Ischial Spines
A/N: The ischial spines form the narrowest part of the female human pelvis. More space between the ischial spines makes it easier to give birth.
I wasn't the only one who had been resurrected. Raoul had travelled to the land of the dead and survived, too. No one comes back from that realm unchanged. If all Lazarus had to fear was dying again, what threat was that? We who died didn't dread to repeat the experience – or so I thought.
Spring turned slowly to summer in Belgium in 1881. Almost two months had passed since our quiet wedding, four since I crawled from the tomb like a dead woman walking. The heated letters between Raoul and his family flew from Brussels to Paris and back again. Those from his sisters Raoul let me read. Martyniere was especially kind, even though she asked me not to write her in return, as her husband inspected all her letters. Those from his uncle he took into our bedroom to read himself, then sat quietly with his head in his hands, saying nothing.
While engaged in a lawsuit to hamper Raoul's inheritance claims, the Comte Auguste de Chagny graciously condescended to send money. Raoul extracted the franc notes and gave them to the St. Vincent de Paul Society. After leaving the letters on his desk for a few days, perhaps hoping they would metamorphose into something more benign that he could share with me, he burned them in the coal fire.
Mostly we waited in that summer between worlds. Raoul found half a house for us to rent on our elm-lined street, with a shared garden in the back. In the other half lived a widow who flushed and giggled when Raoul bent over to kiss her hand, accidentally grazing it with his mustache. It was easier to renounce a title than the mannerisms.
For Raoul, gone were the days of a box at the Opera or afternoons at the racetrack, where Philippe had lost more money on one race than Auguste had sent us that whole spring. Raoul had brought several suits of evening dress with him from Paris, but sold all save the plainest of the entire ensemble. The diamond tie-stud and cufflinks he kept, as they had belonged to his father.
One late June day we stopped at a stall for a treat, a few chocolate-covered hazelnuts for each of us. I almost dropped mine, for as I stood on the sunshine-drenched sidewalk, I felt the little life leap inside of me, and knew with certainty what I had long suspected. I didn't tell Raoul that day, nor in the days after. I wanted him in our bed, and was afraid that if a child was a certainty, he would leave it.
In the night the child in my womb danced as my husband danced within my body. When my pulsing flesh gripped Raoul in return, the three of us moved together until the little shocks fluttered away, one by one. Before he began to snore, I murmured, "I want to show you something." His hand rested heavily where my plump belly curved above the shadowed delta. "Press here," I said softly, and there it came again, the faint sloshing movement followed by a tap, just a tiny pressure, and then a stronger kick. He must have felt it too, because the muscles in his hand jerked slightly, as if that miniscule touch burned him.
"Can you love him?" I asked, frightened of the answer, frightened not to ask.
"He's part of you," he said as he caressed my stomach no longer flat and ridged with muscle, but instead buttery soft. "I will try."
The widow next door stopped me early one morning as I went out for bread. "It looks like a little stranger is coming to stay with you," she said indulgently. "But your husband should stop making you do all that walking. In your condition, you need your rest." What a silly woman, I thought. Everyone knows that walking makes a baby strong, and helps him drop down just right so to be born easily. In the Skotelof of my childhood, women worked in the gardens or fields, and milked the cows until the onset of their pains, as did my own mother.
"Have you started your layette?" she asked. I hadn't, and shook my head. She laughed indulgently, young mothers, how they needed shepherding. Her daughter was a seamstress, she said, and would come over to help me sew one. I would need white cotton flannel, and lots of it, as well as yarn for hats, sweaters, blankets.
"I'd like her to come over," I said presently, and Raoul came home every day to two women laughing, cutting, pinning, and sewing reams of the white stuff. I was glad for her company, as Raoul had decided to pursue a profession, much to Auguste de Chagny's vehemently expressed disgust. Every day Raoul went to the law library and read for the bar examination, especially in the areas of patent and maritime law. When he could read no more, he went to the law office founded by a transplant from Paris like ourselves, one who had known Philippe from his own naval stint under the Second Empire, and who let Raoul assist with cases.
