AS Bird started up the stairs toward his wife’s hospital room, his shoes in one hand and a bag of grapefruit under his arm, the young doctor with the glass eye started down. They met halfway. The one-eyed doctor halted several steps above Bird and launched his voice downward in what felt to Bird like high imperiousness. In fact, he said merely, “How is everything?”
“He’s alive,” Bird said.
“And, what about surgery?”
“They’re afraid the baby will weaken and die before they can operate,” Bird said, feeling his upturned face blush.
“Well, that’s probably for the best!”
Bird’s color deepened noticeably and a twitch appeared at the corners of his mouth. His reaction made the doctor blush, too.
“Your wife hasn’t been told about the baby’s brain,” he said, speaking into the air above Bird’s head. “She thinks there’s a defective organ. Of course, the brain is an organ, there’s no getting around that, so it’s not a lie. You try lying your way out of a tight spot and you only have to lie all over again when the truth gets out. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Bird said.
“Well then, don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Bird and the doctor bowed decorously and passed each other on the stairs with faces averted. Well, that’s probably for the best! the doctor had said. To weaken and die before they could operate. That meant escaping the burden of a vegetable baby, and without fouling your own hands with its murder. All you had to do was wait for the baby to weaken and die hygienically in a modern hospital ward. Nor was it impossible to forget about it while you waited: that would be Bird’s job. Well, that’s probably for the best! The sensation of deep and dark shame renewed itself in Bird and he could feel his body stiffen. Like the expectant mothers and the women who had just given birth who passed him in their many-colored rayon nightgowns, like those who carried in their bodies a large, squirming mass, and those who had not quite escaped the memory and habit of it, Bird took short, careful steps. He was pregnant himself, in the womb of his brain, with a large squirming mass that was the sensation of shame. For no real reason, the women in the corridor eyed him haughtily as they passed, and under each glance Bird meekly lowered his head. These were the women who had watched him leave the hospital in an ambulance with his grotesque baby, that same host of pregnant angels. For a minute he was certain they knew what had happened to his son since then. And perhaps, like ventriloquists, they were murmuring at the back of their throats Ah! if it’s that baby you mean, he’s been installed on an efficient conveyer system in an infant slaughterhouse and is weakening to death this very minute—well, that’s probably for the best!
A squalling of many infants beset Bird like a whirlwind. His eye wildly wheeling fell on the rows of cradles in the infant ward. Bird fled down the corridor at a near run: he had a feeling several of the infants had stared back.
In front of the door to his wife’s room, Bird carefully sniffed his hands and arms and shoulders, even his chest. There was no telling how it might complicate his predicament if his wife, waiting for him in her sickbed with her sense of smell honed to keenness, should scent out Himiko’s fragrance on his body. Bird turned around, as if to make certain of an escape route: paused all along the dim corridor, young women in their nightgowns were peering at him through the dimness. Bird considered scowling back but he merely shook his head weakly and turned his back, then gave a timid knock at the door. He was performing the role of the young husband who has been visited by sudden misfortune.
When Bird stepped into the room his mother-in-law was standing with her back to the lush greenery in the window, and his wife was staring in his direction, lifting her head like a weasel beyond the mound of blanket that covered her spread thighs. Both wore startled looks in the greenly tinged, fecund light. In moments of surprise and sadness, Bird observed, the blood bond between these two women was manifest in all their features and even the slightest gesture.
“I didn’t mean to startle you, I knocked, but lightly—”
“Ah, Bird,” his wife sighed, fixing him with wasted eyes that now were filling rapidly with tears. With her face clean of make-up and the pigment darkly evident on the surface of her skin, she had the firm, boyish look of the tennis player she had been when Bird had met her several years ago. Exposed to her gaze as he was, Bird felt horribly vulnerable; when he had put the bag of grapefruit down on the blanket, he stooped as if to conceal himself and deposited his shoes beneath the bed. If only, he wished ruefully, he could talk from the floor, crawling around like a crab. Out of the question: Bird straightened up, forcing himself to smile.
