Midwives (27 page)

—from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

NEWPORT SITS AT the southern tip of Lake Memphremagog, a thin, cold lake that stretches thirty miles north to south. Perhaps a third of the lake is in the United States, while the rest is north of the border in Canada.

Before my mother’s trial began, I hated that lake. By the time it was over, I loathed it.

As a child there were some obvious reasons to despise it. It was hard to spell and impossible to pronounce. I know now that the name is the Abenaki term for “beautiful waters,” but in grade school it was merely a long chain of syllables, at once incomprehensible and unpleasant.

Even as a teenager, however, even when I was no longer intimidated by the phonetics of the word, I disliked the lake. It always looked to me like the sort of lake that liked to swallow swimmers and small boats whole. Those few times when I was taken swimming there with my friends, its waters always felt more frigid than its neighbors’—especially inviting little places like Crystal or Echo Lake—and its currents more dangerous.

And I don’t think I ever saw the lake when its waters weren’t choppy.

There were also myths about Memphremagog, some involving a giant lizard much more menacing than the benign monster said by some to swim in Lake Champlain, and some involving a particularly gruesome thing that could live as comfortably on the shore as it did underneath those dark waters, and would mutate into the form of its prey: fish or dogs or baby deer. That’s how it killed them. Although I never believed any of these tales, they did reinforce in my mind my conviction that the lake was an unhappy place of which I wanted no part.

Most people aren’t like me, however; most people think highly of Lake Memphremagog. And most people who spend any time at all in the courtroom of the Orleans County Courthouse are very glad the city of Newport meets the lake where it does. The courthouse sits on the top of the bluff on Main Street, and the courtroom is on the third—and, therefore, highest—floor of the century-old stone-and-brick box. The courtroom has three monstrously large windows facing the lake, a mere three blocks to the north. Jurors are granted a panoramic view of the waters, and the shapes and summits of Owl’s Head and Bear Mountain in the distance. I imagine in trials less demanding or notorious than my mother’s, jurors have stared themselves to sleep as they gazed at those waters.

Even during my mother’s trial, however, jurors on occasion used Lake Memphremagog as a place upon which to focus when they wanted to be sure to avoid eye contact with my mother, or when an exceptionally grisly piece of evidence was on display. For me, this was just one more reason to hate the lake.

As the defendant, my mother had a spectacular view of the waters: She and Stephen shared a table by the window, and Stephen always took the seat toward the center of the courtroom so that he could rise and pace without having to climb around my mother or draw undue attention toward her. And as the defendant’s daughter, I sat in the front bench—the one directly behind her—which meant the lake was an unavoidable and inescapable presence in the corners of my eyes as well. Even when my father took the “window seat,” the shadow of the lake remained with me: The windows were that tall and wide and clean.

Fortunately, my mother did not share my dislike for Lake Memphremagog. With an awareness of how the media approached her trial and the role image would play in its history, she said something to my father and Stephen and me one night when we were leaving the courthouse that indicated in her mind the lake was not merely an impartial witness to the events occurring on the third floor of a building a few blocks from its shore, it was actually an ally of hers of sorts. The sun was low as we walked to our cars, but it had not yet set. It was probably close to five-thirty.

“Look where she’s standing,” my mother said, and she motioned toward the reporter from the CBS affiliate in Burlington who was speaking at the moment to a TV camera, “and look what’s going to be in the background. That’s where they all stand. Have you noticed? Day after day, every single one of them. Even that lady from the Boston station who only spent an afternoon here. Isn’t that something? They all stand right over there somewhere.”

We had not noticed it before—at least I hadn’t—but we all understood instantly what my mother meant: The woman was standing across the street from the courthouse, instead of in front of the building itself, or on its steps. Someone—either the reporter herself or her partner with the camera—had apparently decided they would rather have the lake in the background than the Orleans County Courthouse.

“Everyone who isn’t here who thinks about this will remember that water,” my mother continued, “everyone who sees it on TV. Tomorrow or next week or whenever, that’s what they’ll remember when they picture this whole thing. That lake. That amazing and mysterious lake.”

Any hopes Stephen had that the trial would not commence before Christmas had evaporated by the time the Labor Day weekend approached. We all knew it would be a fall affair. And only two days after Labor Day itself, the first Wednesday of September, we were officially informed of the date of the trial. It would begin Monday, September 29, and Stephen expected it would last at least two weeks. Maybe three.

During that unusually hot, arid summer—a July that wilted flower gardens early and stunted the corn, and an August that dried up a good many of our neighbors’ wells—the case never lost what Stephen had referred to once around my mother as its “prosecutorial energy.”

If anything, that person named Tanner seemed to me more rabid than ever as autumn arrived, as interested in persecuting my mother as he was in prosecuting her. And while in hindsight I know this was largely the perception of a teenager who didn’t understand that “deposition” is merely a lawyer’s term for court-sanctioned harassment, or the ways both the defense and the prosecution leverage court appearances for pretrial publicity, I know also there was some validity to my paranoia: Bill Tanner really was furious, Bill Tanner really was out for blood.

Neither Tanner nor his staff could believe that my mother had rejected the State’s offer of a mere year in jail (of which she’d probably only serve six or seven months) and six years of probation in return for a guilty plea on the charge of involuntary manslaughter. If six years on probation sounded like a long time, they still thought it was a tremendously magnanimous and merciful offer: Despite the fact that Charlotte Bedford was dead, my mother would go to prison for barely half a year. Yes, she was expected to give up midwifery, but to them, that was a small price. It just didn’t get any better than this, they must have thought; a deal couldn’t get much sweeter.

