Marla leaned forward and fastened the doctor with a scalpel eye. “What about natural childbirth,” she asked. Marla had been attending classes since the third month.
“If the babies are joined, you’ll have to deliver by cesarean,” the physician said, glad to change the subject, if only slightly. The word “cesarean” got them off on a discussion of scars, how big and where they would be. Leksy wasn’t great shakes on innovative lovemaking, but he did like to look at her nude, which Father Jabowsky had told him was all right if it served to get him in the mood to do what the books on Moral Theology said was all right to do.
The doctor discussed scars at some length because he did not want her to think about this Siamese-twin business. Ovitalibon had never, never been known to produce Siamese twins, but still. It could be argued. In court. That he should have known. Or shouldn’t have recommended. Or should have let God’s will be done in not letting Marla get pregnant at all, because when she didn’t maybe that was God saying no. The doctor could imagine what the woman’s husband would say on the stand. In this church-ridden town they would probably call in the priest as a witness! Either that or subpoena God Himself.
So he sweated and prayed that God, assuming there was one, could still be merciful to poor doctors who were trying their best. First, let the babies be born healthy. Second, let the separation be easy and let both babies live!
He got only part of what he prayed for. Marla went into labor, the obstetrician did a cesarean and delivered her of two bouncing, screaming somethings, nobody was quite sure what.
“Boys,” said the delivery-room charge nurse in a gloomy voice. “Without a doubt. Listen to them complain!”
“They don’t have penises,” whispered a younger nurse.
“One sort of does. Besides, they have scrotums,” the charge nurse answered.
“One of them does. Sort of.”
“Well, they don’t have vaginas,” muttered the charge nurse.
“I think one of them does. Sort of.”
After a quick analysis of the twins’ chromosomes, the doctor attempted to explain to Leksy what the problem was. They were both XXY, and though the doctor did his best, Leksy either wasn’t able or willing to understand the implications.
“The one born first is a boy,” said Leksy, who was still visualizing the babies being born as kittens and puppies are born, one at a time in a slimy sack, not being lifted from the open abdomen in one very much connected and already yelling bloody chunk. “First born is a boy. I know that. If you have to do some surgery, I understand that. God gives us these things to try our faith, but it’s a boy because the Virgin said it was going to be a boy.”
“I’ve always wanted a daughter,” sobbed Marla from the depths of an extreme postpartum depression. She wasn’t thinking at all. She had resolved to give up thinking. Look where thinking and worrying had got her! Now she only cried and said exactly what she felt, no matter how silly it was. “Look at her, so sweet.” She was looking at the left-hand twin, who was, in fact, slightly smaller and sweeter-looking than the right-hand twin. Not that there was anything wrong with the looks of either of them. They were pretty babies. All there, except for the sexual anomalies. Five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. Two little umbilici. Lots of dark hair and cute little curly ears and squinched-up eyes. Just like any two normal children, except for the broad pink tube of flesh that joined them from between right-hand baby’s left armpit to slightly behind left-hand baby’s right shoulder and extended downward almost to their hipbones. The flesh was full of throbbing, heaving movement. It wasn’t just skin and muscle. It was obviously full of innards. Somebody’s.
Preliminary reports revealed that separation was a vain hope. The babies shared one heart that was hooked up in a very unusual and complicated way. They seemed to share a liver and part of one lung. Besides, they were born in a Catholic hospital that had a medical ethicist on staff. At one time there had been a priest who had said yes or no, but now there was a medical ethicist who said the same things. The surgeons emerged from their conference with the ethicist with no joy whatsoever. One child could not be sacrificed for the other. Both lived, or neither, and there was no question that there were two separate children. They had, for example, two quite separate brains. The priest who, just to be safe, baptized them immediately after birth did it twice. There was no question in anyone’s mind that there were two babies there.
By this time there were several physicians involved, all of them aware that a great many people who, believing they were men or women and living acceptable lives as men and women, were actually, genetically speaking, something else again. The deciding factor in cases like these had to be how the parents intended to rear them. The surgeons consulted again. The baby on the right did have sort of a penis, though the urethra opened at the bottom of it, next to his body. Well, that could be fixed. Also, right-hand baby had either testicles that were undescended or ovaries where they belonged, but whichever they were could be moved down and out, as it were, into a scrotum constructed from this and that. This would give righthand baby a set of masculine-appearing sex organs. With the baby on the left, they could leave the gonads where they were, in the abdomen, and then modify the external complications into an acceptable vulva. There was already a sort of vagina, though it didn’t go anywhere, and
