Did Judge Dorset--who could stare directly into Stephen's and my mother's faces--see that in addition to relief there had to be surprise? He was an intelligent man, so I'm sure he did. I'm sure he saw disbelief in their eyes: My mother knew exactly what she had written at different points over the last seven months, and they both knew what she had written on March 15.
My mother and Stephen must have thought they had been given--inexplicably, and without reason--an astonishing gift from the judge, a gift that grew tangible when a court officer carried the three blue binders to the defense table and handed them over to my mother. A moment later the jury was brought back into the courtroom, my mother was returned to the stand, and Bill Tanner began his cross-examination.
Chapter 21.
I cannot undo what I've done, or what I might have done. I don't think there's anything left for me to set right.
--from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife
TANNER'S CROSS-EXAMINATION was often brutal and occasionally mean-spirited. He was angry that the notebooks had not been shared with the State, and his fury was fresh.
Yet my mother endured and even snapped back at Tanner a number of times. At one point she reminded him that when it came to neonatal mortality, her track record was as good as any ob-gyn's; a few moments later she noted that her mothers' babies were less likely to have a low birth weight. She was even able to reiterate how hard she had worked to try and save Charlotte, and how she had only performed the C-section because there didn't seem to be any other choice.
"I had completed at least eight or nine cycles by then," she told Tanner, referring to the CPR she had performed on Charlotte, "and I still wasn't hearing a heartbeat in the woman--but I was getting one from the baby. What was I supposed to do, let them both die?"
I wouldn't categorize all of her testimony as spunky, but there were some particularly spirited exchanges, and she had regained the clarity of mind she had demonstrated early that morning.
And Tanner never asked the one question I dreaded--and, in all likelihood, the one my mother and Stephen feared most: Is there absolutely no doubt in your mind that Charlotte Bedford was dead when you performed the cesarean? But Tanner had no idea what my mother had written in her diary, and so he assumed there was none. Asking her that question in front of the jury would only hurt the State's case by giving her yet one more opportunity to say Charlotte had already passed away when she chose to save the infant's life.
Although there were occasional sparks that afternoon, my mother's cross-examination and the remainder of the trial seemed anticlimactic to me.
Wednesday night I carried my mother's notebooks into the house from the car for her and offered to return them to her bookcase.
"That would be lovely," she said. "Thank you."
I flattened the pages that I'd removed as best I could before I returned them to the binders, but it would always be clear that someone at some point had removed some entries. Apparently she did not add anything to her notebook that night, and she was so tired she never even looked at the books before going to bed.
The next day, Thursday, our obstetricians and our forensic pathologists all said in one way or another that in their opinion my mother had not killed Charlotte Bedford. But Bill Tanner also made sure each witness acknowledged that he had received a fee for his opinion, and that those opinions were not based on having done--or even having seen--the autopsy. Nevertheless, they were impressive figures, especially the elderly fellow from Texas who had had the misfortune of having to perform autopsies four times on women who had died in botched cesareans, some in desperately poor hospitals near the border with Mexico. In all his years and in all those tragic autopsies, he had never once seen less than eleven hundred milliliters of blood in the peritoneal cavity--a full pint more than Vermont's Dr. Tierney had found inside Charlotte Bedford.
And then on Friday, the attorneys gave their closing arguments, and while they were eloquent, it was clear that both the fly fisherman and the Vietnam veteran were exhausted. I had expected the arguments to last all day--or at least all morning--and I was wrong. The arguments were over by quarter to eleven, and the jury had their instructions from the judge by eleven-thirty. They began their deliberations before lunch.
We expected a long deliberation, and so we went home. Stephen had offered to take us to lunch, but my mother said she wasn't hungry.
And so we--the Danforths and their lawyers--left the courthouse, expecting we would separate in the parking lot across the street. Just before my family climbed into our station wagon, as Patty was telling my grandmother and me something about her years on a high-school track team when she was roughly my age, I overheard my father ask Stephen what it would mean if the deliberations went into the weekend.
"This whole business has a lot of great myths," he said to my parents. "Usually, a long deliberation doesn't bode well for a defendant. If a jury's going to send someone away for a long time, they like to make absolutely sure they don't have any doubt about his guilt. And that can take time. But I've also seen cases, even first-degree murder cases, in which it was all pretty cut-and-dried, and the jury came back with a conviction in two or three hours."
"And this one?" my father asked.
"I haven't a clue. But there was a lot of so-called expert testimony they have to wrestle with, and to me that suggests they'll take their time."
"The weekend?"
"There's a chance. But for all we know, the minute you get home you'll get a phone call from me saying to turn around and come right back."
"Are you going back to Burlington?"
"Nope."
"You're staying in Newport?"
"I am."