"You'll need towels," the widow's daughter said. She herself had borne two children so far. "And nightgowns that open down the front, way down. You don't want anything standing in between baby and his breakfast, eh?"
That made me blush. Of course a baby must have the breast, how else would he eat? The enormity of all this crept up on me, day by day, and one afternoon Raoul came into the sewing room to find me sobbing uncontrollably, a little nightshirt on the floor with a needle sticking through it, unthreaded because of my tears. "Are you sick?" he cried. "Do you need the doctor?"
"It's just all so much," I repeated. "How do women do it?"
He held me, his face serious and unsmiling, rocking me back and forth on his broad full chest. Raoul's mother had died giving birth. I didn't have to ask to know that he feared the same for me. "How do you feel?" he asked.
"The sickness is gone. It's been days since I've had it. Raoul, I don't feel badly at all. In fact, I feel better than I have in months. But the littlest thing comes to mind, and I melt into tears."
"What littlest thing came to your mind this time?" he asked, all warm male concern.
I picked up my sewing. "This layette, for one. I don't know how I'm to get it all done."
He laughed at such a small worry. "That's easy. No doubt your seamstress has a friend. Three women sewing will finish everything faster than two. Ask her tomorrow."
"I thought we weren't going to live like nobility, and here we are, relying on servants."
"The nobility aren't the only ones with servants. You had a maid in Paris, did you not? We pay our servants a fair wage and treat them with dignity. It's their employment, after all. Were we not to do it, how would they live? Come now, perhaps there's something else bothering you. What is it, won't you tell me?"
My tears weren't really for the layette that day. Something darker burrowed inside me, something I didn't want to tell him. With each little kick, I caught a nightmare glimpse of Erik's face, shrunken and stuck onto that of a tiny baby's, a little monkey of terror. "It's nothing," I said, letting him hold me, feeling like a liar of the worst sort.
He didn't leave my bed, even with the certainty of a child. The summer evenings were cool and overcast, without the suffocating heat of Paris that drove so many from that city. Winds from the sea blew away the summer stench of sewers. Together in the long twilights we studied Dutch, or "Flemish" as they called it here. Some of the French in Brussels acted as if neither Flanders nor the language existed, but Raoul insisted we learn it. When the evenings grew cool and dark, we extinguished the lamps, kept the bedcurtains open for the breeze, sometimes lazily made love, sometimes not.
The ladies' magazines said that being with child "calmed" women and "damped the fires of passion," but that experience was not mine. The fears I'd forgotten in the first flush of our sweet moon of love came back, that inside of me rested something depraved, something more of Lilith than of Eve. For now I not only accepted the pleasure dispensed by my husband's body; I grew to desire it. As my body softened and spread, as my breasts swelled and grew increasingly tender, he also gravitated towards me.
"More flesh is so becoming on you," he said, rubbing his face over my bosom. "Like beautiful white marble, but soft."
No longer did Raoul need to lie passively quiet for fear that I might shrink from or fear him. One night we lay like two spoons fitted together perfectly in the drawer. Around my fattening stomach his hand moved, then up to my breasts to tweak and tease, until a tiny drop or two of moisture garnished the tip. Then from behind he slid into me, slowly at first, then with increasingly wild abandon, so that our cries rang out together against the backdrop of the dark.
Inside my ocean the little one swirled and swam and grew. Now when Raoul rested his hand on the shore to feel the waves and flips of little arms or legs, those delicate movements waxed stronger by the week. But as Raoul pressed his hand down into the spot where the quickening was most apparent, as he took greater delight in pressing in one spot and feeling a kick in another, I grew quieter and more apprehensive. What if my child's face resembled his father's?
The flush of middle pregnancy, the calm sleepy swelling that brought with it relaxation and well-being was over. Now I expanded at an alarming rate, and the former pleasant pressure on my hips and thighs turned to an almost intolerable weight, a grating downward force from which there was no relief. Gone were the nights when after long bouts of love I slept deeply as an odalisque on her silk cushions. I tossed and turned, but no pillows or even Raoul's body could comfort me, as I woke every few hours only to thrash again.
