Midwives (10 page)

Clarissa Roberson’s mother, Maureen, is a very together woman. She was a hospital baby, and so were all of her children (including, of course, Clarissa)
.

But David Roberson was born at home, and he wanted his children born at home. And so there little Clarissa was, all 137 pounds of her—137 pounds at nine months and a week!—laboring away on the bed in her bedroom, and her mom was right there beside David and me, helping her daughter through it
.

And it was a long labor, and Maureen must be close to sixty now. But she was terrific. Tireless
.

And while I’ve had lots of moms present at their daughters’ deliveries, watching as their little girls made them grandmothers, I’ve never had one who wanted to be as involved as Maureen. Or involved in such an astonishingly loving and knowing and supportive sort of way. Some mothers get a little queasy or nervous when their own babies are in labor, and I think that’s totally understandable. The surges can be breathtaking and scary, and the blood can be intimidating. I think that’s why a lot of the mothers who help their daughters have babies limit themselves to things like brewing the tea, or cheering them on from the head of the bed
.

But not Maureen. She was right in there with me. At one point between surges I put the Johnson’s down to ask David a question, and when I turned around, there was Maureen up to her elbows in baby oil as she massaged her little girl’s perineum
.

It was beautiful. Incredibly, incredibly beautiful
.

—
from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER SAID VERY LITTLE in the hours between when I returned home from school and when the state troopers arrived.

She sat on the couch in the den in her nightgown, with a quilt draped over her shoulders. The little room smelled like cinnamon from the herbal tea she was sipping. Whenever the phone rang—and it must have rung three or four times that afternoon—my father answered it and dealt with the caller.

About five-thirty the sun broke through once and for all, not long before it would disappear for the night into the western horizon. But for a few minutes sunlight filled the den, and the fire my father had started in the woodstove earlier in the day seemed unnecessary.

Twice my mother asked me how school had been that day, but I knew neither time she heard my response.

Once she asked my father for more aspirin for the pain in her ankle, and when he brought her the pills and a glass of cold water, he had to remind her that she herself had requested them.

“Let’s have that ankle X-rayed tomorrow,” my father suggested.

“Yes. Let’s,” my mother said. She rarely looked at my father or me. She stared at the fire through the glass windows in the woodstove, she stared at the tea in her mug. Sometimes she put her tea down on the table by the couch and looked at the cuts on her hands.

“Was that Anne?” my mother asked my father one of the times he returned from answering the phone in the kitchen.

“No. It was just Sara. She was hoping you could bake a cake for the fire department’s potluck next weekend.”

“The fund-raiser.”

“Right.”

“She hadn’t heard?”

“Apparently not.”

But most of the time the three of us sat in silence. For some reason I was afraid to leave the house, and I was afraid to be upstairs alone in my room. And so I sat with my parents in the den. I believe we all understood on some level that we were waiting for something to happen; we all had an intuitive sense that something well beyond our control was about to occur.

My father and I saw the state police cruiser rolling slowly up our driveway Friday night around dusk, and I believe that we saw it at about the same time. The rack of lights along the roof was off, but I don’t think anyone can see a green police car coast to a stop by her house and not be alarmed. Especially the daughter of ex-hippies Rand and Sibyl Danforth.

I was flattening ground meat into hamburgers, and my father was beside me, reaching into the cabinet for a skillet. My mother was still in the den, unmoving and silent but awake.

“I’ll see to that,” my father said quietly to me, perhaps hoping he could shoo the police away as if they were a pair of vacuum cleaner salesmen.

I assumed I would have to remain by the counter beside the sink, hoping to overhear at least the key details, but my mother heard the knock on the door and grew more alert: She put down her tea and sat up, and craned her head toward the door. When she realized who had come to our house, she rose from the cushions and pillows into which she had burrowed, and somehow found the strength to amble into the front hall. And so I ventured there, too.

“I really believe this can wait until tomorrow,” my father was saying.

“I’m sorry, it can’t,” one of the officers said, although his voice suggested that he certainly understood my father’s desire to give my mother a night of peace. “But I promise,” he added, “this won’t take too long.”

The officers were tall, and both well into middle age. One had a white mustache trimmed so severely it looked a bit menacing. The other had the sort of sharp, deep creases across his face that I always associated with farmers—the sort of wrinkles that come from driving a tractor into autumn winds for days and days at a time. Their jackets were buttoned against the March chill, their collars folded up around their necks. When the fellow who would do most of the talking that evening—the one with the mustache—noticed my mother and me approaching in the hallway behind my father, he removed his wide-brimmed trooper’s hat, and the other officer immediately did the same. They nodded at my mother as if they knew her, and I got the impression they’d probably met her at the Bedfords’ that morning.

It was just after six-thirty, and our porch light was on: Sometimes it would make the badges on their jackets sparkle.

“In that case, do you need to come in?” my father asked.

“We do, yes. But just for a few minutes.”

He motioned them inside, and they wiped their shiny black shoes diligently on the mat near the stairs. I tried to remind myself that these two powerful-looking men were not evil, focusing in my mind on the gentle way the one with the mustache had spoken to my father. They both wore wedding bands, which meant they had wives, and if they had wives, they probably had children. And if they had children, then they were fathers themselves. Just like my dad. Remove the troopers’ hats and the holsters, the guns and green jackets, and they were just regular old guys. There was no reason I should be frightened of them.

