Charles and Edwina Nagel, 212 Chestnut St., Pittsfield, Mass. Son
Chas. Jr. now 2½. “We were childless. Now we’re not.”
Felipe and Dora Ortega, 10 Cedar Heights Rd., Leacock, Mich. Daughter Josephine, 3. “We are thankful and hope to have another from a surrogate as soon as we can afford to.”
“Hi!”
“Geoff! Hello! Look at all this stuff from Steph! Want me to get you a coffee?”
Geoff looked tired and he needed a shave, but he smiled and nodded, seized the flyers and began poring.
Alicia came back with black coffee. “My mother refused to let Steph stay in the house.”
“What?—You’re kidding!”
Alicia assured him she wasn’t, and that Steph hadn’t been dampened or even surprised by it.
“One of my patients in pre-natal this afternoon—” Geoff spoke softly, and glanced at a nurse and an intern at a table near them, but they seemed absorbed in their own conversation, “—told me the women of the town are ‘quite shocked by these Rent-a-Womb girls,’” Geoff said on a prim note. “And they intend to turn up tomorrow too, I gather.”
“Pity I’m on duty at ten,” Alicia said. “I’ll have to look out a window—if I can.”
“Funny, I’ve got three fellows coming tomorrow morning to produce. What a time for it! Mighty Muckers outside chanting ‘Abnormal’ and ‘Contrary to nature!’ Ha-ha!” Geoff writhed with mirth, wiped a tear from his eye, and downed the rest of his coffee. “Bye, sweetie! Back to the blessed events!”
The next morning, Alicia had trouble finding a parking place for her car, because other cars had usurped the nurses’ parking row, which was not so sacred as that of the doctors. There were three parked buses, and at least two more arriving. No use looking for Steph in all the confusion of people. The east lawn was covered with women and men, some with banners, shouting and yelling, policemen even, trying to direct people. Alicia hurried into the Frick and checked in at a few minutes before 10.
“Get them out! . . . Get them out!” That was the first chant Alicia heard through the closed windows of a room where she was inserting a tube into the vein of a patient’s right arm. He was an elderly man, and this was a blood transfusion.
“Did that hurt?” she asked.
“Not a bit, thank you. What’s all the commotion outside?”
Then came the taking of four patients’ blood pressure. When she was washing her hands around 10:30, she opened a window to the bright October sunshine and looked out on to the east lawn.
Feminine voices rose to her ears, then a male voice boomed over a loud-speaker, “Keep our country pure!”
That was the Mighty Right with the amplifier.
“Listen to what we’re fighting for.—Take a look at (words unintelligible) and let them speak!” That was one of the Rent-a-Womb girls, and the voice had come from near the big gold-on-purple streamer held by two young women at either end. The streamer said RENT-A-WOMB, and billowed forth and back in the wind. Buses and a lot of parked cars were honking their horns. Each side was trying to drown the other out, Alicia realized. The Rent-a-Wombers had a sort of podium or stage, Alicia was glad to see, because the opponents had a small grandstand, like a section of stadium seating, and a larger platform just below it. From this platform the man with the mike was bellowing.
“. . . American tradition . . . God’s gift of children . . . being turned into an ugly commerce which you see here . . .”
Alicia tore herself away and closed the window. Back to duty.
There must be more than six hundred people on the east lawn, she thought. Had her mother turned out too, maybe with her friend Rosemary?
When Alicia next had a chance to look out of a window, things had hotted up. Some middle-aged women seemed to be tussling with a group of younger Rent-a-Womb girls on the left side of the lawn. A nurse, smiling excitedly, joined Alicia. Her name was Mary Jane, as Alicia recalled.
“Up those church people. I mean up!” Mary Jane made a vulgar gesture which suddenly seemed highly comical to both. “They’ve got all the time in the world to turn out, sure! Moneyed bastards, too!”
Mary Jane was Irish, Alicia thought. Even so, she was pro-Rent-a-Womb and probably in favor of abortion on demand. They both laughed madly in sudden sisterhood, and slapped each other’s shoulders.
