Read an Excerpt

Madeleine's World

Penguin Books

Chapter One

We knew almost nothing about her before she was born, not even her sex, so we must have referred to her as "it," although I can't imagine that now.

She was quiet when Pamela moved, and active when Pamela was still, particularly after we had crawled into bed. Perhaps the motion comforted her, as Pamela's rocking or my pacing would later, and her kicks and somersaults as we lay in bed were protests. Or perhaps the motion cowed her, and our bedtime was a chance to be bold. She would also stir, sometimes violently, when I played the piano or sang with my lips pressed against Pamela's stomach. The same doubt assailed us here: was this pleasure or indignation? Or was there no more feeling involved than when a pupil constricts at a bright light?

Fetuses often suck their thumbs, or their whole hands, sometimes so hard they raise a blister. Is this because they need comforting? (Do they suck their thumbs when their fathers sing to them?) If so, why do they seek it in this way when the primeval comforter surely is food, and nourishment has always come to them through their navels? Or are they merely practicing, strengthening the sucking action for the day when they will need it?

Do fetuses dream? If not, why do they have REM sleep? If so, what could they be dreaming of? Their thumbs, perhaps, the perfect shape of them. Or the rhythmic boom of the cosmos, the first music of this first sphere. Or a muffled dog's bark and the mother's adrenaline that jolted them, too, something to fear already, something to make them suck their thumbs while they dream.

Do fetuses send dreams to the mother? It is considered a bad sign when a pregnant woman dreams of her baby waving goodbye and retreating into the darkness. Pamela and I had naturally wondered about the baby's sex, and Pamela as an adolescent had taught herself conscious dreaming, so three times during the last trimester she called on the long-unused technique as she fell asleep, and pulled the question down with her like a trapped bubble. The answer, each time, was immediate and clear: boy. Perhaps fetuses don't know what sex they are.

On a September evening two days after Pamela's due date, I was picking vegetables in the garden and as I walked back toward the house I saw a fat moon rising over the sugar maples. I remembered having read somewhere--The New England Journal of Medicine? The National Enquirer?--that once a month, at the full moon, there is a spike in births. Early the next morning Pamela's water broke. She labored lightly through the day and night and on through the following morning until, at midafternoon on the day of the full moon, it got serious. Since we had planned a home birth we didn't have to compete for a birthing room in the presumably swamped hospital, but had midwives with us in the dining room, where Pamela rocked in a rocking chair, lowing, hour after hour. She has a high tolerance for pain and she didn't much need me, but I sat next to her, stroking her hard, squared-off stomach with a circular motion she said was comforting, and though I am not a mystical sort, I thought of the pregnant moon, pregnant Pamela, the chair rocking back and forth like the ebb and flow of tides, the tides of her contractions, the tide of seawatery amniotic fluid, tile high tides far away along seashores on this full-moon night.

Madeleine was born just past midnight. The room had been heated to eighty degrees, so it would not have felt cold, but what a chilling void it must have seemed. Perhaps it felt like free fall, to have the hugging walls slide back and her arms and legs spring out, jerking like antennae searching for a surface. But free fall is weightless, and she would have felt instead a new heaviness, a lost buoyancy, as though for nine months she had been falling, falling, and now she had landed.

Laid on Pamela's stomach, she churned her arms and legs and slid on her grease toward the breast. She gave a predator's glittering one-eyed squint up at her mother's exhausted face and chomped down on the nipple. Now, at last, she could vent this primal urge on the organ for which it was designed, the Platonic ideal of her thumbs. Nothing came out. But perhaps she didn't know anything was supposed to come out; she knew only that 'she must suck. She presumably did not know that the real purpose of this first, dry chewing was to make the uterus throw off the placenta and clamp shut over its massive wound before the mother bled to death.

What could she hear? Water remains in the newborn's ear, easing the transition to the sharper sounds outside the womb. She could probably already recognize Pamela's voice, and perhaps mine, but the midwives' steadily rising argument--Pamela was bleeding too much, this was frightening, the uterus would not shut down because the bladder was full but Pamela was too numb to urinate, they should call the doctor, no they shouldn't--probably didn't even register as background noise.

