18. I'll Do It
She looks at herself naked in mirror: Red head and bush; high-cheekbones, perfect nose and full mouth that gives a Frenchy look. Slim and not overlong neck set on not broad shoulders and a chest with firm, high, not big breasts showing darker flat nipples; a belly with a beauty button.
I'm 26. Time for a baby and not maybe. She squares shoulders. I'll do it!
The apartment is empty because it is Monday with Stan at hospital working and Joe at studio painting. Late May and warm and sunny so she goes no clothes to living room and sits at table in corner by window gazing down at the green Parkway, seeing benches and a few lonely people and an occasional car.
I shall try one baby. Then I'll give it five years to see how it turns out. If good, I'll try another. At that rate we might see three in our menage.
She is thinking about her selected donor for the father. She'd researched him. It satisfies her he is physically, mentally and genetically right. She wants her same racial look. She wants her own blood type O, Rh-positive, and the guy's data satisfies that. She wants high intelligence. And she wants a man who looks decent and is under 50.
So he's the one! Now to break the news. She starts getting dressed.
At Noon, Brenda presents herself to Professor John Edwardes' middle-aged secretary, Miss Jenkins. Brenda knows the Professor takes lunch at 12 in his office but isn't sure he will be alone. Luck is with her.
"Can I get in to see him, Jenk?" She has cultivated the old biddy by treating her to lunches.
Jenkins presses a button and picks up the intercom. "Miss Brenda - you know, the red head lady from Sunday Seminar - is out here and would like to chat with you a minute?" After seconds, she puts down the intercom. "Just go right in, Bren."
Everyone thinks Why didn't he ever get married? about Professor John Edwardes. After all, he is elegant looking fortyish, and with the mustache he looks like - but a little better than - the twice defeated presidential candidate and then New York Governor Thomas Dewey.
"He don't even have a girlfriend; is he homo? is another thought.
Only Edwardes can answer. He is an upper class intellectual and ivory tower but hands-on in his work as Chairman of the Sociology Department at Hunter College, and Sunday Seminar has become his special baby.
Now a real baby maybe? Brenda does not know yet but Edwardes is an advocate - not a believer because he is a scientist - an advocate of Malthusian population limits and in Eugenics, the science of improvement somewhat discredited by its Hitlerian advocates.
As he asks her to take a seat across from him and awaits her say, he thinks, Quite attractive in a Latinesque way. Didn't I hear she is of French origin? Also that rumor of a menage a trois with Dr Pelc and Joe the painter?
"Professor, as one of your seminarans - That is the proper word, ain't it?" He nods giving her a mental good point for remembering why they do not use seminarian, and she continues, "I am hoping you won't be put off by my - should I say, unorthodox idea?" She stops and waits.
"Now you have me interested."
"OK, Professor, I want to get pregnant. I'm ready. And I think I can produce something of value. I decided to select a man who will be a best chance to help me conceive a top new person." She stops and notes his mild surprise. "I am not suggesting a social relationship. I want the man to donate his sperm and I'll take care of details."
Before he can ask, she asks.
"And, if it's you, will it be OK?"
Into the silence that follows, he thinks, Is she a harmless lunatic? Then, But why shouldn't I? Take a chance, since romance passed me by?, echoing a song lyric he'd heard. I've observed her at Seminar. She is not crazy; rather intelligent though not schooled. And her two men are gems. Perhaps it will be my only chance to pass my genes on to the future? And the environment she could raise it in is good. I might even have a hand in it?
"Yes," he says. "But what will you need me to do?"
"It won't be hard. Someone like you who I've known and observed does not need tests and I assume you can with no trouble produce when I ask. All I want now is your OK. From the bottom of my heart, I will appreciate it. And I promise - for what it's worth and I value its worth - you won't have a regret."
Several minutes later she is walking out the gate of the Hunter campus thinking I did it.
Several weeks later she is waiting at the apartment for Sister Barbara. From her training and using rhythm/diaphragm she knows the day - 13 days after first day of menstrual blood - is most probable for one or the other of her ovaries to pop an egg, as she calls ovulation - the release of an ovum, midway between menses, the start of a woman's immediate risk to get pregnant. Brenda does not guess at this: she measures morning wake-up temperature, and twice a day checks her cervix mucous by stinkie pinkie and, from long past experience keeping an ovulation diary, notes signs of impending ovulation - heightened sex desire, change of appetite, feeling in abdomen. This, she got from a useful book - Physician's Notebooks - that Professor Edwardes loaned her.
This morning in bed, taking thermometer out of mouth she reads it as 97.8 F - the sudden drop that predicts ovulation, she thinks. Sticking her left middle finger deep into her sexual tunnel and removing it she sees it is covered by clear mucous like mineral oil. Practically, she did not even need to insert the finger because the stuff had been dribbling out of her all night. And from experience every month, she felt it. Lusty, hungry for hot dogs as she always gets the day before ovulation, and that special pressure feeling in low abdomen and rectum, hard to describe but always middle of month, between periods.
Today's the day!
She runs to the Professor's office, telephoning him a little before his lunch and giving the terse Today is it! I'll come for the cup of your stuff at 12. They had talked about this day. At 12, Jenkins, who has not the slightest idea what is going on, ushers her into Edwardes office and closes the door, leaving Edwardes and Brenda alone together. He pulls the top left drawer of his desk and hands her a brown bag with something in it. She puts it in her handbag with a Thanks and leaves, spending a moment at girl talk with Jenkins and then hurrying home.
So here she is. The doorbell in outer hall rings. She knows Sister Barbara's ringing and let's her in.
"All OK, Sister!"
"Good, Brrenda girrl."
Sister will never be able to lose those rrs, thinks Brenda with inward smile. She follows the black garbed nun into the kitchen. Barbara has her usual battered brown briefcase with midwife's materials. Brenda is in a dress, nothing underneath.
Before she gets up on the kitchen table she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a $100 dollar bill and Barbara smoothly puts it into her nun's bulky sleeve with her usual "Me old mitherr in Eirre thanks Ye, and I do too."
Brenda lies flat on her back on the kitchen table, her dress hitched up and buttocks just at edge. Barbara sits and adjusts the light. She inserts a vaginal clamp giving a view inside.
"The sample is there on the counter," Brenda says, indicating a clean plastic cup with cover that contains Professor Edwardes' semen ejaculated about 90 minutes before by masturbation in his office bathroom, to a mental scenario of a sexual encounter with his most desired movie star - Bette Davis.
Sister Barbara takes a long, large medicine-dropper with red rubber bulb and it sucks up the clear semen, which after the few hours has lost its sticky thickness and is watery. She adjusts the light into the vagina. She squeezes the bulb and squirts the semen into the vagina onto the cervix opening’s lower lip, removes the clamp, signals Brenda to lower her legs and gives her a pillow.
"Now, just lie back, Dearrie and let us prray to the good Lorrd" A moment of silence follows. From then and for the next hour lying there in the kitchen after Sister Barbara leaves, Brenda feels contentment.
She decides not to tell her partners. When it comes out, they will think it is one's or the other's. Years later, the question may arise again and can be dealt with. The less anyone knows the better.
For next, click 14.19 Back in Winnipeg - Ali's Indian Lore
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