“I knew of a girl who, because her father was a ne’er-do-well and a drinker, was forced to keep all the records for her family’s farm,” Father Malvey wrote. “She was unable to conceive a child until her father was prevailed upon to assume his responsibilities, whereupon she fell pregnant and was soon the happy mother of twins.”
“I don’t think Father Malvey knows what he’s talking about,” I told Sister Tom.
“The bookseller told me he’s the best there is,” said Sister Tom. “The medical school in Chicago just bought five copies.”
“What luck for the bookseller,” I said, “and for Father Malvey.”
Sister Tom gave me a half-smile.
“I think I need something by a master midwife,” I said. “Someone who’s delivered babies.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Sister Tom. “But if the bookseller has to hunt it down, it’ll cost extra.”
It took me three weeks to copy enough books to earn Mrs. Alice Schaeffer’s Handbook of Feminine Complaints, and another six for the bookseller to bring it to me on his way back from Denver. Spring turned to summer at Holy Child. On Sundays we had services outside in the meadow so we could see the fertility of the earth, and afterward the Mother let us gather geraniums and black-eyed Susans and put them in pitchers and drinking glasses all around the dining room, and that small brightness made us giddy with joy, giggling into our nighttime tea at jokes that would have been nonsense to my friends back home, about Sister Martha’s clumsy catechism, the time she guessed that Saint Ignatius was the patron saint of weasels. All the while my mind moved along two tracks. I came to feel at peace in the convent; I no longer woke each morning expecting to see my sister still asleep in the next bed, and I no longer cried when I milked the cows. I looked forward to taking my vows in September and changing my gray shift for a black robe. But I felt a lack in my head and heart, which I understood that Sister Clementine and some of the other devout sisters filled with baby Jesus, but which no story could fill for me, especially not one in which I could play no part, I who could neither carry a child nor, locked away in the convent, even do what my mama had trained me to do and help bring children into the world. Instead I thought about what I might learn from Mrs. Schaeffer.
Of course a part of me thought maybe Mrs. Schaeffer had a cure for barrenness. I imagined gathering herbs and barks from the woods near Holy Child and steeping them in alcohol like Mama used to when she needed something the herbalist didn’t have. But how would I know a cure had worked? I would have to find a man again and be with him at the right time for several months, and if nothing happened I wouldn’t know if the problem was the tincture or him or me. And even if I was cured, if I conceived and bore a child, would I want to return to my old life? Would I go back to Fairchild with my baby on my hip, triumphant? I could imagine just how my mother would look if I brought a grandchild home to her—the shock and confusion that would play across her face before she let delight break through. It made my chest hurt to think of it. But when the surprise wore off, when the sheriff and Ulla had asked for my forgiveness and my husband had begged me to take him back (probably I would refuse him, though some nights I wavered in my certainty on this point), and I was living a comfortable life as a wife and mother, I did not think I would be satisfied.
I wanted to understand what barrenness was—how a child was conceived inside a woman and what it was, inside or out, that got in the way. Then I could feel the quiet that only comes with knowing what you need to know. And I could teach other people what I knew. I remembered what Mama had said, that you couldn’t just take away something people believed in. You had to give them something in its place.
I knew I liked Mrs. Schaeffer as soon as I read her section on miscarriage. “Some say a woman can cause a miscarriage by going to bed with a man who is not her husband,” she wrote. “This is nonsense. It matters not at all to the baby whom his mother takes to bed, though it may matter a great deal to her.”
From Mrs. Schaeffer I learned that severe cramps could be caused by the blood-rich tissue of the womb growing elsewhere in the body, and that ground flaxseeds added to cereal or coffee could help if taken regularly. I learned that a woman who has cancer of the breast should not eat flaxseeds or soybeans or alfalfa sprouts, and that the best treatment was to remove both breasts at once, not simply to remove the lump the way Dr. Carlisle back in Fairchild had done for Mrs. MacLeish, who died the following summer. I learned that if a woman’s labor does not progress, and she or her baby is in danger, then it is possible to cut open the womb with a very sharp knife, lift the baby out, and sew the mother back up, and that Mrs. Schaeffer had performed seventeen such surgeries successfully in the course of her career. When I got to the section on barrenness, my heart began to race.
“Failure to conceive a child is more common than most people believe,” she wrote.
I myself have seen more than a dozen women with this condition. Many people believe it has supernatural causes, which explains why so many childless women have been imprisoned or hanged for witchcraft, even today when the populace fancies itself educated and modern. I believe the complaint has many causes, all of them natural. Girls who are undernourished routinely lose their monthlies and thus cannot carry children; proper diet will nearly always remedy the problem. Other cases are more complicated. At our surgery in Pagosa Springs we once saw a woman of twenty-one who had been unable to conceive a child after five years of marriage. Though healthy and well-nourished, she had never begun her monthlies, and examination showed unusual formation of the vagina. We have also seen five women who seemed to have no physical complaints themselves, but whose husbands had suffered from mumps or rheumatic fever in boyhood. Three of these women went on to have children by other men, suggesting that fevers in early life may cause a kind of barrenness in men. Unfortunately it has been difficult to test this theory since no man has yet made himself available to us for examination.
In most cases of failure to conceive, however, we have found nothing unusual either in the woman’s medical history or in that of her husband. We are continuing to study this complaint and hope to include our discoveries in future handbooks. We invite any woman or man who has failed to conceive a child after a period of one year or more to visit our surgery for examination.
I dropped the book on Sister Tom’s desk.
“Where is Pagosa Springs?” I asked.
“Out west, in the mountains near Ute country,” she said. “Why?”
I sat in the chair in front of her. I looked behind me before I spoke. I knew the sisters gossiped, because I knew who smoked cigarettes and who kept a secret stash of communion wine. But I didn’t know anyone who wanted what I wanted.
“Could the bookseller take me there?” I asked. “I’d pay him. I’d copy as many books as he wanted.”
Sister Tom smiled, but shook her head.
“There’s not enough money in the world to make that worth his while,” she said. “What if someone finds out where you came from? Everybody knows why girls go to convents, Ada. That’s why they don’t usually come out.”
“So there’s no way,” I said.
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “The bookseller can’t help you. I can’t help you. But the Mother might help you, if she wants to.”