Midwives (32 page)

The fly fisherman looked at specific jurors as he spoke, as if he were eulogizing a river they’d once fished together that was now dry or polluted beyond use. For emphasis, he would occasionally pause and look out the window at the storm clouds, but he always seemed to turn back toward the jury when he had a particularly dramatic point he wanted to make.

“The defense is going to try and convince you that this is a complicated case with a lot of gray in it, and they are going to parade into this courtroom a whole lot of so-called experts who have probably never set foot in Vermont before. Never. But you will soon see this case isn’t so complicated.

“We will show you that from the moment Charlotte and Asa Bedford sat down with Sibyl Danforth to discuss the notion of having their baby in their home, Mrs. Danforth behaved with the sort of gross irresponsibility that could only result in tragedy.

“Should Charlotte Bedford have even been allowed to have her baby in her bedroom in the first place? We will show that other midwives—as well as probably every single reasonable physician on this planet—would have said no. The risk was too great.

“Did Charlotte and Asa understand this risk? It is clear they did not. Either Mrs. Danforth did not appreciate the risk herself or she chose not to share her knowledge of the risk with her clients; either way, she never warned the Bedfords of the dangers of their decision.

“On the day that Charlotte Bedford went into labor, did Sibyl Danforth even demonstrate the common sense to consider the weather? No, she did not. Did a woman born and raised right here in Vermont, a woman who must know the … the orneriness and capriciousness and downright uncertainty of Vermont weather, discuss with the Bedfords the chance that they’d be trapped in their home in the event that something went wrong? No. She did not.”

The rain had not yet begun to drum against the wide glass windows opposite the jury box, but I noticed a few of the jurors looked past Bill Tanner at the ominous sky outside. I couldn’t help but do so, too.

“And then that night,” he said, “when she realized that because of her own astonishing lack of foresight she and a woman in labor were cornered in a bedroom miles and miles from the help a hospital would have provided, what did Mrs. Danforth do? She had Charlotte push … and push … and push. Hours beyond what any doctor would have allowed, she had Charlotte push. Hours beyond what a healthy woman could have endured, she had her push. Without anesthesia. Without painkillers. She had her push.”

My mother moved little during the onslaught. Occasionally she turned toward the lake, and she might have been watching the whitecaps the storm had churned up, but she sat stolidly with her hands clasped before her on the table. Once in a while Stephen or Peter wrote something down, but my mother never even reached for her pen. It was as if she were anesthetized, or had grown inured to hate. Although my father and I both grew flushed with rage, she seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

“Sibyl Danforth had the poor woman push for so long that she thought she had killed her! She actually believed she had had one of her mothers push for so long, so nightmarishly long, that the woman had finally died. Pushed to death, so to speak. The irony? Sibyl Danforth hadn’t pushed her to death. She almost had. But not quite. Charlotte Bedford did not die from pushing. It took a ten-inch knife with a sparkling six-inch blade to do that.

“You will all see—and I am sorry beyond words to say this—when we are done, that one woman is dead because the individual sitting at that table over there took a kitchen knife and brutally gouged open Charlotte Bedford’s stomach in the poor woman’s own bedroom, and she did so while the woman was still breathing.”

He eyed my mother and then shook his head in disgust. My mother didn’t flinch, but beside me my father did. He crossed and recrossed his legs.

“This crime is appalling on many levels, but you will find two especially galling: Charlotte Bedford would not have died in a hospital. This is clear. And Charlotte Bedford would not have died had she been cared for throughout her pregnancy by a physician. Obviously, Sibyl Danforth is not a doctor. She is a midwife. And while the women who call themselves midwives claim to have all sorts of arcane knowledge, while they claim to be able to deliver babies, in reality they know little more about medicine than you or I. Sibyl Danforth has never been to medical school. She has never been to nursing school. She does not have a license to practice medicine. In fact, she has so little medical training of any kind that between six and six-thirty on the morning of March fourteenth, she couldn’t even tell the difference between a living woman and a dead one! Let’s face it, Sibyl Danforth is no more certified to deliver babies than the woman at the stationery store who sold me my newspaper this morning, or the teenage boy who filled my car with gasoline!”

Tanner paused to let the vision grow real in the jurors’ minds: a teenage boy with acne and a baseball cap and grubby hands delivering a baby.

In the momentary silence, however, I heard the sound of a baby about to nurse in the back of the courtroom, and I was glad. An adolescent grease monkey was a powerful image, but it seemed to me it paled before a nursing newborn. The little thing behind us cried briefly with hunger, then cooed when her mother opened her blouse and she saw the breast from which she was about to eat.

When Tanner resumed, he stood up straight and rested one hand on the rail of the witness stand, then empty. “The defense might insist that this trial is about the way the medical profession has stolen the process of birth from the women to whom it rightly belongs,” he said, his voice growing more animated as he approached what I assumed would be a crescendo of sorts. “Well, that’s hogwash. They might argue that this trial is about the right of pregnant women to choose to have their children at home. That’s hogwash, too.

“This trial is about one thing, and one thing only: Sibyl Dan-forth’s pattern of irresponsibility and misjudgment, a pattern that led inevitably to the mistake that cost Charlotte Bedford her life. The definition of involuntary manslaughter in Vermont is clear—you have heard it from the judge—and the case before you is a horrifying but altogether perfect example: Sibyl Danforth was grossly negligent. Sibyl Danforth engaged in conduct which involved a high degree of risk of death. And on the morning of March fourteenth, 1981, she indeed caused the death of Charlotte Fugett Bedford—as the statute says, ‘another human being.’”

