Different Seasons(176)
The Harriet White Memorial Hospital also figured largely in something that happened to me nine years after I had interned there—and this is the story I want to tell you gentlemen tonight. It is not a tale to be told at Christmas, you would say (although its final scene was played out on Christmas Eve), and yet, while it is certainly horrible, it also seems to express to me all the amazing power of our cursed, doomed species. In it I see the wonder of our will... and also its horrible, tenebrous power.
Birth itself, gentlemen, is a horrid thing to many; it is the fashion now that fathers should be present at the birth of their children, and while this fashion has served to inflict many men with a guilt which I feel they may not deserve (it is a guilt which some women use knowingly and with an almost prescient cruelty), it seems by and large to be a healthful, salubrious thing. Yet I have seen men leave the delivery room white and tottering and I have seen them swoon like girls, overcome by the cries and the blood. I remember one father who held up just fine... only to begin screaming hysterically as his perfectly healthy son pushed its way into the world. The infant’s eyes were open, it gave the impression of looking around... and then its eyes settled on the father.
Birth is wonderful, gentlemen, but I have never found it beautiful—not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe it is too brutal to be beautiful. A woman’s womb is like an engine. With conception, that engine is turned on. At first it barely idles... but as the creative cycle nears the climax of birth, that engine revs up and up and up. Its idling whisper becomes a steady running hum, and then a rumble, and finally a bellowing, frightening roar. Once that engine has been turned on, every mother-to-be understands that her life is in check. Either she will bring the baby forth and the engine will shut down again, or that engine will pound louder and harder and faster until it explodes, killing her in blood and pain.
This is a story of birth, gentlemen, on the eve of that birth we have celebrated for almost two thousand years.
I began practicing medicine in 1929—a bad year to begin anything. My grandfather was able to lend me a small sum of money, so I was luckier than many of my colleagues, but I still had to survive over the next four years mostly on my wits.
By 1935, things had improved a bit. I had developed a bedrock of steady patients and was getting quite a few outpatient referrals from White Memorial. In April of that year I saw a new patient, a young woman whom I will call Sandra Stansfield—that name is close enough to what her name really was. This was a young woman, white, who stated her age to be twenty-eight. After examining her, I guessed her true age to be between three and five years younger than that. She was blonde, slender, and tall for that time—about five feet eight inches. She was quite beautiful, but in an austere way that was almost forbidding. Her features were clear and regular, her eyes intelligent... and her mouth every bit as determined as the stone mouth of Harriet White on the statue across from Madison Square Garden. The name she put on her form was not Sandra Stansfield but Jane Smith. My examination subsequently showed her to be about two months gone in pregnancy. She wore no wedding ring.
After the preliminary exam—but before the results of the pregnancy test were in—my nurse, Ella Davidson, said: “That girl yesterday? Jane Smith? If that isn’t an assumed name, I never heard one.”
I agreed. Still, I rather admired her. She had not engaged in the usual shilly-shallying, toe-scuffing, blushing, tearful behavior. She had been straightforward and businesslike. Even her alias had seemed more a matter of business than of shame. There had been no attempt to provide verisimilitude by creating a “Betty Rucklehouse” or whomping up a “Ternina DeVille.” You require a name for your form, she seemed to be saying, because that is the law. So here is a name; but rather than trusting to the professional ethics of a man I don’t know, I’ll trust in myself. If you don’t mind.
Ella sniffed and passed a few remarks—“modern girls” and “bold as brass”—but she was a good woman, and I don’t think she said those things except for the sake of form. She knew as well as I did that, whatever my new patient might be, she was no little trollop with hard eyes and round heels. No; “Jane Smith” was merely an extremely serious, extremely determined young woman—if either of those things can be described by such a Milquetoast adverb as “merely.” It was an unpleasant situation (it used to be called “getting in a scrape,” as you gentlemen may remember; nowadays it seems that many young women use a scrape to get out of the scrape), and she meant to go through it with whatever grace and dignity she could manage.
A week after her initial appointment, she came in again. That was a peach of a day—one of the first real days of spring. The air was mild, the sky a soft, milky shade of blue, and there was a smell on the breeze—a warm, indefinable smell that seems to be nature’s signal that she is entering her own birth cycle again. The sort of day one wishes to be miles from any responsibility, sitting opposite a lovely woman of one’s own—at Coney Island, maybe, or on the Palisades across from the Hudson with a picnic hamper on a checkered cloth and the lady in question wearing a great white cartwheel hat and a sleeveless gown as pretty as the day.
“Jane Smith’s” dress had sleeves, but it was still almost as pretty as the day; a smart white linen with brown edging. She wore brown pumps, white gloves, and a cloche hat that was slightly out of fashion—it was the first sign I saw that she was a far from rich woman.