Lace

  How long overdue?

  “Four months.”

  The pharmacist’s face was immediately wiped of expression. It was like speaking to an automaton, thought Maxine. He said, “You mustn’t consult me, you must ask a doctor. Try Doctor Geneste, he’s a gynecologist. A very sympathetic man. I regret that I can sell you nothing.” He wrote down an address and handed it to Maxine, who couldn’t get out of the shop fast enough.

  Once outside and around the corner she leaned against a stone wall until she regained her self-possession. Then she asked the way to the gynecologist.

  It was an old-fashioned house in a quiet street. Maxine looked for a long time at the worn brass plate on the olive-green front door, then slowly lifted her hand to the doorbell.

  A nurse with low-heeled white shoes, a white uniform and an empty face opened the door. Maxine asked to make an appointment with the doctor. “Speak up,” said the nurse, “I can’t hear you. What’s your name?”

  But Maxine found it impossible to raise her voice above a whisper. “It’s not for me,” she said. “It’s for a friend.” Hurriedly, she gave the false name that Judy had suggested.

  The following Saturday Judy stood outside the olive-green door accompanied by Maxine. The girls sat silently in the reception room until they were beckoned into the consulting room by the impassive nurse. The consulting room was a cream cubicle with two metal chairs in front of a pine desk. On the desk stood a telephone, an old-fashioned brass dinner bell, a large diary, a scribbling pad and a small green-glass jar of cornflowers. In one corner of the room stood a green cotton screen, and in another was a white porcelain sink over which the doctor bent, his back to them.

  The girls could smell the faint, reassuring odour of antiseptic as he turned around to face them. He wasn’t a cross, fat French doctor, as they had both feared. He was tall, thin, relatively young and handsome—rather like Gary Cooper, Maxine thought.

  He treated them like adults. They agreed that the weather was wonderful. Then, in a kind voice, he asked, “How long has it been since your last period?”

  “I think the third week in January,” said Judy, “I mean, I never took much notice.”

  There was a silence. “Better check whether or not there is real cause for alarm,” he said. “I would like to examine you, so perhaps your friend won’t mind waiting outside.”

  Judy took her clothes off behind the screen and stood shivering, not wanting to leave its protection. Then she put on the sleeveless gown that was folded over the screen and sat with her legs dangling over the side of the high examination couch, at the end of which were fixed two unnerving stainless-steel stirrups.

  “You must remember that I am here to help you. There is no need to be frightened. I have to make an examination. But I am a doctor and you must regard me as your confidant, not as a man, and my nurse will be here. Now, have I your permission to examine you?” Judy nodded. He rang the brass bell for the nurse. “Now please just lie back and rest your legs on the stirrups.” Shutting her eyes and feeling unbearably humiliated, Judy lay on her back and allowed her legs to be pulled apart and propped into the impersonal steel stirrups. She felt a probing of rubber-gloved fingers. She heard sticky, greasy sounds. Then he helped her down. The nurse left the room and Judy went behind the screen again to dress. Maxine returned.

  The doctor sat behind his desk looking gravely at the girls. “Of course, I will do tests. But I don’t need tests to know that this miss is almost certainly four months pregnant.”

  Judy felt black despair. No hope. She was caught. Trapped. She wanted to scream and stamp. She would refuse. She would demand a replay. It could not happen. Not to her. Why, why, why?

  The doctor said that abortions were illegal. In any case, miss might be twenty weeks pregnant, so it was too late. If they did not mind his saying so, the question was not whether miss was pregnant, not how to get rid of this baby, but rather to consider where and when it would be born. There was another silence, then casually the doctor asked if the father was likely to be supportive.

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  Another long silence. Then the doctor added that he understood Judy’s situation and he would like to assure her that it was not nearly so rare as she supposed. He had attended other young ladies in similar situations and was used to exercising discretion in these matters. It would almost certainly be possible to keep the matter secret, but the problem was Judy’s age, her parents would have to be told.

  “That’s not possible, both my parents are dead,” Judy heard herself say.

