Born with Teeth: A Memoir (8 page)

When we pulled up to the curb, the cabbie looked at me. “You okay, hon?” Preternaturally grave young women were not unfamiliar to this guy, but he hadn’t yet become impervious to their pain.

“I’m fine,” I answered. “Thanks for asking.”

I stepped off the elevator at the second floor, and instead of taking the customary turn to my dressing room, I headed in the opposite direction and found Claire bent over her desk, brow furrowed in concentration.

“We need to talk,” I said, closing the door gently behind me. “Listen, Claire, there’s no other way but to just say it straight. I’m pregnant. So I’m going to have to quit. I wanted to give you enough time to write me out before I begin to show. I’m sorry.”

Claire stared at me, wide eyed. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said at last, “what are you going to do?”

When I opened my mouth to respond, to tell her that I was confused, terrified, what came out was this: “I’m going to have the baby, and I’m going to give it up for adoption.”

“Of course you are,” Claire said, with such simplicity and conviction I almost burst into tears. Claire was a devout Roman Catholic, but I knew her response had less to do with the mores of the Church than it did with her authentic love for me. “Sit down, honey,” she went on, “and let’s talk about this.”

After dispensing with the details—when did I find out, how far along was I, did David know, had I spoken to my mother—she leaned forward and, taking my hand in both of hers, spoke in a near whisper. “Katie, I have an idea. Just hear me out.” Claire rose and started to pace. “We’ll write the pregnancy into Mary’s story. She and Jack are madly in love, she gets pregnant, he isn’t ready for a baby, they break up, she decides to go it alone, lots of turbulence with Jack until, ultimately, she has the baby and names her (it has to be a girl)…
Ryan Fenelli.
Not only is it fabulous material, so much to play, but you can work straight through to term and return as soon after the birth as you like. What do you think?”

What I thought was: Once again, dear Claire, you have saved me. What I said was, “Thank you. I accept.”

And so it was that millions of people witnessed life imitating art.

The ratings soared as Mary Ryan faced her trials with courage and unwavering conviction. The audience suffered with her when she was cruelly abandoned by Jack, and they despised Jack for his weakness. Their hearts were full of pride when she elected to have the baby alone, without Jack’s love and support. They applauded her independence, they respected her morality, and they adored her guts.

Looking back, I wonder how many viewers—the faithful, the devoted—guessed the reality of the situation. It was, mercifully, kept out of the press, but still—the suddenness with which I popped, this was not at all merciful. One night, I was about to step into the shower when, to my horror, I saw the beginning of a small purple hand crawling under the skin of my abdomen.

Inexorably creeping upward, each magenta finger branding my skin, so that there could be no possibility—ever—of denial.

My days were full. I worked hard. My nights, increasingly empty.

David was kind, even solicitous, but our mutual sadness was such that it precluded any kind of enjoyment or comfort we might have found in each other; so more and more, he stayed away. And I wanted it that way. The course I had set myself on was not one my sweet young lover was built to stomach.

I followed my mother’s advice and made an appointment with a social worker at the Catholic Home Bureau on the East Side of Manhattan. A lovely young woman, with wild red hair and cerulean eyes, rose to greet me. Her name was Susan Smith.

“Is it
really
Susan Smith?” I asked when we shook hands, and she laughed.

“Lucky, aren’t I? So simple.”

“Simple,” I replied, lowering myself uneasily into a chair, “is not something I’m very familiar with.”

Then the lovely smile disappeared and was instantly replaced by a genuine, if studied, expression of sympathy. She read me my rights, so to speak, which were archaic, primitive, in keeping with the history of the Catholic Church: after the birth of the baby, Susan would come to the hospital with legal papers, I would be given the opportunity to change my mind, but, once the papers were signed, the baby was no longer mine. It was an act of renunciation. I would not be allowed to hold the baby; I would not be allowed to see the baby. If the delivery was routine, I was expected to leave the hospital the same day. I would be given no information as to the whereabouts of the baby. I was not to appeal to the Home Bureau after the birth of the baby. The decision to give up my baby was unalterable.

