An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir Page 7

  Well, what do you know. This baby would be due in May.

  But before this:

  The day we left Holt we got up at 5:00 a.m. and drove to Holkham, the wide, bowl-shaped beach of Edward’s childhood and of our summer. On the way there, hares jumped along the side of the roads — early risers? going home to their burrows after a night of hell-raising? — and I prayed I wouldn’t hit one, that this wouldn’t be the first day I struck something living with a car. I didn’t believe in omens anymore, but still. We worried that someone else would have beat us to the beach. In England there’s always some preposterous superannuated sweetheart with a dog tramping along. But we walked through the scrub pines to the sand and then over the great expanse of sand to the water’s edge all alone.

  The sky was peach and gold, a teacup of a morning, just enough clouds so as not to mock us. Why isn’t there a dawnish equivalent for the word dusky? That’s what the light was, beautiful and dawnish. We found a spit created by the receding tide. A spit curl, really: it spiraled around. We walked to the end of it. Edward had already removed the screw that kept the wooden urn shut. He took off the lid. The ashes were in a small white container like a film canister. We opened it up, and then we cast the ashes upon the water, hoping they would . . . what? He wouldn’t return to us, but we hoped someone would. It was tremendously comforting. Fingertip after fingertip, we let him fly.

  It probably sounds ridiculous to observe that I was at that moment already a day or two pregnant, as nearly as I can reckon it. If this morning appeared in a movie, I would spit on it for its nauseating symbolism, the author taking liberties with probability to Give Hope to the Audience. I’m a cynic. I’ve had to go back to the e-mails I wrote that afternoon, to Ann and Lib and my parents, to make sure that it all really happened.

  So: I will report now that when it was done we turned back and walked to the car and passed by the first birder of the morning, a man in his sixties, and his grizzled dog. And that we got in the car and then decided to drive through the miles of parkland around Holkham Hall. We drove through the gates, past the pub we’d liked, and into the grounds.

  Then Edward said, “Look!”

  Huddled together under a nearby tree were about thirty does. In my memory they look slightly worried, twisting their heads over their shoulders — to look at us? wondering where everyone else had gone to? All our married life, Edward will say, Look, and point, and it will take me several moments: he has spotted the heron, the big brown hare, the cardinal so red it can only be called cardinal red. He grew up in the country. He sees the wildlife. I reflected on this truth as I watched the beautiful kaffeeklatsch of does worry beneath their tree. Then I looked to my right.

  My God.

  In the wide open, in a dip in the land, were hundreds of deer. Hundreds. Fawns, does, stags, everyone, in a giant herd, the stags marshaling the edges.

  “Look,” I said.

  The deer moved around one another. They shifted, but they didn’t flee. We could see another car stopped on the other side of the pack, and two people on foot. We bipeds held still.

  “I’ve never seen a stag in the wild before,” Edward said. I said, “Well, then.”

  Finally we drove away. We had to get on the road; it was time for the rest of our lives. On the other side of Holkham Hall, the mawkish entity orchestrating all of this threw in for good measure a clump of stags, fifteen maybe, standing behind a knoll, and when we passed by they ducked down like juvenile delinquents as though to hide. Their antlers still forked up.

  I don’t believe in omens. Still, it’s nice to see Nature try her best to persuade you.

  But if you ask me whether this felt like closure, I’ll tell you what I’ve come to believe:

  Closure is bullshit.

  We were lucky that Edward was standing in the grubby kitchen of our rental house in Saratoga Springs when I came down the stairs with the pregnancy test: we were lucky he was in the United States at all. I suppose I was aware that generally speaking, immigration to the States is no cakewalk. I have seen the movies about green card marriages, but we had been married three years, with pictures to prove it, no quickie job at the courthouse (cheap secular weddings being more suspect), but in fancy dress, with caterers. When we’d lived in the United States before, Edward had gotten short-term visas from the University of Iowa, first as a fellow and then as a teacher. We assumed it would be easy.

  It turned out to be very complicated, very fraught, and very boring. Suffice it to say that having applied outside of the country, Edward was supposed to wait until the U.S. government agreed to grant him an immigrant visa. This would take at least six months. The U.S. government, recognizing the difficulty of a long separation, had invented a different kind of visa that would allow a citizen to bring a spouse or fiancé in the meantime. The wait time for that sort of visa was also six months.

  In Norfolk I had written letters explaining our case. I called and e-mailed every number and address I could find, explaining why we couldn’t bear to be separated come September, when I would have to go to New York to start my job. My father’s boss found a lawyer with connections at the INS who helped us for free, but by summer’s end the application had made it through only the first of three governmental offices.

  Every time I called the American embassy in London for advice, using the pound-a-minute help line, I got a different answer. Finally I was told: it was legal for him to come with me to the United States like any tourist as long as he understood that he’d have to come back to England to get the visa to allow him to go back to America to get his green card. Completely legal. Of course, it was also completely legal for the border official to turn him back immediately if he suspected that Edward had no intention of leaving the country to finish the process.