"So in your opinion, there's a good chance they'll reach a verdict this afternoon."
He shrugged. "I'd hate to get all the way back to Burlington and have them reach their verdict around four o'clock. That wouldn't be fair to you."
"To us?"
"Judge Dorset won't allow the verdict to be read unless I'm present. And you don't want it read unless I'm present. If I couldn't be back here by five o'clock--five-fifteen, at the latest--he'd have to wait until Monday morning to have the verdict announced. And that just wouldn't be fair to you, Sibyl. To any of you."
"No, I guess it wouldn't," my father agreed.
"Nope, not at all."
"Those 'great myths,'" my father said. "Are there more?"
Stephen smiled. "Well, some lawyers think you can tell how the jury has ruled the moment they reenter the courtroom after their deliberations. If they look at the defendant, he's going to be acquitted. If they refuse to look at him--if they're unwilling or unable to look at him--he's going to be convicted."
"In your experience?"
"In my experience? Don't believe it, it's just a myth."
That was the only day during the trial that we had driven my grandmother to the courthouse, and so before we left Newport there was some brief discussion about whether we should go to her home to wait or ours. My mother wanted to go home, and so we decided we would go to Reddington.
"Do you want to join us, Stephen?" my mother asked. "Do you all want to join us? It'll only be sandwiches, but ..."
Stephen thought for a moment, looked at his team--Patty and Peter and the law clerks--and then at my father. I'm sure my father wasn't happy about my mother's lawyer and entourage descending upon his house once more, but the invitation had come from his wife and so he offered Stephen a small smile.
"Sure," Stephen said, "that would be nice."
My grandmother sat in the backseat of our car and asked me innocuous questions about horses and Tom Corts before figuring out I was uninterested--perhaps incapable--of conversation. All I could think about were the ostensible myths Stephen had shared with my father, especially the idea that some lawyers believed you could tell the verdict the moment the jury returned. It made complete sense to me, it reflected what I imagined was the way I would behave if I were on a jury someday: I knew I would
be unable to look at a defendant if I was about to send him to prison.
And so the myth grew real in my mind. It hardened into fact a little later as I drove with Cheryl Visco to the supermarket to get cold cuts and salads and breads for the group of lawyers and midwives that had gathered at our house; it became gospel as I watched the law clerk named Laurel and the midwife Donelle Folino find small reasons to laugh. When my mother was not within earshot, I would hear different groups of adults discussing my mother's future, and I would hear words like appeal and wrongful death, and I would cringe.
I wished Tom were there, but he had gone to school that day. Besides, I wouldn't have dared call him because that would have meant using the telephone, and the last thing any of us wanted was to be on the telephone if the jury came back with a verdict.
And of course the phone rang constantly that afternoon, which was an enormous source of frustration. The calls were always from reporters or my mother's friends, and by two-thirty my father was snapping at them all without discrimination--and no one who heard him could blame him.
Sometimes I heard people talking about the notebooks, but my mother never went to her office to look at them and I was relieved. As far as I knew, she had not opened them on Thursday night either, and so she still hadn't discovered what I'd done.
Would I have broken down as I did if the verdict had come in the following week, would my howls have been quite so loud if the jury had deliberated throughout the weekend? Would waiting the weekend--and therefore having to endure the myth that a long deliberation meant conviction--have caused the same sort of emotional explosion?
Perhaps, but we'll never know, because we were called at three-twenty with the news that we should return to the courthouse.
No one would venture a guess in my mother's presence what a four-hour deliberation actually meant, but I know I was feeling for the first time in well over a week that there was a chance my mother would be vindicated. I could tell Patty Dunlevy felt the same way, and it almost seemed that Stephen had regained his swagger.
But no one would speak of such things to my mother. In one of the strangest exchanges I heard in all of the months before the trial began and the two weeks of the trial itself, my grandmother asked my mother as we drove back to the courthouse, "Have you ever considered putting in another window in your examining room? I think the extra light would make the room much more cheerful."
"I haven't," my mother answered, apparently contemplating a future somewhat different from our fantasies. "But maybe someday when those prenatal posters are gone I'll hang some nice flowered wallpaper. Wallpaper with irises, maybe. Lots and lots of blue irises."
Looking back, I think it was the sheer speed of the deliberations that led to my cries in the courtroom.
By the time we had returned to Newport and climbed the stairs in the courthouse, by the time the judge had told the spectators that he would tolerate "no theatrics, disturbances, or dramatic reactions to the verdict" when it was read, by the time he had asked one of the bailiffs to escort the jury back into their long box and the rest of us were rising in our seats, I had concluded that my mother would be found not guilty on the one charge that mattered: involuntary manslaughter.
I don't think I really cared whether she was found guilty of the misdemeanor, of practicing medicine without a license.
