Chapter 1 of “Fortunate One”

This is the “hospital” where I was born

Today is my birthday so I thought I’d post the chapter from my memoir “Fortunate One: From Nantucket to the White House” that describes my birth. The book is available on Amazon here:

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On the day of my birth—13 months into the Eisenhower presidency and six months before Elvis released his first hit record—my very pregnant mother woke up feeling so odd that she stayed home instead of driving out to milk the cows. Only 21 years old, she and my 22-year-old father owned a small dairy about five miles out of town on the flat and then-deserted south shore of Nantucket Island. Yes, in those days, Nantucket had a dairy farmer, and that farmer was my father.

Early in her pregnancy, my mother asked her doctor when she should go to the hospital. His answer? “You’ll know.” This was in the benighted days before “What to Expect” books, Lamaze classes, and sonograms, but he was right. As the day of March 5th, 1954 wore on, she did, in fact, know that the time had come.

Returning from his milking duties at noon, my father discovered what he surely must have suspected when he left a few hours earlier—that his young wife was in the early stages of labor. My mother, not knowing when she’d eat again, prepared a robust lunch that they ate together, and then, after one last cigarette to calm her nerves, asked to be driven to the hospital.

Her destination—the original Nantucket Cottage Hospital—was neither a cottage nor a hospital as we’d understand the terms today. Imagine your grandmother’s house, but outfitted with a few hospital beds and some medical equipment. That’s what this was, a rudimentary medical facility created in 1912 out of a pair of weathered two-story 18th century houses. Connecting these former dwellings was a passageway that served as entrance, lobby, business center, and reception area. Turn right from the front door and you’d end up in the nurses’ residence; turn left and you’d enter the medical care part of the facility.

My mother had been born in this very building two decades earlier—delivered in fact by the same physician, Dr. Ernest Menges, who met her there later that afternoon. Not much about birth rituals had changed since my mother’s own birth, especially the role of fathers. In keeping with the iron law of mid-century obstetrics, my father’s participation in the birthing process consisted solely of depositing his wife at the front desk. With that task successfully accomplished, there was nothing else for him to do but drive back to the farm for the afternoon milking and pensively await the phone call announcing whether he’d become the proud father of a girl or a boy.

The hospital staff directed my mother from the front desk to a small room across the hall where she herself had been born. This chamber was used by two types of patients: women in labor and terminal patients who were not expected to live long; functioning, in other words, as Nantucket’s version of the circle of life.

The only people in attendance for my birth were Dr. Menges and two nurses, one of whom was my father’s maiden lady aunt, Edith Holmes, the hospital’s gentle, capable, and cheerful head of nursing. Mothers and best friends did not come rushing over with temple massages and heating pads to provide moral support. And if a midwife had arrived, she would have been treated like a witch doctor and driven into the street.

I’m told that the birth itself—at 7:15pm—was unremarkable, consisting mostly of contractions, cooling compresses, and at the end, a whiff of gas to numb the pain and induce outright unconsciousness. Soon after the deed was done, I was whisked away to the nursery while my mother slowly regained consciousness. She was then walked to a small, three-bed women’s ward on the second floor and wasn’t allowed to see me until the following morning. The umbilical cord was definitely not put in cold storage for future use.

The bill for the delivery—there was no insurance—came to $150.

No one arrived at the hospital the next day with a camera to capture my first gurgles and I escaped the nursery only sporadically for tightly regulated bottle feedings. Even my father was denied a glance of his firstborn until the next day’s visiting hours and not a moment sooner.

My parents named me Gary, although until the last minute, I was going to be Glenn. My mother was looking for a given name that theoretically couldn’t be shortened into a nickname. My uncle had the perfectly respectable birth name of James and she believed a grown man should not have the misfortune of being stuck with a diminutive like “Jimmy” all his life. She switched at the last minute, reasoning there is no cutesy moniker for Gary either. Alas, there is almost no name, no matter how short or monosyllabic, that cannot be made into a nickname, and various friends would later call me “Gare.” My wife takes it a step further, sometimes calling me “Ga” when she’s feeling particularly affectionate. (For what it’s worth, my brother-in-law calls his best friend “Glenny,” so there’s no winning this game.)

Despite being completely healthy, I didn’t leave the hospital for a week—after which I was driven home by my father, cradled in my mother’s arms as she sat in the car’s front seat, completely unprotected by not-yet-invented seat belts or infant car seats. Modern mothers who are familiar with being dumped onto the street after one night in the maternity wing might be interested to know that 1950s best practices required the mother to remain in the hospital for at least seven days to recover from the rigors of labor. In this regard, she was luckier than my grandmother, who, having given birth in the 1930s, was sentenced to two whole weeks of hospital bed rest. She later claimed those were the two most boring weeks of her life.

Naturally, there were no televisions or radios—never mind internet devices—to amuse young mothers as they lay in the women’s ward, but my mother considered herself relatively fortunate because she occupied the bed nearest the window and could look out to West Chester Street to see who was arriving and leaving the hospital.

A few days after I was born, I had company in the nursery. Another young mother had also delivered a baby boy. This small detail never came up until three decades later, when I heard that Nantucket had just recorded its first murder since the Civil War. My mother casually informed me that the perpetrator and I had been born practically at the same time and had even shared space in the nursery. She remembered being in the women’s ward with his mother.

It turned out that my first roommate, a hardened townie, had been in and out of trouble with the law for most of his life. Arrested for receiving stolen property at 17; arrested again for fighting with a police officer at 24. Now, at age 29, he had shot a long-time adversary in the stomach, becoming the protagonist in a case that drew national attention thanks to the mystery novel headlines: “A Murder on Nantucket.” Eventually he was convicted of premeditated murder, had the sentence reduced to manslaughter, and was retried and convicted a second time before being sentenced to 14-20 years in Walpole state prison.

For most people, this story was a curiosity. But what I couldn’t stop thinking about were the vagaries of fate. The two of us slept next to each other right out of the womb and never saw each other again. His family had stayed put on Nantucket with its insular and sometimes grievance-filled culture; mine had moved away, where I’d had all the advantages of an upwardly mobile household. What if the nurses had mixed us up in our bassinets? Would I have turned out to be a murderer? How is it, I wondered, that two babies lying side by side in the same nursery, born to two local working class mothers from similar backgrounds and with similar prospects, could end up in such different places?

Not for the first time, I observed that life is just one roll of the dice after another.

• Memoir
• Nantucket
• Nantucket Cottage Hospital