“Did you see the TV?” Mary Jane drew Alicia toward the nurses’ “rest room” which had staff only on its door. The TV here was on, and several nurses standing and sitting watched raptly, some laughing, others gleefully applauding. The screen showed two women face to face yelling at each other, and seemingly about to come to blows.
“Where’s this?” Alicia asked.
“Dallas!” a couple of the nurses answered in unison. One added, “We just saw Los Angeles! Wow! It’s all over the country!”
“Wish I were down on the lawn,” Alicia said to Mary Jane. “My best friend’s head of Rent-a-Womb—practically. Stephanie Fuller.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mary Jane looked at Alicia with sudden admiration, almost. “Hey, I heard Mighty Muck’s going to—You know the fetus burial in LA? Well, Mighty Muck’s—”
Mary Jane never finished, because they all heard the hall buzzer and had to move. Alicia had thought Mighty Muck was solely Geoff’s term.
“. . . would like to introduce . . .” Alicia heard as she strode down the hall. Surely that was Steph’s voice—she hoped so—introducing some of the happy parents.
Alicia had a half-hour break and could have grabbed a sandwich, but she was more interested in the east lawn, where it seemed more people had gathered since she had last looked. She could see the “happy parents,” three couples standing in a row on the podium amid the Rent-a-Womb supporters, all laughing or smiling, perhaps at the difficulties of hearing anything, because at least two mikes seemed to be roaring from either side. The Mighty Right people, who had strung up their red-white-and-blue streamer, were playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” on some kind of portable player while from the Rent-a-Womb side Alicia thought she could recognize “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
“. . . to read you about Abraham and Sarah!” yelled a determined female voice. “When Abraham thought Sarah was barren, he lay with Hagar . . .”
“Lay an egg!”
“. . . ask you for silence! The President is going to speak . . . about sixteen thousand aborted fetuses . . . not forgotten!”
Cheers from squawky elderly throats on the Mighty Right side, and “Yay-hoos!” from Rent-a-Womb. Applause and laughter.
“. . . fetuses collected from hospitals that would have thrown these babies out like garbage,” droned the male voice, coming from a source Alicia could not see. “. . . Now the voice of our President . . . committed to loving the unwanted . . .”
“We want them!” screamed Rent-a-Womb, and clapped hands and yelled. “Birth control!—That’s the result of no birth control!”
This got some laughter from both sides.
“. . . at the burial of . . .” Much sputtering of the turned up loudspeaker, as the President’s familiar voice said: “Just as the terrible toll of Gettysburg can be traced to a tragic decision . . . so can these deaths we mourn. . . .”
Alicia ran down. She had to get closer, had to be in it! She nearly bumped into Mary Jane and another nurse coming up the stairs, and said, “Come on down! Can’t you get off for a couple of minutes?” Alicia raced out into the sunlight toward the Rent-a-Womb side of the lawn, looking for Steph.
“. . . human beings . . . ruled outside the protection of the law by a court ruling which clashed with our deepest moral convictions . . .” This was the President, sounding deadly earnest. “. . . From these innocent dead, let us take increased devotion to the cause of restoring the rights of the unborn . . .” Mad applause on the amplifier.
Some applause from Mighty Righters but not much, because they avidly waited for more from the President.
“What’s abortion got to do with Gettysburg?” Alicia
heard a woman ask a man standing beside her.
“Um—uh—Well, it is a little complicated, but I’ll try to explain when we get home,” replied the man.
“Alicia! I’m over here!” This was Steph, waving, standing on something, otherwise Alicia couldn’t have seen her in the crowd.
Alicia cut her way toward Steph, and her nurse’s uniform and white cap helped. “Hi, honey!”
“Hi!—Sylvia! Meet my friend Alicia Newton. And Sylvia’s husband Jed.”
Alicia said hello. These were a pair of the happy parents, Steph explained.
“Do you know, we’ve had so many people asking us questions,” Steph went on to Alicia. “Women who never get pregnant, though there’s nothing the matter with them or their husbands. You know? They want to know how they can get in touch with a surrogate mother.”
“. . . persistence,” roared the amplifier over the noise of the murmuring crowd, “is what allowed us to have a resting place today . . . for these little boys and girls . . .”
