The Midwife (3 page)

A year and a half since my graduate assistantship had assigned me to Thomas Fitzpatrick
 
—the quiet, unobtrusive man with an Opie Taylor cowlick and a surprisingly boyish grin. A year and a half since I had become the grader of his multiple-choice tests. The one who rinsed his delicate teacups and located his slides on the Law of the Three Ps and refilled his Montblanc fountain pens with fresh ink. And this
 
—
this
 
—was the first time he showed me any affection.

For the length of time it took another ember to fall, I sat motionless and savored the feel of his fingertips grazing my skin. I withdrew my hand, curling it in my lap as if it had been struck. “You’re welcome,” I said. I had never been one for words.

Thom’s wife returned, her lips pinched and her purse tucked beneath her arm. His smile faded. He slid out of the seat to stand beside her. In heels, Meredith Fitzpatrick was a head taller than he was. It was amazing that after all the
time I’d sat in Boswell Auditorium and watched him give lectures on Nigel Cameron’s article “Embryos and Ethics” and Kenneth Alpern’s
The Ethics of Reproductive Technology
, I’d never once realized that Thomas Fitzpatrick was not larger than life, but a rather short, middle-aged man.

“It was nice to see you,” Meredith said.

I said, “You too.” Her smile made me question the sincerity of her words.

“I’ll see you on Tuesday, then?” Thom asked me.

“Something for . . . ?” said Meredith.

“Not for the baby,” Thom replied. “For her thesis.”

Meredith said nothing else. Thom retrieved her coat from the maître d’ and held it by the shoulders while she slid it over her arms, the silk lining slipping easily over her white cashmere sweater. Thom leaned over to give me a rather awkward side hug. Meredith shook my hand. By the lines bracketing the bright slash of her mouth, I knew she would despise me for prolonging an unbearable evening if I asked them to drive me to my car.

So I sat on one of the velvet benches flanking the restaurant’s entrance, as if I were simply waiting for the valet to bring my car around. I smiled as Thom opened the front door for Meredith. The foyer filled with a blast of cold. Outside, the balding valet with the earmuffs reached into the pocket of his parka and dangled car keys in front of Thom. Loneliness and sadness engulfed me. I watched the Fitzpatricks drive away, their headlights barely penetrating the sleet propelled by gale-force winds.

Sure that they’d gone, I exited the restaurant. The
huddled valets in their black dress slacks, black shoes, and downy parkas reminded me of emperor penguins awaiting the passage of winter. The valet with earmuffs nodded; the others barely glanced my way. I hunched my shoulders around my neck and, in my thin loafers, retraced the two blocks to La Trattoria. The checkered awning was bent with the weight of snow. An unlit neon sign claimed that twenty-four hours a day pizza was sold by pie or slice. The sign on the door said
Closed
.

With numb fingers, I pried open the frozen driver’s-side door of my car. As the windows defrosted, I grabbed a cassette tape, got out, and scraped a circle in the icy windshield. Clambering back into the driver’s seat, I sat on my hands and then blew on them. I’d just started to grow warm when the personal risk of this business transaction hit me. I began to shake so hard, my teeth clattered. I held my knees together to keep my legs from trembling. Out of all the mistakes I had made, signing on as the Fitzpatricks’ gestational surrogate could turn out to be the worst.

Perching the basket on my hip, I scale the porch steps and enter the kitchen, letting the screen door slam. I dump the pole beans in the sink and set the basket on the countertop. Keeping my back to Alice, I start snapping.

Her hands, which have been slicing flattened dough
into squares, grow still. “People need to know we’re out here, Rhoda.”

“They already do, or they wouldn’t have sent that journalist.”

“They don’t give real journalists these kinds of stories.”

“If she’s not a real journalist,” I say, “then why’d you bother talking to her?”

“I had to. Something’s gotta change.”

