I nodded.
“And it’s the mother you know?”
“Grandmother, really. The baby’s mother’s mother. We … were friends. For a long time.”
“I see.” She probably did. “And the girl’s mother recently died, according to the chart. A stroke, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
There was no way I could tell her or anyone else what LaVerne had meant, had been, to me. We were both little more than kids when we met; Verne was a hooker then. Years later she married her doctor and I didn’t see her for a while. When he cut her loose, she started as a volunteer at a rape-crisis center and went on to a psychology degree and full-time counseling. It was a lonely life, I guess, at both ends. And when finally she met a guy named Chip Landrieu and married him, even as I began to realize what I had lost, I was happy for her. For both of them.
“Did she know Alouette was pregnant?”
I shook my head. “Their lives had gone separate ways many years back.” So separate that I hadn’t even known about Alouette. “She—” Say it, Lew. Go ahead and say her name. Names are important. “LaVerne had been trying to get back in touch, to find Alouette.”
She looked away for a moment. “What’s happened to us?” And in my own head I heard Vicky again, many years ago: What’s wrong with this country, Lew? “Well, never mind all that. Not much we can do about it, is there? Do you understand what’s happening here?” Her nod took in the ventilator, monitors, bags of IV medication hanging upside down like transparent bats from silver poles, Baby Girl McTell’s impossible ark; perhaps the whole world.
“Not really.” Does anyone, I wanted to add.
“Alouette is an habitual drug user. Crack, mainly, according to our H&P and the social worker’s notes, but there’s a history of drug and alcohol abuse involving many controlled substances, more or less whatever was available, it seems. She makes no attempt to deny this. And because of it, Alouette’s baby was profoundly compromised
in utero.
She never developed, and though Alouette did manage to carry her as far as the seventh month, what you’re looking at here in the incubator is something more on the order of a five-month embryo. You can see there’s almost nothing to her. The eyes are fused, her skin breaks down wherever it’s touched, there aren’t any lungs to speak of. She’s receiving medication which paralyzes her own respiratory efforts, and the machine, the ventilator, does all her breathing. We have her on high pressures and a high rate, and nine hours out of ten we’re having to give her hundred-percent oxygen.
Two
hours out of ten, maybe, we’re holding our own.”
“You’re telling me she’s going to die.”
“I am. Though of course I’m not supposed to.”
“Then why are we doing all this?”
“Because we can. Because we know how. There are sixty available beds in this unit. On any given day, six to ten of those beds will be filled with crack babies like Alouette’s. At least ten others are just as sick, for whatever reasons—other kinds of drug and alcohol abuse, congenital disease, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care. The numbers are climbing every day. When I first came here, there’d be, oh, five to ten babies in this unit. Now there’re never fewer than thirty. And there’ve been times we’ve had to stack cribs in the hallway out there.”
“Are you always this blunt?”
“No. No, I’m not, not really. But we look on all this a bit differently in Britain, you understand. And I think that I may be answering something I see in your face, as well.”
“Thank you.” I held out a hand. She took it without hesitation or deference, as American women seldom can. “My name is Griffin. Lew.”
“Teresa, as you can see. And since Hunt is the name on my nursing license, I use it here. But in real life,
away
from here, I mostly use my maiden name, McKinney. If there’s ever anything I can do, Mr. Griffin, please let me know. This can be terribly hard on a person.”
She removed vials from a drawer beneath the incubator, checked them against her lists, drew up portions into three separate syringes and injected these one at a time, and slowly, into crooks (called heplocks) in Baby Girl McTell’s IV tubing. There were four IV sites, swaddled in tape. Almost every day one or another of them had to be restarted elsewhere, in her scalp, behind an ankle, wherever they could find a vein that wouldn’t blow.
She dropped the syringes into the mouth of a red plastic Sharps container, pulled a sheet of paper from beneath the clipboard and, glancing at a clock on the wall nearby, made several notations.
