The Group (34 page)

Poor Sloan was impatient with suffering; that was why, probably, he had become a doctor. But he hid his idealism behind an armor of hardness; otherwise, he could not go on practicing, seeing all the pain he saw. She had often formulated this theory about Sloan when they had words about crossing a picket line or boycotting Spain and Japan (“Little Captain Boycott,” he called her, to their friends), but now, in the hospital, it struck her as peculiar that nurses, who heard more crying than doctors did, did not develop an armor against it. And she did
not
think that it was only for their own peace of mind that the nurses had begun muttering among themselves (she had heard them) that they would like to see Dr. Turner spend just one night in the patient’s place.

They blamed Dr. Turner, because he was Priss’s doctor, but it was really Sloan who had the bee in his bonnet. Lying in bed tensely listening to Stephen’s mournful cry, Priss suddenly did not understand why Sloan was so strong for breast-feeding. Was it entirely for the reasons he gave—the medical reasons? Or because he had a stubborn streak and felt that Mrs. Hartshorn, the nurses, and Priss were all against him? Or was it something worse? It crossed her mind that Sloan, who was just starting in practice, might regard her nursing Stephen as a sort of advertisement. He liked to make a point of his differences with dear old Dr. Drysdale, who had taken him into his office and who had practically introduced the bottle into New York society. Dr. Drysdale prided himself on being ultra-scientific, but Sloan said that all that boiling and sterilizing was inefficient and wasteful (not to mention the cost of the equipment), when you could tap nature’s resource; the baby could be weaned from the breast directly to the cup. Any mother could nurse, he maintained, just as any woman could keep her weight down during pregnancy—Mrs. Hartshorn had been astonished at how little Priss had gained, even with being on the sofa. Priss had been proud of keeping her girlish figure and proud as Lucifer of nursing Stephen, but now her pride was deflated by the thought that Sloan was using her to prove his theories, like a testimonial in a magazine. And it was true that the tale of her nursing had spread far and wide: everybody and his brother in this wing of the hospital seemed to have heard that poor little Mrs. Crockett, a chestless wonder, was breastfeeding; outside, in the Cosmopolitan Club, her mother’s circle were all talking about it. “Well, you’ve certainly started something!” Kay Strong Petersen had commented. “Every pregnant alumna who’s heard about you wants to nurse.”

It was unlike Priss to be bitter, but it galled her to feel, as she did tonight, that she was a party to a gross deception—one of those frauds on the public that the government Bureau of Standards was always out to uncover. At nine o’clock, when the maid brought in her fruit juice, Stephen was still crying, steadily, like a buzz saw; Priss was trying to do a crossword puzzle but could not concentrate. At the opening of the door, the screams from the nursery came louder; a weaker voice had joined Stephen’s. The idea that her child disturbed the other infants greatly troubled Priss, though the nurses tried to reassure her: newborn babies, they said, quickly got accustomed to a familiar noise. Still, Priss could not refrain from framing an apologetic sentence to the maid. “Oh, dear, Catherine,” she said (she had made a point of learning the maids’ names), “do you hear him? He’ll wake up the whole hospital.” “Hear him?” replied Catherine, who was Irish. “He’ll wake the dead. When are they going to let him have a bottle, for God’s sake?” “I don’t know,” said Priss, closing her eyes in pain. “Ah, don’t take it so hard,” the maid said jauntily, straightening Priss’s covers. “He’s exercising his lungs.” Priss wished everyone would not say that. “It’s not my place to ask,” said Catherine, moving closer to plump Priss’s pillows, “but I’ve been wondering. What put it into your head to nurse?” Priss felt her neck redden. “Im-m-mun-ities,” she stammered. The maid looked at her curiously. “You know,” said Priss. “Like vaccination. He can’t get any diseases I’ve had, like mumps or chicken pox or measles.” “Always something new,” said Catherine, shaking her head. She poured Priss fresh water. “They’re always inventing something, aren’t they?” Priss nodded. “Would you like your radio on, now? A little music? You won’t hear him, over the music.” “No, thank you, Catherine,” said Priss. “Can I crank you up a bit, Mrs. Crockett?” “No, thank you,” Priss repeated. The maid hesitated. “Good night, then, and cheer up. Look on the bright side. They used to say it developed the bust.” Priss could not help treasuring this last remark; she saved it to tell her mother tomorrow, in the brogue, if she could without stuttering. At the same time she had to admit that she had been secretly hoping that Stephen
would
be a bust-developer and she had made Dr. Turner laugh when she asked him anxiously whether she wouldn’t need a nursing brassiere. Her mood lightened; outside, silence reigned—Stephen must have had his drink of water while she and the maid were talking.