The beans are so dehydrated from the sun, I have to score my thumbnail into the flesh to sever the ends. But nothing can be wasted. Not anymore. “We’re fine.”

“You keep saying that, but pregnant girls can’t live on pot pie and green beans alone.”

I toss a bean into the bowl and grip the edge of the countertop. Stress coils around me until every ligament in my body feels like a bowstring. “I
know
what they need.”

“Of course you do.” Alice walks over and places a hot, floured hand on my arm. It is all I can do not to swat it away. “The Lord knows you took good care of me and Uriah,” she says. “But times
 
—they were different then. We had more food. We had more help. And your job was just to take care of us girls, not manage a farm at the same time.”

I stare down at the old stone bowl I’ve painstakingly filled with shriveled beans and resist the impulse to knock it to the floor.

Almost eighteen years ago, while helping maneuver a posterior baby down the birth canal, former head midwife Fannie Graber suffered a slipped disk, a painful graze
of nerves against bone that forced her into early retirement and forced me into her position at the tender age of twenty-four. Ever since that night when I found myself doing what I never thought I would, I’ve been caught between my desire to make Hopen Haus a success
 
—by begging the Old Order Mennonite church to let us have electricity and state-of-the-art equipment
 
—and my desire to keep Hopen Haus as archaic as possible so that my previous life and the secrets pervading it can remain sheltered from the outside world.

But now that a majority of the Dry Hollow Community has left
 
—seeking promises of better jobs and more land
 
—I still find myself crouching behind a list of rules no bishop is here to enforce. Perhaps we should have gone with the community as they wished, yet I couldn’t. And although the invitation remains open, I still can’t. Hopen Haus, which translates to Hope House in English, is not my life. It is the place where my life ended. And so, haunted by memories made stronger by the location where they were formed, I cannot leave.

Alice does not understand this. She does not understand why we did not leave when most of the community did. She does not understand why I demand that our lives and the lives of the girls who come here remain Plain
 
—though we enforce no dress code beyond modesty
 
—nor does she understand my hesitance to ask the townspeople for help.

I should not expect her to.

Two months after my daughter’s birth, I helped birth Alice Rippentoe’s illegitimate son, Uriah, a long-limbed
creature whose dark complexion and stormy disposition contrast the Hebrew meaning of his name
 
—“my light is Jehovah.”

If Hopen Haus draws publicity and a real journalist digs deeply enough that the skeletons in my life are revealed, it will not dramatically affect Uriah’s life. But me? This life, ushering other mothers’ children into the world while never having a child to call my own . . . this is the only life I’ve got.

Returning to her pubic bone tattooed with Aquarius, I inch my way back up the center of Star’s stomach a centimeter at a time. My three fingers dip in the hollow where her uterus drops off and her abdominal cavity begins. This is the fourth time I’ve measured twenty-two weeks. According to her chart, she’s supposed to be twenty-five.

“Everything okay?”

I nod, as I am unable to trust my tongue. If Star wants somebody to hold her hand through the next fifteen weeks, she needs to get Alice or Charlotte to do her checkups, not me. Each time I’ve examined Star, she’s reeked of cigarettes. Yet when I informed her about the effects of nicotine on an unborn child
 
—increased risk of stillbirth, premature delivery, calcified placenta, low birth weight
 
—she’s stared right into my eyes and denied having an addiction.

The ocher stains on her teeth contradict her words.

Star dusts off the seat of her jeans and, as she leaves the room, pats five-year-old Luca Cullum’s head, who’s been
outside the door, whining like a puppy. Though I’ve spoken to his mother, Terese, about his frequent interruptions, Luca still comes in without asking and hops up on the sanded slab serving as our examination table. Swinging his legs back and forth, he reaches over and slips the silver top off the largest glass jar. He shakes his dirty-blond mop to the side and attempts to use what he must believe is a giant Q-tip to clean out his ears.

I roll my eyes at his lack of manners and file Star’s folder under
S
, since she won’t tell us her last name. “Need something, Luca? I’ve got some work to do.”