Sometimes when he reached for me in love I snapped or snarled, which made him retreat in confusion, deeply hurt. The next night was punctuated by lust. Even with my enormous stomach, I lay on my side and lifted my leg for him, and we came together like scissors. Afterwards he would embrace and nuzzle me, only to find me gone to the other side of the bed, clutching my burden, shaking with anxiety, wanting to be held, wanting to be left alone.
"I don't know you anymore," he whispered sadly one night, after I pulled away from him, my body still pulsing.
"I don't know myself, either," I choked back, hating how I hurt him, hating him for his unchanged flesh, his mobility, the unencumbered freedom of the male animal.
No matter how many times I snapped, he always drew me back, his voice gentle. "It reminds me of Father's bitches, the hunting hounds. When one would get close to whelping, there was nothing to be done with her except give her a quiet place to rest, and leave her alone. Even the gentlest dog would take a finger off if you irritated her too much. I like to think that we are above that, but we are not." Then he stroked my belly, and I felt the warm maleness resting against my flank stir again. "Are you sure we should be doing this?"
"Probably not," I answered, irritated at being compared to a whelping bitch. "After all, the dogs don't," and he withdrew, stung.
I hated it when I bumped things, or when I had to let out my already-voluminous dresses once again. At night my flanks and sides burned like fire, almost as if the child were splitting me in two, forcing me to open wider. "How much bigger is this infant going to get?" I complained to Dr. Thierman one day, when the fire in my sides kept me from sleeping night after night. "Might there be two?"
He felt all over my swollen belly, then lightly ran his fingers over the wrinkly stretched ridges where my skin had expanded more slowly than the fruit of my womb. "A good chance there's only one, Mme. de Chagny. Nor do I expect a terribly large offspring, although it feels like one, as you have a slighter frame."
"I'm sick of this," I said. "You say I have two to four weeks more. I'm not sure I can bear it any longer."
"You can, and you will," he said calmly. "My wife has had six children, and with each she swore she could not endure the last few weeks. These weeks will be over soon. Before you know it, you will hold your child in your arms, at your breast."
I looked hesitantly at him, and he said swiftly, "You're not thinking of wet-nursing, are you?"
"I don't know," I replied. "Why should there be a difficulty?"
Thierman had a way of changing the temperature around himself. Warm summer turned to winter by a rise of the shoulders, the raising of an eyebrow, the slow turning of his fat face with its gold-rimmed glasses. I hadn't seen him this cold since our first meeting, when I had inadvertently asked him for some medicine to 'cure' my supposed 'illness.' "Unless I am a sad judge of women's characters, Mme. de Chagny, you are a natural mother, one who will love her children and make every sacrifice for them. I know your husband bears a noble name, although you do not live as the nobility, which I hold to your credit. Nonetheless, the unfortunate tendency to avoid the further responsibilities of motherhood, beyond the bearing of the child, affect all classes who have the means to engage a wet-nurse."
"What's wrong with it?" I asked, chafing at his domineering and paternal tone. The few singers at the Opera Garnier who had had children found wet-nurses at once, and were back on the stage within the month, slim and energetic as ever.
"Have you ever seen a drunken baby, Mme. de Chagny?" he asked, challenging me.
I looked around the dark-panelled examining room with its cutaway drawings of the human frame, muscles, nerves, bones all laid bare. I look like that inside, I thought. So does Raoul. So did Erik. This conversation suddenly made me very tired, and my hips ached on the wooden chair. "Where would I have ever seen a drunken baby?"
"When the wet-nurse plies herself with gin or brandy, it goes straight to her milk, and then right down the throat of the little one in her charge."
"I certainly have no intention of hiring a drunken wet-nurse," I said indignantly.
"No one ever does," he answered back. "But consider this. You told me you lived with farm animals. How does the mare, or the mother goat, or the cow look when her baby nurses from her?"
