AT MIDNIGHT ON A CLEAR and moonless Saturday night, I went into labor. I was sound asleep, and in my dreams, a gray-eyed little boy was laughing. And then I was awake and I could feel, sure and certain, that this baby was ready to be born. I called Vera down at the Cave, and she left Rafi to take care of things there and went to wake up Blossom, and then the two of them came to get me. I sat out on the porch steps with my little suitcase next to me and waited for them in the cool night air. The stars were very bright.
While I waited in the dark, I imagined the scene at the Cave. The band was probably playing its first set, and the bar would be crowded with people who didn’t know me at all, and Rafi would be working fast serving them beers. Pete and Pancho were most likely shooting pool together in the back room. I imagined them watching Vera leave and touching their beers together, and then Pancho would have a good run and sink the eight ball and Pete would go up front to pass the hat for the band. Danny was at the café almost certainly flirting with a woman he had never met before and not knowing yet that this was a different night from other ones. Two of the waitresses would be standing out in the alleyway together sharing a cigarette and trying to hurry about it because they had to get back inside. I imagined Rosalita asleep in Tom’s old iron bed with Bertie next to her, cradled gently in her arms.
Blossom and Vera stayed with me at the hospital, taking turns holding my hand, until in the late afternoon my baby was finally born.
“I’ve never seen a newborn with eyes that color,” the doctor said while I held my slate-eyed little boy in my arms.
Blossom and Vera left after a while, both of them tired and hungry. They were coming back later with catfish and biscuits and pie. I sat in the hospital bed holding my sleeping child and marveling at him. I didn’t even hear the door to the room open, but Danny appeared like magic beside me.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hey,” I said.
“Rafi came by and told me you were having the baby.”
We sat side by side on the edge of the hospital bed. He was looking at the baby and I was looking at him, thinking about how many hundreds of times I had looked at his profile, how well I knew his face, how his eyes looked tired now with the translucent blue shadows I had seen from the very first and the crow’s-feet crinkling the corners that were new lately. I loved him just at that moment as much as I had ever loved him.
He looked up and saw me looking at him. He smiled and touched my face.
“The offer still stands,” he whispered, “to marry you and be a daddy to this baby.”
I looked down at the tiny child in my arms—my baby.
“I know you would,” I said. “And I love you. But you know this baby isn’t yours. And this life that I’m going to have now isn’t the life you ever wanted. I think that, for now, this life is just for this baby and me.”
He smiled at me. “Well,” he said, stroking my baby tenderly, “maybe so.”
We stayed together like that for a long time. But he had a girl waiting for him downtown and he left after a while to meet her. I settled into bed with my baby in my arms and watched him sleep.
When Blossom and Vera came back, bringing my dinner, Rosalita and Bertie came with them. I sat in the bed eating the pie first because the future is always so uncertain, while Rosalita sat in a chair holding the baby and Bertie sat snuggled in Blossom’s lap, gazing serenely at the newcomer.
“She doesn’t mind you holding another child,” Blossom said to Rosalita.
“Esta es tu hermano,” Rosalita said to Bertie. “This is your brother.”
Bertie was getting sleepy and her eyelids flickered gently.
“It will be nice for them to have each other,” Blossom said. “I always think it’s nice when there’s lots of other children in the family.”
Vera laughed. “It’s true,” she said. “You don’t get in half as much trouble by yourself.”
“Yes,” Rosalita said, smiling. “It’s always better to have a comrade.”
The babies were both asleep.
I brought my baby home from the hospital the next day. In the immense quiet of the house with all the trees surrounding it, the baby was a bright spot of warm and noisy life, concentrating in one place, so it seemed to me, the whole warmth of the sun, every gurgle of the river, every whisper of the wind, the very shout of creation.
Rocking my sleepy baby in my arms, I saw every dawn—every indigo, gray, rose-pink, well-remembered dawn—but I saw them through our bedroom window rather than through the opening door of the Cave. Sunrise meant for me the beginning of the day, rather than the end of the night.
It was a long time since I had been down in the Cave. So a few days later, in the early afternoon, I wrapped the baby up and we went downtown. I parked on Thornapple Street and picked my way carefully down the alley and then down the steps to the Ballroom Entrance. There was no one playing pool in the back room and no one at the bar except for Rafi, drying clean ashtrays with a towel and listening to the radio.
“Ah,” he said when he saw me. “At last!”
He held my baby in his arms and crooned to him, swaying back and forth, while I finished drying the ashtrays and then took the covers off the pool tables and brushed them down. My baby had fallen asleep. But eventually two college boys came down the front stairs and wanted beers, so I carefully took the sleeping baby into my arms, kissed Rafi goodbye, and went out the back. Rafi held the door open for me because I had no free hands.