The calm was broken by the head floor nurse, Miss Swenson, who was going off duty. She came in and closed the door. “I want to tell you, Mrs. Crockett, that I’m going to speak to Dr. Turner in the morning. To recommend that Stephen be given a supplementary bottle.” The nurse’s casual tone did not fool Priss.
A supplementary bottle
—the phrase sounded horrid, as if Miss Swenson had said, “I’m going to recommend a dose of strychnine.” The very word
bottle
made Priss bristle, no matter what adjectives were attached. She braced herself against her pillows and prepared to give battle. Miss Swenson went on smoothly, as if she had not noticed the effect of her announcement on Priss. “I know this will be a great relief to you, Mrs. Crockett. We all understand what you’ve been going through. You’ve been a wonderful patient, a remarkable patient.” Even in her shock, Priss recognized that Miss Swenson, whom she had always liked, was speaking with real earnestness. “But why?” she brought out finally. “The scales …”

Miss Swenson, who was in her thirties with blond hair in a bun, came to the bedside and took her hand. “I know how you feel, my dear. Torn. Most nursing mothers cry when I have to tell them that I recommend a supplementary bottle. Even when the child is failing to gain weight. They want to keep trying. You’re exceptionally brave not to break down.” “You mean this happens often?” asked Priss. “Not very often. But we have one or two younger doctors who like to have the mothers nurse as long as they’re able. Not all the mothers agree, of course. There’s still a prejudice against breast-feeding, especially—and this will surprise you—among ward patients. They feel that a bottle baby is socially superior.” “How interesting!” Priss exclaimed. “And we see that same attitude with our Jewish private patients. Even when they have plenty of milk, and the doctor encourages it, they don’t want to nurse; they have the idea it’s lower East Side.” “How interesting,” Priss repeated thoughtfully. “Oh, being a nurse one sees a great deal. And the class differences are quite extraordinary. For example, on a surgical floor you’ll find that all the female private patients and many of the male private patients after an abdominal operation have post-operative urinary retention. While in a ward of Negro men you won’t get a single case. It’s simply a question of modesty; the upper class has been trained to feel embarrassment about the lower part of the body and after an operation when the abdomen has been opened, their inhibitions get to work and they can’t urinate.”

“Fascinating,” breathed Priss. She often wished she had studied sociology. But she did not want to be distracted from the main point. “Do higher-income women have a lower milk supply?” She did not like to use the words
upper class
. Miss Swenson avoided answering this blunt question; probably she was afraid of depressing Priss with the thought that her case was statistically pretty hopeless. She looked at her watch. “I want to explain the supplementary bottle to you, Mrs. Crockett.” To Priss’s surprise, she found that this phrase no longer sounded like a death knell. “But if he’s gaining the right amount …?” she protested, nevertheless. “He’s an unusually hungry baby,” said Miss Swenson. “Your milk is quite adequate from a nutritional point of view, but it doesn’t give him enough volume. What I suggest, Mrs. Crockett, is this. After his six o’clock evening feeding, starting tomorrow, we’ll give him a small amount of formula in a bottle. Your milk supply is at its lowest then, I’ve noticed. At ten he gets enough volume from you to hold him. On a full stomach he’ll sleep through till two; so will you, poor girl. In fact, with the supplementary bottle we may even be able to train him, before you leave the hospital, to sleep right through till six in the morning, so that you’ll have an unbroken night. We like to do that anyway for our mothers, before they go home; once the baby has the habit of the two o’clock feeding, it’s hard for the mother to break it herself. A baby works like a little clock, and we like to have it set right before the mother takes over.”

Priss nodded. How wonderful, she thought, of the hospital to plan ahead for the mothers. None of this would have been possible a few years before. “If he’s still fretful, even with one supplementary bottle,” Miss Swenson went on, “we may have to give him more. Some babies take a supplementary bottle after each time at the breast. But in Stephen’s case I don’t think this will be necessary. You may even find that your flow of milk increases, once Stephen is more comfortable.”