“I don’t know at all why I’m telling you this, Mr. Griffin, but I had a child myself, a son. He was three months early, weighed almost two pounds and lived just over eight days. I was sixteen at the time. And afterwards, because of an infection, I became quite sterile. But it was because of him that I first began thinking about becoming a nurse.”
“Call me Lew. Please.”
“I don’t think the head nurse would care much for that, if she were to hear about it. She’s a bit stuffy and proper, you understand.”
“But what can one more rule matter? Since, as you say, we’ve already started breaking them.”
“Yes, well, we have done that truly, haven’t we, Lew. Do you think you’d be wanting to speak with one of the doctors? They should be along in just a bit. Or I could try paging one of them.”
“Is there anything they can tell me that you can’t?”
“Not really, no.”
“Then I don’t see any reason for bothering them. I’m sure they have plenty to do.”
“That they have. Well, I’ll just step out for a few minutes and leave the two of you to get acquainted. If you should need anything, Debbie will be watching over my children while I’m gone.”
She nodded toward a nurse who sat in a rocking chair across the pod, bottle-feeding one of the babies.
“That’s Andrew. He’s been with us almost a year now, and we all spoil him just awfully, I’m afraid.”
“A year? When will he leave?”
“There’s nowhere for him to go. Most of his bowel had to be removed just after birth, and he’ll always be needing a lot of care. Feedings every hour, a colostomy to manage. His parents came to see him when the mother was in the hospital, but once she was discharged, we stopped hearing from them. The police went out to the address we had for them after a bit, but they were long gone. Eventually I suppose he’ll be moved upstairs to pediatrics. And somewhere farther along they’ll find a nursing home that will take him, perhaps.”
I looked from Andrew back to Baby Girl McTell as Teresa walked away. Names are important. Things are what we call them. By naming, we understand. But what name do we have for a baby who’s never quite made it into life, who goes on clawing after it, all the while slipping further away, with a focus, a hunger, we can scarcely imagine? What can we call the battles going on here? And how can we ever understand them?
Through the shelves I watched people gather over an Isolette in the next pod. First the baby’s own nurse, then another from the pod; next, when one of them went off to get her, a nurse who appeared to be in charge; finally, moments later, the young man in lab coat and Nikes who’d earlier been standing at the desk in front. Various alarms had begun sounding—buzzers, bells, blats—as the young man looked up at the monitors one last time, reached for a transparent green bag at bedside, and said loudly: “Call it.” Overhead, a page started:
Stat to neonatal intensive care, all attendings.
He put a part of the bag over the baby’s face and began squeezing it rapidly.
Then I could see no more as workers surrounded the Isolette.
“Sir, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to step out,” Debbie said. She stood and placed Andrew back in his open crib. The child’s eyes followed her as she walked away. He didn’t cry.
I filed out alongside skittish new fathers, smiling grandparents, a couple of mothers still in hospital gowns and moving slowly, hands pressed flat against their stomachs. An X-ray machine bore down on us through the double doors and lumbered along the hallway, banging walls and scattering linen hampers, trashcans, supply carts. Where’s this one? the tech asked. Pod 2, Mrs. Heslip told him.
Most of the others, abuzz with rumor, clustered just outside the doors. Some decided to call it a night and went on to the elevators across the hall, where I knew from experience they’d wait a while. I found stairs at the end of a seemingly deserted hall and went down them (they smelled of stale cigarettes and urine) into the kind of cool, gentle rain we rarely see back in New Orleans. There, when it comes, it comes hard and fast, making sidewalks steam, beating down banana trees and shucking leaves off magnolias, pouring over the edges of roofs and out of gutters that can’t handle the sudden deluge.
I turned up the collar of my old tan sportcoat as I stepped out of the hospital doorway just in time to get splashed by a pickup that swerved toward the puddle when it saw me. I heard cackling laughter from inside.
Earlier I had noticed a small café on the corner a few blocks over. Nick’s, Rick’s, something like that, the whole front of it plate glass, with handwritten ads for specials taped to the glass and an old-style diner’s counter. I decided to give it a try and headed that way. Moving through the streets of the rural South I’d fled a long time ago. Bessie Smith had died not too far from here, over around Clarksdale, when the white hospital wouldn’t treat her following a car accident and she bled to death on the way to the colored one.
