An Accidental Life (54 page)

Back in the village center now, the piazza, she fanned herself with the straw hat and looked about. She’d been here for four days and had not yet decided when she’d leave. She looked about the Piazza d’Umberto I thinking how lucky she was that Rebecca had told her of the Amalifi Coast and this island.

At this time of evening, dusk, the piazza was almost deserted. In the harbor below she heard the last ferry whistle. A waiter ambled over to the table, wiping his hands on his apron, and asked if she would like something. Alice slapped the hat back on her head and asked for a bottle of cold still water, and a dish of sliced peaches. He nodded and disappeared without comment.

Lights in the piazza were beginning to glow, even though the sun just touched the sea’s horizon. Fog was sinking into the village from the peaks above, from the top of the mountain at Anacapri, and the air was turning cool. She tipped back her head and searched the sky for the first stars. The sky was lavender now. Soon it would turn purple, then black, and the stars would seem so close that you could almost reach up and touch them. The latitude creates that effect, the hotel manager had said.

The waiter brought the peaches, water, and a glass to her table and put them down. No ice, but she’d grown used to that. She’d just cut into a slice of the peach and was lifting it to her mouth, when suddenly she noticed that man, again. She’d seen him here in the piazza every night since she’d arrived.

Studying him, she ate the peach. Tall and lean, gray hair, attractive—she guessed that he was older than her, but only by a few years. Tonight he wore loose linen pants that just touched the tops of his sandals. He wore a collarless blue gauze cotton shirt hanging out over the pants, reaching to his hips, and a straw hat pushed back on his head. He was American, she was certain, although she’d only heard him speaking in Italian.

She watched him while she ate another slice of peach. He seemed to know everyone in the town of Capri. The piazza was the center of social life here after dark; it seemed everyone in the village and the hotels and villas descended on the place at night. One evening she’d watched from this table as the man had played chess for hours, totally focused, completely absorbed in the game.

He stood under the clock tower in the corner of the piazza now, talking with a man who, as she recalled, owned the art gallery in the two-storied building right behind her. The gallery was on the second floor. She’d wandered through it several times. The stranger seemed to be glancing her way, so quickly she transferred her gaze to the bowl of peaches.

But while she ate, she studied the stranger from under her lashes. He had a good solid way of moving, and he held himself straight with the posture and confidence an old soldier never forgets. And he had a good, hearty laugh. She ate another slice of peach and then closed her eyes, enjoying the tangy sweet juice sliding down her throat. This was heaven. She could hear the sea, everywhere on Capri you could hear the sea. And she could smell flowers in the air. As she swallowed, the bells in the tower struck the hour.

“Buena Sera.”

Startled, she opened her eyes, fork still hovering midair, and stared at the man she’d been watching. He stood before her now, holding his hat in his hand. “I think I recognize a fellow American,” he said. “I’ve seen you here for several nights, Signora, and would like to introduce myself.” Motioning the hat toward her table, he said, “May I sit?”

She set the fork down on the plate and patted the corners of her mouth with the napkin in her lap. “Yes, of course. Please.”

“Grazie tanto!”
he said, pulling out the chair across from her. Then he lowered himself into the chair.

“Are you enjoying the island?” He cocked his head, studying her.

“Yes.” She patted her hair and smiled. “It’s lovely.”

“I’m always happy to see someone from the States.” He smiled. “Trevor Morello,” he said, with a two-fingered salute. “At your service, ma’am.” He reached his hand across the table and she hesitated, then gave it a shake and drew back.

But his smile was infectious.

“Alice Hamilton,” she said. “I arrived four days ago on this lovely island, and am finding it difficult to leave.”

“This is the land of the lotus, you know. It’s best not to make plans.”

Morello settled back then, resting both hands on the table. “Where are you staying?”

“La Luna.” She motioned in the direction of the hotel. “It’s small, with a perfect view of the Faraglioni. Just what I wanted.”

“Yes, I know the place. The owners of La Luna are friends. They provide me with escargot from their gardens occasionally. The snails live in the vegetable gardens alongside the grape arbor, the walkway. Have you run into those yet?”

“No. I haven’t met them.”

He smiled.

“Besides,” she added. “If I got friendly and then found them on my plate one night . . .” She made a face.

“Are you here alone, Miss Hamilton?”

“Call me Alice. Please.”

He nodded. “And for you—he pressed his hand over his heart and bowed—“I am Trevor. But am I right that you’re here alone, Alice?”

She nodded.

“I’ve been traveling through Europe for the last few months.” She’d begun her travels in Paris, she told him. From there she’d taken the
Orient Express
to Venice. From Venice to Athens, from Athens to Venice and then on to Florence, Rome, Naples.

“And now . . .”—she spread her hands—“here I am.”

“Where are you from?”

“New Orleans.”

She saw the spark in his eyes. “Have you been there?”

He smiled. “Sure have. It’s a fine place. I like a city with a soul.”

“When were you there?”

His eyes drifted off. “Oh,” He flipped his hand vaguely. “A couple years ago. I was there on business for a few weeks.”

Alice slid her hands into her lap. “I lived there when I was growing up. My family’s gone now. My husband died in the war, and after that, I left.”

He looked her up and down. “Unfortunate man. He missed a delightful life,” he said.

She shrugged. “You were a soldier too, I’ll bet.”

He nodded. “How’d you know?”

“The way you carry yourself.”

He thought about that, and then said, “When you’ve been through war, after that, for a while nothing seems real. You have to keep pinching yourself, until finally one day you realize that you really made it through.”

“What did you do in the war?”

He hesitated, then gave a slight shrug. “Paratroops, WWII. Europe—France, then Germany.” He tilted his head and seemed to be studying her. “I was a jumper.”

“I can’t imagine doing that. Jumping out of planes midflight.” She paused. “Was that fun?”

