Family Matters by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

family. Though crowned with thorns, her head would hot bow.
    â€œFunny, isn’t it?” Terry indicated Betsy’s stomach.
    â€œFunny? Yes, it is funny,” Betsy said. “It is damned funny.” She looked approvingly at Terry’s white uniform. This would be her world for a while, the world of nurses and urine samples and personal questions. All the special, healthy, feminine world of pregnancy, with its arcane processes and vocabulary, would be hers, like a club. She patted her flat stomach; it felt good and ripe beneath her hand.
    Betsy took a bottle of urine downtown to the Planned Parenthood Clinic the next morning as soon as Judd and her nausea were gone. She was assigned a friendly young woman named Peg who took her into a cubicle and dropped a puddle of urine on a test paper with an eyedropper. She explained everything as she went along. Betsy had thought it was rabbits, and her pint jarful embarrassed her. Why hadn’t they told her they needed only a drop? Peg explained about the rabbits, and Betsy tried to look intelligent, but she wasn’t hearing a word. She was looking at a framed wooden cut on the wall of the little room—a mother and child. There was infinite tenderness in the tilt of the mother’s head, in the circle of her arm about the infant.
    â€œPositive!”
    Peg poured out Betsy’s pint and washed her hands. Betsy sat and watched in silence.
    â€œAre you pleased?” Peg had a tiny lisp, and thick red arms like legs.
    â€œYes,” Betsy whispered, and then said more loudly, “Yes, I am. I’m not married, though. But we may decide to, now. We may.”
    Peg dried her hands on a paper towel and sat down facing Betsy. Her face was full of the desire to help. “Do you have a gynecologist?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBetter make an appointment right away. Do you want me to sign you up for some counseling?”
    â€œYou mean, don’t I want a nice abortion?”
    Peg’s face went even kinder at Betsy’s hostility. “I don’t mean that at all. It’s simply that women in your position can sometimes use advice. Someone to talk to.”
    â€œI can talk to the baby’s father. That seems the logical choice.” It was all bravado, but Peg didn’t know that. She shrugged her shoulders and spread her big hands wide. One of them still held the paper towel, wadded up. “Of course,” Peg said. It came out, “Of courth.” The paper towel fell to the floor and she bent to pick it up. The interview was over.
    Why did I get so nasty? Betsy asked herself. What in hell am I doing, anyway? Her condition was incurable, like her mother’s; there was no going back on life any more than on death. She saw herself and her baby in a circle of love. She saw the baby as a piece of herself, transmuted, glorious. But she didn’t see Judd at all.

Chapter Four
    Violet
    Violet lay, or sat propped, in her bed by the window, peacefully thinking. Her placidity was becoming a legend in the family. She could see them look at her with admiration; in turn she looked back at them, amused. Someone—who had it been? Marion? doing her duty by her dead sister?—had asked if she wanted a clergyman, a priest, and Violet’s laughter had bubbled over. She had no need of priests, with the image of Will before her. A priest! She pictured a timid and platitudinous man in black, like the one who’d staged her mother’s funeral. At least there would be no priests and no lugubrious chanting at hers. She had specified: no music, no flowers, no church. She had toyed with the idea of having them play “Stardust”—their song—and smiled at the picture of Frank and Marion, Betsy and Judd, fox-trotting at her funeral.
    Violet kept her mind, when she could, on her death, preparing herself, examining her conscience, as she’d been taught to years ago by Helen. (You ran through the long list of