The Group (33 page)

To Priss, this sounded like a criticism, and she did not reply. Instead, she gritted her teeth. The baby’s mouth always hurt her nipple at the beginning, like a bite. Her breasts were very sensitive, and she hated to have Sloan touch them in love-making; she had hoped that nursing the baby would get her over that. People said that nursing was very satisfying, sensually, to the mother, and she had thought that if she got in the habit with a baby, she would not mind so much with a grown man. Though she had not told Sloan, this was one of her principal reasons for agreeing to breast-feed Stephen: so that she could give Sloan, who was entitled to it, more fun in bed. But so far nursing, like most of sex, was an ordeal she had to steel herself for each time it happened by using all her will power and thinking about love and self-sacrifice. The nurse was watching her now, to make sure that the baby was drawing at the nipple properly. “Relax, Mrs. Crockett,” she said kindly. “Baby can sense it if you’re tense.” Priss sighed and tried to let go. But naturally the more she concentrated on relaxing, the more tense she got. “Bless braces, damn relaxes,” she joked feebly. “You’re tired this evening,” said the nurse. Priss nodded, feeling grateful that someone knew and disloyal, at the same time, to Sloan, who did not know that it wore her out to have company, especially mixed company that sat there discussing her milk.

But as the baby (she wished the nurse would call him “Stephen,” not “Baby”) commenced to suck rhythmically, making a little noise like a snore, Priss grew somewhat easier. She did not
enjoy
the sucking, but she liked his fresh, milky smell, which made her think of churns and dairies, and his pale fuzz of hair and his warmth. Soon she was unaware of his sucking, except as a hypnotic rhythm; the nurse put the bell in her hand and tiptoed out. Priss was almost asleep when she came to, with a start; Stephen was asleep himself. His little mouth had ceased to tug, and the noise he was making
was
a light snore. She joggled him a little, as she had been taught to do, but her nipple slipped out of his mouth. He turned his round soft head away and lay sleeping with his cheek flat on his chest. Priss was terrified; she tried to turn his head and thrust her breast into his mouth. He resisted; his little hands rose and beat feebly at her breast to push it away. She shifted her position and looked at her watch. He had only been nursing seven minutes, and he was supposed to nurse fifteen to get the milk he needed to carry him through till the next feeding, which would be at ten o’clock. She had been cautioned before not to let him fall asleep. She rang the bell, which turned the light on outside her door.

No one came; she listened; there was complete silence in the corridor. Not even the sound of a baby crying came from the far end at the nursery. They were all being fed, obviously—all but poor Stephen—and the nurses were all busy, giving them their bottles. She was always fearful of being left alone with Stephen and usually she contrived to keep a nurse with her, making conversation. But since yesterday there were two new babies in the nursery and two new mothers to care for, so that Priss had become an “old” mother, who ought to be able to look after herself. But this was the first time she had been left entirely alone; normally the nurse popped her head in the door from time to time, to see how things were going. Priss was afraid the nurses knew that she was afraid of Stephen—her own flesh and blood.

Still no one came; another three minutes had passed. She thought of Sloan, who would be in the Visitors’ Lounge with her mother and Bill Edris, talking and enjoying himself; it was against the hospital rules for the husband to watch the mother nurse, and this was one rule that Sloan did not care to break. Perhaps a passing interne would notice her light. She raised her arm to look at her watch again; two more minutes gone. She felt as though she and Stephen were marooned together in eternity or tied together like prisoners in some gruesome form of punishment. It was useless to remind herself that this frightening bundle was her own child and Sloan’s. Rather, she felt, to her shame, that he was a piece of hospital property that had been dumped on her and abandoned—they would never come to take him away.

Just then Stephen woke. He gave a long sigh and turned his head, burying it in her breast, and at once went back to sleep again. Priss could feel his nose pressing against her shrinking skin, and the idea that he might suffocate made her suddenly cold with fear. That was always happening to babies in their cribs. Maybe he had already suffocated; she listened and could not hear his breathing—only the loud noise of her own. Her heart was pounding with a sort of stutter. She tried to move his head gently, but again he resisted, and she was afraid of accidentally touching the soft part of his skull. But at least he was still alive. Gratefully, she tried to collect herself and make an intelligent decision. She could telephone down to the switchboard and get them to send help. But two things deterred her: first, her shyness and dislike of being a nuisance; second, the fact that the telephone was on the right side of the bed and she would have to move Stephen to reach it, but moving Stephen was just the problem. She was scared to. Scared of what, she asked herself. Scared that he might cry, she answered.

