Midwives (19 page)

BEDFORD: Navy blue. And the snowflakes around the shoulders and collar are white.

HASTINGS: But it’s mostly navy blue?

BEDFORD: Mostly.

HASTINGS: (shows sweater to jury and puts it on evidence cart) We’ve established that Veil was born sometime between six-fifteen and six-twenty in the morning. Correct?

BEDFORD: Correct.

HASTINGS: Did you sleep at all the night before?

BEDFORD: No, I did not.

HASTINGS: Had you napped the day before? In the afternoon, maybe?

BEDFORD: No.

HASTINGS: Do you remember what time you got up the day before? Thursday?

BEDFORD: Not exactly. But it was probably around six-thirty.

HASTINGS: So you’d been up all night when your son was born?

BEDFORD: That’s right.

HASTINGS: In fact, you’d been awake for just about twenty-four hours.

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: Were your eyes tired?

BEDFORD: I don’t remember thinking they were.

HASTINGS: Might they have been?

TANNER: Objection.

DORSET: I’ll allow it.

HASTINGS: After being awake for twenty-four hours, might your eyes have been tired?

BEDFORD: It’s possible.

HASTINGS: Thank you. Now, you’ve told the court that you think you may have seen this bit of blood spurt, despite the fact that you were almost seven feet away when it happened. Am I correct?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: And despite the fact that your wife’s stomach was covered in shadow. Correct?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: And despite the fact that you would have been seeing this blood against the backdrop of a navy blue ski sweater. Right?

BEDFORD: Yes, but—

HASTINGS: And despite the fact that you had been awake all night long. No, not just all night. A full twenty-four hours. Is that the testimony you actually want the jury to believe?

BEDFORD: I know what I saw.

DORSET: Does counsel have any further questions for the witness?

HASTINGS: Yes.

DORSET: Then please proceed.

HASTINGS: Did you believe your wife was dead when you went to the window?

BEDFORD: Oh, yes.

HASTINGS: Did you love her?

BEDFORD: Of course.

HASTINGS: Were you sad?

BEDFORD: Good Lord, yes!

HASTINGS: Were you very sad?

BEDFORD: Yes

HASTINGS: And was it in that frame of mind that you think you saw blood spurt?

BEDFORD: Yes, but I was not hysterical. I’m telling you, I know what I saw.

HASTINGS: And yet, did you make any effort—any effort at all—to stop Sibyl when you saw the blood?

BEDFORD: No, as I told Mr. Tanner, I thought it was normal. I assumed my Charlotte had passed away, and this was just … just what the body did …

Stephen had told my parents while they were discussing strategy the night before that there would be two issues with Asa’s testimony: what the man
could
have seen, and what the man
would
have seen. Stephen was firmly convinced that no husband in his right mind would actually have brought himself to witness a knife going into his dead wife’s belly, and that was the real reason Asa had gone to the window. But first, he told my parents, he would cast doubt upon what Asa could have seen from the bedroom that morning.

Stephen’s cross-examination of the reverend began right after lunch and continued until we recessed for the day. There were moments that afternoon—brief but thrilling—when I was convinced with the confidence of a teenager that Stephen had persuaded every soul in the courtroom that it wasn’t logical to believe Asa Bedford would actually have watched his wife’s cesarean, and it was unlikely he could have seen blood spurt even if illogic had somehow prevailed. No man in Asa’s position, I told myself, could be completely sure of what he had seen, and—perhaps more important—no man would have been willing to watch.

But when the cross-examination was over, the fact remained that Asa Bedford was still a clergyman: In our corner of the Kingdom in 1981, this meant his words had weight. Great weight, despite the eccentricities of his church’s dogma. I thought Stephen’s cross-examination had been wonderful, but when we all went to our separate homes for dinner, I nevertheless feared one cross-examination—even a good one—could not undo a week of damaging medical testimony and the memories of the minister.

When girls are little, their dolls are likely to be babies, not Barbies.

So said Stephen Hastings. Stephen, of course, had no children.

But this didn’t stop him from having strong opinions about how children thought and what they believed. After all, he said one night when my father challenged him, he had been one himself. Stephen would readily admit that he hadn’t the foggiest notion of how one should raise a child—how to discipline one, or reward one, or simply smother one with love—but he insisted he understood well the logic that informed a child’s mind. A girl’s mind as well as a boy’s.

And Stephen was convinced that little girls loved baby dolls—plastic infants that demanded no maintenance. No rocking, no feeding, no changing, no watching. No work. Only mock howls, play colic, pretend pangs of hunger. Imaginary dirty diapers. Make-believe mess. Eventually, he said, baby dolls would drop off the child’s radar screen. Older dolls might or might not, depending upon whether the little girl discovered Barbie and Skipper and Ken. But plastic babies—and the instinctive desire to nurture something small and needy—did. Some girls got the nurture bug back when they began puberty, and used baby-sitting as a substitute. Others didn’t rediscover the desire to mother until they were adults themselves, and the primordial need to dispose of the diaphragm and continue the species overwhelmed all reason.

And then, of course, there were those girls who became mid-wives: girls who could not get enough of the tiniest of babies—the newborn—girls who would grow into women who absolutely reveled in the magnificent but messy process of birth.