  Edward dressed in his best clothing, bought a necktie at Heathrow, organized all his immigration papers, rehearsed his explanations, bought the round-trip ticket that would take him back to England after ninety days. We flew across the ocean, white-knuckled, hoping for a female agent. Or a sympathetic agent. Or anyone who was not the American equivalent of the man in Portsmouth. At Logan Airport in Boston, I flew through the U.S. Citizens line, then lurked against a wall, watching to see whose booth Edward would end up directed to: the blond man with the brush cut, the dark-haired woman closest to me. He bounced into the woman’s lane, and I saw him begin to talk, his shoulders up, his hands explaining. Don’t talk so much! I thought worriedly, but she had already picked up the stamp that would give him ninety days in the country, and minutes later he was next to me. We grinned and walked to baggage claim as though we didn’t care, as though we were being watched and assessed on closed-circuit TV. Now we could start worrying about the next step.

  Our first night in the grubby rental house, we lay on an old futon and stared at the acoustic tiles in the ceiling. They reminded me of elementary school classrooms from my 1970s childhood. The combination of Febreze, mothballs, and old cigarette smoke seemed to fill my entire head: I could feel the chemicals muscle their way up my nose and into my skull, which got more packed with every inhalation.

  “This can’t be good,” I said.

  I had known I was pregnant again for eight hours. The world felt perilous. In France I’d been kept busy ducking pathogens in food. All raw vegetables are contraindicated by doctors in France, because of the high rate of toxoplasmosis in French soil; nothing is cooked through; you can’t count on milk being pasteurized; you are tormented by excellent but forbidden pâtés. Now I was scared of air. Our landlords were elderly and absentee, and when we told the woman they’d hired to look over the house that we needed to hire cleaners, she was dubious. “They had the place professionally cleaned in May,” she explained, though it was September. I had taken her on a tour of the filth, and though she couldn’t disagree of course she felt accused. “I don’t think they’ll go for it again.”

  The next day I took myself to the head of the English Department to ask for advice on what to do
about the house.

  “You see,” I said to Linda, “I’m pregnant again — ”

  “Oh, Elizabeth!” she burst out. “That’s the best possible news!”

  I teared up and laughed at the same time. The best possible news! Of course it was! In my state over the house and my general fear, I’d forgotten. For a few months, Linda was the only person besides us who knew I was pregnant. I’d lean into her office and wink, or give the thumbs-up, to tell her that everything was fine. Even after I’d told a few friends, and then our families (we waited till we saw them in person), I didn’t go out of my way to tell people. My fantasy was that I’d turn up in a handful of months with a baby. “Oh, this?” I’d say. “This is what I’ve been working on in my spare time.”

  All summer long we’d waited for the autopsy results. I wanted to read them and I didn’t want to read them: I was terrified that the verdict would say, essentially, Cause of death: maternal oblivion.

  The report had finally shown up after a small international dance of paperwork. Using the Internet I could decipher the conclusion: chorioamniotitis, with no known histological cause. Lib knew a French-speaking doctor who spent an hour with me on the phone. The report had two halves. The first was about me, the blood tests they’d run, the umbilical cord and placenta and uterus. Olivier went through in a very calm voice, translating and then explaining the medical terms. There was some inflammation to the cord, and some dead spots on the placenta, but it was impossible to know whether these had caused Pudding’s death, or whether his death had resulted in them. I’d scanned the second half, which was entirely about his body, its perfection, its blamelessness. You couldn’t blame his kidneys. His heart was faultless.

  “It doesn’t look like we need to go through that,” said Olivier. He’d been wonderful, calm, warm. “We could —”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s not.”

  “No,” he agreed, and I could hear the relief in his voice.

  The midwives had said that the umbilical cord was looped around his neck and that the amniotic fluid was low, but we’ll never know what happened. I’m fine with that. No one explanation, no one moment I can worry over, rub at in my brain, saying, There. If only I’d done exactly that differently.

  Still, pregnant for the second time, some days I just imagined that I had done everything wrong, and was doing everything wrong all over again. All chemicals seemed dangerous; ditto substances organic and dirty. Mothballs, mice, Febreze, mold, lead dust, flies — baby killers, every last one.

  Anyhow, one of my kind and eloquent colleagues talked to the landlords, and they agreed to hire professional cleaners, and that was that.

  No, I insist: other people’s children did not make me sad. But pregnant women did. In the waiting room of a Saratoga Springs ob-gyn practice, for my first visit, I watched the other women. The practice was next to Saratoga Hospital, which we could see from the back windows of the grubby rental house. One woman had brought a toddler boy, who held in his lap a plastic toy that played “The Wheels on the Bus” in a doorbell-to-hell electronic chime. A younger woman tugged at her low-slung maternity jeans as she backed into a chair, and then she patted her stomach. “When are you due?” asked the already mother, and the young woman answered, “Friday. I can’t wait.” I have nothing in common with you, I thought. That shows I had already forgotten the one lesson I’d vowed to learn: you can never guess at the complicated history of strangers.