“Priss Hartshorn Crockett!” she said sternly to herself. “Are you ready to let your newborn baby die of suffocation because you’re shy and/or because you can’t bear to hear him cry? What would your mother think?” Determined, she half sat up, and this abrupt movement dislodged the baby, who slipped to her side in a little heap, woke up and began to cry furiously. At that moment, the door opened.

“Well, what’s going on here?” exclaimed the student nurse, who was Priss’s favorite; she was glad it was not the other one, at any rate. The girl, in her blue-striped uniform, picked up Stephen and cuddled him in her arms. “Have you two been having a fight?” Priss replied with a weak chime of laughter; humor was not her strong point, but now that she saw the baby safe in the nurse’s strong bare arms, she laughed with relief. “Is he all right? I’m afraid I lost my head.” “Stephen’s just plain mad, isn’t he?” the girl said, addressing the baby. “Does he want to go back to bed?” She picked up his blanket and wrapped him in it; she patted his back to “bubble” him. “No, no!” cried Priss. “Give him back, please. He hasn’t finished nursing. I let him go to sleep in the middle.”

“Oh, my!” said the girl. “You must have been scared, all right. I’ll stay with you this time till he finishes.” The baby belched, and the girl unwrapped him and laid him, under the covers, on Priss’s breast. “Somebody should have come in to bubble him,” she said. “He swallowed a lot of air.” She gently slid the nipple into his mouth. The baby pushed it away and began to cry again. He was evidently angry. The two girls—Priss was the older—gazed at each other sadly. “Does that happen often?” said Priss. “I don’t know,” said the girl. “Most of our babies are bottle babies. But they do that sometimes with the bottle if the holes in the nipple aren’t big enough; they get mad and push the bottle away.” “Because the milk doesn’t come fast enough,” said Priss. “That’s my trouble. But I wouldn’t mind if he pushed a
b-bottle
away.” Her thin little face looked rueful. “He’s tired,” said the student nurse. “Did you hear him this afternoon?” Priss nodded, looking down at the baby. “It’s a vicious circle,” she said gloomily. “He wears himself out crying because he’s famished and then he’s too exhausted to nurse.”

The door opened again. “You left Mrs. Crockett’s light on,” the older nurse chided the student. “You should remember to snap it off when you come in. What was the trouble here, anyway?” “He won’t nurse,” said Priss. The three women looked at each other and sighed jointly. “Let’s see if you have any milk left,” said the old nurse finally, in a practical tone. She moved the baby’s head slightly to one side and squeezed Priss’s breast; a drop of watery liquid appeared. “You can try it,” she conceded. “But he’ll have to learn to work for his supper. The harder he works, of course, the more milk you produce. The breast should be well drained.” She squeezed Priss’s breast again, then clapped “Baby’s” head to the moist nipple. While both nurses watched, he sucked for another minute, for two minutes, and stopped. “Shall we prime the pump again?” said Priss with a feeble smile. The older nurse bent down. “The breast is empty. No sense in wearing him out for nothing. I’ll take him now and weigh him.”

In a moment the student nurse was back, breathless. “Two ounces!” she reported. “Shall I tell your company they can come back?” Priss was overjoyed; her supper tray appeared while she was waiting for her family to return, and she felt almost hungry. “We’ve heard your vital statistic,” announced Mrs. Hartshorn. “Is two ounces a lot?” asked Allen dubiously. An excellent average feeding, declared Sloan: Priss’s milk was highly concentrated, though the volume was not large; that was why the baby was gaining steadily, despite the little fuss he made before meals. Then they all trooped out for the evening, to let Priss have her supper in peace. Sloan was carrying the cocktail shaker; they would not need it any more in the hospital, for next weekend Priss would be home.

