The Laments Read Free

man in a spotless white coat, “surely you don’t expect white mothers to sling
their
babies over their backs like natives? It’s hardly civilized . . .”
    “Civilized?” snapped the doctor. “A word used to justify everything from bottle-feeding to the atom bomb!”
    “You don’t approve of bottle-feeding?” whispered another scandalized student.
    “In Africa,” replied the doctor, “the lack of sterile water makes bottle-feeding a baby
killer
. If bottles, nipples, and formula had arrived two thousand years ago, we’d all be dead of dysentery. No human race left!”
    The ruddy philosopher slid to a halt—his rubber soles scuffing the shiny white linoleum—whereupon he dismissed the students and swept into Julia Lament’s room.
    “ NO NAME YET? ” he asked as he squeezed the Lament baby’s toes.
    “Sorry.” Julia smiled.
    “My dear Julia, I’ve a favor to ask,” said the doctor, who sensed in her failure to name her baby a healthy resistance to convention that suited his newest objective.
    “Yes?” she said, both flattered and made anxious by his informality.
    “It’s an unusual one, but quite serious,” he added, frowning to make his point.
    “Tell me.”
    “I have a patient who delivered a two-and-a-half-pound premature infant last night. The child is in an incubator. I wondered if you might be willing to let her hold little . . . little . . .
Lament
here, so that she gets used to touching a baby.”
    “Touching?” repeated Julia with reluctance.
    “The problem is rejection,” explained the doctor, “a sense of distance, a feeling that the baby is not really hers.”
    “Just touch him?” she said with skepticism.
    “Actually,” said the doctor with a fixed smile, “I meant nurse him, too.”
    “Nurse
my
baby?”
    “Imagine, Julia,” said the doctor, holding an imaginary bundle before her, “you have carried your baby for so many months, and then, for thirty days, you can’t touch him. He’s in an incubator, fighting for his life. Consider the sense of loss. Consider, perhaps, feeling that you don’t
have
a baby anymore. Consider sitting in a ward like this with lots of other women holding their newborns while you sit alone. Imagine your breasts full of milk with no baby to take them. You may think my request unorthodox, but I assure you it’s quite a common practice.”
    “In Europe, you mean?”
    “No,” said Dr. Underberg. “Among African women.”
    “African women?” she replied uncertainly.
    Prepared for the inevitable reaction, the doctor continued, “Not that thousands of years of experience producing happy and healthy infants should make a difference to you”—he sighed—“but this small act of generosity could help a mother who, I fear, is in danger of losing that precious bond with her child.”
    “Yes,” replied Julia cautiously. “What a shame that would be.”
    “I thought I saw the rebel in you, Julia,” said Dr. Underberg, slapping his knees. “The first day we met, I knew you were different. You’ll show the establishment a little gumption!”
    As the doctor sailed down the hall, Julia’s resolve hung in the balance. It had been five years since Mrs. Urquhart’s assault on Beatrice. Was Julia still a rebel? She looked down at her darling boy. He let out a peep, and his eyes opened briefly. Then, perhaps it was only in her imagination, but he seemed to tip his head with a small, rallying nod.
    A HEAVYSET WOMAN lay in a nearby maternity room with her eyes squeezed shut. There was no baby beside her. She was a mother yet not a mother.
    “Mary?” said a voice.
    It was her imagination calling. Nobody cared about her. Not the nurses. Not the doctors. Not Walter. Not even God.
    “Mary, open your eyes.”
    I will not.
    Perhaps she could just shut out the world this way. Perhaps if she didn’t look, listen, or speak she could vanish of her own accord.
    “I have someone for you to meet.”
    She relaxed her eyes enough to see Dr. Underberg place