Four Marys

Madonna del Parto, ca. 1460, Piero della Francesca

Are the drapes drawn open or being closed?

Each of the heavy, velvet wings is clasped

in the hands of a little angel, a little man really,

in the shades of plum and mint green that frame

the birthing tent's opening for a girl

who retreats into or emerges from the dark.

It isn't clear: the perspective is such

that if I cover the painting's

top half with a hand, Mary steps forward;

if I cover the lower, she shrinks back,

her blue bodice split at the bulging seams

to show the pear-white cut of her linen shift,

the great weight of the child she is about to bear

and later bury. And even if I didn't believe

the child would rise again, I would believe the artist

had seen such fear paint a girl's face

when the eldest women in the village

were called for help, and fresh straw brought in

if there wasn't a bed, and hot water, and rose oil to rub

over the hips, and vinegar and sugar water

to drink, and hog's gut and a thick needle

to sew her up with later. Even if I did not believe

in Mary's joy, I would believe in her pain, the quick flick

of her thoughts turning to the sister, or the cousin,

or to her own mother who'd died giving birth,

the baby, too, not making it, for the birth

was in winter: ice so clogged the village's

deep ruts that the midwife's cart slipped

into the soak dike, splitting the wood wheel

in two, and by the time the woman could walk

the steep hill up to the villa, the mother had torn,

and in the rush to save her, no one worked

quick enough to cut the cord wrapped

around the baby's throat. Or the baby came out

strong and fine, but died two years later

when it stumbled into a fire, or was bitten by a rat

and sickened and starved, or caught the fever

that spread through the town when all the animals

were stabled inside the houses for winter.

So many people died, so many people

were supposed to die, it's hard to conceive

of how the mothers survived their grief,

and how they named their next, living baby

after the dead one because the name, at least,

was good. It's hard to know whether I should read

the deepest grief or resignation or both in the line

from Mary Shelley's 1818 notebook, the year

her daughter, Clara, died, two weeks

after Mary had given birth to her. Woke this morning.

Found my baby dead, all the little black scratching pen

could add to paper, and the rest was blank,

and then there were months, and then

there was Frankenstein. Piero della Francesca

painted an embroidery of pomegranates

into Mary's birthing tent, symbol of fruitfulness

and the underworld, of a mother's grief

and of her rage to get her child back, the daughter

both dead and alive to her, as Mary knows her own child

is both dead and alive to us. A winter fruit

for the winter birth of a rich woman

whose house wanted to ward off a grueling

delivery, and so whose midwife would feed her

pomegranate seeds to sustain her, a fruit

the midwife herself would eat only once, as payment

from the duke for the son she finally ushered

into the world for him. Such a strange, leathery

skin, though the color was bright

as blood on fresh linen, and who could have expected

those glistening cells packed inside, wet prisms

in the ruby eye of a ruby insect, or the heart

of a god who take what he wants

and never gives it back. The midwife took the fruit home

and split it with her husband and tried not to think

of the bed of the girl she'd just left, its stains

that looked almost black in the dawn light,

and how the girl's skin had turned bluish, the fragile spring

she'd require to spend alone in bed away from the duke

and healing. How can Mary not look

downcast before these curtains that threaten

to close on her, to open? I have no doubt

of seeing the animal today, Mary Wollstonecraft

Godwin, Mary Shelley's mother, wrote,

meaning birth, meaning Mary, the little animal

she never saw grow up, because Wollstonecraft

died of an infection days after giving birth.

But before that was told she could not nurse

her infant daughter for fear the corruption

would spread through her milk, though she stayed

at Mary's bedside the final three days of her life.

And Godwin stayed beside her, who, because he loved

his wife, believed her genius could survive

any truth, and so published a memoir later

detailing everything: Wollstonecraft's affairs,

her daughter's illegitimacy, her attempts at suicide—so that

in the 1798 index of the Anti-Jacobin Review would publish,

under the heading "Prostitution," See Mary

Wollstonecraft. Two towns over from his Madonna,

in a church in Arezzo, Piero della Francesca

painted a fresco of Mary Magdalene, her curled hair wet

with the tears she used to bathe Christ's feet,

her body a swollen green swathe of dress, the red cape

folded to accentuate the pendulous belly

and thick thigh, the Magdalene bristling

between arch columns that frame her, one

painted slightly forward, the other behind

her body, so that we do not know in which direction

Mary is headed, nor what she is, really,

her almond eyes glittering out at us, her halo chipped,

over centuries, away. It is wonderful

when time accentuates something of the truth

already within us: the frank look, the unabashed

leg with which the woman kicks off the covers from the bed

of the man to whom she is not married; the neat,

round muscle of his shoulder pressed against hers

in the dark, his body over and over coming alive

under her hands, a dream or a nightmare

Mary Shelley once had of Clara.

All this time, she told her husband, their daughter

had not been dead at all, only cold, the little body frozen

and waiting to be attended to. And so we rubbed

it before the fire, and now it lives, she told

Shelley in the conversation she recorded

in her journal, and cried awhile, and went to bed.

Then woke again the next morning, and remembered.

The midwife, walking back down from the villa

three summers later, having attended the birth

of the duke's new, less delicate wife, hums a song

to herself that she hummed to the baby

she just left, a girl this time, no pomegranates

for payment; a girl who will, if lucky, inherit

her mother's strength and her plainness, both traits

the midwife believes might protect her from

and in the birthing bed. She'll grow up,

the midwife thinks, and marry, and have children

herself, some less or more like her, sons

with obdurate natures, perhaps, or a daughter

who inherits her curly hair, perhaps the sturdy thighs

of a woman like this shopkeeper kneeling now by a store

in the Piazza Grande to retrieve a shower of euros

from someone's coin purse. The woman stands, straightens,

and I see her mouth thin to a not unpleasant line

as she looks out at me, calculating, perhaps,

the time until lunch as she tugs at the waist

of her linen pants. The yellow pleats sag, slack

at her belly. The weight from a pregnancy

she never lost, perhaps, or the thickening

that comes to anyone, in the later part of life.

Source: Nightingale (2019)