“However,” said Susan Smith. Full stop. The eyes again turning soft. “You will be able to actively participate in the choice of whom you would like to parent your baby. We have many couples on file, and we—you and I—will go through them carefully and choose which ones you find most suitable, most desirable. Then we will limit this choice to one or two couples. The upside here is that you have six months to comb through these files. At the end of this process, you will be very sure which woman and which man you have most confidence in, which couple you feel can best raise your child. Many couples, I am sure, will want this baby.”

Such foreign, ill-fitting words coming out of that lovely girl’s mouth. I had the sudden urge to hit her, but I took the high road and shook her hand instead.

We met often over the next months, Susan Smith and I. She pulled card after card from a file on her desk and told me the
story of many men and women. She explained why they couldn’t have children or even, in some cases, why they preferred adoption. She described to me their jobs, their backgrounds, their hobbies, their deepest wishes.

“Now, this couple,” Susan said one day, tapping the card in front of her, “is amazing. And they’ve been through it. Eight years ago, they were promised a baby, but at the last minute, the birth mother changed her mind. No sooner did they get here than they had to turn around and go home. They were brokenhearted.”

“Tell me about them,” I urged.

“Well, they’re both Irish-Catholic, midthirties, passionate about each other and about having a family, and did everything in their power to conceive a child, but it just wasn’t to be. He is a very successful brain surgeon, she’s an artist, and they live in a beautiful house in Westchester County. She probably calls me twice a month, and has for years, still hoping for a baby. She was in despair when she lost the baby girl they thought was theirs eight years ago. Inconsolable. And such a lovely woman, so full of life and hope. I wouldn’t do that to her again.”

I swallowed. “What does she look like?”

Susan Smith smiled, looked me straight in the eye. “Oh, she’s a wild Irish rose.”

I made my decision, and the day came when I was allowed to sit in Susan Smith’s office while she phoned the prospective adoptive parents with the good news. Susan indicated that I was to sit close beside her and listen in on the exchange.

A woman answered.

“Molly, this is Susan Smith at the Catholic Home Bureau. How are you?”

Silence on the other end. “I don’t know,” said a voice, dropping to a whisper.

“Well, I think you’re going to be fine, more than fine, when I tell you to prepare the nursery. Your baby will be coming to you in just a few weeks.”

Another silence, then the woman gasped, I heard a cry, a muffled shout, the phone dropping to the floor and being picked up seconds later by a man, who said, “Who is this? What’s going on? Molly’s running upstairs crying and laughing and shouting at the same time, she’s lost her mind, and I want to know what the hell is going on!”

Susan Smith was very direct with the husband. “Hello, Jack, this is Susan Smith from the Catholic Home Bureau. I’m calling to tell you that you are about to be a father.”

Seconds passed. “Holy Mother of God,” the man said, and Susan responded, “Exactly.”

My mother came in for the birth. I flew her to New York first class.

My due date had been an educated guess, and Dr. Morris was kind enough to inform me that it might be as much as a week to ten days off. So Mother and I entertained each other. In an effort to encourage labor, we sneaked into a porno movie in Times Square called
Defiance,
and afterward we were so weak from laughter that I could barely move.

“Walk! You need to walk! Let’s go!” my mother sang out.

And so we walked until I was forced to sit down on the curb at the corner of Forty-Second Street and Ninth Avenue. Not an ideal part of town for a hugely pregnant girl to take her ease. My ankles were so swollen I couldn’t wear shoes at all, so I had bound my feet in three pairs of men’s woolen socks. My mother, studying me, said, “Let’s pretend you’re my very eccentric daughter who loves porno movies.” We looked at each other, me down below, she up above, and then we did what we always did when faced with the absurd, or the unbearable. We laughed.

My due date came and went, and one morning I woke to find my mother putting the last of her things into a suitcase. “Kitty Kat, this is the longest pregnancy in the history of the world. I need to get home or your father will shoot me. You’ll be all right, won’t you? I mean, kid, I’ve been here for a
week.
At this rate, you’ll have to put
me
in the hospital.”

