A Summer of Love, a Summer of Pain

Adrizzly Saturday morning. Planned Parenthood, New York City. Second Avenue. Jammed full, of course, with many, many people. It’s a clinic and clinics have their realities. Waits. Lines. Nonchalance. A uniformed guard. My then-21-year-old daughter, her boyfriend and I have come about her unwanted pregnancy. A few other swains are with their girls.

We sit on the floor, umbrellas next to us, hearing the static of a radio barking sotto voce, the honey tones of women talking, an occasional message over the P.A. system.

The place is very decent, but heavily used. It’s been “done” in a rose-and-turquoise color scheme, understated, utilitarian--not uncheerful, just fine. There are many windows along the west wall that look over to the windows of other New York buildings.

It seems to get busier.

I study the carpet. Nice industrial stuff--gray in expanse, bluish-rose-turquoise on inspection--and I think of my own back-alley experience 33 years ago in Pittsburgh. . . .

*

My friends Tommy and Kathy were my guardian angels with human hands to hold me, but I felt alone and very isolated as they took me to an address we’d obtained. It was truly in a back alley. Tommy handled the money part. I found myself lying on a bed in a simple, clean bedroom in a kindly woman’s home, an image of Christ on the wall. I felt trusting but scared, dissociated, observant, alert, alone.

The woman stuck something inside me and jiggled it around. It looked like a knitting needle, but it wasn’t. Then she inserted a catheter, which had to stay in. Thank you and goodby.

I promptly puked as we traveled out of Pittsburgh to Uniontown--to the summer theater where friends from school were working. Peter and Sherry, Frank and Rusty, Tommy and Kathy.

Rusty was a nurse, so she nursed me, and that was lucky. She gave me penicillin, thank God. It probably took the edge off the infection that developed and got the better of me eight weeks later. But it didn’t get the best of me--didn’t get me .

June, it was. 1962.

I waited there in that funny little town that had agreed to have college kids run a summer theater, and nothing much seemed to happen with me. I remember being one flight up, with a window overlooking Main Street, U.S.A., with all the buildings made of yellow brick.

I slept; I dribbled; I bled. Once I think I made it over to a variety store across the street and looked at lipsticks and bought some M & Ms. After a day or two or so, I removed the catheter as I’d been instructed.

And oh, yes, I talked to Rene, my swain. He was in Texas at the Alley Theatre. I told him I’d passed the fetus as the woman in the clean bedroom with the picture of Christ on the wall had said I would: Sure enough, some offal had passed from me and I examined it closely. I could make out a shape within a bloody blob, a vertebrate outline that had some structure and digits, even what appeared to be minute bones. I think I was about three months pregnant. I was 18 years old.

That woman didn’t have the means or the ability to completely and hygienically clean out my uterus. She told me I’d bleed for about two weeks, which I did. And then I stained pads and panties for weeks and weeks with this awful persistent brownish stuff. I kept thinking it was tapering off and would soon stop. It was bloody pus from the infection inside, to which I was semi-oblivious, semi-aware.

By now I was at my own summer theater in Wooster, Ohio, amid lush and lazy lawns, white clapboard churches, lightning bugs, Isalys ice cream and A & W Root Beer stands. I was acting in all the plays, and we did a show a week. The first show was “The Boyfriend.”

I was blessedly absorbed in learning all the music and being swept into its irrepressibility. My condition didn’t improve, but I tended to ignore it even while fretting over it.

I engaged in magical thinking: It wasn’t so bad so it couldn’t be bad. Jane, my best friend from college, was my roommate that summer in Ohio. And thank God for Stuart. He was like a bro to me. He delivered me safe and chastened to Long Island at the end of that strange, suffused and youthful summer. He was my ticket to giggles in the face of fear.

My mother and father drove all the way from New York to visit one weekend, and my daddy did handstands on an Ohio lawn, to my mortification and the amusement of my cronies. I didn’t share my predicament with my parents. It wasn’t so much any castigation I feared about my love affair, any scarlet letters, but rather a concern that I’d screwed up right on the brink of responsibility.

I did see a doctor at one point. A young, blond, handsome churchman who saw fit to moralize and pontificate at me in his office: “I’ve had women who’ve sat in that chair that had abortions like you who’ve died. . . .”

He scared me, which he’d meant to do. He didn’t comfort me or reassure me--he wanted to terrorize me and make me feel fear and guilt. (Of what was I guilty? What had I done wrong? Made love to a boyfriend?)

Occasionally I’d talk to that boyfriend. Once I got to Ohio, he’d already left Texas for yet another summer theater in Fish Creek, Wis., where he was playing Mack the Knife. He was beginning his professional life as an actor, having graduated university drama school that very June.

He cared about me--yet his life and opportunities stretched before him. Same for me. But because of the way he made sure things were in order by getting the hurry-up dollars of the abortion from his father in London and arranging for Tommy, Kathy, Rusty, etc., to look after me during the ordeal, I never felt abandoned by him, and gained an understanding of his morality.

I began to love him that summer, and he me, despite our being apart. He thought I was very brave.

When we talked on the phone, it was almost otherworldly. It was long distance, and in 1962 that carried import, at least to me. I’d scarcely ventured over the landscape of the land, and to be in Ohio, which was beyond Pittsburgh, which was way beyond Long Island. And to be talking to him in Wisconsin was some sort of amazing grace, some sort of privilege of worldliness and maturity.

This, my 19th summer, was irrefutably the division between adolescence and adulthood, or so it seemed.

The summer and my bloodied condition continued. We did “Harvey,” “Rose Tattoo,” “Ladies in Retirement” (no puns intended).

We all lived in a big ol’ house, and Jane and I shared an uncarpeted room. I remember how I distrusted the kitchen, my first real experience of a communal one. It decidedly did not resemble the polished Hungarian gleam of my mother’s. The bathroom was blessedly next to our bedroom.

*

One night I woke drenched in gore. I couldn’t even walk without blood soiling my legs and the floor. I crept to that bathroom with sheets of the sullying fluid rushing out at something like 4 in the morning. I woke Jane with the word hemorrhage on my ashen lips.

I guess we called that doctor and got to the hospital and called my parents in shame. After all, they had to be informed for me to have a D and C since they would have to pay. Had I waited until dawn, I would have been nevermore.

A week or so later my pallor was gone. I was weak but well, and relieved to be traveling east on the turnpikes with Stuart, who was a good egg--a great egg in that situation. Stuart bore the wayward daughter straight to her bewildered but compassionate, loving but critical parents: forever immigrant, forever aching with confusions they couldn’t name.

I know that I was really lucky. No “rose tattoos” for me, no permanent scarring from an illegal abortion that could have rendered me permanently infertile. I married that boyfriend and we had two children, exactly right for zero population growth.

One is my daughter--here she is now at Planned Parenthood, New York City. She just went in for consultation a moment ago and waits inside, after telling me: “If I’m less than six weeks pregnant, I have to have a sonogram and it will be $75.”

My daughter has all the benefits of the Supreme Court, narrowness expunged by enlightenment and Big Science. Antiseptic is a given here. Margaret Sanger’s picture is on the wall over the guard’s desk: 1883-1966, it says on the small bronze plate underneath.

I’m anxious for my daughter, of course. It is a “procedure,” and there is still blood, and there is still a risk factor, albeit, today in the United States, one resulting in less than one death per 100,000.

At least she’s in company with a lot of others. They aren’t on the fringe of society--this is part of life, and we do this at times because we can, because we have the choice. And the future of the human race doesn’t stop here.