At age sixteen, I had fled. Fled my father’s docility and sudden rages, fled old black men saying “mister” to ten-year-old white kids, fled the fields and the tire factory pouring thick black smoke out onto the whole town like a syrup, fled all those faces gouged out and baked hard and dry like the land itself. I had gone to the city, to New Orleans, and made a life of my own, not a life I was especially proud of, but mine nonetheless, and I’d always avoided going back. I’d avoided a lot of things. And now they were all waiting for me.
A
FEW
WEEKS
BEFORE
THAT,
AT
NINE
in the morning, I’d just finished putting a friend’s son on the bus to send him home. He’d kind of got himself lost in New Orleans, and I’d kind of found him, and I think finally we were all kind of glad, parent, child and myself, that I could still do the work. It was a beautiful morning, unseasonably cool, and I decided to walk home. So I left the Greyhound Terminal and started up Simon Bolivar, with downtown New Orleans (what they’re now calling the CBD, for Central Business District) looming at my back like so many cliffs.
I never have figured out just how a street in this part of the city got named for a South American liberator, but that’s New Orleans. Some of the streets down here actually have double signs, a regular-size one and a smaller one riding piggyback, with different names. Further up, where it becomes La Salle, Simon Bolivar has one of those.
I walked past the projects. Newer ones of slab and plastic looking like cheap college dorms from the fifties, older brick-and-cement ones like World War II institutional housing, most of them with sagging porches, window frames and entryways, air conditioners propped on long boards, spray-painted lovers’ names or exhortations to
Try Jesus
on the walls. Then, crossing Martin Luther King, I passed the old Leidenheimer Bakery and a lengthy stretch of weathered Creole cottages and doubles, storefront churches, windowless corner foodstores. Every couple of blocks there were clusters of chairs and crates beneath trees on the neutral ground where the community’s social life is carried on. Lots of boarded-up buildings with signs on them.
Do Not Enter, No Admittance, Property Pelican Management.
There were even signs on the Dumpsters outside the projects:
Prop. of HANO.
Signs on everything. The ones we read, and the ones we just know are there. We learn.
I went on up to Louisiana, turned left, looked in the window at Brown Sugar Records and across at the Sandpiper’s sign over the door, a two-foot-high martini glass complete with stirrer and olive and a rainbow arcing into the glass. It’s supposed to be lit up, of course, probably all greens and blues, but the lights haven’t worked in twenty years at least. These great old signs still turn up all over the city. Things are slow to change here, or don’t change at all.
I went on across St. Charles to Prytania, stopped at the Bluebird for coffee, and stepped through my front door just as the rain began. First a few scattered drops—then a downpour so hard you could see and hear little else.
Fifteen minutes later, the sun was struggling back out.
I poured an Abita into an oversized glass and settled down by the window to look over notes on Camus and Claude Simon. It was my semester to teach Modern French Novel, something that rotated “irregularly” among our three full-time professors (who got benefits) and four part-time instructors (no benefits: administration would be ecstatic if
everyone
were part-time), and it had been a while. My last couple of books had done well, and I hadn’t been teaching much. But then I started missing it. Also, I couldn’t seem to get started on a new book. I’d begun two or three, but they kept sounding more like me—
my
ideas, the way
I
see things—than like whatever character I supposedly was writing about.
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.
That great opening line of the novel I probably admire more than any other I’ve read. And I thought again how much blunter, how much more matter-of-fact and drained of passion the phrase is in French than it ever could be in our own language. How well it introduces this voice without past or future, without history or anticipation, with only a kind of eternal, changeless present; how Meursault, and finally the novel itself, becomes a witness upon whom only detail (sunlight, sand, random clusters of events) registers. Telling in the calmest way possible this astonishing story of a man sentenced to death because he failed to cry at his mother’s funeral.
I remembered, as I always did now, reading this, the telegrams Mother had sent, one before, one after, when my father was dying.