"In bliss," I had to admit. "We used to let the calf have the first milk when he was very young. It was as if the whole barn filled with light."
"That's right. I'm not saying it's not work. You have to rest, and partake of a few foods you haven't had since childhood. The old wives say, 'A tooth for every baby,' but I'll have none of that in my practice. You'll eat custard, and eggs, and milk every day. You might not resume that girlish figure at once, and you may miss the upcoming 'season' this year."
"That doesn't matter to me," I interrupted. "Most evenings find us at home, studying Flemish."
He laughed until his round sides shook. "Nothing like the language of the Netherlands to put you to sleep. But seriously, Madame, I beg you to forsake the idea of a wet-nurse. With the proper food and rest, you and your baby will be far happier."
I endured, one day to the next. Then one morning as I walked in the November-grey garden, a weight like a sack of flour unceremoniously dropped down in the bowl of my hips. The child in my womb seemed to have fallen a few inches. Some of the upward pressure on my chest was gone, and I drank the cold air in greedily. But the encumbrance on my back and legs, intense before, was now almost overwhelming. I waddled back into the house, staggered up the stairs, and looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.
A band of pressure tightened around my girth, squeezing me in a great iron corset. Then it released. The maid came into the kitchen to investigate why I'd encroached on her domain. I stood at the sink and began to wipe the breakfast dishes. "Ma'am, I can do that," she started to say, but I waved her off. As I wiped, I leaned on the sink, lashed by unrelenting bands of pain. When all the dishes were cleaned, I washed the sink and counters. Each time I lifted the bucket, the fierce squeezing crushed me harder.
"Ma'am, please..." begged the maid.
"Get out," I growled, and she did. She must have run all the way down to the law library, to tell M. de Chagny that his wife had gone mad, for what lady of the house would be on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor? I gathered that was where she went, for an hour or so later Raoul came in, a puzzled expression on his face. I hung over the bucket on my hands and knees, feeling my insides twist.
"I'm sending for the doctor," he said abruptly.
"Nonsense," I replied. "They're just little cramps. He'll be in the office all day with sick people. No need to bother him with me," and then I could speak no longer, as a giant's hand squashed the breath out of me.
"Christine," he begged.
"Haven't you ever seen a woman have a baby before?" I snapped, and then he laughed with nervous overtones. Of course he hadn't. "Look to your shoes, anyway. This floor is clean," and so he stepped out of the kitchen, hanging in the doorway to watch me carefully.
"So when have you seen a woman have a baby?" he asked lightly, his face turning serious as I crouched under a wrenching wave that lasted even longer than the last one.
When it passed, I told him, "My mother, when she bore my sister. I was just a little girl of four. Our cottage had one room, and it was winter. There was nowhere to go, so I sat on my bed all night while she travailed. Then the midwife came, and ..." Another band of pain wrapped itself around me, and against my will I cried out.
"The midwife what?" Raoul said. "Oh, hang this, where is that maid? I'm sending her for the doctor. Can't you at least get up?"
"No! I don't need the doctor! The midwife? My mother was delivered, what else did you think happened? She sat up on the stool, and that was that. I watched everything, and so did my father. It took a long time, all night." There was blood, too, I thought. A lot of blood. Oh, God, what had I gotten myself into?
"I never knew you had a sister," he said, as another pain struck me.
"I don't, anymore," I said when I had recovered. "She died while still a baby, of some kind of fever," and I gripped the wood hard, so my nails dug into it a little. Then I leaned over and spewed the remains of my breakfast into the bucket. It sent Raoul into a frenzy. Energetically he called for the maid twice, three times, and when her feet came tapping down the stairs, he said with force, "Go for Dr. Thierman now. Look, I'll write down the address. Tell him Mme. de Chagny is having pains and has just lost the contents of her stomach. Don't delay, either." To me he turned. "Shouldn't you go to bed?"
