"The Pull of the Stars"

[fiefoe]

Third time to read a novel about a plague this year, and I certainly didn't plan it. Also uttered unsurprised that the narrator fell in love with a girl. Wish Emma Donoghue gave more scenes or more backstory to the fugitive Dr. Lynn.

• Three hearses in a row outside an undertaker’s, the horses already in harness for the morning’s first burials. Two aproned men shouldered a load of pale planks down the lane to the back—for building more coffins, I realised.
• DEFEATISTS ARE THE ALLIES OF DISEASE. I supposed the authorities were trying to buck us up in their shrill way, but it seemed unfair to blame the sick for defeatism.
• The hospital’s atmosphere of scrupulous order—which had survived four years of wartime disruption and shortages and even the Rising’s six days of gunfire and chaos—was finally crumbling under this burden. Staff who fell sick disappeared like pawns from a chessboard.
• Across the globe, in hundreds of languages, signs were going up urging people to cover their coughs.
• Anonymous at Admitting, we’ll call him, Groyne intoned. Gone beyond the veil. Off to join the great majority. The orderly had a bottomless supply of clever euphemisms for the great leveller. Turned up her toes, Groyne might say when a patient died, or hopped the twig, or counting worms.
• My heart squeezed for Eileen Devine. The bone man was making fools of us all. That was what we kids called death in my part of the country—the bone man, that skeletal rider who kept his grinning skull tucked under one arm as he rode from one victim’s house to the next.
• The tight-sheeted cot between her and Ita Noonan was a reproach, a tomb blocking my path. I called up Eileen Devine’s drooping face; she’d kept her dentures in a glass by her bed. (Every baby seemed to cost these inner-city women a handful of teeth.) How she’d loved the hot bath I’d drawn her two days ago—the first she’d ever had, she’d told me in a whisper. Luxury!
• Always on their feet, these Dublin mothers, scrimping and dishing up for their misters and chisellers, living off the scraps left on plates and gallons of weak black tea. The slums in which they somehow managed to stay alive were as pertinent as pulse or respiratory rate, it seemed to me, but only medical observations were permitted on a chart.
• many pregnancies, I might put anaemia, heart strain, bad back, brittle bones, varicose veins, low spirits, incontinence, fistula, torn cervix, or uterine prolapse.
• All these years, I’d been expected to set my judgement aside and obey my ward sister; such an odd sensation, today, to have no one telling me what to do. A measure of excitement to it, but a choking feeling too.
• The man had been up since yesterday morning, then. He held on to the stethoscope around his neck with two hands as a swaying passenger on a tram might grip an overhead strap.
• The little bolt on the door so you can be private, and lashings of gorgeous hot water, and such nice squares of paper. I’m liking hospital. That made me laugh. Especially the smells. I thought, Eucalyptus, linseed, carbolic? Whiskey, at the moment? For me they couldn’t cover up the faecal, bloody tang of birth and death.
• It struck me that she was a beauty in a white-faced, bony way; a precious bead winking in a dustbin.
• Having my last brother, or trying to. Her voice was very low, as if it were a secret, and a shameful one, rather than the most ordinary tragedy ever told. Even if this girl was ignorant of the mechanics of birth, she knew the fundamental fact about it: the risk.
• Bridie was watching me, her eyes crinkling in sympathy. Mary O’Rahilly sketched a cross, touching her forehead, shoulders, and breastbone, before resuming her walk. I felt as if I were adrift in a leaking boat with these strangers, waiting out a storm.
• Young doctors had a tendency to treat nature the way one would a lazy horse—with a crack of the whip. They particularly distrusted primigravidae, who had no record of being able to give birth unaided.
• Waiting for the pang’s grip on Delia Garrett to loosen, I realised I couldn’t imagine enduring such sensations, and yet this was something most women all over the world did. Was there something uncanny about me that I only ever hovered over the scene, a stone angel?
• If the head crowned too fast, during a contraction, it could tear her open. I could press on the perineum, but that would further strain the delicate skin. Instead I did what Sister Finnigan had taught me: set the heel of my right hand behind Delia Garrett’s anus, pushing the unseen head forward, and snaked my left arm over her thigh and through her legs so I’d be ready at her soft parts. Now!