But, of course, I was.

“I’m Sergeant Leland Rhodes,” the one with the mustache began, “and this is Corporal Richard Tilley.”

“Rand Danforth,” my father said, extending his hand first to Rhodes and then to Tilley. When he turned, he saw my mother and me standing in the hallway behind him.

“Connie, why don’t you go upstairs. This shouldn’t take long,” he said, his voice even.

“I could finish cooking dinner,” I offered.

“You could, but you don’t have to,” he said, and I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder, pushing me gently (but without ambiguity) in the general direction of the stairs.

My mother made them coffee. That was the first thing that surprised me: I had barely reached the top of the stairs, and I heard her asking the state troopers if they would like some coffee or herbal tea. They both chose coffee, and while my father escorted the pair into the den, my mother went to the kitchen to make a pot.

The next day, I gather, Stephen Hastings would think that was one of the strangest things he had ever heard. “Coffee,” my father said the lawyer repeated over and over. “You made them coffee.”

The officers were courteous, and Sergeant Rhodes began by explaining that they were simply gathering information that evening about the tragedy my mother had witnessed.

“We just want to know what you saw,” Rhodes said, as if my mother were a mere spectator, someone who had happened to see two cars collide at an intersection. “We want you to tell us what happened, while the memories are still fresh.”

“I don’t think my memories of last night will ever go away,” my mother responded, and years later my father would tell me that one sentence made a huge difference in what happened next. Apparently my mother’s eyes grew watery as she spoke, and my father feared she might finally—and suddenly—break down. He became so fixated on her, so worried about her emotional well-being, that he failed to cut short the interview when he had the chance during the next exchange, or inform both the troopers and my mother that there would be no further conversation until they had an attorney present. He told me the idea had already begun to form in the back of his head that they would need a lawyer, but in his mind it would be to defend against a civil suit, not a criminal charge. Not the sort of felony that would bring state troopers by our house on a Friday night.

“That’s probably true, Mrs. Danforth, but Bill Tanner and I have both found over the years that some details are more … crisp when you talk about them right away,” Rhodes said.

“Bill Tanner?” my mother asked. “Why do I know that name?”

“He’s the state’s attorney for Orleans County. You met him this morning,” the sergeant answered.

Once the troopers had left, my father told my mother he hadn’t realized the state’s attorney had been at the Bedfords’ that morning. Either my mother had forgotten to tell him that detail or she hadn’t realized who William Tanner was—or why the fellow had joined the medical examiner at the Bedfords’ house.

And so when Rand Danforth interrupted with the question any husband-protector might ask in that situation, he asked it timidly, without conviction: “Should we have our attorney present?” he wondered aloud.

“Sure, if you’d like. But all we’re doing right now is filling in the blanks in the story,” Rhodes said, his voice casual and unconcerned.

Would things have ended differently if my mother had remained silent at that moment, or if my father had persevered—insisted, perhaps, that they postpone any discussions with the state police until they had an attorney present? It’s possible, but it isn’t likely.

In all fairness to my parents, even Stephen Hastings decided there was little that was particularly incriminating in the portion of the affidavit gathered that first evening. The troopers hadn’t known what was involved in a home birth, and so they hadn’t asked the sorts of questions that might have elicited long, informative, and damning responses: After Asa brought you the knife, did you examine Charlotte one last time to make sure she was dead? Did you check for a fetal heartbeat before cutting? Did you ask Asa for permission to slice open his wife?

Mostly the troopers had simply allowed my mother to tell her side of the story, to present what she believed had occurred. Stephen did make a pretrial issue of what he called the “interrogation,” but he also told us before the suppression hearing that the State would probably prevail—which it did.

Besides, my parents didn’t even have an attorney that night. They had used lawyers just twice before in their lives: once, almost a decade and a half earlier, to write their wills in the days immediately before I was born, and then a second time when my father started his own architectural firm and wanted a legal incorporation. They had used the same attorney on both occasions, an elderly friend of my grandmother who lived in St. Johnsbury and died soon after helping my father found his firm.

And the fact that the two troopers did not actively encourage my parents to have a lawyer present would actually prove helpful to Stephen in one small way when the case finally came to trial: He used that fact to help bolster his contention that the State had a vendetta against home birth, and was more interested in putting midwives out of business than protecting my mother’s civil liberties. The troopers did not have to “Mirandize” my mother at that moment or inform her of her rights, the judge had ruled, there was nothing illegal about the way they took her statement; but Stephen nevertheless was able to suggest that Rhodes’s portrayal of himself as a “good cop” that night was morally ambiguous at best.

In any event, my mother said both to the two police officers and to my father after he broached the idea of a lawyer, “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Her voice was incredulous, not defensive, as if she couldn’t believe an attorney would ever be necessary. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. What do you need to know?”

At some point soon after my mother started to speak, Corporal Richard Tilley began taking notes. He wrote fast to keep up with my mother, and the few questions his partner asked usually began, “Could you repeat that, please, Mrs. Danforth?”

Eventually Tilley filled eleven pages of lined yellow paper, and my mother’s story stretched from the moment early Thursday afternoon when Charlotte Bedford phoned her with the news that she was in labor to the time Friday morning when my mother leaned exhausted against a pay phone at North Country Hospital and called my father. The state troopers stayed in our den for over an hour, nodding and scribbling and sipping my parents’ coffee.