Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [96]
“You have? When was that?”
“When I was with John Haskell,” Olympia says, startling herself with the name spoken out loud. She has never talked of her time with Haskell with anyone, not even Lisette. “I went with him when he attended a birth. It was in a boardinghouse in Ely Falls.”
“You went into the room?”
“I saw it all. The birth was breech and the woman, a poor Franco with three other children, was nearly deranged with the pain. Dr. Haskell gave her laudanum, I think, and she quieted some. But I remember him struggling to turn the baby. He had his hands — ”
Olympia cannot go on, however, for she experiences then the first pain of her own. Rigid with surprise, she holds her breath until it is finished. When it has subsided, she lets out a long sigh.
Lisette stands above her. “You must not hold your breath,” she says. “You must breathe each time you get the pain.”
Olympia nods, shaken by the ferocity of the contraction. “Is this how it will be?” she asks.
“Listen to me,” Lisette says, drawing up a chair close to her bed. She takes Olympia’s hand in her own. “You are used to behaving in a certain way. You are very proper. You hardly ever get upset, and when you do, you keep it to yourself. But now is not the time to be proper. It is bad for the baby and for you. Do not worry about screaming with the pain. Do not worry about all the embarrassing things your body is going to do, because it is going to do plenty. Do you want me to fetch your mother?”
“No,” Olympia says. “There is no need.”
The pains come on hard then and are dreadful. Olympia is appalled, even during the first hour, which she thinks surely must be the last, since any increase of pain seems unendurable.
After daybreak, Olympia’s mother, summoned by Lisette, enters the room. She has on a blue silk dressing gown tied at the waist. Her hair is rolled back from her head with rags. “Fetch Dr. Branch,” she says at once to Lisette. Olympia’s mother wets a cloth in a basin, walks to the bed, and lays the wrung and folded towel upon her daughter’s forehead. Her face is heavily creamed and glistens in the electric-lamp light. “And I shall need hard sweets for Olympia to suck on,” her mother adds. “There are some in my room in a silver jar on the dresser.”
Olympia is mildly surprised at how easily her mother assumes the mantle of command. She holds the cloth against Olympia’s brow, even as Olympia clenches her teeth and pulls the bedclothes into knots. Lisette returns with word that the doctor is out on his rounds and will be by as soon as he can be found. When Olympia has the pains, her mother leans over the bed and pins her arms back against the bedclothes, and oddly, this seems to help. In between the pains, her mother unwinds the rags from her hair and drinks a cup of tea that Lisette has brought, and once even gets up and inspects the quilted yellow box with its tiny treasures. Thus her mother abandons her normal air of elegance and diffidence and is as involved with the mechanics of the birth as Lisette is. She shows herself to have courage and kindness and common sense, qualities that Olympia has not noticed in her in abundance before. Once Olympia emerges from a short sleep and hears her mother chatting pleasantly, even laughing, with Lisette. Despite the pain, Olympia finds their ease together reassuring. If they are not terrified, then she should not be.
The doctor comes shortly after noon, and Olympia can smell liquor on his breath. She wonders where he has been, if he has been sharing a drink with her father in his study before he came to her, though that seems unlikely so early in the day. Olympia is barely coherent, saving all her strength to withstand the hideous and constantly recurring pain. She thinks it is knowing that the pain will come again and again that exhausts her, knowing that she cannot stop it. She begs for laudanum, and Dr. Branch gives her three spoonfuls of a brownish liquid that causes her to drift in and out of sleep, only to be shocked each time she wakes to another pain and sees her mother and Lisette