The Birth House

Mrs. Ketch dies and, though Dora does not attend the funeral, she goes to leave food and toys for the children at the Seaside Centre. While there, she tries to learn more about the death. The women, including Aunt Fran, are talking about how quickly Brady Ketch wanted to bury her. They speculate that he may have killed her, especially since Constable McKinnon “was on his way to visit the Ketch place to talk to Brady” (289).

Bertine catches Dora before she can leave and tells her to help feed the children. Soon, Brady comes in but refuses to take food from Dora, saying “you can’t be sure it’s not poison” (290). He told the constable that Dora was responsible for his wife’s death. Laird Jessup is drunk and reminds everyone how he suspected that Dora caused his cow to have a deformed calf when she was a child. The women begin to whisper, some against Brady and some against Dora. Mrs. Hutner then reveals that Dora has been diagnosed with hysteria, causing more whispers.

Bertine comes to Dora’s defense, threatening Brady. Meanwhile, Aunt Fran begs Dora to leave to avoid escalation of the situation. Although Dora wants to yell at Brady, Aunt Fran stops her, and she leaves.

Dora runs all the way home but finds “Dr. Thomas sitting at my kitchen table with the Willow book laid open in front of him” (292). She tries to throw him out, but he says the constable asked him to come see her. He examines her bottles of remedies and says: “from what the constable told me of Mrs. Ketch’s death I can see you’ve gotten yourself in quite a lot of trouble” (293).

Dora denies knowing what he’s talking about. Dr. Thomas tells her that if she admits contributing to Mrs. Ketch’s death, that he could say that her hysteria and “uniformed use of ‘home’ remedies” caused a sad error (294). Not only would she be able to escape guilt, but she would also put “the problems of midwifery to rest, setting the record straight” (294). In exchange, she will go to a women’s sanitarium and return home “a better woman, a better mother” (294).

Dora begins to worry that people will believe she killed Mrs. Ketch and considers taking the offer, if she can bring Wrennie. Dr. Thomas tells her this is impossible, and her daughter would be sent to an orphanage until she got out of the asylum, which could be a year or more. Hearing this, Dora refuses and sends him away.

Dora’s mother doesn’t believe she is guilty and offers to let her stay at the family home for the night. Hart also doesn’t believe it, but he believes the doctor has made up his mind “that you’re the one who’s got to pay” and advises her to leave for Boston to stay with Charlie (296).

Bertine agrees to watch Wrennie and write to Dora while she is away, and Dora leaves.

Dora travels by boat to Boston, staying below deck the whole time due to seasickness. She sets off to find Charlie and finds Boston immediately intimidating and confusing. She feels “simple and naïve” compared to the people in Boston, and she misses her mother terribly (299).

Tired and possibly lost, Dora is swept along with a crowd carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary to a building where a ceremony is taking place to honor her. Dora feels faint and grabs for the nearest person to steady her, a young man of Italian descent.

He offers to take her to Charlie’s address, and she trusts him because “there was something in his face that made me think of my brothers and of home” (301). He takes her through the streets of Boston and explains that the celebration she was swept up in was the Fisherman’s Feast of the Madonna del Soccorso, a saint who saved a child from the devil.

They arrive at Charlie’s address, “an ample, grand, ivy-covered home with stained glass window-panes in the door and three magnificent dormers” that is at odds with the fishing town surroundings (302). Miss Maxine Cabott, the woman from Charlie’s letter, opens the door. Dora finds her “a marvelous, brazen-looking woman” (302). She’s at least 30, and therefore older than Charlie, who is 20.

Maxine introduces Dora to Judith, a young woman with brown skin who reminds Dora of Nefertiti, and she hears other women in the house. Maxine tells her that Hart sent a telegram announcing her arrival. Dora is surprised to find that Charlie lives with Maxine, since he had only told the family that he worked for her. Maxine and the other women serve her lunch and she meets Rachael, a painter. She learns that only Charlie, Judith, and Rachael live with “Max”; the rest “come and go as they please” (304). The house is “a community of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians, even an actress or two” (304-05).

Max insists that Dora have her own room and stay as long as she likes. The room is on the third floor and is on the side of the house next to Paddy Malloy’s Playhouse or “the Trap” (305). This is a theater and brothel. There is a newspaper article on the wall about Max, who staged a protest for women’s suffrage by appearing naked at the state house. Rachael explains that “Max likes to get people talking” but that she saved Rachael and Judith from an orphanage (306).

