By Wendy WassersteinFebruary 13, 2000

The Baby Who Arrived Too Soon

As I tried to become a parent in my late forties, I thought that getting pregnant would be the hard part. A premature child never occurred to me.

“I looked up at the sonogram screen and saw a tiny hand waving at me, as if to say, ‘Hold on, Mom. I’m coming!’ ”Illustration by Al Hirschfeld © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation

I got up at 5 a.m. on August 27th to write Fay Francis’s eulogy. Fay was a descendant of New York’s Harriman family, a Wasp doyenne who lived on the Upper East Side and was always properly decked out in pumps, gloves, and Schlumberger brooches. Almost every Christmas Day for twenty years, I had eaten Christmas lunch with Fay and her son André Bishop, who is the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theatre and one of my oldest friends, at the Colony Club. Every year, at cocktail time, Fay presented me with a purse suitable for the Queen Mother.

As I began to gather my memories of Fay that morning, I felt a tingling from my left elbow to my hand. I figured it had to be psychosomatic. I had never been asked to be the opening act at an Episcopal service before. Furthermore, although Fay was eighty-two, her death had unnerved me. I remembered my last conversation with her. Because she had been ill the previous Christmas, we had cancelled our lunch, but I had called to wish her well.

“Thing is, lamb, I worry about you,” she had said in her stately old New York accent. “All the men your age are either married or gay, and the single ones want young things. You have your work and your friends, but you deserve some personal happiness, too.”

For the funeral, I put on a gray suit and gray pearls. I even made an appointment at an Upper East Side salon to get my hair blown straight. If I was going to give a eulogy at St. James Church, I was going to look like St. James Church. Unfortunately, instead of making my hair straight, the hairdresser decided to express herself through my natural curls. I arrived at the church looking like an extra from “Yentl.”

André’s brother George, an Oxford-educated minister, presided over the service wearing a white robe with gold vestments. George told us that he knew his mother had found redemption at the end of her life because, in April, she had sent pears to his father’s ailing second wife and, in May, Georgia peaches. I had never known that the Fruit of the Month Club was the road to salvation.

When I finally reached the pulpit and began to speak, my voice cracked. Maybe it was my affection for Fay, or the unaccustomed tingling in my hand. Or maybe I was simply unhinged by the passing of time. Looking out over the pews of the church, I recognized theatre colleagues whom I had known for a quarter of a century. Over the years, we had all become part of one another’s family.

Of course, as with most families, the majority of mine who had gathered at St. James that morning didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on in my life. On August 27, 1999, I was forty-eight years old and six months pregnant.

It’s not like I got knocked up. Most forty-eight-year-old women don’t. I had made my first appointment with a fertility doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital when I turned forty. For the next eight years, I progressed from artificial inseminations to egg-stimulating Chlomid pills and on to daily injections of Pergonal. When I had first contemplated becoming a mother, I was involved with a man who I hoped would be the father. But when we stopped seeing each other I felt there was no reason to abandon the project. A male friend agreed to help me.

Fertility treatments, even more than high-school dances, are a regular confirmation of negative femininity, with every disappointment underscored by megadoses of hormones. There’s nothing like sitting in fertility doctors’ offices, looking at photos of the children they’ve nudged into creation and knowing that you’re the negative statistic. It becomes an addictive impossible dream.

As my failure rate accelerated, I moved into high-tech reproductive territory: I tried in-vitro fertilization, gift (gamete intra-fallopian-tube transfer), and, finally, surrogacy. Marcy, from Alaska, flew in to be implanted with embryos created out of my eggs and donated sperm. Unfortunately, the embryos deteriorated somehow in packing or storage, and were unusable. Marcy went back to Alaska.

At that point, I started looking into adoption. But I had lost my momentum. While I was being injected with hormones that could make a tyrannosaurus give birth to a foldout couch, my oldest sister, Sandra Meyer, who was an advanced breast-cancer patient, was having monthly chemotherapy treatments.

I have a photograph of Sandra from the mid-nineteen-sixties, surrounded by men in suits, when she was the first female product-group manager at General Foods. Explaining my sister’s career to my high-school friends, I’d simply say that she sent Tang to the moon with the astronauts. She was defiant during her long illness, and I’m sure that my obsession with getting pregnant was partly a wish to bring her some life-affirming news.

Sandra died in December of 1997, at sixty. My family scattered her ashes on the beach in East Hampton on New Year’s Eve.

Almost a year after my sister’s death, I was having lunch at Café des Artistes when an attractive man whose face I couldn’t quite place tapped me on the shoulder.

“Wendy, it’s me, Michael Drews,” he said. He was my first and most compassionate fertility doctor. “How’ve you been?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I answered, smiling up at him. “I’m O.K., and I’ve given up on that other thing.”

“That’s why I came over,” he said, his voice cheerful and, as always, a little too quick. “Things have improved dramatically since you started, and I’d say you’ve got a good chance for success today. Call me. I’m at St. Barnabas Hospital, in New Jersey.”

Six months later, I was lying on a day-surgery gurney in Livingston, New Jersey, watching my egg-and-sperm combination platter on live-action video. An embryologist in the room next door was siphoning the embryos from a petri dish into a tube. It was a surreal cross between PBS’s “Nature” and the Food Channel.

Dr. Drews entered the room with the magic tube, which was the width of a pipe cleaner. As he inserted it into my uterus, he said, “So, Wendy, are you writing?”

“Yes. I started a new play,” I said. “But it’s not as interesting as this!”

“Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” he said when the procedure was over. As he left, I noticed that he was wearing clogs. A lot of doctors wear them. I’ve never understood why.

I got on a flight to Europe the next night. Looking out at the stars, I began to weep. I wasn’t crying for Sandra exactly, or for fear that this last effort would again prove to be futile. For eight years, I had believed that the greatest regret of my life would be childlessness. I realized now that I was finally willing to give that up. The decade of loss had almost passed, and I was content to be uprooted, in space, alone.

After my return home, one afternoon two weeks later, there was a message on my answering machine from a lab: “Congratulations. You’re pregnant.” My due date was approximately Christmas, 1999. It was a millennium prophecy close to a miracle.

My decision to keep my pregnancy a secret from most of my friends was a simple one. I knew that I was teetering on the high end of high risk. If the baby didn’t come to term after all these years of trying, I wanted it to be a personal loss, not a public one. My plan was to wait until Labor Day, well into my seventh month, and then to inform my friends that the twenty pounds I had recently gained were not the result of bad habits and anxiety. And Labor Day was when my brother Bruce and his wife were expecting their second child.

After Fay’s funeral, I went to my regular appointment at the East Side Women’s Ob/Gyn Associates. A nurse wrapped a Velcro-lined cuff around my upper arm. She looked at me sternly. “Your blood pressure is a little high,” she said. “Relax for a few minutes. Don’t be nervous. I’ll be back.”

Although I’m a big, hearty girl, even in routine circumstances I could be voted Miss White Coat Syndrome. Ever since my sister’s death, I’ve been convinced that any protracted time spent with a health-care professional is a prelude to terminal illness.

The nurse returned in five minutes and wrapped the cuff around my arm again. “It’s higher now!” She seemed to be irritated with me. “I told you to relax! Lie on your left side and the doctor will be with you in a few minutes.”

I reached for a magazine and came upon a detailed account of Cindy Crawford’s pregnancy: Cindy is “over the moon” about her baby. Cindy does yoga and is working out all the way through. Cindy never has swollen fingers and legs. Cindy never has to lie on her left side.

Twenty minutes later, Dr. Laurie Goldstein came into the room. Dr. Goldstein is deeply committed to women’s-health issues, and she still wears the insignia of her activist generation: dangling earrings, little makeup, and evolved-graduate-student attire.

“I hear your blood pressure is high,” she said, wrapping the Velcro cuff around me again.

“Well, I get nervous,” I said. “And I was planning on leaving for England tonight.”

“Try to relax.” She started squeezing the blood-pressure pump again and asked me, “Did you know you have protein in your urine?”

“No. I spoke at a funeral this morning.” I held up Cindy’s pregnancy photos. “You shouldn’t keep things like this around your office.”

“You’re absolutely right.” She looked at me intently. “I want you to get into a taxi and go over to Mount Sinai Hospital. Your blood pressure is very high, and there’s a chance you have preëclampsia.”

“Who?” I asked her in a panic.

She explained, “Preëclampsia is a high-blood-pressure condition that can lead to liver and kidney failure. I’m not saying that you have it. And, if you do, most likely we can treat it by keeping you in bed until your delivery.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. When I’m frightened, I become excessively polite. “Can I go home first to get a few things?”

“Get a friend to bring them to you. I want you to go right now.”

Half an hour later, my gray St. James suit was strewn over a stool in the Labor and Delivery ward at Mount Sinai’s Klingenstein Pavilion.

Michele K. Silverstein, a doctor in her thirties with brown curly hair and kind brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, is the junior member of the obstetrics associates. She is also the person every modern Jewish mother secretly hopes her daughter will turn out to be. She has the earnestness of a science jock, but it’s offset by a skating-rink-size diamond from her hematologist husband.

“Are you comfortable in here?” she asked about my quarters.

“I’m in a Kafka story, Michele!”

“Look, I hope it’s just for the night,” she said. “We’ll monitor you and probably send you home tomorrow.”

I called William Ivey Long, an old friend from the Yale Drama School, who had been my fertility confidant. He was in the middle of designing costumes for the upcoming musicals “Contact” and “Swing!” and for the Broadway play “Epic Proportions.” Even so, he rushed over to spend the night on the reclining guest chair in my hospital room.