How well could she see? Not across the room, not to the door through which one of the midwives was hurrying toward the telephone. A newborn can focus between eight and ten inches away, the distance from breast to face. Adrenaline grants her an hour or so of alertness and calm, a heightened awareness that will not return for days, and this is the window celebrated in recent years as an opportunity to bond with the maternal face, the one clear image in the little circle beyond which vague shapes flutter and murmur. But the maternal face was replaced by a bearded one, as Pamela was coaxed into the shower, where warm water on the abdomen was supposed to help her urinate. Madeleine didn't seem to care. She stared into my eyes. Her face was squashed, her eyes Uralic, her skin pink and blemishless. Perhaps she concentrated. I could not. I listened to the shower, and fatigue and the sight of so much blood made me feel faint, and I was distracted by fierce admonitions to myself to bond! bond! since bonding would be especially important if I ended up raising this baby on my own. (Actually, new research had already suggested that the whole bonding-at-birth idea had been greatly overplayed, but I was suffering from the usual pop-scientific lag of about a decade.)

From the shower, gasps of relief. It had taken an hour. A few minutes later, the steady bleeding stopped.

The new family got into a fresh bed. Midwives and relatives faded away. It was three A.M. The only sound in the room was one Madeleine had surely never heard before: her own gummy snorting, as loud as a warthog.

CHAPTER TWO

Her wordsworthian clouds of glory seemed literal: tiny nibs of white-blond hair marked out a hurricane whorl on her red scalp, and her irises were storm clouds of dark blue-gray. Her pupils were enormous. As windows to the soul, they were thrown wide open, drawing me toward them for a look, a trip, a fall through. I am not being fanciful. Since your pupils dilate when you see something you like, and since we all love to be liked, this is probably the genes' way of seducing the parents, of preventing them from abandoning this alarming burden somewhere in the forest.

As for Madeleine's point of view, one can only guess, in the first weeks, at the mix of volition and reflex. Placed on her stomach, she "swam," kicking her legs and flailing her arms. Attagirl! I might think, or I might hurry to relieve her of what could be distress. But all newborns do this automatically, like wind-up toys. Is it a dying remnant of life in the womb? Or a much deeper genetic signpost, pointing back to our ancient aquatic existence?

She would grasp anything that touched her palm and be unable to let go. Look at newborn monkeys, developmentalists say, who must grip their mothers' hair to ride on their backs. A human newborn has such a strong grip she can hang from a bar. You might think the purpose of that startling hard squeeze on your index finger is to strengthen the grip even more, but in fact it's getting weaker by the day.

In the so-called Moro reflex, a newborn who thinks she is falling will shoot out both hands, spreading fingers to clutch at the air, and then pull her arms tight against her chest. An idea almost inevitably intrudes: branches! The hairy, pea-brained, pre-australopithecine babe is falling out of the tree and it spastically spreadeagles to catch branches in its strong grip. If a human baby, in falling, happens to be holding a pencil in one hand, only her other hand will shoot out. Evidently, she thinks the pencil is a branch. But if the baby is holding her thumbs, this satisfies her as well as the pencil does, and neither hand reaches out. Newborns frequently hold their thumbs. You could argue this supports the theory. If the hands are reaching for branches, then branchlike objects are comforting, and babies hold their thumbs all day for the feeling of security it gives them. You could equally argue it undermines the theory. I see primeval babies plummeting down through the forest understory, blissfully holding their thumbs.

The swimming reflex, the grasp, the Moro--all are remnants, somewhat mysterious, of larger urges and larger questions spanning eons and species, out of which the baby sails. They disappear before our eyes as she individualizes, as she slowly coalesces out of Life into her own life.

At twelve and a half weeks, when it is less than two inches long, a human fetus will turn its head to the right if its right palm is touched, or to the left for its left palm, open its tiny translucent mouth, and suck. When I held Madeleine to my shoulder for a burp in the dim predawn of the first and many subsequent mornings, she would work her way from my neck to my cheek to my chin, a mountain climber rounding the corner of a cliff face, her eyes closed, chuffing all the way, leaving a trail of incipient hickeys. Like the true mountain climber, she had no choice: I was there.

Later, when I watched her grip the air and bring two fists to her open mouth, the word "mammotropic" would come to mind. She was perfectly capable by then of distinguishing a face from a foot and a breast from a brick, and yet when she got hungry she did not look around for Pamela or the breast, she simply tried to stuff whatever was near into her mouth--my shirt, the table edge, empty air--and kept doing it until the breast came within reach. Like the hands grabbing for the invisible branches in the Moro reflex, this rooting seemed blindly opportunistic, and dubiously suggestive of some deep past when each mother (of whatever species we were back then) had thousands of babies, paying attention to none of them, and they all sucked promiscuously, and if one happened to find a breast, it survived.

