Evan Hunter - The blackboard jungle

“You made good time, Rick,” she said. She was a small woman, as blond as Anne was, miraculously blond considering the fact that she was fifty-four and hadn’t once used any tints on her head. She smiled now and held his hands tightly, and he asked, “Is she all right. Mom?”

“She’s fine, darling,” Anne’s mother said.

“I came the minute I got your message. I had to clear it with the office, but...”

“I was in the ladies’ room,” Anne’s mother said, as if she felt some compulsion to explain her recent absence.

“But she’s all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine. She called me the minute the pains started.”

“She should have called me,” Rick said. “I would have...”

“I took a cab,” Anne’s mother said. “I was there in fifteen minutes. I think it’s going to be an easy birth, Rick.”

“How do you know? I mean, how can you tell?” he asked.

“The pains were coming very fast when we got here. Dr. Bradley took her right upstairs.”

“He was here when you arrived?”

“Yes. He’s awfully nice, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Rick said, realizing he was whispering, and wondering why he was. His mother-in-law sat on the bench beside him, and Rick turned and looked up at the face of the clock in the wall, hanging over the list of names lettered in red and black scroll. He didn’t know what the names were all about, and he was too worried to read any of them. He turned from the clock without having consciously read the time, and then he looked at his mother-in-law and saw the nervousness on her face, too, and envied her for being a woman because she knew what it was all about, and he knew only the worry and the strain and the fear bred of ignorance.

His eyes roamed the room, and he knew he was consciously allowing them to roam, filling the time until Dr. Bradley appeared. He saw the sign TELEPHONES to the left of the entrance doors, and he saw the boards flanking each side of the entrance doors, the boards holding the doctors’ names, and the red in buttons and the black out buttons which flashed a white arrow when the doctor was in the hospital. He was tempted to walk over to the board and see if Dr. Bradley were indeed in, but the girl at the reception desk had said he was in, and his own mother-in-law had said she’d seen him, but he still wanted to walk over there and check. He rose abruptly, and then realized how foolish he was being, but since he was standing he began to pace, and Anne’s mother watched him and said nothing.

The wall opposite the entrance wall had an arch smack in its center. He could see a sign reading EMERGENCY jutting out into the corridor beyond the arch, and he wondered if Anne were considered an emergency, and then he realized that was foolish, too. Benches flanked the arch in that wall, and two windowed doors flanked the benches symmetrically. A water fountain hugged the wall in the left corner, and a high arched window with a bench under it was on the right-angle wall that held the reception desk. On the righthand side of the arch, over the bench there, a bronze plaque and a small sign commanded his attention. He could not read the plaque, but the sign said:

He wondered if Anne would need a transfusion, and he wondered if he should go up to the nth floor and give some blood, and then he reminded himself he was being foolish again, and he wondered why he was being so damned foolish. Women had babies every day of the week. In China, they dropped them in the fields and then picked up their hoes again. But this wasn’t China, and this wasn’t a faceless woman-who-had-a-baby-every-day-of-the-week. This was Anne, this was his wife, and she was up there in the delivery room all alone and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do for her. This was one battle that was all her own, exclusively, and the knowledge left him frustrated because he wanted to help her and he knew he couldn’t.

All he could do was pace under the big chandelier that dominated the ceiling of the room, the ceiling with its ornate circular design. He walked to the reception desk, and then to the glass-fronted case to the left of the desk, where the carefully scripted words Flowers For Sale were lettered onto the wood.

He wanted to buy flowers, but the case was closed, and the Gift Shop (magazines, candies) opposite it was locked tighter than a drum, too. He realized they were both probably open during visiting hours, but this was not visiting hours, so he toyed with the idea of running down to either of the two florists on the opposite corners of 76th Street, and then he thought he’d miss Dr. Bradley if he did that, so he kept pacing, back and forth, back and forth, and then over to the telephone booths, and then to the arch near the telephone booths, across the marbled floor, looking up at the legend on the arch:

He did not read the rest because the “in Loving Memory of” filled him with a sudden dread. He did not know the statistics for women who died in childbirth, though he suspected the figures were very low indeed. But women did die in childbirth and, no, nothing like that would happen, nothing like that to Anne.

He walked back to the bench where his mother-in-law sat, and she said, smiling, “Relax, Rick. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.”

He nodded blankly, looked up at the clock again, thought abruptly of the lesson he’d taught on “The Fifty-First Dragon,” and then switched his thoughts back to Anne and the delivery room.

It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes since he’d arrived at the hospital when he saw Dr. Bradley coming through the arch where the emergency sign hung in the corridor. Dr. Bradley was not smiling, and he looked very tired, and Rick walked to him quickly, seeing out of the corner of his eye Anne’s mother rise from the bench.

Dr. Bradley extended his hand, and Rick took it, and then the doctor smiled, very weakly, like a man who has just swum the English Channel and is too tired to pose for pictures. Rick didn’t ask anything, but his questions were all over his face, and the doctor looked at Rick’s face, and his mouth stopped smiling. He looked very, very tired, and the weariness showed in his eyes and even his mustache seemed limp under the aquiline sweep of his nose. A light sheen of sweat stood out on his forehead, and Rick studied the doctor’s eyes and then said, “Is she all right?”

“Yes,” Dr. Bradley said wearily, smiling again. “She’s fine, Mr. Dadier.”

Anne’s mother was standing beside them now, craning forward like someone who wants to intrude but isn’t sure her intrusion is welcome.

“She’s all right?” Rick asked again.

“Yes, she’s fine.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?” Anne’s mother asked.

Rick saw the pain stab deep into Dr. Bradley’s eyes, and the pain leaped the distance between them and lodged in his own throat like a poisoned dart.

“The baby was stillborn,” Dr. Bradley said softly. “A boy. I’m sorry, Mr. Dadier. The umbilical cord... it sometimes happens and there’s no way of foretelling...” He paused and wiped the sweat from his forehead, knowing that no matter how well he told this, no matter how honest he was, how sincere he was, there would still be doubt, that lingering doubt which silently asked, “But couldn’t you do something?” The doubt which silently accused the obstetrician.

“Around the baby’s throat,” Dr. Bradley said softly. “Intrauterine...”

“The baby is dead,” Rick said, stunned. “Is that it?”