The lights were bright in the emergency room. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I wasn’t supposed to be remembering this, but I would, I knew I would. I was stripped from the waist. The table felt wet. I looked at Joe through blurred eyes. Joe was supposed to be reading a newspaper with the other expectant fathers, tucked into a waiting room with a coffeemaker.
Joe was sawing at my hand with something, something metal.
Someone was moaning, “Please, please, please, make it stop”—that was me.
A nurse: “Oh, goodness, she’s awake again.”
“I can’t—I can’t get it off!” Joe wiped at his forehead with his sleeve. “For Christ’s sake, don’t you have anything sharper?”
The nurses flocked around me, so many nurses, all in white, all moving quickly, all scared, and there was a doctor somewhere: I could hear him calmly putting on his gloves.
“No, and you’d better hurry,” one of the nurses snapped at Joe, “or she’s gonna lose that finger.”
“Please, God. Oh, for God’s sake, make it stop. I’ll do anything.”
“Louise.” Joe’s tearful face was right above mine, his hand pushing my hair back from my forehead. I didn’t care about seeing him or whatever he was doing to my hand. I didn’t care about the baby. All I wanted was for the pain to stop. He was saying something about my engagement ring, about blood transfusions. He pulled my face toward him.
“Louise, you’re going to be all right, I promise.”
“Just take the baby out, just get it out, just make it stop. Make it stop, I’ll do anything.”
“The baby’s already here, Louise, she’s here, she’s beautiful. Louise? Louise!”
“Mister, her finger!”
I could hear Joe weeping, trying to catch his breath, then the sawing, sawing at my ring finger began again. At last I felt a pinch against that finger on my left hand, and then something gave way. Something broke. Someone stuck something into my upper arm, and I was gone.
I awoke in a sunny room. I’d expected a common ward after giving birth, rows of tired and happy new mothers convalescing together in our mutual sighs, but this was a tiny room of my own, white walls, green linoleum floor.
Joe was sitting in a chair, staring out the window, his face swollen and eyes red. I summoned some strength and cleared my throat, letting out a dry cough.
He sprang to life. At once he was by my side, holding my left hand. “Oh, Louise,” he said, brushing my hair from my forehead. My hair, I realized, was balled up in a disgusting, sweaty mass. “Jesus, you gave me a scare.”
Tears were forming in my eyes. I had flashes of memory from the night before, or two nights before—time had become slippery, I knew both too much and too little. Perhaps I didn’t want to ask what had happened. My right hand went to my stomach. It felt like a partially collapsed balloon, a painful, swollen, raw balloon. “The baby—is the baby all right?”
“She is. She’s got black hair, Louise, all standing straight up. She’s in the nursery. They said you can see her when you’re awake, which you are—thank God, you’re awake.” He kissed me. “I’ll have them get you a wheelchair.”
“I need water, too,” I croaked. “Joe…” I caught his sleeve, as he was getting up to reach for a pitcher beside the bed. “What happened?”
He took my hand. “The doctors aren’t sure why, but something inside you—the placenta?” The word brought color to his cheeks. “It partially detached, it seems, before it should have. I thought I was going to lose you, Lou, and that scared me.” He brushed my sticky hair back from my forehead.
I managed a tiny smile. “Did you save the ring?”
The corners of his mouth raised a bit. He patted his breast pocket. “It’s just fine. Mangled, but the band can be repaired. You, on the other hand…There was a minute when I thought you couldn’t be saved.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. We were both crying now. I dabbed the corner of my eye. “I’m all right.”
He nodded, his hand resting at the back of my neck. He held my gaze with his brown eyes. “You scared me more than anything ever has.”
Of all the memories that came flooding back to me those first few days in the hospital, I couldn’t remember the baby coming out, although I was told later it happened right there in triage. They’d had to get her out as quickly as possible. And so, when I first saw her, in a nurse’s arms with a pink ribbon in her hair, she was a stranger.
“Look at that,” I said, pointing at a sign above the rows of wire bassinets. “ ