Pre-Natal Care
August 9
I know I’m too healthy, so today I braved the town’s growing interest in my stomach and took our new gas-saving bus down to the library. There . wasn’t a soul that I know in the reading room and I marched boldly toward the shelves and started investigating. Medicine, medicine, where would the medical books be?
I was just up to History when a girlish titter fluttered up behind me, the Third Assistant Librarian. “My, you’re looking well! Can’t I help you find the book?”
“I’m looking for ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’,” I said firmly.
She found it before I could even locate the medical department. And then ado or die spirit swept over me. Airily I asked, “By the way, have you any books on medicine? You see, I’m writing a, murder story-”
“Right here, on the top shelf,” she interrupted gleefully. “No, no, you mustn’t reach! I’ll get them. Here are a couple you might be interested in.”
I grabbed the two books, dropped “The Decline”, and fled. I had caught a glimpse of the title of one of those books and I hugged them, titles down, to my shirt front till I was in the car.
At home in the bathroom, safe from Lucretia’s curious eye, I tore the heart out of them. One was a paper-bound volume put out in some pre-Rooseveltian era by the United States Department of Labor. (The Government is rather wonderful when you get on to it.) The cover was a riot of flowers practically smothered in pollen-but no bees-and the title was “Pre-Natal Care”. The other cover had a picture of a very maternal young woman in a late nineteenth-century dress with an early Italian cherub in her arms. This was called “Infant Care”.