THE GARDEN, by Clare Beams
Irene Willard is a midcentury American woman with a history of miscarriages and a husband who is eager to start a family. Still childless, now pregnant for the sixth time, Irene dutifully packs herself off to an isolated ancestral estate that has been repurposed by a husband-and-wife medical team into a care center for high-risk pregnancies. This place is more haunted manse than hospital. The doctors are prone to say things like “now for your first injection” — and they won’t take no for an answer. Small indefinable living things skitter in the shadowed corners of the rooms. And: There is a neglected garden out back that has the power to bring dead things back to life.
With such a richly gothic setup, you might forgive me for thinking “The Garden” was about to deliver some blood-splattery fun and maybe even some zombie babies by the end. But that is not this book — or at least, that is not the whole story. Tucked inside this story’s gothic envelope is a tale inspired by a horrific chapter in the history of obstetric medicine.
“The earliest whisper of ‘The Garden’ came to me in the history of diethylstilbestrol” (or DES), Beams writes in her acknowledgments. “That drug’s story … set mine in motion.” A synthetic estrogen that was prescribed for decades to prevent miscarriage, DES did nothing to prevent miscarriage; what it did instead was cause cancers, infertility and birth defects. How could such a medical tragedy have continued for so long? Beams borrows facts from history to fashion an answer to that question in the guise of a horror story.
Irene is savvy and skeptical and she has doubts from the beginning about the hospital and its so-called state-of-the-art treatments. But her fear of triggering another miscarriage keeps her paralyzed and compliant: She “would never go home by choice to wait for the wave, the streak, the clot, the pool, the groan, the clench, the seep, the first slight cramp, each moment a terrible balance of hoping and dreading, listening and trying not to listen, feeling and trying not to feel.”
When Irene discovers that the garden out back seems to hold supernatural gifts, she feels newly empowered, and enlists two fellow patients to corroborate its miracles of resurrection. In a twisty echo of the experimental treatments being done to their bodies inside the house, the women begin to conduct life-and-death experiments of their own: First, they kill only small things — a beetle, a pill bug, a baby garter snake — and bring them back to life. Soon enough, they’re speculating about how to use the garden to prevent or reverse a miscarriage. Of course they are. And by the time Irene’s baby begins to move inside her in ways that remind her chillingly of the pathetic creatures she has helped reanimate, we’ve entered full-on horror territory.
The genius of the novel is the way Beams continually intertwines fictional elements with true-to-life obstetric practices. The women here are injected with mysterious drugs in ever-changing dosages. Psychiatric sessions are laughably mercurial. Every now and then, a patient goes into labor and disappears upstairs to another floor of the hospital. Sometimes she comes back without a baby. Sometimes she doesn’t come back at all.
“They’re doing a lot of things to us without exactly saying why, aren’t they?” one woman hesitantly ventures to ask another. “And still changing it all as they go.” Although Beams works to remind us how pregnancy creates a dangerous power imbalance between the pregnant person (who wants every good outcome for her developing child) and her doctor (who is promising to deliver nothing but good outcomes) — an imbalance that can lead to a medical disaster like DES continuing for decades — the novel never feels preachy. It never drags. I loved the poetic grossness of “pale, glistening chicken,” which perfectly captures the women’s institutional meals. Music when played at this hospital sounds “liquid, swampy.” Humor blooms at the least expected junctures.
Make no mistake, this is a serious story, even an angry one. Even so, there is something delightful about the way Irene and her co-conspirators are at first too squeamish to kill a salamander, but then quickly evolve into wild women who are ready to make any sacrifice necessary for the sake of their gestating children.
The publisher compares the novel to “Rosemary’s Baby,” but in at least one important way, they are very different. In “Rosemary’s Baby,” the Devil comes to claim his hellspawn in the end and that’s that. But Beams leaves us purposefully, chillingly in doubt. Is the power of the garden real? Is it a delusion brought on by Irene’s fear and isolation? Is the women’s belief in it all a hallucination induced by the unknown drugs injected into their bodies each day? When things go off the rails — as they are wont to do, both in high-risk pregnancies and when messing with dark forces — is it because of the doctors and their experimental treatments, or because of what Irene and her friends did in the garden?
“What have you heard, exactly?” one woman says to another.“That their organs, their feminine organs — that there are things wrong sometimes,” she replies. “It’s the result of having given us all those drugs.” “Well, but we did things too,” the first woman says. Some readers are going to miss getting answers to this novel’s questions, but the ambiguity floating freely through it is perfect for Beams’s intentions.
Just as the pregnant women who were prescribed DES endured decades of fear and guilt about how the drug’s harms would manifest in their children, the patients in “The Garden” learn there is nothing they can do to take the doubt away. There is no monster for them to slay, or be defeated by. There is no catharsis. There is only one woman at a time, trying to navigate a world where, when it comes to her child’s welfare, she can never be completely at ease.
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