“Hey,” he sang, working to keep his voice light, “is the pain all gone now?”
“It still hurts periodically. And every so often there’s a contraction like a spasm. Even when I’m not in pain somehow I don’t feel right, and the minute I laugh it hurts.”
“That’s miserable.”
“It is. Bird, what’s wrong with the baby?”
“What’s wrong? That doctor with the glass eye must have explained, didn’t he?” As he spoke, trying to keep the song in his voice, Bird looked quickly in his mother-in-law’s direction, like a boxer with no confidence darting a glance behind him at his trainer. Beyond his wife’s head in the narrow space between the bed and the window, his mother-in-law was transmitting secret signals frantically. Bird couldn’t catch the nuances, only that he was being commanded to say nothing to his wife, that much was clear.
“If they would just tell me what was wrong,” his wife said in a voice as lonely as it was withdrawn. Bird knew that the dark demons of doubt had driven her a hundred times to whisper these same words in this same helpless tone.
“There’s a defective organ somewhere, the doctor won’t talk about the details. They’re probably still testing. Another thing, those university hospitals are bureaucratic as hell!” Bird could smell the stench of his lie even as he told it.
“I just know it must be his heart if they have to make so many tests. But why should my baby have a bad heart?” The dismay in his wife’s voice made Bird feel again like scuttling around on the floor. Instead, he spoke harshly, affecting the tone of voice of a peevish teen-ager: “Since there are experts on the case why don’t we leave the diagnosing to them! All the speculation in the world isn’t going to do us one damn bit of good!”
An unconfident Bird turned a guilty eye back to the bed and saw that his wife had tightly shut her eyes. He looked down at her face and wondered uneasily if a sense of everyday balance would be restored to it; the flesh of the eyelids was wasted, the wings of the nose were swollen, and the lips seemed large out of all proportion. His wife lay motionless, with her eyes closed; she seemed to be falling asleep. All of a sudden a whole river of tears spilled from beneath her closed lids. “Just as the baby was born I heard the nurse cry ‘Oh!’ So I suspected that something must have been wrong. But then I heard the Director laughing happily, or I thought I did, it got so I couldn’t tell what was real and what was a dream—when I came to, the baby had already been taken away in an ambulance.” She spoke with her eyes closed.
That hairy Director son of a bitch! Anger clogged Bird’s throat. He had made such an uproar with his giggling that a patient under anesthesia had heard him; if he has a habit of doing that when he’s astonished, I’ll lie for him in the dark with a lead pipe and make the cocksucker laugh his head off! But Bird’s rage was that of a child’s, limited to a moment. He knew he would never grip a club of any kind, never lie in wait in any darkness. He had to acknowledge that he had lost the self-esteem essential to rebuking someone else.
“I brought you some grapefruit,” Bird said in a voice that asked forgiveness.
“Grapefruit! Why?” his wife challenged. Bird realized his mistake immediately.
“Damn! I forgot you always hated the smell of grapefruit,” he said, stumbling into self-disgust. “But why would I have gone out of my way to buy grapefruit of all things?”
“Probably because you weren’t really thinking of me or the baby, either. Bird, do you ever think seriously of anyone but yourself? Didn’t we even argue about grapefruit when we were planning the menu at the wedding dinner? Really, Bird, how could you have forgotten?”
Bird shook his head in impotence. Then he fled from the hysteria that was gradually tightening his wife’s eyes and turned to stare at his mother-in-law, still transmitting signals from the cramped niche between the bed and the wall. His eyes implored her for help.
“I was trying to buy some fruit and I had this feeling that grapefruit meant something special to us. So I bought some, without even thinking what it was that made them special. What shall I do with them?”
Bird had gone to the fruit store with Himiko, and there was no doubting that her presence had cast its shadow on the something special he had felt. From now on, Bird thought, Himiko’s shadow would be falling heavily on the details of his life.
