The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth
by
Carole Maso
The ROOM LIT by ROSES
FOR A LONG TIME I HAD wanted a child, but the desire, attenuated, had passed, and other feelings had taken its place. I had become so entranced by the utterly hypnotic path I found myself on, so bleary, so consumed by my work, that I had lost track of whatever else I may have once wanted. I had wandered away into a kind of otherworldly bliss, a joy like no other, and the child further and further off on some remote horizon had become a shadow — like almost everything else in my world. From those weird, windy, solitary heights from which I worked now I watched the child wave, wave, and then finally vanish. Disappeared on a beautiful, curving planet — utterly out of reach. A distant, infinitesimal music.
The Bay of Angels, a book I had just begun composing after ten years of note-taking, was to be the project for the rest of my life; I was quite certain of it — and the prospect of a life of such possibility and pleasure and challenge was more than I had ever dared ask or hope for. Over the years it had slowly grown in me — each book I had written was preparation for it. Time was passing and the urgency, as Stein said, “to write something down someday in my own handwriting” was pressing. The chance to get closer to the eternity in myself. I was ready at last. It was clear to me that in order to even attempt such an endeavor more sacrifices would have to be made. But they were well worth it — had always been worth it. The accompanying melancholy was just part of the bargain, the demands such work makes, the tolls it takes, simply part of the deal. I thought of Beckett’s “sadness after song.” Sadness because it was so imperfect and inadequate and fleeting, because it demanded absolutely everything. I watched the child recede.
With every major decision there is regret, for the very act involves choosing one thing over another. I have always experienced a certain sorrow when any project I am working on begins to take a shape and becomes a stable, definitive text — because it excludes the thousand books it might have been. No matter how spacious, no matter how suggestive or fluid, I cannot help but feel the death of possibility all over again — the books that now would never be. I have never felt completely reconciled to that fact. This and not that.
The sadness after song. I would not mind. If song it was I got to sing.
How then to account for the wave of clarity that passed through me, propelling me into an utterly charmed and charged night to retrieve that little waving figure who was mine? The child I had spent years writing about in my Bay of Angels notebooks. When I look back I see that she is there in one way or another in many, many guises. My writing life, as always, so much further ahead of my conscious, rational mind. How had I been so blind? There she was at the periphery of every page, waiting, begging at the edge of language, calling my name. But I did not, could not recognize her — until it was very nearly too late.
With the child revealed and the desire no longer disguised, the exact right moment with the exact right person came with strange speed — in an instant, in motion, and under a sky of enormous beauty and calm. A trillion spermatozoa and the serenity of the egg, and she is made. After one night. I was sure of it even then. Such was my improbable bravada — knowing full well the difficulty of conception after thirty-five, let alone after forty. And knowing also all that could go wrong even if by some miracle the child in a single night might materialize. Still there was not one moment of doubt or uncertainty. Doubt had passed. I was as lucid as I have ever been. I moved toward the moment embracing its strangeness, its odd gravity, filled with a mystic’s faith. And the man. I think now he must have known or sensed there was something extraordinary taking place between us — as we traveled in the night backward and forward toward the child. Did this mysterious l’étranger from a far-off land, who uncannily had also existed in my pages for many years, somehow see in me a brilliance, illuminated as I must have been by my longing? It is a fairy tale, a story of such unlikeliness and charm. We came together without will almost, caught in the motion, without choice — and this pull, unlike anything I had felt before, this strangeness, might have been called in another time destiny, fate. The child just outside us, asking for the mere chance to live. Mere, indeed. Did we dare turn away from her? Did we dare ignore her pleas? In that night of ever expanding circles, heavenly bodies. The stars aligned. A primal ancient motion — the violence of creation, and then rest.
I know from Latin that amniotic means lamb. An odd thing. How I have called this back I do not know, but I am certain of it the way people are certain of things in dreams.
Just months ago, Helen, my companion of the last twenty years — that is my whole life — had prayed over the relics of every saint in Tuscany and Umbria for a child. We had ended finally in Assisi, first at St. Francis’s Cathedral where I had wept in front of the Giottos and the Cimabues — that little piece of Paradise — and then where we had descended the dark stairs to the reliquary and witnessed at the crypt a bride and groom exchanging vows. Oh, the Italians know how to have a wedding, I remember thinking. Afterwards we made our way up the pilgrim’s road to the Cathedral of St. Clare, and it is the weird thing about Assisi — or maybe it is, after all, the weird thing about me — but despite the crowds, the town seemed completely hushed, a village of silence and birds. We were caught in some incredible stillness, mystery, abyss. I do not question such things too closely. It was what I noticed. The birds sucked up in some God vortex. And Helen, struck by this holy place, whispered ferociously over the relics of the saint to me: Pray for the baby. What extraordinary role did Helen play in allowing the child through to the other side? And serene, recumbent Saint Clare in that most humble and sacred of places…
We had prayed to every saint, martyr, and of course the Virgin for this baby and now — I was only a few days late — one could only hope. Helen rose at 6 A.M. and drove through fog to the CVS pharmacy for the home pregnancy test. What does CVS stand for? I wondered. CVS, just another fin-de-siècle beacon, without meaning. I tried not to take it as a sign for something. Would the test be positive, would the test be negative? I let the question flicker in my head, savoring the last few moments before absolute certainty. I believed I knew but I had been wrong before. Holding the wand in the early morning fog, I passed it through my urine — two stripes and the child is found.
For luck — and from now on everything will be done for luck, whether it is eating a Peking duck or wearing a certain blue scarf or playing Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Britten, Bartók — this day we go to the Poet’s Walk, a place I suppose it was imagined certain romantic pastorals might be composed. A blue mountain, a white gazebo. There is a child, is our ode.
In an instant my own childhood floods back. That daydreaming girl, swinging on her swing, long ago. The heart rising and falling. Again and again. Buoyancy of the afternoon. If you could make one wish what would it be? I’d ask myself. One and only one.
We meet my family at the Dutchess County Sheep Show. Everyone looks different observed through the lens of the miraculous. It is news that must be kept secret for the first three months, there is no question. Too many things could go wrong. To attach language to such catastrophe were it to happen would not be possible. To imagine having to casually engage in a dialogue of vanishing, to have to accept consolation. But I am far from cautious today. Wildly ecstatic, already in mourning, I pet the head of every sheep I see. Lamb, be with me. Everywhere I look there is beauty and fire this October afternoon, wonder and iridescence. It feels like a celebration. Placenta in Latin means cake.