VIII
Nellie Jacobs opened her eyes. She was lying on a hard, unyielding bed, staring up into a bright electric light bulb. When she blinked, the bulb seemed to waver and float. It also seemed much farther away than a self- respecting ceiling lamp had any business being.
Hovering between her and the lamp were her daughter and her husband. Hal Jacobs asked, 'Are you all right, darling?'
'I'm fine.' Even to herself, Nellie sounded anything but fine. What she sounded was drunk. She felt drunk, too, at least to the point of not caring what she said: 'Don't worry about me. I was born to hang.' She coughed. That hurt. So did talking. Her throat was raw and sore and dry. As she slowly took stock of herself, that was far from the only pain she discovered. Someone had been using her belly for a punching bag.
'Do you know where you're at, Ma?' Edna Semphroch asked her.
'Of course I do,' she answered indignantly. That bought her a few seconds in which to cast about through the misty corridors of her memory and try to find the answer. Somewhat to her own surprise, she did: 'I'm in the Emergency Hospital at the corner of Fifteenth and D, Miss Smarty-Britches.' Recalling where she was made her recall why she was there. 'Holy suffering Jesus! Did I have a boy or a girl?'
'We have a daughter, Nellie,' Hal said. If he was disappointed at not having a son, he didn't show it. 'Clara Lucille Jacobs, six pounds fourteen ounces, nineteen and a half inches-and beautiful. Just like you.'
'How you do go on,' Nellie said. A little girl. That was nice. Little girls, thank God, didn't grow up to be men.
Someone new floated into her field of view: a man clad all in white, even to a white cloth cap on his head. A doctor, she realized, and giggled at being able to realize anything at all. Businesslike as a stockbroker, he asked, 'How are you feeling, Mrs. Jacobs?'
'Not too bad,' she said. 'I had ether, didn't I?' She remembered the cone coming down over her face, the funny, choking smell, and then… nothing. The doctor was nodding. Nellie nodded, too, though it made her dizzy, or rather, dizzier. 'I had ether, and after that I had the baby.' The doctor nodded again. Nellie giggled again. 'A lot easier doing it like that than the regular way,' she declared. 'One hell of a lot easier, believe me.'
'Most women say the same thing, Mrs. Jacobs,' the doctor answered. Her cursing didn't bother him. He'd surely heard a lot of patients coming out from under ether. He hadn't even noticed. Edna had, and was smirking.
Nellie went on taking stock. She'd felt a lot of labor pains before Hal and Edna brought her to the hospital, and a lot more before the doctors put her under. But she'd missed the ones at the end of the affair, and those were far and away the worst. And she'd missed the process of, as one of her fallen sisters had put it many years before, trying to shit a watermelon. Sure as sure, this was better.
'Would you like to see your daughter, Mrs. Jacobs?' the doctor asked.
'Would I ever!' Nellie said. Smiling, the doctor turned and beckoned. A nurse brought the baby, wrapped in a pink blanket, up to Nellie. Clara was tiny and bald and pinkish red and wrinkled. Edna had looked the same way just after she was born.
'She's beautiful, isn't she?' Hal said.
'Of course she is,' Nellie answered. Edna looked as if she had a different opinion, but she was smart enough to keep it to herself.
'If you want to give her your breast now, you may,' the doctor said.
What, right here in front of you? Nellie almost blurted. That was foolish, and she figured it out before the words passed her lips. He'd had his hands on her private parts while delivering Clara. After that, how could she be modest about letting him see her bare breast?
But she was. He must have read it in her face-and, of course, he would have seen the same thing in other women, too. He said, 'Mr. Jacobs, why don't you step out into the hall with me? I think your wife might have an easier time of it with just the ladies in here with her.'
'Oh. Yes. Of course,' Hal said. He followed the doctor out of the room, looking back over his shoulder at Nellie as he went.
'Slide down your gown, dearie, and you can give your wee one something good,' the nurse said. She was a powerfully built middle-aged woman with the map of Ireland on her face. After Nellie exposed her breast, she set the baby on it. Clara knew how to root; babies were born knowing that. She didn't need long to find the nipple and start to suck.
'Ow,' Nellie said, and made a hissing noise between her teeth. She'd forgotten how tender her breasts were and would be till nursing toughened them up.
'She's getting something, sure enough,' the nurse said. Nellie heard the gulping noises the baby was making, too. The nurse went on, 'You'll be better off if you go right on nursing her, too. Breast-fed babies don't get the bowel complaints that carry off so many little ones, not nearly as often as them that suck a bottle.'
'Cheaper and easier to nurse a baby, too,' Nellie said. 'Nothing to buy, nothing to measure, nothing to boil. I'll do it as much as I can.'
Edna watched in fascination. 'They know just what to do, don't they?'
'They do that,' the nurse said. 'If they didn't, not a one of 'em'd live to grow up, and then where would we be?'
'You were the same way,' Nellie told Edna. 'I reckon I was the same way, too, and my ma, and her ma, and all the way back to the start of time.' She didn't mention little Clara's father, nor Edna's father, nor her own father, nor any other man. That wasn't because she assumed they were the same way, too. It was because, as far as she was concerned, men weren't worth mentioning.
After about ten minutes, the baby stopped nursing. Nellie handed her to the nurse, who efficiently burped her. Clara cried for a little while, the high, thin wail of a newborn that always put Nellie in mind of a cat on a back fence. Then, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch on her back, she fell asleep.
Nellie found herself yawning, too. Not only were the remnants of the ether coursing through her, but she'd also been through labor and delivery: hard work, even if she hadn't felt most of it.
'Rest now, if you want to,' the nurse said. 'We'll want to keep you here for a week, maybe ten days, make sure you don't come down with childbed fever or anything else.' She cast a speculative eye toward Nellie. That or anything else no doubt meant or anything else that's liable to happen to an old coot like you.
Had Nellie had more energy, she might have resented that. As she was now, without enough get-up-and-go to lick a postage stamp, she simply shrugged. A week or ten days with nothing to do but nurse the baby and eat and sleep looked like heaven to her.
Edna took a different perspective. 'A week? Ten days?' she exclaimed in mock anger. 'You're going to leave me running things by myself so long, Ma? That's a lot to hand me.'
'I've already done a lot,' Nellie said. 'Besides, the place has to bring in enough to pay for my little holiday here.'
It didn't, not really. She and Hal had saved up enough to meet the hospital bill. Hal knew how to sock away money. It wasn't the worst thing in the world. Nellie wished she were better at that. She'd learned some from paying attention to the way her husband handled things. Maybe she could learn more.
Edna stopped complaining, even in fun. Nellie thought she recognized the gleam in her daughter's eye. Hal wouldn't be able to watch Edna the way Nellie had ever since she'd become a woman. Edna wouldn't have a lot of time to get into mischief, but a girl didn't need a lot of time to get into mischief Fifteen minutes would do the job nicely.
And maybe, nine months from now, Edna would have an ether cone clapped over her face and wake up with a baby hardly younger than its aunt. If she did, Nellie hoped the baby would have a last name.
She yawned again. She was too tired even to worry about that very much. Whatever Edna did in the next week or so-if she did anything-she would damn well do, and she and Nellie and Hal would deal with the consequences-if there were consequences-later. The only thing Nellie wanted to deal with now was sleep. The light overhead and the hard hospital mattress fazed her not at all.
Before she could sleep, though, her husband came back into the room. He bent over her and kissed her on the cheek. 'Everything will be fine,' he said. 'The doctor tells me you could not have done better. You will be well, and little Clara will be well, and every one of us will be well.'
