Page 14 - WTP Vol.X#1

The Spiritualists
The year my wife and I were about to stop birth control and “let things happen,” I watched a television documentary about recent incidents of premature birth that featured an astonishment
of medical marvels tempered by the inclusion of problems that often follow—crippling side effects, babies precarious with pneumonia, and even one acknowledgement, despite progress, of death. I recognized the symptoms at once. A college friend and his wife, only a few weeks earlier, had suffered through a similar scenario.
When my wife and I visited that couple a month later, my friend showed slides, each of them taken only minutes apart, sequenced to memorialize the first day of their son’s forty-hour life. He spoke for himself and his silent wife, explaining the complications and symptoms, including how the doctor had warned them of the inevitability of loss.
The last of those pictures, a head shot, stayed on the screen while he referenced his sense of heaven, how families would be reunited. My wife and I disguised our skepticism about the likelihood of eternal life. For sure, I didn’t mention how I’d read about a woman who painted the face of an infant on her breast, sat in a cabinet in the dark, and waited for grieving parents to accept the possibility of contact with their dead child.
She claimed to speak to the departed. She bared what she claimed was the beautiful face of the dead child and thrust it through the shadowed, sized open-
ing into the dim light for viewing. She asked joyful parents to extend their hands to brush the soft face of their baby, repeating the name of the resurrected, what I couldn’t do that night, staring at the lost, cya- notic child, thinking of reassurances and roll calls for the briefly living.
The Dark Car
One late evening, a few months later, as I began to enter freeway traffic from a narrow side street, my wife, using a tone set exactly upon obey, said “Stop” just before a car without headlights flashed by so close to us it trembled our tiny, economical German car.
We caught up to the dark car, still without headlights, as it sat at the first stoplight in one of many industrial
towns along the Ohio River. A woman, we could tell, was driving. She was alone, turned left, and for a block we followed until she turned again, still dark, leaving us to cross a bridge to a second factory town before entering, with caution, the highway to our home.
By now it was late January, my wife early in pregnan- cy that seemed to have happened from our first un- protected sex. We’d laughed that we were like those teenage couples in the cautionary sex-ed high school films we’d once been forced to watch.
But that night, when we speculated, when several miles of silence was about to end at our apartment, what I wondered was the nature of my wife’s voice that made me not question her warning. Not volume, not a pitch up to panic, just precise connotation among a thousand variations of command.
Lesson One: The Evolution of Eyes
Some things we began to notice: In the discount store, the oversized eyes of babies on velvet; in the mall, a woman who drew infants with chalk; in the news- paper, a report on the craze for Big Eyes paintings;
in a magazine, a discussion of the cartoon evolution of Mickey Mouse, who had rounded from rodent to child’s toy, his face adorable now that it featured the sentimental safeguard of the newborn, the sugared look shared by puppies and kittens and lambs.
Maternity Ward, Visiting Hours
The last summer I had lived at home, after I some- times borrowed my sister’s car, I was responsible for picking her up where she worked as a nurse in ob- stetrics at a hospital named for the patron saint for a sprawling spectrum of the down and out—the falsely accused, the homeless, the orphaned, the mentally ill,
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A Birth Primer
Gary Fincke