Dora writes to Bertine to tell her that she arrived safe and to give her a list of things not to do with Wrennie. She wants Wrennie to forget that Dora was her mother and be loved by Bertine.

That night she goes to Charlie’s room and “curled up next to him like we used to do when we were children” (308). She whispers to him the reason for her visit: that she’s suspected of killing Mrs. Ketch and that she isn’t even sure whether it’s true. She laments that she “couldn’t save any of them, not Darcy, not Iris Rose, not Mrs. Ketch” (309). Charlie puts an arm around her and tells her: “Whatever came after wasn’t your fault. You did just what Miss B. taught you. It wasn’t your fault. You have to believe that” (309).

Dora receives a letter from Bertine and the Occasional Knitters Society. They tell her that the town has learned that Experience Ketch fell down the stairs. When Dr. Thomas arrived, she was already dead. Brady still claims that Dora gave her something that caused the fall. Dr. Thomas is also still convinced of Dora’s guilt, saying in the paper: “This is the kind of sad, inexcusable tragedy that comes when we dismiss scientific theory and cling to the ignorance of the past” (311).

Ginny is going to go to Dr. Thomas to try to get information to help prove Dora’s innocence. Ginny only drank half her tea with mitts, and so is pregnant again.

Dora writes back to say she did give Experience a tincture, but that dizziness is not a side effect. If the remedy killed her, it would have been from bleeding, which would have been easy to check if Brady hadn’t buried his wife so quickly. She ends by saying: “I guess I won’t be home anytime soon” because she does look guilty (312).

The day after Dora arrives, Max insists that she have an “Independence Day, Dora’s day to meet Boston” (313). She takes a bath in a tub with running water, gets a haircut from Rachael, borrows a sheer modern dress from Judith, and goes “out on the town” with her new friends (313).

The point, according to Max, is for Dora to be “whomever she decides to be” (313-14). She suggests that Dora abandon the last name “Bigelow” and remarks, “Rare suits you so perfectly” (314). Dora agrees and is “Miss Dora Rare” to all of Boston (314).

Dora wishes she were as confident as Max and admires how “she carries the city inside her, and the city, in return, carries her” (314). She also notes that “except for the Willow Book under my bed and Charlie in a room down the hall, everything that was ever mine is gone,” including her old name and the “familiar voice of the moon” (314).

The group has a picnic in the Copps Hill cemetery, which is a “long-standing tradition” because it is “lucky to visit the dead” (315). They drink a toast to the child buried under the nearest tombstone, and Max laments the temperance teetotalers and the Watch and Ward Society, which have made Boston less interesting (315).

They tell Dora how Charles came to work for Max. In February, a friend invited Max to spend a weekend at her cabin in the woods. Her friend’s husband brought some drinking buddies along, and Charlie arrived to deliver an illicit crate of beer. After some drinking, Max started to sing and was placed on top of the piano. Some of the men pushed the piano outside and out onto the frozen pond.

Suddenly, Charlie shouted for everyone to get off the ice, as it was about to break. But Max didn’t notice; she kept singing. So, Charlie came to her rescue and “skated me away in his arms, gliding along in his boots” (317). The piano ended up at the bottom of the pond. Since she owed him her life, Max says the least she could do was “give him a job and a place to stay” (317).

As they leave, they see a group of children dancing around the wishing stone before they each sit on top of it and say a wish. Max insists that the group follow suit, which they do. Charlie’s wish is for “another kiss from Maxine” (317). Max wants a kiss from Rudolph Valentino. Rachael wishes for the Red Sox to win the World series. Judith hopes for more days like this one. And Dora “wished for Wrennie to always be happy” (318).

Bertine and Ginny write to Dora to say that Dr. Thomas claimed that Ginny’s “morning sickness is neurotic in nature, the pregnant woman’s way of gaining attention from a husband” (320). He tried to cure it with “the suggestive method,” which only resulted in Ginny being sick on his shoes (319).

Although her morning sickness passed on its own, her hands and ankles are swollen. She also says that Brady Ketch and Dr. Thomas are close friends, and that Brady helped the doctor shoot and mount the beloved white doe. This upsets Dora as she feels “Dr. Thomas won’t be happy until he’s taken every last thing that mattered to Miss B.” (321).

