Midwives (11 page)

A little after seven-thirty, Sergeant Rhodes looked over at his partner’s pad. “And then you went home?” he asked my mother.

“No, then I went back to the Bedfords’. I had to get my car.”

“Oh, that’s right, it was still in the snowbank.”

“Sort of. The snowbank had begun to melt.”

“Who drove you there?”

“To the Bedfords’? I don’t remember his name. He worked for the rescue squad.”

“Your car was okay?”

“It was fine. The hardest part was backing around the police car.”

“There were troopers still on the scene?”

“I guess so. One of their cars was still there.”

“Did you speak to an officer?”

“I didn’t see one to speak to.”

“Were you alarmed?”

“Alarmed? Why would I have been alarmed?”

Rhodes apparently answered my mother’s question with a question of his own: “So you didn’t go into the house?”

“No.”

“You went straight home.”

“Yes. I went straight home. And then straight to bed.”

There was a long silence. Finally Rhodes took the pad from the corporal and passed it across the coffee table to my mother.

“Why don’t you read this, Mrs. Danforth, and make sure we have everything right,” he said, as Tilley handed my mother his pen.

My mother read through the pages, but she said later she didn’t read them particularly carefully. Most of the time she could decipher Tilley’s penmanship, but she was exhausted and so when she came across a word or a sentence that was incomprehensible, she just ignored it and moved on. Tilley had usually captured the gist of what she had said, and it seemed to her that was all that should matter at that point.

“Is the story accurate?” Rhodes asked her when she was through. “Did Richard here even come close?” he continued, smiling.

“It’s more or less what happened,” my mother said.

“Good, good,” Rhodes murmured. He then made the request of my mother that would finally lead both of my parents to realize they needed a lawyer, and they needed one right away. It didn’t matter that it was between seven-thirty and eight o’clock on a Friday evening; it didn’t matter that it was the start of a weekend. They needed an attorney. A criminal attorney. And they needed one immediately.

Nodding as if his request were small, a bit of minor and inconsequential protocol, Rhodes looked at the bookshelves over my mother’s shoulder and asked, “Would you swear to the truth of it for us, please? And then sign it?”

Charlotte spent a half hour today looking at all of the pictures of babies and moms on my wall. She’d noticed the photos during her very first visit, but today was the first time she really wanted to see them
.

“Look, Foogie,” she said to her little boy, pointing at the first photo ever taken of Louisa Walsh. “Maybe your baby sister will look like her.”

“Or maybe my baby brother will look like that one,” Foogie said, pointing at a picture of another baby he must have assumed was a boy. It wasn’t. He was actually looking at Betty Isham at three hours, wrapped in blue swaddling because that’s what her parents happened to have handy. Of course I didn’t tell Foogie that
.

Anyway, Charlotte says she wants a girl, Foogie says he wants a boy, and Asa just wants a healthy baby. Charlotte tells me that’s all Asa prays for from the birth: another healthy child. That’s all he says that matters. A healthy baby
.

Charlotte’s taking good care of herself. I’m sure he’ll get his wish
.

—
from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER DID SIGN the affidavit. My father tried to stop her, telling the troopers, “She’ll be happy to sign it once our attorney has reviewed it,” but my mother believed that she had done absolutely nothing wrong.

“I’ll sign it,” she said to my father, and she did, scrawling her name in large, proud letters along the bottom of the eleventh page.

Saturday morning my parents were up and around well before me. I struggled downstairs in my nightgown sometime around eight o’clock, and my mother and father were already fully dressed and finishing breakfast. Unlike most Saturdays, my father was wearing slacks and a necktie, and my mother was wearing a skirt and a blouse. She was sitting with her right leg stretched out straight, and even through her thick wool tights I could see how swollen her ankle had become.

“How did you sleep?” my mother asked me, her voice a forced attempt to be cheerful.

“Okay,” I mumbled, noting through my own morning fog that neither she nor my father looked particularly well rested. I imagined they had slept, but it had been fitful at best.

“Up to anything special today?” she continued.

I shook my head, suddenly self-conscious as I stood before them beside the refrigerator. Quickly I reached for the milk and a box of cereal and joined them at the kitchen table.

At that point I knew the basics of my parents’ agenda for that day, but none of the details. I knew they were seeing lawyers, little more. As they sipped their coffee, I was able to pick up the rest.