Pointless to ask her to stay. My poor little mother had had enough. Enough of babies being born, enough of babies dying. And as for babies unbidden, well—she’d come to New York, she’d done what she was capable of doing, and now it was time to go.

We rode the elevator to the lobby, and I asked the doorman to flag a cab. Mother put her long, cool fingers to my cheeks and said, “My friend Mother Columba says that God is Everythingness. Who knows?” I put her in the cab, handed her a fifty, stuffed another in her purse, and kissed her on the cheek. The taxi pulled away, and I wondered what my mother must be thinking.

It’s hard to know what’s in a person’s heart when she never says good-bye.

When it begins, I am alone. I am lying in my emerald-green pullout bed, and it is just before dawn, the darkest hour. I lie as still as death, waiting for life to announce itself. Distant stirrings arise, unfamiliar, neither pleasant nor harsh, then settle and subside. I lie in wait, patient and wholly unprepared. The stirrings swell into tight waves, and I know that, very soon, it will be time, and still I don’t move. I watch the dawn almost hungrily as it blossoms outside my window, and I watch as my abdomen ripples and hardens, a tiny fist or maybe the ball of a foot suddenly distorting the skin with a sharp kick, a swift poke, and all the while the waves are undulating and surging, and I am playing for time, but there is none, and so I reach for the phone and dial Beth’s number.

“Sorry to wake you, sweetheart, but I think you should come. They’re about ten minutes apart.”

“What!”
she cries, from the bowels of Lower Manhattan. “I’m on my way! Don’t move!”

And so I don’t, even though now it is uncomfortable in the bed and there is much to be done. The sun illuminates the room; I sit on the edge of the bed, try to stand, sit again, not so much defeated as unable to go forward. I wait.

At last, a knock at the door. I push myself up and cross the room to let Beth in. She drops her bag, takes hold of my arm, and guides me toward the bathroom.

“Let me feel your tummy.” A practiced hand, a good hand, resting lightly on my stomach. “Hmmm, uh-huh. Let’s get moving. You’re going to shower while I pack you a bag. Come on.”

The faucet is turned on, my nightie is off in a flash, and Beth is leveraging me into the tub, itself a small masterpiece of choreography. I let the water run over my face, my breasts, my heaving stomach. Everything is leaking at once. I climb out of the shower, and Beth hands me a towel, does her best to dry what I cannot possibly reach.

“What do you want to wear?” she asks, as if I might be going on an audition, because the closet is, indeed, full of lovely clothes, but none of them have fit me for months, and I point at the one garment that has been my steadfast shroud: a commodious and badly soiled off-white cotton dress that slips on and off with the ease of a large cape. Beth frowns.

I say, “Just help me put it on.” Once dressed, I lean against the wall and instruct Beth to pull two pairs of men’s woolen socks over my feet, which is again met with resistance.

“You have to wear shoes—it’s a hospital!” she objects, but I am already opening the door and shuffling toward the elevator.

On the street, despite the unremitting piercing of the doorman’s whistle, there is not a taxi to be had, and even those that look like they might be empty hurtle by, dismissing us. Without warning, a contraction overwhelms me, and I am forced to sit on the curb.

Beth grows frantic and runs into the middle of Central Park West, waving her arms and screaming, “Taxi! Goddammit, I said, Taxi! Taxi!
Taxi!
” The doorman takes offense at this and, stepping back on to the sidewalk, crosses his arms over his belly.

Beth prevails, and a taxi swerves to a stop in front of the building. She shouts to the cabbie, “Just wait a minute, will ya? We need a
minute
here!” And all the while she’s trying to pull me up because the men won’t help, the cabbie and the doorman absolutely do not budge, frozen in a kind of primordial terror (or is it disgust?), but Beth manages to get me to my feet and with considerable effort wedges me into the back of the taxi, runs around to the other side, and jumps in, shouting to the cabdriver, “New York University Hospital, and step on it!”

