first.”
Buddy told me Will was a
third-year man and had to deliver eight babies before he could graduate.
Then we noticed a bustle at the
far end of the hall and some men in lime-green coats and skull caps and a few
nurses came moving toward us in a ragged procession wheeling a trolley with a
big white lump on it.
“You oughtn’t see this,” Will
muttered in my ear. “You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t
to let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race.”
Buddy and I laughed, and then
Buddy shook Will’s hand and we all went into the room.
I was so struck by the sight of
the table where they were lifting the woman I didn’t say a word. It looked like
some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups sticking up in mid-air at
one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes I couldn’t make out
properly at the other.
Buddy and I stood together by
the window, a few feet away from the woman, where we had a perfect view.
The woman’s stomach stuck up so
high I couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed
to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly
legs propped in the high stirrups, and all the time the baby was being born she
never stopped making this unhuman whooing noise.
Later Buddy told me the woman
was on a drug that would make her forget she’d had any pain and that when she
swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in
a kind of twilight sleep.
I thought it sounded just like
the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain,
obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she
would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her
forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of
her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to
open up and shut her in again.
The head doctor, who was
supervising Will, kept saying to the woman, “Push down, Mrs. Tomolillo, push
down, that’s a good girl, push down,” and finally through the split, shaven
place between her legs, lurid with disinfectant, I saw a dark fuzzy thing
appear.
“The baby’s head,” Buddy
whispered under cover of the woman’s groans.
But the baby’s head stuck for
some reason, and the doctor told Will he’d have to make a cut. I heard the
scissors close on the woman’s skin like cloth and the blood began to run
down--a fierce, bright red. Then all at once the baby seemed to pop out into
Will’s hands, the color of a blue plum and floured with white stuff and
streaked with blood, and Will kept saying, “I’m going to drop it, I’m going to
drop it, I’m going to drop it,” in a terrified voice.
“No, you’re not,” the doctor
said, and took the baby out of Will’s hands and started massaging it, and the
blue color went away and the baby started to cry in a lorn, croaky voice and I
could see it was a boy.
The first thing that baby did
was pee in the doctor’s face. I told Buddy later I didn’t see how that was
possible, but he said it was quite possible, though unusual, to see something
like that happen.
As soon as the baby was born the
people in the room divided up into two groups, the nurses tying a metal dog tag
on the baby’s wrist and swabbing its eyes with cotton on the end of a stick and
wrapping it up and putting it in a canvas-sided cot, while the
Buddy told me Will was a
third-year man and had to deliver eight babies before he could graduate.
Then we noticed a bustle at the
far end of the hall and some men in lime-green coats and skull caps and a few
nurses came moving toward us in a ragged procession wheeling a trolley with a
big white lump on it.
“You oughtn’t see this,” Will
muttered in my ear. “You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t
to let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race.”
Buddy and I laughed, and then
Buddy shook Will’s hand and we all went into the room.
I was so struck by the sight of
the table where they were lifting the woman I didn’t say a word. It looked like
some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups sticking up in mid-air at
one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes I couldn’t make out
properly at the other.
Buddy and I stood together by
the window, a few feet away from the woman, where we had a perfect view.
The woman’s stomach stuck up so
high I couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed
to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly
legs propped in the high stirrups, and all the time the baby was being born she
never stopped making this unhuman whooing noise.
Later Buddy told me the woman
was on a drug that would make her forget she’d had any pain and that when she
swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in
a kind of twilight sleep.
I thought it sounded just like
the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain,
obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she
would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her
forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of
her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to
open up and shut her in again.
The head doctor, who was
supervising Will, kept saying to the woman, “Push down, Mrs. Tomolillo, push
down, that’s a good girl, push down,” and finally through the split, shaven
place between her legs, lurid with disinfectant, I saw a dark fuzzy thing
appear.
“The baby’s head,” Buddy
whispered under cover of the woman’s groans.
But the baby’s head stuck for
some reason, and the doctor told Will he’d have to make a cut. I heard the
scissors close on the woman’s skin like cloth and the blood began to run
down--a fierce, bright red. Then all at once the baby seemed to pop out into
Will’s hands, the color of a blue plum and floured with white stuff and
streaked with blood, and Will kept saying, “I’m going to drop it, I’m going to
drop it, I’m going to drop it,” in a terrified voice.
“No, you’re not,” the doctor
said, and took the baby out of Will’s hands and started massaging it, and the
blue color went away and the baby started to cry in a lorn, croaky voice and I
could see it was a boy.
The first thing that baby did
was pee in the doctor’s face. I told Buddy later I didn’t see how that was
possible, but he said it was quite possible, though unusual, to see something
like that happen.
As soon as the baby was born the
people in the room divided up into two groups, the nurses tying a metal dog tag
on the baby’s wrist and swabbing its eyes with cotton on the end of a stick and
wrapping it up and putting it in a canvas-sided cot, while the
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