raised in anger, but had no strength to assure her that there was no need to object: a body, after all, was a paltry thing, and really, Momma, all modesty had long ago gone out the window.
And then there were murmured prayers. A bald priest in a black cassock with a green-and-gold stole, with a missal in one hand and the other reaching for the small container Gabe held out to him in his cupped palm. Gabe, too, in a pale suit, standing at the dark priest’s elbow, but presiding somehow, elegant and assured, nonetheless. I focused on Gabe’s hands. His beautiful hands. And then I felt the flesh of the priest’s thumb against my forehead and my palms. And then someone fumbled with the blanket at my feet and I whispered, or so I was later told, “Oh, honestly.” It was Tom who laughed then. I knew him by his laughter.
Later, he put his dry lips to my cheek and held them there.
“Please,” he said, later still.
“A beautiful boy,” he said, and kissed me again.
He said, “You’re doing fine.”
And another time, “Home soon.”
I heard the loudmouth doctor say, “Built like a child to begin with,” and kept my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
Then another morning, and when the doctor came in, I was sitting up in the bed and had just finished a light breakfast. He folded the blanket down to my thighs to examine my incision, but this time with a polite caution I had not seen before. He even said, “If I may.” He touched the bandages with his fingertips. It occurred to me that I had become accustomed to looking down across my body to find his head hovering there. I knew his bald spot as well as I knew Tom’s. He said, “That’s fine, much better,” and then quickly, almost shyly, covered me again. He was, I thought, giving my body back to me. I felt a peculiar regret, the end of some intimacy.
He put his hand on my forearm. He was red-faced and gray-haired and strong-jawed. He looked like an old general. Someone had told me he’d had a bad war. Brutal. “Don’t have any more children,” he said. And then turned to the nurse in the doorway. “Bring this little mother her boy.”
At home—it was agreed that I would go back to my mother’s house until I was fully recovered—my mother said, “There is the ring. There is the sheath. You can take your temperature every morning and keep a record. You can sleep in separate beds.”
The baby, little Tommy, was plump and healthy, alive in my arms, and he woke every three hours. Once again, my mother and I were sharing the big bed. My mother was up at the child’s first whimper, always the warmed bottle of formula at the ready. The ordeal that had almost killed me was reduced now to the hot red incision that split my belly—so jagged and roughly sewn that my mother, seeing it, had whispered, “I’d like to wring his neck.” If I moved the wrong way, the pain from it would flare across my entire midsection, make me stoop to catch my breath.
My long ordeal, as I’d come to call it, reduced as well to the ache in my breasts that my own doctor had assured me would soon go away as my milk dried up. He was gentler than the general, but still he spoke of my breasts and the milk they were producing with a dismissive smile, as if the whole process was some vestige of a primitive time—an immigrant custom, as one of the nurses on the ward had called it when my mother, who kept asking why I didn’t nurse the child, was out of the room—a persistent biological habit that these young mothers, had they only the wherewithal, would have long ago managed to break. None of my friends nursed their babies, and the infection I’d had in the hospital would have precluded it, anyway. Not that this satisfied my mother, who watched the child rooting against my shoulder and said, “He knows what he’s missing.”