No one sleeps in hospitals. Bells ring throughout the night, and every room has a round-the-clock open-door policy. Every two hours, I was awakened to have my blood pressure taken. At four in the morning, a nurse told me, “It’s one-eighty-nine over ninety-five. Relax and lie on your left side.”

As far as I can make out, relaxing and lying on your left side is the treatment for preëclampsia. Preëclampsia, I came to learn, is better known by the name toxemia. It is most often diagnosed by protein in the patient’s urine, swelling of extremities, and hypertension. In a pregnant woman, the condition can lead to a seizure, and possibly a coma. An affected fetus can suffer from stunted growth, or can die if the placenta separates from the uterus. The only cure for preëclampsia is delivery. When the condition occurs late in the third trimester, mothers are immediately scheduled for childbirth.

Laurie Goldstein reappeared the next morning with bad news: I showed all the classic signs of preëclampsia. I was to be moved to the fourth floor for a weekend of observation. I tried to take deep breaths and think about those pears from the Fruit of the Month Club. Maybe they could be my salvation, too.

I had never been hospitalized before, and hadn’t realized that the experience was a non-stop meet and greet. In addition to bi-hourly blood-pressure monitoring, I was being treated by rotating cardiologists. One of them, Robert Phillips, an M.D./Ph.D. in his forties, reminded me of science majors I had known in college. He was accessible, and, with the right anecdote, I could make him giggle.

On Monday, after taking my pressure three times, Dr. Phillips explained the various blood-pressure medications I was taking. The phenobarbital, he told me, could make me groggy and forgetful. Then he mentioned that another doctor would be covering for him the following week, because he had to go to Houston. I asked him why.

“I’m going to the National Space Biomedical Research Institute,” he told me. “There’s going to be a human settlement on Mars, and I want to be part of Mount Sinai’s advisory team.”

“Mars! Really?” I was sure I was experiencing a phenobarbital reaction.

“I’m competing against doctors from Stanford and Penn,” he told me.

“You know, it’s important you get this,” I said. “They’re always sending people like John Glenn or Sally Ride into space. They need Jews from Mount Sinai!”

“Try to lie on your left side,” he calmly admonished me.

I rolled over. “Listen, you’ve probably got the old ma nishtana problem here. Why is your proposal for Mars different from anybody else’s? You need to punch it up.”

“Punch it up?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure. You need a laugh on the third line,” I said. “Like a family anecdote—that always warms the room.”

“That’s good,” Dr. Phillips said, impressed, and he handed me a copy of his proposal: “The Effect of Microgravity on Cardiovascular Hemodynamics.”

On Monday morning, as I was trying to translate Dr. Phillips’s cardiovascular-speak, my troika of female obstetricians—Laurie, Michele, and Rebecca Brightman—appeared. Becky Brightman is a beauty. With dark hair and bright-blue eyes, she reminded me of Suzanne Pleshette in her pre-Bob Newhart phase. The three of them advised me to stay in the hospital until as close to my due date as possible. I was twenty-five weeks pregnant; that meant three months at Mount Sinai.

The next day, while I was calculating how I would inform the Princeton Theatre Department that I would not be teaching playwriting that fall, Dr. Richard Berkowitz, the hospital’s head of obstetrics, came in. In his opinion, my preëclampsia was potentially life-threatening and I should prepare myself to have the baby that afternoon, depending on the lab results. As I was absorbing my new schedule, a nurse came in and told me to clean up my room because I was expected to be out by 11 a.m.

For the first time, I didn’t care about being voted Miss Mount Sinai Congeniality. I lowered my voice. “You know, it’s impossible to lie on my left side and to be out of this room at 11 a.m. I’m a person, not a grouper!”

I had no idea where the grouper came from. Maybe it was imagery left over from the service at St. James. Or maybe I was starring in a pro-life Christian docudrama warning young girls not to grow up into self-centered heathens: Marry young and procreate!

Two hours later, I was lying on a gurney awaiting a cesarean. Michele K. Silverstein came to see me.

“I’ve asked Ian Holzman, who runs the neonatal unit here, to talk to you about premature babies.”

In all my years in pursuit of fertility, the possibility of having a premature child had never occurred to me. The trick had been to get pregnant. Period.

Dr. Ian Holzman is a warm, energetic man in his fifties with a gray beard. When he came to see me, he said, “You should know that babies born after only twenty-five weeks’ gestation are at a higher risk for having lung or brain damage than those born even at thirty weeks. That’s not to say it’s inevitable.” He smiled at me with a comforting familiarity. “But you should know.”

Lying on my gurney, I decided that I’d moved on from Christian docudrama to the plague portion of the Passover Seder, when we dip our pinkies into wine to represent the hideous disasters the good Lord inflicted on the Egyptians: locusts, frogs, pestilence, infertility, preëclampsia, brain damage.

