CHAPTER 14 Evelyn 
TORONTO | SPRING 1971
With a deep sigh, Evelyn closes her office for the day, locking the large wooden door with the satisfying thunk that signals the oncoming relief of the weekend. It’s been a particularly hectic Friday afternoon and Evelyn’s nurse, Alice, is busy straightening up the waiting room in the aftermath of a new patient: a four-year-old boy named Jeremy whom she has already nicknamed the Human Tornado.
“Evelyn,” Alice says. “Do you have plans later tonight?”
Evelyn sits down in the chair next to the stack of children’s books Alice just tidied and crosses one leg over the other, pressing a week’s worth of exhaustion into the chair back.
“No, thank goodness. After our next appointment, I’m going home for a shamefully large glass of wine.” She checks her watch. “She’s coming in at six, right?”
Last summer, Evelyn told Tom that she wanted to relocate to Toronto and start her own practice, and he agreed to come with her. They bought this old house on Seaton Street and converted the main floor into a waiting room, reception space, and two exam rooms. Even with the rent from the apartment upstairs, Evelyn’s still gone into more debt than she ever imagined possible. But despite the debt, she’s proud; she has a full roster of patients.
Chester Braithwaite was her first. The octogenarian arrived on the porch of the clinic moments after she hung out her shingle, in an act that had instantly endeared him to her and dug a little divot into her heart.
“Hullo, Doctor,” he said, actually tipping his gray wool cap in Evelyn’s direction. “I live just down the street there and I’ve come to see if you’re acceptin’ new patients. My wife passed last year, ya see, and my daughter’s been haranguing me to look after my health. Wondered if ya had room for an ol’ fella like me. I’ll tell ya right now, I’ve no intention of givin’ up my nightly whiskey. I smoke a cigar once a week on Sunday evenings, and I don’t eat vegetables. Not about to change my ways now. But my ticker’s strong and I’ve a mind to live out at least another ten years, so ya’d be stuck with me for a while. Whaddya say, Doc?”
If pressed, she would never admit to harboring preferences, but Chester is her favorite. Aside from the delightfully frolicking cadence of his name, Evelyn is particularly fond of him for his paternal nature and unabashed honesty. During their exams, most of Evelyn’s patients will overexaggerate the virtues of their diet and lifestyle while underreporting the prevalence of health-related vices. But not Mr. Braithwaite.
Chester referred several of his friends and neighbors to “that lovely young lady doctor down the street, ya know,” which helped her practice flourish. And when she was able to hire a nurse, she plumbed her trusted networks for someone who would be supportive of her unique clinical offerings. Through a mutual friend who was also part of women’s liberation, Paula connected her with Alice, and they hit it off after their first meeting over coffee.
Alice isn’t much younger than Evelyn, somewhere in her mid-twenties. She’s crusty on the outside with a soft center, like a well-made croissant, and even though they haven’t known each other long, Evelyn trusts her as much as she trusts Tom. She and Alice have been performing a couple of abortions after-hours each week for the past six months.
Now Alice sits in the chair across from Evelyn, leans forward with her hands clasped tightly between her knees. “I want to run something by you.”
“Shoot.”
Alice hesitates. “Remember when my sister Emily came in?”
“Of course.” A smart girl. A failed condom.
“Well, a friend of hers was asking about it for a friend of hers, because that girl’s aunt had told her she could call around to doctors’ offices and ask for a woman named Jane.”
“Jane?”
“Jane. Just Jane. It’s a code word.”
Evelyn shifts in her seat. “A code word for an abortion?”
“Kind of. A code name for this network that’s connecting women with doctors who will provide abortions. A whisper network, basically. Apparently there’s a big one in Chicago that’s been using that code name and it’s caught on elsewhere. I guess it’s generic enough to slide under the radar.”
Evelyn is quiet for a moment. “Someone I knew a long time ago named her baby Jane,” she mutters, running her index finger over a seam in the thigh of her scrubs. “Interesting that they’d use a code.”
“Very,” Alice says. “It’s a clever system.”
Evelyn notices the spark of possibility in her eyes. “I see where you’re going with this, Alice, but—”
“Please just hear me out, Evelyn. Please.”
