An Innocent, a Broad Read online

  an Innocent, a Broad

  ANN LEARY

  Contents

  Part One - Prom

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Part Two - Special Care

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Part Three - The Ugly American

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Part Four - Auld Reekie

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for An Innocent, a Broad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  The events described in this book took place over thirteen years ago. In writing the book I relied solely upon my memory and the letters I wrote home to a few friends. I did not seek professional support from medical staff at University College Hospital. Any technical explanations (or technical errors) are mine.

  The names of many of the people in this book have been changed to protect their privacy. Some characters are not based on any one person but are composite characters.

  PART ONE

  Prom

  ONE

  DURING MY PREGNANCY with Jack, my first child, I worked in my stepfather’s Boston law office and spent most of the day fantasizing about my baby and about its birth. I read someplace that one should keep a journal during pregnancy, and while I’ve always been too lazy for journal keeping, I thought I might chronicle the labor and birth, and perhaps even send in the result to one of the maternity publications that I had recently begun to read. These magazines printed real, first-person accounts of childbirth, and I was especially fascinated by the home-birthing stories.

  Who are these women? I wondered as I read one enthralling birth story after another. They scrubbed their kitchen floors and home-schooled their older children while they labored, then, when it was time to push, they pulled a plastic tub out of a closet, squatted over it, and blithely expelled a baby into the hands of an astoundingly capable husband. The children would help stitch up Mom, and the placenta would be stored in a lunch box in the freezer, presumably to be displayed annually on the child’s birthday.

  I admired the women in these stories for their stoicism and almost mystical strength, and I often imagined my own home birth. In my daydreams the home birth was never planned but happened almost against my will. I imagined that when I recognized the first pangs of labor, I would take a leisurely bath. Then, packing my pajamas into an overnight bag, I would realize that there was no time to make it to the hospital, and I would inform my husband in hot, gasping breaths that we would be having the baby at home. We would then spend the rest of the evening on our bed, laboring and breathing and ultimately producing a beautiful, plump baby that my husband would triumphantly slide onto my bare belly. (This fantasy would also, on occasion, include a handsome fireman who was called upon in a moment of panic.) Although I had never been able to endure a menstrual period without pain medication, I thought that with each dizzying contraction, a preternatural strength and instinctive wisdom would permeate my consciousness, and I would produce my baby with the calm efficiency of a mother cat. I also assumed that the entire birth story could be told on a single typed page.

  I was wrong.

  Jack’s due date was July 3, 1990, but his birth story began almost four months earlier on March 23, when my husband, Denis Leary, and I arrived in London for what was supposed to be a long weekend. Denis was scheduled to appear the following night on Live from Paramount City, a BBC television show that featured unknown American and British comedy acts each week. We were young and broke, and producers were not yet in the habit of flying us anywhere, but the night before we had entered the first-class lounge at the Virgin terminal as if we flew first-class all the time, and during the flight I drank eight glasses of water, just as I’d been instructed to do in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Our first child was due in another fourteen weeks, and I spent the entire flight basking in the knowledge that this squirming, curving, rapturous movement inside me was from our baby. (Even in my thoughts, the word was italicized.)

  For some reason I’d always had an uneasy suspicion that I would not be able to conceive a child, and when I did, I viewed it as nothing short of a miracle. Certainly I was aware that it didn’t require a lot of intellect or talent to procreate and that most people could do it. But I’ve always known that I desperately wanted to be a mother, and I suspected that I might be punished for some premarital sexual high jinks by having my tubes sealed shut or my womb rendered useless by some invisible disease. It’s a Catholic thing. The year before, after having lived together since college, Denis and I had decided to get married, and I wanted to immediately try to have a baby. Fortunately, Denis isn’t one of those bothersome types who worry about actually being able to clothe and feed the child once it’s born, and he was only too happy to participate in the baby-producing scheme. We stopped using the birth control that I had always feared was pathetically uncalled for, and miraculously, after one night of trying, I became pregnant. Now my neurotic mental flight patterns were rerouted, and I was overwhelmed with fear about the well-being of my unborn baby.

  I had a recurring dream as a child. My mother leaves my brother and me in the car to run into a store, and while she’s gone, the car starts driving by itself. I have to jump into the front seat and steer, but my feet can’t reach the brakes, and the steering wheel keeps coming off its column, so we go careening through town, barely missing fatal collisions. We keep going. We want to stop, but we can’t, and then I awaken. From the moment I learned I was pregnant, I felt as if I were in that car again, being taken for a ride I couldn’t control.

  A near miss occurred during my first trimester, when I began “spotting,” a term I had never heard before but one that’s relatively self-explanatory. In a panic I left work and started driving to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’d been assigned by my HMO to have my prenatal care. I drove through Charlestown and on toward Cambridge on what was then known as the Prison Point Bridge. I was trying to prevent the heaving sobs in my gut from working their way to the surface.

