My raincoat got caught between the doors of a subway car recently after a sprint to make the train.  A simple tug extricated my coat and me.  Nothing really frightening.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  So why the kettledrum heartbeat?  Why the wobbly knees and the need to sit immediately?

      Ah, yes.  Speak memory.

      It was over twenty years ago that I was nabbed by another subway door, but then I was not alone.  I had my two small children in tow.  One of my hands gripped my four-year-old son, and the other held the hand that belonged to his seven-year-old sister.  My son and half my torso made the train before the doors closed.  My girl was left on the platform with the other half of my body and my head

     Of course, I knew that New York City subway trains can’t move when a door is partially open.  Or can they?  Unfortunately, I was in possession of a fat mental chronicle of horrifying train mishap stories.  And having experienced a near miss a few years before as a third-grade teacher, I was genuinely terrified.

     It happened on a field trip with my students.  Waiting for a train to take us to our destination, the kids were neatly lined up in pairs on the platform.  The train arrived, but only half the door slid open, and the orderly double line of children disintegrated as the class surged to fit through.  Suddenly, the little girl in front of me began to slip between the car and the platform.  Fortunately, only one of her legs was involved, and I was able to grab her under her arms and yank her up.  I cried for an hour when I got home that evening. 

     And here I was again, but this time with the fate of the flesh of my flesh on the line.  Should the train begin to move I would have to decide which child’s hand to let go.  Do I squeeze out the door while pleading with a stranger on the train to get off at the next stop with my boy?  Or do I try to jimmy my body onto the train to join my son while instructing my girl to go directly to the token booth clerk—all the booths were manned in those days—and beg for sanctuary.  And, English major that I am, seeping into these calculations were thoughts about the horrible fate of Sophie Zawistowska.

     Sophie’s Choice, a harrowing novel by William Styron, tells the story of a young mother imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II who is forced by a sadistic camp doctor to choose between the lives of her son and daughter.  She must make this ghastly decision, or both will be put to death.  Sophie saves her son, and lives the rest of her nightmare of a life grappling with the repercussions of her choice. 

     I don’t know how long I was dissected by the 4 train while weighing my dreadful options, but it wasn’t long enough for either of my children to size up the situation and start to cry.  Fifteen seconds?  Twenty?  It had to be less than a minute, but I have spent countless hours replaying the subway scene.  And I have always worried that, in the end, the choice would have forced a realization.  Might the decision have come down to not whether it was safer to be alone on a train or an empty platform, but have been all about which of my babies I loved the most?  A Sophie’s choice.  Still, it haunts me.   

     Happily, I wasn’t forced to decide which hand to release.  Noticing my plight as he looked up from his newspaper, a man on the train rose to pry open the doors so my daughter and I could fully enter the car. 

     I recall taking part in a discussion among mothers sitting around a gaggle of eight- and nine-month-old babies at a playgroup I belonged to with my firstborn.  The topic was when—and if—to have a second child.  All of us were over thirty.  Most lived in small apartments.  Some needed to go back to work as soon as possible; others wanted to.  We talked about space and money and energy and careers.  I, however, looked at my baby girl and wondered to myself how I could possibly love another human being as much as I loved her.  I was brimming over with passion.  Was there room in my heart for another? 

      But as an only child himself, my husband would not consider the idea of a singleton in the new family we were creating.  And I reasoned that I couldn’t be the only mother in the history of mankind to harbor this not very rational fear.  Mother Nature must make provisions.

      So my son was born, and I brimmed again—with boundless, unfathomable, unconditional love.  Mother Nature had provided in spades.  And not only had she endowed me with the ability to grow my heart, she had made my children, despite being fashioned from the same gene pool, so different that I could love each of them for their very own stuff.  Clever girl, Mother Nature.

      So right here I would like to put the matter to rest.  My daughter, quite resourceful even as a child, was perfectly capable of following my instructions to run back to the subway entrance, slip under the turnstile, and get the clerk in the booth to notice her.  Her brother and I would have gotten off at the next stop, elicited the help of the clerk there in calling the other station to make sure my girl was safe, and then hopped a train back to the scene of separation.

      And there, relieved and happy, I would have fit both pieces of my heart back together again, just where they belonged.

 

Trudy Whitman is a freelance writer, and currently writes features and a regular column for The Brooklyn Heights Press, a 70-year-old weekly.