Lost Brother

17. From the time I was a toddler until I turned twelve, my mother spent about four years of her life pregnant. During the 1950s, pregnant women didn't worry about smoking, caffeine, eating certain fish or taking Lamaze classes. And when it was time to deliver, they were pretty much knocked out, and woke up with their babies sleeping off the same anesthesia down the hall in the nursery. For the most part, Mom did a pretty good job having her babies. Each labor and delivery got quicker with each kid, so much so that when her last child, Amy, was born, Mom barely made it into the delivery room before my sister made her presence known.

But it was while we were living on Cortland street that my mother suffered a miscarriage during the early days of 1959. It was a cold and wintry day. I was playing with my sisters in the living room and Daddy was shoveling snow out in front. Mom suddenly called me from the bathroom. It was a loud call at first and I reluctantly got up from what I was doing and walked through the dining room, following her voice. She continued to loudly whisper my name, obviously not wanting my younger sisters to hear or see her.

She was crying, clutching my father’s old tan terry cloth bathrobe around her and even though she tried to stay as much behind the door as she could, I still saw that the robe, her hands and the floor were all stained with blood.

“Go get Daddy,” she pleaded, “and tell him I’m hemorraghing!”

I was eight years old and very scared at what I saw. I froze for a second, frightened by her bloody hands and the fear in her face.

“Mom, what happened?” I started to say, but she quickly cut me off.

“Nancy, hurry, I need him!”

Racing for the stairway I kept repeating her words - words I could not totally understand, but knew their seriousness - with each leap on the steps.

"Hem-rah-jing, hem-rah-jing, hem-rah-jing," frantically whispering it over and over to myself as I jumped down the three flights of stairs so I wouldn't forget, wouldn't get the big, strange word wrong and not be able to communicate the seriousness of the situation to Dad. I opened the front door and ran up to my father. Before he could question why I had run out of the house into the snow without a jacket, he saw the look of fear on my face.

“Mommy said she’s hemorraghing,” I told him as loudly and as carefully as I could. Without a word, he threw the shovel in the snow and took the stairs two or three at a time. By the time I got back upstairs, he was carrying her out of the apartment; she was still wearing his robe. They disappeared down the stairway, into the car and drove away down snow-encrusted Long Avenue.

I don’t remember who stayed with us while they went to the hospital or even how long she was gone, but I do remember later asking my father if Mom would be coming home with the new baby. He looked and me, then away, running his hand through his short, dark brown hair. Slowly and sadly he shook his head, “I don’t think so, honey.”

Many years later, my mother told me about the miscarriage. She was nearly seven months along when she stopped feeling movement. As it was her fourth pregnancy, she knew something was wrong. The doctors confirmed that the fetus was dead, but she had to continue to carry it. Finally, weeks later, her body rejected what would have been my parents’ first son. Of course, they knew it was a boy when she delivered it at the hospital but they didn’t tell my dad - not until after my brother was born in 1960.