A nurse stuck her head in: “Your ex-husband is here!” I had no idea whom she could be talking about.

My friend Gerald Gutierrez, the Broadway director, pulled back the curtain. “Hello, darling,” he said. “I hear you’re not a grouper!”

Suddenly, Michele K. Silverstein burst in. “So we’re not operating,” she said.

Dr. Berkowitz joined us to explain. “I just spoke to one of the leading experts on preëclampsia, in Tennessee,” he told us. “His experience with the severity and early onset of your preëclampsia indicates that we have more time than we thought.” In general, he said, every day in the womb is equal to three days in the N.I.C.U.—Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “The longer we can keep that baby inside of you, the better the baby’s chances for survival are.” He smiled at me. “So I’ve gotten you a room back on the Labor and Delivery floor, and we’ll just keep you there as long as we can.”

Gerry Gutierrez pushed the gurney down the hall. I looked up at him and said, “Now we’ve got time to punch up a speech for this guy who wants to go to Mars.”

When I called my friend Jane Rosenthal to tell her about my new fall plans, she immediately swung into action. Jane is a movie producer and a crackerjack organizer. She reached William Ivey Long during the final dress rehearsal of “Contact” and told him to get up to Mount Sinai to redecorate my room.

At nine in the morning, William arrived with an armful of coördinated blue floral curtains, pillows, and Monet posters. The room, formerly a beige netherworld, became the decorator showroom of the second floor. Nurses and hospital attendants popped in throughout the day to ask William for color and fabric tips.

The nights were more challenging. To ward off any chance of seizure, I was now attached to an intravenous magnesium drip, which made me nauseous. I’ve never been good at asking for help. As an Ethical Culture School graduate, I have always believed that my purpose is to be generous and to serve others. But when I was too ill to make it to the bathroom, Angela, the night nurse, who wore a medallion around her neck that said “Girl Power,” would bring me a pan for the nausea. She gave me soothing sponge baths, too. I quickly became obsessed with the disparity between Angela’s paycheck and Demi Moore’s.

Each day, I left my stylish nest in Labor and Delivery to have a sonogram, and one morning the doctor doing the sonogram asked if I would like to know the sex of the baby. Before the preëclampsia, I had decided to let the baby’s gender be a surprise. But now I wanted all my cards on the table.

“It’s a girl,” the doctor told me. “There’s her hand,” she said, moving an ultrasound mouse over my stomach.

I looked up at the screen and saw a tiny hand waving at me, as if to say, “Hold on, Mom. I’m coming!”

“Do you want a copy of that?” the doctor asked me. I kept it by my bedside for the rest of my stay.

When I made it to the Jewish holidays—a full week—without my kidneys collapsing, my doctors were thrilled with me. My anxiety level, however, was mounting for a different reason. I had told my mother a week earlier about my pregnancy, but she had no idea that I was in the hospital.

The last time my mother, Lola Wasserstein, had been in a hospital, she had watched her oldest daughter die of cancer. I knew it would be impossible for me to lie on my left side and to keep my blood pressure down with my mother sitting by, weeping and seeing Sandra in me. So for her sake, and for the sake of my daughter, I decided I could not invite my mother to Labor and Delivery.

“Your mother called me, crying,” my agent told me just after Labor Day. “She asked me where you were.”

My blood pressure was up again. I left a message on my mother’s machine: “Hello, Mother. I’m still in England with Flora. I’m having a wonderful time.”

After twelve days in the hospital, the news about my condition was suddenly not so good. “Your blood platelets are beginning to drop,” Becky Brightman informed me at 10 a.m. “Don’t panic. It’s a matter of the entire picture.”

But I was panicking, and not just about my platelets. A nurse had just told me that my brother Bruce and his pregnant wife, Claude, had booked the delivery room across the hall from me for the following week. I started imagining a scene from a Marx Brothers movie, “A Day at the Hospital”: While Bruce is telling Claude to breathe, he sees me being pushed to the sonogram room with my magnesium-drip sidekick.

On Sunday morning, sixteen days after I was admitted, Michele K. Silverstein came to see me. “How would you like to have a baby today?” she asked.

At 12:45 p.m., I was wheeled into the operating room accompanied by two female obstetricians, two female nurses, a female anesthesiologist, and Gerry Gutierrez. I felt as if I were back in class at Mount Holyoke, in 1967, with one visiting male student from Amherst. It was familiar in the best possible way.

I don’t think I really connected lying on that brightly lit table with bringing new life into the world. Looking down at Becky and Michele, with their intelligent, professional faces and perfectly coiffed heads, I imagined that they were having a heated conversation in the Neiman Marcus shoe department.

“J. P. Tod’s.” Becky examines my pelvis.

“Manolo Blahnik.” Michele passes Becky an instrument.