As I walked down the alleyway toward my car, the sleeping baby seemed extra heavy—as sleeping babies do. My arms felt very full and I thought then that I had never before realized how empty my arms used to be.
What would happen, Socrates asks Glaucon, if the former prisoner were to return into the depths of the cave and resume his old seat among his former fellows? His eyes, accustomed now to the bright light of the sun, would take time to adjust to the gloom. For a long while, the prisoner would be blind. And his former friends, observing his blindness upon returning, would conclude that the upper world is a place where one loses one’s sight. The cave dwellers would believe that their friend has lost his senses and become a fool.
Socrates points out that the denizens of each place, the one above ground and the one below, would each have similar views of the other world that is not their own. Each would view the other as a place of blindness, a place to be risked only at one’s peril. In some ways, both would be right. In choosing to live in one world, the prisoner must forsake the other. There is no way to live in both worlds without being regarded all the time as a fool, without returning continuously to blindness. Few of us have the strength for that. Socrates tells us that we will have to choose.
I didn’t know Charlie Blue was in town. He snuck in quietly and lay low out at Vera and Pete’s cabin in the woods. I was surprised when I found him at the barbecue joint out on the highway, sitting at the back corner table with Pamela.
“Charlie Blue,” I said to him while he took my baby into his arms, making kissy-face sounds at him, “when did you get back home?”
“Oh, Josie,” he said. “I’m not really here. I’ve got a new house out in L.A. that I should be in right now, but I just came back for two days to see about a couple of things. Tell me where this baby came from. I’ve been gone longer than I thought.”
I ordered a plate of barbecue. “I would have thought by now you’d know all about where babies come from,” I said. “The rock-star life must be more sheltered that I thought.”
He grinned and blushed and looked just the same as he used to.
“What are you doing back in town?” I asked. “Is there no decent barbecue in Hollywood?”
“Girl,” he said, “don’t even get me started. The only food I get anymore is green algae shit and I don’t know what all—kale and chard and shit like that.” He shuddered.
“You gotta pay your dues, baby,” I said.
“I thought that meant starving and freezing and having my fingers bleed—stuff I could handle. No one told me about the chard.”
“Lord, how you suffer!” I laughed.
“Not that it’s really so bad out there, though,” he said, cutting his eyes over at Pamela. “I mean, there are compensations. Palm trees and sunshine all the time are nothing to sneeze at. You know—swimming pools, movie stars.”
Pamela laughed and said to me, “Charlie has snuck back into town to invite me out to Hollywood to sing on his new record.”
“It’s going to be a smash, Miss Pamela,” he said. “You’re passing up a golden opportunity.”
“Passing it up?” I said. “You’ve got such a great voice! You should do it!”
“Oh, I thought about it,” she said. “But you know, it would mean being away from home an awful long time. And just right now, I kind of want to stick around here.”
“Swimming pools . . . ,” Charlie said in his most enticing voice.
“I’ve already got the pond.”
“. . . mooooovie stars.”
He flashed her his best beguiling smile and she laughed.
“And leave behind my glamorous life here?”
“Pancho could come with you, you know,” he said. “They have out-of-tune pianos in Hollywood, too.”
“Oh, maybe he would come,” she said. “Probably so. But he’d always be missing home. We would both always be missing home.”
Charlie looked out the window, blinking into the dappled sunlight. “It’s not like you could never come back,” he said.
“You haven’t,” she said.
“What are you talking about? I’m here right now!”
“I thought you said you weren’t really here. Besides, it’s not the same anymore, is it?”
“Do you want it always to be the same?”
“Yes,” Pamela smiled. “Yes, I guess I do.”
He shook his head. “There’s a whole big world out there that you’re missing out on.”
“I’ve got a whole world right here,” she said. “I would hate to lose it.”
“You might get rich and famous,” he said. “Wouldn’t that make you happy?”
She laughed. “But I’m already happy!”
“I’m telling you, out in L.A., you can get everything your heart desires.”
“Except good barbecue,” she said.
He eyed my plate. “You going to finish that?” he asked.
“I’ll share,” I said, and he started right in on the hush puppies.
“There are some things you have to sacrifice for art,” he said, talking with his mouth full. “I just wish good barbecue wasn’t one of them.”
Blossom’s middle daughter, Amity, agreed to babysit for Rosalita and me when we went to our class. We were already waiting together at Rosalita’s house when Amity showed up, followed two minutes later by Rafi.
“If Amity doesn’t mind, I just thought I’d hang around,” he said, looking sheepish. “In case she needs help or an errand run or anything.”
“We’ll only be gone an hour,” Rosalita was saying when Billy Joe came in the door with his guitar.
“I thought it seemed like this might be a good time to give the babies some music,” he said, looking from me to Rosalita to Rafi to Amity uncertainly. “If that’s all right with you.”