“Fetuses still?” yelled a man from somewhere, laughing.
“Not fair!” cried a woman among the Mighty Right. “Bad taste! Turn that off!”
“No, it’s part of the LA fetus burial!” yelled a girl.
Day and night, we’re Mighty Right!
Day and night, we’re Mighty Right!
The famous chant sounded determined, but only about a dozen voices had joined in.
“That wasn’t the President talking!” croaked a woman.
“No, that last voice was somebody else at that sick funeral and you deserve it!” yelled a man on the Rent-a-Womb side, giving a kick to two youths in white sweaters from the Mighty Right who seemed to be trying to manhandle him. Then a girl and two young men plunged in to help the man being menaced by the two white sweaters.
“Day and night—outa my sight!” countered the Rent-a-Wombers. The new chant grew. “Day and night—OUTA MY SIGHT!”
“Alicia!”
Alicia recognized the voice of her mother, saw her mother with upraised hand or finger several yards away, as if her mother were admonishing her or maybe warning her of danger, and at that instant at least twenty people surged between them from the hospital side of the lawn toward the street side. Several people got knocked off their feet. A couple of women screamed, then it was a free-for-all, and nobody spared the elderly on either side.
“Keep your cool! No rough stuff!” Stephanie yelled to the Rent-a-Womb side, raised her arms for attention, even tried to jump into the air, making Alicia wince, because Steph looked as if she carried a bushel basket beneath her raspberry-colored woolen dress.
The town whistles went off for noon, police sirens screamed from nearby, and Stephanie screamed, all at the same time.
“Oh, Geoff!” Alicia yelled. “Here!” She had spotted him coming tentatively down the hospital’s steps.
Geoff ran toward her, and his white gown parted with his speed. “Good thing there’s a hospital near! Ha-ha!” Geoff neatly dodged a tall young man who was falling backward on to the lawn, having been shoved by someone.
“I saw Steph a minute ago,” Alicia said, “and now I can’t find her. She shouldn’t be in this fracas!”
She and Geoff were dodging swinging arms, and sidestepping people who might have walked backward into them. The police blew whistles and yelled for order. A few people had fallen, unconscious or stunned.
“Stretchers!” someone cried.
Stretchers were coming. Five or six interns hopped down the hospital steps with stretchers and first-aid kits.
“Hello, Alicia! I’m Frances, remember?” Frances had a bloody nose. “We’re trying to protect Steph. Come this way!”
Steph wasn’t on the ground, but she looked in pain, and was being supported by a couple of Rent-a-Womb girls who were plainly trying to move her in the direction of the hospital but without much success because of the crowd. Geoff grasped the situation, and called to an intern whom he knew by name. “This job’s my department, I think,” Geoff said to Alicia.
Within seconds, Steph was being borne on a stretcher toward the hospital, and Frances and a couple of other Rent-a-Womb girls were walking alongside her. Alicia heard a couple of taunts from Mighty Righters, something about “another factory baby there,” but Alicia managed to put it out of her head. She wasn’t even angry about it. She knew that Steph had stated publicly today that she was going to have “her own” baby, and if certain people hadn’t heard her, too bad.
“We’ve won! . . . We’ve won!”
“We’ve won!”
Which side was chanting that? Both sides. Which side had won? Which side would ever win, Alicia wondered as she crouched on the lawn, helping another nurse bathe a bad scrape on a woman’s arm with disinfectant, getting a bandage ready. Many people were leaving the scene, which made the dozen or so fallen figures more visible. A few zealots on either side still shouted insults at one another. Glancing up from her next first-aid job, Alicia saw the Rent-a-Womb girls, some of whom Alicia now knew by sight, putting away their banner, picking up fallen flyers from the lawn.
When Alicia entered the hospital, walking alongside a scared young man with a cut on his forehead that was still bleeding, she realized that she didn’t know how much time had passed since the chaos of noon. She got the boy on to a chair, took care of his cut, and assured him that he wouldn’t need a stitch. Alicia found another nurse to take over and persuade the boy to lie down for a few minutes, and then she looked at her watch. Nearly half past 1! She had been thinking of Steph.