Tanner might have been about to say more, but the storm spared him the effort: Almost on cue, perhaps a second after quoting the statute, a gust of wind slammed the first sheet of rain into the picture windows behind him with such force that it sounded like thunder and shook the glass.

I was only one of many women and men in the courtroom who gasped.

At my high school, we were allowed to miss study hall up to three times a quarter if we had a valid excuse like a doctor’s appointment or—apparently—the involuntary manslaughter trial of one’s girlfriend’s mother. By passing on the study hall before lunch and skipping the history class that came after, Tom was able to string together almost three consecutive hours to drive up to Newport and surprise the Danforth family as we emerged from the courthouse. My parents invited Tom to join us at a restaurant, but he had brought with him sandwiches and soda and a vision of an autumn picnic for two, and they let us go our own way for an hour.

“Just don’t talk to any reporters,” Stephen said to us as we left the adults. “Please. In fact, don’t talk to anyone … please.”

It was still pouring, so Tom and I ate our sandwiches in the front seat of the rusty Sunbird his older brother had finished repairing but would not be picked up by its owner until the end of the week. He had double-parked beside the Newport Library, an austere brick, almost imposing monolith across Main Street from the courthouse.

During most of our lunch we didn’t speak of the trial, although I don’t believe either of us was explicitly or consciously avoiding the subject. He’d asked how it was going as soon as we were seated in the automobile, and I’d told him what a mean son of a bitch Bill Tanner was, but then we’d moved on to other subjects: The fact that Sadie Demerest was going to break up with Roger Stearns. The fear we had that our football team would lose its first game that Friday night to St. Johnsbury, a much bigger school with, we had to assume, a much bigger and better team. The idea that Chip Reynolds was experimenting with the little tabs of acid his older brother was always bringing back from Montreal, and our firm belief that he was headed for trouble.

The rainstorm I’d watched that morning in the courtroom had come in from the north, and Tom told me of the armies of Canadian geese he’d seen flying south before it: I imagined great honking gray Vs in the sky, and in my mind I saw them flying overhead in wave after wave. He told me his uncle had gotten his first partridge of the year that day, a quick shot up on Gary Road just before breakfast, and he laughed at his uncle’s pride in shooting a bird that “probably weighed about as much as a Snickers bar.”

Before we parted, as I pushed the wax paper I’d crumpled into a ball into the bottom of my brown bag, I asked him if people in school were talking about the trial.

“I know one class, senior humanities, talked about it for a good forty-five minutes this morning. Made a lot of us wish we were a year older.”

“You mean in class? They talked about it in class?”

“Honest to God. Garrett Atwood told me,” he said, referring to a senior basketball player who was dating my precocious friend Rollie.

“And they were talking about the trial?”

“Not so much the trial,” he said, pressing the smoldering tip of his cigarette into the ashtray, “as the way it’s all so … so tragic. Mrs. Bedford being married to a minister and all.”

I don’t believe the word
irony
was a part of either of our working vocabularies back then, but I knew exactly what he meant.

“Did Garrett tell you how it ended?”

“I don’t think the discussion really went anywhere, except a couple of girls ended up crying.”

“For Mrs. Bedford? Or her husband?”

“Both. And for you and your mom.”

“That’s so sad.”

“The whole thing’s sad. Of course, Mr. Rhymer’s a smart guy, and he kept everyone from getting hysterical. But Garrett said everybody still left feeling like this is one of those horrible things we’re just not meant to understand.”

“What about outside of class? Were people talking about it outside of class, too?”

“Well, yeah. Because you’re not in school. But let’s face it, if you were there, people would probably still be talking—just not when you were around,” he added.

“What are they saying?”

He shrugged. “Oh, mostly that they think it’s unfair what’s going on. Most girls are saying they think it’s A-OK to have a baby at home, and someday they probably will.”

He didn’t look at me as he spoke; he stared straight at the still-smoldering butt of his cigarette, and I knew instantly he was lying. I knew it with an intuitive, instinctive conviction. I knew, in fact, that exactly the opposite was true. The girls, when they spoke of me or my mother’s situation at all, were sharing their fears about childbirth in general, and their astonishment that anyone would be stupid enough to try such a thing in their home.

“Like many midwives, she was probably viewed by the village with a mixture of awe and envy, fear and respect,” Stephen said, referring to a late-eighteenth-century midwife whose diary he had studied. The woman had practiced in central New Hampshire, and her two-hundred-year-old diary had been discovered and published when I was in the sixth grade. Although I had not read the book, my mother and her midwife friends had, and the woman—Priscilla Mayhew of Fullerton—had become both a small saint and a large role model in their eyes.

“That’s how it’s always been with midwives,” he said with dignified authority, pacing calmly before the jurors. “To some people, they’re witches—or, these days, strange and somehow dangerous throwbacks to another era. But in the eyes of other people, they’re healers. Not surprisingly, it always seems to be the women who see them as healers, and the men who are quick to cry witch. Or shaman. Or meddler. Midwives, by their very nature and profession, have always challenged authority; they’ve always been a bit too independent—in the eyes of men, anyway. The history of midwifery in America is filled with the names of women lionized by their own gender and ostracized by men. Names like Anne Hutchinson. That’s right, Anne Hutchinson. The first religious leader in Colonial America who was a woman was also a midwife.

“In addition to having a brilliant mind, Anne Hutchinson had the strong heart and gentle hands of a midwife. And she had followers. So what happened to Anne? The men—
the men
—of Massachusetts banished her to the rough woods that with her help would become the fine state of Rhode Island.

“Did they ask the mothers how they felt about this? No. Of course they didn’t,” Stephen continued, and he shook his head and smiled at the jurors, offering them a grin that said,
I’m not surprised, are you?