Different Seasons (76 page)

Mrs. Gibbs, the blind woman, had a large and spacious first-floor apartment, and at six-thirty P.M. Miss Stansfield worked her way carefully downstairs, knocked at her door, was admitted, and asked if she might use the telephone to call a cab.

“Is it the baby, dear?” Mrs. Gibbs asked, fluttering already.

“Yes. The labor’s only begun, but I can’t chance the weather. It will take a cab a long time.”

She made that call and then called me. At that time, six-forty, the pains were coming at intervals of about twenty-five minutes. She repeated to me that she had begun everything early because of the foul weather. “I’d rather not have my child in the back of a Yellow,” she said. She sounded extraordinarily calm.

The cab was late and Miss Stansfield’s labor was progressing more rapidly than I would have predicted—but as I have said, no two labors are alike in their specifics. The driver, seeing that his fare was about to have a baby, helped her down the slick steps, constantly adjuring her to “be careful, lady.” Miss Stansfield only nodded, preoccupied with her deep inhale-exhales as a fresh contraction seized her. Sleet ticked off streetlights and the roofs of cars; it melted in large, magnifying drops on the taxi’s yellow dome-light. Mrs. Gibbs told me later that the young cab driver was more nervous than her “poor, dear Sandra,” and that was probably a contributing cause to the accident.

Another was almost certainly the Breathing Method itself.

The driver threaded his hack through the slippery streets, working his way slowly past the fender-benders and inching through the clogged intersections, slowly closing on the hospital. He was not seriously injured in the accident, and I talked to him in the hospital. He said the sound of the steady deep breathing coming from the back seat made him nervous; he kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if she was “dine or sumpin.” He said he would have felt less nervous if she had let out a few healthy bellows, the way a woman in labor was supposed to do. He asked her once or twice if she was feeling all right and she only nodded, continuing to “ride the waves” in deep inhales and exhales.

Two or three blocks from the hospital, she must have felt the onset of labor’s final stage. An hour had passed since she had entered the cab—traffic was that snarled—but this was still an extraordinarily fast labor for a woman having her first baby. The driver noticed the change in the way she was breathing. “She started pantin like a dog on a hot day, doc,” he told me. She had begun to “locomotive.”

At almost the same time the cabbie saw a hole open in the crawling traffic and shot through it. The way to White Memorial was now open. It was less than three blocks ahead. “I could see the statue of that broad,” he said. Eager to be rid of his panting, pregnant passenger, he stepped down on the gas again and the cab leaped forward, wheels spinning over the ice with little or no traction.

I had walked to the hospital, and my arrival coincided with the cab’s arrival only because I had underestimated just how bad driving conditions had become. I believed I would find her upstairs, a legally admitted patient with all her papers signed, her prep completed, working her way steadily through her mid-labor. I was mounting the steps when I saw the sudden sharp convergence of two sets of headlights reflected from the patch of ice where the janitors hadn’t yet spread cinders. I turned just in time to see it happen.

An ambulance was nosing its way out of the Emergency Wing rampway as Miss Stansfield’s cab came toward the hospital. The cab was simply going too fast to stop. The cabbie panicked and stamped down on the brake-pedal rather than pumping it. The cab slid, then began to turn broadside. The pulsing dome-light of the ambulance threw moving stripes and blotches of blood-colored light over the scene, and, freakishly, one of these illuminated the face of Sandra Stansfield. For that one moment it was the face in my dream, the same bloody, open-eyed face that I had seen on her severed head.

I cried out her name, took two steps down, slipped, and fell sprawling. I cracked my elbow a paralyzing blow but somehow managed to hold on to my black bag. I saw the rest of what happened from where I lay, head ringing, elbow smarting.

The ambulance braked, and it also began to fishtail. Its rear end struck the base of the statue. The loading doors flew open. A stretcher, mercifully empty, shot out like a tongue and then crashed upside down in the street with its wheels spinning. A young woman on the sidewalk screamed and tried to run as the two vehicles approached each other. Her feet went out from under her after two strides and she fell on her stomach. Her purse flew out of her hand and shot down the icy sidewalk like a weight in a pinball bowling game.