Dora writes back to her friends and prescribes Ginny tea and rest from afar. She tells them that Max “is supported by family wealth and treats the rest of us with more than our share of whatever we might need” (322). Max also hosts suffragette meetings, and Dora realizes she always took her freedom to vote in Nova Scotia for granted. She muses that women “have died for these rights, while I was complacent, happy enough to sit at home and knit” (322). 

A group of women gather at Maxine’s to read excerpts from books that “have been ‘banned in Boston’ by the Watch and Ward Society” (323). Max has begun rescuing such banned books from burnings.

Dora is content with her life. Though she keeps the curtain drawn in her bedroom, she can hear Miss Honey, one of the prostitutes across the way in the Trap. She is popular with many men and Dora admires how she is always in charge of the men. Dora also wonders if it would be so bad to be Miss Honey, since she “seems so pleased, so proud of herself” without regret (325). She wonders if the women who marry young “are the ones who have sold ourselves for far too little a price” (325).

Dora also notices that Rachael and Judith are a romantic couple. Speaking to Dora privately, Max clearly approves of their relationship, saying: “No matter what form it takes, love is always a glorious thing” (326). Dora regrets wasting herself with Archer and has “little hope that I’ll ever find love or even true affection” again (326).

Dora then writes to Bertine to tell her that an influenza epidemic has struck Boston and urges the people of Scots Bay to avoid contact with anyone from the outside until it passes.

Dora recalls visiting Miss B. once when she had influenza. Miss B. treated her with a cold bath “to shock the fever” and “then a dose of onion syrup and a right good rubbin’ with castor oil” (328).

In her journal, she records how “Boston is being laid to waste by the Spanish Influenza” and how several of the prostitutes at the Trap next door have contracted it (330). She hears Miss Honey coughing and, for the first time, calls to her to ask if she needs help. Miss Honey tells her that half of the girls “feel dead already, and the doctor refuses to call” (331). Dora advises her to let in fresh air and passes her over a pot of chicken soup.

A few days later, Dora records that Maxine has come down with the flu “after having spent the evening at a suffrage meeting in Back Bay” (332). Dora insists on attending to her, since she is the only one with medical experience. Meanwhile, the women at the Trap are recovering, though one girl died. Miss Honey is better and comes to visit Dora and sing to Max from outside her window. Dora sticks to Miss B.’s advice: aspirin if the fever causes fits, and “if that don’t work, then dunk ’em in cold water” (332). However, the next day Max is worse. Charlie is “desperate when he asks after her. I think he loves Maxine more than she knows” (333).

Bertine writes to Dora to tell her she can come home. Brady Ketch, tired of dealing with his many children alone, took them into Canning and attempted to sell them off. Hart helped put a stop to it and once the children “saw that their father wasn’t able to lay his hand on them, they spoke right up, telling the constable and anyone who would listen the truth about what happened to their mother” (334). The truth is that Brady beat Experience and then pushed her down the stairs to her death.

Ginny hopes Dora will be able to return in time for her baby’s birth. She admits to feeling strange, though Dr. Thomas tells her that her symptoms are normal.

Dora writes back to say that she cannot come home until she is sure Maxine is well but will be home soon. Max is still very ill, though Dora tries to distract her with stories of her life in the Bay. Even though she is ill, Max pushes her “to get back there, to fight for your place—your house, for Wrennie” (337). She tells Dora to “never let someone take what’s rightfully yours. You can give all you want in life, but don’t give up” (337).

The next day, Dora records that Maxine shows signs of pneumonia. Dora treats her with an onion and barley bath, and onion syrup. Slowly, over three days, Max begins breathing easier and feeling better. She tells Dora that Miss B. visited her in a dream “standing under willow tree, with teacups dangling from every branch. She said the same thing over and over: Don’t you wanna know what done come next?” (338). Max doesn’t know if the message was for her or Dora.

A week later, the women’s suffrage amendment is defeated again, despite Max’s best efforts. Dora finds herself tempted by city life; she appreciates how easy running water and electricity make everyday life and enjoys the music. She feels the city whisper “to me in a dream telling me to start a new life” (339). However, she then dreams “of the Bay, Mother’s smile, Bertine’s laugh, Spider Hill, the voice of the moon” and decides to go home (339).