It was kind of hard to tell Eddie because it was all such a new idea.
They had never discussed the possibility, or rather the certainty, of
Dot’s becoming pregnant. He didn’t know that it had finally happened,
and she hated to tell him. He got mad so easy.
His ignorance of the result of their young and irresponsible
carelessness was not due to the fact that they lived like a
moving-picture couple, who one would imagine consummated their amours
through an ambassador, but rather because Eddie was only vaguely
conscious that the dates on the calendar had anything to do with Dot’s
physical condition.
She wondered if she couldn’t get Edna to tell him. No, Sue Cudahy would
be a more acceptable message-bearer, or even Maude McLaughlin. Dot knew
that she was only playing with the thought to relieve her feelings. She
knew she would have to tell him herself.
Gee, this was worse than asking him if they might take Edna’s
furniture. Babies were cunning things, sort of gay and friendly. They
didn’t cost much either, and it would sleep in a crib beside their bed.
There’s something sort of valuable about them. She couldn’t afford
a nurse; so she’d have to stay home and mind it. No leaving them
alone. Some people did, of course, but occasionally a baby pulled the
blanket up and smothered, or the house caught fire. No, she’d have to
cut out parties and stay home and probably sit close to the crib and
watch the baby while it slept. Tied down. No dances, no movies, no
window-shopping of an evening. Tied down. But the baby would be in his
crib, and it would be an ivory-colored crib with perhaps a picture of
a pussy-cat at the head and foot.
“Eddie.” One had to tell Eddie, and it seemed proper that one should be
careless and hard in the telling. “I think I’m pregnant.”
Eddie looked at her without speaking. He was leaning against the
built-in sideboard in the kitchen while Dot fried the chops for supper.
“It’s the twenty-eighth now,” she went on. “Yep, I guess I’m pregnant.”
“You don’t seem much worried,” he said.
“Of course, I’m not worried,” she began gayly and stopped short. There
was something in his face that stopped her. She ought to be worried. He
was worried. The familiar eyes had narrowed in their equally familiar
way.
Worried! God, a baby! They were all right, of course. Some fellows were
simply coo-coo about their kids, and the little devils got so after a
while that they would say Daddy. But Dot standing there at the stove,
young, smiling--pretty green, Dot. What did she know about pain? And it
was pain. Eddie could imagine pain. He could see it coming unexpectedly
upon Dot, catching her in the dead of night, catching her while she
smiled in her sleep. Even his arm about her wouldn’t help, and how
could she know what it would be like? Young, smiling, frying chops, and
telling him that she was pregnant, in the tone she used to the iceman
when she ordered a twenty-cent piece of ice. But maybe--Even Dot was
a woman. Maybe she wanted a baby. Cute damn things. Once a baby in a
bakery had got so that she knew Eddie and had quite unexpectedly made
him a present of her rattle. It had been a pink rabbit with little
pebbles inside. Of course, he’d given it back to her; but it was the
idea of the thing.
“Do you want a baby?” he asked.
There was his face. Narrow eyes, set jaw. There was his voice. Cold,
steely. There was his question. Do you want a baby? He threw his
cigarette on the lovely oilcloth and crushed it to nothingness. Eddie
had never abused their home before. Do you want a baby? He was looking
at her now. What did he want her to say? No, of course. Would he look
so worried, so hard, if he wanted the other answer?
Dot turned a chop over, disclosing a hitherto unsuspected lovely brown
side. She threw the pancake-turner on the tub. It made a nasty clatter
from which even the tub seemed to shrink.
“What do I want a baby for?” she asked. “Who wants to be tied down for
months before and years after? Not me.”
Eddie sighed. That was a sigh of relief, of course, but his expression
never relaxed all evening.
On the thirtieth Dot looked at Eddie questioningly. “It’s the
thirtieth,” she said. “Where do we go from here?”
“You’re sure now, eh?”
“Positive.”