Evelyn licks her dry lips, nods.
“So, there’s a team of organizers for this network. They just call themselves Jane, or the Janes. It’s basically a formalized version of what we do. Right now women hear about us from their sister’s friend’s cousin, then they call us, right? But it only allows a relatively small circle of women to hear about the fact that we can offer safe abortions. Word isn’t going to get out much further than a few degrees of removal from you and me.”
“We do a couple of them a week, Alice. We’re doing what we can.”
“But not all we can, right?”
Evelyn chews the inside of her cheek. “What we’re doing now is risky enough as it is.”
“I know. But I want to do more. If we can.” Alice lets out a long sigh. “The organizers are having a meeting tonight. I asked Emily to try to connect with one of them through her friend. She gave me the address. It’s at eight o’clock. I’d like to go.”
Evelyn surveys her nurse with a shrewd eye. “And you want me to come, too.”
“Yes. Just come see what it’s all about, and we can talk about it afterward. No commitment.”
Alice smiles, her perfect teeth shining white in her dark face. She’s a serious person and doesn’t smile often, but when she does, it illuminates everything around her. It’s so warm, perfect for calming the nerves of their after-hours patients.
Evelyn stands and paces the worn carpet a few times, stooping to pick up a rogue piece of yellow Lego before turning back to Alice. “I can imagine what it’s about. It’s a bunch of women risking everything by being brazen and too out in the open about what they’re doing. It’s easier the way we do it, Alice. The less people know about what we do here, the better. It keeps us safe, and that means we can continue to offer the service. We can’t offer it if we’re in prison. And neither can these Janes.”
Alice meets Evelyn’s eyes straight on. They’re reflecting the soft light of the lamp on the reception desk.
“But what if we’re too safe here? What if some desperate woman out there right now can’t find us? What if she thinks there’s no one who can help her?”
“We can’t help everyone, Alice. I wish we could, but we can’t.”
“No, we can’t help everyone, but we could be helping more.”
The two women stare at one another for a long moment, each calculating the consequences of pushing too hard.
Evelyn exhales slowly, shrugs. “Let me think about it.”
Tom has already started on dinner when Evelyn arrives home. She can smell onions and what might be eggplant. They’re both vegetarians, and Tom is one of the best cooks Evelyn has ever encountered. She hangs her purse and jacket up on a hook in the front hall and neatly sets her shoes on the boot tray before wandering down the long hallway to the kitchen, following the sound of classical music and sizzling veggies.
“Welcome home, dearest,” Tom says. He plants a kiss on her cheek and hands her a large glass of red wine.
“Ah, cheers,” Evelyn says with a sigh, settling herself down on a stool at the kitchen island.
“My wife seems taxed on this Friday evening,” Tom says, his back to her as he tends to the frying pan. “Care to vent?”
Evelyn hadn’t intended to get married, but Tom asked when she suggested they move to Toronto, and she’d agreed willingly. It was the most natural of seemingly unnatural choices, to marry a gay man. For both of them, it felt like an extension of their existing relationship.
But in the moment when Tom proposed, Evelyn had laughed aloud.
“I thought your intentions were entirely honorable, Mr. O’Reilly,” she said with a smirk. “Or have you just been manipulating me all this time? Leading me into believing you’re gay so you could sneak up on me with a surprise proposal?”
He dropped to one knee and held both of her hands in his own. “Marrying you would mean that I could enjoy a lifetime’s supply of your lemon shortbread cookies, and that alone is worth the commitment.”
She smiled wryly.
“But, Evelyn, you have truly made me happier than any other woman ever has at any point in my life.”
The smile sank a couple of notches on Evelyn’s face as she realized he was quite serious. His relationship with his mother was strained, to say the least. He had fled England to escape her snide remarks about his “nature” under the pretense of expanding his horizons with an overseas education.
“I know you have your reasons for never wanting to get married or have children,” Tom continued. “You’ve trusted me with your biggest secrets, and I’ve trusted you with mine. But I think we could stay safe and be very happy sharing a life together.”
Evelyn smiled, then, feigning outrage, cried, “You don’t expect me to take your name, do you?”