• But relief drained away as I spotted what I was dreading: half the afterbirth was missing. The red tide was rising, soaking the bedding.
• I was in. Immediately I curled my fingertips back so as not to damage the uterine walls. I was a fearful burglar, creeping around a lightless chamber. ... I ran my little finger behind the afterbirth and raked its strings, sawing it free. I got two fingers behind it, then three, peeled the awful fruit with my awkward gloved hands. Come away, I found myself begging the thing. Release your grip on her.
• But my spirits sank none the less; to think that this morning, while Delia Garrett had been griping, flicking through her magazines, snoozing, eating a stolen sausage, her passenger had departed already.
• Tantalising not to be able to get precise answers out of the delirious, isn’t it? Every symptom is a word in the language of disease, but sometimes we can’t hear them properly. And even if we do, we can’t always make out the full sentence.
• STAY CLEAN, WARM, AND WELL NOURISHED, BUT FORBEAR TO USE MORE THAN A FAIR SHARE OF FUEL AND FOOD. EARLY TO SLEEP AND KEEP WINDOWS WIDE, WHILE TAKING CARE TO AVOID DRAUGHTS. VENTILATION AND SANITATION WILL BE OUR NATION’S SALVATION. That paradoxical prescription made my mouth purse; it seemed intended to discomfit either way, whether one turned the gas a little up for health or a little down for economy. Already I felt ashamed every time I caught myself resenting small privations when others had it so much worse. Guilt was the sooty air we breathed these days.
• The Ministry of Food claimed that levels of nutrition had actually improved since the war began because we were eating more vegetables, less sugar. But then I supposed they would say that.
• Dr. Lynn had sent the wrong chaplain. I pointed to her bed. But she’s a Protestant, Father. Church of Ireland.
• The priest nodded. I’m afraid the reverend’s been struck down. There’s only me today, for right- and left-footers alike. Well, as they say, all cats are grey in the dark.
• In the ordinary way of things, she’d have shed her burden sometime in January, then some weeks later gone to be blessed and sprinkled with holy water. Only now did churching strike me as a peculiar tradition, as if giving birth left a faint taint on a woman that needed wiping away. Did Ita Noonan’s death do away with the need to be churched? I wondered—was it enough to purify her in the priests’ eyes?
• It may sound rather back-to-front, but it’s the metabolic processes of decomposition that cause rigor mortis, whereas a low temperature slows down decay and keeps the cadaver soft.
• I supposed the foetus demanded more of everything. A mother’s lungs, circulation, every part had to boost capacity, like a factory gearing up for war.
• Where had she learnt all she seemed to understand? No comb of her own; a single stolen visit to a cinema. Had she ever been in a motorcar, I wondered, or listened to a gramophone?
• I pictured trams grinding along their lines across Dublin like blood through veins. We all live in an unwalled city, that was it. I saw lines scored across the map of Ireland; carved all over the globe. Train tracks, roads, shipping channels, a web of human traffic that connected all nations into one great suffering body.
• No, a white man, metamorphosed. Red to brown to blue to black. This poor fellow was at the end of that terrible rainbow.
• Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.
• Odd how one took conversation for granted. A ribbon held taut between two people—until it was cut.
• I wondered how long it would take me to remember not to ask Tim whether any post had come that day. How many weeks before I stopped missing it? This was how civilization might grind to a halt, one rusted-up cog at a time.
• I put the fruit to my nose and drew in the citrus tang. I thought of its arduous journey through the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar, and up the North Atlantic. Or overland through France—was that even possible anymore? I just hoped nobody had been killed shipping this precious freight. I tucked the orange and chocolates into my bag for a birthday lunch.
• puzzled it through. So for the crime of falling pregnant, Honor White was lodging in a charitable institution where tending her baby and those of other women was the punishment; she owed the nuns a full year of her life to repay what they were spending on imprisoning her for that year. It had a bizarre, circular logic.
• I saw red. Look around you, Mr. Groyne. This is where every nation draws its first breath. Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.
• Bridie let out a laugh. Nice for you. I thought of this morning’s poster: refrain from laughing or chatting closely together. I said, Oh, believe me, I’m grateful.