She went up to the fifth floor, where both delivery and predelivery rooms were, and got the Hall Attendant to inquire, because she wasn’t supposed to barge into delivery.
At that instant, the delivery room door opened, and Geoff came into the hall. He opened his arms and laughed when he saw Alicia.
“It’s a girl! Easiest birth I ever saw in my life!”
“She’s really okay?”
“It’ll be hard to hold her down. Ha-ha! How’re things on the battlefield?”
Alicia was suddenly sick of the battlefield. Steph was fine and with a baby girl! Babies were what the whole fight was about, wanted babies, that was. And neither side had won, she remarked to Geoff, and Geoff agreed, because neither side had listened to the other.
“But both sides are happy, don’t forget,” said Geoff. “Mighty Right always thinks it’s won. And Steph was telling me Rent-a-Womb got a lot of names and addresses of people who want babies, so she thinks Rent-a-Womb won.”
Alicia’s mother had a black eye. Of all injuries not appropriate, Alicia thought, this was the worst, and it looked comical on her mother’s face. The atmosphere was worse in the house, really intolerable, so Alicia eased herself out. All it meant was that she and Geoff married a little earlier than planned, and they concluded the house deal earlier, and moved in.
No End in Sight
She lies now, certainly a hundred and ninety, some say two hundred and ten, and with no end in sight. She doesn’t know Sunday from Wednesday, couldn’t care less, has refused to wear her hearing aid for the past ninety or more years, flushed her false teeth down the toilet at least a century ago, causing the nursing home staff to have to grind her food for her ever since. Now she’s spoon-fed three times a day, four if you count “tea,” and pees in bed in a diaper. Naomi’s diapers have to be changed ten or more times in twenty-four hours, round the clock. The Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home charges extra for their diaper-using guests.
Naomi can’t or won’t bother pushing a handy red-glowing electric button that hangs over the edge of her night-table, she just lets go. When it comes time to change the bed linen, which is twice a week, two nurses lift her to a nearby chair which has a hole in its seat and is called a commode. The nurses spread Naomi’s gown in back, in case she is in a mood to relieve herself while they are remaking the bed. Two nurses lift Naomi with ease, because she doesn’t weigh much, into a wheelchair twice a month, and she is rolled t
o the “beauty parlor” down the corridor for a shampoo and set, manicure and pedicure. This costs seventy-four dollars. Her thin white hair looks like a puff of smoke, but still her scalp has to be washed, the hair fluffed to make it look more like hair, though Naomi hasn’t asked for a mirror in decades, and couldn’t see into it, if she did: Naomi deliberately broke her glasses many years ago in a fit of temper, and those being the fifth pair the nursing home had had made (at Naomi’s account’s expense, of course), the home did not have another pair made. Or maybe the optometrist demurred, remembering how disagreeable Naomi had been the last time he had tried to fit her with glasses.
But if a pair of specs had lain by Naomi’s bedside lamp, would she have put them on? No. What was she “seeing” with her eyes half shut, as they were most of the day and night? What was she seeing in the rare moments when they were more open? What was she remembering? Were childhood memories more vivid than the events of her mature years, as everyone said? Maybe. Naomi mumbled, talked to imaginary characters sometimes, but seldom could the nurses understand what she said, and who cared? Naomi didn’t say anything funny about the people around her now, as she’d done a hundred years ago when she’d used to walk, assisted by a nurse usually, into the refectory for a meal. Generations of nurses had come and gone since then, and Naomi’s bizarre and snide remarks, being airy things and unwritten, had not been handed down to the memory of the current nursing staff.
Naomi’s only offspring, her son Stevey, had not been wealthy when he died, but he had left his all to his mother, some seventeen thousand dollars. Stevey had never married. Of course his small fortune, which he had invested as well as possible in Time Deposits and suchlike, had long ago run out. But such is the luck of people like Naomi, that she was bequeathed another small fortune from an uncle of Stevey on Stevey’s father’s side, and that had lasted incredibly long, though not as long as Naomi was lasting. But more later of the odd financial situation. Stevey has been dead for about a hundred and ten years. He had a normal span of life, and died before he was eighty.