Nancy greeted me warmly, though her skin was ashen and her brown eyes were ringed with darkness. “Sit,” she said, pointing with her chin to a chair by the bed. I sat, and she moved her head to indicate the swathed package in her arms, giving it a winsome smile. “Here’s my little lad.”
The baby looked not unlike a newborn mouse, with minuscule hands and a pale, wrinkled face. The sides of his head bore cotton gauze, apparently covering damage from the forceps. His eyes were hooded by swollen, nearly translucent lids.
“Lovely,” I murmured, attempting sincerity.
She sniffed his scalp and moved her lips over its coating of pale hair. “He’s the sweetest thing.” She leaned to kiss his nose. The baby gazed vaguely in her direction, his eyes swimming with devotion.
At first I felt startled at her fondness for him, since she’d spoken harshly of the servant who was his father. Then I looked at my bulging belly, where my own baby had begun to kick and wiggle, as if sending out a rhythmic message. A surge of nausea passed through me; a squeezing force took up my heart. And all at once I understood: Nancy can’t help but adore her son. She grew him inside, and pushed him out in mighty suffering, and now this tiny creature needs her—belongs to her—as no other person ever will.
And I will feel the same. I won’t merely love the baby inside me when it shows its face. I’ll adore it with all the fierceness that ever bound one creature to another.
“He’s beautiful,” I told Nancy, sincerely now.
“Don’t it seem a miracle?” She leaned into her pillows. “How they come from inside us. It don’t seem possible.”
She held up her small charge; I thought she wanted me to hold him. My arms tingled, anticipating his weight, and I moved them forward for her to make the transfer. But she pulled the baby back to her chest. She’d meant only to give me a closer look.
“He’s got all the parts he should have, in all their proper places.” She reddened. “I had a mind he might…”
I nodded, recognizing the belief she held. Many of the inmates are afraid their babies will be malformed because they were conceived out of wedlock.
“I’m calling him William, after my dad.” Nancy raised a hand to scratch her nose, and the baby’s head lolled back at an alarming angle. “Oh! I forget how weak he is!” She propped up his neck and stroked his cheek, staring.
“May I hold him?” I asked, unable to resist.
She began moving him to me, but his distress grew with stunning quickness. His limbs pushed against the swathing cloths; his mouth opened into a bawl that revealed pink gums and a glistening interior. So she opened her dressing gown and guided his mouth to her. With his head in the palm of her hand, she lowered her thin face to gaze upon him. As he sucked, his face and body slackened into complete ease.
I cleared my throat, embarrassed to see her naked breast. Then I scolded myself for prudery. For what could be more natural than an infant taking nourishment from its mother?
“He needs thee,” I said. Could I say nothing more useful? But Nancy locked her eyes with mine, and a flicker of joy passed between us. Then she dampened it.
“We mustn’t rejoice in the offspring of our sin.” She was quoting the young Reverend Williams, who often preaches here. He wants us to feel nothing but a gray desperation at the births of our children, followed by a grand relief at giving them away.
Just then an infant’s cries erupted in the hall, and Nancy stiffened, appearing to dread their advance. Anne strode in, holding a baby as new as Nancy’s but with a febrile hue.
“Feeding him again?” Anne demanded. Her tall body was as tensed as an archer’s ready bow.
Nancy’s excuse tumbled out. “He was crying, and I knew he’d stop if—”
“If nothing.” Anne pointed toward a clock on a corner table. “You’re to keep track on that clock and save half your milk for this baby, as we discussed. It’s her turn now. At even hours you nurse this one, and at odd hours, you nurse your boy.”
Nancy put her finger in William’s mouth to dislodge him, then pulled her gown closed. Again he transformed in seconds, his face pursing tight, his limbs jerking. With unsteady hands Nancy laid him in the bassinet, where he continued his protest. On the front of her gown, wet blotches formed and grew.
“Take her.” Anne reached with the other crying infant toward Nancy. “We’re calling her Mabel.”
A tremble passed through Nancy as the infant applied herself to a nipple with eagerness. Nancy turned her face toward the shuttered windows. Reaching to her, I brushed tendrils of brown hair from her forehead and wiped away the perspiration there.
So this was how Nancy would spend her three weeks before giving William to an adoption agent and finding her next domestic situation. Nursing every hour! I hadn’t known we might be put to such a use. Of course a motherless babe does need a nurse, but must it be Nancy? Must her troubled, lonely soul be interrupted in this brief chance it has to love its own?
In his bassinet on the floor, William gave up his protest. His eyes closed; his chest began to rise evenly. As the unknown infant drank, Nancy dozed, too. She looked as if she’d fallen from a great height into the bed, so thoroughly was her weight surrendered. I stared at Mabel; if she carried syphilis from her mother, then Nancy would catch the disease through her nipples, and so would William. Anne was neatening up the room’s effects, so I gave a cough to gain her attention.
She turned to where I sat, impatient.
“How did Mabel come to be here?” I asked—for someone had to think of Nancy.
Anne turned her palms up in a gesture of unknowing. “An old woman brought her. She claimed the mother handed the child over in the street, saying she’d return shortly. The mother never returned.”
“Would that be untrue?”
Anne focused her gray-blue eyes on me. “We’ve heard that explanation a thousand times. It could as well be that an unscrupulous person had the mother pay a hefty fee to get the baby adopted—then kept the fee and passed the baby to that old woman, with no intent of returning.” She walked to a corner and dropped herself to a wooden chair. “Or the old woman herself might have promised the mother, for a fee, to find the baby a family, then brought it here instead.”
“Why is it that falsehoods and babies so often go together?” I asked.
Anne gave me a baleful look, as if to say she was too occupied with the resulting problems to answer such a question. Her foot tapped the wood floor like the tail of an overstimulated cat.
“I wonder how thee knows Mabel is free of disease,” I said. “The women in our Meeting would nurse an infant only if they knew the mother’s condition.”
Anne flushed. “I examined the baby.”
I said nothing.
“Doctor Stevens taught me her methods. Lilli, this baby would die without a mother’s milk. Would you have me let her perish?”
I wouldn’t, not at all; yet I prayed silently for Nancy’s safety.
Anne stood. “Nancy,” she called.
The girl opened her eyes.
“Miss Partridge will bring a second bassinet, since Mabel will stay in this room until you go.”