“Of course not, my darling. I wouldn’t dare suggest such a thing, for fear of grievous injury to my most delicate and valued organs.”
Laughing, Evelyn nodded. “Okay.”
“That’s a yes?”
“That’s a yes.” And she let Tom slide a simple ring onto her finger.
Evelyn runs that same finger around the rim of her wineglass now, watching the diamond in her engagement ring catch the light from overhead as she considers how to broach the topic of the Jane network with Tom. They’re rarely cagey with one another. Their shared bluntness is one of the things that’s made their unique relationship work over the years. And how else could it work if they weren’t brutally honest with one another? There’s no space to play games with each other when your relationship is based on a mutual need to keep your true identity a secret.
“I know that look. Spit it out, love,” Tom says, sitting down on the stool across from her.
Evelyn softens, takes a long sip of her drink. “Alice came to me with a proposal today.”
“Mmm, bad timing. You’re already married.”
“Ha, ha, yes, I know. But seriously, she was asking me to join her at a meeting of an underground abortion network. It’s called Jane.”
“Jane?” Tom asks.
“Jane.” Evelyn takes another large swig of wine.
“Huh. What are they doing that you aren’t?”
“I’m not sure, really. Sticking their necks out unnecessarily. That’s what I told Alice, anyway. Sounds like a whisper network of sorts, but I don’t have much detail.”
“Where’s the harm in going to get that detail?”
“Mm?”
“Go to the meeting. There’s nothing to lose, right?”
Evelyn considers for a moment, then shakes her head. “No. Not tonight, anyway. I need time to think.” She pauses, then taps her finger on the side of her glass. “Can a girl get a top-up?”
Tom unfolds his long limbs and retrieves the bottle from the counter beside the stove, sets it down beside Evelyn before turning his attention back to meal preparation. Evelyn pours a little too much into her glass, then leans forward, settling her elbows onto the island.
“Alice is adamant that we can be doing more than we already are, but”—Evelyn shakes her head—“there’s a lot to lose if we’re found out.”
Tom is quiet for a while, though Evelyn can tell he’s thinking it over. “You remember the Parliament Hill protest?” he asks.
“Of course.”
“Do you remember the conversation we had the night before you left?”
She can see where he’s going with this. In medical school, his grades were always a couple of percentage points higher than hers. It was an ongoing joke at the time, but she’s always felt like Tom benefits from a slight edge. He’s often just one step ahead of her. It’s a trait that makes him such an attentive husband, though. He anticipates her needs before she’s fully aware of them herself.
“You thought I was worrying too much,” he says. “And that you’d be a hypocrite for not going to the protest. You basically told me that if you’re doing this, you’re doing this, right?”
Evelyn holds his intense gaze with her own.
“Well,” Tom says, “it would seem that other women are doing it, too. Maybe the need is coming out of the shadows a bit, and that’s a good thing for everyone. It’s illegal, full stop, so there will always be a risk, I grant you. But if more women are standing up to the illegality, fighting against it… why not join them? Maybe there is safety in numbers, in a way. You told me they couldn’t arrest you all at the Hill protest. Not enough handcuffs, right?”
Evelyn takes another long draft from her glass, eyeing her irritatingly sensible husband. She nods again. “Not enough handcuffs.”
Evelyn and Alice wait for their after-hours appointment to arrive on a damp Tuesday evening. They got takeout from the Chinese food place two blocks away and sat on the floor of the waiting room, eating off the tiny coffee table.
“So,” Alice begins, popping a chunk of broccoli into her mouth with the short wooden chopsticks. “Have you given any more consideration to the Janes?” She hasn’t mentioned it at all since their first conversation a few weeks ago.
Evelyn keeps her eyes on her noodles. “A little bit, yes.”
“And?”
“I spoke with Tom about it. But I’m still not sure.”
Alice sighs. “Okay.”
They sit in a sticky silence for another five minutes, each eating faster than they normally would. When they’ve finished, Evelyn stacks the take-out containers and walks them over to the reception desk garbage.
“Our patient’ll be here in ten. Let’s get prepped,” she says.
Alice straightens, stretches her arms over her head. “What’s her name?”
