A Room in Athens Read online

  More contractions brought the placenta, or after-birth. Heavy, dark red, and deeply veined, the miracle sack swung before my eyes, Madame Kladaki exhibiting with a kind of womanly pride my infant’s nine-month nesting place, as though she had made it herself.

  Then a dreadful time passed, greater than any pain of birth. Natural childbirth, natural stitching, was apparently the rule. I had been cut, as are most women, to prevent the tearing of the perineum that sometimes occurs; a cut hardly felt at the time, because of the numbness caused by the terrific pressure of the birth. But now, Madame Kladaki began to sew up my flesh. She gave no local anesthetic and I watched her in a vague, helpless bewilderment as she went about her work, buxom and housewifely, like a seamstress—or more rather like my mother when, years before, she had stuffed and sewn a chicken.

  It seemed to take forever. In fact it took about a half hour. Meanwhile, the baby was weighed and measured. They told me his weight in kilos and his length in centimeters, and I gathered that he was just about perfect size and length. Somewhere around seven-and-a-half pounds and maybe twenty-one inches.

  Miss Elleadou was speaking to me.

  “We give grades to our girls, you know,” she said chattily, “from one to ten, depending on how well they did.”

  “Oh,” I said, wincing as the needle pierced, “and what was mine?”

  “To you, Madame, we gave a six.” She smiled at me, not without kindness: “You did not do so very well.”

  Somewhere, in the midst of the pain and the tiredness, I felt an edge of disappointment, like getting a lowly B in school instead of the coveted A. Freighted with gut, the needle pierced again in its mindless torment, and I felt a flicker of anger with Miss Elleadou and Madame. Something here was not right, but I was too tired to know what it was.

  Finally, they helped me to dress. Marina brought in a teaspoon of jam and a glass of cold water. They put the jam to my lips, then the water. I remembered from somewhere it was part of the traditional hospitality ritual.

  “Levez-vous, Madame,”49 said Madame Kladaki.

  I sat up and she kissed me on both cheeks. When I had gotten off the table she laid the baby in my arms.

  “Give him to your husband,” she said.

  I walked slowly to the door, staring down at this tiny stranger who did not look anything like what I had ever imagined. I felt the unfamiliar slight weight in my arms as I walked very carefully across the room. The door was flung open; Arno looked up in surprise and I put the infant into his awkward arms.

  The nurses laughed and teased him gently in Greek as I walked slowly down the hall to my room. He gave the baby to Marina and soon followed. I had to wait a few minutes while they made the bed.

  I stood looking around the room and at the two girls who watched me curiously from the other beds, smiling and nodding.

  “They told us you have boy!” said one in English.

  Finally, I could lie down. The bed with its fresh linen took my heavy, aching flesh. Arno sat on the bed and we talked and smiled, exchanged a kiss. It was over.

  I have a son. I have a son. We have a son. Every half hour it would strike me afresh. I smiled at the exquisite new tenderness I felt for my husband. When he returned for evening visiting hours we studied the baby for the first time together. I held him for a moment but I couldn’t sit up properly, so he lay in Arno’s arms quietly, expectantly, it seemed, and then yawned. We laughed. He was so tightly bundled up that all we could see was his face—the face of an old man. His brow was quite wrinkled, his eyes a deep shade of gray, his hair, still a little sticky with something, was a darkish fuzz, undefined, like lead—what I had seen without recognizing when he was still inside. But he had perfect little ears, a large nose, and a lovely mouth. He bore an air of solemnity and quiet observation. He was both funny and old-looking, and at moments he looked strangely like my father. He was hardly a beauty, but we were both immensely impressed.

  They had barely permitted me to eat that afternoon, and when my light dinner of egg-lemon soup, yogurt, and fruit50 finally came, I ate it all much too fast, then watched with breathless curiosity when, soon after dinner, the two other babies were brought in to nurse. Mine would be brought on the second day. Both the girls bit their lips and groaned when Marina helped the babies take hold of their nipples, and Katie, the one who spoke English, squirmed and got tears in her eyes. But then, after they had nursed a while, the girls seemed to forget their discomfort and they talked and cooed to the infants. I was eager for mine to be brought to me.

