Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [183]
“Now, massage the uterus,” Haskell says to Olympia.
Olympia places her hand upon the lower portion of the girl’s abdomen and presses upon the uterus. The infant, slippery and purple, emerges into the world. Haskell grasps the child firmly with both hands and immediately attends to it, suctioning the mucus from the mouth. Olympia hears the infant, a boy, make his first astonished cry. On the bed, the girl weeps, a particular kind of weeping Olympia has seen often but never witnessed outside the childbed, a combination of relief from pain and joy and exhaustion and something else — fear about the days and nights to come. In the doorway, the father is white-faced.
While Haskell attends to the child, Olympia massages the girl’s uterus into a hard ball to prevent flooding and tries to provoke a contraction forceful enough to expel the placenta. After Haskell has cut the cord, Olympia gently pulls on it, and the afterbirth comes away. “Lydia, stop,” Olympia says, twisting the afterbirth round and round upon itself and withdrawing it. She sets it aside to be examined later. She stands.
“Let me,” she says, lifting the infant out of Haskell’s arms. She receives the child into the flannel, and it seems, as it always does, a most elemental gesture, to take a child from a man.
• • •
Olympia tucks the robe around her legs and ties the scarf over her hat and under her chin. The ride is jarring from the ruts as they enter the village and turn onto the main road out of town.
“I shall go back tomorrow,” Olympia says.
“The girl has no one?”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“I did not like the look of the father.”
“Nor I. I shall have to call Reverend Milton about the family. John, I think she may need to be taken in.”
“Is there room?”
“Yes, just. Eunice will be going to Portsmouth tomorrow.”
“As tutor to the Johnsons?”
“Yes.”
“And the infant?”
“My dear, the ‘infant’ is a year and a half.”
“Is she? Has it been that long since Eunice came?”
They enter the city limits of Ely Falls. Since the mills have begun to close, the city is slightly less bustling than it used to be. If Ely Falls goes the way of Lowell and Manchester, it will not be long before they will pass empty boardinghouses and collapsed mill buildings. They head east onto the Ely road.
“How was the clinic?” Olympia asks.
“Much the same. Though I did see a dreadful case of accidental poisoning by oxalic acid. The woman had mistaken it for Epsom salts and given it to her husband. The man died within twenty minutes of reaching the clinic. It was terrifying to watch his struggle, Olympia. The pain in his esophagus and stomach must have been beyond imagining. I tried magnesia and chalk, but he was too far gone for that.”
“Are you sure it was an accident?” Olympia asks.
Haskell turns briefly in his wife’s direction. “My dear, you do have a devious mind,” he says, reaching for her leg. “Well, the police are bound to investigate any accidental death. Also, a man came by trying to sell me an X-ray machine.”
“And will you buy it?”
“Yes, I think I might. I am rather convinced by the research.”
He massages her thigh through her skirt. “And Tucker came round today,” he adds.
“Did he?” Olympia asks.
“He needed to discuss some matters having to do with fundraising. He said he was getting married.”
“To whom?”
“A woman named Alys Keep.”
“The poetess?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“How extraordinary.”
“He asked after you.”
“Did he?”
“You know, I think he has a special fondness for you. There is something in the way he inquires about you that is always a little less than casual.”
Haskell withdraws his hand to shift the gears, and as he does so, she thinks about meeting Tucker and about her custody suit and about the terrible months afterward. The nights she roamed the house, crying for the boy. Haskell would hear her and come find her and then ease her back into bed. It was Haskell who finally, one day when she was away, dismantled the room, taking the children’s furniture back to the attic.
He pulls suddenly to the side of the road and makes