The cab swung all the way around, now travelling backwards, and I could see the cabbie clearly. He was spinning his wheel madly, like a kid in a Dodgem Car. The ambulance rebounded from Harriet White’s statue at an angle ... and smashed broadside into the cab. The taxi spun around once in a tight circle and was slammed against the base of the statue with fearful force. Its yellow light, the letters ON RADIO CALL still flashing, exploded like a bomb. The left side of the cab crumpled like tissue-paper. A moment later I saw that it was not just the left side; the cab had struck an angle of the pedestal hard enough to tear it in two. Glass sprayed onto the slick ice like diamonds. And my patient was thrown through the rear right-side window of the dismembered cab like a rag-doll.

I was on my feet again without even knowing it. I raced down the icy steps, slipped again, caught at the railing, and kept on. I was only aware of Miss Stansfield lying in the uncertain shadow cast by that hideous statue of Harriet White, some twenty feet from where the ambulance had come to rest on its side, flasher still strobing the night with red. There was something terribly wrong with that figure, but I honestly don’t believe I knew what it was until my foot struck something with a heavy enough thud to almost send me sprawling again. The thing I’d kicked skittered away—like the young woman’s purse, it slid rather than rolled. It skittered away and it was only the fall of hair—bloodstreaked but still recognizably blonde, speckled with bits of glass—that made me realize what it was. She had been decapitated in the accident. What I had kicked into the frozen gutter was her head.

Moving in total numb shock now, I reached her body and turned it over. I think I tried to scream as soon as I had done it, as soon as I saw. If I did, no sound came out; I could not make a sound. The woman was still breathing, you see, gentlemen. Her chest was heaving up and down in quick, light, shallow breaths. Ice pattered down on her open coat and her blood-drenched dress. And I could hear a high, thin whistling noise. It waxed and waned like a teakettle which can’t quite reach the boil. It was air being pulled into her severed wind-pipe and then exhaled again; little screams of air through the crude reed of vocal cords which no longer had a mouth to shape their sounds.

I wanted to run but I had no strength; I fell on my knees beside her on the ice, one hand cupped to my mouth. A moment later I was aware of fresh blood seeping through the lower part of her dress ... and of movement there. I became suddenly, frenziedly convinced that there was still a chance to save the baby.

I believe that as I yanked her dress up to her waist I began laughing. I believe I was mad. Her body was still warm. I remember that. I remember the way it heaved with her breathing. One of the ambulance attendants came up, weaving like a drunk, one hand clapped to the side of his head. Blood trickled through his fingers.

I was still laughing, still groping. My hands had found her fully dilated.

The attendant stared down at Sandra Stansfield’s headless body with wide eyes. I don’t know if he realized the corpse was still breathing or not. Perhaps he thought it was merely a thing of the nerves—a kind of final reflex action. If he did think such a thing, he could not have been driving an ambulance long. Chickens may walk around for awhile with their heads cut off, but people only twitch once or twice ... if that.

“Stop staring at her and get me a blanket,” I snapped at him.

He wandered away, but not back toward the ambulance. He was pointed more or less toward Times Square. He simply walked off into the sleety night. I have no idea what became of him. I turned back to the dead woman who was somehow not dead, hesitated a moment, and then stripped off my overcoat. Then I lifted her hips so I could get it under her. Still I heard that whistle of breath as her headless body did “locomotive” breathing. I sometimes hear it still, gentlemen. In my dreams.

Please understand that all of this had happened in an extremely short time—it seemed longer to me, but only because my perceptions had been heightened to a feverish pitch. People were only beginning to run out of the hospital to see what had happened, and behind me a woman shrieked as she saw the severed head lying by the edge of the street.

I yanked open my black bag, thanking God I hadn’t lost it in my fall, and pulled out a short scalpel. I opened it, cut through her underwear, and pulled it off. Now the ambulance driver approached—he came to within fifteen feet of us and then stopped dead. I glanced over at him, still wanting that blanket. I wasn’t going to get it from him, I saw; he was staring down at the breathing body, his eyes widening until it seemed they must slip from their orbits and simply dangle from their optic nerves like grotesque seeing yo-yos. Then he dropped to his knees and raised his clasped hands. He meant to pray, I am quite sure of that. The attendant might not have known he was seeing an impossibility, but this fellow did. The next moment he had fainted dead away.