  The day had been full and Arno left early. The night of the baby’s birth was a long, slow night. I drifted in and out of sleep, unable to settle down. In the drowsy darkness I could hear the occasional far-off cry of a newborn child. Many times I woke that night with a feeling of strength flowing back, happy, remembering my son.

  Chapter III

  The Clinic

  IN THE BACK YARD OF MADAME KLADAKI’S PSYCHOPROPHYLACTIC MATERNITY CLINIC, a lime tree grew. The room I shared with Katie and Rosa was large and pleasant and light, and it overlooked the lime tree and the other fruit trees in the yard and faced a graceful tangle of tiny metal spiral stairways, all painted yellow—perhaps they were fire escapes. Maids hung laundry from these stairs, wrung mops, sang, bickered, and joked. Their voices came through the closed windows. It was October; although I was sweltering in the 80-degree heat, a nurse tucked another blanket around my neck. She was scolding me in rapid Greek. I appealed to Katie: “What have I done?”

  “Angela wants you to keep covered. It is winter time, you know.”

  The other girls wore bed socks and bathrobes beneath the heavy blankets. They willingly—docilely, I thought—lay still beneath the load of linen and wool. Once, I got up to open the window, but Miss Elleadou came running. “Madame! Madame! What are you doing? You will catch cold!” She guided me back to bed and once again tucked me up until I was in tears from the heat. Finally I forced them to take away two of the heaviest covers.

  We were eating our mid-afternoon snack, a large plate of white, sweet custard, which we got twice a day to encourage our milk. Katie was telling me about her job at the Athens office of Procter and Gamble where she was a secretary.

  “Are you going back to work?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, as soon as the baby is three months. Then I will leave him with my mother. But who will take care of you when you go home?” she asked with a look of concern on her plain, chubby, intelligent face. “How will you manage with no family and no maid?”

  “Well, my husband will help,” I said. And then, as she continued to look at me I felt she must be thinking American-men-dominated-by-American-women (a theme we’d heard throughout Europe), and I added quickly, “He doesn’t usually help out much at all, but if I need him, he will.”

  “Ah, yes. But he must love you very much.” I looked at her earnest face across the room, surprised, puzzled, touched.

  “Why yes,” I said. “He does love me, of course.” I felt a peculiar shyness.

  “Where is your husband?” I asked. “He must be pleased with your little son.”

  Although she had had her baby the day before me, she said, “My husband has not yet seen him. He is studying for exams and cannot come. But as you see, the rest of my family and my husband’s family all come; and my husband and I talk on the telephone.”

  Rosa asked Katie what we were talking about, and they went off in Greek while I puzzled over Katie’s remark about love. Rosa was Katie’s opposite in every way. Where Katie was dumpy and plain, sentimental and intellectual (she was reading Pride and Prejudice in English during her stay), Rosa was tall, beautifully built on slender, graceful lines. She was younger than either Katie or myself, just twenty, and her body had already returned to its skimming curves and flats. She was temperamental, mercurial, full of quick laughter one moment, pouting the next, dancing in time to the music of the transistor radio. In bed, she danced with her shoulders and eyes, out of bed with her whole young, healthy
frame. Elegance and animality blended exquisitely in her. She might have been a model or an actress. Her black-haired daughter enchanted her, and I watched her talking and cooing to the infant happily.

  Her husband came once a day, along with a crowd of family and friends. He commented often in his few words of English that I had a son, and I felt he was disappointed with his daughter. He was handsome, over forty, friendly, yet a little cool. When he visited, he merely put his hand on his wife’s shoulder now and then for a moment, although all of her other visitors kissed her heartily.

  Twice a day, company poured into our room. Katie was near the door, Rosa in the middle, and I at the far wall with its locked windows at the foot of the bed. The many relatives clustered around their two beds, laughing, excited, passing around candy and pastries to everyone in the room. I was introduced to all and they nodded and smiled. Often I heard the word Americana popping up in the conversations, and I wondered what they were saying about me.

