Danny arrived on his floor with an armful of parcels he’d carried up the tight stairwell. They contained his clothes, freshly laundered, wrapped in brown paper, and tied off with a ribbon by a laundress from Prince Street, a widow who did a dozen loads a day in the tub in her kitchen. He tried maneuvering the key into the door with the parcels still in his arms, but after a couple of failed attempts, he stepped back and placed them on the floor, and a young woman came out of her room at the other end of the hall and let out a yelp.
She said, “Signore, signore,” and it came out tentatively, as if she weren’t sure she was worth the trouble. She leaned one hand against the wall and pink water ran down her legs and dripped off her ankles.
Danny wondered why he’d never seen her before. Then he wondered if she had the grippe. Then he noticed she was pregnant. His lock disengaged and the door popped open, and he kicked his parcels inside because nothing left behind in a hallway in the North End would stay there long. He shut the door and came down the hall toward the woman and saw that the lower part of her dress was soaked through.
She kept her hand on the wall and lowered her head and her dark hair fell over her mouth and her teeth were clenched into a grimace tighter than Danny had seen on some dead people. She said, “Dio aiutami. Dio aiutami.”
Danny said, “Where’s your husband? Where’s the midwife?”
He took her free hand in his and she squeezed so tight a bolt of pain ran up to his elbow. Her eyes rolled up at him and she babbled something in Italian so fast he didn’t catch any of it, and he realized she didn’t speak a word of English.
“Mrs. DiMassi.” Danny’s holler echoed down the stairwell. “Mrs. DiMassi!”
The woman squeezed his hand even harder and screamed through her teeth.
“Dove e il vostro marito?” Danny said.
The woman shook her head several times, though Danny had no idea if that meant she had no husband or if he just wasn’t here.
“The … la …” Danny searched for the word for “midwife.” He caressed the back of her hand and said, “Ssssh. It’s okay.” He looked into her wide, wild eyes. “Look … look, you … the … la ostetrica!” Danny was so excited that he’d finally remembered the word he immediately reverted to English. “Yes? Where is …? Dove e? Dove e la ostetrica?”
The woman pounded her fist against the wall. She dug her fingers into Danny’s palm and screamed so loudly that he yelled, “Mrs. Di-Massi!” feeling a kind of panic he hadn’t felt since his first day as a policeman, when it had sunk in that he was all the answer the world saw fit to give to someone else’s problems.
The woman shoved her face into his and said, “Faccia qualcosa, uomo insensato! Mi aiuti!” and Danny didn’t get all of it, but he picked up “foolish man” and “help” so he pulled her toward the stairs.
Her hand remained in his, her arm wrapped around his abdomen, the rest of her clenched against his back as they made their way down the staircase to the street. Mass General was too far to make on foot and he couldn’t see any taxis or even any trucks in the streets, just people, filling it on market day, Danny thinking if it was market day there should be some fucking trucks, shouldn’t there, but no, just throngs of people and fruit and vegetables and restless pigs snuffling in their straw along the cobblestone.
“Haymarket Relief Station,” he said. “It’s closest. You understand?”
She nodded quickly and he knew it was his tone she was responding to and they pushed their way through the crowds and people began to make way. Danny tried a few times, calling out, “Cerco un’ ostetrica! Un’ ostetrica! Cè qualcuno che conosce un’ ostetrica?” but all he got were sympathetic shakes of the head.
When they broke out on the other side of the mob, the woman arched her back and her moan was small and sharp and Danny thought she was going to drop the child onto the street, two blocks from Haymarket Relief, but she fell back into him instead. He scooped her up in his arms and started walking and staggering, walking and staggering, the woman not terribly heavy, but squirming and clawing the air and slapping his chest.
They walked several blocks, time enough for Danny to find her beautiful in her agony. In spite of or because of, he wasn’t sure, but beautiful nevertheless. The final block, she wrapped her arms around his neck, her wrists pressing against the muscle there, and whispered, “Dio, aiutami. Dio, aiutami,” over and over in his ear.
At the relief station, Danny pushed them through the first door he saw and they ended up in a brown hallway of dark oak floors and dim yellow lights and a single bench. A doctor sat on the bench, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He looked at them as they came up the corridor. “What are you doing here?”
Danny, still holding the woman in his arms, said, “You serious?”
“You came in the wrong door.” The doctor stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and stood. He got a good look at the woman. “How long’s she been in labor?”
“Her water broke about ten minutes ago. That’s all I know.”
The doctor placed one hand under the woman’s belly and another to her head. He gave Danny a look, calm and unreachable. “This woman’s going into labor.”
“I know.”
“In your arms,” the doctor said, and Danny almost dropped her.
“Wait here,” the doctor said and went through some double doors halfway up the corridor. Something banged around back there and then the doctor came back through the doors with an iron gurney, one of its wheels rusted and squeaking.
Danny placed the woman on the gurney. Her eyes were closed now, her breath still puffing out through her lips in short bursts, and Danny looked down at the wetness he’d been feeling on his arms and waist, a wetness he’d thought was mostly water but now saw was blood, and he showed his arms to the doctor.
The doctor nodded and said, “What’s her name?”
Danny said, “I don’t know.”
The doctor frowned at that and then he pushed the gurney past Danny and back through the double doors and Danny heard him calling for a nurse.
Danny found a bathroom at the end of the hall. He washed his hands and arms with brown soap and watched the blood swirl pink in the basin. The woman’s face hung in his mind. Her nose was slightly crooked with a bump halfway down the bridge, and her upper lip was thicker than her lower, and she had a small mole on the underside of her jaw, barely noticeable because her skin was so dark, almost as dark as her hair. He could hear her voice in his chest and feel her thighs and lower back in his palms, see the arch of her neck as she’d ground her head into the gurney mattress.
He found the waiting area at the far end of the hall. He entered from behind the admitting desk and came around to sit among the bandaged and the sniffling. One guy removed a black bowler from his head and vomited into it. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. He peered into the bowler, and then he looked at the other people in the waiting room; he seemed embarrassed. He carefully placed the bowler under the wooden bench and wiped his mouth again with the handkerchief and sat back and closed his eyes. A few people had surgical masks over their faces, and when they coughed the coughs were wet. The admitting nurse wore a mask as well. No one spoke English except for a teamster whose foot had been run over by a horse-drawn cart. He told Danny the accident had happened right out front, else he’d have walked to a real hospital, the kind fit for Americans. Several times he glanced at the dried blood covering Danny’s belt and groin, but he didn’t ask how it had gotten there.