My cesarean lasted approximately an hour. Gerry held my head. At two-twenty-five, I heard a cry and saw a baby out of the corner of my eye.

“Congratulations! You have a daughter,” Becky Brightman said to me.

The baby was whisked away to the hospital’s N. I. C. U. She was about fourteen inches long and weighed seven hundred and ninety grams, or one pound twelve ounces.

I had called my brother Bruce just before the delivery, and at nine that night he approached the desk at the N.I.C.U. “I’m here to see Baby Wasserstein,” he announced.

“Do you have some I.D.?” the receptionist asked.

“I’m Bruce Wasserstein,” my brother answered. “I’m the baby’s father.”

“Someone else came in who said he was the father,” she said, referring to Gerry, who had been given a hospital bracelet marked “Father” when we were in the delivery room.

“Yes. That’s right. Well, he’s the father and I’m the father.”

In short order, my brother, an iconoclastic investment banker who had protected oil companies from T. Boone Pickens and advises movie studios about the dot-com world, managed to secure permanent visitation rights as a parent.

The day after I delivered, the news that I had had a baby flashed through the theatre community. One rumor that would become a particular favorite of mine was that I had been pregnant and hadn’t known it.

That morning, Ian Holzman and his neonatal residents came in to see me at eight o’clock. “Your daughter had a bad night,” he informed me gently. “You’ve got a very sick little girl. I just want you to know that.” He smiled kindly and left.

This was the first I had heard of my daughter’s condition. I couldn’t really take it all in. My pediatrician later explained that the illness was hyaline membrane disease, a lung affliction common in premature babies. I knew that it had caused the death of Jacqueline Kennedy’s third child, Patrick.

After dinner, a nurse wheeled me upstairs to see my baby for the first time. My family genes do not specialize in shoulder blades or collarbones. The first thing I noticed about my daughter was that she has shoulders like Audrey Hepburn’s when she wears that white strapless Cecil Beaton number in “My Fair Lady.” She was also wearing a “What’s My Line” eye mask. This was to shield her eyes from the bright lights that were installed to correct her high bilirubin levels, which had caused jaundice. Even in her Isolette-brand incubator, my daughter was elegant.

“She’s sleeping, Mommy,” an N.I.C.U. nurse told me. The nurses there call every mother “Mommy.”

My daughter was attached to an I.V. drip for feeding. Lying on her side, she had a C-pap (continuous positive airway pressure) tube in one nostril, to keep her lungs inflated. On her chest were penny-size sticky pads holding down wires that were attached to a machine that measures heart rate, pulse, and oxygen level. Any time her oxygen level or heart rate became abnormal, bells would go off. There were forty babies in the N.I.C.U., and each was attached to monitors like these. With bells going off constantly, the place sounded like S. Klein’s during a lingerie sale.

Dr. Holzman came over to me as I looked at my baby from my wheelchair. “She needs a name,” he said.

“I’m working on it,” I told him. Names are a big deal to a playwright.

“Well, pick something. She’s doing much better.” He made a knock-on-wood gesture. “She’s a good baby, even if she does look like you wouldn’t pick her out in the poultry department.”

“Thank you.” I decided to take this as a compliment. He sees poultry. I see Audrey Hepburn.

The Nipple Nazis attacked the next day at dawn.

“Are you pumping?” an ultra-thin woman demanded from my doorway.

“Not yet,” I answered. “I just had preëclampsia, a cesarean, and my daughter was born at twenty-seven weeks. I think I need to sleep.”

“You must pump every three hours!” she announced. “Or you will dry up.”

She wheeled in a breast pump that looked as if it could bail out a battleship. Sternly, she showed me how to pump each breast separately or, if I liked, both together, a sort of duet for mammaries.

Duly intimidated, I tried to sit up and attach two plastic bottles to my now Hindenberg-size breasts. Hurricane Floyd was raging outside, and incision staples were pinching my stomach. Then a hospital social worker came into the room. “Your mother is here,” she said. “She doesn’t know if you want to see her.” Bruce had told my mother about the birth. I still hadn’t spoken to her.

For most of my life, my mother, Lola, who has the petite build of a Fosse dancer, had told people that her age was “twenty-one plus.” When her oldest granddaughter turned thirty, my mother became “thirty,” too. Although I have given up trying to estimate how old she is, it is clear that my mother is a trouper. Even at “thirty,” she takes Broadway dance classes every day.

My mother sat next to my hospital bed wearing black leather pants, a multicolored sweater, and a bright knit cap. My father, in a gray suit, sat silently beside her.

“We saw the baby. She’s very little,” my mother said.

I continued eating orange Jell-O.

“We thought you didn’t want to see us, but your father had an appointment here at Gerontology.”

“Are you O.K., Dad?” I asked.

“He’s fine.” Lola is my father’s official spokesperson.

I looked at my mother. Her dark eyes were shining as if she were still a girl playing by the Vistula River in Poland.