“Celeste.”
Half an hour later, Celeste is on the surgery table with her socked feet in the stirrups. She’s the youngest patient they’ve ever had. Only sixteen.
“How are you doing, there, Celeste?” Evelyn asks, fixing her surgical mask into place and pulling on her gloves. “Do you understand the procedure as Alice has explained it to you? You understand what we’re about to do?”
Celeste nods, and the tears start to fall, as they often do right before Evelyn begins her work. Alice rushes over with some tissues and encourages Celeste to blow her nose.
“Sorry,” Celeste says.
Evelyn can’t count the number of times a patient has unnecessarily apologized to her in this room. “That’s okay. Do you need a minute?”
“No, I’m okay. To be honest, I’m just grateful. I had a friend—” She swallows with difficulty. “I had a friend who died last year because she got pregnant. She comes from a really religious family and she panicked and thought she could get rid of it by drinking… drinking bleach. I thought I was really careful about not getting pregnant. And then when it happened, I just thought, Oh my God, I’m going to die now.”
Alice’s wide eyes meet Evelyn’s over the tops of their masks. The room is silent. A car passes by on the wet road outside the window.
Celeste takes a shaky breath. “I just figured, if I didn’t want to be pregnant anymore, that I’d have to do one of those things you hear about, you know, like using a knitting needle. Or throwing myself down the fucking stairs. Sorry. My mom says I swear too much. But yeah, I called my doctor to just ask if there was anything I could do, and she wouldn’t talk about it, but she gave me your number.”
Evelyn’s brow furrows. This isn’t the first time they’ve gotten a referral from another physician’s office. She’s glad, in a way, that they know what she does and have the decency to refer their patients to her, but she resents the fact that they aren’t willing to step the hell up themselves.
“Anyway, I really thought I was probably going to die,” Celeste says again, her watery eyes reflecting the bright lights of the overhead halogens. “So, thank you. I just…” Her lip trembles. “I just wish I had known about you before Linda got pregnant. I can’t—”
Alice steps forward with a cool cloth, brushes Celeste’s hair back off her forehead.
At the end of the table, Evelyn is speechless. She tries to clear her head of the uncomfortable truths that she’s beginning to fear may end up dictating her career.
“Okay, Celeste,” she says gently to her patient. “Take some deep breaths and hold Alice’s hand. This will all be over soon.”
“A church?” Evelyn asks Alice, stopping short on the sidewalk outside the ornate building. “Seems a bit… unlikely.”
Immediately after they put Celeste in a cab on Tuesday night, Evelyn asked Alice to find out about the next meeting of the Janes. Alice engaged her grapevine and found out there was a meeting on Friday evening. They took the streetcar over together after veggie sandwiches and milkshakes at Fran’s Diner.
Alice inspects the numbers on the red-brick exterior. “It’s the right address. Besides, it’s a United church. Can’t be that bad, right? Let’s go in and see.”
Evelyn leads the way up the path, and they enter, letting the heavy wooden door close with a soft thud against the noise of the bustling street.
“Are you here for the Knitting Club meeting?”
Both Evelyn and Alice jump at the woman’s voice, which echoes up into the cavernous ceiling. The speaker is standing in shadow to the left of the entryway. She’s in her late twenties, Evelyn would guess, with large glasses and pin-straight dark brown hair that falls well past her shoulders.
“Um,” Alice falters, but Evelyn catches on.
“We’re here to see Jane,” she says, her throat sticking.
“I don’t think she’s seen you before.”
Evelyn and Alice exchange a look.
“My name’s Alice and this is Evelyn,” Alice begins, nodding at her boss. “We heard about you through my sister, who heard through a friend, et cetera. I followed up to get the information about when and where you’d be meeting.”
“Okay. But you’re not actually looking for Jane, though, are you?” the woman asks, frowning. “As in tonight? ’Cause that’s not—”
“Oh, oh no,” Alice interrupts. “I’m a nurse and Evelyn’s a doctor and we’re interested in—” Evelyn clears her throat loudly. “Possibly interested in helping out with, you know, the cause,” Alice finishes, her cheeks flushing.