Yet as the jury was being led in, that changed. That changed completely. None of the twelve jurors would look at my mother. They looked straight ahead of them as they walked, they looked at their shoes as they sat. They looked at the clock on the wall, they looked at the lake.
"Please be seated," the judge told us when the jury was back. "Good afternoon," he said to the group, and then turned to one of the court officers.
"Miss Rivers, do you have the envelope with the sealed verdict forms?"
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Would you please return that envelope to the foreman?"
My mother sat unmoving between Stephen and Peter, her hands clasped before her on the table. Beside me I saw my grandmother's hands were trembling.
"Mr. Foreman, would you review the envelope with the forms?"
The foreman had one good hand, and one with only a thumb. But over the years he had apparently become fairly dexterous with his six fingers: With the disfigured hand he used his thumb and palm to hold the envelope, and with the other he flipped through the papers.
"Are they the forms you signed? Are they in order?" Judge Dorset asked.
The foreman looked at the judge and nodded. And still none of the jurors would offer my mother a glance. Not one brief glance. They wouldn't even look at my father or me.
Please, I prayed to myself, -please, look at me, look at my mother. Look at us, look here, look here, look here. But none would, none did. And then one, the elderly Lipponcott woman, looked toward Bill Tanner, and I knew it was over and we had lost. My mother would be found guilty, my mother would go to jail. My theft of pages from my mother's notebooks had merely been one more meaningless gesture in a meaningless tragedy. Charlotte Bedford was dead, and my mother's life was essentially over. She would go to jail, she would never catch babies again.
And that's when I started to cry. It wasn't simply the pressure that caused me to scream and sob, it wasn't the waiting or the tension or the stress. It was the idea that the roller-coaster ride was finally coming to an end, and it was coming to an end with a long chain of cars--some holding Bedfords and some holding Danforths--smashed on the stanchions that were supposed to carry us all high above the craggy horrors of the earth.
I was not present when the verdict was read, I was with my grandmother and Cheryl Visco and Patty Dunlevy in a small conference room far down the hall. I have been told that when the judge asked my mother to stand and face the jury, Stephen helped her to her feet. Some of those present tell me that he held her elbow as the verdict became public, but others aren't so sure. With my father right behind him, I don't believe that Stephen would have done such a thing.
But I was wrong about so much; he may have.
If my mother believed the myth about juries Stephen had told us earlier that day in the parking lot, and if she had noticed that none of the jurors would look at her, then she may have been surprised by the verdict. I am told she nodded her head a tiny bit and sighed, and my family's relief was manifested much more visibly by my father: He murmured a "Thank you" so loud that people in the rows far behind him could hear it, and looked up toward the ceiling in gratitude and relief.
A long second later, when everyone in the courtroom had absorbed the verdict, there was the sort of spontaneous reaction that the judge chose not to stifle: Charlotte's sister and mother and the midwives started to cry. The midwives cried with joy, while the Fugetts sobbed for their dead sister and daughter and friend.
Some of the witnesses who had been kept from the courtroom through the largest part of the trial, people like Asa Bedford and Anne Austin and B.P. Hewitt, were in the room when the verdicts were announced, but none of them showed much reaction. Not even Asa. He hugged Charlotte's mother and rocked her, but his face remained impassive.
Later Bill Tanner would try and suggest that although my mother had been acquitted on the charge of involuntary manslaughter, the jury had still sent an important message to midwives about home birth: They had found her guilty of practicing medicine without a license, a signal that he said meant Vermont juries were not at all enamored with the idea of home birth.
That evening, however, neither the midwives nor my father cared that my mother had been found guilty of the misdemeanor. A two-hundred-dollar fine was absolutely nothing compared to a manslaughter conviction, and once more the adults played loud party tapes at our house, while I curled up on the couch in their midst and sipped herbal tea till close to midnight.
Even seven years after my mother's trial, many of her midwife friends feared that my decision to go to medical school would be seen by many people as an indictment of home birth. It was not. I became an
ob-gyn at least in part because a woman's right to choose to have her baby at home was important to me, and I wanted to be sure there were always doctors on call who would support that decision.
I know there were other reasons as well, but those reasons are more difficult for me to articulate: They begin, on some level, with a desire to be around babies that is so strong it may be genetic, but they go deeper still. A need to know without reservation exactly when someone is alive and when someone is dead. Atonement. A desperate distaste for the whole idea of a C-section, combined with an occupation that will demand I perform the operation with regularity. Reparation. Compensation. Justice.
Some of my mother's midwife friends are aware that I have been writing this book, and they fear now that my recollections will be tinged by my profession. In their eyes, I am not the one who should tell my mother's story, and they want me to leave it alone.