My eye was caught by the words Port Frederick Civic Foundation in the newspaper.
I focused on where it appeared in a Sam Hayes editorial that was headlined: FOUNDATION SEEKS STABLE, SANE NEW DIRECTION UNDER STRONG NEW LEADERSHIP.
Thanks to the resignation this week of longtime director Jennifer L. Cain, the Port Frederick Civic Foundation is now poised to reestablish itself as a powerful force to maintain and enrich the important institutions of this community: family, church, and government. The Port Frederick Times welcomes and applauds this signal of positive, conservative change. Under the controversial leadership of Miss Cain, the foundation too often embroiled itself in costly and morally bankrupt endeavors, like the current pornographic exhibit at the New East Gallery, the local AIDS hospice, and support of Planned Parenthood. Now, with her fortuitous departure, the foundation is free once more to invest its funds where they will work to the best interests of the businesses and families of Port Frederick. Though it is unkindly hinted by others—although not by this paper—that Miss Cain now joins her father James D. Cain III in welldeserved exile—we wish her well, particularly in light of the death last week of her mother, who was a victim of mental illness, and also in light of Miss Cain’s own recent near-asphyxiation, which has been attributed, by the police department, where her husband is a lieutenant, to accident. We wish her good health and every success. There is no need to express such wishes for the foundation, because Miss Cain’s departure assures that the Port Frederick Civic Foundation will thrive, right along with the community it is pledged to serve.
I handed the editorial to Geof when he got back into the car.
“He said he would do it,” I said, “and he did.”
Geof read it, then handed it back to me. “I think,” he said, “that I’m going to go have a little talk with Sam Hayes.”
“Drop me off at the doctor’s office first, will you?”
“Don’t you want to go with me? Aren’t you upset?”
“About this?” I gestured toward the editorial. Seeing it in print wasn’t nearly as painful as I would have thought it might be, or maybe the pain was only relative to my obsession about my mother. The article would embarrass my sister, but I wouldn’t lose any friends over it. If I did, then they were not, by definition, friends. I shrugged. “What can I do? It isn’t the sort of thing I can defend myself against. I can’t demand a retraction. I can’t write a letter protesting that I’m really a wonderful person. I’ve got to let it go. Sam doesn’t need me to tell him how I feel about this. He knows.”
“Well, he doesn’t know how I feel about it,” Geof retorted, “and I’m going to make sure that he does.”
“You and Harry Truman.”
“What?”
“Defending your women.”
He snorted, as he pulled the gearshift back into first gear and tried it again. “Hell, no. My woman can defend herself. I’m only thinking of myself and the poor, defenseless Port Frederick Police Department.”
He let me out in front of the medical center, as close as he could get to the building without getting stuck in the snow. I was determined to see Doc Farrell; Geof was determined to give Sam Hayes a piece of his mind. As hot under the collar as we both were, it’s a wonder any snow stuck to either of us.
Unlike any other doctor I ever heard of, Doc Farrell kept regular Saturday hours. But then, he wasn’t married, had no children, and had never been seen on a golf course.
When I reached Marjorie Earnshaw’s reception desk, I said, “I have to see him, Marj.”
“You can’t, Jenny, even with this snow and cancellations, he’s backed up something awful because of deliveries this morning.”
“I’m having a miscarriage. I’m hemorrhaging, Marj.”
“Well, my God.” She got up from her chair. “Why didn’t you say so? For heaven’s sake, stay where you are, I’ll get you a wheelchair.”
By the time Doc Farrell arrived, a nurse had already examined me and said, kindly, “I expect it was only a little spotting, honey. You’ll be fine.”
The doctor was not so friendly.
“What’s this all about, Jennifer?” He looked harried and tired. “You’re not pregnant. Weren’t you just in here a few days ago, had a urinalysis? Didn’t I examine you then? I’d know if you were pregnant. You’re not. So what’s this about having a miscarriage? And hemorrhaging?”
“My mother had an abortion, didn’t she?”
