The Love of a Good Woman

girl can look large and meaty in this raw state. In the days after labor, in the maternity ward, women lay carelessly, even defiantly, with their fiery cuts or tears exposed, their black-stitch wounds and sorry flaps and big helpless haunches. It was a sight to see.
    Out of the womb now came plops of wine jelly, and blood, and somewhere in there the fetus. Like the bauble in the cereal box or the prize in the popcorn. A tiny plastic doll as negligible as a fingernail. I didn’t look for it. I held my head up, away from the smell of warm blood.
    “Bathroom,” my father said. “There’s a cover.” He meantthe folded cloth that lay beside the soiled rods. I did not like to say, “Down the toilet?” and took it for granted that that was what he meant. I carried the basin along the hall to the downstairs toilet, dumped the contents, flushed twice, rinsed the basin, and brought it back. My father by this time was bandaging the girl and giving her some instructions. He’s good at this—he does it well. But his face looked heavy, weary enough to drop off the bones. It occurred to me that he had wanted me here, all through the procedure, in case he should collapse. Mrs. B., at least in the old days, apparently waited in the kitchen until the last moments. Maybe she stays with him all the way through now.
    If he had collapsed I don’t know what I’d have done.
    He patted Madeleine’s legs and told her she should lie flat.
    “Don’t try to get up for a few minutes,” he said. “Have you got your ride arranged for?”
    “He’s supposed to’ve been out there all the time,” she said, in a weak but spiteful voice. “He wasn’t supposed to’ve gone anyplace.”
    My father took off his smock and walked to the window of the waiting room.
    “You bet,” he said. “Right there.” He let out a complicated groan, said, “Where’s the laundry basket?” remembered that it was back in the bright room where he’d been working, came back and deposited the smock and said to me, “I’d be very obliged if you could tidy this up.” Tidy up meaning doing the sterilizing and mopping up in general.
    I said I would.
    “Good,” he said. “I’ll say good night now. My daughter will see you out when you’re ready to go.” I was somewhat surprised to hear him say “my daughter” instead of my name. Of course I’d heard him say that before. If he had to introduce me, for instance. Still, I was surprised.
    Madeleine swung her legs off the table the minute he was out ofthe room. Then she staggered and I went to help her. She said, “Okay, okay, just got off of the table too quick. Where’d I put my skirt? I don’t want to stand around looking like this.”
    I got her the skirt and panties off the back of the door and she put them on without help but very shakily.
    I said, “You could rest a minute. Your husband will wait.”
    “My husband’s working in the bush up near Kenora,” she said. “I’m going up there next week. He’s got a place I can stay.
    “Now. I laid my coat down somewheres,” she said.
    M Y favorite movie—as you ought to know and if I could have thought of it when the nurse asked me—is
Wild Strawberries.
I remember the moldy little theater where we used to see all those Swedish and Japanese and Indian and Italian movies and I remember that it had recently switched over from showing
Carry On
movies, and Martin and Lewis, but the name of it I can’t remember. Since you were teaching philosophy to future ministers, your favorite movie should have been
The Seventh Seal
, but was it? I think it was Japanese and I forget what it was about. Anyway we used to walk home from the theater, it was a couple of miles, and we used to have fervent conversations about human love and selfishness and God and faith and desperation. When we got to my rooming house we had to shut up. We had to go so softly up the stairs to my room.
    Ahhh, you would say gratefully and wonderingly as you got in.
    I WOULD have been very nervous about bringing you here last Christmas if we hadn’t already been deep into our fight. I would have felt too protective of you to expose you to my father.
    “Robin? Is that a man’s name?”
    You said, Well yes, it was your name.
    He pretended he’d never heard it before.
    But in fact you got along pretty well together. You had a discussion about some great conflict between different orders of monks in the seventh century, wasn’t that it? The row those monks had was about how