Fortune's Rocks (55 page)
“No mother present?” Haskell asks.
Olympia shakes her head.
Haskell narrows his eyes. “Tell me this is not what I think it is.”
“I do not know. I have had the same thought. I pray not. The girl refuses to say who the father is, but that could be for any number of reasons.”
In the eight years they have been working together, she and Haskell have attended incestuous births before. Once they birthed a woman who made no attempt to hide her obvious physical affection for her brother, a situation that rattled Haskell no end.
“What is the father’s name?”
“Colton.”
She bends to the girl. “Lydia, this is Dr. Haskell,” she says as the girl is awakened by another pain.
In answer, the girl grits her teeth and makes again the short rhythmic grunts.
Haskell lifts her birthing skirt and examines her.
“I am not sure about the pelvis,” he says. “But it is definitely near time. How did you get here?”
“Josiah.”
“The Reverend Milton called you?”
“Yes, I tried to reach you at the clinic. Josiah said he would stop by to see if he could find you. Apparently the father only went to the minister after his daughter had been in labor more than ten hours. I think they thought they could manage the birth themselves.”
Haskell shakes his head. In synchronous movements — which are the same, yet never exactly the same — Haskell slides the girl down along the bed, lifts her knees, and gently secures her ankles to the bedposts while Olympia props her up into a half-sitting position with pillows and sacking behind her. As she does this, she speaks constantly to the girl so that she will not be unduly afraid. Earlier, during a respite from the contractions, Olympia explained to Lydia the procedures that would happen, having surmised, rightly, that the girl had no idea whatsoever about the birth to come. Even so, the child looks frightened half out of her mind, simply from the pain if nothing else.
“She can bear down now,” Haskell says.
“Lydia,” Olympia instructs. “Strain as if at stool.”
The girl strains. She grunts and pants for breath. And then, on Olympia’s instructions, she repeats the process. And then again. And then again.
“The head is presenting,” Haskell says after a time. “I shall not need the forceps after all. Lydia, bear down hard now. Push with all your might.”
The girl screams as if she were being torn apart. Outside by the car, the father freezes. The head is born, and Haskell passes his finger around the infant’s neck to find out whether the navel-string is wound around it. “Lydia, bear down hard now,” Haskell commands, this time with some urgency in his voice. He pulls on the cord, loosens it, and slips it over the baby’s head.
“Now, massage the uterus,” Haskell says to Olympia.
Olympia places her hand upon the lower portion of the girl’s abdomen and presses upon the uterus. The infant, slippery and purple, emerges into the world. Haskell grasps the child firmly with both hands and immediately attends to it, suctioning the mucus from the mouth. Olympia hears the infant, a boy, make his first astonished cry. On the bed, the girl weeps, a particular kind of weeping Olympia has seen often but never witnessed outside the childbed, a combination of relief from pain and joy and exhaustion and something else — fear about the days and nights to come. In the doorway, the father is white-faced.
While Haskell attends to the child, Olympia massages the girl’s uterus into a hard ball to prevent flooding and tries to provoke a contraction forceful enough to expel the placenta. After Haskell has cut the cord, Olympia gently pulls on it, and the afterbirth comes away. “Lydia, stop,” Olympia says, twisting the afterbirth round and round upon itself and withdrawing it. She sets it aside to be examined later. She stands.
“Let me,” she says, lifting the infant out of Haskell’s arms. She receives the child into the flannel, and it seems, as it always does, a most elemental gesture, to take a child from a man.
• • •
Olympia tucks the robe around her legs and ties the scarf over her hat and under her chin. The ride is jarring from the ruts as they enter the village and turn onto the main road out of town.
“I shall go back tomorrow,” Olympia says.
“The girl has no one?”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“I did not like the look of the father.”
“Nor I. I shall have to call Reverend Milton about the family. John, I think she may need to be taken in.”
“Is there room?”
“Yes, just. Eunice will be going to Portsmouth tomorrow.”
“As tutor to the Johnsons?”
“Yes.”
“And the infant?”
“My dear, the ‘infant’ is a year and a half.”
“Is she? Has it been that long since Eunice came?”
They enter the city limits of Ely Falls. Since the mills have begun to close, the city is slightly less bustling than it used to be. If Ely Falls goes the way of Lowell and Manchester, it will not be long before they will pass empty boardinghouses and collapsed mill buildings. They head east onto the Ely road.
“How was the clinic?” Olympia asks.
“Much the same. Though I did see a dreadful case of accidental poisoning by oxalic acid. The woman had mistaken it for Epsom salts and given it to her husband. The man died within twenty minutes of reaching the clinic. It was terrifying to watch his struggle, Olympia. The pain in his esophagus and stomach must have been beyond imagining. I tried magnesia and chalk, but he was too far gone for that.”
“Are you sure it was an accident?” Olympia asks.
Haskell turns briefly in his wife’s direction. “My dear, you do have a devious mind,” he says, reaching for her leg. “Well, the police are bound to investigate any accidental death. Also, a man came by trying to sell me an X-ray machine.”
“And will you buy it?”
“Yes, I think I might. I am rather convinced by the research.”
He massages her thigh through her skirt. “And Tucker came round today,” he adds.
“Did he?” Olympia asks.
“He needed to discuss some matters having to do with fundraising. He said he was getting married.”
“To whom?”
“A woman named Alys Keep.”
“The poetess?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“How extraordinary.”
“He asked after you.”
“Did he?”
