You poor dear, facing this all alone. How far along are you? Why, you’re hardly showing at all! Is Dr Randall absolutely certain, because sometimes a woman only imagines it? Do you feel that draft? Yes, yes, I feel it too. Hardly suitable lodging for a newborn. My goodness, how old the child will be when your husband returns from Alaska! Are you drinking enough water? You must drink plenty of water every day. I tell you, my sister’s children are all brats, and it’s because she didn’t let them cry when they were babies?—?you mustn’t indulge them when they fuss. Osler’s Powder, it is absolutely the best for diaper rash. Oh, I can’t abide by Osler’s Powder.
They set themselves down in my sitting room and commenced to telling me every dull and horrifying consideration of child bearing and child rearing, as if they did me favor to counter my vast inexperience. Oh, I wish I possessed more gratitude and patience. I know they are well intentioned, but I detest being told that I will surely feel this way or that I must always or never do such-and-such or suffer the consequences. It makes me very contrary, so that I want to say, “Well, I don’t think I will use diapers at all. Instead my baby will crawl naked in the yard” or “Water! I never drink water, but only whiskey and coffee.”
There was something diminishing about the conversation, too, as if suddenly we had become only, collectively, and forever Mothers, with no room for an entire individual. I would have much rather heard about Mrs Whithers’s efforts to learn how to play the flute, or Mrs Burton’s recent trip to San Francisco. Did she see the traveling opera production as she had hoped?
When at last they all left and I had my house to myself again, I asked Charlotte to please come into the kitchen and sit down with me. I was certain I had made it perfectly clear to her that my condition was one to be kept to ourselves until I saw fit to share it, that I am by nature a private person, and it is my right. “Yes ma’am,” she said. Always “Yes ma’am” but no apology or explanation, and the child would not even meet my eyes. It was only with great effort that I controlled my temper.
March 14
It is not fair that all the women of Vancouver Barracks know, yet poor Mother does not, and so I have written to her at last. She need not worry about traveling all the way here, as I am well cared for, and once the baby is born and Allen has returned, we will go East and pay her a visit. I doubt she would come if I asked it of her. The journey to Boston for the wedding was trying for her, let alone the three thousand miles and week-long train journey across all that wild country. It is better for both of us, as unkind as those words might be.
It occurs to me that there are wives here at the barracks with husbands not unlike Mother. A peculiar observation, but it is true. Some of these poor women are asked to account for every minute of the day and are reprimanded if it is not spent as their husbands see fit. If they turn their time to embroidery and gossip, they are condemned as frivolous. If they attempt to organize a literature club or a discussion of women having the vote, they are mocked for taking themselves too seriously. Mrs Whithers is not even allowed to choose the fabric for her own dresses. She says she is not bothered by it, as her husband has suitable taste. (Oh Allen?—?what would you pick out for me? I fear it would be duck canvas soaked in linseed oil, so that my dress could serve also as rain coat or tent.)
I make light of it, but in truth it would smother me.
And so that day not long after our wedding, dear Allen, when you returned and asked how I had spent my hours, and I admitted I had done nothing all day except wander Nantasket Beach to seek out the laughing gulls and black-bellied plovers, that your parents had invited me to their club but I declined their company to remain alone at the seaside with my notebook, and you did not scorn or chide me, but rather said we should take off our shoes and let the waves wash over our feet?—?that day I was filled with more love than I ever could have imagined. And when my hands grew cold, you didn’t say we should leave the beach, but instead took them in your own and kissed each of my fingertips, and I was warmed by your breath.
You have been gone from me six weeks. Oh Allen, I miss you more than I can bear.
March 16
More and more I regret my taking the doctor’s book on obstetrics, yet I cannot bring myself to return it and confront his disapproval. A guilty conscience has never sat well with me, and it causes me to worry. Does Dr Randall already know and judge me harshly? Will my mischief cause some embarrassment for Allen?
Yet it is more. I do not like to admit to it, but as Dr Randall predicted, the book upsets me. Even the entries on normal pregnancy and labor are gruesome. The sketches are particularly chilling, the organs flayed and pinned, so that one cannot help but conjure the corpses from which they were taken. Heart, cranium, umbilicus, womb, fetus, all dissected and coldly drawn. I know it is the necessary way of science, this partnership with the macabre, yet it repulses me.