The Custodian of Paradise (9 page)

“So, tell me what is new at Bedside Manor?” I liked to ask her, though I knew she wouldn’t answer.

“She never speaks to me, never,” I complained to Dr. Breen. “I would rather she sermonized me all day than just sat there, saying nothing.”

“I have told her to say nothing that might upset you, so she says nothing at all because every word
you
say upsets
her
. She would speak to you if you were less—provocative.”

“Tell me, Stepdoctor Breen, what is the silent treatment meant to treat?”

He grinned as if to say that he knew that my wit was but bravado, knew I was afraid because I had no idea what giving birth was like, unlike him who had witnessed, overseen and managed it a thousand times before.

“What a marvel of conversation she would be if only she had time to learn a language.”

“Miss Long has always been a woman of few words,” my mother said. “She has been with my husband’s family all her life.”

“If only you had known her years ago,” I said, “you could have learned from her example.
You
might have been with your husband’s family all your life.”

“You make a mockery of things that you will never understand.”

Dr. Breen examined me daily, palpating my belly gently with his fingers and hands, now and then looking at my face as if my belly were some strange musical instrument and the score for the piece that he was playing at a pitch that only he could hear was written on my forehead.

The only other doctor who had ever examined me was my father, whose palpations were nowhere near as gentle as Dr. Breen’s. My father would put one hand atop the other and press down until I winced or protested that it hurt, at which point he would grunt and move on as if taking inventory of my organs, trying to confirm that all were present and properly located. I suspected that Dr. Breen was a better doctor than my father, to whom, in spite of everything, I felt a filial loyalty. It seemed that by submitting to Dr. Breen’s ministrations, I was being unfaithful to my father. To have been examined only by this pair of father-doctors—how strange that seemed.

“I find that one drink of Scotch at bedtime helps me sleep,” I said, wondering if my mother had repeated those words to him.

He shook his head to indicate that I would not be getting any Scotch, but also, it seemed, in wonderment at the word “find,” implying habitual use of whisky by a girl who was only fifteen.

Again that condescending smile. “I will give you some laudanum if your sleeplessness persists.” A couple of times he drew from a bottle some drops of laudanum that he mixed with water. Each time, after drinking it, I fell into a dreamless sleep, but woke still feeling tired.

“Do you know what my father calls an obstetrician, Stepdoctor Breen?” I asked him one day.

“No,” he said. “I can’t imagine.”

“A plumber in the ladies’ room. Ironic, isn’t it? An obstetrician who can’t make his wife pregnant. A sterile obstetrician. Attending at the birth of other people’s babies, attending every day to the pregnant wives of other men.” His face turned crimson red. I feared that he would shout at me.

“The problem may be with your mother,” he said at length.

“How gallant of you to say so.”

I fancied that his past, present and future patients would be somehow reassured to hear that his wife was at last expecting, that it would remove the one nagging reservation they had always had about him.

   
Chapter Three
   

LOREBURN

I
TOOK A BREAK FROM WRITING
. S
PENT MOST OF THREE DAYS
outdoors, sitting on the beach and staring out to sea. I watched the light at Quinton blinking just perceptibly when it was foggy and listened to the foghorn. Always the shotgun was beside me in case the dogs came near. I imagined the conning tower of a German submarine surfacing far out in the bay. But my mind was in Manhattan, preoccupied with a time when the outcome of the war before this one was still in doubt. It was not long before I was writing again.

Sometimes Dr. Breen examined me internally, drawing a sheet down from above my bed so that I couldn’t see what he was doing or what he was doing it with, a bed sheet that rolled off a spool fixed to the wall. With Miss Long assisting, he examined me. I was grateful to be shielded from the sight of them. I tightly closed my eyes, clenched my teeth and gripped the bedsheets with my fists. I heard the clinking of metal instruments and a murmured exchange between him and Miss Long.

“You would tell me if you were in pain or discomfort, wouldn’t you?” he said when, the examination complete, he drew down my nightgown and rewound the sheet onto its spool. “You wouldn’t keep it to yourself?”

“I would tell everyone,” I said.

“So you’re not having any pain?” He sounded faintly surprised in a way I found offputting.

“No,” I said, “but if I do, I’ll be the first to know.”

“Let’s try to be serious now. You will tell me, won’t you?”

“I suspect my discomforts are the customary ones.”

“Such as?”

“My bladder.”

“It hurts?”

“It works. It can’t stand to be anything but empty.”

“Anything else?”

“My back.”

“It’s been complaining.”

“It’s been complaining that I don’t lie on my stomach any more.”

I felt like some unethical experiment of his, something for which he would be banished from his profession if his colleagues got wind of it.

He and my mother acted as if the baby had no father, as if I merely willed it into being, perversely and spontaneously generated what I knew would be a predicament for everyone. I wondered if my father had told them who I said the father was, the name of the unsuitable-for-marriage man that I supplied him with.

I thought of Prowse, whom only I knew to be the baby’s father, Prowse whose air of entitlement I had mistaken for ardour.

I was the habitation, the shelter of a creature that was half-composed of Prowse, whom I had loved and now wished I could bring myself to hate. This half-Prowse would grow up in this house, in this city that Prowse had never seen, raised by parents Prowse would never know, this half-Prowse of whose existence Prowse would never know. But I, in spite of Prowse, my mother and Dr. Breen, would always think of the baby as wholly mine.

The customary and cursory morning examination became abruptly more elaborate and endlessly drawn out. Dr. Breen seemed to put his stethoscope on every square inch of my belly, then work backwards to the place that he had started from. His expression was both quizzical and wondrous, as if I had arrived at the stage in my
pregnancy that he found most fascinating. I thought that perhaps his thoroughness and look of delight had to do with this being, for the first and only time,
his
baby whose health he was monitoring, whose sounds he was attending to, all his medical detachment having given way to what he had never before regarded as the miracle it was. I looked at his face, inches from my belly as, with his head cocked sideways and the tubes of the stethoscope depending from his ears, he moved the amplifier almost imperceptibly. He looked like a doctor mapping out a woman’s womb, as if the stethoscope were an experimental instrument of his invention and he had no idea yet what the sounds were that it enabled him to hear.

“Can I listen?” I said.

He stuffed the stethoscope into his doctor’s bag.

“Do you think America will join the war?” I said. “The rest of the world is going up in flames and here you are—”

“There are more pleasant things to think about,” he said.

It is strange. David was born during one World War and died in another.

At night I felt that this was a house in waiting, a house in which no one slept soundly. Everyone was waiting, wondering. The rest of them waiting for the baby to come and for me to go. I for whatever would come next, the unimaginable future that would begin the day I left this house. There were four of us now and there would be four when I was gone. All waiting for this strange interregnum to be over with. For the house to be cleansed of its secret and of the danger that secret posed to all of them. Feeling as if this period of yearning and dread would never end. Looking forward to when it would seem, when it might even be possible to pretend, that this time had never been.