  The gynecologist looked skeptical. “Then who are your guardians?”

  “My elder sister, who’s married,” she said. Then, with a flash of inspiration, “My sister, Judy—Judy Jordan.” Innocent navy-blue eyes stared at him.

  “Then I must write to your sister and inform her of these matters and ask her permission to care for you. There is also the matter of payment. Where you have your baby depends quite frankly on what you can afford.”

  “There will be no problem about payment,” said Maxine swiftly. Judy opened her mouth, then shut it again. They were talking as if having a baby were no more of a problem than buying a pair of skis.

  But already, sitting in this neat consulting room and talking to an adult, she felt calmer. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrible, provided her parents never found out. Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t the end of the world. And she didn’t know quite how to describe the sensation, but her feelings had altered in the last month in a very strange way. It was as if the rest of the world didn’t really matter. What mattered was that under her rotund little stomach (now hard as a tennis ball) she had felt a sort of flutter, a butterfly-wing touch.

  In fact she thought it might have moved.

  Suddenly she had realised that this was a real baby. It was her baby. To Judy’s surprise, she had dwelt on this private thought with catlike complacency, and after those first moments of panic, when she faced the doctor, this feeling of smug unreality had returned to her.

  The gynecologist was saying, “After the baby is born you will have three choices. You can keep the baby; the baby can be adopted; or it can be cared for by foster parents until your life is more settled.”

  He carefully rearranged the little blue flowers in the green jar. “If you have the baby adopted, then you will have to say good-bye to your child forever, but the advantage would be that you will never have to pay anything. On the other hand, if you find foster parents for the baby, then you would have to pay for its keep, because the child would still be yours.”

  He looked up at Judy gently and said, “Naturally, you can’t decide such things immediately. You will no doubt wish to consult your sister.”

  “Look, I can tell you right away what I’d like to do,” said Judy. Suddenly she felt that her baby was not rubbish to be dumped in a bin, not an unwanted pet to be handed over to somebody else. Her baby was lying there under her heart, curled up in her body. Already it had a little nose and mouth and minuscule fingers. It was her flesh and blood. She couldn’t hand that to somebody else, like a parcel over a post office counter.

  Without much logical thought, but with already developed maternal instincts, Judy suddenly heard herself say, “I want to keep it. I don’t want to give my baby away. I would like to find my baby foster parents until I’m old enough to have a home of my own for him.”

  “Well, that is something to be thought over carefully,” Doctor Geneste said. “We can discuss it on your next visit.”

  Afterward the two girls went to a quiet tearoom. “Why did you say there would be no problem about money?” Judy wanted to know.

  “Because there won’t be. I’ll talk to the others tonight. Between the three of us we should surely be able to raise the money for your medical bills.”

  It was after midnight. The white lace curtains had not been drawn over the window. In front of the silver rectangle, three dark figures sat whispering on Maxine’s bed. “Doctor Geneste
said that the hospital fees would be about one thousand Swiss francs. Between us we can almost certainly raise that amount. He said that to put a child in a foster home costs five hundred francs a month. That’s six thousand francs a year.”

  Maxine summed up the financial situation on her fingers. “That’s fifteen hundred Swiss francs a year from each of us. Now the question is, can we afford it?”

  “Only twice as much as stabling a horse in London,” Pagan offered. They all pondered.

  The girls treated Judy’s pregnancy with the awed respect and horror of those who had narrowly escaped such a dreadful fate, and were therefore prepared to make a financial sacrifice to the God of Luck. They regarded the situation as if it were a school escapade in a girl’s adventure book, desperate but not immoral. They, her friends, would stand staunchly by Judy. With the cheerful idealism of girls who have never had to face a truly serious situation, they all agreed that they wanted to help support the child.

  “I’ll have to tell some enormous lie,” said Kate thoughtfully. They all told lies and only regarded lying to each other as a sin. “I’m sure that if I can think of a real whopper, I’ll get money from my father. The only problem is that he might be very inquisitive.”

