Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [38]
Neither John nor I had ever been in a law office prior to law school. We went to our first jobs—each clerking for federal judges—with only one summer’s legal experience each behind us. And during our judicial clerkships we applied for permanent jobs by writing letters to law firms across the country, many in places we’d never seen. It was not a focused evaluation of what was right for either of us. We were simply doing what the map to success suggested: law school, law review, federal clerkship, corporate law firm. None of it was bad for us. In fact, we learned a lot. Among the things we learned, though, was that this wasn’t what we wanted. We ended up in Nashville, practicing law with people we enjoyed immensely. We had a beautiful home, two cocker spaniels, and a station wagon. A picture-postcard life, really. We had good friends, friends as close to us as family in George Masterson and Sol Miller, young lawyers who, like us, had been transplanted to Tennessee.
We were not all that young, but it seems now, from this vantage point, that we must have been. Working at our first real jobs, painting the rooms of our first house. George was our best friend, a best friend to both of us. When George wanted to buy a place for himself, we looked with him, the three of us checking the bathrooms and the view. No wonder George did not marry then; he was nearly married to us. It was George we first called when the doctor told us we were listening to our “daughter’s” heartbeat. We learned to mimic the sound: I would do the sh-sea and John would do the pa-tum, pa-tum. My sister’s home Drano test said we were having a girl as well. So my mother gave all the girl baby clothes to us and all the boy baby clothes to my sister, who was having a baby a month later. Only the Korean man who worked in the parking garage in my building disagreed. “Korean saying,” he said. “A woman having a boy baby look rough. You having a boy.”
I had not been asleep long. Awaking, I knew I was in labor. I got up and took a shower, thinking, correctly, I might not get another shower for a day or two. Then I got John up, and we went to Baptist Hospital. There my labor progressed, slowly but surely through the night and into the morning, until it didn’t progress anymore. The resident spoke in whispered tones to someone about what he should do. He needn’t have whispered; in the next room a woman was delivering a baby she already knew to be stillborn, and her wail was all any mother on the maternity ward heard. For hours. Finally my obstetrician came, looked at the X-ray they had taken, and started preparing me for a cesarean section. As was the practice then, I left John at the operating room door. As the anesthesiologist leaned over me, I could hear my obstetrician talking through each step. And then I heard him say, “It’s dead.” “What did he say?” I asked the anesthesiologist. Had he really said the baby was dead? I was frantic. “Don’t worry about anything,” the anesthesiologist said, “the baby is fine.” But all I could think about was the mother of the stillborn baby and her pitiful wail. “Tell me what is happening,” I insisted, speaking loudly enough for the obstetrician on the other side of the curtain to hear me, but only the anesthesiologist answered: “Be still. It will be fine.” When, seconds or minutes or hours later—I was too frightened to calculate anything—they showed me our son, I didn’t count his fingers or toes. I simply saw the contorted face and heard the beautiful scream, and I cried. It turned out that what was “dead” was the power to the cauterizing machine, and you can just imagine what I said to the obstetrician later about his choice of words. In the recovery room, I didn’t tell John about