The Republic of Nothing (27 page)

I tried to sluff it off. “You've been watching too much TV. Look around,” I said, sweeping my arms around at the blue sky, the yellow lichen-covered rocks, the exotic, wind-sculpted spruce trees and juniper. The air was filled with the tangible smell of clean salt air laced with bayberry and other delicate maritime perfumes. “Look at this. Where's the murder? Where's the bloodshed? No assassinations here. This is a great place to bring a kid into the world.” Once again Gwen had ripped me out of my little fantasy cocoon of safety and happy endings. I thought I had it all figured out. I had never said it, but I assumed
that I was going to marry her or at least live with her. That she would have the kid and
I
would be the father. Happily ever after. I was refusing to think about the bastard Burnet who I had tried to flush out of my memory. In truth, I secretly wanted him to die in Vietnam. It was part of the package. Part of happily-ever-after. “It's not your decision, “ I said to Gwen. “We're going to have the baby together.”

The birds flew over — gulls, sparrow hawks, a sweep of plovers. Gwen had grown deaf. “Could we go talk to your friend, the doctor? I'd like to talk to Ben Ackerman.”

I looked up at the plovers, now arcing off to the sea. I had to stop myself from saying out loud what was going through my head:
Ben Ackerman is not a real doctor.
“You want to see Ben?” I asked. “Why?”

“I want to know about my options.”

“What options?”

“I want to know if I can
not
have the baby.”

“I think you should talk to your parents first,” I said. I knew her mother and father would be reasonable. I also knew they would try to talk her out of it. “And I think you should tell them I'm the father, not Burnet.” This was a very important point to me. Yet another lie I wanted to add to my life. I don't think I even cared any more that Burnet was the father.
I wanted it to be my baby.

She gave me a look of soft defiance, but behind it I saw the fear. What exactly was she afraid of? What was it that had sent her out into the cold water the other night? A fear, deeper than anything I could understand, a sad, haunting despair. She had told me nothing about her actions. I had wanted to believe it was just a test of herself, something she could not explain to me. Something I could never fully understand.

“Were you really trying to drown yourself?” I blurted out.

“I felt like I had thrown everything away. I wanted to change the world and if I had a kid now, I would be bringing up a child in a world that was ugly and cruel and full of hate.
If I have the baby, I won't be able to make this a better place. Once it's better, then I'll have kids. I'll have ten of them and you can be the father.” She sucked in her breath. “No, I don't think I would have been able to kill myself.” She looked almost embarrassed now. “The water was too cold.” She laughed at the absurd point she was making. “People who are serious about killing themselves slit their wrists indoors in bathtubs full of warm water. It's hard to explain, but I just needed to do that. I needed to push myself a little, to toy with the idea and to feel the pain. You weren't supposed to be there.”

Did I believe what she was telling me? I don't know. But she had brought me back to a possibility more frightening than any I'd tried to understand yet. I suddenly forgot about the invisible baby, the sweet martyrdom of my fatherhood. Gwen was mysterious and unpredictable in ways I could never fathom.
I was suddenly aware that somehow in all this mess I could lose Gwen.
She might simply vanish from the island, from my life. And I could not let that happen.

“I think we should go see Ben now.” I said.

He was wrestling a section of framed wall into place when we arrived. It would take him forever to build this house. He was too much of a perfectionist and it was slow going. Gwen and I walked across the floorboards and I grabbed onto the wall to steady it as it wobbled in the breeze. Ben smiled at us both, picked up a level and began to readjust the framed section so it was perfectly vertical. He began to hammer it onto the subfloor. When he was certain it was anchored, a great grin of satisfaction came over him. One modest item had been set right in the world, one fraction of perfection achieved. He threw his hammer down with a loud bang on the floor and rubbed his hands together. “How are you two kids doing?”

“Gwendolyn's pregnant, “ I answered.

Ben pulled three nails out of his nail apron and studied them as he rolled them between his fingers. “That's a bomb-shell,” he said.

“I'm thinking about having an abortion,” Gwen said. “I'd like your advice as a doctor.”

Ben gave me a puzzled look. I don't think he had considered himself a doctor any longer. No one had called on him for medical advice in quite a while. I think he was happy to have grown out of the lie and into another role: the world's slowest, most meticulous and grudgingly perfect house builder.

“Abortion laws were beginning to loosen up in New York State when I was leaving the profession.” Ben looked at me, silently asking for my compliance with the lie. His voice, how-ever, had assumed a cool, clinical tone like he had used at the nursing home in New York City. “My colleagues had per-formed some at the hospital. I had been involved in one or two emergency situations. I'm no expert. How far pregnant are you?”

“Fifty-two days,” she said. She knew exactly the night. It had only been once.

“If you want an abortion, then it should be soon or it will be much more complicated. Have you thought all of this through? It's an important decision.”

“Yes,” Gwen said immediately.

“Are you sure it's the right thing?” He was looking more at me than her now. I think he was shocked to think I was the one who had made her pregnant.

“Yes,” Gwen answered again.

“Do your parents know?”

“No. It's my decision.”

“I think you should discuss it with them.”

“Would you be willing to give me an abortion here on the island?” Gwen asked.

“I would be breaking the law. But even without that, the answer is no. Why do you want one?”

“I'm too young. I want to live more of my life more first. I want to help stop the Americans from killing people in Vietnam. I want time to change things, to make people see how
bloody cruel they are. I want to fix up the world as best I can and then have kids. Ian understands.”