“Yeah’um.” Luca claps the lid back on the glass cylinder. I wince, sure that he’s cracked it. “There’s news people outside,” he says.

“News people?” Sliding hands beneath Luca’s armpits, I lower him to the floor and unfurl a sheet over the table in preparation for the next appointment. “Luca. Really.”

“I ain’t lying.” He whips out his cotton swab and points it to the window. “Go look.”

I raise an eyebrow but walk over to the window and peel back the curtain Charlotte sewed to ensure the girls’ privacy. My jaw drops. A long black van scrawled with the silver words “Channel 2 News” is parked at a cockeyed angle in front of the east steps. A man in a collared shirt and khakis holds a microphone before Charlotte’s quivering mouth. Another man dressed in a T-shirt and jeans snaps pictures of Alice.

Dropping the curtain, I turn to Luca, who just smiles.

“See,” he says. “Told ya there was.”

Supper at Hopen Haus is a family affair. Everyone is required to attend, even if battling late-afternoon nausea that redefines morning sickness. I take my seat at the head of the two tables made uniform with mismatched cloths and watch the four girls clamber over the benches at speeds proportional to their bellies’ sizes. Everyone quiets as I lower my head to signal the silent grace. Afterward, the girls begin to talk and greedily consume the meal: sautéed kale doused with vinegar,
grummbeere supp
, and radish sandwiches stuffed with crumbling portions of the goat cheese Uriah made before he went to Canada with Wilbur Byler.

My appetite has vanished. I have a difficult time being grateful for such meager fare. Hopen Haus is at its lowest capacity since Fannie Graber founded it twenty-five years ago, yet we cannot take many more boarders without someone going hungry. I look down the table again
 
—imagining where these girls would live if we were forced to close our doors.

Our youngest boarder, Desiree Jones, is fifteen weeks pregnant and fifteen years old. She has slick pigtails that poof out behind her ears, and a mocha baby face contrasted by a chip on her shoulder as large and scathing as her mouth. Desiree’s social worker brought her to us from the projects in Knoxville, and here Desiree will remain until her mother’s child-abuse allegation goes to court.

Terese Cullum is in her late twenties. She has pale blonde dreadlocks bound in a kerchief and wears peasant skirts and chunky turquoise rings, the latter of which she refuses to take off regardless of her body’s rising water retention. At twenty-eight-weeks pregnant, she shows signs of early-onset preeclampsia. She and her five-year-old son, Luca, hitchhiked here from southern Tennessee. Her boyfriend
 
—who fathered her unborn baby, but not Luca
 
—abandoned Terese at a rest stop without so much as a dime.

Our driver, Wilbur Byler, brought sixteen-year-old Lydie Risser to us four months ago. Wilbur said Lydie was from the Split Rock Community in Kentucky, and that though Lydie’s parents had hired him to drive her to Hopen Haus, they hadn’t told him that she was even with child. But as she clambered out of the van in her cape dress
and long twin braids, the humiliation singeing Lydie’s cheeks explained it all.

I know how Star arrived, but I am not sure who dropped her off. One morning, just after dawn, I heard the crackle of tires on the lane and crawled from beneath the quilts on my bed to look out the window. A heavyset girl was leaning against the open passenger door of a small white truck. She wore baggy jeans and a sweatshirt, as it was March and cold. Her hair was the only circumspect thing about her; it was short and twisted into stiff purple spikes. The girl suddenly flung out her arms, arguing. A backpack sailed out of the interior of the vehicle
 
—hitting her stomach.

She staggered backward, clutching the burden. The truck then bounced down the washed-out lane. The girl kept watching until the taillights had winked out around the bend near the old cattle chute. And then she dropped her backpack, clutched her hair with both hands, and cried. Even after I sent Charlotte outside to welcome the girl in, she refused to tell us anything beyond what would soon become obvious: she was newly pregnant and alone.

