Claudette’s Head

Heddy had no baby. Then we saw Heddy pluck the baby out from somebody’s arms. Heddy’s face when she turned to us, holding the baby, exposed the feelings any competent woman of this century could have in my opinion. I didn’t think it then, but I think it now.

Heddy brought the baby to us.

The baby was curled into her arm and into her breast, and was not crying. It was not at all one of those forlorn babies.

I have seen a face on a baby just after the delivery that made me think you could dress the baby up in a busi­ness suit and it could, just as it was, go to the office and run things splendidly. Not this baby. But this baby, which belonged to Heddy’s sister, with its good nature, was reassuring to me, which meant absolutely the world at the time.

That’s the moment I chose to tell Heddy’s sister about the stranger-than-fiction newspaper account I had read the night before, when Heddy gave the baby back to her sister for its bottle.

I said, “Tell me if this surprises you,” after I told her what the story was about. Heddy’s sister Claudette is an emergency-care doctor, who selected that specialty, she had said, because she likes the variety and the surprise of it.

It probably was not fear I saw in Claudette. It was probably discomfort I saw. The baby probably had been stepping on her arm, pinching her, or scratching her, or something, when I said, “It’s about a woman delivering her own baby—one of those stories.”

Claudette said, “I am trying—” and by then she had the baby in a sitting posture in her lap, and she had the nipple of the bottle stuck into its mouth.

I don’t even want to go into the gory details again of the newspaper story I told Claudette, of that woman giving birth in the airplane bathroom. Suffice it to say, the woman accomplished the birth undiscovered. She traveled then, afterward, unremarkably, from Newark to San Francisco, and the baby was lying under the sink for six more hours—but was not dead.

What I did was I pressured Claudette into saying the story surprised her, because I could tell she was not surprised. But I got her to say with a laugh, “Any—” and then I interrupted and filled in for her the rest, until she was shaking her head gaily, yes, yes. What I said was, “There never is any follow-up.” I said, “These reports of women who squat in the field, who give birth, and then who carry on in the field with their work, these reports, they never mention for how long those women carry on. These women, down through the ages, could have dropped dead within minutes. Who does the follow-up?” I asked, does she, Claudette, do any follow-up at her hospital, after she gives these patients their emergency care, because Claudette had said she had to make a fast good guess about what was wrong with people. Claudette said she had to use com­mon sense. Claudette said, “It is such a small commu­nity.” She said, “You hear, and if you really care, you call, and you find out.” About her baby, she said, “He always does this. He just plays.” About me, of course, she didn’t say. I didn’t say a word about it either, because my husband was there with us also, listening to every word.

I am terrified I will be found out.

There was a downhill sweep of burnt lawn that I could see out the window behind Claudette’s head, which led the eye to the grander blue sweep of a lake with sailboats on it and to the sky, which was not too much—all of it—to take in.