‘Yes. I have to. Why?’
‘I think I’m going to frighten you a little before you go,’ I said.
Her eyes widened slightly. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened enough already.’
‘Which is exactly why I’m going to do it Sit down again, Miss Stansfield.’ And when
she only stood there, I added: ‘Please.’
She sat. Reluctantly.
‘You’re in a unique and unenviable position,’ I told her, leaning back against the examination table. ‘You are dealing with the situation with remarkable grace.’
She began to speak, and I held up my hand to silence her.
‘That’s good. I salute you for it But I would hate to see you hurt your baby in any way
out of concern for your own financial security. I had a patient who, in spite of my
strenuous advice to the contrary, continued packing herself into a girdle month after
month, strapping it tighter and tighter as her pregnancy progressed. She was a vain,
stupid, tiresome woman, and I don’t believe she really wanted the baby anyway. I don’t
subscribe to many of these theories of the subconscious which everyone seems to discuss
over the Man-Jong boards these days, but if I did, I would say that she – or some part of
her – was trying to kill the baby.’
‘And did she?’ Her face was very still.
‘No, not at all. But the baby was born retarded. It’s very possible that the baby would
have been born retarded anyway, and I’m not saying otherwise – we know next to nothing
about what causes such things. But she may have caused it.’
‘I take your point,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You don’t want me to … to pack myself in
so I can work another month or six weeks. I’ll admit the thought had crossed my mind. So
… thank you for the fright.’
This time I walked her to the door. I would have liked to ask her just how much – or
how little – she had left in that savings book, and just how close to the edge she was. It
was a question she would not answer; I knew that well enough. So I merely bade her
goodbye and made a joke about her vitamins. She left I found myself thinking about her
at odd moments over the next month, and –
Johanssen interrupted McCarron’s story at this point. They were old friends, and I
suppose that gave him the right to ask the question that had surely crossed all our minds.
‘Did you love her, Emlyn? Is that what all this is about, this stuff about her eyes and
smile and how you “thought of her at odd moments”?’
I thought that McCarron might be annoyed at this interruption, but he was not. ‘You
have a right to ask the question,’ he said, and paused, looking into the fire. It seemed that
he might almost have fallen into a doze. Then a dry knot of wood exploded, sending
sparks up the chimney in a swirl, and McCarron looked around, first at Johanssen and
then at the rest of us.
‘No. I didn’t love her. The things I’ve said about her sound like the things a man who is
falling in love would notice – her eyes, her dresses, her laugh.’ He lit his pipe with a
special boltlike pipe-lighter that he carried, drawing the flame until there was a bed of
coals there. Then he snapped the bolt shut, dropped it into the pocket of his jacket, and
blew out a plume of smoke that shifted slowly around his head in an aromatic membrane.
‘I admired her. That was the long and short of it. And my admiration grew with each of
her visits. I suppose some of you sense this as a story of love crossed by circumstance.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Her story came out a bit at a time over the next
half-year or so, and when you gentlemen hear it, I think you’ll agree that it was every bit
as common as she herself said it was. She had been drawn to the city like a thousand
other girls; she had come from a small town..
… in Iowa or Nebraska. Or possibly it was Minnesota – I don’t really remember
anymore. She had done a lot of high school dramatics and community theatre in her small
town -good reviews in the local weekly written by a drama critic with an English degree
from Cow and Sileage Junior College – and she came to New York to try a career in
acting.
She was practical even about that – as practical as an impractical ambition will allow one to be, anyway. She came to New York, she told me, because she didn’t believe the
unstated thesis of the movie magazines – that any girl who came to Hollywood could
become a star, that she might be sipping a soda in Schwab’s Drug Store one day and
playing opposite Gable or MacMurray the next. She came to New York, she said, because
she thought it might be easier to get her foot in the door there … and, I think, because the
legitimate theatre interested her more than the talkies.
She got a job selling perfume in one of the big department stores and enrolled in acting
classes. She was smart and terribly determined, this girl – her will was pure steel, through
and through — but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a
way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small midwestern towns know.
Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is
somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen
blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks
at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly … perhaps
even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness – the ache of the uprooted plant.
Miss Stansfield, admirable as she may have been, determined as she may have been,
was not immune to it And the rest follows so naturally it needs no telling. There was a
young man in her acting classes. The two of them went out several times. She did not
love him, but she needed a friend. By the time she discovered he was not that and never
would be, there had been two incidents. Sexual incidents. She discovered she was
pregnant. She told the young man, who told her he would stand by her and ‘do the decent
thing’. A week later he was gone from his lodgings, leaving no forwarding address. That
was when she came to me.
During her fourth month, I introduced Miss Stansfield to the Breathing Method – what
is today called the Lamaze Method. In those days, you understand, Monsieur Lamaze was
yet to be heard from.
‘In those days’ – the phrase has cropped up again and again, I notice. I apologize for it
but am unable to help it – so much of what I have told you and will tell you happened as it
did because it happened ‘in those days’.
So … ‘in those days’, over forty-five years ago, a visit to the delivery rooms in any large
American hospital would have sounded to you like a visit to a madhouse. Women
weeping wildly, women screaming that they wished they were dead, women screaming
that they could not bear such agony, women screaming for Christ to forgive them their
sins, women screaming out strings of curses and gutter-words their husbands and fathers
never would have believed they knew. All of this was quite the accepted thing, in spite of
the fact that most of the world’s women give birth in almost complete silence, aside from
the grunting sounds of strain that we would associate with any piece of hard physical
labour.
Doctors were responsible for some of this hysteria, I’m sorry to say. The stories the
pregnant woman heard from friends and relatives who had already been through the
birthing process also contributed to it. Believe me: if you are told that some experience is
going to hurt, it will hurt. Most pain is in the mind, and when a woman absorbs the idea that the act of giving birth is excruciatingly painful – when she gets this information from
her mother, her sisters, her married friends, and her physician – that woman has been
mentally prepared to feel great agony.
Even after only six years’ practice, I had become used to seeing women who were
trying to cope with a twofold problem: not just the fact that they were pregnant and must
plan for the new arrival, but also the fact – what most of them saw as a fact, anyway – that they had entered the valley of the shadow of death. Many were actually trying to put their affairs in coherent order so that if they should die, their husbands would be able to carry on without them.