The woman’s eyes pop like champagne corks and she extends a hand to Evelyn, who offers her own. The woman nearly crushes it with enthusiasm before grasping Alice’s in turn. “That’s excellent, excellent news, thank you both so much for coming. My name’s Jeanette. We’re in desperate need of willing doctors, that’s the focus of the meeting tonight. Down the stairs to the right over there,” she says with an enormous smile. “We’ll be starting in a couple of minutes.”
“Thank you,” Evelyn and Alice say in unison, and head off in the direction of the staircase, which takes them down into the basement of the building. There’s a single door with a paper sign that reads KNITTING CLUB MEETING scribbled in black marker. Alice raises an eyebrow at Evelyn and pulls the handle.
They emerge into a large community room. Orange plastic chairs are set up lecture-style facing a wooden pulpit with a brass cross inlaid onto the front of it. The air smells like a library, and it’s full of the excited chatter of at least a dozen women. Evelyn gestures to a line of four empty seats at the back, and as they settle in, she scans the room with a keen eye. Her shoulders relax with relief that there’s no one here she recognizes.
A few minutes later, a young woman who looks like she can’t be more than twenty-five years old sidles up to the pulpit and grasps the sides of it in both hands. She leans forward, smiling at the assembly. Silence falls almost instantly, and Evelyn can feel an electricity in the room.
“Welcome everyone,” the woman says with a voice like chocolate. “Thank you for coming to tonight’s Knitting Club meeting.” An appreciative chuckle from the crowd. “My name is Holly. I see we have a few new faces, so I’d like to ask our newcomers to hang back after the meeting so we can get to know each other a bit, and I can make sure you’re not a spy.”
She smiles, but a few of the women glance back at them with suspicion. Evelyn shifts in her seat.
“So, tonight’s meeting is a bit of a check-in for the movement and the organization,” Holly continues in a crisp tone, looking down at a sheet of paper in front of her. “I’m proud to say that since this movement began, we’ve been able to connect almost a thousand women with a few doctors who are willing to provide safe, effective abortions.”
Applause erupts from the assembled women. One of them lets fly a whoop! of support.
“It’s great, it really is, it’s amazing,” Holly says. “We’ve been able to save a lot of lives through the Jane Network and we couldn’t have done that without all the time, energy, and sacrifice you’ve put into making it happen. So, thank you. But there are still a lot of women waiting. We’ve done our best to not turn anyone away. That was always one of our commitments, our goals. But one or two have fallen through the cracks. They came to us almost too late, needing a procedure immediately, and we didn’t have a doctor available to perform it. And those cases weigh heavily on our collective conscience.”
Evelyn catches herself holding her breath. The crowd is hushed. Holly may be young, but she certainly knows how to command a room.
“But we have a good news story here with us today,” she goes on, smiling at a woman in the front row. “I’d like to hand the floor to Lillian, our guest speaker, who is going to share her experience with us. A little support for her, please!”
Holly initiates a round of applause and steps back from the pulpit as Lillian rises from her seat. Holly gives her a warm hug, then Lillian faces the Janes. She coughs into her fist, which is trembling slightly. She’s a short girl with sandy blond hair and shoulders that turn inward, protective.
“Hi, there,” she says.
A chorus of warm female voices call, “Hi, Lillian!”
“I, um, I don’t have a whole lot to say, but I just wanted to come say thank you to every one of you who had a hand in helping me, you know, get an abortion.” Her voice drops off on the last word. “I heard about Jane through a friend of a friend, like pretty much everyone does, I guess. I was really scared at first. I…” She falters, casts her eyes down. “I was really desperate. I—I got raped by my stepdad.” Her voice goes up at the end, like it’s a question she’s still trying to answer. “After a lot of other abuse. For a long time. And obviously I couldn’t…”
The unspoken words press down on the shoulders of every woman at the meeting. They all feel the magnitude of Lillian’s experience, the crushing weight of it.
“It’s a special kind of evil mother that allows that shit to happen under her own roof,” Evelyn says bitterly.
Alice grasps Evelyn’s cold hand in her own, squeezes it tight. “I know,” she whispers.