He snapped his mouth shut, and folded his white-clad arms over his chest.
“Only, you called it a hysterectomy,” I continued. “Either that, or she had an abortion that went wrong, maybe it was septic, maybe she got seriously infected, and so you had to do a hysterectomy to take care of the problem. Really took care of it, too. Boy, she didn’t have a problem in the world after that, just blissfully comatose, no more worries.”
“She had—” Doc Farrell leaned forward and said it slowly and distinctly. “—a hysterectomy. Period. I do not perform abortions. I never have. I never will. Not on any woman. And certainly not on your mother. I will show you the records to prove it.”
And he whipped out of the room. I heard him yell at Marj to get my mother’s medical charts. And then he returned, and dumped the thick folder on my lap.
“Read that,” he said. “And then apologize.”
I clasped the folder and, feeling a weird sense of glee that I’d finally managed to get my hands on it, slipped out of the doctor’s office. Then I took the elevator down to the canteen in the basement. From the vending machines, I bought an egg salad sandwich on white bread and a can of Mountain Dew.
I sat down at one of the small metal tables to eat and to read, losing track of all time as I perused my mother’s medical history. It wasn’t easy to read, what with Doc Farrell’s indecipherable scrawls, all the Latin medical terms, and the various hieroglyphic lab reports. Her first visit to the gynecologist was right before her marriage. Were you a virgin when you got married, Mom? I wondered. None of your business, Jenny, I decided. I looked through many years of lab tests, finding a miscarriage… no, two of them, that I’d never known about… one in the eighth week, the other in the fourth month. Ah, here was her pregnancy with me, along with complaints of morning sickness and swollen ankles. After my delivery (7 lbs 4 oz), the doctor had scribbled a note after a postpartum visit: “Excessive crying, lacks energy, reports feeling inadequate.” There were similar notations made after Sherry’s birth (7 lbs 6 oz), including a terse notation that, “patient says feels angry a lot.” Homicidal was more like it, I thought, as I read that phrase so many years later. Only she wouldn’t have been able to say that, probably couldn’t have brought herself to admit, Doctor, sometimes I think I want to kill my baby.
I read all the way through, front to back in that file, including the full report of the hysterectomy. I found nothing untoward. Nothing to indicate an abortion. Nothing even to indicate a suspected or confirmed pregnancy. Nothing unusual reported about the operation itself.
“Fool,” I said to myself. “What did you think you’d find, incriminating statements with red arrows pointing to them? If any such things ever happened, he’d have destroyed any record of them. Of course, he can hand you this file and say, ‘Read it.’ There’s nothing in it to incriminate him.”
* * *
About that same time, Geof was standing out in a blizzard, waiting for a tow truck to come and help get the BMW out of the parking lot at The Times. It wasn’t that his car needed to be towed. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the other cars around him that were stalled or stuck, and that blocked his exit and prevented him from driving away.
He stood in the snow, stamping his feet, which were cold and wet in his loafers. But he was too hyped up to get back in his car and wait for the truck. He thrust his ungloved hands in his pockets, and hoped I wouldn’t worry about him, that I wouldn’t think he’d been in an accident. He had tried to reach me at Doc Farrell’s office, but Marj Earnshaw had told him
that I’d already left. So now he pictured me standing at the front door of the medical center, staring out at the snow, searching for his headlights, looking woebegone.
He was eager to erase that pitiful expression from my imagined face, and he had just the story to do it. After letting me off, he had burst into Sam Hayes’s office—all macho posturing and bluff, as he knew I would describe it—ready to haul the publisher out of his chair and slam him into a wall.
And then Geof discovered the publisher had already been beat to a bloody pulp. Not literally, just figuratively. The “perpetrators” were my trustees, my employees, and my friends, as well as the directors of practically every charitable organization in town, their employees, and dozens of other people whom the foundation had helped in some way through the years. They’d been calling and haranguing him ever since his editorial hit their front porches. By the time Geof reached him, Sam Hayes was already typing up a “softened editorial stance” in order to appease subscribers who threatened to cancel, and to stave off angry advertisers, like my friends who owned restaurants and my friend who managed the health spa and the friends who owned a bookstore and my friends who ran a gas station, and a respectable number of Geof’s friends who advertised, as well.
