“Thee could marry here and make a new home,” I tried. “Widows marry.” With her full-featured loveliness, Gina would draw many suitors.
But she jerked her head side to side. “A real widow could marry. Not me.” She pushed her needlework away and raised a hand to the silver cross on a chain at her neck. “God knows the truth.”
I didn’t understand, since she is a Catholic. “Couldn’t thee confess and do penance and be absolved?”
Gina shook her head vigorously. She’s already taking on that weight for one lie, she said—the lie that makes her baby not a bastard—partly because the baby will be better off. But if she undertook a marriage under false pretenses, she’d be lying in a church. “You don’t know. That goes straight to God.” She stared at me, shaking her head, and a tear fell to the blanket below. I reached between our beds to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged my hand away.
“Doesn’t Angela go to church still?” I asked. “And isn’t Angela lying?” As soon as I said these words, I berated myself for my idiocy.
She moaned. “Oh, what I did! I made her a sinner, too.”
I said Angela chose this path on her own, but Gina remained dismal. She calmed herself by reminding us that dark thoughts are bad for our babies. We fell into silence, since we had no other sort of thoughts to offer.
Gina blew out the candle and fell to sleep, and a ferocious feeling constricted my throat. I asked myself, What do I want? And the answer made me queasy.
I still want Johan to love me. I want his unusual way of thinking to guide me in seeing common things afresh. I want to feel his silken skin against my own. I want his tender care extended to our baby. I want to do what we spoke of doing, our hands touching over the oak table one night after the others had gone to bed: explore a strange city, join in marriage with no encumbrances from Meeting or family, fill a house with furnishings he builds for us, bring children into our intimate world. He promised to make a canopy bed—a canopy bed! I’d make curtains to surround it. And tucked between them, we’d lie together….
Instead of all that, I’ll give our baby to an adoption agent and return to the small house in Germantown that the de Jongs have occupied for nearly two hundred years. I’ll enter again the unpleasant realm of Father and Patience—a thought that brings dread and halts my breath.
Yet there will be good parts to returning. When I step into that house, my months of hiding will vanish like a dream. I’ll be me again, returned to the place that formed me. I’ll find comfort in Mother’s kitchen, where each cast-iron pot and wooden bowl and stirring spoon is known to my hands. I’ll treasure the things she chose or made, the signs of her attention that inhabit every cranny, the green shoots in our gardens that prove her influence endures. Within hours I’ll have loaves of dough rising in the hollow beside the hearth, a ham blanching on the stove, a pot of spring greens boiling. I’ll set the table and light our lamps as dusk descends.
I can breathe in now and feel a hint of the peace that used to gather in that hour before supper. When Peter and I were small, unless a crisis in some other family propelled her out, Mother would sit in the rocker beside the hearth and read Bible tales to us. Young Peter rested upon her lap, I sat at her feet, and together we basked in the bubbling of pots, her clear-toned voice, her violet-water smell.
What a gap yawns between those days and now, with Mother in the ground and me seated on a hard mattress, heavy with child and grieving over our coming separation.
At six the waking bell will ring, and our usual round of chores and meals will begin.
Third Month 24
I’m close to delivery! Dr. Stevens has started me on her protocol: a bitter quinine tonic, a concoction for preventing constipation and headache, and chloral hydrate at bedtime to encourage rest. The medicines nauseate me and dull my senses, but they haven’t lessened the only symptom I minded, apart from the cramps—which is nerves.
My nerves are growing ever more bothersome. I spend rest hours in the courtyard and can only stare into the air, dizzied and weak. I keep believing that the constant twinges and pulling pains mean that delivery is imminent.
I described my condition to the doctor this morning, lying flat on the cot in her examination room as she felt gently along my belly.
“You could have these symptoms for days,” she replied. “Perhaps another week.”
“Another week?” I protested. “That would be maddening!”
Amusement raised the corners of her lips. “Many find it so.” And in a moment, nodding her small head: “Good. The baby’s heartbeat is robust. Its body is head down, legs up.” She reached her slender arm up past my protruding belly and patted my crown. “Simply wait, and stay as calm as you’re able.”
I mentioned that her medicines are making me feel ill.
“You should be grateful for them,” she scolded. “Doctor Prestweiss developed this protocol for the married women at his retreat. They’ll remove any blockages or weakness that otherwise might make you sick after delivery.” I made no reply. “My use of this protocol has kept the death rate here extremely low, Lilli—four mothers in over four hundred births. And only one of those died from childbed fever.”
Though these numbers were meant to be encouraging, I made a frightened face as I rose to my weary legs.
“You should be grateful,” she repeated. “Last year at the city hospital, forty-two women per hundred died of childbed fever.”
How appalling! I did express my gratitude before shuffling off to make way for her next patient.
Like her colleagues at the Woman’s Medical College, some of whom I’d met in Germantown, Dr. Stevens is imbued with the fortitude of one who aims to improve the lot of her sex. The clothes on her slender form are wrinkled, and more of her hair escapes her bun and cap than remains tucked within them; to me these things are to her credit, for she focuses on what matters more.
But please, Dr. Stevens, don’t let me become the fifth mother to die here! And don’t let my baby die!
Each time the muscles of my belly tighten in a cramp, I wonder whether my time is nigh. I wonder what will become of me and my baby when we leave this place. I wonder what young woman will take my bed, and what happens to all the desperate girls whom Anne must turn away. At the window I stare out to the far-off stars and think, What is the purpose of all this suffering?
I know the Bible’s answer, the one I heard at Meeting and from Mother’s lips a hundred—no, five hundred times.
Do not despise the Lord’s discipline,
nor lose courage when thee is punished.
For the Lord disciplines those whom he loves,
as a father the child in whom he delights.
What terrible love. Right now, I’ve half a mind to refuse it.
I’ve swallowed my drams of chloral hydrate. A stupor overtakes me. I hope to sleep till the morning bell.