“After that,” Grandma said, “I couldn’t have any more children. The doctors told me something had gone wrong. Something inside me. They said I’d never carry another baby.”
She wiped her eyes with the tissue Dr. Hale handed her.
“We had saved up money for the baby,” she said. “Frank and I. Nineteen hundred dollars in a coffee can on top of the refrigerator. It was for the nursery. For clothes and diapers and a rocking chair. It was a lot of money back then. It took us four years to save it.”
“What did you do with it?” I asked.
Grandma smiled.
“I went to the hospital administrator,” she said. “A man named Mr. Bauer. Bald as an egg. Smoked cigars in his office. I put that coffee can on his desk and told him I wanted to put a window in Room 214.”
Dr. Hale laughed softly from the corner of the room.
“He told me I was crazy,” Grandma said. “He said it was a storage room. He said there was no reason for it to have a window. He said the hospital didn’t have the budget for silly renovations.”
“What did you say?”
“I said it wasn’t a storage room. I said it was a room where women had their babies, and some of those babies died, and some of those babies were taken away. And I said that no mother, not ever again, should have to lie in that bed and stare at a blank white wall.” Grandma’s chin came up a little. “I told him I’d pay for it myself. All of it. Every penny. And if he said no, I’d go to the newspaper.”
“Did he say yes?”
“He said yes. On one condition. That nobody ever knew who paid for it. He didn’t want other nurses getting ideas.” She shook her head. “So it was an anonymous donation. And that summer, a man came with a saw and cut a hole in the back wall of Room 214. And they put in a little square window, two feet by two feet, looking out at the courtyard.”
“And the cherry tree?”
“Frank planted it,” Grandma said softly. “Right outside that window. In the middle of the night, so nobody would stop him. He dug the hole with a shovel he brought from home and planted a little cherry sapling. He said if somebody was going to look out that window, they ought to have something to look at.”
I thought about the big bare tree in the courtyard. The one I’d been looking at from the waiting room. Shiny and wet in the rain.
My grandfather planted that. Fifty-three years ago. In the middle of the night.
“I went back to work in the fall,” Grandma said. “Same floor. Same job. Everybody thought I was crazy for coming back. Everybody thought it would be too painful.”
“Why did you?”
“Because of the girls,” she said.
“What girls?”
Dr. Hale stepped forward.
“Back then,” he said quietly, “this hospital had an arrangement. With a few of the churches and some private agencies. Young women who got pregnant without being married were sent here to deliver. Quietly. They were brought in through a side door. They gave birth in Room 214, where nobody would see them. And then their babies were taken away immediately and given to adoptive families.”
“Immediately?” I said.
“Before they could hold them,” Dr. Hale said. “Before they could even see their faces. That was the policy. They said it was kinder that way. A clean break.”
“It wasn’t kinder,” Grandma said. “It was cruel. I’d hear those girls crying all night long through the wall. Seventeen years old. Eighteen. Asking over and over, was it a boy or a girl? Is it healthy? Can I just see it once? And the nurses would say, ‘It’s better if you don’t know, sweetheart. Get some rest.’”
She looked at me.
“That’s why I put the window there, Daniel. Not for me. For them. So at least they’d have something to look at besides a blank wall while their hearts broke.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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