He does, and we fly through Central Park at sixty miles an hour, swerving to avoid cyclists and pedestrians. The cabbie peppers the silence with a series of invectives, until Beth leans forward and says, “Could you please just shut up and drive?” He glowers at her in the rearview mirror. This is not how he sees his part in the movie.

Beth reaches over and takes my hand. She understands that I cannot talk. It is such a gloriously beautiful May morning, I put my hand to the window and hold it against the glass; I want to see what my hand looks like before it becomes another kind of hand. I press my face to the window, and I think to myself, There will never be another day like this day. This day will end. Everything passes in front of me with alarming speed, and though I recognize the splendor of the trees and the radiance of the sun, I am detached. This startles and unsettles me.

The taxi driver, disgruntled now, speeds through traffic with careless velocity, cracking gum and swerving and braking until, finally, he screeches to a halt in front of New York University Hospital. Beth throws a twenty-dollar bill at him, and we walk
away from the turmoil of the morning into the cool, clinical confines of a foreign place.

Beth steers me to the admissions desk. “My friend is in labor, she needs a wheelchair. I would appreciate a wheelchair immediately, and then we’ll do the paperwork.” She is masterful, and a wheelchair quickly appears, I am placed in it, and the process of admissions begins. It is all in Beth’s hands now; I am simply a young pregnant girl in a wheelchair.

It happens fast. I am stripped, given a hospital gown, hoisted onto an examining table. Dr. Morris come in seconds later, pats my hand, and says, “Well, Kate, so let’s hope today’s the day,” and straps on a rubber glove. “Yes, indeed,” he continues, “you’re almost fully dilated. Let’s get you prepped, it won’t be long now.” Leaning down, and most unprofessionally, he kisses my cheek and whispers, “You’re a good girl. I’ll get you through this as quickly and painlessly as possible.”

A nurse comes in, all business. She neither smiles nor engages (does she know what will happen to the baby?), but in short order I am subjected to a process that is so fast and so brutal, I submit to it like a lamb to the slaughter. Legs are spread wide, an electric razor applied, and then an enema inserted, and I am told: “Do
not
go to the bathroom until you absolutely have to.” Within seconds, it is unbearable, and, lumbering down the hall, hospital gown flapping, I find a bathroom and stagger into the stall like a crazed animal.

Beth helps me out, and we make baby steps back to the examining room, where I am greeted by a cadre of medical residents, who have come to observe and to learn. They do not meet my eyes, to them I am a specimen (do they know what will happen to the baby?), and then Dr. Morris enters the room, now brusque and distant, separates my legs, and describes in clinical detail the condition of my cervix and the state of my labor. There is a
collective leaning in, a general acknowledgment of having gotten what they came for, followed by a brisk exodus.

I turn to look out the window, think there might be tears. No tears, I promise myself. But Beth has turned her face away. Suddenly, and without explanation, two orderlies come in and begin to wheel me to the delivery room.

I say, quickly, “Beth, you have to come with me—don’t leave me.”

She is holding my hand, saying, “I’m here, don’t worry, I’m here, Katie.”

Doors swing wide, a new room, disturbingly bright, and everything is fast now, feet in cold metal stirrups, nurses bustling, hidden behind masks, Dr. Morris looming over me, and I whisper, “Beth, please let Beth stay,” but I don’t hear his answer because a nurse is shouting, “Don’t push, breathe!”

And there is the sense of a hive at its most agitated, and I am in it but not of it, when I hear Dr. Morris say, “Okay, that’s enough. Let’s get this girl out of this thing,” and without warning a black rubber mask is put over my nose and mouth and I hear an already distant but still-urgent voice ordering me to “Breathe deeply, Kate—on my count, take three deep breaths, in and out!”

But there is no second breath, there is only oblivion.

I am quite alone, and it is over. The room is different. It has the dimensions and character of a closet; it is small, dark, and quiet. I run my hand over my loose, flaccid stomach and then lower, to find padding, thick and unwieldy, between my legs. On the floor beside the bed sits a pair of white espadrilles. Beth, the smuggler, slipped them into my overnight bag before we left the apartment.