  When Arno came in to see me they watched our meetings curiously. As he came in we kissed on the mouth and then he sat down on the bed. Often he brought pages of manuscript with him, for he was truly embarked on the novel which had begun so suddenly the night before my labor started. We talked of the book and I read with delight the first chapter the day after the baby’s birth. But mostly we riffled through the copy of What to Name the Baby that I had carried with me from America.

  “We’ve got to find a name,” we kept saying to one another. And the old family jokes about names continued, despite all serious attempts. “Rip,” I said. “How about that?”

  “Rip?” he echoed with disdain. “My son, Rip? What kind of name is that? How about Slit or Perforation? Or there’s always Rock or come to think of it, Boulder. Why not Boulder? It’s got guts.”

  “Or Burlap—or Beethoven.”

  And we were off. He was stretching out at the foot of the bed, leaning on his elbow. I became fleetingly aware of the surprised stares of the Greeks. Finally, we were down to three serious possibilities: Saul, Seth, or Joshua. As I wrote them down over and over to see how they looked in the pages of my diary, I remembered how I had written boys’ names in my notebooks years ago in that adolescent name-writing passion that believes magic is in names and that by writing a name one possesses the person. For a young girl, the act of writing a boy’s name is a romantic, even a sexual, act.

  During the drearier periods of chemistry or civics I had also written out the names of my future children: Eric, Ian, Clive. A far cry from the three Hebraic names which uprooted the English greenery transplanted in our hearts. I felt a pull back to the raw, hot, blinding land of our ancestors. Why we were both drawn there, I don’t know. Our parents, immigrants and children of immigrants, had stayed clear of “Jewish” names, and in a sense we were saying no to that.

  Without ever really talking about it, we had agreed to choose names which spoke to us of virility and strength—and at the same time tie our baby with a nominal cord to a past that, once out of the ghetto and into the gyrations of twentieth-century America, was quickly being lost. Although our own ghetto-conscious and irreligious relatives might say ‘But it sounds so Jewish!’ with a slight wailing note of disappointment, I listened to the three names, Seth, Saul, and Joshua, and felt (or thought I did), tremors of recognition.

  Seth meant “compensation,” and I had lost two pregnancies.51 Saul, the tragic king.52 His bad end did give me a slightly uneasy feeling. Finally, Arno settled it. I had already begun to call the baby Saul, but on the third day we telephoned his parents in Philadelphia and over five thousand miles of echoing cable he shouted out “Joshua! I said Joshua!” And so it was. The one name out of three completely untouched by association or memory. Joshua meant only strength to me, and Josh meant joke, thus laughter. Strength and laughter, not a bad beginning.

  At Madame Kladaki’s, nobody ever questioned whether a woman would nurse her child—not Madame, the nurses and aides, the girls themselves, or their families. It was simply taken for granted. Of course, one would breastfeed. And, probably because our milk supply was assumed ample, there was not a single case of “not enough milk.” Everyone had milk—the problem, in fact, was that we all had too much milk.

  Marina and the little black-haired nurse, Angela, with her quiet, nun-like ways and shyness, were devoted as aunties to us and the babies. They taught us, as women must be taught, by other women who love the babies and love the idea of a baby at a woman’s breast. Perhaps our trouble in America, where doctors, nurses, and families openly or subtly discourage breastfeeding, is that we have broken the chain. Our mothers never breastfed, or our grandmothers never did, and the business of teaching with love has passed into the hands of efficiency-minded or simply uncaring professionals.53