“Mother, I want you to go back to see the baby and tell her you’re her grandma.” I took her hand. “I want you to pass your energy on to her. I want you to teach her how to survive!”

My mother dropped my hand. “She’s my grandchild! Of course she’ll survive!”

Later, my sister Georgette told me that when our mother first saw my baby and heard the details of my delivery she cried as inconsolably as she had when Sandra died.

“I have a name for my daughter,” I announced to Dr. Holzman five days after the delivery. I was examining a twinkling ruby light on my baby’s big toe. The light was heating up her capillaries and tracking her blood pressure.

“Well, what’s her name?” a nurse with a long braid asked me.

“Lucy Jane,” I answered.

“I’m Catherine,” the nurse said. “I was the nurse who admitted your daughter and will be her primary-care nurse during her stay here.”

There are at least fifteen nurses on duty at the N.I.C.U. None of them is more efficient than Catherine McCarron. She cares for at least four premature babies and, perhaps even more difficult, deals with their mothers.

“Would you like to hold Lucy?” Catherine asked me that morning.

“Hold her?” I asked. Lucy was attached to at least six wires and was the size of my outstretched hand. So far, our contact had been through the incubator’s porthole.

“It’s called kangaroo care,” she explained. “It started in Colombia, where premature babies don’t have the medical advantages of babies in a place like this. But a mother just holding her baby, skin to skin, makes an enormous difference.”

I washed my hands as Catherine opened the incubator. She handed me my daughter. Lucy Jane was almost weightless. Her tiny legs dangled like a doll’s. Her diaper was the size of a cigarette pack. I opened my sweater and put her inside. Her face was the size of a small apple. She wore a tiny pink-and-blue-striped cap that made her look like Santa’s tiniest elf.

I began to sing to her softly: “Picture yourself on a boat on a river where tangerine peaches meet marshmallow skies.” I knew that those weren’t the right lyrics, but they were close enough. I told my daughter I had named her Lucy because when she waved to me from the sonogram I thought of her as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, saying hello.

The bells in the N.I.C.U. continued to ring. Mothers sat by their tiny infants, fighting for life in their Isolettes. I sat there among them, wanting my daughter to see a full moon and eat a peach. Her nickel-size feet tickled my breast. I couldn’t cry in the N.I.C.U. We were there, I hoped, for the long haul.

One morning, three weeks after I had spoken at Fay Francis’s funeral, Rebecca Brightman arrived in my hospital room to remove my staples and to tell me it was time for me to go home.

I walked out of the Klingenstein Pavilion onto Fifth Avenue on the day before Yom Kippur. The city seemed to be in Technicolor. James Lapine and Heidi Ettinger, friends from drama school, had come to take me home. Lucy would be staying in the N.I.C.U. until at least December 14th, my original due date.

I watched as couples walked through the revolving door, holding their newborns in their required-by-law car seats. These parents were satisfied customers. They got what they came for. I felt ashamed of envying them—after all, I was alive, and so was Lucy. But I did envy them.

The day after I arrived home, there was a message on my answering machine from the N.I.C.U. Lucy had needed a transfusion. When I reached Catherine McCarron, she told me that the hospital had moved quickly because Lucy had become anemic. After assuring me that everything was O.K., she said, “I think I may also have overstepped myself. Your mother happened to come in for a visit when the transfusion was happening and I think it threw her.”

I imagined Lola grabbing her heart and knocking over several Isolettes.

“She caused a little bit of a stir. So I hope you don’t mind, but I asked her to come only with you or with scheduled permission. Is that all right?”

“Yes. It’s fine. I’m sorry. Thank you, Catherine.”

I hung up and called my mother.

“I hate that Irish nurse,” Lola said. “Everyone else there loves me. But if you don’t want me to go I won’t go.”

“I want you to go, Mother,” I said. “Just next time come with me.”

On the holiest night of the year, after Yom Kippur services at Temple Emanu-El, I took a taxi back to the Klingenstein Pavilion. It was ten o’clock and I learned that Lucy Jane had had another reversal. She had lost around fifty grams after the transfusion, and now she had a respirator tube taped over her nose and mouth. My daughter, like some other critical babies in the N.I.C.U., was under a plastic container, as if she were a hydroponic Bibb lettuce. I put my hand through the Isolette porthole and stroked her tiny fingers.

When I was in college, there was a popular aphorism: “Smith to bed, Holyoke to wed.” That sums up why my mother had been glad when I decided on Mount Holyoke. She thought I’d pick up a little art history plus a husband—and security. But I’ve never understood how marriage is supposed to guarantee safety. Leaving the N.I.C.U. that night, though, I wished that all the ridiculous myths were true: if a man in a suit could make this easier, I thought, I would happily return to Temple Emanu-El for emergency Yom Kippur nuptials. But even a man in a suit is no guarantee against lung damage and anemia.

