Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

"No way."

"A hippie?"

"Isn't that word awful? I can't believe we ever used it seriously."

"We didn't, Sibyl. At least I didn't."

"I'll bet you were a real hippie-hater back then. I'll bet we drove you crazy."

"I didn't hate hippies! I didn't even know any hippies. Why would you think I'd hate them?"

"Because you're so unbelievably uptight. Look at your shoes."

"I'm not uptight."

"You think so?"

"I do."

"Okay, let's see. Ever smoked grass?"

"Yes."

"A lot?"

"I didn't like it. So I didn't do it again."

"So you did it once."

"Or twice, maybe."

"In Vietnam or Vermont?"

"Vietnam."

"That doesn't count."

"Why?"

"I've always envisioned that place as so totally horrible you had to smoke dope like air just to survive."

"It was horrible if you were in the jungle. I wasn't."

"So you didn't have to smoke dope?"

"Well, at least not to survive."

"But you didn't want to either."

"It seems to me, Mrs. Danforth," he said with professorial gravity, "that any movement that uses an illegal drug as its principal criterion for membership or inclusion is a movement not worth joining."

"Okay. Here are some easy ones. Ever spent a week in a commune?"

"Thankfully not."

"Slept in a van?"

"Nope."

"Been barefoot?"

"Of course."

"For days at a time?"

"Hours. Maybe."

"Worn beads?"

"Not a prayer."

"That's fine. Let's get a little more serious: Ever tried to connect with the Black Panthers? Maybe help set up a volunteer breakfast program for hungry families in Boston?"

"You did that, I suppose?"

"I did. Ever put together prenatal information pamphlets for poor Vermont women, and then gone house to house and trailer to trailer for days to make sure people got them?"

"Did that too, eh?"

"I did. Or how about just feeling the most incredible, awesome love for people-all people-just because they're human and therefore amazingly magic? Ever felt that?"

"Probably not sober."

"Or just wanting the world to stop caring about things? Possessions? Status? Wanting us all to stop judging each other by what we own?"

"I like what I own, Sibyl," Stephen said, trying to make light of her passion, and then I heard him yell in mock pain.

"Do you always hit your lawyers?"

"That didn't hurt," my mother said, and she was laughing.

"Trust me, it did."

"I did those things, I felt those things," my mother said, ignoring him. "I was with people like Raymond Mungo and Marshall Bloom. I really believed the war was wrong."

"I believe you did."

"I grew up in Vermont-not Westchester County or some town-house in Back Bay. I actually knew boys who went to Vietnam. A lot of them. Most of the boys in my high-school class went there. For me, the war wasn't just some trendy thing to protest against. I was worrying about boys I knew well-sometimes very well-as well as villagers I'd never met."

"Boys like me."

"Yes, boys like you. Being a hippie wasn't just about bouncing around without a bra, or having a lot of sex with boys you barely knew. It's really easy today to look back on those years and make fun of us for our clothes or drugs or silly posters. But at its best, the whole… era was about trying to make the world a little less scary."

A floorboard squeaked as one of the adults outside stood up. A shadow passed across the sill, and Stephen's voice grew closer.

"I didn't mean to make fun of the things you did," he said.

"You didn't make fun of anything. I was just telling you."

I then heard the wood shift under my mother's weight as well, as she stood up beside him. The two were silent for a long moment and I envisioned them watching the sun set, or staring into the shadows shaped like ice cream cones that were cast by the line of blue spruce at the western edge of our lawn.

"You never told me how we might settle," she said finally.

"I didn't, did I?"

"No."

"Okay, let's see," Stephen began, those first words offered at the end of a long sigh. "Here is where the idea of small-town Vermont has always been most real to me. Bill and I know each other, and we know the system. When I used the word settle, I meant negotiate. Or bargain. Depending on what the State has or doesn't have in the way of a case, I can imagine me sitting down with Bill at some point this spring and saying to him, 'Bill, we both know we can settle this thing now, or we can make all our lives unduly hard in six months with a trial.'"

"What would we be negotiating?"

"It might be the charge. And if we agree on that, it might be the sentence."

I flinched at the word sentence, and clearly my mother had, too. "The sentence?" she said, a tiny but unmistakable sliver of panic shooting through her voice. "I haven't done anything wrong!"

"Everything I'm saying here is conjecture, Sibyl. This is all just… just talk. Okay?"

"I don't think I like this kind of talk."

"Well, a sentence may not even be an issue. So let's not talk about it now. Fair enough?"

"No, I want you to go on."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. The idea that we're already sentencing me freaked me out there for a second, but I'm fine now."

"Okay. Here's one way we might settle this thing. We plead guilty to a charge of practicing medicine without a license-a misdemeanor-and we pay a fine. No big deal, at least not in the greater scheme of things. Then on a charge of involuntary manslaughter, we accept a deferred sentence. Let's say two or three years and another small fine, but no conviction at the end of the deferment. How does that sound?" Stephen asked, and I could tell that he thought he had just painted a wonderful scenario for my mother, one that he believed would restore her confidence and mood.

"Tell me what a deferred sentence is," she said simply.

"You plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter. Usually, that would mean imprisonment for one to fifteen years. Not in this case. A deferred sentence is a postponement of the sentencing by-in my example, anyway-two or three years. If at the end of that time you've met all of the conditions for the deferment, there's no jail time and no record. Just the fine."

"What's a condition? Something like house arrest?"

"God, no! You'd come and go as you pleased, your life would be completely normal. Maybe you'd do some community service. But mostly you'd just be expected not to break any laws during the deferment or-and I think this is inevitable-work as a midwife."

"And after two or three years?"

"It would be like nothing happened."

"It will never, ever be like that. Not under any circumstances."

"I mean in the eyes of the law."

"So if I give up my practice for a few years, the State will back off? Is that right?"

"That's one… possibility."

"And there'd be no record?"

"On the charge of involuntary manslaughter. In the stew I just cooked up, you've pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license."

"And that's a misdemeanor?"

"Astonishingly, yes."

"Is this… stew likely?"

"I don't know yet."

"But you don't think so, do you?" my mother said. We had both heard the doubt in Stephen's voice.

"Sibyl, I just don't know. For all I know, it's possible. Maybe probation is possible-"

"Probation?"

"Let's suppose the State has an airtight case, a case we just can't win. There's no way. In return for no jail time we plead guilty, and you get a suspended sentence and a couple years' probation. Again, your life goes on more or less as it always has, except there's this probation officer you see every so often, and you give up midwifery."

Slowly, sounding at once oddly drugged and unshakably determined-each syllable in each word a declaration itself-my mother said, "That's not an option, Stephen. I could never give that up. I never will give that up."