“Well,” said Eddie. It was different when it was a fellow’s wife. A
fellow didn’t go in a pool room and get hold of a guy he knew, tell
his story, and see if the guy could suggest a drug or a doctor. It was
different when it was a fellow’s wife. “Well,” said Eddie. “Well--”
Dot went to see Sue Cudahy. Sue had quit work. She was going to marry
Pat in another month, and she was letting him get accustomed to
supporting her.
Dot found her sitting on the sofa in the Cudahy parlor, re-stringing
her yellow beads. She looked a little bored with life and had none
of the shining mysticism of a girl in her last month of single
blessedness. She chuckled when Dot told her news.
“Good for you,” she cried.
“Good!” Dot looked grieved at her friend’s perversity. “It’s hell.”
“Why, what’s the matter? You’re married, ain’t you?”
“Sure, but Eddie--I don’t want a kid. Say, Sue, what do you do to get
out of a mess like this?”
Sue, in turn, looked a trifle grieved. It was cruel and tactless of Dot
to come to a girl on the brink of marriage and ask such a question.
“I really don’t know anything about it,” said Sue, a bit coldly.
Dot didn’t “get” Sue’s position at all.
“Gee, there must be something,” she said. “Look, Sue, Pat’s in a drug
store. He can get me something, can’t he?”
“Why, that’s against the law, Dot. Pat would lose his job.” Sue looked
properly shocked at her friend’s request.
“Well,” said Dot, “all right. I’m sorry I asked.”
Silence for a moment; then Dot spoke of the gorgeous winter coats in
Koch’s window.
It was just before she left to go home and fix Eddie’s supper that Sue
relented.
“Pat did get something once for the wife of a friend of his,” she said.
“I’ll call him up, and you can send Eddie over to the store tonight and
he’ll let him have it.”
Dot was grateful and said so. She went home feeling lighter of heart
than she had felt for days. Everything was going to be right again.
Only Pat’s wonderful remedy didn’t help. Religiously Dot took it and
each night when Eddie came home she sadly admitted that success had not
crowned her efforts.
“All that rotten-tasting stuff,” she thought, “just to keep a little
crib out of the bedroom.”
“She’s afraid of being tied down,” thought Eddie.
After a week, Dot stopped taking the stuff. She would almost have let
things drift. She was tired of medicine and of baths so hot that they
burned her skin. She was almost ready to say, “Well, what’s to be will
be.”
Only Eddie said, “What are you going to do now?”
She thought of Maude McLaughlin the next day. Maude had always been
wise. She would know something. Time was growing very important now.
In fear of being put off, Dot went without preparing Maude for her
visit. What are you going to do now? Eddie had asked. Even hours seemed
precious. What are you going to do now?
Maude was at home, a Maude in kimono and mules, a Maude with tousled
hair.
“I didn’t think I’d find you home,” said Dot. “But I took a chance.”
She followed Maude down the hall into the dining-room. From abovestairs
a voice floated down.
“Who is it, Maudie?”
“For me,” said Maude, curtly.
That had been Mrs. McLaughlin, Dot knew. She wished that she could
speak to her. She would probably be able to help.
“I’m spending the day in,” said Maude. “We have visitors. A niece of
mine is visiting us. You didn’t know my sister, did you?”
“Didn’t know you had one.”
That seemed to vex Maude. “Of course I have a sister,” she said. “She
is married and lives up-state. She’s sick and has sent her kid down
here for us to mind. I was playing with her when you came in.”
“Funny to think of you playing with a kid.”
“Oh, I’m good at it,” said Maude.
A tall negress in a stiff white dress came to close the door that
divided the dining-room from a room beyond. Dot caught a flash of
a blond-haired tot of two or thereabouts. The door closed, and the
child’s voice, raised in instant disapproval, rent the air. Between her
violent shrieks, Dot could hear her saying, “Mommie, Mommie. I want my
Mommie.”
“She’s homesick,” explained Maude.
“Poor kid,” Dot commented.
The negress opened the door. “Sorry, Miss McLaughlin,” she said;
“she’ll be quiet if you let her stay in here.”
The child scampered past her nurse and climbed up on Maude’s lap.
She brushed a little smooth cheek against Maude’s face and curled up
contentedly. “Mommie,” she whispered.
