MAY 2, 1904, THE PRESIDIO, SAN FRANCISCO
Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.
—Dr. Charles Meigs, obstetrician,
Jefferson Medical College,
at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
TWENTY YEARS AGO, I LOST MY WITS to childbed fever, much less common now that the nabobs of medicine have acknowledged Pasteur’s discovery that pullulating matter and not miasma spreads infection. At the time of my lying-in, obstetricians delivered one baby on the heels of the next, their hands unwashed and their frock coats stiff with gore. Women might have been laboring in a sty instead of a hospital. In one, I was delivered of my own small vitality, squalling with pent-up rage against the assumption of an existence that was doomed to end. I expelled my child into a pair of gentleman’s hands rudely tugging at my womb, a violence that caused it to wander into hysteria and madness. (I never mentioned my wandering womb to Mr. James, who would have bullied me into describing every nuance of sensation that I had experienced, for the sake of his literary ambition.)
This recounting I have undertaken, like the agony attendant on creation, with its elements of shame and folly, is for my lost son. Martin, I never saw you! For all I know—or care!—you were a mulatto babe gotten on me by one of God’s black angels. All this long time, I have been yearning for you. The cards are against us, shuffle them as we will! I have been apostrophizing a ghost.
I look out the window onto Golden Gate Park. Beyond its green sward and eucalyptus trees, the ocean wets the Orient’s ragged hem and our own. Its contrary motions are regulated by the moon, which is said to be feminine. The resolution of contrarieties in nature comforts me.
I hear your father at the door. With an ink-stained hand, he will take one of mine and quietly—he is a silent man—wait with me by the window for the coming of the night.