When Miss Swenson left, Priss was a changed woman. What impressed her, she said to herself, was the empirical spirit here, the willingness to try without prejudice different methods and
mixtures
of methods till they found one that worked, which was often a compromise, like the New Deal. She was sure Miss Swenson was a Democrat. She was so relieved that Sloan had got his training here, instead of at Columbia and Presbyterian. This hospital, she mused, half fancifully, was like an up-to-date factory: no baby was sent out until he was in good working order, tried and tested and guaranteed to run without friction for at least the first few months. Why, they even gave demonstrations, for mothers who were not lucky enough to afford an Irene or a practical nurse, on how to bathe a baby and bubble him and fold his diapers, and the ambulatory mothers who wanted to were allowed to go into the diet kitchen and see the formulas made! And these new babies who ate and slept regularly, on a schedule, like little clocks, as Miss Swenson said, were going to grow up into a new kind of man, who perhaps (it did not do to be
too
optimistic) would no longer want to make wars and grab property. And nowadays everything was being made so easy for those babies’ mothers: the infants were trained to the toilet in the very first months, by just being set gently on the potty when their regular time came, and as for washing diapers, there was this new thing called Diaper Service that came every day with fresh diapers and took away the soiled ones in a sanitized can.

That night Stephen broke all his previous records—three solid hours, from 3:00
A.M.
till 6:00. Dr. Turner, when he came into Priss’s room the next morning, scolded her for the circles under her eyes and advised her to put on some rouge. But he was very sweet about the bottle, acting as though Miss Swenson’s suggestion was what he had decided to prescribe himself, after looking at the chart. The weight curve, he said thoughtfully, was not the whole picture. Priss did not remind him that he had said the exact opposite, standing in the same spot, two days before, on Saturday. He departed humming, having picked one of Priss’s roses for his buttonhole.

The fly in the ointment was Sloan. She was afraid he would see red at the words
supplementary bottle
. Dr. Turner promised to talk to him; if
she
did it, Priss thought, she would find herself stammering and using some sickly euphemism like “Tonight Stephen is going to get some formula for dessert.” It was odd how hospitals got you talking that way. One thing Priss was resolved on: neither she nor anyone else was ever going to talk baby-talk to Stephen. Or use expressions like “Wee-wee” or “Number Two.” She had not yet decided what to say instead.

At lunch time, Sloan appeared; he was angry. A muscle twitched by his eye. He was more angry at Dr. Turner and the nurses than he was at Priss, whom he treated as an innocent party. They had high-pressured her, he said, into accepting the bottle. “But, Sloan,” she argued, “it does sound like a good idea. Stephen will be getting the best of both worlds, don’t you see?” Sloan shook his head. “Prissy, you’re a layman. Turner’s a woman’s doctor. When you leave the hospital, he doesn’t follow through. Except for your check-up. He doesn’t see what happens when a child that’s been nursing starts getting a bottle. Neither do these maternity nurses. That’s what the pediatrician sees. Every darn time.” He sat down in the armchair and ran his hand through his blond hair; Priss saw that he was truly upset. “What happens, Sloan?” she said gently. “It’s simple,” he said, wiping his glasses. “When a child gets an ounce of formula, without half trying, from a bottle, he stops nursing so eagerly from the breast. Why should he? The child is a reasonable being. When he stops sucking for all he’s worth, the mother’s milk supply goes down. Then they give him another ‘supplementary bottle.’ Then another. Within a week he’s getting a bottle with each breastfeeding. At that point he starts rejecting the breast. Too much trouble. Or the pediatrician steps in and calls a halt. If the mother’s milk is down to an ounce a feeding, it’s not worthwhile to go on. Especially with the headache of boiling the bottles and the nipples and making the formula for six daily feedings—it’s a duplication of labor. I tell you, Priss, if Stephen starts on a bottle tonight, you won’t be home a week before your milk gives out, and you’ll have a full-time bottle baby!”

Priss nodded meekly. She seemed to have no mind of her own. In no time, he had convinced her that it would be all over with her nursing if they gave Stephen that bottle. Why, it would be like starting him on drugs or liquor; right away, he would get a taste for it. She saw what Sloan was fighting and how Miss Swenson and Dr. Turner had deceived her. For herself, she felt sad and beaten, as though she had lost her reason for living if she could not nurse Stephen. It was silly how much she had counted on it. “Does it make that much difference; Sloan?” she said earnestly. “Haven’t you and I got a wee bit hipped on this nursing?”