“You know, I think he has a special fondness for you. There is something in the way he inquires about you that is always a little less than casual.”
Haskell withdraws his hand to shift the gears, and as he does so, she thinks about meeting Tucker and about her custody suit and about the terrible months afterward. The nights she roamed the house, crying for the boy. Haskell would hear her and come find her and then ease her back into bed. It was Haskell who finally, one day when she was away, dismantled the room, taking the children’s furniture back to the attic.
He pulls suddenly to the side of the road and makes a turn onto a narrow lane. She glances out the window and sees that they are in the marshes. He switches off the motor.
“John?” she asks, surprised that they have stopped.
For answer, he turns toward her and unfastens the top three buttons of her blouse. He tucks his fingers into her corset.
She laughs. “John?” she asks again.
“In a moment, we shall be at the house,” he says, “and will be surrounded by twenty-three girls and will not have a moment to ourselves. And then I shall have to go to the clinic, and when I come home, I shall probably be so exhausted that I will fall asleep immediately.”
“No, you will not. That is just an excuse.”
“Do I need an excuse?” he asks, massaging her breast.
“No, perhaps not,” she says.
“We were here once, in the marshes,” he says, unbuttoning her blouse further.
She can see and feel that day as vividly as she can the polished wood and leather of the interior of the car. The wet seeping along the length of her skirt. The whomp and flutter of a bird’s wing. The sun stuttering through the grasses. It was the first time she understood the nature of sexual passion.
His beard brushes against the skin of her chest, and she can smell the natural oil of his hair. They do not remove their coats. They might be young lovers, she thinks, with nowhere to go.
• • •
They park in the driveway and enter, as they always do, through the back door, Haskell carrying both of their satchels. Maria is on the telephone in the hallway, reading a grocery list into the mouthpiece.
“Six dozen eggs, four pounds of that cheese you sent us on Monday, seven chickens . . . Can you wait a minute?”
Maria puts her hand over the mouthpiece and turns toward Olympia. “I am just calling in the groceries to Goldthwaite’s,” she says. “You have a visitor.”
“I do?” Olympia asks, unwinding her muffler.
“A Mr. Philbrick.”
“How extraordinary,” she says.
“I shall just run up and change my shirt,” Haskell says, hanging his coat upon a hook, “and then I shall come in and say hello.” He checks his pocket watch. “But I am needed at the clinic. Ask Rufus to stay to dinner. I shall be back by then.”
Olympia watches her husband walk through the kitchen, snatching a biscuit from under a cloth on his way. She guesses he has not eaten since breakfast.
“Maria, did you give Mr. Philbrick tea?”
Maria, who came to them only seven months ago, has proven herself the ablest of all the girls and thus has been rewarded with the job of assistant to Lisette.
“Yes.”
“And where is Josiah?”
“In his office with the accounts.”
Olympia tucks a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. When she opens the swinging door, the cacophony of the house greets her like a rush of warm air. She likes to think of it as organized cacophony, though often it is not. She walks past the dining room, remodeled to hold two long refectory tables, and then past a sitting room in which Lisette is reading from a medical text. Around her, in a circle, are eight young women, some merely girls still, between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, some Franco, some Irish, some Yankee, all pregnant. All have been dismissed by their families. When it is their time, the girls will give birth upstairs and then will stay on for as long as they need to. When they have recuperated, they will contribute to the household by assuming various jobs — in the nursery or with the laundry or with the meals. The only rule is that they may not abandon their infants.
As Olympia makes her way toward the study, she remembers the night she first had the idea, sitting on the bed in the room with the blue forget-me-nots on the walls. In the months following the custody suit, Haskell helped her to bring the idea to life, even as he was starting up his own clinic in Ely Falls. Haskell and she moved into her mother’s old rooms, refurbished the other rooms to accommodate young mothers with newborns, and gradually, over a year’s time, took in girls whom Haskell either saw at the clinic or came to his attention. By the following year, girls and their families were begging for places, and still Haskell and Olympia continued to remodel. In the summer, when the weather turned fine, they were going to have the chapel converted into a dormitory.
But they have not had their own child. And they have been told they may not ever. Not long ago, in Boston, a specialist suggested to them that Olympia’s infertility was probably a result of her having had to give birth at such a tender age.
She turns the corner and finds Philbrick in the study, once her father’s, now her own. Still robust at sixty, Philbrick is dressed in a dark maroon jacket with plaid trousers. Ever the dandy, she thinks, eyeing as well the empty sandwich plate on the side table.
“Olympia,” he says, standing.
“Mr. Philbrick. Please sit.”
The room is considerably more feminine than it was when it was her father’s. Books still line one wall, but on the other, Olympia has put her pictures — the paintings and drawings by local artists she began collecting half a dozen years ago: a Childe Hassam, a Claude Legny, an Appleton Brown, an Ellen Robbins. A red and white silk settee has replaced her father’s old captain’s chair, but she still has his desk. And she has never replaced the objets — the malachite paperweight, the bejeweled cross, and the shells — that remind her of the days when her father would sit in his chair, reading one of the hundreds of books that were warping in the damp.
“It has been too long,” she says, sitting.
“You have an extraordinary household,” he says.
“It is the people within it who make it so,” she says.
“I have long wanted to see it. Of course, I have heard much about it. How many do you have here?”
“We have twenty-three girls. Eight of them have not yet given birth. The others will stay on as long as they need to. We have had several girls three years now.”
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