When Phoebe’s pains began in earnest, Sukey banished me to the shabby front room. I sat there a while, unable to get any work done on the latest seascape, while my wife’s groans pierced the air and her cousin tried to comfort her. After some time of this — either minutes or hours — I snuck over to the bedroom door, which was open the merest crack, and put my eye to the narrow opening. In the bedroom, Phoebe and Sukey were absorbed in their separate tasks, as was the midwife, a stout, red-faced middle-aged woman. 

I was ready to spring back to some more innocent area of the front room whenever Sukey left Phoebe’s side to heat up more water or fetch any necessary items. This happened several times.

On one of those occasions, Sukey marched over, dark curls spiraling from her kerchief, and informed me that it would be many hours before anything happened, as first children rarely arrive quickly. She practically ordered me to take one of my customary long walks, but, to my surprise, I declined. For once, everything that mattered was happening here.

Sukey returned to the bedroom. With my eye at the slit between the door and the frame, I watched as Phoebe bore down to bring forth our child. Sukey grasped her hand and mopped her brow, murmuring encouragement as the midwife worked below, having drawn up Phoebe’s thin, pale legs to enable the babe to emerge.

It seemed endless, the guttural pants, the louder cries, the whispered words meant to impart strength, the stale and sharp odors permeating the small, close space. Then, in a sudden gush of blood and other effluvia, the babe shot forth, launched into being head first, the damp, dark hair of its crown swiftly followed by the pale, eely body, slick and glistening like a landed fish.

The midwife caught the infant up in a towel, looked the tiny form over with a practiced eye, expertly tied off the umbilicus, and severed it with a knife brought for the purpose. She then lay the squalling newborn on Phoebe’s abdomen still swollen with advanced pregnancy, as though nothing had yet emerged from within. The babe kicked at its loose wrappings and lay naked atop Phoebe as she and Sukey wept from mingled exhaustion, relief, and joy. The midwife said, “It’s a healthy girl.”

I moved from outside the bedroom door before I could be discovered spying and waited in the front room to be ushered in when all had been made ready. I felt nearly as spent as I imagined Phoebe must be, delicate as she was. The trembling throughout my limbs took hours to subside.

After a while, Sukey called me in, smiling and looking remarkably well despite her long attendance on Phoebe. I went into the bedroom to see my wife and daughter while Sukey paid the midwife the last of our money and sent her off. As the three of us had discussed earlier, we named the infant Marina, to commemorate our meeting on the strand when Phoebe, Sukey and I had been staying at the Oceania Hotel one summer, and fate had entwined our lives.

Afterward, when Phoebe and Marina were asleep, Sukey made me some beef tea. “You need it,” she said. “You’re too skinny, and you have dark circles under your eyes.” It was first time she had shown concern for my welfare since my aborted attempt some months ago to join Captain Fazakerly’s doomed expedition to the Northern Regions. I accepted the cup and took small sips from it, reflecting on what I had seen. I could resume wrestling with my muse and hunting for commissions tomorrow.Birth is the ultimate act of creation, but my art, attuned to vast expanses, cannot capture it.

^^^

Bridget Goldschmidt received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in fiction, from Brooklyn College in 1991. Her short fiction has been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction and The RavensPerch. She works as a trade magazine editor and lives in New York by the ocean. She has previously written stories about Phoebe and Sukey for Oblivioni Magazine and Luminaura Magazine.

Composite image design by Kalyee Srithnam, from an unattributed 19th-century engraving of a mother in childbed with her husband and newborn, and Albert Robida’s Paris la Nuit, from Le Vingtième Siècle (1883).