“Knitting needles, whisks, alkaline douches?” he asked very gently, rubbing her back as if to help her bring it forth. From what Desdemona had told him, they’d had no one to ask, no one to whom they felt they could turn. Huge brains, utter inexperience.
“Until I learned to make ergotamine and managed my own abortions. Once the Pill appeared we were safe, we didn’t have to worry any more. I was so fertile — Jim too, I guess.” She lifted her head, turned it to look at him through eyes that did understand but hadn’t yet grasped the full enormity of his news. “We can afford a family now,” she said. “I can’t possibly be as bad as you say, Doctor.”
“Believe me, Millie, you are. You are! Your endometrium is virtually solid scar tissue. Think about it — think! When you dislodge a fetus you interfere with a natural process. If the pregnancy is early enough, there are no sequelae. But I’m guessing that the first two or three of your pregnancies were well along before you acted, because the indications are that you suffered post-abortion hemorrhages, infections — you’re lucky to have lived.” He paused, then spoke in a sterner voice. “You’re a sitting duck for a uterine cancer, Millie. I must recommend hysterectomy.”
“I can conceive, and I will conceive,” she said.
“And if you do, it will go the same way as this one. You can’t carry a child to full term or anywhere near that, Millie.”
“I refuse to have a hysterectomy,” she said.
“It’s your choice, my dear. I’ve given you my opinion, and I suggest you get a second opinion, even a third. Don’t make up your mind to anything until then,” Dr. Solomon said.
He sat back on his chair, upset, impotent, unable to sway or to help her. “I know how big a blow this is, my dear, but it isn’t the end of the world. No one is entitled to apportion blame, least of all me. Try to see this as having some purpose you just can’t glimpse yet. And talk it over with your husband. Be open about it, then send him to see me.”
But Millie wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t respond. Half an hour later Dr. Solomon gave up, wondering how he could have handled it better. Even for a physician of his experience, the Hunter situation was unusual enough to be uncertain how to proceed. A ghetto doctor would have had more insight.
After he had gone Millie lay back, the “No Visitors” sign still on her door, grateful for the privacy that gave her. She didn’t cry, having wept all her tears, it seemed, during those nights worrying and wondering what had happened to kill her baby.
Like Gettysburg after the battle up there … What was wrong with parents, that they closed their eyes to the most enormous drives of adolescence? That the only advice they could give was to “be a good girl”? What if you met a Jim, and you couldn’t be a good girl? Did they tell you how to look after yourself on, say, your thirteenth birthday, as a rite of passage? No. Why? Because virginity rules. Guys can play around, girls have to go to the marriage bed with hymen intact. So either you were a good girl, or a disgraced one.
Her mind wandered, but with purpose: to retrace her history with Jim. We heavy petted through the Holloman years, then we consummated those four terrible years of anguish in such a cataclysm of passion I can still feel it now. But Jim could never get the rubbers on without tearing them, so I kept conceiving. At first I didn’t know what was happening to me, so I left things far too late. We had no idea what to do. A mixed-blood baby then would have brought our careers crashing, that was how we saw it, and I couldn’t be spared to have it and then put it up for adoption. Jim needed me. What was the year? 1955. How resourceful Jim was, even then. He consulted the professional whores, asked them where they went, how much it cost. We paid twenty dollars to an old Jamaican woman on the West Side — home of the Catholic Hispanics, plenty of business there. I was four months gone, it was a nightmare … Next time we went elsewhere. No better.
Suddenly Millie felt weary almost to death; the anxiety taking its toll. She dozed, woke minutes later with John Hall’s face in front of her confused eyes. John! How kind he was, how sympathetic, how much on my side. Able to listen to Jim on the subject of long-chain molecules, but also happy to listen to me on the subject of birth control, how impossible it was, how much I dreaded falling pregnant. I was so exactly right for John! His problem wasn’t homosexuality, it was asexuality. A vicarious participant in life, that was John. He adored Jim and me as only a man without sexual urges could. What made Jim his enemy was Jim’s sudden realization that John thought my troubles as fascinating as Jim’s. The famous incident of the pearls … Just Jim’s jealousy and possessiveness. I wonder whose version Carmine believes, mine, or Jim’s? The real one saw us leave for Chicago immediately afterward, exactly as Jim said. I put it back six months to make it appear less significant. Everything for Jim has been the story of my life since I turned fifteen.