And yet it was in the nursing that Pamela and I got our earliest sense of Madeleine as an individual, as something more than a mere bundle of irrepressible urges. When we compared her with the babies of our friends (all of whom seemed to be having babies at the same time we did; or did we just lose our other friends?), she seemed by far the most avid nurser. She had an idiosyncratic way of attaching. She would dart her head forward and fasten on the nipple with a sudden bite, vigorously shaking her head as though, catlike, she were trying to break the breast's neck. Later, when the rooting reflex abated and she was capable of turning away from the nipple after a couple of sucks to see what else was going on, she seemed partly to do this because it allowed her to start again with another attacking bite and shake. She already had amusements.

All newborns seem preprogrammed to be attracted to the human face, but only some of them will respond to your stuckout tongue by sticking out their own tongues. At my repeated attempts, Madeleine only furrowed her brow and slightly tucked her chin. Puzzlement and mild concern? Actually, books say newborns focus on the human face, but whenever I held Madeleine she would usually stare, if she looked at me at all, at the top of my head, or over my shoulder. Developmentalists coolly explain that babies like edges. New Agers have their own interpretation babies can see auras.

Like many parents, I found it almost impossible not to imitate her expressions back to her. This seems an odd instinct, since surely Madeleine was supposed to be learning her expressions from me. As long as she was smiling, everything was fine. She was happy, I was happy she was happy, and either she was happy I was happy she was happy, or more likely, she was confirmed in her original happiness by the fact that I was happy she was happy. Either way, it was a closed circuit of intense satisfaction to me, and of sufficient interest to her to induce her to stick with it for a minute or more. Unfortunately, along with smiling back at her, or crossing my eyes back at her, I would unthinkingly look startled hack at her. This particular feedback loop would immediately spiral into a screech. She would startle at something trivial--say, my bumping a drawer on the changing table--and on seeing my cartoonish wide-eyed "Oh!" would infer that her worst fears were true (that she was hurt? that I was hurt? was there yet any distinction between "she" and "I"?) and would instantly break into wailing.

She stared intently at round things, presumably because they looked like breasts. Or perhaps because they looked like faces. If I turned while holding her, she would shift her head to keep the round thing in view. If I kept turning, she would twist her neck as far as it would go, then whip around to the other side. I had never appreciated how many round objects there are in our lives: doorknobs, watches, plates, saucers, tops of glasses, bottoms of glasses, crackers, cookies, cucumber slices, deodorant roll-balls, lightbulbs. I could stand anywhere, and after a second or two she would focus on something round, lean toward it, lock on. Someone gave us a padded-disk squeeze-toy with concentric circles and a bull's-eye, black on white. She adored it. Perhaps the central black spot was an eye, with concentric eyebrows. Or perhaps it was a nipple, creating its own magnetic field, an emanation of "suck here" lines. The globe on the piano was either a winningly friendly fathead or the gloriously overswollen breast of her dreams. Above her changing pad, a mobile of black-and-white patterned disks (our impression that black-and-white objects were part of an educational craze for newborns was confirmed by this gift's brand name: Stim-Mobile) made a whole crowd of faces, jostling for an admiring view, or perhaps it was a happy return to the days when the baby had eight teats to choose from.

Madeleine also stared up a lot. One of the midwives said she looked at the ceiling because its blankness provided relief from overstimulation. (I suppose I could have solved that problem by getting rid of the mobile.) But I wasn't convinced. I suspected the smoke alarms, which were round with nipplelike test buttons, or the circular plates holding up the ceiling lights. We eventually discovered that she loved to hold yogurt lids, and it occurred to me that they were both round and blank. Like me with my brandied evening coffee, did she prefer her stimulants soothing?

But there was more to her looking up than the ceiling. She also looked "up" when lying on the bed. That is, she arched her back to look along the mattress, away from her feet. Often, when we held her she pushed the back of her head hard against our palms until she ended up prone in our lowered arms, her head hanging upside down. She was trying to roll, which fetuses accomplish in the womb by throwing their heads backward and to one side. Unbuoyed by water, she could no longer do it. In the cramped womb she had been free, whereas now, in this limitless space, she was chained by gravity. Success in her new world was months away. But every day, every hour, she tried.

So as I paced with her or carried her around doing chores, she was always twisted in my arms, looking backward. In her wide-eyed, solemn gaze I imagined I saw sadness, but with a mature resignation. I seemed always to be carrying her away from the object of her greatest desire.

CHAPTER THREE

The sound of conversation was comforting. Both Pamela and I talk a lot, but since I could hold Madeleine indefinitely without getting tired, she would usually be in my arms, and she would never lie quieter, never slip more easily into sleep than when she was leaning back against my chest while I droned on and on. Once she was asleep, nothing conversational--crosstalk conducted at a roar, barked agreements, finger-jabbing pontificating--would rouse her, or even cause her to stir. In marked contrast, two soft sounds invariably made her startle and whimper: One of them was clearing my throat. The other was any kind of rustling. Balling a plastic bag next to her crib would disturb her more than dropping a pot lid.

