Midwives (25 page)

Stephen won this motion as well, and Patty spent a weekend in August listening to tapes of Asa Bedford—fiery fundamentalist—and of his congregation.

And then there were the plea negotiations, although the two sides were always so far apart it never really looked as if a compromise or bargain was possible. At one point Stephen had my mother willing to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter if the State would offer a deferred sentence of five years. The idea of my mother giving up midwifery for five years astonished me, but it seemed reasonable to my father and Stephen, and they convinced her to accept it. Pressured by the medical board and emboldened by angry ob-gyns, however, the State would not offer a deferred sentence.

But, Bill suggested to Stephen, the State might listen to a mere year in jail and then a suspended sentence with probation—perhaps six more years—if my mother was willing to pay additional fines, perform community service, and never practice midwifery again.

As soon as the State reiterated its demand that my mother give up midwifery, of course, the negotiations inevitably broke down. It wasn’t the specter of prison that made it impossible to settle, it was my mother’s unwillingness to relinquish her calling.

“Don’t you get it, Stephen, a woman’s dead,” our attorney told us Bill would remind him—as if he’d forgotten why they were meeting or speaking on the telephone.

“I haven’t lost sight of that, Bill,” Stephen said he would usually respond, “and my client is as saddened by that fact as anyone. But my client didn’t kill her.”

Sometimes Bill would hint to Stephen that the rage his client had heard the day she was arraigned was absolutely nothing compared to what she’d have to endure throughout a trial. And Stephen did all that he could to make sure my mother understood this.

“Doctors are a funny bunch. They just don’t approve of people without medical degrees delivering babies,” Stephen said a number of times that summer, always as a warm-up to his warning that the State would say astonishingly mean things about midwifery and my mother. By Labor Day his expression “Doctors are a funny bunch” had become a running joke in our household, a bit of gallows humor as the trial loomed near.

For all of us, of course, that humor veiled both fear and anger. In July I began to experience the first shooting pains up and down the left side of my back that dog me still, pains that made it excruciating to ride Witch Grass some days or swim in the river with Tom Corts on others. But given the fact that Sibyl Danforth was “that midwife who did the C-section,” I didn’t believe I could trust a doctor that summer, and I did not want to subject my mother to what I imagined would be the tension of having to take me to see one.

I’ve always liked stories that end with parents folding their children into their arms, or tucking them into sleep at the end of a day. They are many and they are varied.

I longed to be tucked in the summer I turned fourteen, an odd desire only in that I hadn’t had any longings of that sort in at least half a decade before then, but a yearning wholly explicable when I contemplated the loss of my mother and the dissolution of my family.

Afternoons when I was alone in the house, I’d blast my stereo as loud as the speakers and my ears could bear. I’d cocoon inside the music, the noise and vibrations sheltering me from the worst of my fears. Rock music has never been a particularly subtle form of expression, but it’s unquestionably noisy and prone to anger. That summer, in most ways, I was much closer to woman than girl; being lost below waves of anger and noise was about as close to being tucked in as I could hope to get.

I spent lots of time with Tom, much more so than during the school year. We would spend evenings together when he returned from the ski resort where he was working once again, and whole afternoons on his days off. We swam together in the river, often with Sadie Demerest and Rollie McKenna and the boys who passed through their lives that summer. A road followed the river almost exactly, builders and pavers choosing to align the asphalt path with the aqua, but the water was hidden from the road by steep banks that slid twenty feet down, and by thick walls of maple and pine and ash. On a hot day, there might be thirty of us from the high school sunning ourselves on the rocks smack in the middle of the water, or bobbing in the deep pools between the boulders. On a cool or cloudy afternoon, there might be as few as four or five of us, depending upon whether Rollie or Sadie had brought a boy with her that day.

At any given moment that summer, I was as likely to be found experimenting with eyeliner with Rollie, as with marijuana with a half-dozen girlfriends at one of the places at the edge of the forest or far corners of the fallow meadows that had become our designated places to hang out.

Tom turned sixteen early in August and started to drive, which I think terrified my parents as much as anything that summer, because that meant we could actually drive ourselves to movies or one of the diners near the ski resort. Tom didn’t have a car of his own, but an advantage of coming from a family that owned an automotive garage and graveyard was that he always had one at his disposal. Some were in better shape than others, but they all ran.

If my parents had not reached a point where they pined to see Tom someday as a son-in-law, they had grown from merely tolerating him to sincerely liking him. Once we had begun going steady during the school year, well before Charlotte Bedford had died, he began coming over to our house with some frequency. Usually my mother was busy with one of her patients in the part of the house that served as her office or she was off somewhere delivering a baby, and we always had the privacy to neck and listen to records. I think it speaks well of the young Tom Corts that he continued to come around even after Charlotte Bedford died. In the spring and summer between my mother’s arraignment and trial, he dropped by especially often, both because he understood I needed him and because he wanted to show his alliance with my family. I know my parents appreciated that. My mother actually baked a cake for him the night before he turned sixteen.

And showing his alliance with my family demonstrated no small amount of maturity and spine. My mother’s calling had always had the capability of eliciting strange and strong reactions in people, ranging from those parents who wouldn’t allow their little girls to play at my house when I was very young because they feared my mother would whisk us all off to a birth, to my teenage friends who assumed—optimistically but mistakenly—that among the alternative or New Age herbs my mother used on a regular basis were marijuana and hashish. After one of my mother’s mothers had died, all of the small communities in which I lived—my village, my school, my circle of friends—were split. Some folks saw Charlotte Bedford’s death as an indictment of midwifery generally, and of my mother’s irresponsibility specifically:
This was bound to happen, you know
, their gazes said when they ran into me at the front counter of the general store, or in the locker room as I got dressed after track. Other people would go out of their way to show their support for my family as we endured what they viewed as a lynching:
You’re all in our thoughts and prayers
, they would tell me, sometimes giving me bear hugs at the pizza parlor in St. Johnsbury or as I helped my father empty our trash at the town dump.