“You must have known I can’t be in the same room with even one grapefruit; the smell irritates me terribly,” Bird’s wife gave chase. Bird wondered apprehensively if she hadn’t detected Himiko’s shadow already.
“Why don’t you take the whole bag down to the nurses’ office?” As his mother-in-law spoke, she flashed Bird a new signal. The light filtering through the lush greenery in the window at her back ringed her deeply sunken eyes and the spatulate sides of her soaring nose with a quivering, greenish halo. Bird finally understood: this radium spook of a mother-in-law was trying to tell him that she would be waiting in the corridor when he returned from the nurses’ office.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Is the office downstairs?”
“Next to the clinic waiting room,” she said with a long look at Bird.
Bird stepped into the dusky corridor with the bag of grapefruit under his arm. Even as he walked along, the fruit began discharging its bouquet; it seemed to infuse his face and chest with particles of fragrance. Bird reflected that the smell of grapefruit could actually provoke an attack in some asthmatics. Bird thought about his wife lying peevishly abed and that woman with green halos in the hollows of her eyes, flagging signals like the poses in a Kabuki dance. And what about himself, toying with the relationship between asthma and grapefruit! It was all an act, a bad play, only the baby with the lump on its head was for real: only the baby gradually wasting away on a diet of sugar-water instead of milk. But why sugar the water? It was one thing to deprive the baby of milk, but to flavor the substitute in any way, didn’t that make the whole nasty business more like a contemptible trick?
Bird presented the bag of grapefruit to some off-duty nurses and started to introduce himself; suddenly, as if the stuttering that had afflicted him as a schoolboy had returned, he found himself unable to get out a single word. Rattled, he bowed in silence and hurried away. Behind him the nurses’ bright laughter rose. It’s all an act, phony, why did everything have to be so unreal? Scowling, his breath coming hard, Bird climbed the steps three at a time and passed the infants’ ward warily, afraid he might carelessly glance inside.
In front of a service kitchen for the use of relatives and companions of the patients, a kettle in one hand, Bird’s mother-in-law was standing proudly erect. Bird, approaching, saw around the woman’s eyes instead of a halo of light sifted through green leaves an emptiness so wretched it made him shudder. Then he noticed that her erectness had nothing to do with pride: exhaustion and despair had robbed her body of its natural suppleness.
They kept the conversation simple, one eye on the door to Bird’s wife’s room fifteen feet away. When Bird’s mother-in-law confirmed that the baby was not dead, she said, reproachfully, “Can’t you arrange for things to be taken care of right away? If that child ever sees the baby, she’ll go mad!”
Bird, threatened, was silent.
“If only there was a doctor in the family,” the woman said with a lonely sigh.
We’re a pack of vermin, Bird thought, a loathsome league of self-defenders. Nonetheless he delivered his report, his voice hushed, wary of the patients who might be crouching like mute crickets behind the closed doors that lined the corridor, their ears aflame with curiosity: “The baby’s milk is being decreased and he’s getting a sugar-water substitute. The doctor in charge said we should be seeing results in a few days.”
As he finished, Bird saw the miasma that had enveloped his mother-in-law vanish utterly. Already the kettle of water seemed a weight too heavy for her arm. She nodded slowly and, in a thin, helpless voice, as if she wanted badly to go to sleep, “Oh, I see. Yes, I see. When this is all over, we’ll keep the baby’s sickness a secret between us.”
“Yes,” Bird promised, without mentioning that he had spoken to his father-in-law already.
“Otherwise, my little girl will never agree to have another child, Bird.”
Bird nodded; but his almost physical revulsion for the woman merely heightened. His mother-in-law went into the kitchen now, and Bird returned to his wife’s room alone. But wouldn’t she see through a ruse this simple? It was all playacting, and every character in this particular play was a dissembler.
Bird knew by the face his wife turned to him as he stepped into the room that the hysteria about the grapefruit was forgotten. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re all worn down,” his wife said, extending abruptly an affectionate hand and touching Bird’s cheek.