“Oh, very rewarding,” he said in a strange tone, and with a little smile. After a moment he seemed to settle in the chair, relaxing. “How long will you stay with us on Capri?”

Alice turned her head and looked about. Colored lights glimmered around the square, and strings of twinkling white lights framed striped canvas above the diners in every cafe. She looked back at Trevor. “I’ll stay here until I’m bored, I suppose. Or until some other place calls.”

“Let’s have dinner, shall we?”

She put her hands in her lap. “Yes. Let’s do.”

“Gianno’s going to play,” he said. Across the piazza she saw the young man with his guitar. He sat off to the side, in a chair far from the cafés and tables.

Trevor stood, turned to her, and stretched out his hand. “Will you dance? I think you might remember this song. It’s from our time, back then.”

Alice stood up and smoothed her skirt. They walked to a spot near where Gianno played, away from eyes. With one hand on her waist, he took her other hand in his and they began dancing.

Over his shoulder she looked at the colorful scene: the old men playing chess, the younger men in their work shirts and jeans, the children and dogs, and cats outnumbering the dogs. The women in flounced dresses the color of a sunset, and everywhere the lights.

And then Trevor took one step back and lifted his hand high overhead and with a quick, sharp motion sent her spinning, whirling, and the lights streamed in circles around them and the stars winked high overhead and she found herself laughing as he pulled her close again, and she thought to herself—

Yes. This is life.

Author’s Note

The story is fiction, but based
on fact. That many infants have survived abortions is true, and there are thousands living now. Before 2011 I had never heard of infants born alive after surviving an abortion. Below is the shocking testimony given by Jill Stanek, a registered nurse working at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, before a House Committee in the United States Congress in 2001 that inspired this book:

One night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted downs syndrome baby who was born alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was about 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about ½ pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, extending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet that I couldn’t tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was beating through the chest wall. After he was pronounced dead, we folded his little arms across his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where all of our dead patients are taken. (
Testimony of Jill Stanek, R.N. Christ Hospital, Oak Lawn, Illinois
)

I first heard Jill Stanek speak of this on a television show one night in 2011, and afterward began researching the issue. What I found was almost unbelievable—live births during abortions, particularly induction abortions, had been occurring for years. It was, and still is, one of the best-kept secrets in the country (despite Kermit Gosnell, who is considered by many as only an abberation).

In 2001 Congress enacted the Born-Alive Infant’s Protection Act as a response to Ms. Stanek’s and many other witnesses’ testimony. This law established that for federal purposes, an infant completely expelled or extracted from the mother and who is alive is a “person”—regardless of whether the child’s development is believed to be, or is in fact, sufficient to permit long-term survival. The Act does not mandate medical treatment where aggressive treatment would be futile. It only establishes a fact—a baby born alive is a person with the constitutional rights held by any other person in this nation.

But this law does not bind the states; it governs only federal hospitals, administration, and facilities.

The need for the law was obvious by the time of those hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary in the House of Representatives in 2000. In a rational world, it would seem self-evident that infants who are born alive at any stage and under any circumstance are “persons”, and are therefore entitled to protection of the law.

But the Congressional hearings concluded that “recent changes in the legal and cultural landscape have brought this well-settled principle into question.” Live birth had become the new frontier. In a Supreme Court decision in 2000,
Stenberg v. Carhart
, the Court concluded that an infant’s location in the mother’s body was irrelevant to the unborn child’s status—his or her right to protection under the law is extinguished if the mother intends to abort the child. As the court made clear, this is true even if the infant’s crown is inches from the cervix and birth.

Given that the infant’s location had just been made irrelevant, Justice Scalia’s dissent from that opinion argued that the result was to give live-birth abortion a free rein.

Testimony from many witnesses before the committee made it clear that in hospitals and clinics around the country infants born alive in abortions, like Baby Chasson in the story, were being left to die on their own. Somehow, the committee concluded in its report, what had developed in our country was a situation where “infants who are marked for abortion but somehow survive and are born alive have no legal rights under the law—no right to receive medical care, to be sustained in life, or receive any care at all.”

The Committee Report is publically available—Report 107-186/107th Congress, 1st Session/House of Representatives. The belief systems of those who would bind an infant born alive with the mother’s prior choice that he or she should die, as reflected in this report, is almost beyond belief. Confusion over the rights of a born-alive infant really reached a peak when Princeton University Bioethicist, Peter Singer, in his 1993 book
Practical Ethics
, advocated the idea that “a period of twenty-eight days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to live as others.” Any infant!

In the committee hearings in 2000, many other witnesses testified to the plight of infants surviving abortions. Nurse Allison Baker, R.N., B.S.N., also working at Christ Hospital, testified about three live-birth abortions that she witnessed there. Here is a portion of her testimony.

The first occurred on a day shift. I happened to walk into a “soiled utility room” and saw, lying on the metal counter, a fetus, naked, exposed, and breathing, moving its arms and legs. The fetus was visibly alive and was gasping for breath.

Christ Hospital’s ultimate response to the allegations was that although it had performed late term abortions on infants with nonfatal birth defects, it was changing policy and would henceforth use the procedure to abort only fatally-deformed infants.

And then there is the story of Baby Hope in 1999. The mother’s abortion procedure was initiated in a clinic, but when she experienced severe pains she reported to the emergency room of Bethesda North Medical Center in Cincinnati. The infant was born alive at twenty-two weeks, although some doctors believed that she was older. As reported by the
Washington Times
on May 17, 1999, she was a perfectly formed newborn. Baby Hope lived for three hours without the benefit of an incubator or other intensive care. Initially the attending physician placed the infant in a specimen dish. A technician saw the child gasping for air, realized that she was alive, and held the baby until she died three hours later.