The second group, I’m sorry to say, was considerably smaller than the first. I spent most of that calendar year under the critical gaze of assistant gym teachers, town clerks, checkout ladies at the supermarket, the fellows who pumped gas, and—all too often—the parents of the girls I thought were my friends, or the parents of the children for whom I baby-sat. I could never prove this, but I believe in my heart that Mrs. Poultney abruptly stopped calling me to take care of Jessica the last week of March because of the role she believed my mother had played in another woman’s death.

Tom Corts, however, never wavered, and so some afternoons I daydreamed of him tucking me in at the end of the day, or sitting in the rocker beside my bed through the night as I slept. In hindsight those daydreams have led me to wonder on occasion if they were part of some peculiar attempt to forestall an adult sexual relationship with Tom, but most of the time I know that isn’t the case. That summer we went well beyond the enthusiastic groping through sweatshirts and cardigans that had marked our spring, but Tom wasn’t pressuring me to sleep with him and I was feeling no particular urgency either.

I think instead I daydreamed of Tom watching over me in a vaguely fatherly capacity because I could no longer be protected that way by my own father. Just as Tom had turned sixteen that summer, I had turned fourteen, and that meant I could no longer be held and embraced and cuddled by my dad in the way I once was. I would have used the word
weird
at fourteen to describe any such desire on my part or show of affection on his, well aware that the word was imprecise. But precision with the language of need is impossible at fourteen, and I feared anything I might say would be misconstrued—or, worse, would reflect a deviance inside me that was at once dangerous and unhealthy.

The fact is, despite the anger that coursed through my father at those moments when he viewed himself as abandoned by his spouse, the midwife, it was indeed my father who taught me how to tease a troll’s neon-pink hair. It was my father who was there the Saturday I slid headfirst down a metal slide onto a tent stake and needed seventeen stitches along my cheek. It was upon my father’s lap that I watched hours and hours of
Sesame Street
on a TV with fuzzy reception. My father was of a generation that had yet to understand the profound importance of the frequent squeeze, but he still knelt to hold me relatively often, and I can remember being lifted as a tiny girl into his arms and being hugged. To this day I do not mind at all being held by a man with some stubble on his cheeks.

For Tom’s sixteenth birthday, I used up weeks of baby-sitting money to buy tickets to a rock concert in Burlington. Soon after his birthday we went, just the two of us for a change, and we had hours together alone going and returning in a giant Catalina of a car. I turned up the volume on the eight-track tape player that dangled underneath the glove compartment, and curled my legs up against my chest. The Catalina had a couch the size of the general store’s freezer case, but Tom was near and the music was loud, and the trip to and from Burlington inside that car offered the sort of vaguely womblike escape I was craving.

Since we happened to be going to Burlington, my mother asked us to drop off an envelope with Stephen Hastings and pick up a banker’s box of her files. Stephen had had the files for months, and had photocopied the materials he needed.

My mother probably expected me to peek inside the envelope, and I didn’t let her down. She was returning to Stephen Xeroxes of Charlotte Bedford’s medical files, part of the history Stephen had petitioned the court that summer to see. My mother had scribbled her thoughts in blue pen on some of the documents, and now that I’m a physician and the trial has passed, the things she circled make sense. In the car that afternoon, however, the notion that Charlotte had been treated five years earlier for iron-deficiency anemia meant little, as did a Mobile, Alabama, doctor’s prescription in 1973 for a drug I could not even begin to pronounce at the time: hydrochlorothiazide, an inexpensive diuretic used to control hypertension.

Apparently my mother had treated Charlotte for anemia while the woman was in her care, but not for high blood pressure; apparently Charlotte’s blood pressure had not been high enough to alarm her. But, then, it also didn’t appear that Charlotte had thought to share with my mother the fact that she’d been treated for the disorder in the past.

Stephen’s law firm comprised two Victorian homes that shared a driveway at the edge of the campus of the University of Vermont. The buildings were in the hill section of Burlington, the mannered, elegant, and tree-lined streets at the top of the hill that towered over the commercial section of the city. In the nineteenth century, when Burlington was a thriving Lake Champlain lumber and potash port, the wealthier merchants and more successful businessmen had built homes for their families on the hill above the city proper.

I hadn’t expected to see Stephen when we arrived. I had assumed I would simply drop off the envelope with a receptionist, pick up the banker’s box, and leave. But after I explained to the woman at the front desk who I was, she said Stephen would be disappointed if he didn’t get a chance to come out and say hello. She said he was in the middle of a meeting with an investigator, but the meeting had been going on all afternoon. When she went upstairs to find him, I went back out to the car to get Tom so he wouldn’t have to sit there alone, baking in the sun while wondering where I was.

Stephen had been meeting with Patty Dunlevy, and the two of them came out to greet me, Stephen in a crisp navy-blue business suit, Patty in sandals and the sort of flouncy peasant dress I usually associated with my mother’s midwife friends. It seemed odd for the woman I’d first met in mirrored sunglasses and a black bomber jacket to be wearing a styleless muumuu, and I must have stared. She took my elbow conspiratorially with one arm and, motioning toward her dress with the other, said, “Isn’t this thing hideous? I bought it at a secondhand shop in the North End. But I spent the morning with some more of your mom’s moms, and I figured I should look the part.”