The N.I.C.U. is a large open space divided in the front by a long reception desk and ringed by a wallpaper border of rabbits and Teddy bears in hot-air balloons. The Isolettes are lined up against the walls, with about four feet—room for a rocking chair—between them. The babies in the most critical condition are in the back area. The ratio of babies to nurses there is two to one. In the front, on the left, are the long-term tenants, preemies who will be staying a month or two, roughly until their natural due date. The ratio of infants to nurses here is four to one. To the right are the short-term residents, who will stay anywhere from one night to a week. These babies tend to be twins with a touch of jaundice, or full-term newborns with some small complication.

Two weeks after Lucy Jane arrived, Catherine told me that my daughter was being promoted out of the critical nook. “She’s been able to breathe without the C-pap, so she’s moving up front.”

Lucy Jane Wasserstein’s see-through mobile home was rolled to the front left corner of the N.I.C.U. Living alongside Lucy was a baby whom I’ll call Shayna Hutchinson. She was born a month before Lucy and now weighed approximately three pounds. Most preemies turn the corner when they weigh a kilo (2.2 pounds). Shayna had achieved that goal; Lucy was still working on it.

I recognized Shayna’s mother, Miss Hutchinson, from our time at the back of the room, when our babies were still critical. A tall African-American woman, she guarded her daughter jealously. On Shayna’s Isolette was a sticker that read “Please Call Mother Day or Night with Any News on Her Condition.” At first, Miss Hutchinson seldom said hello. In a nearby corner was Mrs. King, another African-American woman, and her son, and to her right were the Kaur twins, Tony and Tina, whose father owns an Indian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. Together with the Asian, Caribbean, and Irish nurses, our wing of the N.I.C.U. redefined a multicultural neighborhood. Competitively, we’d all check out each other’s baby’s weight. Compassionately, we’d ask a nurse if everything was all right when a cardiac monitor light suddenly blinked on. In our zone, none of the babies except the Kaur twins had a visible father.

There is a rhythm to visiting the N.I.C.U. I went twice a day, mostly at feeding times, with my ready-to-go bottles of home-pumped milk. Once their lungs are strong enough, the babies move from I.V.s to nasogastric tubes. Every three hours, mother’s milk is pumped into a tiny tube that drips into the baby’s nose. Most preemies have to build up the strength to suck from a bottle.

Arriving to see Lucy at five o’clock one evening, I noticed that her tiny knit cap had been cut down the center.

“Why did they do that to Lucy’s cap?” I asked one of the nurses. Catherine was off duty.

“They took another brain sonogram today,” she informed me.

“Another?” I hadn’t heard of the first one, and I panicked, just as my mother would.

“You’ll have to ask the doctor.”

I ran down the corridor in search of Dr. Green, a large Southerner who was covering for Ian Holzman. He was talking to a resident.

“I’m Lucy Jane Wasserstein’s mother,” I said, panting. “Can you tell me about her brain sonogram?”

“I’m in the middle of a sentence right now,” he said. Then he walked away.

With no information about Lucy, I couldn’t bring myself to go back inside to the fluorescent lights, the ringing bells, and Mrs. Kaur endlessly knitting afghans for her twins. I couldn’t bring myself to smile one more minute or pretend this was all just routine for me. I went home, got into bed, and cried.

Before I returned to the N.I.C.U. in the morning, a friend called to warn me that there was a large item in a daily tabloid speculating about the identity of my child’s father. During my entire hospital stay, no one had asked me about this. Now, suddenly, I felt like Hester Prynne, and my daughter, who was in intensive care with a possible brain malfunction, was fodder for gossip columns.

The next morning at the hospital, I asked Dr. Holzman about the brain sonogram. “The brain ventricles are slightly enlarged, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” he told me. “Most likely, she’ll grow out of it. We’ll follow it up next week.”

I looked over at Shayna. She still had a C-pap in her nose to aid her breathing. Her brain was doing fine, though.

By this time, Shayna and Lucy Jane were each strong enough to drink from a bottle. There wasn’t enough room in the corner of the N.I.C.U. for Miss Hutchinson and me to feed our daughters at the same time, so I scheduled my visits around hers. During our time in the hospital, we managed to build a neighborly friendship.

“I think Lucy and Shayna leave here in the middle of the night and go out for pizza,” I said one evening, trying to lighten the mood.

“I check on Lucy whenever I see Shayna,” Miss Hutchinson said, laughing for the first time. “Those Latin women over there come snooping around here, and I won’t let them get near either of our babies.”

I felt that, with Miss Hutchinson guarding her, Lucy Jane was the safest she would ever be.

Dr. Green interrupted me as I was feeding Lucy one night. “I want to talk to you,” he said. “She had another sonogram, and the ventricles are still enlarged.”

“Dr. Holzman said there was no reason to worry,” I said.

