Reading myself into Howard Norman’s novel, Come to the Window
Howard Norman in his book Come to the Window tells the story of a young pregnant woman enduring an early cesarean section in what would have been her 7th or 8th month. The mother-to-be was also suffering a Spanish flu infection. The year was 1918, not the last year of the flu epidemic, but the final year of World War I. It was the bodily and mental stress of the epidemic and the societal and economic stress of a brutal war that likely complicated her pregnancy.
The mother was enduring yet another unsettling complication. Her husband, the father of the child, was a German by birth and was looked on with suspicion by the local community, that being in Nova Scotia. He was knifed and killed in an anti-German riot. And then adding to her heap of woe, the mother-to-be was also as Norman puts it “on the lam,” because she was a convicted killer. The details of this set of circumstances befalling a complicated young woman don’t concern us here. Norman intertwines them more believably than it might seem possible. It’s part of his undeniable skill as a storyteller.
What interested me about the birth of the child was Norman putting words into the mouth of a physician attending the birth. He said, “the child itself, if the mother was weak from illness, mustered up an astonishing hurry to be born, to escape the mother’s failing body.” Norman’s flu ridden mother couldn’t herself summon the energy to deliver her fetus, eager to get out, and hence the need for the cesarean.
Norman in that passage seems to suggest the fetus had some agency, though without any actual awareness, in the matter of its birth. It may have wanted a chance in life that it sensed its mother had no capacity to give it. It would have almost certainly died if and when the mother died.
The child that did result from the cesarean was in fact a girl, and so the prospects for her as a motherless child would have been dark. Assuming again the fetus had some measure of intrauterine “agency,” it weighed its likely death at birth against the uncertain, but dubious prospects of a motherless childhood and “decided” to take its chances with life.
All this raises some question about whether the fetus is or can be “rational”. But since that question launches us into an unknowable point of nature, I’m not going to add my own personal two cents on the issue. There is, though, an emerging scientific explanation for what could be interpreted poetically as fetal agency. It involves the science of epigenetics, a field of study that looks at the effects of environment, including uterine environment, in shaping how genes express themselves. It’s hormones then that give the illusion of rationality.
What Norman’s story recalled to me, switching to a different wavelength, was the circumstance of my own birth. I found out as a 50-some year old about a discrepancy in how I came about. The discrepancy concerned my birth certificate versus my mother’s recollection of my birth. The birth certificate has me as gestated for only seven months; while my mother says the pregnancy went to a nine month normal term.
I asked her about this when she was in her late 70’s, so the event itself was certainly not recent in her memory. Plus she had four other births and maybe mine got confused with the others. She thought, though, the discrepancy was no big deal. Whether it was a clerical error or an error of her memory didn’t concern her. I was a normal, healthy baby she said. There wasn’t any one else to ask for clarification, so it was and will remain an unresolved question. Even though it’s not an especially consequential issue, it is one which allows me speculate on who I was and how I came to be me.
In particular, I wonder whether fetal me wanted to get out of the womb earlier than normal and, if so, whether that might have been triggered by some anxiety the budding human I was experienced in utero. A “Let me out of here!” kind of anxiety.
It was a time of war, in which my father had enlisted, and it was a time during which my mother’s sister and father both passed, one from leukemia the other from tuberculosis. Her sister had left an infant son, who my mother had essentially adopted. It was also a time my mother was raising my one year old brother, her first child. A stressful time, in other words. So I ask myself, did all of my mother’s accumulating and unrelenting stress hormones flow down into me? Is that what I was trying to escape from?
The question of whether this feeling of wanting to distance myself from present circumstances is one I’ve experienced many times in my child, teenage, and adult lives. It’s simmered down substantially over the years, so that now in my old age I can say that it’s something I rarely feel. It’s part of the reason that old age seems it’s own kind of blessing. But that’s another story.
I was different even as a young child. I was gay, though I had no knowledge of what to call it. That label didn’t even exist at the time. The only labels available were pretty condemning, so I prayed to God to get me out of it. But that was asking God to undo my biology and the prayers didn’t work. God apparently preferred to keep me the way He made me.
I also was Catholic which I eventually had to abandon to avoid the negativity I would otherwise have to endure for my entire life. Since my conception of God was tied to the Catholic definition of Him, I had to reconsider my attachment to Him. I eventually put ‘Him’ into lower case ‘him,’ and took to exploring the ‘godless’ morality of Buddhism. It fit much better.
Norman’s novel doesn’t trace the trajectory of the newborn past her first year, and it leaves the reader to draw conclusions of what bullets she might have dodged in her later life. Those possibilities concern the history of the girl’s dead mother, someone she of course would never know directly. That young mother presented in her own early years a contrary nature that put her at odds with her community and with her parents. The kind of mother she would have made had she lived and raised her daughter would likely have cast her daughter in her own mold and set her on the road to her own tragedies. Who knows.
Her mother early in her own childhood resisted and finally fractured the inevitability of her small village future by imagining herself a classical music composer. She took lessons by mail and read. She then took herself off to the big city, Halifax, to get better trained. She met her instructor, married him on the sly, returned pregnant to her village, married a second man, and killed him on her wedding night. Bad choices, which ultimately proved her undoing, but she “went to the window” and looked out.
My own choices to leave aspects of my young self behind were certainly less dire, but it took a long while to accept that they were not wrong headed, as much as they may have delayed successful outcomes.
Besides the changes in my attitude toward god and church, there were changes in career interests, changes in educational pursuits, changes in geography, changes in partners, changes in appearance. There were no actual changes in nationality — I’m still an American — though I seriously explored becoming Dutch, Polish, or Canadian at various times. I’ve lived so much of my life going to the window and looking out that it’s become who I am. And most importantly, it’s who I prefer to be.
Norman’s novel, like his earlier The Bird Artist, looks at characters born into circumstances they are not existentially well fitted for. He takes their discontents and explores how they will explore, adapt, or retreat elsewhere. Sometime they work it out, sometimes not. What seems most important is that they know and value themselves enough not to regret who they are or what they do to survive.