Friday night my father had spoken by phone to attorneys at three firms, two in Montpelier and one in Burlington. The pair of attorneys in Montpelier were casual friends of our family, the sorts of people my parents would see at big Christmas parties and town-wide summer picnics and whose company they probably enjoyed. But we weren’t especially close to either one, so my father’s phone calls had probably caught them off guard the night before. Nevertheless, each lawyer was happy to meet with my parents and try and understand if he could help them.

The third attorney was Stephen Hastings, a friend of Warren Birch, one of the Montpelier lawyers my parents were visiting that morning. Hastings was a young partner in a Burlington firm, and Birch thought he was an excellent criminal lawyer—something Birch suggested he himself wasn’t.

And so my parents’ plan was to meet with the two Montpelier-based attorneys before lunch and then see Hastings at his firm in Burlington in the afternoon. They left soon after I’d finished my breakfast, and I spent most of that day in a daze.

Tom Corts and I had been going steady by then for close to four months, although we hadn’t formalized the arrangement with anything as symbolic as an ID bracelet or ankle chain. In our part of Vermont, ID bracelets were passe by 1981, and the only girls who wore metal around their ankles were a trio of especially fast young things led by a newcomer to the Kingdom from Boston.

Tom and I were supposed to have gone to a dance together Friday night, a shindig at the American Legion post in Montpelier of all things. The Legionnaires had been holding “alcohol-free” dances every other Friday that winter for the high-school kids, hoping to decrease the number of us who drank too much before rolling our daddies’ pickups into ditches, or slamming our already-dented Novas into trees. Obviously I was years away from driving that spring, and the privilege still eluded Tom by five months. And, of course, we were nowhere near old enough to drink legally in Vermont.

But Tom’s friends in the tenth and eleventh grades had discovered that while the dances may have been alcohol-free in the Spartan dance hall inside the Post, there was almost always at least one unemployed quarry worker from Barre or laid-off lathe operator from the furniture factory in Morrisville hovering around the nearby convenience store who would buy a kid a six-pack if he could keep one or two of the beers for himself. And so small groups of us would stand in the shadows of the Legionnaires’ Post or the convenience store, stamping our feet to stay warm and holding chilled beers that were nowhere near as cold as the night air around us.

Usually one of my parents or Rollie’s mother would drive us to the dances that winter, but we always had one of Tom’s older brothers pick us up. We feared our breath or my babbling would give our drinking away. I’ve never held alcohol well, and in eighth grade it only took a beer and a half to give me the giggles.

I had not gone with Tom to the dance that Friday night, however, because I had suspected in school that I had best be home in the evening. By the time most of us started piling into school buses to go home at three, Tom had heard that one of Sibyl Danforth’s mothers had died. We discussed it briefly before each of our last classes began, and his take was at once characteristically prescient and prickly:

“That preacher’s probably upset, but it’s the doctors who’ll come after her. Doctors think they know everything.”

And then after a long pause, he added, “They scare me, doctors do. They’re like pack animals. Wolves. They surround their prey and go right for the throat.”

Tom had called me late Friday night, close to eleven, from the pay phone in the convenience store’s parking lot. He said our line had been busy most of the night, and I explained to him that my father had been talking to lawyers. I could tell he’d been drinking, but he was still far from drunk. He said he couldn’t come by my house Saturday morning because he’d agreed to help an older cousin move into a new apartment in St. Johnsbury, but he said he’d be by in the afternoon. I told him that would be fine.

When my mother and father left for Montpelier Saturday morning, they told me they wouldn’t be back until late in the day, and that I should screen incoming calls: As a midwife, my mother had probably been one of the first people in the county to purchase an answering machine, and so our family had used one for years. I was an old hand at screening phone calls.

They were concerned that newspaper reporters would phone us, and their fears were well founded.
The Burlington Free Press
, the state’s largest daily paper, was the first, but the reporter who called only beat the
Montpelier Sentinel
and the
Caledonian-Record
by minutes. A fellow from the Associated Press in Montpelier left three messages, and I will always believe he was the person who then called every ten minutes until lunch, hanging up each time when the answering machine’s recorded message clicked on.

I spent most of the day in a fog, listening to the messages reporters and family friends and other midwives would leave on the answering machine, and waiting for Tom to come by. Usually if I was expecting Tom when my parents weren’t home, I’d anticipate that we would wind up quickly on the couch in the den, where we would neck until Tom would start trying to pull up my sweater and I’d have to slow the proceedings. We both knew it was only a matter of time before I’d finally take off my sweater and let him do battle with my bra, but we hadn’t reached that point yet.

