Everything was going splendidly, except that Pat did put on more weight than I liked. I didn't suspect a thing, and I can still kick myself that, for all my experience in the field, I could blithely ignore so obvious a clue. Perhaps it was an unwitting desire to discount Chuck's gloomy misgivings. Still, the fetal position was good, the heartbeat strong, about 150. Pat's condition was excellent, and, if she was heavy, she was a fair-sized girl with a good pelvic arch, and a big baby was not unlikely.
However, what was to be known as the Transplantation Split came into existence early the morning of August 15. I'd managed to blackmail a colleague to cover my practice the last three weeks of August and was actually having a nonworking vacation in the pleasant company of the Kelloggs. So when Pat woke with abdominal contractions, she roused me to time them. They were a businesslike three minutes apart. It's not unheard of for a primipara to deliver quickly, so I hospitalized her and phoned Chuck to get the hell up there.
If he'd driven instead of hiring that damned helicopter, I'd have been all right. I tell myself, and him when he brings the matter up, as he often does, that I wasn't hogging all the glory for myself. He had a right to some.
At any rate, the helicopter set him down on the hospital grounds just as Pat went into second-stage labor, and he assisted me in the delivery room along with the regular nurse. I hadn't been able to wrangle Esther in there, but she was more valuable in the waiting room keeping the parents from exploding.
Chuck and I couldn't restrain our shout of triumph as, at 8:02 A.M., I delivered the six-pound, seven-ounce, perfectly normal, bright red daughter of Peter and Cecily Kellogg from the womb of another woman. I brushed aside the nurse who reached for the newborn and made my own breathless examination of her squalling wrinkled person. I left Chuck to deliver the afterbirth and suture the episiotomy.
"Hey, Doc," Chuck drawled with infuriating irreverence, disrupting my delighted examination, "you forgot something."
Half-angry at his aspersions about my competence, I turned to see him delivering the butt end of another girl child, as healthy as her precipitous sister. I stared transfixed as he eased the head through with deft hands and slapped breath into the mite, who weighed in at a scant five pounds, three ounces.
"You didn't tell me about this," said Chuck, all innocence.
If I'd thought more quickly, I could have told him that I felt he deserved something for all his help.
"I didn't know," I admitted instead.
"God bless you, but I love an honest woman, Ali. It's such a relief."
Then he went over the new girl as carefully as I'd done her sister.
I do feel obliged to add to this account that the heartbeats of identical twins are often synchronized. My mistake lay in assuming a single birth and in not taking a precautionary X ray, as I ordinarily did when the mother appeared to gain more weight than normal or was carrying a large fetus.
My oversight is a family joke, but the most felicitous kind for the Kelloggs. The Transplantation Split is now a familiar medical fact: some minute change in temperature (perhaps moving Pat to my house after the implantation) caused the egg to split, yielding twins. It doesn't always occur in exogenetic pregnancies, but the incidence is proportionately higher than with regular pregnancies.
We were hard put to explain our jubilation to the deliver-room nurse. We made sure that Pat had delivered the after-birth and would rouse satisfactorily from the anesthesia. Then we literally burst into the waiting room, simultaneously yelling:
"It's a girl!"
"No, it's-"
"What?" demanded Esther, irritated.
I remember that Cecily looked as if she were about to faint, but Peter caught on quickly.
"Twins?"
"Ali outdid herself. It's twins!" cried Chuck. "She delivered your first daughter, a spanking six pounds, seven ounces…"
"And I gave Chuck the honor of ushering your second daughter into the world."
"A very dainty miss at five pounds, three ounces. As healthy a pair as any parents could wish."
"Pat's all right?" asked Cecily, tears streaming down her cheeks.
"Right as rain."
"When can we see the children?" asked Peter.
I know I stopped talking and stared at Peter, stunned with the sad realization that he would never see his children, and wishing that another miracle would occur for him.
Chuck covered my gaffe. "They'll be in the nursery by now. Go see the modern product of a virgin birth."
"Dr. Henderson, you ought to be ashamed of yourself," said Esther, but she wasn't really angry and was far too eager to see the twins to argue with him. Champagne is not recommended by any dietitian to break a night's fast; but we were all back at the vacation cottage, getting pleasantly polluted with toasts to Pat, the parents, Esther, ourselves, never for a minute suspecting that the hardest part was just beginning. Not even when the phone rang.
Esther, being nearest, answered it. I just happened to be looking in her direction, so I saw the abrupt change in her expression and realized that something was wrong. My first thought was for the children, then for Pat. Was she hemorrhaging…?
Esther only listened, openmouthed and sheet-white, and then dazedly but the receiver down.
"Mrs. Baxter's in town," she said, which was sufficient to silence everyone. "A friend of hers saw Peter and Cecily in the supermarket last week and told her. I don't know how she found out about the births…"'
"We weren't exactly closemouthed about twins," Chuck said, remembering our hilarity when we brought champagne in the town at ten o'clock.
"Well, she went to the hospital, she saw Pat, she saw the twins. She's crazy, the things she said. She told the whole blooming hospital. But it isn't the truth. It isn't the truth at all."
I've never sobered faster in my life. Cecily dashed to the kitchen sink to be ill.
It was a good thing I had medical license plates, because we passed three cops on the way to the hospital at a speed that was unwise even for doctors.
Chuck went for Avery, who was already trying to explain the situation to the village-sheet's reporter who had been informed of this tidbit of malicious gossip. Esther and I dashed to the maternity wing. I could hear Pat's sobbing voice as we turned the corner. I snapped an order for a sedative to the floor supervisor, who made the mistake of not concealing her snide expression.
"Crafty, Crafty," cried Pat as she saw me enter the room. Her two roommates had poisonous expressions on their faces. She was trying to get out of the bed, clutching her tummy. I pushed her back, shoved her legs horizontal and yelled at the nurse to get the hell in there with the hypo.
"Crafty," sobbed Pat in weeping distress, "you can't imagine the horrible things she said. She didn't give me a chance to say anything. I don't think she wanted a logical explanation. She hates Peter! She hates him! She hates Cecily for being so happy with him. And she despises you for giving Cecily her children. I've never seen anyone so full of hate. She must know the children aren't mine and Peter's, but that's what she said. And she kept on saying it, and saying it" - Pat was covering her ears to shut out the sound of that vengeful slander - "and everybody heard it. It's ghastly, Crafty. Oh, Crafty, what will Cecily do?"
I swabbed her arm and gave her the sedative as she was talking - rather, babbling. I also gave orders for her to be moved to a private room. Pat's words became incoherent as the drug took effect. Even as I was pushing her bed toward the private room, I thought of how very characteristic of Pat to worry about Cecily rather than the equivocal position into which Cecily's mother had put herself and her brother. I do not recall ever before being so consumed with anger as I was at that hour in my life. Had I known where Louise Baxter could be found, I think I would have strangled her with my bare hands.