Midwives (1997) Page 17

BEDFORD: Yes, but I was not hysterical. I'm telling you, I know what I saw.

  HASTINGS: And yet, did you make any effort--any effort at all--to stop Sibyl when you saw the blood?

  BEDFORD: No, as I told Mr. Tanner, I thought it was normal. I assumed my Charlotte had passed away, and this was just ... just what the body did ...

  Stephen had told my parents while they were discussing strategy the night before that there would be two issues with Asa's testimony: what the man could have seen, and what the man would have seen. Stephen was firmly convinced that no husband in his right mind would actually have brought himself to witness a knife going into his dead wife's belly, and that was the real reason Asa had gone to the window. But first, he told my parents, he would cast doubt upon what Asa could have seen from the bedroom that morning.

  Stephen's cross-examination of the reverend began right after lunch and continued until we recessed for the day. There were moments that afternoon--brief but thrilling--when I was convinced with the confidence of a teenager that Stephen had persuaded every soul in the courtroom that it wasn't logical to believe Asa Bedford would actually have watched his wife's cesarean, and it was unlikely he could have seen blood spurt even if illogic had somehow prevailed. No man in Asa's position, I told myself, could be completely sure of what he had seen, and--perhaps more important--no man would have been willing to watch.

  But when the cross-examination was over, the fact remained that Asa Bedford was still a clergyman: In our corner of the Kingdom in 1981, this meant his words had weight. Great weight, despite the eccentricities of his church's dogma. I thought Stephen's cross-examination had been wonderful, but when we all went to our separate homes for dinner, I nevertheless feared one cross-examination--even a good one--could not undo a week of damaging medical testimony and the memories of the minister.

  When girls are little, their dolls are likely to be babies, not Barbies.

  So said Stephen Hastings. Stephen, of course, had no children.

  But this didn't stop him from having strong opinions about how children thought and what they believed. After all, he said one night when my father challenged him, he had been one himself. Stephen would readily admit that he hadn't the foggiest notion of how one should raise a child--how to discipline one, or reward one, or simply smother one with love--but he insisted he understood well the logic that informed a child's mind. A girl's mind as well as a boy's.

  And Stephen was convinced that little girls loved baby dolls--plastic infants that demanded no maintenance. No rocking, no feeding, no changing, no watching. No work. Only mock howls, play colic, pretend pangs of hunger. Imaginary dirty diapers. Make-believe mess. Eventually, he said, baby dolls would drop off the child's radar screen. Older dolls might or might not, depending upon whether the little girl discovered Barbie and Skipper and Ken. But plastic babies--and the instinctive desire to nurture something small and needy--did. Some girls got the nurture bug back when they began puberty, and used baby-sitting as a substitute. Others didn't rediscover the desire to mother until they were adults themselves, and the primordial need to dispose of the diaphragm and continue the species overwhelmed all reason.

  And then, of course, there were those girls who became mid-wives: girls who could not get enough of the tiniest of babies--the newborn--girls who would grow into women who absolutely reveled in the magnificent but messy process of birth.

  As spring became summer and Stephen steeped himself in the culture of home birth, he concluded that the principal difference between the woman who becomes an ob-gyn and the woman who becomes a midwife had less to do with education or philosophy or upbringing than it did with the depth of her appreciation for the miracle of labor and for life in its moment of emergence. Women who became doctors viewed themselves as physicians first, ob-gyns second. He felt that when these girls began focusing seriously on what they wanted to be when they grew up--in high school or college--they probably decided originally that they simply wanted to be doctors. Then, perhaps in medical school, they narrowed in on obstetrics.

  Those girls who became midwives, on the other hand, knew midwifery was their calling at a very early age, or--as my mother's path suggested--had one profound, life-changing experience involving birth that pulled them in. Stephen was adamant that the women who became ob-gyns loved babies no less than midwives, but they were the type who were more likely at a young age to trade dolls that one dressed for toy cribs for dolls that one dressed for pretend formals.

  Certainly Stephen was on to something in my case, at least when it came to dolls. My dolls stayed babies barely beyond my arrival in first grade; almost overnight that year they became a small world of Barbies obsessed with clothing and cars and the color of their hair. I even had a Nurse Barbie, although to be honest she spent most of her time with Ken with her clothes off.

  Yet did I become an obstetrician simply because I wanted to be a doctor, and I happened to grow up in a house that made me comfortable with the anatomic terrain? I doubt it. And after watching the way some ob-gyns clinically picked my mother apart in the courthouse--using the third person as if she weren't sitting merely a half-dozen or so yards away--it's arguable I might have developed such a visceral distaste for the entire profession that I would have become anything but a baby doctor.