As spring became summer and Stephen steeped himself in the culture of home birth, he concluded that the principal difference between the woman who becomes an ob-gyn and the woman who becomes a midwife had less to do with education or philosophy or upbringing than it did with the depth of her appreciation for the miracle of labor and for life in its moment of emergence. Women who became doctors viewed themselves as physicians first, ob-gyns second. He felt that when these girls began focusing seriously on what they wanted to be when they grew up—in high school or college—they probably decided originally that they simply wanted to be doctors. Then, perhaps in medical school, they narrowed in on obstetrics.

Those girls who became midwives, on the other hand, knew midwifery was their calling at a very early age, or—as my mother’s path suggested—had one profound, life-changing experience involving birth that pulled them in. Stephen was adamant that the women who became ob-gyns loved babies no less than midwives, but they were the type who were more likely at a young age to trade dolls that one dressed for toy cribs for dolls that one dressed for pretend formals.

Certainly Stephen was on to something in my case, at least when it came to dolls. My dolls stayed babies barely beyond my arrival in first grade; almost overnight that year they became a small world of Barbies obsessed with clothing and cars and the color of their hair. I even had a Nurse Barbie, although to be honest she spent most of her time with Ken with her clothes off.

Yet did I become an obstetrician simply because I wanted to be a doctor, and I happened to grow up in a house that made me comfortable with the anatomic terrain? I doubt it. And after watching the way some ob-gyns clinically picked my mother apart in the courthouse—using the third person as if she weren’t sitting merely a half-dozen or so yards away—it’s arguable I might have developed such a visceral distaste for the entire profession that I would have become anything but a baby doctor.

To this day, some of my mother’s friends think I’ve betrayed her by becoming an ob-gyn. There are two midwives in Vermont who won’t speak to me, or to the midwives who use me as their backup physician. But as I’ve said to all those midwives from my mother’s generation with whom I’ve remained friends, or to those midwives of my generation with whom I’ve become friends, my choice of profession was neither an indictment of my mother’s profession nor a slap at her persecutors. Clearly her cross was a factor in my decision—all my C-sections have been upon inarguably living women, each one properly anesthetized and prepared for the procedure—but as a friend of mine who’s a psychiatrist says, motives don’t matter: Most of the time we don’t even know what our motives are. And while I learned from my mother that how babies come into this world indeed matters, I learned from her detractors the ineluctable fact that most babies come into this world in hospitals. In my opinion, I do a lot of good in delivery rooms and ORs, and while I don’t use an herb like blue cohosh, I’ve never once had a prenatal exam that took less than half an hour. I get to know my mothers well.

Stephen brought in the specialists fast, even before my mother was charged with a crime. In addition to a photographer to chronicle the cuts and bruises my mother received crawling around the ice by her car, he immediately hired an accident reconstructionist to examine the slope and width of the Bedfords’ driveway. He wanted to be sure there could be no doubt in a jury’s mind that my mother had done everything humanly possible to try and transfer Mrs. Bedford to the hospital the night that she died, but the driveway had been a mess and the roads impassable: My mother did what she did because she hadn’t a choice.

And he probably spent entire days on the phone those first weeks, tracking down midwives around the country who’d been tried for one reason or another—practicing medicine without a license, illegal possession of regulated drugs—and interviewing their lawyers. He found forensic pathologists and obstetricians who could serve as our expert witnesses should they be needed, some willing to come from as far away as Texas.

And although Stephen may not have been particularly interested in the specifics of how high blood might spurt, there were some medical issues that mattered to him greatly—including, of course, Charlotte Fugett Bedford’s cause of death. Stephen wanted to be sure that we had our explanation for why the woman had died, especially after the autopsy was complete and it was clear that the State was going to contend there had been no cerebral aneurysm, and that the cause of death was therefore Sibyl Danforth.

With the help of his specialists, in those first weeks Stephen began developing lists: long litanies of the complications that can occur in any birth, home or hospital; anecdotes from my mother’s professional history that demonstrated her unusually high standards of care; incidents that suggested that the medical community had a vendetta against home birth, and my mother was merely a scapegoat—tragic, but convenient.

The specialist who became most involved with us as a family, however, actually knew as little about home birth in the beginning as Stephen. She was, in fact, more of a generalist, since her specialty was getting information. Patty Dunlevy was a private investigator, the state’s first female PI. Stephen Hastings chose her as his investigator first and foremost, he said, because she was without question the best in Vermont. But given the issues surrounding my mother’s case, we all understood the fact that she was a woman wouldn’t hurt either.

Patty fast became a role model of sorts for Rollie McKenna and me. We met her together, on a Wednesday afternoon less than a week after Charlotte Bedford had died. The two of us were grooming Witch Grass in the section of the McKennas’ paddock nearest the road when Patty’s white car—a squat but sleek foreign thing caked with mud, a good-sized ding on the door, a spiderweb crack in the windshield—squealed to a stop in the dirt by the fence. The woman driving leaned across the empty passenger seat, pulled off the mirrored sunglasses she’d been wearing, and rolled down the window to ask if either of us knew where someone named Sibyl Danforth lived.

New paranoias die even harder than old habits (especially when the paranoia’s grounded in reality), and my immediate fear was that this woman was a reporter. So despite the mistake I had made only two days before when Stephen Hastings appeared at our front door, I responded to the woman’s question with an inquiry of my own.

“Does she know you’re coming?” I asked warily.

“Sure does. You must be her daughter.”

“What makes you think so?”