• Wait for the next pang, and be ready to push. I had such long acquaintance with other women’s pain, I could almost smell it coming.
• My eyes slid to Bridie. Not a bit, Mrs. O’Rahilly. Nature knows how. (Knows how to serve her own ends, I didn’t say. I’d seen nature crack a woman like a walnut shell.)
• The taller butted in. It’s the woman doctor we want. Lynn. We’ve a warrant. (Patting his breast pocket.) War crimes.
• I wondered if the foetus’s head was blocking the urethra, preventing liquid from flowing. I told her, I’m going to let it out for you. (Such a simple description of a tricky procedure. Yet in the absence of a doctor, I had to try it.)
• can’t be sure without taking thorough measurements with a Skutsch’s pelvimeter, and that would probably require general anesthesia. This girl might pass out at any minute, and he wanted to put her to sleep so he could fiddle with instruments and formulas to determine the exact ratio of the problem?
• He murmured, The mortality rate for caesareans is so high, I’d rather try a symphysiotomy. Or actually, better still, a pubiotomy. My heart sank. These operations to widen the pelvis were common in Irish hospitals because they didn’t scar the uterus and limit future childbearing. Pubiotomy did have one advantage over a caesarean: it was less likely to kill Mary O’Rahilly even if it was performed under local anesthetic only on a camp cot by a young general surgeon who’d learnt it from a diagram.
• So many rules I was getting used to breaking, bending to an unrecognizable degree, or interpreting in the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Only for the duration, of course, for the foreseeable future, as the posters said. Though I was having trouble foreseeing any future. How would we ever get back to normal after the pandemic? And would I find myself relieved to be demoted to mere nurse under Sister Finnigan again? Grateful for the familiar protocols or forever discontented?
• There was that opulent fur coat slung over the back of the chair that held her gramophone. Also a folded hospital blanket and a pillow on the floor behind the desk; was the philanthropist locum kipping here like some tramp? Dr. Lynn followed my gaze. Her voice was jocular: I can’t get home much under the current circumstances. The influenza, you mean? That and the police.
• That baby will suck the marrow from her mother’s bones and still have less chance of surviving her first year than a man in the trenches. That horrified me. Really? She said sternly, Infant mortality in Dublin stands at fifteen per cent—that’s what living in the dampest, most crowded housing in Europe will do.
• (I added that so she wouldn’t think I’d earned enough to buy myself such a thing.) She murmured, It’s still warm from you. The chain between the two of us was a taut umbilicus.
• Bridie nodded. People paid the convent to have them said for special intentions. That flabbergasted me, the notion of children praying on an industrial scale, children so hungry they’d eat glue.
• Bridie didn’t ask, Doesn’t what? Instead, she asked, Doesn’t talk to you? To anyone. Not a word anymore. As if his throat’s been cut—except the damage is all in his mind. I wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to blab all this, to set one small pebble of pain on the scale against Bridie’s boulders.
• It happens every day, the world over—women have babies and they die. No, I corrected myself, they die of having babies. It’s hardly news, so I don’t know why it still fills me with such rage. Bridie said, I suppose it’s your fight.
• The time of my life. Such an adventure! A couple more people are alive because of us—because you and me were here and did our bit. Can you credit it? But—the very best days, really, Bridie? Well, and I’ve met you. (Her five syllables, like blows to my chest.)
• I let the kiss happen. Never before, never this way. Like a pearly moon in my mouth, huge, overwhelming, the brightness. This was against every rule I’d been reared by. I kissed her back. The old world was changed utterly, dying on its feet, and a new one was struggling to be born. There might only be this one night left, which was why I kissed Bridie Sweeney, held her and kissed her with all I had and all I was.
• Now that Mary O’Rahilly had confessed the truth, what in the world was I going to advise her to do? She’d be taking her baby home in six days or less, and neighbours made a point of never coming between man and wife.
• The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.
• I held her in my arms as crimson bubbled from her nose. I couldn’t find a pulse in her skinny wrist. Her skin was clammy now, losing all the heat it had hoarded. I did nothing, only crouched there counting her fluttering sips of air—fifty-three in a minute. How fast could a person breathe? As light as the wings of a moth; as loud as a tree being sawn down.