  To this day, some of my mother's friends think I've betrayed her by becoming an ob-gyn. There are two midwives in Vermont who won't speak to me, or to the midwives who use me as their backup physician. But as I've said to all those midwives from my mother's generation with whom I've remained friends, or to those midwives of my generation with whom I've become friends, my choice of profession was neither an indictment of my mother's profession nor a slap at her persecutors. Clearly her cross was a factor in my decision--all my C-sections have been upon inarguably living women, each one properly anesthetized and prepared for the procedure--but as a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist says, motives don't matter: Most of the time we don't even know what our motives are. And while I learned from my mother that how babies come into this world indeed matters, I learned from her detractors the ineluctable fact that most babies come into this world in hospitals. In my opinion, I do a lot of good in delivery rooms and ORs, and while I don't use an herb like blue cohosh, I've never once had a prenatal exam that took less than half an hour. I get to know my mothers well.

  Stephen brought in the specialists fast, even before my mother was charged with a crime. In addition to a photographer to chronicle the cuts and bruises my mother received crawling around the ice by her car, he immediately hired an accident reconstructionist to examine the slope and width of the Bedfords' driveway. He wanted to be sure there could be no doubt in a jury's mind that my mother had done everything humanly possible to try and transfer Mrs. Bedford to the hospital the night that she died, but the driveway had been a mess and the roads impassable: My mother did what she did because she hadn't a choice.

  And he probably spent entire days on the phone those first weeks, tracking down midwives around the country who'd been tried for one reason or another--practicing medicine without a license, illegal possession of regulated drugs--and interviewing their lawyers. He found forensic pathologists and obstetricians who could serve as our expert witnesses should they be needed, some willing to come from as far away as Texas.

  And although Stephen may not have been particularly interested in the specifics of how high blood might spurt, there were some medical issues that mattered to him greatly--including, of course, Charlotte Fugett Bedford's cause of death. Stephen wanted to be sure that we had our explanation for why the woman had died, especially after the autopsy was complete and it was clear that the State was going to contend there had been no cerebral aneurysm, and that the cause of death was therefore Sibyl Danforth.

  With the help of his specialists, in those first weeks Stephen began developing lists: long litanies of the complications that can occur in any birth, home or hospital; anecdotes from my mother's professional history that demonstrated he
r unusually high standards of care; incidents that suggested that the medical community had a vendetta against home birth, and my mother was merely a scapegoat--tragic, but convenient.

  The specialist who became most involved with us as a family, however, actually knew as little about home birth in the beginning as Stephen. She was, in fact, more of a generalist, since her specialty was getting information. Patty Dunlevy was a private investigator, the state's first female PI. Stephen Hastings chose her as his investigator first and foremost, he said, because she was without question the best in Vermont. But given the issues surrounding my mother's case, we all understood the fact that she was a woman wouldn't hurt either.

  Patty fast became a role model of sorts for Rollie McKenna and me. We met her together, on a Wednesday afternoon less than a week after Charlotte Bedford had died. The two of us were grooming Witch Grass in the section of the McKennas' paddock nearest the road when Patty's white car--a squat but sleek foreign thing caked with mud, a good-sized ding on the door, a spiderweb crack in the windshield--squealed to a stop in the dirt by the fence. The woman driving leaned across the empty passenger seat, pulled off the mirrored sunglasses she'd been wearing, and rolled down the window to ask if either of us knew where someone named Sibyl Danforth lived.

  New paranoias die even harder than old habits (especially when the paranoia's grounded in reality), and my immediate fear was that this woman was a reporter. So despite the mistake I had made only two days before when Stephen Hastings appeared at our front door, I responded to the woman's question with an inquiry of my own.

  "Does she know you're coming?" I asked warily.

  "Sure does. You must be her daughter."

  "What makes you think so?"

  "You're looking out for her. I'm Patty Dunlevy. I work with Stephen Hastings--your mom's lawyer."

  The woman was in her late thirties or early forties, but her hair was still an almost electric strawberry blond. That afternoon she was wearing a golf-course-green headband to keep her mane from her face, and the sort of tailored black leather jacket one was more likely to find on the back of a Park Avenue debutante at a dance party than a biker at a Hell's Angels rally. But we'd learn quickly that Patty was a chameleon, which was one of the reasons she was so good at what she did. I know when she interviewed my mother's clients or other midwives that spring and summer she was likely to be dressed in billowy peasant skirts or broken-in blue jeans; when she visited physicians or hospital administrators, especially the hostile ones, she'd appear in madras skirts and low-heeled pumps, with crisp, well-ironed blouses. Patty clearly liked her mirrored sunglasses and black leather jacket, but she also understood they were a needless occupational encumbrance with many of her sources, and was careful to make sure her first impressions were perfect.

  And once I understood that Patty Dunlevy wasn't a reporter, I liked her right away. Rollie and I both did. Her car was both a reflection of her work ethic--style tempered with labor--and the remarkable way the woman herself was one of those walking centers of inexorable gravitation: After I'd informed Patty that she was indeed looking for my mother, I did not simply provide directions to our home, I climbed into the car and served as copilot for the five hundred yards separating the McKennas from the Danforths.

  "How's your mom doing?" she asked, as Rollie and Witch Grass grew small in the rearview mirror.

  "I guess fine."

  "What a nightmare. You don't know how awful I feel for her."

  "What do you do with Mr. Hastings? Are you a lawyer, too?" I asked, settling into the bucket seat in her car.

