“Do you still have your notebook?”
“It’s in the vault, Stephen. Maybe to future generations I’ll be famous as Rachel’s Boswell.”
“Her what?”
I laugh. “He was a famous biographer. We’ll get to Boswell and Dr. Johnson later.”
He pauses, then asks, “Would you mind telling me about your baby?”
The question is a natural one, and having gone this far with my story, I can’t stop now. Yet I don’t want to live through the answer to this question again. I’ve always spoken freely to these people about Rachel, but I’ve never talked about the baby. I’m not sure why. Perhaps if I had, Jerry wouldn’t feel so betrayed now.
I look at Stephen, whose smooth, young brow is lined with concern, and I tell him, “The child came prematurely, a month short of term.”
He pulls in a deep breath, his eyes focused inward on a point in memory. “Like Rebecca. But she was so sick before her baby came. Were you sick?”
“No. I don’t know what happened, Stephen. I only know that one afternoon I started feeling—well, just crampy and uncomfortable, but I didn’t think much about it, not till the contractions started. I was milking the goats, and the pain doubled me over. But it didn’t last long, and I finished the milking and carried the pails to the house. That was when the next contraction hit.”
“What did you do?”
I shake my head at that, because I can remember my state of mind, remember I didn’t know what to do. I’d read the books available at Amarna on first aid and physiology, but I still had a rather vague idea of what was supposed to happen in childbirth.
“Well, I wandered around the house talking to myself like a madwoman. I kept hoping it was a false labor. But finally…” And I remember that moment of fatalistic calm. “I knew this was the real thing, and it was coming too soon. That frightened me, but I had no choice in the matter, so I prepared for the birth. I bathed myself, built a fire in my room and laid in plenty of wood, put a kettle of water on the stove, and brought in a basin to wash the baby in and a sharp knife to cut the umbilical. I covered the bed and the floor at the foot of the bed with clean sheets, and I brought in enough candles to light me through the night. All this between contractions, of course. And I filled a syringe with morphine and put it on the table by the bed.”
His breath catches at the word morphine, but he says nothing, and I go on. “Actually it was an easy labor and only lasted about eight hours. Toward the end I squatted on the floor as women have since—well, probably since before we were homo sapiens. All through my labor, I kept telling myself a child bom only a month prematurely could live. I knew it would be touch and go, but…”
I remember with mordant clarity the culmination of labor, remember squatting naked in that warm room in candlelight, remember the overwhelming urge to bear down, to force the baby into the world, whatever the cost in pain, remember the exultant emotional surge that accompanied it. And finally the baby’s head appeared, then its body came out into my hands….
It was perfect, my child, gauzed with a creamy coating, still covered with fine, silky hair. It would have lost that in the last month. Incomplete, yet still perfect. And so small. It couldn’t have weighed more than four pounds, and it filled my two hands easily. The umbilical cord was twisted like a slick rope around its right arm, and the tiny hand seemed to grasp it. The tiny, perfect, lifeless hand.
Poor little creature, what agonies did you endure? And your mother was oblivious, never guessing your death throes, helpless to offer succor even if she had known you were dying….
“It never occurred to me, Stephen, even at the beginning of my labor, that the child… was already dead.”
His eyes close, but he isn’t surprised. Unlike Jerry, he had no reason to believe my child had lived.
But at the time of its birth I had no reason to believe it had died.
And I remember holding that mote of failed life and crying out with the clawing agony of this new grief, remember my cries echoing on nothing. That was what was left to me. Nothing. I had at that moment tested the depths of desolation, and I would never sink deeper.
Stephen’s voice reaches through to me. “Oh, Mary, I’m so sorry.”
My eyes are hot with tears, and it takes me a moment to realize I’ve been remembering a grief thirty years old. “Thank you, Stephen.”
“The baby—was it a boy or a girl?”
Why is that always the first question asked about a newborn child? But what else can one ask? What is more essential to its identity at that point—except, is it alive or dead?
“It was a boy.”
“Oh.” That comes out on a sigh, as if the fact that the child was male made its death even more of a loss. But Stephen is the product of a patriarchal society, although his attitudes, shaped by the necessities of his isolated life, are less rigid than those of his predecessors. I’ve often wondered what human history might have been if men had never discovered the connection between copulation and conception.
For a long time Stephen is silent, studying me, and at length he says, “I don’t know how you kept going after that.”
I look seaward, remember the second pyre I built, a smaller one for the child I never named. “I’m not sure how I did, either, Stephen, and a great deal of the next year is lost to me. But ultimately… I suppose I felt a duty to go on living. For one thing, there were the animals to consider. Mostly, there were the books. I had to finish what Rachel had begun. And time does heal grief. Finally. At least, it covers the raw wound with scar tissue. So, I went on living, with all the work and disappointment and even occasional joy that entails. And I worked on the books. But I was in no hurry about that, and I read most of them before I sealed them. In fact, it took nearly twelve years to finish the job. I remember the day when I put the last books in the vault and snapped the padlock shut. I had such mixed feelings at that moment. There was an emptiness, as if I’d used up all the purpose in my life. Then there was the conviction that Rachel and I had created nothing more than a crypt, that we’d buried the books like so many embalmed corpses, and they’d never be discovered and resurrected. But at the same time I felt… a link with the future and the past, as if I held the broken ends of a singing cord, one in each hand.” Stephen is rapt, and what I see in his eyes gives me hope. He’s beginning to understand.
Then I shrug. “Other than that, I simply lived, and I was lucky— I stayed healthy, except for occasional colds and a few teeth I had to extract myself. And, of course, the menopause. The design of the reproductive system in the human female leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and saw how old I was getting, and I began to have a little arthritis and other symptoms of the decline of various systems. The winters were the hardest times—the nights are so long at this latitude—but I think I held on to my sanity, and I accomplished what I had to do.”
He looks at me with amazement, perhaps even admiration. “Did you ever wonder if anybody might come here someday?”
“I fantasized about that occasionally. After all, there are other survivors in our corner of the world. Luke found some, and Jerry told me a family came to the Ark from California.”