Dot took a deep breath and said, “You know, I’m pregnant.”
She half expected Maude to burst out in hearty congratulations, and
Maude’s horror-stricken expression comforted her.
“Oh, Lord, Dot,” she said. “For God’s sake, don’t have a baby. Oh, the
agony of it.”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Dot, “if only--”
“You wouldn’t mind it, eh?” Maude’s eyes rested on the curly blond head
against her breast. “Fancy that passing through you,” she said.
Dot gasped. She’d never thought of childbirth except vaguely. Both Dot
and Maude lost sight of the fact that it was not an infant’s head they
were regarding.
“I’ve taken some medicine,” said Dot, “but it’s no good.”
“None of it’s any good,” said Maude. “There’s no medicine in the world
that will do the trick. You have to have an operation.”
“Well, gee, don’t that hurt terribly?”
“It does,” said Maude, “the first time, because most girls are crazy
enough to try it without ether. If you have ether you don’t feel a damn
thing, where in actually having the baby, they can’t very well give you
ether until the worst of it’s nearly over.”
Dot was overawed at the easy, almost doctorlike way that Maude gave out
her information. She sat with her legs crossed carelessly, the child in
her arms, a cigarette in her mouth. Once she removed the cigarette for
the express purpose of kissing the baby. Dot was enchanted with Maude’s
worldliness.
“Gee, you know a lot,” she murmured, devoutly. “Did the doctor tell you
or did you read it in a book?”
Maude laughed a little. “Dot, you’re wonderful,” she said. “I don’t
know whether to kiss you or to kill you. You might go to hell, Kid, but
it won’t be from lack of faith.”
“What do you mean, Maude?”
Maude sighed. “You must be kidding me,” she said. “Nobody could be so
thick, but anyhow I’ll write you an address where you can go and get
fixed up. Don’t let them charge you over fifty dollars.”
Dot gasped. “Fifty dollars!”
Maude looked at her in surprise.
“Holy God, Kid,” she said, “you didn’t expect to beat that price, did
you? I know a girl who pays three hundred for every one she has.”
“Three hundred!”
Maude shrugged. “It’s a bootleg operation, Kid. If it was legal it
wouldn’t be worth more than ten dollars, but the country says ‘No
abortions’; so dumb doctors who couldn’t cure a split lip get rich on
doing them.”
Maude’s words didn’t reach Dot’s consciousness. She was thinking of the
price. Fifty dollars! Could Eddie raise fifty dollars?
Maude followed her train of thought.
“You can have a baby for nothing,” she said. “The hospitals are wide
open to the woman who wants to have a baby, but to the woman who
doesn’t want one--that’s a different thing. High prices, fresh doctors.
It’s a man’s world, Dot. To the woman who knows her place they will
give their charity, but the woman who wants to keep her body from pain
and her mind from worry is an object of contempt. Hm, Dot, did you get
that? I’m getting pretty smart. Guess I’ll get a soap box and talk
birth control to the down-trodden masses.”
Dot said nothing for a moment. Then she asked, “Maude, do you suppose
it is really terrible pain for a woman to have a child?”
“Dot, it’s unbelievable agony. If you ever have one, remember while
you’re in the delivery room that I told you not to do it. Dig up fifty
dollars for an operation even if you have to sell your furniture.”
“But, look, Maude, there’s an awful lot that must be nice about a baby.
People have ’em all the time and they seem happy about it.”
Maude thoughtfully extinguished her cigarette. “Honey,” she said,
“you’re an awful nice kid, but you’re a moron. No offense meant. It’s
just a condition over which you have no control. A lot of people are
morons, and ideals are meant for them. There’d be no law and order if
everybody thought like I do, and I ought not tell you this, but I’m
going to anyhow. Ted told me, and it’s pretty near true. Did you ever
notice that when there’s something unpleasant to do it’s always covered
up with a lot of glamour commonly known as bologna? It’s good for the
world that the women should have babies; so they keep the fiction
moving about dear little baby hands, beautiful motherhood, a woman’s
true mark of distinction, and so forth. It’s good for the world that
our men should go and be butchered and starved and diseased in their
God damn armies; so we hear about glory and bravery and patriotism and
that bunk. Any time you hear a lot of piping about any grand honor
you’re getting, take a look under it and you’ll see it’s the bunk.”