I had packed forceps in my bag that night; I don’t know why. I hadn’t used such things in three years, not since I had seen a doctor I will not name punch through a newborn’s temple and into the child’s brain with one of those infernal gadgets. The child died instantly. The corpse was “lost” and what went on the death certificate was
stillborn.

But, for whatever reason, I had mine with me that night.

Miss Stansfield’s body tightened down, her belly clenching, turning from flesh to stone. And the baby crowned. I saw the crown for just a moment, bloody and membranous and pulsing. Pulsing. It was alive, then. Definitely alive.

Stone became flesh again. The crown slipped back out of sight. And a voice behind me said: “What can I do, doctor?”

It was a middle-aged nurse, the sort of woman who is so often the backbone of our profession. Her face was as pale as milk, and while there was terror and a kind of superstitious awe on her face as she looked down at that weirdly breathing body, there was none of that dazed shock which would have made her difficult and dangerous to work with.

“You can get me a blanket, stat,” I said curtly. “We’ve still got a chance, I think.” Behind her I saw perhaps two dozen people from the hospital standing on the steps, not wanting to come any closer. How much or how little did they see? I have no way of knowing for sure. All I know is that I was avoided for days afterwards (and forever by some of them), and no one, including this nurse, ever spoke to me of it.

She now turned and started back toward the hospital.

“Nurse!” I called. “No time for that. Get one from the ambulance. This baby is coming
now.”

She changed course, slipping and sliding through the slush in her white crepe-soled shoes. I turned back to Miss Stansfield.

Rather than slowing down, the locomotive breathing had actually begun to speed up ... and then her body turned hard again, locked and straining. The baby crowned again. I waited for it to slip back but it did not; it simply kept coming. There was no need for the forceps after all. The baby all but
flew
into my hands. I saw the sleet ticking off his naked bloody body—for it was a boy, his sex unmistakable. I saw steam rising from him as the black, icy night snatched away the last of his mother’s heat. His blood-grimed fists waved feebly; he uttered a thin, wailing cry.

“Nurse!”
I bawled,
“move your ass, you bitch!”
It was perhaps inexcusable language, but for a moment I felt I was back in France, that in a few moments the shells would begin to whistle overhead with a sound like that remorselessly ticking sleet; the machine-guns would begin their hellish stutter; the Germans would begin to materialize out of the murk, running and slipping and cursing and dying in the mud and smoke. Cheap magic, I thought, seeing the bodies twist and turn and fall.
But you’re right, Sandra, it’s all we have.
It was the closest I have ever come to losing my mind, gentlemen.

The baby wailed again—such a tiny, lost sound!—and then he wailed no more. The steam rising from his skin had thinned to ribbons. I put my mouth against his face, smelling blood and the bland, damp aroma of placenta. I breathed into his mouth and heard the jerky susurrus of his breathing resume. Then the nurse was there, the blanket in her arms. I held out my hand for it.

She started to give it to me, and then held it back. “Doctor, what ... what if it’s a monster? Some kind of monster?”

“Give me that blanket,” I said. “Give it to me now, Sarge, before I kick your asshole right up to your shoulderblades.”

“Yes, doctor,” she said with perfect calmness (we must bless the women, gentlemen, who so often understand simply by not trying to), and gave me the blanket. I wrapped the child and gave him to her.

“If you drop him, Sarge, you’ll be eating those stripes.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“It’s cheap fucking magic, Sarge, but it’s all God left us with.”

“Yes, doctor.”

I watched her half-walk, half-run back to the hospital with the child and watched the crowd on the steps part for her. Then I rose to my feet and backed away from the body. Its breathing, like the baby’s, hitched and caught ... stopped ... hitched again ... stopped ...

I began to back away from it. My foot struck something. I turned. It was her head. And obeying some directive from outside of me, I dropped to one knee and turned the head over. The eyes were open—those direct hazel eyes that had always been full of such life and such determination. They were full of determination still. Gentlemen,
she was seeing me.