“I am—”
“You’ve begun to look like a sewer rat that wants to scurry into a hole.” The slap caught him unawares. “Is that so?” he said with a bitterness on his tongue, “like a sewer rat?”
“Mother is afraid you’ll start drinking again, that special way you have, no limits, night and day—”
Bird recalled the sensations of protracted drunkenness, the flushed head and the parched throat, belly aching, body of lead, the fingers numb and the brain whisky-logged and slack. Weeks of life as a cave dweller enclosed in whisky walls.
“If you did start drinking again you’d end up dead drunk and no good to anybody just when our baby really needed you. You would, Bird.”
“I’ll never drink that way again,” Bird said. It was true that the tiger of a ferocious hangover had sunk its teeth in him, but he had torn himself away without recourse to more liquor. But how would it have been if Himiko hadn’t helped? Would he have begun once again to drift on that dark and agonizing sea tens of hours wide? He wasn’t sure, and not being able to mention Himiko made it difficult to convince his wife of his power to resist the whisky lure.
“I very much want you to be all right, Bird. I think sometimes that, when a really crucial moment comes, you’ll either be drunk or in the grip of some crazy dream and just float up into the sky like a real bird.”
“Married all this time and you still have doubts like that about your own husband?” Bird spoke playfully, but his wife did not fall into his saccharine trap; far from it, she rocked him on his heels with this:
“You know, you often dream about leaving for Africa and shout things in Swahili! I’ve kept quiet about it all this time, but I’ve known you have no real desire to lead a quiet, respectable life with your wife and child. Bird?”
Bird stared in silence at the soiled, wasted hand his wife was resting on his knee. Then, like a child weakly protesting a scolding though he recognizes that he has misbehaved, “You say I shout in Swahili; what do I say?”
“I don’t remember, Bird. I’ve always been half-asleep myself; besides, I don’t know Swahili.”
“Then what makes you so sure it was Swahili?”
“Words that sound that much like the screaming of beasts couldn’t come from a civilized language.”
In silence, Bird reflected sadly on his wife’s misconception of the nature of Swahili.
“When mother told me two days ago and then again last night that you were staying at the other hospital, I suspected you’d gotten drunk or run away somewhere. I really had my doubts, Bird.”
“I was much too upset to think about anything like that.”
“But look how you’re blushing!”
“Because I’m mad,” Bird said roughly. “Why would I run away? With the baby just born and everything—”
“But, when I told you I was pregnant, didn’t the ants of paranoia swarm all over you? Did you really want a child, Bird?”
“Anyway, all that can wait until after the baby has recovered—that’s all that matters now,” Bird said, breaking for easier ground.
“It is all that matters, Bird. And whether or not the baby recovers depends on the hospital you chose and on your efforts. I can’t get out of bed, I haven’t even been told where the sickness is nesting in my baby’s body. I can only depend on you, Bird.”
“That’s fine; depend on me.”
“I was trying to decide whether I could rely on you to take care of the baby and I began to think I didn’t know you all that well. Bird, are you the kind of person who’ll take the responsibility for the baby even at a sacrifice to yourself?” his wife asked. “Are you the responsible, brave type?”
If he had ever been to war, Bird had thought often, he would have been able to say definitely whether he was a brave type. This had occurred to him before fights and before his entrance examinations, even before his marriage. And always he had regretted not having a definite answer. Even his longing to test himself in the wilds of Africa which opposed the ordinary was excited by his feeling that he might discover in the process his own private war. But at the moment Bird had a feeling he knew without having to consider war or travel to Africa that he was not to be relied on: a craven type.
Irritated by his silence, Bird’s wife clenched into a fist the hand she was resting on his leg. Bird started to cover her hand with his own and hesitated: it appeared to simmer with such hostility that it would be hot to the touch.
“Bird, I wonder if you’re not the type of person who abandons someone weak when that person needs you most—the way you abandoned that friend of yours,” Bird’s wife opened her timid eyes wide as if to study Bird’s reaction, “… Kikuhiko?”