  I knew it, I thought, and as I sat in traffic, I was almost completely engulfed in self-pity when I noticed a man in a pickup truck in the next lane waving frantically at me. I stared at him, uncomprehending. He was gesturing violently at me to leave my lane and pull into the lane in front of him. I shot him an evil look and was about to proceed when at last his words sunk in.

  “You’re in a funeral line!” he was shouting. “You’re in a friggin’ funeral procession!”

  I looked, and as far as I could see in front of and behind me, there were cars with their lights on and funeral-parlor flags on their antennae. I didn’t remember pulling into a funeral procession. I hadn’t noticed the other cars at all. Charlestown is an Irish-American neighborhood, and I realized later that the man had been admiring the funeral procession, as only the Irish can do, when he saw me brazenly penetrate its ranks.

  My baby, my perceived misfortune, my swelling grief—all were completely erased from my mind in that instant, as I tried to process my newfound shame. I moved a lot as a child and was always the new student, always the out-of-sync, unwanted interloper in a group. As a result, to this day I would almost rather be flogged than find myself in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. I sheepishly smiled and waved at the man for allowing me to pull in front
of him. Then I pulled out of the death lane. I drove to the hospital, where my belly was lubed and the doctor rolled the sonogram wand up and down and across my skin. I looked frantically at the monitor and saw black, white, and gray swirling lines that swelled and crashed like waves.

  “Can you see anything?” I asked the doctor, not sure what a ten-week-old fetus might look like. The doctor just frowned and kept the wand gliding around searching for something. Then she stopped.

  “There,” she said. “There it is.”

  I looked at the monitor and saw more black and gray swirls. “What is it?” I asked.

  “The heartbeat,” the doctor said, and she pointed to a faint light in the middle of the screen. There it was, blinking on and off like a signal from a tiny lost soul.

  IT TURNED OUT that the spotting was due to normal hormonal changes, which are explained on page 344 of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. My copy of the book automatically opens to this page even now, thirteen years later. I read What to Expect… compulsively during that pregnancy. I read nothing else. The book is made up of thousands of hypothetical questions about pregnancy, which the authors answer in soothingly matter-of-fact terms. For example, on page 138, in the chapter entitled “The Third Month,” a question reads:

  “I find that I’m getting a lot more headaches than ever before. Do I have to suffer with them because I can’t take pain relievers?”

  The authors then discuss the hormonal causes of the headaches and offer alternatives to medication, such as eating regularly and exercising. I read the book cover to cover twice before I understood why I kept reading it. It was because I was trying to find the answers to my questions, none of which were even mentioned in the book. I read about why pregnancy causes heartburn and indigestion, but I wanted to know how to prevent having a baby who was born with only a brain stem. Or how to guarantee that I wouldn’t die in childbirth. How to ensure that my child would live a life with a minimal amount of suffering, that it wouldn’t be a victim of bullies or become a prisoner of war or have a hunchback. These were the important questions, and they were nowhere to be found in the book, nor were the answers. I’m a master fretter, and I worried about every possible disastrous scenario that might endanger my precious baby—except for one! The scenario that my child might be born three months early, weighing only two pounds, six ounces, in a foreign country.

  Which brings us back to March 23, 1990. We landed at Heathrow that Friday morning and were met by a friendly production assistant named Mandy and a driver named Ned. Again, Denis and I behaved as if we were constantly being met at airports by drivers and perky assistants, and on our way to the hotel, Mandy told us how excited the producers were to have Denis on the show. Tonight, she informed us, Denis could try out some material at the Comedy Store in Leicester Square, and the next night he would perform live for all of Britain on the BBC.

  I tried not to think about the performances. Once, backstage at a New York comedy club, a drunken comedian had told me that performing stand-up was more difficult and unpredictable than giving birth.

  “It’s eighty percent luck, only twenty percent talent. Anything can happen. It’s decided by the Fates, by astrology, by … who the fuck knows?”

  These words elevated this particular comic, in my mind, from a washed-up hack to a wizened sage. No truer words had ever been spoken. Comedy, like childbirth, is sometimes just too excruciatingly painful to watch, especially if it’s being performed by somebody you love. The material has been conceived with such hope and high expectations, but the delivery is fraught with peril. The audience might be too drunk to listen, or all the front tables might be occupied by non-English-speaking tourists. One mistimed word or forgotten sound effect can mutilate an otherwise hilarious bit, and one altered joke can abort a whole set.

  Fortunately for Denis, the planets must have been aligned in his favor the night, weeks before, when the BBC producers had spotted him in New York at Catch A Rising Star, and they were aligned again that Friday night at the Comedy Store in London. I knew two minutes into his act that he was going to “kill.” The audience hung on every word. They roared at every gag and interrupted the set with applause. I hadn’t seen Denis perform in months, and I, too, laughed uncontrollably. I laughed and laughed, and our baby rolled gleefully under my ribs. I held my swollen belly in my hands and felt a delicate orb (a knee? an elbow?) glide beneath my skin, and I wept with laughter.

