Midwives (43 page)

Those entries would have to go, too.

“Well, after we’ve given Dorset the notebooks, I’m going to have to steal away and get something to eat.”

I nodded.

“Any idea what sort of things your mom wrote in her diaries?”

“She’s never shown them to me,” I told her.

I think initially Patty was going to keep her car running while I ran inside our house, but I heard her turn off the engine while I fumbled with my key in the front door.

I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t dare take the time then. I went straight to my mother’s office and found the three notebooks the judge would expect, and laid them out upon my mother’s desk in a row. I would move chronologically forward from March.

For a second I considered flipping through the pages with my fingertips wrapped in Kleenex, but then I remembered the pages were already covered with my fingerprints from the week before. And so I decided I would only bother with tissue when I pressed down hard on the metal tabs at the top and the bottom of the binder that would release the key pages.

Tom had offered to go with us, but I was glad I’d said no. I felt bad enough about what I was doing; I wouldn’t have wanted to involve anyone else.

I was shaking as I worked, a precursor of sorts to the trembling I’d experience while we awaited the verdict. I wasn’t sure what law I was breaking, but I knew what I was doing was illegal. And I knew what I was doing was wrong.

When I returned to Patty’s car I was still shuddering. I dropped the three notebooks onto the floor below the glove compartment and pushed them to the side with my feet as I climbed in. Five loose sheets of paper, folded down to the size of a paperback book, were pressed flat against my stomach, hidden under my blouse and my sweater and my jacket.

“Is that everything?” Patty asked, glancing down at the notebooks on the floor mat.

“That’s everything,” I said, the first of at least three times I can recall that I told that particular lie.

By the time we returned, my mother had completed her testimony and the court had recessed. Before taking the binders with him into his chambers, the judge told us he would let us know by one-thirty or two whether we could all go home for the day or whether the trial would resume midafternoon. If we were told to go home, it meant he was probably going to allow some or all of the notebooks, and Stephen and Bill Tanner would be granted a day to examine the entries; if we were asked to remain, it meant the judge had decided nothing in the notebooks was relevant and the State would not be allowed to see them.

Stephen was prepared to lose: He was prepared to lose both on the specific issue of the notebooks, and I think he was prepared to lose the case. He knew what my mother had written in March and—perhaps—early April: He probably knew that it only got worse.

And I think my mother was ready for defeat as well. I didn’t believe at the time that my mother had slipped on the stand with the conscious hope that it would ensure a conviction—and even today I don’t think she hoped for one on an unconscious level—but I think she had become resigned to that inevitability. Given the guilt in her own mind, she must have viewed her notebooks as all the evidence the State needed to convince the jury she had killed a woman in labor.

The difference in my mother’s and Stephen’s attitudes, if there really was one, is that Stephen still had some fight left in him. He was prepared to appeal a decision that allowed any part of the notebooks as evidence, and he was already modifying his strategy for his expert witnesses: It didn’t matter whether Sibyl Danforth thought Charlotte Bedford was dead or alive, because Sibyl was merely a midwife. Our obstetric experts and forensic pathologists were positive, based on their years and years of medical experience, that the woman was dead by the time my mother made her first cut.

The principal issue he would have to overcome was my mother’s testimony itself. Carefully he had elicited from her the idea that she had done everything she could to see whether Charlotte Bedford was dead, without ever having her say categorically that she was sure beyond doubt that the woman had died. That part of the transcript has become for me a small study in legal ethics:

HASTINGS: Did you check one last time to see if the woman had a pulse?

DANFORTH: Yes.

HASTINGS: Did you hear one?

DANFORTH: No.

HASTINGS: Did you check one last time to see if she had a heartbeat?

DANFORTH: Yes, absolutely.

HASTINGS: And did you hear one?

DANFORTH: No, I did not.

HASTINGS: You did everything possible to make sure the woman was dead?

DANFORTH: Oh, yes.

My mother hadn’t lied, but if the notebooks were allowed, it would look to the jury as if she had, and not even Stephen Hastings’s experts would be able to restore her credibility.

Consequently, our lunch was an extremely quiet affair, and even Patty Dunlevy was subdued while we awaited Judge Dorset’s ruling. Occasionally my father or Stephen would try and bolster my mother’s spirits as they had in the days immediately before the trial started, and once or twice Peter Grinnell tried to include Tom—who, despite everything else on her mind, my mother had somehow remembered to invite to lunch—in the conversation by asking him about school. But most of the time everyone sat around the wooden restaurant table in silence.

While the fears of the adults around me began and ended with the issue of whether Judge Dorset would allow the notebooks to be admitted as evidence, I had an additional worry as we ascended the stairs to the third-story courtroom to hear the judge’s ruling. I was afraid he had discovered that pages were missing, and in a voice filled with fury and disgust he would ask Stephen or me what we had done with them. Throughout lunch and as we walked back to the courthouse, I had been sure that everyone around me heard the papers rustling beneath my clothes every time that I moved, and I was convinced the moment the judge saw me that he would be able to tell I was responsible.

When I’d gone to the bathroom at the restaurant, I’d considered ripping the pages to shreds and flushing them down the toilet, but I was afraid: If the judge discovered they were missing and insisted that they be presented, their continued existence might be my only hope for clemency. But as we wandered near the ladies’ room at the courthouse, the idea crossed my mind once more to destroy them, and I told my parents I had to go to the bathroom and I would catch up with them in the courtroom in a minute.

