Midwives (1997) Read online

  "I guess you'll have to refer her to someone else," my father said. "Maybe Tracy Fitzpatrick."

  "Tracy lives in Burlington, for God's sake. She's too far away for most of my mothers."

  "What about Cheryl?"

  "Cheryl Visco doesn't have a moment to breathe; she couldn't possibly handle anybody else. Besides, she lives too far away, too."

  "What about--"

  "And I have relationships with these women--that's what counts! They trust me, not Cheryl or Tracy. They don't even know Cheryl or Tracy. And what about someone like Peg Prescott? She's due next month. What am I supposed to say to her? 'Well, Peg, it's no biggie. Just go to the hospital delivery room, and some doctor you've never seen before will take good care of you. No biggie, no biggie at all.' She will freak, she will absolutely freak."

  Without looking up from his plate, my father asked, "What did Stephen say you should do?"

  "He didn't have a solution."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "We stumped the stars?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I'm just surprised. I thought our hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer had the answer to everything."

  "Did I miss a step somewhere? Did Stephen say something to you today that pissed you off?"

  "Do I sound pissed off?"

  "Yes, you do."

  I tried to remind my parents of my presence before their fight could escalate, rising from the table on the pretext of getting another glass of skim milk. I asked them if either wanted anything from the refrigerator while I was up.

  "Honestly, did Stephen say something that angered you?" my mother continued after she'd told me she was fine and my father had remained silent.

  "No."

  "Then why this tone?"

  "I just think it's ... it's odd that he drove all the way out here this afternoon."

  "What's odd about it? He's our lawyer."

  "Maybe odd is the wrong word," my father said. "It just seems to me that he shouldn't be driving all the way out here to give you information he could just as easily give you on the phone. It seems financially irresponsible. It seems like he's awfully cavalier with money. With our money."

  "Maybe lawyers don't charge for driving."

  "And maybe there's a fish with wings out back in the pond."

  "If I worked in Burlington, I'd want to get away as much as possible," I said as I sat back down. I didn't believe that at all--as a matter of fact, at that age I thought working in Burlington was positively glamorous--but it seemed to me the sort of thing my parents liked to hear, and it might help keep them civil.

  "Is that so?" my mother asked me. She smiled slightly, and it was clear she didn't believe a word I'd said.

  "Yup. Get away from all that noise. All those cars."

  "All those record stores," she added. "That big mall with all those clothing stores on Church Street."

  "I'm not saying a city's all bad," I explained. "It's just that if you're there every day, it's probably fun to come out here every once in a while."

  "I agree," my mother said, touching my hair fondly for a moment.

  My father tried to glare at me, but he appreciated my intentions too much to be angry at me for siding with my mother. He smiled, too, as he raised an eyebrow.

  "Okay, fine. Maybe his little visit here this afternoon didn't cost us a penny."

  "Obviously it cost something," my mother said.

  "Oh, maybe not," my father said, a hint of sarcasm in his tone. He leaned across the table and kissed her once on the forehead. "Maybe April mud is a great lure for a poet like our lawyer. Maybe it's downright seductive. Maybe it was the beauty of our mud alone that drew Stephen here."

  While my father and I were watching television together after dinner, we heard my mother on the telephone with one of her midwife friends in the southern part of the state. It seemed that one of my mother's newer patients, a college professor at the end of her first trimester, had been unable to hide her discomfort and nervousness around my mother at a prenatal appointment that morning. The woman's blood pressure had been much higher than the first time my mother had taken it, a month earlier.

  After a lengthy discussion--interrogation was the exact word my mother had used on the phone that night--about all of the things that could go wrong during a home birth, the patient had started asking very specific questions about what had occurred up in Law-son. As Stephen had advised her, my mother had refused to talk about that. Apparently my mother and the professor had eventually agreed that she should reconsider her decision to have her baby at home, and think about whether she might be happier after all delivering the child with a doctor in a hospital.

  Recalling the conversation with her friend had saddened my mother, and my father and I both heard my mother's voice go brittle. When she hung up the phone, my father went into the kitchen and rocked her in his arms for a long time.

  Chapter 13.

  I do the supermarket shopping, as if nothing happened. It's surreal. I push my cart up and down the aisles, and I nod at people and they nod at me. I pick out fruit, which is never easy this time of year, and I try and find things I think Connie will eat.

  Yesterday Rand and I figured out the monthly bills, and we paid them. We made sure there was enough money in the checking account, as if life were still completely normal and our biggest worry was bouncing a check.

  And today I ordered a pair of blueberry bushes from the nursery, and Rand ordered three cords of wood. He said he hoped we could have them by Memorial Day so he could have them stacked by the Fourth of July. That's Rand: only guy I know who has his winter wood stacked before summer's even gotten a serious dent.

