It happened at St. Margaret’s Hospital for Women in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Huddled close by was St. Mary’s Infant Asylum, a home for unwed mothers run by the Sisters of Charity, who had none for us. The asylum was a shadowy fortress with dim, echoing corridors, slippery shiny floors, and endless bells ringing for prayers (forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation). There were no telephones, no television. But there was lots of time to think about our sins. We had to attend daily mass, though we could not take Communion until we’d confessed our trespasses and done our penance. Hidden from the teeming streets, we watched through the window as others went about the business of their lives. Hidden. Shame imprinting.

  I don’t remember everything. Memories of the subsequent births, many years later, of my other children, have overlaid those of the first. Or maybe, one therapist suggested, I have traumatic amnesia. Yet I can break off shards of the experience which I examine dumbly—glittering fragments that refuse to make a pattern, a meaning.

  During my stay at the infant asylum, there were frequent forays to the clinic across the street: panties off, legs apart. Young residents, maybe dead now, performing frequent, careful vaginal examinations: exposing, poking, prodding; taking notes, whispering among themselves. What were they looking for? What did they see? Learn? No nurses were ever in the room. Never any hellos or good-byes. We were bodies on a table. We had no names.

  Yes, the labor was long and hard. Two nights before it started, on New Year’s Eve, a bunch of us, anonymous girls with big bellies, gathered in a common room after the nuns had gone to bed. We turned a radio up loud, sang along to Beatles songs, laughed our heads off as we did jumping jacks, do-si-does, and sit-ups, trying to break our water, bring on labor. Lucky me, I succeeded.

  In a small room by myself, darkness and terror closing in. They strapped me to a metal bed so I could not get away or hurt myself trying to escape the thundering pain (that I’ve kept inside me ever since). Once a nurse came in and shoved a wet face cloth, wrung into a hard cylinder, into my mouth. “You’re making too much noise,” she said. “Bite down when the pain is bad.”

  No epidurals, no other analgesics. We were meant to suffer, the cost of our redemption.

  At last the crowning, a quick skid into the operating room. Dizzy, mindless with pain, hardly understanding what was going on. Another young resident I’d never seen before. Did I want him to adjust a mirror overhead so that I could watch the birth? he asked. A nurse whispered something to him; he turned the mirror away and did not speak to me again.

  A quick episiotomy and at last the birth, a big screaming baby boy. I heard him before I saw him, red and slimy, flailing into the world. I reached for him. The nuns or maybe the nurses, or maybe the nuns were nurses, held me back. I wanted more than anything to hold onto that baby boy, to keep him close, this baby I’d been carrying inside, so heavily and sorrowfully and lovingly, all that time. Yes, I loved that baby, would forever, the baby with whom I’d been cast into exile. I wanted to get my hands on him. My hands needed to touch him; my heart too. My mouth. I had to nuzzle him and kiss him. If I could only hold him and keep him close, then everything in my world would be OK. Possible.

  Instead they swaddled him and carried him away. I caught a glimpse just before he disappeared, a big ferocious boy who’d belong to someone else. No, no, no, they kept telling me as they worked me over, and I fought them, bloodied and exhausted. They injected my breasts with hormones to dry up my milk. Ergotrate for my uterus, something else to make me sleep.  When I woke up he was gone for good. I was left there, empty and anguished, to think about my life.

  Nineteen sixty-seven had just begun; the age of assassination was underway. The world was crazing, cracking up. I was two months into my nineteenth year, the second oldest of eight children in a Scots-Irish Catholic family.

  My parents came to take me home. They did not want to see or touch my baby: if they never saw him, he might not exist, their first grandchild. I was so very fortunate, they told me.  Should be grateful for what they’d done, were doing for me, concealing from the world my shame, allowing me to come back home.

  In silence we drove back to the house on Pleasant Street in Plainville, Massachusetts. There I hid myself away; hid every real important thing about myself. I was afraid to cry. I could not show any feeling. Soon enough I did not have any. They, we, never spoke of this again, not one word, not even, decades later, during their dying days.

My mother bought me a girdle, a super strong one I had trouble getting into and out of. “Wear it all the time,” she said. “That way nobody will know.”

I was nobody. I knew.
 

 

PERCEPTIONS: Stories

by Jane Manaster

    Stories that become our memories are even better when we share them. We recall the details, the conversations, the ups-and-downs and colorful backdrops. In our minds, we hear the tone of voice, see the smiles and the raised eyebrows. Mostly, Perceptions are fictional tales with an element of real-life people, places, and events woven in. Turn the pages from Jewish rites of passage to a hiatus in Portugal, men challenged as they transition to single life in middle age, then recognize seasonal celebrations with settings on both sides of the 'Pond.' Jane Manaster's Perceptions invites you to share all these and more from a very personal view. Meet Jane's friends and enjoy reading how she has blended the stories together in her wonderful life. Available from Amazon or ask for it at your local independent bookstore.

Find this and more in ArtsMart