“Yes,” I lied. “I do.” It ‘was so odd again to see my father in her, to recognize that same flawed, possibly fatal drive to improve upon the human race somehow, to take the whole global problem in hand and fix it. I would never understand this deep-seated motivation. Now, in order to stop the killing in the world, she would have to postpone the arrival of one new soul into it.

Ben shook his head. “I think I understand what you're saying but I can't help you. I'm not licensed in Nova Scotia to practice medicine, certainly not abortion and abortion is not legal here. I think you should go home and discuss this with your parents.”

I guess I knew then that Ben had ceased, once and for all, being a doctor. It seemed to cause him pain to be brought back into the difficult moral arena that medical decision-making created. He walked across the floor of his someday home and picked up two two-by-sixes and began to measure them, marking them with the T-square and trying to pretend we weren't there.

“Thanks. Bye,” Gwen said as we walked down the plank to the ground.

“Why can't you tell your parents?” I asked her. “They aren't like other kids' parents. They're smart. They don't see the world in black and white. They'll understand how you feel.”

“No,” she said. “I can't.”

“Why?”

“Because my mother wanted to have an abortion once. She was young and pretty and thought she had a career ahead of her as a dancer, maybe an actress. Then she met my father. She got pregnant and decided to have an abortion — it was illegal in those days, of course, but she had found a ‘safe' clinic in Las Vegas. She was all ready to go. My father was in Alamagordo making new bombs. He went to see her, found the note she had left for him. He drove to Nevada and stopped her. He forced her to go back to New Mexico. He convinced her to have the baby, and she resigned herself to it. They ended up getting more serious with each other and getting married. “And somehow a little tiny soul waiting in a soul bank some-where had its way and came into the world.”

I tried to think of a world without Gwen. Now I could begin to see the difficulty of her situation.

“But this is different. Very different,” she asserted, rubbing her hands across her face. “
I
need to make the decision. Correction.
We
need to make the decision. What do you think we should do now?” The ball was back in my court because I was inextricably involved in the game.

“C'mon,” I said. “There's somebody else on the island we can talk to.”

My grandmother was the most no-nonsense woman who ever walked the face of the earth. A woman who possessed warmth, kindness and compassion, she also possessed that rarest human quality: common sense. We arrived while she and Jack were drinking tea and discussing a book they had both recently read and admired:
The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan.

“We need your advice,” I began, looking at Bernie. “It's of a private, medical nature.” I lowered my eyes but hoped that Jack would get the drift.

Jack, always humble, always willing to slide out of this century and back into the days of pirates, scraped his chair back and said, “I have some reading I need to do anyway. Good to see you again, Ian.”

But Bernie grabbed him by the cuff. “Stay, Jack,” and turning
to Gwen, “I tell Jack everything, anyway. That's the way we are. No secrets. No weapons. Everything plain as the nose on your face. That's our relationship. So he might as well stay.”

Gwen gave me a shrug. She trusted me. I trusted them. Maybe pretty soon the whole island would know. Gwen wasn't really all that troubled about that. She was probably infinitely different from a thousand other North American girls who got pregnant. She wasn't trying to cover anything up. She just had her priorities. Fix the world, then have a pile of kids. She looked down at
The Feminine Mystique
sitting on the table.

“Jack's a feminist, too, I might add,” Bernie said. “Read all of Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir. He understands women better than most women do. We're both tuned into the battle for equal rights.”

“I'd beat the faces off the sons of bitches who try to dispossess women of their fair share,” Jack said, sitting back down now, a male radical feminist streetbrawler.

Bernie shushed him, apologizing, “We're still trying to work out a few bugs in the male evolutionary system — aggression, tendency towards violence, defence of the indefenceless by punching their lights out, that sort of thing.” She sounded very professorial just then. Clearly, we weren't going to shake Jack from the room. No book of nineteenth-century piracy or even twentieth-century feminist rhetoric would lure him away from our nearly public real-world crisis.

“It's nice to see you both again,” Gwen said.

Bernie looked her in the eye. “Haven't talked to you for a while, Gwendolyn. You look all grown up. I remember the day you arrived. Another family of Yanks. So how do you like it here on the island, compared to The United States of America, I mean?” She asked the question like Gwen had only been around for maybe a week. Old people had this funny thing about time.

“It's not so bad, really, I guess,” Gwen answered, “except for the fact that I'm pregnant and I don't want to be.”

There. It was out. Didn't surprise me any. Jack lifted his eyebrows a couple of centimetres above their normal at-ease status. Bernie was taken back for only a second. It would have been a sign of defeat for her to show any real shock or surprise. “I like that,” she said to old Jack. “The girl has balls. She comes here with a problem looking for advice. Cuts through all the small talk and gets right to the point. That's something.”

Jack nodded.

Bernie reached her hand out to Gwen. “Give me your wrist, honey. Jack, could I have your watch.” Gwen held out her hand. Jack set his watch down on the table beside his wife. Bernie grabbed Gwen's wrist, pressed her index finger down on the vein and watched the seconds tick by. After a full minute of silence, she said, “If I had the proper instrument, I'd really like to check the blood pressure, but you have a good count and the pulse is strong. You're in good shape. Probably no reason why you shouldn't have the baby if you wanted it.”

“It's all wrong. I just don't think it's the right time,” Gwen said defiantly. “After all, it should be my decision, not anybody else's.”

Bernie was scratching at a longish hair that was growing out of her neck. Jack was the one to answer. “Damn straight. About time women had the right to control their own procreative processes.” You could really tell he'd been reading the female liberationists.