He helped me to my feet, but I shook off his arm. "I can walk, and no, I'm not going to bed." Another pain hit, this time long and strong, and I began to get a little frightened. If this was the beginning, what would the end be like? When I stood, the savage pains relented a little. "Look," I said to Raoul, "I'm fine now, and am going to water the ferns." Dubiously he looked me over. When the doctor arrived a few hours later to the sight of me polishing brass candlesticks, his clownlike smile was directed more towards Raoul than myself.
"New fathers cause me more difficulty than new mothers," he joked. He placed his hand on my abdomen and pressed lightly. "Good, it's dropped well." Raoul hovered anxiously, like a prisoner awaiting a verdict. "M. de Chagny, I recommend you go to a restaurant, take a leisurely lunch laced with a couple of pints of good strong ale, and then consider how much paperwork you have to catch up on at your office. I will send for my nurse, who has caught almost as many babies as I have. There's no need for panic, as I'm sure Mme. de Chagny has already told you," and I glared at him and Raoul both, nodding fiercely.
When the iron-faced nurse arrived, she no longer appeared to me like a sphinx to be tolerated. Instead, I grasped her hand and wouldn't let go. She was like Juno herself, no longer cold and distant, but instead strong and reserved, a fountain of hidden knowledge whose depths we both were going to plumb throughout the afternoon and into the night. Or so her silent, stern face said. In the kitchen she boiled water in a little pan and made a light gruel laced with honey. I sucked it off the spoon as if I were a child myself, taking little bites in between pains.
When I began to pant in between the pains, the nurse smiled for the first time and announced, "It's time to go upstairs now, Madame." So with the maid on one side, the nurse on the other, I walked up the long stairwell to our room, stopping every few steps as another riveting pain clanged through me. Oh, blessed Virgin, I prayed, let me come down these steps again. Don't let me die. Water ran down my leg, and I cried out in fear.
The nurse wiped it with her hand and looked at the moisture, then sniffed it. "Good," she said mysteriously. "All clear." The strangeness of her comment was swept away by a black rush of pain different than the ones before, and I screamed out loud. "Go for the doctor," she directed the maid. "Tell him that I said it is time." After the maid was gone, she undressed me and said quietly, "Keep it inside." She brought her flat expressionless face towards me, and held my head in her hands, her cold grey eyes boring into mine. "Listen to me. Do not scream. It's not good for you or the baby. Look here, I've brought my stool. But if you scream, or thrash, or lose control, Dr. Theirman won't let me use it, and instead it will be chloroform and forceps for you."
I nodded mutely. The horrible reek of chloroform came back to me, as I remembered Erik clamping a rag soaked with the stuff over my face, and the terrible sickness that followed. I didn't know what forceps were, but they must have been dreadful, from the tone in the nurse's voice.
Under a terrible weight of pain I staggered. Instead of screaming, I clamped my jaws together and gripped the nurse's hand as tightly as I could. She reached up between my legs and felt around. Just as I was about to protest this indignity, she half-carried me over to the birthing chair, pulling my nightdress up above my hips as we went. Then, to my shame, a black shadow obscured the light from the hall, a large round-shouldered shape followed by a taller, leaner one. Dr. Thierman looked into the bedroom, then gripped Raoul by the arm, turning him back into the hallway. "It's downstairs for you, my man," he said with a laugh under his voice.
The sight of Raoul awakened me from my torpor of pain. I wanted him near me, wanted him to hold and comfort me, and I cried out piteously for him over and over. Death loomed over me, but rather than the soothing of his warm kind hands, the last of him I would have was his face vanishing through the door. The nurse gripped my hand and whispered harshly into my ear, "Stop that. Don't scream out, remember? Your husband will be with you shortly. Now it's up to us," and so I quieted down, really frightened now.
I sat in the hard birthing chair with Thierman's hands up under my nightshirt, fingers exploring my opening in a way that not even Raoul had dared. One pain crushed me after another, with barely room to breathe in between. The child within me twisted over, then back again. When I looked down at Thierman's large head between my legs, I cried out, "Oh, God, what's wrong?" for his hands and my thighs were smeared with blood.