  All of a sudden I missed Savary, missed being the only woman in an unwed mothers’ home: I wanted to go away with Edward and not mention anything to anyone until we had an actual baby to show off. If we had an actual baby to show off. The waiting room end tables were piled high with pregnancy and parenting magazines, every one as sweet and awful and toxic as the Febreze-scented curtains back at the house. And then I felt toxic, outgassing pessimism, worry, bad luck.

  Even the paperwork was intolerable. I checked boxes and wrote terse explanations. Previous pregnancies: 1. Living children: 0. Explanation . . . The receptionists were being raucous behind the glass window into their office, but when the young woman took my clipboard and reviewed it she looked up at me, full of sympathy.

  I sat back down and flipped through the stacks of magazines until I found a copy of O, with a cheerful, childless Oprah Winfrey on the front. Then the nurse called me in.

  First the familiar urine sample. I carried the half-filled cup, as directed, down the hall to a far examining room, which was disconcertingly decorated with wood paneling and pheasant-patterned wallpaper and pheasant-themed prints. The doctor was a man in his fifties; the office was his. It felt like the den of a befuddled father of many daughters, the place he went for a little manly time alone with his pheasantalia, only to discover that no matter what, he was chased by damnable women who insisted on offering him cups of urine before dropping their pants. He flipped through my just completed records.

  “This is your first pregnancy?” he asked. If I hadn’t become pregnant again, I might have gone years without saying it. This was the first time of many; I’d say it every month, then every week, then twice a week. “I had a child who was stillborn.”

  The doctor was pleasant and kindly, but he seemed unsure of how to respond. Medically, I’m sure he did know, but personally he seemed uncomfortable, and who could blame him? Some things can’t be reduced to their medical facts. He cleared his throat. “Any postpartum depression with the last pregnancy?”

  “Well,” I said. “Well.”

  He nodded and turned back to his paperwork.

  At the end of that first appointment I had to schedule the next. “Who do you want?” the receptionist asked. “Doctor? Midwife?”

  “Doctor,” I said. “If that’s all right.” I didn’t blame midwifery for Pudding’s death, I just couldn’t bear the idea of too much warmth from a medical professional. All my romantic notions about collaborating on a birth had gone out the window. I wanted to be told what to do; I swore I would obey.

  Besides, what were the chances?

  When I returned for every successive appointment, the pregnant women in the waiting room made me sad: there they sat in the present, dreaming of the future. I couldn’t bear watching. I wanted a separate waiting room for people like me, with different magazines. No Parenting or Wondertime or Pregnancy, no ads with pink or tawny or pearly smiling infants. I wanted Hold Your Horses Magazine. Don’t Count Your Chickens for Women. Pregnant for the Time Being Monthly. Here I was, only in this second, and then the next, and nothing else. No due dates, no conversations about “the baby” or what life would be like months from now. No “This time will be different” or “Listen, it will all be worth it when you hold your child in your arms.” What I wanted, scrawled across my chart in shaky physician’s cursive: NOTE: do not blow sunshine up patient’s ass.

  I rotated through the doctors, and they all seemed perfectly capable. In the unlikely event (my God, how we strived to ever lower our expectations) that I actually had a baby, any one of them would be welcome to extract it.

  And then I had an appointment with Dr. Knoeller.

  Almost immediately Edward and I took to calling Dr. Knoeller “Bones,” because she was a doctor (short for Sawbones, like the doctor on Star Trek) and because she was extraordinarily thin, but mostly, I think, because we instantly worshipped the ground she walked on and it helped us to be irreverent about one small thing. The appointment was our last checkup of my first trimester, and she looked at the chart.

  “Is this your first child?”

  “I had a stillbirth last year,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said immediately, words I’ve never tired of hearing. We went over the details a little, and then she said, “You’ve scheduled an amnio.”

  “Yes,” I said. In France the blond Baltimorean asked us if we were worriers; when we said yes, she made an appointment for an amniocentesis. Even so, I’d been startled when I spoke to the French genetic counselor, who was heavily pregnant herself, and sh
e informed me that if the results came back positive for Down syndrome, they “recommended” that we terminate the pregnancy. Edward and I hadn’t discussed what we’d do if it turned out that Pudding had Down syndrome, because we agreed that all the theorizing in the world would probably crumble to dust in the face of a fact.

  But this time it was different. We simply wanted to know. It would only be information.

  “I mean,” I said to Dr. Knoeller, “we figured we might as well. I guess. I don’t know. What do you think?”

  Well, she said, the real question was, if we had an amnio, and the results were normal, but it was one of the one in two hundred pregnancies that miscarried after the procedure, how would we feel?