I happily settled on a theory to Madeleine, the conversational roar was the sound of the tribe, filling the void, keeping the predator at bay with noise around the fire. The rustling--so quiet, so stealthy--was the predator itself, creeping up over dead leaves and twigs. And my throat-clearing was the very growl of the beast. Men tend to talk in high voices to their babies. As a fake tenor in pickup choirs, I had a well-developed falsetto anyway, and I derived a (perhaps significantly) deep satisfaction from wah-wahing old songs to Madeleine an octave above where they belonged. One theory I've read holds that men do this instinctively in order to sound more like the mother, who is, after all, the vital parent at this stage. But perhaps we do it in order to sound less like a saber-toothed tiger.

Like adults, babies find white noise soothing. Light-sleeping lawyers in city apartments have to buy white-noise generators because they no longer have a parent around to hold them close and say "Sshh." That instinctive shush is our homemade white noise, an effective blocker of distressing sounds like throat growls and leaf rustlings, or the baby's own cries which, when she hears them, frighten her all the more. Perhaps it also recalls for the baby the hiss of water in the ears in the womb, or the muffled whoosh of the mother's circulatory system. Lovers go to Niagara Falls partly because the negative ions thrown off by falling water sharpen the libido. We went to Niagara Falls when Madeleine was six weeks old for a more prosaic reason: I had an assignment. But for Madeleine, evidently, the stimulant ions couldn't hope to compete with the sound of the world's largest white-noise generator, and she slept for almost three days straight.

Or perhaps it was the lousy weather. Madeleine had a keen barometric sense. On low-pressure days, she would swirl, cloudlike, down into a cozy depression of her own. We had noticed the correspondence at home, when on rainy days her nap lasted all afternoon, but it was only at Niagara Falls that we saw a reason for it. There, we were forced to venture outside despite the weather, as in the prelapsarian arboreal days, and she was down in the Snugli on my chest, the only warm and dry member of the family. If she had woken, she would have fussed, and that would have forced us to bring her out into the spitting sleet.

Once you settle on the primate-memory model--the idea that while parents are driving to the doctor or the supermarket, honking at other members of the herd, their baby in the back seat is crossing the veldt, fearing carnivores and lethal weather--you can amuse yourself devising reasons for all sorts of things. The most terrified we ever saw Madeleine in the first months was when I put her in her car seat on the morning of the first snowfall and unthinkingly set about scraping ice off the windshield. The black scraper blade was a paw, clawing at the fragile saplings hiding the mouth to her cave. My allergic sneezing was so common she eventually got used to it, but to my blowing my nose, never. The white tissue was some small but insanely aggressive animal, a proto-wolverine, which with greedy snorts was devouring my face.

For these fears, or the pain of gas, or the obscure misery of fatigue, she could be soothed by pacing. The rocking chair worked well enough, but walking worked better. From the kitchen through the dining room to the living room was about thirty feet. Refrigerator to piano, back to refrigerator. I walked to California on that quarterdeck in Madeleine's first year. She would almost immediately quiet down and look up and watch the smoke alarm sail to the rear, then the round plate of the ceiling light. Then the plate would come back, then the smoke alarm, then the smoke alarm again, then the plate. (I'm tempted to see in these comforting disks passing overhead a root of the popular passion for flying saucers, filled with aliens who are almost all face, and knowledgeable beyond our understanding.)

Parents tend to pace or rock their babies at the heart's rate of seventy per minute. Although I am left-handed, I always carried Madeleine in my left arm, thus forcing myself to do chores with my clumsy right hand, and I have since read that for both right-and left-handers, four out of five parents carry their babies on their left side, where the heartbeat is loudest. So surely pacing calms because it's a return to' womb rhythms, physically and aurally. But I am reluctant to abandon my model. When the primate family set out on a journey, it was at its most vulnerable: in the open, in the unknown. Babies who cried when their parents walked out into the world betrayed their location to saber-toothed tigers and proto-wolverines.

Plate ... smoke alarm ... plate ... An unmistakable increase in her mass--no, I don't believe it, but I swear it's true--would tell me that she had fallen asleep. A dream might boil across her face, opening eyes that floated in opposite directions, stretching the corners of her mouth into practice smiles or whimpering grimaces. Dreaming of ...?

Continues...

---

Excerpted from Madeleine's World by Brian Hall Copyright © 2004 by Brian Hall. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---