Kikuhiko! Bird thought. A friend from his days as a tough kid in a provincial city, younger than himself, Kikuhiko had tagged along wherever Bird had gone. One day, in a neighboring town, they had had a bizarre experience together. Accepting a job hunting down a madman who had escaped from a mental hospital, they had roamed the city on bicycles all night long. Whereas Kikuhiko soon grew bored with the job, began to clown, and finally lost the bicycle he had borrowed from the hospital, Bird’s fascination only increased as he listened to the townspeople discussing the madman, and he kept up his ardent search all through the night. The lunatic was convinced that the real world was Hell, and he was terrified of dogs, which he took to be devils in disguise. At dawn, the hospital’s German shepherd pack was to be loosed on the man’s trail, and everyone agreed that he would die of fright if the animals brought him to bay. Bird therefore searched until dawn without a moment’s rest. When Kikuhiko began to insist that they give up the hunt and return to their own city, Bird, in his anger, shamed the younger boy. He told Kikuhiko he knew of his affair with an American homosexual in the CIA. On his way home on the last train of the night Kikuhiko sighted Bird, still bicycling through the night in his eager search for the madman. Leaning out of the train window, he shouted, in a voice that had begun to cry, “—Bird, I was afraid!”
But Bird abandoned his poor friend and continued the search. In the end he succeeded only in discovering the madman hanging by the neck on a hill in the middle of the town, but the experience marked a transition in his life. That morning, riding next to the driver in the three-wheel truck that was carrying the madman’s body, Bird had a premonition that he was soon to say good-by to the life of a delinquent; the following spring, he entered a university in Tokyo. The Korean war was on, and Bird had been frightened by rumors that young men on the loose in provincial cities were being conscripted into the police corps and shipped off to Korea. But what had happened to Kikuhiko after Bird had abandoned him that night? It was as if the puny ghost of an old friend had floated up from the darkness of his past and said hello to him.
“But what made you feel like attacking me with past history like Kikuhiko? I’d forgotten I’d even told you that story.”
“If we had a boy, I was thinking of naming him Kikuhiko,” his wife said.
Naming him! If that grotesque baby ever got hold of a thing like a name! Bird winced.
“If you abandoned our baby, I think I’d probably divorce you, Bird,” his wife said, unmistakably a line she had rehearsed in bed, her legs raised in front of her, gazing at the greenery that filled the window.
“Divorce? We wouldn’t get divorced.”
“Maybe not, but we’d argue about it for a long time, Bird.” And in the end, Bird thought, when it had been determined that he was a craven type not to be relied on, he would be turned out to live the rest of his melancholy life as a man unfit to be a husband. Right now, in that overbright hospital ward, that baby is weakening and about to die. And I’m just waiting for it to happen. But my wife is staking the future of our married life on whether I take sufficient responsibility for the baby’s recovery—I’m playing a game I’ve already lost. Still, for the present, Bird could only perform his duty. “The baby’s just not going to die,” he said with many-faceted chagrin.
Just then his mother-in-law came in with the tea. Since she was trying not to telegraph their grim exchange in the corridor, and since Bird’s wife was determined to conceal from her mother the enmity between herself and Bird, their little conversation over tea was comprised, for the first time, of ordinary talk. Bird even attempted some dry humor with an account of the baby without a liver and the little man who was its father.
Just to make certain, Bird looked back at the hospital windows and verified that all of them were masked behind trees in lush leaf before he approached the scarlet sports car. Himiko was fast asleep, wedged under the steering wheel as if she were bundled into a sleeping bag, her head on the low seat. As Bird bent forward to shake her awake, he began to feel as if he had escaped encirclement by strangers and had returned to his true family. Guiltily, he looked back at the branches rustling high at the top of the ginkgo trees. “Hi, Bird!” Himiko greeted him from the MG like an American co-ed, then wiggled out from under the steering wheel and opened the door for him. Bird got in quickly.