“I’m just warning you. We’re sending her for another sonogram tomorrow.”

At 8 a.m., I stood by my daughter’s Isolette. When I was a child, Lola would always kiss our kepele (Yiddish for “little head”) before any major test. I put my hand through the porthole and touched her head. “A kiss on the kepele, Lucy Jane,” I whispered.

After the sonogram, I ran into a young woman who had recently taken home one of her twins on a heart-and-lung monitor while the other remained in the N.I.C.U. in critical condition.

“This is a very bittersweet place,” she said, touching my shoulder. “It’s wonderful having my daughter home, but the other one being here is very hard.” (In December, I learned that the twin in the N.I.C.U.had not survived.)

I was rocking Lucy in our corner of the N.I.C.U. when Dr. Holzman came back with the test results, beaming.

“Not a problem,” he told me. “Ventricles are completely normal!” He put up his hand for a high five. I slapped him back and kissed my daughter.

During Lucy’s hospital stay, my brother visited her regularly. His son Dash arrived a week after she did, and he continued to flummox the hospital staff by saying that both babies were his children. I believe that his constant presence caused my daughter to become a very early overachiever.

“She’s doing great. I think she might be home before Thanksgiving,” Dr. Holzman went on. “You’d better get the crib ready.”

A week before Thanksgiving, Lucy Jane moved to the final, pre-discharge level of the N.I.C.U. We were now in the company of white professional couples who had conceived twins after taking fertility drugs. For the first time in the N.I.C.U., I felt self-conscious about being a single mother.

“Would you like to feed Lucy Jane in the nesting room?” Catherine asked me.

I took my daughter, finally unattached by wires, to a private room where parents bond with their children in the days before they leave the N.I.C.U. As I rocked her, I whispered to her, “We are so lucky!”

Gerry Gutierrez came to the N.I.C.U. on Lucy Jane’s last night. Catherine reminded me to bring a car seat the next day; I was going to be one of those parents in the revolving door.

I went over to Miss Hutchinson to say goodbye. “I brought something for Shayna,” I said, and handed her a package. It was a doll and a children’s book I had written.

Miss Hutchinson turned away. I reached toward her and she stepped back nervously. “I feel so badly,” she said. “I didn’t bring anything for you.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Shayna was Lucy Jane’s first roommate.” Miss Hutchinson began to cry. It was almost time for Shayna to go home, too.

Gerry and I took a taxi down Fifth Avenue, and I noticed that the city was lit up for Christmas.

“Miss Hutchinson wins Best Supporting Actress in ‘The Birth of Lucy Jane,’” Gerry said over dinner. The Best Supporting Actor award, we decided, went to Dr. Rob Phillips. (I learned a few weeks later that his group had been accepted to advise on missions to outer space. But, contrary to my phenobarbital-enhanced assumptions, he wouldn’t be taking blood pressure readings on Mars; he’d be consulting from Earth.) And the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award went to Lola Wasserstein.

James Lapine and Heidi Ettinger arrived at Mount Sinai in the morning to take Lucy Jane and me home. Catherine McCarron walked us to the door and cut off Lucy Jane’s hospital bracelet, ten weeks after her birth. She gave me a kiss and said, “Once you get Lucy Jane home, you’ll forget all about this place.”

“No,” I said. “I will never forget this place.”

A week later, I was walking down the street in my neighborhood and strangers smiled at me. “How’s the baby?” they asked. A concierge at the Parker Meridien hotel stopped me to say, “I think your having that baby is just great!” Suddenly, I felt as if I were in a millennial version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Hester Prynne had become the most popular girl in town.

While waiting at the East Side Women’s Ob/Gyn Associates for my final post-cesarean checkup, I picked up a magazine and found an article called “Cindy Crawford, Model Mom.” Cindy was back at work. On the Web, she had launched a monthly column recommending baby products. Cindy was having a ball.

Weeks earlier, Miss Hutchinson had told me, “Every night, I pray for all the children here.” I began to pray for them, too. Although I remain a religious skeptic (St. James and Temple Emanu-El notwithstanding), throughout my days of awe at the Klingenstein Pavilion I had a kind of blind faith. I believed in the collaboration between the firm will of my one-pound-twelve-ounce daughter and the expertise of modern medicine. Of course, there was more than a bit of random luck involved, too.

Just after a midnight feeding recently, Lucy Jane and I settled in to watch television. An “I Love Lucy” rerun was on. It was the one where Lucy has just had a baby and Ricky rushes to the maternity ward in his voodoo costume, fresh from the Club Tropicana.

When Ricky burst into song, my daughter started to cry. She had seen a lot of things in the N.I.C.U., but she wasn’t accustomed to bellowing Cuban men in feathers. I held her close—all ten pounds of her—and told her not to be frightened. Then I looked down at her double chin and her round baby cheeks. “I love Lucy, too,” I told her. “And we’re home.” ♦