The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

locked herself in the upstairs bathroom and ran the taps in the tub until they could no longer camouflage the noise—not a noise she herself was making, not a mechanism of lungs and larynx and vocal cords, but a shifting of plates, mantle roaring through crust, an avalanche somehow sliding upward through her esophagus, a geologic boom of awful movement. Her water broke and kept breaking, pouring out of her fathomless body. She never guessed what she could contain. Seeing her bellowing down the stairs—seeing what she had done, the secret she had kept—Pat was too scared to be angry. The baby was crowning by the time the hospital people got her on a table.

Before she gave birth, Jane imagined pain as a visitation, a localized phenomenon to be accommodated, managed, at times encouraged.She didn’t yet know that a person could become pain, that a body could become both stimulus and response and explode the higher mind, leaving a dumb howling beast to crawlin its wreckage. There was no thinking-Jane to trust the pain or see God in it. She was tortured, she thought later—the thoughtwas blasphemous—like a saint. The stretching on the rack. The crackling fire. But amid the torture she saw no visions, rememberedno prayers. Most saints, after all, did not become mothers. For most—there were exceptions, and it was a sin to think yourselfexceptional—it was a disqualifying event. Not for Mother Seton, but again, Jane’s own mother said she didn’t count.

A groaning beast, a buffalo prone on the plain. Put her out of her misery. If you can bleed out that bad and not die, thenyou must be an animal.

Thinking-Jane returned to herself on the final push, the baby hurtling out of her body, a meteor, a rocket, a slick, downyaeronautic shell reentering the earth’s atmosphere. Jane’s insides scorched black, endless as outer space. Her kenosis.

“It’s a girl,” a voice said, a doctor or a nurse.

“I know,” Jane said, reaching out with both hands.

It wasn’t yet hospital protocol in western New York State at the beginning of 1977 to accede to a mother’s request that a newborn be placed immediately into her arms, but Jane wasn’t asking. The astonishing baby draped on her chest, swampy and stern, eyes liquid and unblinking, bottomless. Once again there was nothing between them.

 

They named her Lauren, a laurel, green and fragrant, a wreath for the Christmas just gone past. The ceramic nativity scene at Saint Benedict’s was still installed in a side chapel, there until Epiphany: officious wisemen in their jewel-toned robes, watchful Joseph, an exuberant angel, beatific Disney livestock. Jane stood dumbfounded bythe display, Lauren bundled under her coat, grunting wetly against Jane’s collarbone. Beneath her clothes, Jane was soakingthrough a maxi pad. Mary was draped in puddling porcelain silks, sunk to her knees in pillows of straw, her hands pressedtogether in prayer toward the swaddled Jesus in the manger. The mother of God had labored on a donkey and then labored ina barn, her body breaking itself open centimeter by centimeter amid hay and shit and cold, an animal among animals. Away ina slop trough, no crib for a bed.

Jane felt a certain kind of way that Christ’s suffering on the Cross was exalted, itemized station by station in this same church, aninfinity of wood and stone, while Mary’s suffering was heated in a kiln and painted in cartoon colors for a children’s seasonaldiorama. She fumbled around inside the cloudy dome of her postpartum brain for the sound of the feeling, hoping she’d recognizeit by touch. Earlier that morning, she told Pat that they needed to buy more diaphragms, or more diamonds, or more diapers—that was it. What was the thing she felt? Put out. Pent up. Perturbed! That was it. Perturbed, the er-er-buh requiring an indignant pursing of lips.

Ringing through her head: O night when Christ was born / O night divine

Would Jane’s high school English teachers have circled Christ was born in red pencil? Was that passive voice? Mary is the subject and Christ is the object. She couldn’t remember the rules. The cell was empty.

“I love that they add something every year,” Dee was saying. “Look at the darling little lambs, right there at the angel’sfeet.”

“Who helped Mary clean herself?” Jane thought, and the thoughts turned into muffled words in the air close by—she could hearthem. “Who helped her clean the baby?” It was Jane who was speaking. “Did Mary need stitches? Did they find a spare mangerfor the afterbirth?”

“Okey-dokey, that’s all, folks,” Pat was saying as he placed his hands on Jane’s shoulders and nudged her toward the exit.The Porky Pig voice he used when he wanted to change the subject, make Jane stop talking. It was Pat’s version of her father’sHow about those Bills?

Later, Jane’s mother told her that Mary didn’t suffer labor pains, because she wasn’t a sinner.

That month was Roots—there was O.J. sprinting across the screen in loincloth and warrior beads, like Pegasus wings could sprout from his backas he broke from the cold storage of Buffalo—and that month was the blizzard. Midnight in the afternoon, flaying winds, snowdriftstaller than Pat and packed like cement. The roads were unpassable, but the lights and the phone stayed on, the furnace andsump pump chugged away, and so the little house on Maple Way became a moon station, a glowing, lonely pod. Jane and Laurendidn’t leave the house for weeks, Jane living off stockpiles of dried pasta and canned beans, Lauren living off Jane. Patstudied and watched a lot of TV in the basement, talked to Colin and Brad on the phone. He was good with the baby. Jane couldrely on him for a solid half hour, forty-five minutes at a stretch, of cuddling on the couch or google-eyed play on the carpet,and she could use the time to do laundry.

It was good that the roads were unpassable because nursing the baby agitated Jane’s parents. “That’s obscene,” her father said, fleeing the room, the first and only time he saw the baby at her breast.