Priss picked up the last number of
Consumer Reports
; she was hoping they would have an article on bottled baby foods. She knew she was letting herself slip, mentally, in the hospital; she
lived
on the bulletins the nurses brought her of how many ounces Stephen had taken—they weighed him before and after each feeding. If the nurse forgot to come and tell her, she nearly died, imagining the worst and not having the gumption to ring and ask. The other important event was the regular morning weighing, before his bath, which showed his over-all gain for the day. Nothing but these figures and her own fluid intake interested Priss now; she was always having to ring for the bedpan because of the gallons of water she imbibed. The nurses were awfully co-operative, though they disapproved, she knew (except the student), of her breast-feeding Stephen. They thought Sloan and her obstetrician, Dr. Turner, were balmy. But they too were impressed,
nolens volens
, by the evidence of the scales. The child
was
growing.

If it had not been for the bulletins, Priss would certainly have lost faith. Sloan and Dr. Turner did not have to hear Stephen crying. The nurses and Priss had to hear it. At eight o’clock that night, right on the dot, down in the nursery Stephen started to cry. She knew his voice—the whole floor knew it. Sometimes he would whimper and then go back to sleep for a while, but when he began noisily, as he was doing now, he might cry for two solid hours—a scandal. It was against the rules for the nurses to pick him up; they were allowed to change him and give him a drink of water, and that was all. The babies were not supposed to be “handled.” And if they gave him a second drink of water, he might not nurse properly when feeding time finally came.

Sometimes merely changing him would quiet him for the time being. Often the drink of water would quiet him. But not always. A lot depended, Priss had discovered, on when he got the water; if they gave it to him too soon, he would sleep briefly and wake up again, howling. If he woke up midway between feedings, the nurse usually let him cry, after changing him, for an hour, and then gave him the water, so that, tired from crying and with a deceptively full stomach, he would often sleep through until the next feeding. That was the best, for then he was fresh when he was brought in to nurse and would draw with might and main from the nipple. But if he woke up shortly after a feeding, it was horrible: after an hour’s cry, he would get his water, sleep, wake up and cry again without stopping—his record, so far, was two hours and three-quarters.

Priss’s ear was attuned to every detail of this routine; she could tell when he was getting his water, when the nurse was just changing or turning him over. She could tell when he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, by the way his cries subsided and finally trailed off. She could recognize the first sleepy whimperings, and her imagination shared the nurse’s hesitation as to whether to pick him up and change him at once or whether to leave him alone, hoping that he would not wake fully. She knew too that one of the nurses (she was not sure which) used to break the rules and pick him up and rock him in her arms; this was indicated by a sudden respite, a fairly long silence, and then a fierce renewal of crying as he was set back in his basket again. She could never make up her mind how she felt toward the nurse who did this: thankful or disapproving.

The nights were the worst. There were nights when, hearing him start at three or four in the morning, she would have welcomed anything that would let him stop and rest—paregoric, a sugar-tit, any of those wicked things. During her pregnancy, Priss had read a great deal about past mistakes in child rearing; according to the literature, they were the result not only of ignorance, but of sheer selfishness: a nurse or a mother who gave a crying child paregoric usually did it for her own peace of mind, not wanting to be bothered. For the doctors agreed it did not hurt a baby to cry; it only hurt grownups to listen to him. She
supposed
this was true. The nurses here wrote down every day on Stephen’s chart how many hours he cried, but neither Sloan nor Dr. Turner turned a hair when they looked at that on the chart; all they cared about was the weight curve.

Sloan had warned Priss repeatedly against listening to the nurses: they meant well but they were in a rut. They also liked to think they knew better than the doctor. It irritated him to have Priss dwell on how long Stephen had “vocalized.” “If it bothers you so much,” he had said to her sharply the other day, “you can get them to give you some cotton for your ears.” That was not Priss’s point, but she had considered doing what he said because she knew that worrying was bad for her milk supply; the nurses were always telling her that. But she was too much of a liberal to “turn a deaf ear” to a hungry baby; that would be like those people who were blind to bread lines and picket lines. If Stephen howled, she wanted to know it. Moreover, being a worrier, she would
imagine
that Stephen was crying if she had ear stoppers in. Sloan replied that this was ridiculous, but that since she refused to be rational, she would have to suffer.