“Gee, Maude, you take the joy out of life.”
“Ain’t no joy in it, Kid. It’s eating, drinking, working, loving,
suffering, and dying. Go see that doctor, Kid, and cheat the world of a
baby that would damn near kill you in getting here.”
Dot nodded amiably. At last Maude had said something intelligible. She
wanted Dot to go to the doctor’s. Well, of course, Dot would go; but
the rest of her friend’s tirade sounded pretty dizzy. It was unpleasant
stuff, Dot could gather that much. All about not letting her child grow
up and join the army. Well, if he wanted to join, Dot couldn’t see how
she was going to stop him; but she wouldn’t argue that point with Maude
right now.
She felt that she ought to go. A sudden detachment had claimed Maude.
She gazed at her watch and gazed in the direction of the door behind
which the negress lurked. The child had grown restless and fretful.
“Well, thanks a lot, Maude. I think I’ll run along now.”
Maude nodded as though that was also her feeling on the subject. Dot
wormed her way into her coat and said good-by.
“I’ll let you know how I make out,” she said.
Maude did not follow her to the door. It seemed there was a law about
moving the child from her lap. As Dot passed through the hall she
encountered the negress, who was bearing a tray in the direction of her
charge. There was a big bowl of carrots and potatoes, a glass of milk,
a slice of bread and butter, a pat of Jello molded into an enticing
little form, and three Nabiscos.
Just before she closed the door, Dot heard Maude’s voice raised in a
dulcet eulogy.
“Oh, Mommie’s lamb, see the lovely carrots and the nice ’taters and
afterwards if you eat everything there’s Jello and crackers--”
Dot closed the door. She felt a little cold and wistful. Jello in a
heart-shaped mold. Carrots could be shaped that way, too. There were
cribs with pussy-cats on them made in apartment-house sizes that would
just fit into that corner beside the bed. She had recently seen a high
chair with the back shaped like a rabbit’s head. Did you put bootees on
little tiny babies or those infinitesimal glove-soft shoes that one saw
in windows? Oh, well, hell! Might as well go see this doctor and get it
over with. Who wants a baby to tie you down when he’s small and go join
the army when he gets big?
Dot consulted the address which Maude had given her. It was Dr.
Griegman, and he lived two blocks from the Theresa Hotel. She knew that
nothing important could happen that day, for she had not the fifty
dollars, and Maude had told her that for illegal operations the doctor
collected before he put the patient on the table. Still, it would be
just as well to see him and find out if he would do it at all.
The doctor’s house was a brownstone front similar to the one in which
she and Eddie had lived. It was perhaps Dot’s fevered thoughts that
cloaked it in a sinister haze. There seemed something dread and ominous
in the many drawn shades, something weird and murderous about the cat
who innocently took the sun upon the front steps.
Dot rang the bell. A middle-aged woman whose forte was not English
opened the door. She ushered Dot into a huge reception room, and Dot
sat down. There were several chairs, a divan, a long, low table. The
room was empty save for herself. There was something offensive in the
barrenness of the doctor’s table. One could fancy the doctor saying,
“What! Magazines for the dames who come in here? They don’t need them.
Their minds are well occupied.”
The rug needed sweeping, Dot noted after a time. Another few minutes
passed before she observed the huddled wisps of dust clinging together
beneath the divan. Then she saw other things. Dirty windows, a smeared
mirror. She shuddered. There was a damp chilliness about the room.
Suddenly the rolling doors sixteen feet in front of her parted, and the
doctor gestured for her to enter. As she crossed the threshold and the
doors snapped behind her, she had a comforting thought that after all
Maude knew where she was going. Maude could put the police on the right
track if Eddie became alarmed at the prolonged absence of his wife.