Meanwhile, when the rumor of Tanner’s offer circulated throughout the medical community, many doctors—especially obstetricians—were livid. Absolutely livid. The whole idea that a hippie midwife had killed some woman with a bedroom C-section (and in their diatribes, this was indeed the essential scenario) and might only go to jail for a few months had a good number of physicians enraged beyond reason. It seemed to me that some of them were spending more time writing editorials or letters to newspapers than they were practicing medicine, and Stephen took to calling the State Medical Board “the Furies,” a shorthand reference even I understood.

Looking back, I still find it astonishing that so many doctors were so clearly unwilling to heed their own advice about stress.

From the window in my parents’ bedroom, the one that faced our backyard and—in the far distance—Mount Chittenden, I watched my mother and Stephen sit back in two Adirondack chairs in the corner of the lawn by the porch. They’d moved the chairs so they were side by side and they could see the sun set through the damp fall air.

“Being pretty can be a disadvantage with a jury,” Stephen was saying, and he stretched his legs through the leaves on the ground by his feet.

“You think too much. You think too much about the damnedest things.”

“That’s my job.”

“Well, I don’t think we need to worry that I’m so pretty we’re at a disadvantage.”

“It will be a factor in the voir dire. That’s all I’m saying.”

“The what?”

“The jury selection.”

“The way your mind works. Unbelievable.”

“I hope that’s a compliment.”

“I’m not sure. I just find it incredible.”

“My mind?”

“This process. The very idea that because you think I’m pretty—”

“It’s the idea that the jury will think you’re pretty. What I think is irrelevant.”

“Hah!”

“They will, Sibyl. You are an undeniably pretty woman. Undeniably. And with some jurors that will be an asset. With others, it will be a problem we’ll have to overcome.”

My mother and Stephen dangled their arms over the sides of their chairs, and their fingers picked at the grass just this side of dormancy and the fallen leaves that had begun to dry. Sometimes the tips of their fingers touched, occasionally the backs of their hands grazed. I wondered if they were savoring those brief, brief seconds when their skin brushed together.

“You’re really going to let Connie watch?” my grandmother asked my mother one Saturday in mid-September, as if I weren’t there having lunch with the two of them at our kitchen table.

“We’re really going to let Connie watch,” my mother said.

I imagine in her younger days my grandmother had been an extremely tolerant woman. Her daughter, after all, had dropped out of Mount Holyoke to live with an older man on Cape Cod, and then spent a winter with the Black Panthers in Boston. When Sibyl had finally returned to Vermont, she got pregnant before she got married, and she’d done both very young. And even if this
had
been “the sixties”—an umbrella rubric for a variety of excesses and an excuse for all sorts of otherwise antisocial behaviors—one might have expected a certain amount of mother-daughter tension. But they always insisted there had been none, a point of family history my father says he can corroborate from at least the moment he entered my mother’s life.

By the time Charlotte Fugett Bedford died, however, my grandmother had grown more conservative. Her own husband, my grandfather, had died ten years earlier, and a decade of living alone had made her slightly skittish, wary, and quick to frown or find fault. And, of course, the woman who watched her daughter on trial was considerably older than the woman whose daughter had dropped out of college: She had aged from her early fifties to her mid-sixties, and she was no more exempt from the anxieties of age than anyone else.

Nevertheless, my Nonny—my name for her, even at fourteen—was still a warm and energetic woman when I was growing up. My mother’s tendency to hug friends on sight was at least partly genetic, and I’ll never lose my love for the vaguely floral, vaguely antiseptic smell of my Nonny’s hair spray: I’d get a strong whiff of it with every embrace.

In any case, when it was clear that the charges against my mother would not be settled without a trial, Nonny tried hard to convince my parents to keep me away from the courtroom. She thought it would be a scarring experience, and while there were certainly people attending the trial who would have agreed with her—especially in light of my eventual breakdown—my parents knew how desperately I wanted to be there. Moreover, I think they realized that it would be equally scarring for me to hear important details second-hand in the girls’ bathroom at school. And so it didn’t matter that I’d miss two (and perhaps three) weeks of classes; it didn’t matter that I’d see all sorts of frightening pieces of evidence; it didn’t matter that I’d hear truly terrible things said about my mother, or have to watch a variety of witnesses in all likelihood sob on the stand.

No one, after all, expected Asa Bedford to keep his composure throughout the entire proceedings, or Anne Austin to endure without tears what Stephen himself said would be a “withering search-and-destroy, free-fire, relentlessly savage” cross-examination. And I think both my father and Stephen had begun to wonder by September how even my mother would do. We could all see she was growing quiet and morose—not so much gloomy, as tired beyond the rejuvenating powers of sleep—and in their own ways they were constantly trying to rally her spirits.

Yet absolutely none of this mattered, because my parents understood how badly I wanted to attend the trial. It seemed to me I had a moral responsibility to be present; in my mind, my appearance was an important show of solidarity with my mother.

Besides, Stephen wanted me there.

“Stephen thinks Connie here will be very helpful,” my mother said to her mother, and she gave my arm a small squeeze.
Don’t you worry about Nonny
, that squeeze said:
You’re going
.

“Helpful? Helpful how?”

“Connie will be a constant reminder for the jury that I’m not just some faceless defendant. I’m not just some midwife. I’m a mother. I have a daughter, a family.”

Nonny had turned the last carrots from her vegetable garden into a salad with raisins and walnuts, and while the carrots were supposed to be shredded, the blender my grandmother used was older than I, and the salad still had a great many large orange chunks. I watched Nonny methodically chew one of those pieces while she thought about my mother’s explanation, and noticed there was some dry dirt on the cuffs of her light-blue cardigan. From her garden, I thought. She’d probably harvested the carrots we were eating that very morning.