Charlotte now mistakes the reason for my sullen demeanor and reaches over to pat my hand. “Maybe they didn’t air the story,” she soothes, a natural
grossmammi
, even though she’s neither been married nor had a child. “It’s been a week, and we’ve not heard anything yet.”

She goes back to spooning her soup. I pull both hands below the table and curl them into fists. To my right, Alice’s gaze brands my skin. When I meet it, she shifts away. Her guilty silence speaks volumes.

“Oh, they’ve used it,” I say, watching as below her white
kapp
, the tips of Alice’s ears slowly turn red.

Alice Rippentoe was baptized into Dry Hollow Community’s Old Order Mennonite church one year after I was. But differences of opinion, such as her wanting publicity for Hopen Haus and my despising it, have cropped up countless times since we became midwifery peers. I am grateful for that night, six months before Alice joined the church, when a slipped disk christened my position as reluctant head midwife and gave my opinion more weight than hers.

She cuts her eyes over at me again, the color of them like a thundercloud. “I didn’t know the news would pick the story up. Okay, Rhoda? I just thought that journalist
 
—”

“Well, they did,” I interrupt. “They picked the story up, and now they’ve got our pictures, too.” When I went outside to send the Channel 2 News team away, an attentive cameraman had taken my photo before I could turn away.

Charlotte shakes her head, heavily buttering a piece of salt-rising
brot
and layering it with red-veined radishes. “
Ach
, such a shame,” she murmurs.

Unlike orthodox Charlotte, who’s never once stepped foot outside Old Order Mennonite parameters in her fifty-seven years, I am upset not because I believe any captured image is idolatry, but because I’ve been using this cloistered lifestyle to conceal my past. Now, with that one brilliant flash, everything I have worked so hard to keep in darkness may be revealed.

“Can’t we just talk to them?” Alice asks. “Ask them to retract the story due to our religious beliefs?”

I take one fist out from beneath the table and hammer it on top.
“No!”
Panic makes my voice louder than I intend. Star bristles and looks over in alarm. Smiling to reassure her, I lower my voice and lean toward Alice.

“Telling them we want the story retracted will make it seem like we’ve got something to hide, and they’ll come back here to find out what it is.” I shake my head. “No, all we can do now is wait and hope it blows over.”

“Get back here!” The baritone command is still resonating when it is chased by two German shepherds with tawny coats and silvered muzzles. The dogs trot up to the entrance of the dining room and pause while thwacking their plumed tails against the doorframe and smiling.

Hopen Haus’s range of boarders is matched only by their family members, who sometimes visit without warning, as if to make sure we are indeed taking care of their kin. Therefore, I am only slightly perplexed by the sound of a stranger’s voice and the appearance of his dogs in our dining room. But as the dogs’ owner comes to stand in the doorway and I ready my simulated hostess smile in greeting, I look beneath the grizzled beard of the man and see a smooth-faced boy I knew a lifetime ago.

A
life
ago. My smile falters. The room pulses with my sporadic breath.

Seeing my struggle, Alice rises to her feet. Looper lowers his head, and I can spot the slight thinning at the cowlick’s curl. He hooks his fingers beneath his dogs’ collars. “Sorry,”
he mutters. “For intruding.” And I wonder if Looper is apologizing for intruding on our meal or for intruding on the life that I have built apart from him.

“No need to be sorry,” says Alice. I watch her move toward him. My tear-glazed eyes make their bodies waver like a mirage. Cradling his elbow
 
—a habit from her
Englisch
life that she has yet to break
 
—Alice guides Looper over to the high-back chair at the head of the two tables; a position that is the counter-opposite of mine.

He smiles while taking the seat. The matching dimples that I remember comb the graying strands of his beard. “I don’t mean to put y’all out,” he says. I am caught off guard by his words that are so slow, they sound poured from a jar.