The Saturday that my parents went searching for a lawyer, however, the idea that Tom and I might make a beeline toward the couch never even crossed my mind. I knew I was happy Tom was coming by, and I knew I was scared—scared as if one of my parents were desperately ill. But I had no concept of how the two emotions might overlap when Tom finally appeared at our front door: Was he supposed to hug me or bring me a beer? Was he supposed to grill me for the details of what I knew or mindfully talk about everything but home birth? And if he happened to be at our house when my parents returned, would either of us have the slightest idea what to say to them—especially to my mother?

Just before lunch Rollie came over, and for about an hour the two of us listened to the calls coming in to the answering machine. Had my parents even imagined the dozens and dozens of people who would use the phone to besiege me, they might have taken me with them and then sent me shopping in Montpelier and Burlington while they met with their lawyers. But none of us expected the deluge that began just after nine o’clock:

“Good morning, my name is Maggie Bressor, I’m a writer with the
Burlington Free Press
. I would like to speak with Mrs. Sibyl Danforth as soon as she returns, please. I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m writing a story about the … the birth up in Lawson, and I only need a few moments of your time, Mrs. Danforth. I am on a deadline, so I may try you again this afternoon. My number here in Burlington is 865-0940. Thanks a lot.”

“Hi, Sibyl, hi, Rand. Molly here. I heard about the, um, tragedy, and I’m thinking of you. Travis and I both are. Call us when you feel up to it. And let us know if there’s anything we can do. Bye for now.”

“Hello, I’m looking for Sibyl Danforth. This is Joe Meehan with the
Sentinel
. Just thought I’d see if you were home. I’ll call back.”

By the time Rollie arrived, I’d had to put in a second cassette tape to preserve the messages. And still people called.

“Sibyl? Are you there? If you’re there but not picking up, please pick up! It’s me, Cheryl. I have a whole file of legal stuff from MANA I want you to see. It’s huge! Okay, you’re not there, I believe you. But call me when you are. Or maybe I’ll just drop the stuff by. There are even the names of some lawyers in it—all, of course, in places like Maryland and New Mexico—but they might be able to give you the name of one in Vermont. A good one. If you need one. Talk to you soon.”

Rollie sipped her soda and asked me what MANA was.

“It’s one of Mom’s midwife groups. They’re in the Midwest somewhere,” I answered. I learned soon that the acronym stood for the Midwives’ Alliance of North America, the closest thing lay mid-wives had then to a national trade association.

“Hi, guys, Christine here. Call me. I’m worried about you.”

“Sibyl. Hello. This is Donelle. I know another midwife I want you to talk to. She witnessed a mother die in a home birth, so she understands the pain you’re probably feeling. She lives in Texas, and I know she’d be happy to talk and listen all you wanted. Bye-bye.”

“Timothy Slayton with the Associated Press. Thought I’d try again.”

It really was endless. Eventually even Rollie grew tired of listening to the calls, and went home about one-thirty. Tom didn’t get to our house until close to three, and in the hour and a half in between I continued to stare at the answering machine and watch its red eye blink when the tapes for incoming and outgoing messages weren’t turning. Only once did I pick up the receiver and talk to someone, and that was when I heard my father’s voice speaking from a phone in the attorney’s office in Burlington.

“How are you doing?” he asked me.

“Oh, fine.”

“What have you been up to?”

“Reading,” I lied. I was afraid he and my mother would worry if they knew the truth and envisioned me sitting with my arms wrapped around my knees, transfixed by the telephone answering machine.

“Schoolwork?”

“Yup. Schoolwork.”

“Well, it’s Saturday, so don’t work too hard. Life goes on. Have you been on the phone?”

“A little, I guess.”

“Any calls for your mom?”

“A few.”

“Friends or reporters?”

“Both.”

“Okay. When your mom and I are done with Mr. Hastings, we have one more stop. Since we’re in Burlington anyway, we’re going to go by the hospital to get your mom’s ankle X-rayed.” He had tried to downplay the importance of the hospital visit, implying that they probably wouldn’t have bothered with an X ray if they hadn’t been in Burlington anyway, but it’s hard to make light of a visit to the emergency room.

“It still hurts her?” I asked.