  Actually, the supermarket shopping is a little different now. It doesn't feel like it's taking longer, but I know I spent more time in the grocery store today than I have in years. It wasn't intentional, it just happened. I pulled into the parking lot around one-thirty, and it was almost three o'clock by the time I got out. An hour and a half. I think it usually takes me about forty-five minutes.

  It's not that the lines were so long, or people stopped me to talk. If anything, it seems like people go out of their way these days not to stop me to talk. They nod when they see me, and then stare with this amazing intensity at the label on the canned peas or beans in their hand so they don't have to make any more eye contact with me than necessary and risk a conversation. It's weird.

  So I don't know exactly why the shopping took so long today. I just went about my business, but I guess I was moving in incredibly slow motion. Me and my cart, just moseying along the store aisles. But I have a theory. I once read somewhere that work takes up as much time as you can give it. If you give a job thirty minutes, for example, you'll do it in thirty minutes. But if you can give it an hour, it'll take an hour. That makes sense. And I think that's what happened today at the grocery store. Normally I would have done the shopping in less than an hour because I'd have to be home for prenatals. I'd have two or three mothers scheduled between, say, two-thirty and five, and I'd have to be back to check weight and pee, and to listen to fetal heartbeats. I'd have to be back to measure bellies and look for edema.

  Nope, not today, not anymore. At least not while I'm--and I love this expression--"out on conditions." What a concept. With a completely straight face, like he was explaining to me a tax code or something, the judge set five conditions for my "release." First, he said, I had to agree to appear in court and I had to keep in touch with my lawyer. Those two made sense.

  But then, like I'm this hardened criminal and I go around holding up convenience stores on a weekly basis, he said I couldn't commit another crime (like I'd committed one in the first place!) and I couldn't do any illegal drugs (which I don't think was a reference to the fact that I'll smoke a joint when offered one if I'm not on call, but was merely one more way of getting in a dig).

  The only condition that really bothers me--no, it doesn't bother me, it pisses me off and scares the hell out of
me at the same time--is the midwifery one. I'm not allowed to practice my craft until this trial is over. That's the one that hurts. I'm not allowed to birth any babies, I'm not allowed to tend to any mothers.

  So today instead of learning if May O'Brien had felt her little one kick or Peg Prescott's cervix had begun to thin, I did the grocery shopping. I bought beets. I looked at bottles of salad dressing. I picked out sodas with sugar for Rand, and sodas without sugar for Connie.

  And I guess I did it all at the pace of a dead person.

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  MY MOTHER WAS CHARGED with involuntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license on Wednesday, April 9, a little over a week after the medical examiner had filed the final autopsy report. We knew on Tuesday night she'd be arrested the next day, and I spent all of French class and most of algebra on Wednesday morning envisioning what was occurring at that moment at my home--as well as in a police cruiser, and at the courthouse to the north in Newport.

  Stephen had come to our house again on Tuesday, arriving this time at the end of the day and staying through dinner. My father seemed less concerned with the idea that the lawyer's meter was running than he had been the week before, given Stephen's reason for coming to Reddington and the gravity of his news. Moreover, that night he was able to walk us all step-by-step through the process my mother would endure the next day, and make it seem like a series of tedious but commonplace formalities, rather than a series of increasing indignities that could lead eventually to jail.

  Nevertheless, the idea that my mother was being arrested fueled the darkest parts of my adolescent imagination, at the same time that it absolutely terrified the part of me that was still a little girl. One moment I saw my mother subjected to the sort of violent police brutality I had glimpsed on the news, and the next I saw myself as a motherless child, a lonely latchkey kid stretched tall in a teenager's body.

  As the daughter of a midwife, of course, I had spent long hours and afternoons alone, so the idea of an absentee mother shouldn't have terrified me. But that morning in school it did, especially since my mother had adamantly refused to allow either Stephen or my father to drive her to Newport so she could discreetly turn herself in. Despite Stephen's assurances that turning herself in in no way implied guilt or culpability, she insisted that the State would have to come to Reddington to get her.

  "If they want to arrest me, they'll have to come here," she had said Tuesday night, without looking up from the plate of food in which she had no interest.

  Consequently, to prevent the worst visions from completely clouding my mind Wednesday morning, over and over I ran through the scenario Stephen had presented, trying to focus on the sheer banality of what my mother was experiencing at that moment.

  A Vermont state police cruiser from the barracks in Derby was driving to our home in Reddington, twisting along Route 14 through Coventry, Irasburg, and Albany. The rack of lights on the roof was flashing, but the siren was silent. It was passing the cars that were sailing along at the fifty-mile-per-hour speed limit, and flying past the pickups and milk tankers lurching along at thirty-five. It slowed as it passed the general store and the church in the center of Reddington, and then turned into our long dirt driveway. It coasted to a stop behind my mother's station wagon and beside my father's small Jeep. Two green-uniformed officers climbed from their cruiser and walked up the path to our front door, perhaps the very same two fellows who had appeared at our home the month before: Leland Rhodes and Richard Tilley. Politely they explained to my mother exactly why she was being arrested, citing specific dates and formal charges.