“Would you mind going to my apartment first? We can stop at the bank on the way to the other hospital.”
Himiko pulled out of the driveway and immediately accelerated with a roar of exhaust. Bird, thrown off balance, told Himiko the way to the house with his back still pinned against the seat.
“You sure you’re awake? Or do you think you’re flying down a highway in a dream?”
“Of course I’m awake, Bird! I dreamed I was making it with you.”
“Is that all you ever think about?” Bird asked in simple surprise.
“Yes, after a trip like last night. It doesn’t happen that way often, and even with you that same tension isn’t going to last forever. Bird, wouldn’t it be great to know just what you had to do to make the days of marvelous lays go on and on! Before we know it, even you and I won’t be able to stifle the yawns when we confront each other’s nakedness.”
But we’ve only just begun!—Bird started to say, but with Himiko’s frantic hand on the wheel, the MG was already churning the gravel in Bird’s driveway and then nosing deeply into the garden.
“I’ll be down in five minutes; and try to stay awake this time. You can’t dream much of a lay in five minutes!”
Upstairs in the bedroom, Bird threw together a few things he would need right away for a stay at Himiko’s house. He packed with his back to the baby’s bassinet: it looked like a small, white coffin. Last of all he packed a novel written in English by an African writer. Then he took down his Africa maps from the wall and, folding them carefully, thrust them into his jacket pocket.
“Are those road maps?” Himiko asked as her keen eye lighted on Bird’s pocket. They were under way again, driving to the bank.
“They certainly are; maps you can really use.”
“Then I’ll see if I can find a shortcut to the baby’s hospital while you’re at the bank.”
“That would be a good trick: these are maps of Africa,” Bird said, “the first real road maps I’ve ever owned.”
“May the day come when you’ll be able to use them,” Himiko said with a touch of mockery.
Leaving Himiko wedged beneath the steering wheel and beginning to drop off to sleep, Bird went in to arrange for the baby’s hospitalization. But the baby’s lack of a name created a problem. Bird answered endless questions for the girl at the reception window and finally had to protest: “My infant son is dying. For all I know he may be dead already. Now would you mind telling me why I am obliged to give him a name?” he said stiffly.
Miserably rattled, the girl yielded. It was then that Bird sensed, for no special reason, that the baby’s death had been accomplished. He even inquired about making arrangements for the autopsy and cremation.
But the doctor who met Bird at the intensive care ward disabused him instantly: “Where do you come off waiting so impatiently for your son to die? Hospitalization here isn’t that high, you know! And you must have health insurance. Anyway, it’s true that your son is weakening, but he’s still very much alive. So why don’t you relax a little and start behaving like a father? How about it!”
Bird wrote Himiko’s number on a page of his memo book and asked the doctor to phone him if anything decisive happened. Since he could feel everybody in the ward reacting to him as something loathsome, he went straight back to the car, without even pausing to peer into the incubator at his son. No less than Himiko, who had been asleep in the open car, Bird was drenched in sweat after his run through the sun and shadow of the hospital square. Trailing exhaust fumes and an animal odor of perspiration, they roared off to sprawl naked in the hot afternoon while they waited for the telephone call that would announce the baby’s death.
All that afternoon, their attention was on the telephone. Bird stayed behind even when it was time to shop for dinner, afraid the phone might ring while he was out. After dinner, they listened to a popular Russian pianist on the radio, but with the volume way down, nerves screaming still for the phone to ring. Bird finally fell asleep. But he kept waking up to the ringing of a phantom bell in his dream and walking over to the phone to check. More than once the boundaries of the dream extended to lifting the receiver and hearing the doctor’s voice report the baby’s death. Waking yet another time in the middle of the night, Bird felt the suspense of a condemned murderer during a temporary stay of execution. And he discovered encouragement of unexpected depth and intensity in the fact that he was spending the night with Himiko and not alone. Not once since becoming an adult had he so needed another person. This was the first time.