“You’re not,” Alice says. “We’re used to visitors.” She pinches off pieces of
brot
and drops them before the old dogs that have padded over and curled in half circles behind Looper’s chair. She motions to Lydie to bring another place setting. “Where’ve you traveled from?”

Looper’s eyes slice through the confusion crowding the table and cut me in half. “Wisconsin,” he says. He smiles his thanks at Lydie, who sets a bowl steaming with
supp
and clatters silverware beside it. “Originally, I mean. Now . . .” He leans down and runs his hand over the head of the dog closest to him. “Now I live wherever my dogs are allowed to stay too.”

“What do you do for a living, Mr. . . . ?” asks Charlotte.

“Just call me Looper.” He scoops a spoonful of new
grummbeere
and dumps them into his mouth, gingerly
mulching the food and blowing out their trapped heat. “Mainly drywalling,” he says. “But I can do excavation, finish carpentry, electricity, plumbing. . . . Guess handyman would be the better title.” He drains his Mason jar in one long gulp.

Alice nods at Terese, and she brings the pitcher over from the sideboard and refills his glass with sassafras tea. “And that’s why I’m here.” Looper wipes his mouth with the cotton napkin, but beads of moisture still cling to his beard.

“Why?” asks Charlotte.

“From what I saw on the news, it looks like this place could use a little sprucing up, and I wondered if you’d allow me to do the job.”

The story has aired and Pandora’s box has opened.

He looks at me. I swallow hard and unhook my tongue from the dry roof of my mouth. “Perhaps we . . . we can discuss this after the meal?” I ask.

“Of course.” Looper smiles, dropping the balled napkin beside his plate.

With my fork, I puncture a red
grummbeere
flecked with parsley. Buttered broth seeps from the holes, but I do not have the strength or the appetite to bring the vegetable to my mouth. I know Looper looks at me for an answer, as do Alice and Charlotte. But with the secrets of our past, I don’t know what answer to give.

Constellations pin themselves to the velveteen night when Looper finally interlaces his hands and rests them on the
worn knee of his jeans. “How long you been like this?” he asks.

Though the question’s vague, there is no need for him to clarify. I can’t imagine how ridiculous he must think I am
 
—wearing the costume of my Plain dress and scraped bun as if I thought that, by assuming a different leading role, I could forget our story. “Eighteen years,” I whisper.

“Eighteen years!” He pulls one of my
kapp
strings and barks out a laugh that causes his dogs to lift their heads and look around the yard before seeing nothing of interest and returning to the pillow of their paws. “You were barely eighteen when you left.”

“I
know
how old I was.” I am grateful the only light comes from the fireflies that lie like a glittering blanket over the field. I am fraught with his disbelief at how young I was then, when I know these intervening years have not been kind.

“It’s pretty brilliant,” he says. “Dropping off the face of the earth by joining a Mennonite commune.” Leaning forward, he digs into the back pocket of his jeans, takes out his wallet, and tosses something onto my lap.

I look down and see a piece of paper folded into a square. Opening it, I can make out a column of words beside a large black-and-white image. The ink is spotty, and the woman featured has her hand up in an attempt to shield her face, as any respectable Mennonite woman would. But even with my
kapp
and altered features, there is no doubt Looper
 
—surfing the Internet
 
—would’ve instantly recognized me. The bold title reads, “Abandoned
Mennonite Community Becomes Home For Unwed Mothers.” I am sure that journalist made me sound like a saint, which only adds to the plethora of lies.

I fold the article
 
—the edges softened with handling
 
—and pass it back. “This is called a community, Looper. Not a commune. And I had no choice.”

He snorts. “Beth, you don’t know the choices you had.”

His use of my real name strips off my costume and shuts off the stage lights. I clench my teeth against the desire to shield my nakedness, when revealing who I am
 
—even for a moment
 
—is the very least this long-suffering man deserves.

“I might not have,” I say, “but I know going home wasn’t one of them.”