Geof left Sam’s office, satisfied and smiling.
The feeling lasted until he got to the parking lot.
With nothing else to do, he started thinking about how to break the bad news: The day before, while I was at the golf course, he had been suspended without pay for dereliction of duty, disobeying orders, falsifying sick leave, and failing to report to work.
* * *
I was still lost in thought about my mother when I looked up and saw, not only that it was six o’clock at night, but that Marjorie Earnshaw had entered the canteen.
She nodded at me, and approached my table.
“Mind if I join you, Jenny?”
“Sit down, Marj.”
She touched a hand to the black and white striped band around her hair, and pulled out the other chair.
“Don’t you ever go home, Marj?”
“Three nights a week I volunteer over at the hospital.” She inclined her huge head of hair to the left, in the direction of the hospital just across the street, the one where I’d been a patient only a few days previously. “I usually pick up a sandwich down here.”
“I’ll bet you can tell those interns a thing or two.”
She smiled sardonically. “A few doctors I could name, too.”
“Yeah.” I tapped the medical file in front of me. “He’s a real winner, isn’t he?”
She looked where I was pointing, then up at me, her face registering surprise and insult. “Well, I didn’t mean Doctor—”
“He killed her, Marj.”
“What in heaven’s name—”
“My mother. It’s not in here, is it? Did he have you expunge it? Or did he just never write it up, so you didn’t have to take out anything at all. Her last pregnancy. The abortion.”
I stared at her bitterly. She had to have known all about it; nothing ever occurred in that office that she didn’t know all about.
I thought she’d rail at me, but she became surprisingly quiet and gentle. “Jenny, I don’t know where you get these ideas, but they just aren’t true. He’s a fine doctor, and he never did any such thing. Look, I’ll be glad to talk to you about it, but I’ve got to have something to eat.”
I nodded, nonplussed by her unexpected kindness.
“You know what, Marj? If you’d been a doctor, you would have had a better bedside manner than he does.”
She smiled, with a touch of her old, familiar arrogance, and went off to the vending machines. I focused my gaze on my mother’s file, but looked up as I heard the sound of the coins rattling down the machine. A sandwich popped out of its slot and Marj opened a little plastic door to take it out. She put coins, twice, in the coffee machine, and I watched as the plastic cups plopped down and the liquid filled them. She walked over to the condiment table, where, although her back was turned to me, I could tell that she was mixing cream and sugar into the drinks. She returned to the table, setting a cup of coffee in front of me and then settling down to drink her own coffee and eat her own sandwich. It appeared to be tuna fish.
“Why, thank you, Marj.”
I gazed at the whitish, sickening looking instant brew in the brown plastic cup with a white rim. I preferred black, but I didn’t say so. I looked up, to find her gazing encouragingly at me.
“You’ll feel better if you drink it, Jenny.”
“Thanks—” I smiled. “—Dr. Earnshaw.”
I picked up the cup and it finally registered. Brown plastic with a white rim. Just like the one Geof had found in our driveway. Dumbly, I held it in my hand halfway between the table and my mouth, staring at it, frantically attempting to understand the implication of it.
“Something wrong with the coffee, Jenny?”
“What?” I didn’t dare to look at her for fear that she’d see the awareness in my eyes. “No.”
This was it! This was the proof that Doc Farrell had something to hide, including my own attempted murder! Here was a brown and white plastic cup from the vending machine in his own office building. He’d picked up a cup of this crap before he drove out to my house, and it had fallen out of his car when he’d gotten out of it in order to shut me into the garage. This was it! Wait until Geof saw this! I hid the exultation on my face as I gulped a swallow of the vile brew.
“Ugh.” I set it down.
“Better drink it all,” Marj advised.