“I didn’t want to have a baby,” Lillian continues. “I couldn’t tell my mom. I’m in school. I want to be a teacher, so I would have had to drop out, and I didn’t want to do that. I told my doctor, and he said he didn’t think my situation would be enough for the abortion committee to approve. Can you believe that?” Lillian shakes her head in disbelief amid dark mutterings from the crowd. “He said even though it was rape, it might not be approved. He had another patient who was in the same situation, and they denied her an abortion because they didn’t believe her. They thought she was just covering for a mistake.” She pauses. “Anyway, all I mean to say is that access is really hard. I ended up just telling my doctor I had a miscarriage, but I don’t think he believed me. There’s a lot of girls like me who just have no other option, and getting help from you all has literally saved my life. I’m not sure I would have kept going otherwise. So, thank you.”
She scurries back to her seat in the front row as applause erupts. Alice sniffs while Evelyn’s finger gravitates, as it often does, toward the scar at her wrist.
She remembers with painful accuracy what it feels like to be pregnant and wish you weren’t. To be in denial, then weeks later find yourself vomiting up your morning toast while the tears run down your face into the toilet. To feel the slight swell of your belly and the pain in your breasts and know that you won’t be able to hide it much longer. To dream of ending it, any way at all. An accidental trip down a flight of stairs, or drinking just enough bleach to not quite kill yourself. Opening up your wrists in a bathtub.
Steam fogging up the bathroom mirror.
The feeling of falling, falling, the scent of roses on the warm air.
Her brother’s voice calling her name.
Evelyn wrenches her mind out of that dark corner of her past, back into the bright lights of the church basement. She rolls her shoulders back, tries to focus.
Holly returns to the pulpit, her eyes shining with admiration and something deeper, a fiery determination that seems to glow. “Thank you, Lillian,” she says. “Thank you for your bravery in sharing your experience with us. It was our honor to help you exercise your right to determine what happens to your own body.”
Evelyn’s heart is racing as though she just ran up several flights of stairs. Holly reminds Evelyn a bit of Paula, her protest friend from the Abortion Caravan. She isn’t as crass, but there’s a fierceness to her entire presence that takes Evelyn back to those days in Ottawa. The steely yet pained expressions on her comrades’ faces when they delivered the coffin to 24 Sussex Drive with the fire of the setting sun in their eyes. Paula screaming her outrage up into the sky because it was too big to be contained in her body. How the air in the House of Commons gallery was charged with the protesters’ daring and resolve.
Evelyn feels that same energy hovering over the heads of the women gathered in this musty church basement tonight. The fight is still very much alive; it’s simply changed its form.
“And that leads me into our big focus tonight,” Holly says, shifting her weight. She’s all business now. “Access. Adequate, on-demand access. As word has caught on about Jane, the demand has outstripped our resources. Lillian just demonstrated to us what we’ve known for a while now: that the abortion law is too restrictive. Women are coming to us instead of even trying to go the legal route because the powers that be want us subjugated. The truth is we desperately need more doctors. We need to be able to provide safe abortions to every single woman who calls Jane. It’s our duty as resourceful, privileged women.
“So, if you have any friends who are sympathetic to the movement and have some time to spare—and are sensible enough to exercise discretion—please approach them. And if you know a doctor who might be willing to join our network, please, please, please”—she leans forward on the pulpit like a preacher—“ask them to reach out to us. It’s a risk, yes, but these women need help.”
“We can help.” Evelyn is on her feet in the back row.
“Yes!” Alice gasps.
Every single face turns in their direction. It’s unnerving, but Evelyn plows on. “My name is Evelyn Taylor. I’m a family physician and my nurse Alice and I”—she motions to Alice to stand—“have been performing abortions for the past several months at my practice, after-hours. I trained under Dr. Morgentaler in Montreal.”
Suddenly Evelyn feels the intensity of all those eyes, the heat rising in her face. Alice gives Evelyn’s hand another squeeze, but Evelyn keeps her eyes on Holly’s. “We can help,” she repeats.
A grin spreads across Holly’s face. Everything in the room is lit up. She nods slowly. “All right, then, Dr. Taylor, Alice. Welcome to the Jane Network.”