  Maxine said, “Aunt Hortense has promised me a dress allowance when I get back to Paris. It won’t be much, but I’ll also have an allowance from Papa. I’m sure that somehow I can scrape up thirty Swiss francs a week.”

  After a great deal of arithmetical plotting, Kate wrote and asked her father if he would send a contribution to the Gstaad Athletic Fund. As Miss Gstaad, she wanted to make a truly magnificent contribution.

  By return post came a letter from Kate’s father saying that he’d asked the headmaster to advance her four hundred pounds, and was delighted that his girlie was featuring so prominently in local life.

  The same evening Pagan clattered up the wooden stairs, burst into the bedroom and triumphantly flung a sheaf of francs onto Kate’s bed. “My contribution! Three thousand six hundred francs.”

  Maxine gaped at the notes. “But how generous of your mother!”

  “Oh, I didn’t ask her! I wouldn’t have got a sou from her. No, I took my pearl necklace to Cartier. . . . I’ve always hated the bloody thing! Every birthday I was given two extra pearls to add to it. . . . Cartier wouldn’t buy it—they only buy back their own stuff—but they were terrifically kind and that little man with the pince-nez took me to another jeweler, who at first offered two thousand, but pince-nez beat him up to that.” She pointed gleefully to the money on the bed. “The only other thing I had to sell was Grandfather’s signet ring, and that really would have been painful, so I’m glad it wasn’t necessary.”

  Those two sums alone would take care of the first two years. They had plenty of time later to plot where they’d get the next payments.

  Maxine was only able to pay three hundred Swiss francs in cash from her allowance. She couldn’t manage to squeeze another sou from her family, but she asked her papa if her stay at l’Hirondelle could be extended so that she could sit for the French Commercial Diploma in the autumn. She was taking the course anyway, and as the class proceeded at the snail’s pace of the non-French-speaking girls, it would not require much work to pass the course. Thus she could stay in Gstaad until Christmas and look after Judy until the baby was born.

  Judy’s next visit to the gynecologist was calm and reassuring. Nothing is really important except birth and death, and the people who sat in that small consulting room only thought hopefully and happily of birth. Other problems, such as money and danger, seemed distant and unreal. What was important to them and Doctor Geneste was that nothing should upset his mothers and their babies.

  By Judy’s third visit, Doctor Geneste had received a letter from Miss Post’s sister. She thought that under the circumstances, the doctor was doing the right thing for her sister Emily. She herself had only recently married and didn’t want to take on someone else’s child at the moment, but Emily could rely on them for help when she returned to the United States.

  “She isn’t much of a letter-writer, but I knew I could count on her,” said Judy, whose parents had forwarded Doctor Geneste’s letter to her. She had immediately written and thanked her mother for forwarding the letter—a dentist’s bill mistakenly sent to her U.S. address instead of the hotel. She then wrote a reply from her “sister” to Doctor Geneste, addressed the envelope to Monsieur Geneste rather than Doctor, and sent it to a girlfriend in Rossville. Judy asked her to post it to Switzerland, explaining that it was a brush-off letter to a boy and Judy wanted him to think she was back in the United States.

  By her fourth visit, Doctor Geneste said he had heard of a suitable woman to be a foster mother. Farther along the valley in the village of Château d’Oex was a hospital where he worked as a consultant. One of their ward maids, a young widow with a baby, had applied to be a foster mother. She was strongly recommended by the hospital as quiet and reliable. Would Miss Post care to visit her?

  The following Saturday, Maxine and Judy caught the little blue bus and travelled up the valley. It was a narrow valley, with low-lying fields and a few clusters of chalets around a gray church with a very thin spire. It was midsummer and the cows had been taken up to the mountain pastures. The bus passed through fields thickly sprinkled with wild flowers under a sky that was the same colour as the wild forget-me-nots at the side of the road.

  Judy had felt miserable for months. She only felt calm in the doctor’s consulting room. But suddenly she felt indescribably happy and contented as they bounced along that little country road. Furtively, she felt the hard curve under her coat. For the first time she longed for it to grow bigger.