She was right. I couldn’t carry a full cup of coffee out to Geof when he arrived to pick me up. Grimacing, I downed the rest of it.
While Marj ate, she chatted about her years with “Doctor,” although most of the stories revolved around her and about how she’d always managed to save the day, in one way or another. She told me about patients she’d diagnosed quicker than he had, about lab tests she just knew had to be wrong and sure enough when they were redone she was right, about bandages she’d applied and pills she’d prescribed that had helped the patients “so much.” I felt lulled and comforted by her droning voice, and her boring, egotistical stories. Tell me more, Marj, I thought, sleepily, as my head came to rest on my hand, put me right to sleep.
“Do you need a ride home, Jenny?”
“Hm?” I couldn’t seem to get my mouth to work.
“I think you need a ride home. Your husband called a long time ago, but I thought you’d already left, so that’s what I told him. There’s a blizzard outside, you know. You’d better come on back to the office with me, while I get my keys.”
“Umkay.”
I allowed her to take the file, which she put under her arm, and to help me to my feet. Must look like a patient, I thought, with Marj propping me up like this. She guided me to the elevator, and then inside of it, and punched the button for the right floor. I watched her do it all, but it seemed like a dream to me. When the elevator opened again, Marj pulled me out, letting me fall heavily against her as we walked—she walked, I dragged my feet after her—to Doc Farrell’s door.
Marjorie was talking again.
“I’ve been a great help to many patients, Jenny. I helped your mother once, when she was pregnant and desperate. I saw the lab tests, and I heard her crying in Doctor’s office. I knew she couldn’t have that baby, and I knew I could help her even if none of the fancy doctors would. We did it at my house. It was April 10, 1971. Even in my own kitchen I’m a better doctor than most of them will ever hope to be. I did everything right. It wasn’t my fault that she got infected. She just didn’t take care of herself, the way I instructed her. Well, we won’t blame her. It was an accident.”
Marj pushed me through the door, and turned to lock it.
My knees buckled, and I collapsed onto the floor.
“That’s what I tried to tell you at the funeral.” Marj bent down to grasp my wrists and she began to pull me across the floor. ??
?I saw in the paper that your mother died and, I don’t know, something in me felt so bad. I wanted you to know it was an accident. I even sent flowers, special flowers, baby’s breath and rosebuds for the baby, and a white carnation for your mother. Because she was dead. That’s what you wear on Mother’s Day, you know, a white carnation if your mother’s dead. I wanted you to know! Not that I was sorry; there wasn’t anything for me to be sorry about. But that it was an accident.”
She pulled me through a swinging door and down a corridor in the direction of the examination rooms. I was limp, so very limp in her grasp, and she was struggling, grunting, against my weight.
“But you weren’t satisfied with that. You had to know more, to ask questions, and pry. And Doctor was worried, because he had performed the hysterectomy to cover up my—the accident. Didn’t want his practice compromised, he said, by a malpracticing nurse! Afterward, I told him I’d never do that again, and I kept my promise. I went to your home, Jennifer. I was going to tell you that you shouldn’t ask those questions. I was going to let you know it was an accident, so you’d leave us alone. But there you were, already asleep in the garage, waiting for me. I knew you were tired and so upset, and I wanted to help you. But it didn’t work out, and I was so scared that people would find out, and they wouldn’t know that it had all been an accident. So now I’m going to help you at last.”
Marjorie dragged me into one of the little cubicles.
She began undressing me, starting with my left shoe.
“I’m going to exchange lab tests, Jennifer, so now yours will say you are pregnant, just as you claimed in front of so many people in the office today. Like your poor mother, you can’t have this baby. Too much mental illness running in the family, you know, can’t take that risk. And so you tried to abort yourself, and well, it just went wrong, that’s all, just like your poor mother. And you managed to get up here, to cry for help, and I was here to help you.”
She had my shoes off, and had pulled off my mother’s black trousers and was tugging at my stockings now. Help me, I cried inside myself, oh, please, somebody help me.