  For brief moments I would see my French teacher and the blackboard behind him, but he would quickly disappear as my mind drifted back to the events occurring at my house. One of the two officers was placing my mother in handcuffs, and the other was leading her into the backseat of the cruiser. My father and Stephen Hastings were not allowed to sit with her on the drive north to Newport and had to follow the police car in their own vehicles.

  They arrived at the police station during my algebra class. As the rows of X's and Y's on the paper before me were transmogrified from variables and vectors into abstract line drawings, my mother's fingers were inked, her prints recorded, and her face photographed from the front and the side. With the tips of her fingers still blue, she was then brought to the courthouse to stand before a judge. Stephen was allowed to remain beside her, but my father had to sit in one of the rows of benches that formed two square blocks behind her.

  I imagined the judge behind a desk that was not merely huge but elevated above the rest of the furniture in the courtroom with comic-book absurdity. I saw him staring down at this lawyer in a Burlington-type big-city business suit and this woman in a dress with blue irises and pearls and lipstick. At Stephen's suggestion, my mother had endeavored to look as suburban and unthreatening as possible, and so she was wearing the pearl necklace and lipstick that usually appeared only on special occasions like weddings and New Year's Eve dinner parties.

  Stephen had taken great pains at dinner the night before to make it clear to us that my mother would not go to jail the next day for one single moment, so Wednesday morning I was at least saved from visions of steel bars and cell blocks. But I did hear the judge's voice as often as I heard my math teacher's, and that voice was stern: the sort of voice that can still be heard sometimes from the tall pulpits, reminding New Englanders that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God. Sadly, I did not see the judge as a kind of impartial referee and arbitrator, someone who, it was conceivable, might actually become an ally of Sibyl Danforth's. Instead I conjured a judge who cared solely about conviction and punishment, and so when he spoke it was simply to agree with that unreasonably evil Bill Tanner, or to harangue my mother for taking the life of a patient.

  The only snippet of conversation I heard in my mind that I knew reflected the reality of what was occurring in Newport was the response to the question from the bench "How do you plead?" Stephen was to speak for my mother at the arraignment, and so it was he who would answer, "Not guilty." My mother would have absolutely no lines that day in the drama of which she was the reluctant star.

  At that point, I assumed, my parents and Stephen would leave the courthouse, and my father would drive my mother home.

  The reality, I would learn later, had been in a small way somewhat better than my fantasies, but in one important way far worse. The small way? Judge Howard Dorset was no Jonathan Edwards-like preacher, no Calvinist voice from on high who took pains to inform my mother of the yawning, flaming pit before her. Months later when the trial was in progress, I would in fact discover that I rather liked the sound of Dorset's voice, especially the way as a native of northern Vermont he would occasionally stretch words like stairs and pairs into two syllables, or business into three.

  Nevertheless, my mother had to endure one astonishing moment for which Stephen had not prepared her: the conditions of release. Stephen had made it clear that my mother would have to give up midwifery until the trial was over or the case was settled, but otherwise he had led her to believe the discussion of bail wouldn't be contentious.

  In actuality, it was.

  Bill Tanner argued that "a midwife by her very nature demonstrates a reckless disregard for authority, and for the established medical norms of our society. A midwife is by nature an outlaw, someone who cavalierly puts women--and babies--at risk on a daily basis for no other reason than a mindless and backward distaste for the protocols of modern medicine." My mother was a good example: an irresponsible ex-hippie in a little hill town, tooling around northern Vermont in a beat-up station wagon. A woman with no formal medical training, she nevertheless ran around with syringes and surgical silk, with drugs like Ergotrate and Pitocin, while feigning the sort of expertise it took doctors years to acquire.

  "Sibyl Danforth has a long history of challenging the State, first as a war protester and now as a midwife," Tanner said. "Gi
ven that history, and given the fact that she is now facing fifteen years in prison if convicted, the State believes there is a real and significant danger of flight."

  "Your Honor, we all know there's no risk of flight. None at all. My client has lived in the same house for almost a decade, and in the same town almost her entire life," Stephen said.

  "Moreover, Mrs. Danforth faces the loss of her practice--such as it is," Tanner interjected.

  "And let's not forget she's a mother. She has a daughter in school here in Vermont whom she loves very much. And she has a husband with an established architectural practice. This is where her life is, this is where her roots have grown deep and taken hold. Mrs. Danforth isn't going anywhere."

  "She has no job, Your Honor, her career's in shambles. Her reputation has been irrevocably tarnished. There are just so many reasons for her to leave the Northeast Kingdom that we know there's a very great risk of flight. And so we'd like to see bail reflect that. The State would like to see bail set at thirty-five thousand dollars."