He looked up quizzically. "Nothing at all, Madame. Surely you know a little blood comes with every lying-in." Then with each squeeze came a burning, as if that sack of flour I carried on my hips was trying to push itself out through a keyhole. By now I couldn't stop the waves, coming on now bitter and tearing. A shuddering low coloratura came out of me, never pausing for breath, as something hot and wet slid between my legs. Thierman shouted, "It's all in the ischial spines! I was right about the spines, again!" and the nurse said soothingly, "Indeed you were." I leaned back in the hard chair and panted, too frightened to look down.
Thierman and the nurse made murmuring, approving noises, and then a faint cat's mewling started, that turned to a long, drawn-out cry. Giddy with relief, I glanced down to see a blue snaking cord. Recoiling at the blood-soaked rags and bloody water in the pan, I followed the blue cord to the source of that pitched wailing. In Thierman's hands lay a baby, and from the unmistakable size and thrust of him, a boy. Then a sluice of thick hot matter shot out of me and plopped into the metal tray below, followed by one large surge of blood, then another. It's my death come for me this day, I thought. As I swooned, the last I heard before the blackness was Thierman's command, "Get her into bed and get those feet in the air!"
Someone was kneading my stomach like bread, and I grunted with the pain. "Where's my baby?" I cried, trying to sit up, but the nurse pushed me down. "He's fine, you'll hold him soon. But we must take care of you first," and she continued to squeeze down into the depths, molding me like clay under the artist's hand.
"Bring the child over," Thierman said, and the swaddled baby lay in my arms, moving his little head back and forth, making fish-like motions with his mouth, red little face screwed up and head all wrinkled, slightly bulging in the back.
"Is his head all right?" I asked anxiously.
Thierman laughed. "It's molding. He'll straighten out in a day or so. He's beautiful, Mme. de Chagny, and an easy birth it was, too. Now onto the breast with him."
An easy birth, I thought. So this was an easy one, and I prayed sincerely to never know one that was difficult.
The baby's mouth popped open and closed like one of the goldfish in the botanical garden pond. Around the pink tip of my breast he went, and into his mouth slid the whole colored part, down deep into his mouth. He pulled with a strength I wouldn't have thought possible. Tears came to my eyes, of pleasure, of pain at the fierce sucking, of relief. There before me stood Raoul, hands suddenly everywhere, on my hair, my face, hovering above my exposed breast, drifting over my flattened belly, drifting without touching, taking it all in with eyes and hands.
When the nipple slipped out of the baby's mouth, the nurse picked him up and handed him to to Raoul, who stared at the thick shock of black hair crowning the delicate baby head. Raoul examined the infant's face before anything else, then unswaddled him so to inspect every fold, every crevice, every digit.
"Wrap that baby up," Dr. Thieman fumed. Normally kind and jocular, he spoke sharply to Raoul, whose behavior baffled him. "Do you want him to catch pneumonia, and him not a few hours old?"
I turned my face away. I knew what Raoul was looking for. But there was nothing unusual, just a long, muscular, red-faced baby who squalled and wet and squirmed like any other.
Thierman sat by my bedside filling out certificates. When he entered the date of our marriage alongside that of our son's birth, Raoul defied him with stares to reproach us, but the doctor showed himself just as impervious to simple arithmetic that nine minus six equals three as was Raoul himself. "A fine birth," he kept saying, signing the article of birth with a flourish, handing it to the nurse to sign as a witness. Then Raoul signed while little Philippe sucked again.
"Will it hurt like this always?" I asked, for the thin pains brought tears to my eyes. The nurse shook her head, no, it seemed I would toughen up, and it was true, as the pains were soon supplanted by deep shocks of pleasure that pulled through me like cords. Every few hours he yanked and tugged me dry, then rolled his eyes back in drugged infant sleep. Overlaid on that sweet face I saw another image, another's eyes rolled back in bliss, another's face caressed from torment into the womb of unconsciousness.
I held close the little sleeping fragment of my dark past, and thanked God that I would walk down those stairs again after all.
(continued...)