Tom asked me if I was feeling okay, and I told him I was fine.

In the courthouse bathroom, however, I was again unable to bring myself to dispose of the notebook pages, although this time it was not merely a fear of the judge that prevented me. At some point, I assumed, my mother would get her notebooks back: Although it was unlikely I could ever press the folds from the pages and replace them in the diaries before she noticed they were missing, at the very least I could still return them to her. Someday, I imagined, she would forgive me for reading them—especially, I reasoned, if by some miracle she was acquitted.

But I did read the pages once more in that bathroom, and as I did I reassured myself that I was making the correct decision: I had to do everything I could to protect my mother and preserve our family.

Besides, my mother’s conviction would not bring back Charlotte Bedford. It would merely destroy a second woman.

The jury was not present when Judge Dorset issued his ruling, but most of the spectators had reassembled.

None of us, of course, could see Stephen’s or my mother’s expressions when he spoke, but I assume if the spectators envisioned anything at all on their faces, they envisioned only relief: The judge ruled that there was nothing in the diaries that was relevant to my mother’s testimony specifically, or to the case in general. The notebooks were a personal account of her life but had little relevance to the issues under examination and would therefore not be shared with the State.

Did Judge Dorset—who could stare directly into Stephen’s and my mother’s faces—see that in addition to relief there had to be surprise? He was an intelligent man, so I’m sure he did. I’m sure he saw disbelief in their eyes: My mother knew exactly what she had written at different points over the last seven months, and they both knew what she had written on March 15.

My mother and Stephen must have thought they had been given—inexplicably, and without reason—an astonishing gift from the judge, a gift that grew tangible when a court officer carried the three blue binders to the defense table and handed them over to my mother. A moment later the jury was brought back into the courtroom, my mother was returned to the stand, and Bill Tanner began his cross-examination.

I cannot undo what I’ve done, or what I might have done. I don’t think there’s anything left for me to set right
.

—from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

TANNER’S CROSS-EXAMINATION was often brutal and occasionally mean-spirited. He was angry that the notebooks had not been shared with the State, and his fury was fresh.

Yet my mother endured and even snapped back at Tanner a number of times. At one point she reminded him that when it came to neonatal mortality, her track record was as good as any ob-gyn’s; a few moments later she noted that her mothers’ babies were less likely to have a low birth weight. She was even able to reiterate how hard she had worked to try and save Charlotte, and how she had only performed the C-section because there didn’t seem to be any other choice.

“I had completed at least eight or nine cycles by then,” she told Tanner, referring to the CPR she had performed on Charlotte, “and I still wasn’t hearing a heartbeat in the woman—but I was getting one from the baby. What was I supposed to do, let them both die?”

I wouldn’t categorize all of her testimony as spunky, but there were some particularly spirited exchanges, and she had regained the clarity of mind she had demonstrated early that morning.

And Tanner never asked the one question I dreaded—and, in all likelihood, the one my mother and Stephen feared most: Is there absolutely no doubt in your mind that Charlotte Bedford was dead when you performed the cesarean? But Tanner had no idea what my mother had written in her diary, and so he assumed there was none. Asking her that question in front of the jury would only hurt the State’s case by giving her yet one more opportunity to say Charlotte had already passed away when she chose to save the infant’s life.

Although there were occasional sparks that afternoon, my mother’s cross-examination and the remainder of the trial seemed anticlimactic to me.

Wednesday night I carried my mother’s notebooks into the house from the car for her and offered to return them to her bookcase.

“That would be lovely,” she said. “Thank you.”

I flattened the pages that I’d removed as best I could before I returned them to the binders, but it would always be clear that someone at some point had removed some entries. Apparently she did not add anything to her notebook that night, and she was so tired she never even looked at the books before going to bed.

The next day, Thursday, our obstetricians and our forensic pathologists all said in one way or another that in their opinion my mother had not killed Charlotte Bedford. But Bill Tanner also made sure each witness acknowledged that he had received a fee for his opinion, and that those opinions were not based on having done—or even having seen—the autopsy. Nevertheless, they were impressive figures, especially the elderly fellow from Texas who had had the misfortune of having to perform autopsies four times on women who had died in botched cesareans, some in desperately poor hospitals near the border with Mexico. In all his years and in all those tragic autopsies, he had never once seen less than eleven hundred milliliters of blood in the peritoneal cavity—a full pint more than Vermont’s Dr. Tierney had found inside Charlotte Bedford.

And then on Friday, the attorneys gave their closing arguments, and while they were eloquent, it was clear that both the fly fisherman and the Vietnam veteran were exhausted. I had expected the arguments to last all day—or at least all morning—and I was wrong. The arguments were over by quarter to eleven, and the jury had their instructions from the judge by eleven-thirty. They began their deliberations before lunch.

We expected a long deliberation, and so we went home. Stephen had offered to take us to lunch, but my mother said she wasn’t hungry.

And so we—the Danforths and their lawyers—left the courthouse, expecting we would separate in the parking lot across the street. Just before my family climbed into our station wagon, as Patty was telling my grandmother and me something about her years on a high-school track team when she was roughly my age, I overheard my father ask Stephen what it would mean if the deliberations went into the weekend.