The room on the other side of the door was not the hideous room with
the “table” as Dot had expected. There was a door, however, in the west
wall, which was certainly concealing the chamber of horrors. Dot tried
not to look at it, but there was nothing much more attractive in the
room they were in. A very old desk with papers in a crazy swirl across
it stood beneath a double window. The telephone was on it, and a paper
weight in the actual size of a human skull made Dot wonder gloomily if
it represented a former patient. A couch with the stuffing bursting
forth ran along one wall. There were two chairs, a table, a bookcase,
and a great deal of dust. The doctor’s diploma hung on the wall, but it
was too far above her head for Dot to read, had she so desired.
The doctor sat on the desk, and Dot timidly settled herself on a chair
that promptly tilted back six sudden inches and made her gasp.
The doctor laughed but sobered quickly at the blank, frightened query
on Dot’s face. “That’s the desk chair,” he said. “Sit there.” He
gestured to another chair which Dot accepted gingerly.
“Now, what seems to be the trouble?” he asked.
Dot didn’t feel much like telling him. He seemed so very young. She
wanted an old doctor with a full white beard which, though unsanitary,
would certainly be reassuring. Dr. Griegman was thirty or thereabouts,
and everybody knows that a doctor of thirty suggests to the feminine
mind rompers or an affair, depending on her type. To Dot he suggested
rompers. A doctor of thirty was to her like a plumber of ten.
But she told him that she thought she was pregnant. Dr. Griegman looked
properly interested, as though he ever had patients in a different
condition.
“What makes you think that?”
Dot explained.
“Hm,” said Dr. Griegman. His dark, not bad-looking face seemed worried.
“Are you married?” he asked.
Dot blushed hotly.
“Of course I am,” she said.
“Of course you are,” Griegman mocked. “I’ve never had a patient yet who
wasn’t.”
He jumped from the desk. “All right,” he said, “let’s look you over.”
He motioned to the west door. “Go on in. Take off your dress and
brassiere or whatever you wear and climb up on the table. Let me know
when you’re ready.”
Dot went slowly into the other room, closing the door behind her. There
was the operating table standing white and quiet as a casket, only not
quite so white. Griegman’s last patient had evidently had her shoes
shined before the examination. There was a basin in the corner where
water dripped with maddening monotony. Dot took off her hat and coat
and hesitatingly began to unhook her dress. Eddie might be sore when
he heard that another man had seen her like that. But still, a doctor!
Surely a doctor saw so many women that it was kind of flattering
oneself to think he’d be fresh.
Dr. Griegman came into the room without being called just as Dot was
stepping out of her dress. She did not meet his gaze, but he stood
watching her as she walked to a chair and laid her dress upon it.
Her little chemise just covered her nudity and it was with a note of
desperation in her voice that Dot asked: “Must I take this off, too?”
“If you don’t mind,” said the doctor with mock deference; then added:
“Less time would be wasted if women did at once what they were told to
do.”
Dot slipped her chemise down over her feet and the doctor slapped the
center of the table meaningly.
Dot, frightened and confused, climbed upon it and lay down. He bent
over and touched her breasts. Dot turned her face away from him and lay
dumb and miserable while he pursued his examination.
At length he said: “Seems no doubt about it. You are certainly
pregnant.”
He went back to the head of the table again and bent over her. His face
was very close to her now.
“Sure you’re married?” he asked.
Dot nodded. There was a lump of anger and fright in her throat.
“I like to help little girls out,” he said. “Little single girls.”
His hands were adventurous and heavy. Dot stiffened beneath their touch.
“I’m married,” she said, dully.
“Too bad,” he said. “Fifty dollars is a lot of money.”
Dot jumped to a sitting posture preparatory to getting down from the
table. The doctor put an arm around her for assistance and captured a
breast in one of his hands as he did so.
“This is a good time to be indiscreet,” he suggested.
Dot reached for her chemise and dress, and the doctor instantly became
professional.
“You want to attend to that soon,” he said. “It’s in its second
month. Give me a ring and make an appointment if you decide to have an
operation. Bring your husband or a friend with you.”
He retreated into the other room, and Dot hurried into her hat and
coat. As she passed him on the way out he said: “That will be five
dollars for the examination.”
Dot only had two dollars and a quarter with her; so he took that.