Very slowly, I roll onto my side and prepare to sit up, anticipating agony. There is none. When I lean over to put on my
shoes, there is a sudden rush of blood, but no pain. Gingerly, I rise to my feet and pull open the closet door. Hanging there, in solitary confinement, my white cotton dress. Carefully, I slip it over my head. In the bathroom, I splash water on my face and brush my teeth. Then I look. Matted, lusterless hair, pale skin, dark circles under empty eyes. I run a comb through my hair and smooth it with my hands. I touch my cheek.

In the corridor, I am lost. A doctor is passing, and I stop her: “Excuse me, but I’m looking for the nursery. Is this the maternity ward?”

She cocks her head, appraising me, steel-gray eyes beneath a helmet of black hair. “You’re a long way from the nursery,” the doctor replies, as if slightly put out. “This is the oncology ward. Take the elevator to the third floor and you’ll find a directory there, and a bridge to the nursery, but it’s a hike.”

It is a long way to the nursery, and on this journey, turning over and over in my mind, is the question: Why did I wake up on the oncology ward? I follow the bridge to another building, where I am told that the maternity ward and the nursery are two distinct units and that I must go back, and down, and then straight ahead through a passageway. That is, if I’m looking for the nursery, and not the maternity ward.

At the end of the passageway, double doors open into a long, cool, dimly lit corridor. In the distance, I make out the solitary figure of a nurse sitting at her station. I slowly walk toward her, trying to quiet the flapping in my brain, as if something has been let loose in there that wants to sit still but can’t. As I approach, the nurse looks up. She is pristine, from white-capped head to white-shoed toe, and she is smiling.

“Can I help you?” she asks, standing. She is young, no more than thirty, and she exudes calm. For a moment I hold my breath but then realize with relief that, no, she doesn’t recognize me.

“Yes, I think so,” I reply. “I had a baby this afternoon, and I was wondering if I could see my baby.”

The beautiful young nurse with the warm brown eyes now stops to consider me. A shadow crosses her lovely face and she asks, “What is your name?”

“Kate Mulgrew.”

She pauses and says, “Let me see.” She consults the large white journal sitting open on her desk. A minute passes, during which she intently studies this journal.

Finally, she closes the book, looks at me, and with a modulated voice says, “The birth record shows that your baby is to be put up for adoption.”

I nod, and place a hand on the countertop.

The nurse is glancing furtively up and down the corridor while she speaks. “Hospital policy forbids the birth mother to see her baby under these circumstances. You understand.”

I do not nod. I see the brown eyes harden, and my pulse races, but the good nurse—the infinitely good nurse—whispers, “If you go quickly down the hall you’ll see the nursery on your right. Stop in front of the window and I’ll come and pull up the blinds. But you need to hurry.”

Down the hall a little way, quickly, and there’s the nursery, just as she promised, concealed behind venetian blinds. The nurse comes up behind me very softly and, again looking to her right as if expecting someone who might disapprove, she manipulates a tangle of silver cords and choosing one, pulls, and the room is instantly revealed.

“Just look for your name on the bassinette. Your daughter is there,” and she points to the front row. Daughter. She said daughter. And there on the front of the bassinette is the label clearly marked:
BABY GIRL MULGREW
.

I press my face against the glass. Strain to see her. Tiny brown face under a pink cap, pink cap over black curls, miniature
fists suddenly escaping from the blanket, opening and closing. I put my hands to the window, can’t be helped, and the little fists are opening and closing, opening and closing, and my face is flattened against the pane and then
thwack!
The venetian blinds are dropped, the nursery disappears, I turn in bewilderment, but the nurse is adjusting her cap and saying just under her breath, “That’s enough now, you need to go,” and hurries off in the direction of a group of doctors, coming in to make their rounds.

I stand there, just outside the nursery, but as the doctors draw closer, I lower my head and, averting my eyes, make my way down the corridor, through the passageway, across the bridge, and up six floors to the cancer ward, where I know Susan Smith will be waiting for me.