  Teaching takes a little time and a little patience. Before the babies were brought in, those early days, Angela gave us each a small bottle of sterile water and some cotton and told us to swab the nipple and areola. Then, as Rosa and Katie put their more experienced infants to their breasts, Marina came to me. The baby was going to be nursed for the first time. I had no milk yet, and he wasn’t really hungry, but the colostrum54 had come in. Marina handed him to me. He was wrapped up, a tight little bundle in his blue-and-pink blanket—and so different from the Greek babies, with their rosy cheeks and long black hair. I took him with a smile, beginning to feel the real “mineness” of him for the first time. Marina took my areola in her fingers and began to press the area gently, then more firmly, until a few drops of clear fluid appeared. She worked steadily and rhythmically, with concentration, but as she sat down on the bed, crossing her firm, full, bare calves, she gave me a big, open smile. Her eyes held a joke—I never did know what—but she was amused by me, “the Americana,” for some reason. She patted my face for a second, gently, then she swabbed the nipple once more and placed his mouth to it and began to rub her finger against his cheek. As she rubbed he began to seek a little with his tiny open mouth. Finally, he took the nipple, but not the whole areola, which is essential to getting milk. Then he stopped and slept. Soon he woke, whimpering. Over and over, Marina massaged me, pressed his head, which was no bigger than my distended breast, rubbed his cheek. He appeared to try, but got nowhere. Finally, although he was quiet, he seemed a little frustrated. Then Marina bore him away, sleeping and unfed, to his small crib in the delivery room and placed him on his side, along with his five mates. For Madame Kladaki’s clinic was a full house now. Every bed was filled and every crib. Six new mothers, walking like old ladies, groaning and chattering; six new babies, all black-haired and gorgeous but one, like a duckling among swans. Mine.

  That evening, the other two babies were brought in for their ten o’clock nursing; but mine was not. He was asleep, Katie told me. I watched, with empty arms, the two at their hungry feeding. But when Marina brought him in to me at dawn, he was, for the first time, completely awake, and I noticed the same oddly expectant quality in him I had the first day. I took him delightedly. He had changed. He no longer looked like a wizened old man; unaccountably, in the two days of his life, he had become budlike and beautiful. He was fresh and pink and his little face was wonderful to see. As Marina had taught me, I put him to my breast, and to my surprise he took a firm grasp. He had caught on. Although he was only to nurse for five minutes at each breast, he sucked so vigorously that after half an hour I could barely tear him away.

  Like the other girls, I, too, squirmed and gasped a little as he nursed, for not only were my breasts sensitive, but each time he sucked, my womb contracted, and it was like having labor pains again. But I knew this was the natural way of getting the body back in shape. The novelty of holding the hungry baby helped me forget the discomfort. I squirmed and grinned, winced, and felt a great happiness coursing through me, along with the pains.

  Finally, in a stupor of exhaustion and warm milk, he closed his eyes, and I held him on my knees. He was wrapped as in a papoose, or as a mummy, in two small white sheets. Marina and An
gela were across the room, busy with linens; this was the first time I’d had him to myself. Quickly, I unfastened the safety pins that held the bandage-like cloths—they looked like cloths used for making arm slings, and were the small sheets on which the girls at the layette shop had been so insistent. I could barely wait to see him—I had not had a glimpse of anything but his face since I had first seen him kicking from the delivery table. The inevitable question—Is everything truly perfect? (Dr. Spock55 says the question means “Am I good enough to have a perfect child?”) Quickly, I opened the wrappings, freeing his arms from the cloth which pinned them firmly to his sides like a straitjacket. His hands, each finger with its minuscule nail, were exquisite. His feet didn’t look quite so big as I remembered them. I was surprised at the looseness of his skin. I was about to remove his diaper when Marina and Angela ran to my bed, gasping. I looked up to see Rosa and Katie staring at me with apprehension and surprise. I realized that I had never seen either of them examine their infants. Come to think of it, they too had never seen anything but their babies’ faces!

  “Oh! Why do you unwrap your baby, Frances?” cried Katie with round, wide blue eyes. Marina snatched him up and began to pull the cloths tight around his arms and legs, murmuring and clucking as though he had been plundered.

  They were all so shocked that I began to stammer. “I—I just wanted to see him.”

  Marina hustled him away. Later, as we all sat up eating our sweet, creamy custard, I asked Katie why the babies were wrapped. I had experienced so much the past few days that certain awarenesses came slowly. I had seen that the babies were all tightly bundled, but hadn’t thought to call it “swaddling” to myself. In fact, in my ignorance, I had not realized swaddling was still practiced.56

  “We wrap the babies because it is winter, Frances,” said Katie in her schoolmarmish way. “Don’t you wrap them in America?”