Peter Geye: The Lighthouse Road

Her voice was lilting and faint and it put the boy at ease. She went to the rocking chair next to the window and lifted her nightdress. Her full breast shone in the winter moonlight. Odd as much as lunged for it, and in an instant Rebekah could hear him suckling.

Thea began another song, her voice even fainter from across the room.

"What does it mean?" Rebekah asked, her voice upsetting the deep silence enough that Odd pulled off Thea's breast.

Thea guided his head back to his feast. "A bear sleeping," she said softly.

"It sounds pretty. You sing nice." Rebekah could see Thea's smile in the moonlight, could see her glassy eyes. "It's a lullaby. A song you sing your baby. It's called a lullaby."

"Lullaby," Thea repeated.

"You're making me sleepy."

Again Thea smiled.

Then there was only the sound of Odd suckling, of Odd catching his breath when he was finished. Thea put him over her shoulder and stood and walked around the room as she patted his back. She stopped at the window and stood there with her son, the moon gone higher but still shining through the glass.

Rebekah watched them for what might have been an hour. Long enough that the moon no longer gave them light. When Thea finally returned to her bed with the sleeping boy, she did so still whispering the lullabies. She fluffed her pillows and lay down. She pulled the bedding up over her legs and sang to him more.

And Rebekah might have fallen asleep listening to Thea sing but she was intent on enforcing Hosea's will. So she struggled to stay awake. When no sound had come from the other bed for some minutes, Rebekah slid from her bedcovers, crossed the room, and stood above Thea and her son. It was the first time she'd seen Thea sleep since the child had been born. Odd lay in her limp arms, wrapped in his blanket, the cap falling off his head, his hair winging out after his bath earlier that night.

Neither Odd nor Thea woke when Rebekah picked up the boy. She held him as she'd seen Thea, setting him in the crook of her arm, holding his head with her free hand. His lips puckered and he reached for his face with his bunched hands and she was sure he'd wake bawling but he only settled deeper into her arms. The floor creaked as she stepped off the carpet, into the whispered light from the window.

Thea slept soundly, her head fallen on her shoulder, her breathing slow and tremulous. There were no dreams there. And there were none in the boy, either. She could see that. All of that sleep absent of dreams saddened Rebekah deeply. She laid the boy in the bassinet and tiptoed to bed, thought she might conjure dreams for all of them. Lord knows she had them.

R ebekah woke to Thea's screams and the light of morning. Her eyes flashed open and the first thing she saw was Thea thrashing in her bed, kicking and tearing at the bed linens. "Odd! Odd! Odd!" she said, her voice shrill and piercing.

Rebekah threw her covers back and jumped from bed, not remembering her antics in the middle of the night before. They reached the bassinet at the same moment and looked together into its emptiness.

Thea hollered as she ran from room to room in the flat, her panic rising alongside her shouting, Rebekah trailing the desperate mother.

By the time Thea reached the second floor her shouting had given over to sobs. She went down the hallway from door to door, stepping into each room to check for the boy. It was in the fourth room, in the surgery, that she found him, lying on the table, Hosea standing above him with a pair of eight-inch nickel-plated shears in his hand. On a tray next to the boy lay a pile of bloodstained gauze and a long needle and syringe. The boy was naked and wailing.

Rebekah managed to get her arms around Thea before she reached the table. Before she reached her boy. Thea's cries mixed with Odd's and Rebekah hugged her tight.

Hosea spoke. "Dear child, there's nothing amiss." He set the shears on the table, turned and reached out for Thea, took her hands in his, and tried to pull her to him.

"My boy! " Thea shrieked, fighting to free herself from both Rebekah and Hosea. They held her tight. Her crying had sapped her breath and she went limp in their arms and could only muster a whisper as she said, " Good Lord, my boy."

Hosea ushered her to a chair and urged her to sit. To Rebekah he said, " Apply an ample dose of Vaseline to the boy's prepuce and wrap him up." Turning to Thea he said, "Miss Eide, listen to me."

Thea seemed to have no breath left in her.

"Miss Eide!" Hosea shook her by the shoulders. "Miss Eide, listen to me. Odd is fine. I gave him an examination this morning, I circumcised him. There's nothing wrong with the boy that a little nap won't cure. You've nothing to worry about. These are things the child must have done. Do you understand me?"

Of course she did not.

On the table on the other side of the room Rebekah had wrapped the boy's bottom, had dressed him in his layette and his knit hat. In her clumsy way she picked him up and carried him to Thea, who pushed Hosea out of the way and stood and took her boy in one motion. Odd stopped wailing as soon as he was in his mother's arms. Thea hurried from the surgery, ran up to her bedroom, and closed the door behind her.

Hosea and Rebekah stood in the surgery, looking at each other, shocked though they ought not to have been.

After a moment Hosea said, "There's no use denying it any longer. She's suffering badly. Postpartum melancholia. Worse than I've ever seen it." He looked at Rebekah and said softly, "Will you check on Thea?"

H osea read deep into the night, consulting his old medical journals and further chapters in Fox's Psychopathology of Hysteria. Around midnight he'd decided there was but a single course of action: He must remove her ovaries to quell the madness. It was a decision that greatly eased his concern, and after he reread Battey's "Oophorectomy: A Case Study" in the British Medical Journal he made notes in his surgeon's journal. Before he retired for the night, he wrote a long explanation in Norwegian and practiced it twice.

Early the next morning, after only two hours' sleep, as soon as he heard stirrings in Thea's bedroom, he knocked quietly on the door.

He knocked, put his ear to the door, and listened to her feet hurry

ing softly across the floor. "Miss Eide?" he said quietly. He knocked again when she did not answer. "Miss Eide, I must speak with you. May I come in?"

When she failed to answer again he pressed the door open. She sat on the bed, Odd clutched in her arms. She had the look of a cornered animal.

"Thea, dear, what do you think I've done? Do you not understand that I took Odd yesterday only to perform perfunctory and essential examinations? That if I'd failed to perform those examinations I would have been in breach of the code of ethics by which my profession is governed?"

He'd intended to spare her his lecture on professional ethics, to cut right to the matter at hand, but he couldn't help himself.

She only looked at him fearfully.

He proceeded in Norwegian, reading from the notes he'd prepared late the night before, notes he hoped would convey not only his sense of urgency but his profound affection for her and her boy. "Miss Eide, I am your friend. I have tried to help you. And your boy." He paused, judged the look on her face, and took a step closer.

"Thea, I was helping your boy yesterday." He paused again, looked at his prepared remarks, looked at Thea, still clutching Odd on the bed, her eyes swollen with tears and lack of sleep, and thought he loved them both. He wished he could tell her, wished he could convey the honesty of his feelings. Instead he returned to his remarks.