“It’s fine,” Rosalita said, “but we’ll only be gone—”
“Hey, everybody.” It was Blossom standing at the door with a pie in each hand. “I just thought I’d drop these by and see how everything was going. What are all y’all doing here?”
“Vamonos,” Rosalita said to me, “before anyone else comes. We’ll be late.”
“Don’t worry,” Rafi said. “We’ve got everything covered.”
I kissed my baby goodbye, and Rosalita and I got into my car and drove up to the college. We found the building and the classroom and nervously picked out two seats next to each other close to the door.
My baby had been born at the end of August. At the end of September, Uncle Joe took the bus all the way to Waterville to come see us. Danny picked him up at the bus station and brought him to my house. He looked just the same, smiled just the same. Only a little more gray hair and a few more laugh lines. He was wearing his best clothes for the visit.
“Well,” he said, taking the baby in his arms, “let’s see this fine young man here. Look at those eyes!”
“He’s strong,” I said. “That’s for sure.”
“Well, of course he is,” said Uncle Joe. “Of course your child is strong.”
“I haven’t heard a word from Mama since I wrote her,” I said. “Did she say anything to you about the baby?”
He shifted in his seat and looked uneasy. “Oh, Josie,” he said. “You know your mama. She gets busy with things at hand. I guess you heard your cousin Belle’s getting married, and your mama is all up in that, of course, running the arrangements and I don’t know what all.”
“Of course,” I said.
“She did ask me what the child’s name is going to be. You didn’t say in your letter.”
“I wanted to surprise you with your namesake, Uncle Joe. I named him after you.”
“Well, now,” Uncle Joe smiled, looking pleased. “Isn’t that fine? Yes, he sure is a strong little devil. You ought to be proud.”
We went to Blossom’s restaurant for dinner and Blossom made a fuss over him, bringing him extra coffee and putting ice cream on his pie.
“I’m sure glad to know you’re watching out for my girl,” he said to Blossom as we were leaving.
Blossom patted his hand. “Don’t you worry,” she said.
We went to the bookstore the next day.
“All these books,” he said. “I never seen anything like it. You have to wonder what’s in them all.”
The day after that, I put him back on the bus to go home.
“You let me know if you ever need anything,” he said. “If you ever need anything at all, you hear?”
I kissed him goodbye and watched until the bus drove away. When I went home, I found a worn ten-dollar bill on the kitchen table with a note that said, “For my namesake. Love, Uncle Joe.”
Every week all semester, Amity came by to watch the babies, and never once was she alone. Rafi came by, or Vera, whichever one wasn’t working. Billy Joe brought his guitar a lot. Or Pancho and Pamela spent the evening, each holding a baby while they sang. As often as not, Rosalita and I would come back to find Blossom cutting pie for everyone in the kitchen and Danny sitting in the rocking chair, gingerly holding a sleeping child.
Eventually it seemed silly to pay rent on my house by the river, and Little Joe and I moved in with Rosalita and Bertie and Emma Goldman. I brought all my empty canning jars with me and we decided that, come spring, we would plant a garden.
With the savings on rent, I could afford to take another class at the college the next semester. I signed up for Small Business Management and Accounting.
Rosalita’s eyes got big when she saw it on the list of available courses.
“Dios mío,” she said. “Do you suppose that it is possible that we could make this bookstore profitable?”
“It’s worth a shot,” I said. “Miracles can happen.”
I never saw Jake again. When Jake’s mother died, Blossom saw the notice in the newspaper. But there was no funeral service, and none of her sons ever came around.
I imagined sometimes that Little Joe had Jake’s look around his eyes or maybe in the line of his jaw. But there was no address I could mail a snapshot to; I had no pictures of Jake that I could use to compare. Jake, wherever he was, never knew.
Above ground, the freed prisoner is finally able to see the sun. The sun is to him the light of truth and reason. Seeing all so clearly, he develops a new view of the world based on reality rather than supposition, objects rather than reflections, truth rather than shadow. He becomes, Socrates says, a philosopher.
Socrates argues that it is the duty of the philosopher to lead us all from the darkness of the cave, with its false understandings built only on shadows and echoes, out into the sunshine, where we will finally see the truth. In the light of true knowledge and reason, humans will at last come into our own.
I am sure that all of this is correct. It is famously hard, after all, to argue with Socrates. Better people than I have tried and failed.
And yet I wonder.
The enlightened philosophers, contemplating truth in the sharp glare of the sun—do they ever close their eyes against it, just for a moment, and remember fondly the beautiful, flickering blue shadows on the wall? Do they ever perhaps imagine they still hear—in the distance—the faint musical echoes of their old world? Standing even now on the very pinnacle of wisdom, do they ever sometimes quietly mourn the loss of their smoky, dreamlike, dusky cave?