  The next morning we had room service bring us breakfast, and we ordered up a storm. We weren’t paying! We stuffed ourselves with bangers and eggs and chocolate croissants. Then we decided to go for a walk, and as we strolled hand in hand toward Oxford Street, I suddenly experienced what is technically—and ironically—called PROM, or premature rupture of membranes. In lay terms, my water broke.

  It’s true that at times like this we learn of what we’re really made. I used to think that if I were in a major disaster—say, a plane crash or an earthquake—I would be the one to take charge. While the weak-willed people with the small brains ran shrieking into the burning wreckage, I would be the one to stop them and lead them to safety. In my mind most people were handwringers, unable to take action, while I was a doer, the one who would coolly Heimlich the choker and tourniquet the bleeder. It was easy to hold these beliefs about myself, as I had never actually been involved in any kind of real-life crisis. I identified with the heroes and heroines in literature and felt sure that I would have been able, for example, to deliver Melanie’s baby in Gone With the Wind or rebuild a plantation with nothing but my bare hands and razor-sharp intellect. It never occurred to me that nobody sees herself as Prissy the useless slave girl, and that it’s easy to feel brave when the most imminent threat is an overdue cable bill. So it came as a bit of a surprise that afternoon in central London to learn that I am, in fact, the shrieking, running-into-the-burning-wreckage type.

  “Maybe you just peed your pants,” Denis offered hopefully, between my wailing cries.

  “No, I didn’t pee my pants. THE BABY!” I screamed.

  “Well, how do you know it’s not pee?” Denis asked, frantically trying to wave down a cab.

  “Because I still have to pee!” I cried. “It’s the baby. OH, MY GOD, WE’VE LOST THE BABY!”

  If this had happened on Broadway on New York’s Upper West Side, I imagine that a riotous crowd would have formed. Passing women would have joined me in my panic, homeless men would have offered filthy blankets, and fights would have ensued about which hospital I should be taken to. But this was London, and while I saw that many English passersby noticed me, they quickly averted their eyes. This wasn’t out of cold indifference, but was an effort to spare me embarrassment, a condition the British consider far worse than PROM. Any Brit worth his salt would have thought it the height of embarrassment for me to be standing on the corner of Berners and Oxford Streets with amniotic fluid running down my legs, and so wouldn’t dream of calling attention to me. A cab pulled up, and as we entered, a passing, middle-aged woman whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “There’s a hospital round the corner off Berners Street, dear,” and then she scurried off.

  TWO

  THE TAXI DROPPED us at Middlesex Hospital, and we burst through the front doors into an empty lobby.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” said Denis.

  “Oh, my God!” I cried. Repeatedly.

  Suddenly we heard approaching footsteps, and a nurse appeared in the lobby.

  “Where’s the maternity ward?” I shrieked—snot, tears, and amniotic fluid flowing freely.

  After an appalled silence, the nurse said, “I’m afraid you’re in the wrong hospital. We have no maternity department here.”

  “My wife just… her water came out… and she’s only six months pregnant—” Denis began.

  “Not even six months!” I wailed.

  “We’re from … out of town,” Denis said, and he said this in an imploring voice, as if he were trying to persuade the nurse to make an exception in
our case.

  “You need to go to University College Hospital. It’s only a short distance.” The nurse’s initial perplexed tone had been replaced by a cheerful, commandeering one. She now spoke with the unrestrained enthusiasm of a trapped miner who sees a light ahead and tastes a breath of fresh air. “I’ll ring you a taxi!”

  “A taxi?” replied Denis. “That’ll take too long. Can’t you get us an ambulance?”

  “No,” said the nurse. “You’re better off taking a taxi. Look, someone is being let off out front. Tell the driver you want the Women’s Hospital at UCH, but it’s best not to mention the bit about the leaking fluids to the driver. Well then, good luck,” she chirped, and she shoved us out the door and into the awaiting taxi with great haste.

  “University College Hospital,” Denis shouted.

  “Which building?” inquired the driver.

  “I don’t know,” Denis said helplessly. “Is there a maternity building?”

  The driver nodded, and, frowning at my teary, moaning reflection in his rearview, he wheeled away from the curb and sped through the winding gray streets of central London.

  It took only a few minutes to reach UCH, but the journey allowed me just enough time to take stock of the situation and become completely unraveled. By the time we walked through the doors into the Women’s Hospital at UCH, I was in an absolute frenzy and we were rushed into Labor and Delivery. There Denis and I were told to wait in an examining room for Dr. Andrews, who appeared almost immediately. Through heaving sobs I apprised him of the situation, and Dr. Andrews (“Call me Scott,” he insisted) listened patiently.