Fourth Month 27
The doctor arrived this morning in a sweat, having traveled here on horseback. “Today’s my surgery day,” he told Clementina loudly in the hall. “I’ve got two hours till my next operation.”
Clementina called me to the parlor and stood to his side as he felt my forehead and neck, shot questions at me, looked down my throat and in my ears, and prodded at my chest through my clothing with his sharp fingers. Then, though this was already decided by physical impediment, he pronounced me unfit for nursing. He diagnosed not influenza but something else entirely.
“She has a breast infection as well as blocked ducts, and her milk is no longer safe,” he told Clementina. “If the blockages don’t open soon, pus will gather and form abscesses, and I’ll have to cut them open.”
I flinched.
“What’s the cause?” asked Clementina.
“It comes of having too much milk. She’ll need to release it more often—if she becomes able to nurse again.”
If? Clementina glanced at me with a grimace. It seemed she recognized the damage done by her father’s feeding schedule. The doctor took her expression as a sign of concern for Henry, which perhaps it also was.
“The boy continues to gain weight?” he asked.
“Several ounces a day,” I replied. I’d been charged with weighing him each morning on a calibrated scale.
“Excellent.” Dr. Snowe restored his instruments to a leather bag. “A few days of artificial feeding won’t harm such a hearty fellow.”
This gave me hope that Charlotte—who was hearty when I left her—won’t have declined much in our nine days apart.
Dr. Snowe ordered me to take a series of hot baths to bring my fevered blood to the surface and cool it. He left a glass pump so I could try to get the milk moving after each bath. Dismissed, I started toward the back stairs.
“While you’re here, doctor,” Clementina said, “I’d like an ointment—” Just as my ears perked up, the door to the parlor closed.
This afternoon I took three baths in the kitchen, and what a strain this put on Margaret! For hours, she did little but heat water and pour it in the tub, then haul cooled water out of the tub and heat more water on the stove and pour it in the tub, then bottle-feed and change Henry.
At the end of it, I’d never been so clean. If I were beef, I’d have been stewed. But my vomiting and weakness persisted, and my breasts were so taut as to be growing shiny. I pumped three times to no avail.
When the doctor returned at evening, I was unable to walk, so he ascended to my room. In my left breast he found a solid area and declared it an abscess. After putting me in a chair and laying old newspapers around us, he sliced it with a lancet. Blood, curdled milk, and pus ran into his collecting bowl. He pressed on the abscess to release more fluid, and a roaring began in my head from the pain. When the last trickle ceased, he applied strips of linen to my front and had me lie down. Already the pain and swelling were reduced; with what voice I had, I thanked him.
He went to pull the kitchen bell on the second story and returned to my side. Frau V. stomped upward, audibly disgruntled. But when she reached the servants’ story, apron dusted in flour, she laid her eyes on me and began to stammer. “I had—I had no idea you were so bad off.”
I tried to reply but wasn’t able, for such a show of sympathy brought my suffering clearer, and I was overcome.
“You must feed this young woman only cooked vegetables and fruits until I give further instruction,” the doctor told her. “Tend to her wound. And put hot compresses on the other breast, or we’ll have another abscess.”
Frau V. looked at him peevishly. She isn’t fond of this sour-smelling, imperious man with his twirled moustache. She promised to comply but let out a groan about the extra work as she made her way down the stairs. My debts to her and Margaret grow by the hour.
Then Dr. Snowe applied cotton and gauze to the wound and offered me ten drops of laudanum in water, promising easy sleep and a pleasant mood. I’d never taken laudanum, for its opium and alcohol are addicting. But I drank the liquid down, and it did put me in a far more comfortable state. He said I can nurse again once the incision has healed enough not to reopen—if the fever is gone and I still have milk. My eyes closed; my head was impelled toward the pillow. He left.
The rest I had under the influence of laudanum was a peculiar one. Noisy voices rose with unusual clarity from the kitchen, along with the clatterings and clinkings of kitchen work. The sounds felt sharp and irritating inside my ears. Frau V. seemed to have a visitor downstairs, perhaps a servant who’d accompanied a friend of Clementina’s. I’d drift until some sound awakened me, then drift some more. Sometime in the night I heard the outraged voice of Clementina: “As if I’d accept such treatment. Thinking I would be such a woman as that.” And then, “I’m sorry, you say—as if that could fix it.”
My fever broke in the night. When I surfaced to another day, the house was briefly quiet.
Fortunately Frau V. is an experienced caretaker of the sick. She changes the cotton and gauze hourly and cleans the wound with a calendula wash. The compresses she brings for the other breast are calling forth enough milk to lessen the swelling.
Mother’s hands were cool; Frau V.’s are warm and fleshy. Mother’s voice was sedating; Frau V.’s is harsh. But as the cook leans over me, she smells pleasantly of roses.
Fourth Month 28
This is my twenty-fourth birthday, and Charlotte is a day shy of one month old! I want no gifts but to touch her tendrils of hair, as soft as the hair at a goat’s throat, and to kiss her cheeks and belly.
Those gifts won’t be mine today, but I’ve had some lovely surprises. Margaret had asked my birth date at a writing lesson, and she hadn’t forgotten. When she brought my breakfast of cooked fruit, she gave me a pair of sheepskin slippers, saying they’ll warm my feet when I rise in the dark for Henry. And she must have told Clementina, for the lady called me to her bedroom. She sat before her dressing table, surrounded by pots of rouge and powder, an engraved silver tray filled with cut-glass perfume bottles, and an iron curling rod heating over the wick on its stand. She stopped brushing her long hair to hand me a woven shawl of golden-yellow wool. “To cover you while you nurse,” she said, “when you can nurse again.”
I was moved by her kindness and her optimism. I wrapped the shawl around me, proclaiming it heavenly soft, and thanked her.