Leaves & Pages

Lady in Waiting: An Intimate Journal of a Labor of Love by Rory Gallagher ~ 1943. This edition: Stephen Daye, 1943. Hardcover. 243 pages.

My rating: 6.5/10

My oldest child turned twenty yesterday, and it gave me a surprisingly sharp shock to realize that two decades had passed since that white-knuckle after-midnight drive to the hospital an hour away where our first-born was ushered into the world in a memorable – at least to me! – fashion.

All those clichés are true, by the way, especially the one about the instant rush of love one feels upon holding your newborn child, and even more so the one about you never being free from a continual background hum of worry ever again. Not to mention the whole “time passing like the blink of a moment” thing…

So this book was an apt choice for some light reading last night, after the person-in-question casually breezed in to eat his cake, deposit his laundry in a heap beside the washing machine, and honour us with his welcome presence for a few days, before his next jaunt off into the wild blue yonder.

Oh, twenty…  For with all of the very reasonable angsty worries of today’s “young adults”, they still have that marvelous thing, youth itself, and that’s a rather grand advantage in the great scheme of things, thinks me from my middle-aged perspective.

Well, enough about my own Mother Musings, and on to Rory Gallagher’s. Lady in Waiting is a 1940s version of the Mommy-lit of today’s jogging-stroller set, though it concentrates solely on the nine months of expectation and comes to a screeching halt upon arrival of Baby.

It’s funny enough, though the author works a bit too hard here and there as she plays out every twinge for maximum laugh-appeal, but there are enough moments of genuinely relatable ironic glee to keep it on my too-good-to-part-with shelf. A period piece, most definitely. Set in the eastern United States, where the author lives (as her story opens) in a pleasant (rented) two-hundred-year-old rural home along the Saugatuck River, during the mid years of World War II, with the expected adventures of coping with less than satisfactory maids and other upper-middle-class domestic mini-crises.

And that is all I’ll be saying about it, but I will add in several random page scans, plus this archived newspaper article I found in my internet cruise looking for more on the author. (I didn’t find much – the Rory Gallagher most recognized by Google being the Irish folk-rock singer.)

From The Times Recorder, (apparently) someplace in Ohio, July 19, 1943:

“LADY IN WAITING” by Rory Gallagher (Stephen Daye; $2.50.) Apparently the first baby is an experience from which no parent ever recovers. Each thinks of it as a unique experience, even as he talks over the impending event with neighbors who undoubtedly are going through the same experience exactly..For all the conversation, it seems true that no woman has recently put down a day by day account of the mystical nine months–none until Rory Gallagher came along with her “Lady in Waiting.”

Just why the author chose to use a pseudonym is a little vague, and since she has put her neighbors and friends in under their correct names (including me) I see no reason why Rory Gallagher should not be identified as Mrs. Patrick Dolan, Ruthie for short. The Dolans lived a mile and a half down the Lyons road from us, in Weston, Conn., while all of the events of “Lady In Waiting” were laid. If I had time, I should write a book of my own on having a neighbor have a baby. It would be almost as funny as Ruthie’s.

For “Lady in Waiting” is funny as well as physiological. It is brash, too, and has a swing that is peculiarly like its author. Mrs. Dolan-Gallagher has a terrific sense of humor, which might seem odd to the superficial, because she happens to be half Scottish and half German. She is tall and slender, and this provided her first difficulty–she was afraid she would “show.” She did, eventually. I doubt whether anybody ever broke the news to papa from a sitting posture in a parking lot but Ruthie did. Most gals take the pills the doctor proffers, but Ruthie didn’t. Mama is presumably the second to know the news, but Ruthie’s mama was not. The business of the morning horrors, the strange yearnings and so forth usually run a pretty definite course –but Ruthie’s did not. Prospective mothers, as a rule, pick inconspicuous places for their fainting spells, but “Jake’s” mother chose a Philadelphia dinner table manned by various butlers and such. So the last, and exciting day. I don’t think old ladies in tippets will approve, but a lot of people will think “Lady in Waiting” a row.

And here is the Kirkus Review take, June 21, 1943

With the birth rate running a high fever, this just might catch on. (I)t is a nine months’ diary, composite of the trepidations, small concerns and humiliations, and its share of girlish laughter. Daily cares and changes; the husband’s refusal to consider her as fragile as she thinks he should; the monstrousness of the paraphernalia; the Mein Kampf between morning sickness and appetite; the bluff nonchalance of the doctor; the small worries and large; and finally the advent of Jake, with no trouble at all, just as friend husband is off to the wars. Light handling of prenatal preconceptions and preoccupations.