“He said somepin about ’fectious diarrhea,” Mrs. Williams added, her fright now gone with the coming of Dr. Newton.
“Gave him castor oil?” Dr. Newton asked, incredulously. “The blithering fool!”
Mimi and Mrs. Williams showed their dismay at his words.
“Thank goodness he’s probably vomited it all up by now.” His words were punctuated by Jean’s pathetic screams.
“Mrs. Daquin, your baby’s got a bad case of intussusception—folding back of a part of the intestine over another part,” he added as she showed her lack of comprehension of the longer word. “Or, to make it simpler, it’s acute intestinal obstruction. The only chance of saving him is through an operation—and it’ll have to be done without an hour’s delay.”
Mimi sank her head into her hands. Had she just heard the death sentence pronounced on her, she would have felt not half as terrified as the thought of her Petit Jean going under the knife. She felt sick, disheartened, beaten. She raised a haggard face, her hair dishevelled, to the doctor.
“Isn’t there anything else than operating?” she pleaded.
“Nothing,” he told her. “And even then the chances are somewhat less than one in ten. This sounds hard and brutally frank—but it’s best you know the truth,” he added kindly, deep pity in his voice for her distress.
“Then operate,” she declared, firmly, all panic gone from her face and voice. …
They drove rapidly to the coloured hospital where Dr. Newton was to operate on Jean. Mimi held his tiny form close to her, stifling its screams in the softness of her breast. On her face was fear, despair, agony without hope. She was haunted by the spectre of death, she saw before her Petit Jean lifeless, never again to coo and smile and welcome her with soft little cries. Not until now did she realize how much he meant to her. She felt guilty of a great crime, of putting food into her own body when it might have averted this horrible thing. Even Dr. Newton’s assurance in answer to her timid questioning that physicians did not know the cause of the malady other than that it was due to the thinness of the intestinal walls of an infant, that most frequently it occurred in apparently perfectly healthy and well-cared-for children, her feeling of guilt did not leave her. Jean’s eyes were closed. He seemed to be in a deep stupor from which he roused only when another spasm of pain came over him. Mimi kissed him feverishly, madly, as the nurse took him gently from her. …
Up and down the hall she paced oblivious of everything save the tragic scene being enacted on the other side of the closed door. The odour of the anaesthetic stifled her, choked her, made her want to cry out in suffocation. The feeble little cries and groans as Jean slowly passed into unconsciousness made her frantic. She wanted to burst open the door, snatch him from the cruel knives, take him and the two of them plunge to simultaneous death in the waters of the river nearby. The immaculate nurses who passed rapidly infuriated her, they seemed so calm, so callous. She wanted to seize them and shake them until their teeth rattled, screaming: “Don’t you realize that my Jean—mon pauvre Petit Jean—is being cut to pieces in there!” … She wanted to do all these things but she did none of them. She paced frantically back and forth, back and forth, for hours, days, centuries, past the closed door …
“Operation’s a success—he’s resting easily—won’t know until a day or two. …” The words came to her as from a great distance. “You’d better go home—there’s no good you can do here—it’ll be half an hour or so before he comes out from under the anaesthetic … and then he’ll probably sleep. …”
“Mother of God! Save him! Save him!”
It had been a long time since a prayer had passed Mimi’s lips. But now she prayed—prayed with the fervour of Luther, of Savonarola, of St. John, of all the martyrs, yea, with a fervour greater than all of these, the plea of a mother for her child. …
All night she alternately tossed in her narrow bed or sat by the window looking into the darkness outside. Above, a pale moon was sheathed in dusky blue swirls of clouds, so delicate and wispy they looked like graceful twistings of chiffon, but this beauty she did not see. From near at hand the fast-dying noises of the city came to her, the hum imperceptibly fading away as the crowds thinned out, but she heard none of these. Any minute Jean might be dying, she thought with a shiver. And then she would hurry down the stairs to telephone the hospital. Always she received the same answer, he’s resting easily.
Though she tried to keep the thought from her mind, she knew she had come to the parting of the ways. I wonder I ever thought I could go through with it, she reflected. For my own sake I don’t care. But I’m not making enough money to keep us and I won’t be able to save anything at this rate for the future—for Petit Jean’s future, she amended. Rent due Mrs. Williams, the surgeon’s fee, bills for the hospital. She cudgelled her brains for some way of making money. The Hunters? No! Mrs. Daquin? A thousand times no! The man in Germantown? A bitter smile came over her face. It wouldn’t be wise for him to make such an offer now.
The thought brought her to herself with a shock. Defiantly she answered her own question—I’d do even that if it would save Jean! She had reached the stage of desperation. The long months of anxious toil and uncertainty, of worry and undernourishment, had gathered their toll. Now that Jean’s life hung in the balance, she felt that there were no means to which she would not go. But all the possible sources of help she could think of would serve only to help her
