A Book of American Martyrs(164)

But the first pregnancy was a very different case. In 1956 I was just slightly older than you are now, I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and I did not want a baby. Very passionately, I did not want a baby. I didn’t even like babies. I preferred baby animals. I did not want the father to know because I did not want to be dependent upon him. I believed that he would want us to marry, in fact he was a medical student and might have helped me but I could not involve him. So I tried to find a doctor who would help me terminate this pregnancy. I consulted friends, I made calls, I was referred by “friends-of-friends”—I was trying not to become desperate. I would call someone, and be given another number to call, and I would call that number, and I would be told it was a wrong number, but I was told to leave my number, and maybe someone would call me. Finally I had to pay seventy dollars to get a number to call, and after several calls I managed to make an appointment, and it was an actual doctor’s office, or maybe they were just renting the office from an actual doctor. There was a man, the “doctor,” and there was a woman who was his “nurse.” I had to pay them three hundred seventy dollars ahead of time, in cash. This was so much money in 1956—you can’t imagine! But I managed to get hold of three hundred seventy dollars which I handed over to them and by this time I was so anxious, so exhausted . . . In a state of terror I lay down on the examination table. The woman—the “nurse”—was giving me pills in a little cup to sedate me when there was a phone call, in the next room. I could hear the man—the “doctor”— talking in an excited voice, clearly something had gone wrong—I was starting to become sleepy but made an effort to stay awake. A panic came over me that the police were on their way to arrest us all—or they were going to kill me—or that I would bleed to death afterward. I saw the worried look in the woman’s face—I thought, I don’t want to be killed by these people. So—I told them to stop the procedure. I could not allow myself to fall asleep. I did not believe in God but the wild thought came to me—“God is sparing you and your baby. Run away!” And so—that’s what I did.

The father had wanted to marry me. He had no idea that I was pregnant. He’d said he was in love with me. Your grandfather Clement.

I didn’t love him but I respected him. I liked him. Our parents knew one another. Our wedding present from his parents was ten place settings of heirloom silver—Oneida, 1905.

So we were married, and Gus was born—he had not been wanted (by me) but he was born.

I’d thought that I would be bitter. I’d worried about post-partum depression. But I had no expectations about being a mother and so I wasn’t disappointed. I kind of liked the little guy. As an infant Gus was filled with life, curiosity, heat—his little body gave off a powerful heat. I devised little games for him to accelerate, as I thought, the baby’s mental growth. Clement was enthusiastic about this, too. I read to him long before he could understand words, I spelled out words for him on cards, I arranged a game in which he could pull a cord, and change pictures on a slide projector—things you learn about in developmental psychology. I’d insisted upon naming him Augustus, to suggest his great worth.

None of this was anything I’d expected. Everything that had to do with my pregnancy and with the childbirth and the baby was unexpected, unpredictable. I wasn’t religious of course, I was certainly not Catholic but reading Augustine’s The City of God had made an impression on me.

All the classics have had their effect upon me, I realize now. Secular, religious. Ancient, modern.

Through Gus’s life I came to love him and to admire and respect him though I did not live with him. Though I was not his “mother”—he was not my “son”—in the old way of the family.

Everyone called him Gus but I thought of him as Augustus—truly he was a special person. I never stopped believing that.

But when Gus was two or three I knew that I would have to leave him eventually. I would have to leave Clement. I stayed for years—eight years. I would have to leave my life as Mrs. Clement Voorhees. I would have to leave a house in Birmingham, Michigan. A doctor-husband, a child of eight. The Oneida set was tarnished in the sideboard—I don’t think I’d ever touched it. Being that kind of woman wasn’t my personality. “Motherhood” did not make my heart beat faster. Family life was like being trapped in a shell—a kind of turtle shell that doesn’t grow with the turtle but confines it, and squeezes it to death.

Yet, I loved the child. I loved Gus, that he was the person he was. I just did not want to be “his” mother and I did not think that it was necessary for his development and his happiness, that I pretend to be this person.

When I told this story to Gus—(he was an adult by this time with children of his own)—he was wincing and uneasy as you can imagine. He asked me what was the point of the story, and I told him the point is that abortion is what I’d thought I had wanted—absolutely. I had not the slightest doubt about this.

And yet, I’d been mistaken to want to be rid of the baby-to-be. Because the baby-to-be was him.

Bullshit, Gus said.

Somehow, in my telling, Gus had not seen where it was leading until this moment. And now—he could not think how to respond. What I had told him was like a blow to him that went so deep he could not absorb it.

It is not bullshit, I said. It is not any kind of shit.