  "Nope. I'm an investigator."

  "A detective?"

  "More or less. I work with lawyers to get the poop they can't."

  An image passed behind my eyes of Patty Dunlevy sitting in her squat little car in the parking lot of one of the motels out by the Burlington airport. She was using a camera with a lens the width of a bazooka to photograph illicit lovers through dusty, half-open venetian blinds.

  "What sort of poop?" I asked.

  Her answer suggested that she'd heard the apprehension in my voice.

  "Oh, all sorts. It might be something incredibly mundane like getting a confirmation of a power outage from an electric company. Some phone records. Or it might be something a little more interesting like getting background on a hostile witness. The sort of thing that just might discredit someone a tad. But I'll tell you point-blank what I tell everyone: I don't do adultery and I don't do divorces."

  "What are you going to ... do for my mother?"

  She smiled. "Well, for starters, I'm going to get from her the name of every single person on this planet who will say something nice about her if we ask them to testify. Then we'll begin figuring out exactly what I'm going to do for her."

  "You'll have a long list, you know."

  "Of people who like her? Terrific. It's always a special treat when Stephen actually has me working for the good guys."

  . . .

  I'm not superstitious now, and I wasn't in 1981. In my mind, it is merely ironic--not symbolic--that Charlotte Fugett Bedford went into labor on the thirteenth of March, and that the results of the written autopsy arrived on the first day of April. April Fools' Day. The former a day of bad luck, the latter a day of bad jokes.

  April 1 was a Tuesday that year, and in my parents' attempts to give our lives a small semblance of normalcy, they had insisted I try out for the junior varsity track team as we'd discussed throughout the winter. I always thought I was a pretty good athlete, and I was confident my legs were strong from my years of riding Witch Grass. I hadn't yet begun to imagine whether I'd be running long distances or sprinting short ones, but I knew I'd like the way I looked in those shorts.

  Tryouts began on Tuesday, and so I didn't get home that afternoon until close to dinner. But there had been enough conversation about the imminent submission of the written autopsy in our house in the weeks since Charlotte Bedford had died that I could tell instantly by my parents' silence and the presence of a bottle of scotch on the kitchen table that its final conclusions had offered only bad news.

  As my mother rose from her seat and began to serve dinner--a beef stew that none of us touched, despite the fact that we all understood it would be the last heavy stew of the winter--my father told me what I already knew. The medical examiner had found no signs of a stroke, no indications of a seizure. Immediate cause of death? Hemorrhagic shock due to a cesarean section during home childbirth.

  Chapter 12.

  Birth is a big miracle foreshadowed by lots of little ones. Conception. Little limbs. Lanugo. A fingerprint, hard bones. The quickening. The turning. The descent.

  I will never forget the moment of quickening with Connie. She was thirteen or fourteen weeks old. I was bundled up in this monster sweater that hung down to my knees. Lacey Woods had brought it back from somewhere in Central America, and it had this vaguely Aztec eagle on the back. It was beautiful, and so heavy that it kept me warm even outside on the sort of cold December day on which Connie made herself known.

  I was sitting on one of the tremendous rocks in Mom and Dad's backyard, one of the ones that faced the ski resort on Mount Republic. Rand and I had decided by then we were going to get married, but the little one inside me wasn't the reason. She--of course, then it was still he or she, we hadn't a clue whether we'd be blessed with a boy or a girl--was just the signal that we might as well do it sooner rather than later.

  The sun was already behind Republic, even though it wasn't quite four o'clock yet, and it was getting really chilly. They'd made some snow on the trails at the ski resort, but otherwise the ground was still brown, and so the mountain looked a little bit like a volcano that made this weird white lava.

  I hadn't climbed those rocks since I was in high school, and sitting there made me feel like a very little girl. And then, suddenly, I felt this tiny flutter a bit below my belly button. A tadpole flicking its tail. A ripple, a wave. Instantly that image of the tadpole--an image I'd
probably pulled from some high-school biology textbook--changed to that of a newborn baby. I knew my baby at that moment looked nothing at all like a newborn, but that was what I pretended was fluttering inside me. A psychedelic little person doing the breaststroke in a lava lamp. A bubble bouncing euphorically, but in slow motion, around in my tummy. I saw a newborn's pudgy fingers flicking amniotic fluid with a whoosh, I saw little feet smaller than baking potatoes gently splashing my own water against me, and I wrapped my arms around me and hugged my baby through my belly.

  Oh my God, was I happy. I remember I just sat on that rock grooving on the little person--my little person--inside me. Of all the little miracles that build to that big one, the birth itself, my favorite must be the moment of quickening. All these emotions and expectations and dreams for your baby just roll over you like so much surf.

  And quickening really is the perfect word to describe it, because your heart races, and the pace of the pregnancy just takes off.

  Some mothers experience the quickening as early as twelve weeks, others are much further along. Sixteen weeks is common in my experience, but some women don't feel it until they're through a good eighteen weeks. It really doesn't matter, except that those women who have to wait have to worry. It's inevitable, a mother can't help it. You want to feel your friend, you want to know he or she's there.