  Angelina Dassin was waiting for them by the fountain in the cobbled square. A young woman with dark hair drawn back in a bun, she had the rather gaunt, highly coloured face that is typical of that region. She was carrying a black-eyed, solemn baby boy whom she shifted onto her left hip in order to shake hands with them.

  They all walked through the village to the dark wooden chalet with the fishscale-tiled roof. Madame Dassin had been told the situation and felt sorry for this small, forlorn blond child. While Madame Dassin went for glasses of fresh milk, Maxine and Judy sat in the barely furnished living room and looked at the spectacular view across the valley to the snow-topped mountains.

  Both Judy and Maxine thought this rustic scene ideal. The atmosphere was one of serenity, the little boy seemed a lively child and Madame Dassin seemed to live up to her hospital recommendation. So they arranged that Judy would move into the chalet for two weeks after she stopped work, before the baby was born. After the birth, she would then rest at the chalet for a month while she breast-fed the baby. Both girls earnestly stressed that, when Judy was older and had a home of her own, she would wish to take back her child. Madame Dassin nodded.

  Maxine added that, at the suggestion of Doctor Geneste, Judy did not want the child told any details about Judy, other than that one day his mother would come and take him to his real home. There was to be no attempt to deceive the child by telling him that Madame Dassin was the natural mother.

  Angelina Dassin agreed to this. “What do you intend to call your baby?” she asked.

  Hunched in a shabby armchair, Judy looked out the window across to the sharp Alpine skyline and said, “If it’s a girl it will be Elizabeth after my mother. If it’s a boy it will be Nicholas.”

  Maxine wasn’t surprised.

  By the end of September, Judy’s stomach seemed enormous. Her situation was apparent to the rest of the hotel staff, who sympathetically said nothing. She now walked with an odd sway, a stiff-backed lurch and she found it hard to sleep the whole night through because of the baby’s kicking. She would lie in the moonlight, thinking how wonderful it was to feel her own baby dancing under her heart.

  On the seventh of October, two weeks before the baby was due, Judy said good-bye to the staff of the Imperial and caught the bus to Château d’Oex laden with
gifts: a fine white knitted shawl and two boxes full of baby clothes from Maxine, Kate and Pagan, a bottle of kummel, a jar of peaches pickled in brandy and a magnificent smoked ham from the head chef.

  On the thirteenth of October Judy woke at five in the morning “Ouch!” She caught her breath. No, it wasn’t the baby kicking, it was pain in her back.

  She sat up in bed, already feeling an excited thrill of achievement. She couldn’t wait to tell Angelina. She heaved her unwieldy body out of bed, wrapped the white lace shawl around her shoulders and sat in the living room, twisting the twin coral rings, one for each middle finger, that Nick had given her just before he left Switzerland.

  “I know you won’t accept a ring for the finger I want to put it on,” he had said, as they sat among the brilliant yellow king-cups that grew in the damp soil on the river bank, “but I want to give you a ring, because somehow a ring is connected with a promise, and with this ring I promise that I’ll always love you.” He had slipped one rosebud on the middle finger of her right hand. Then he picked up her left hand.

  “Just a minute,” Judy had said, “what does that ring promise?”

  “That I’ll always be ready to help you.” He had kissed the fingertip and slid the second ring on it. “You can always rely on me.”

  Suddenly Angelina appeared in the living room and scolded Judy. “Back to bed! You don’t want a cold as well as a baby,” Angelina cried. She felt a proprietary interest in the impending birth.

  The flutters in Judy’s abdomen continued irregularly throughout the day. Doctor Geneste had been alerted and was quietly reassuring. “Nothing is likely to happen yet,” he said.

  Twenty-four hours later, Judy began to experience definite strong contractions.

  By eight o’clock in the evening the contractions were coming at half-hour intervals and Angelina decided to take her to the hospital. They left Roger with the farmer’s wife next door and two red lollipops, then together they walked down the main street in front of the arched town hall, where they waited for the bus.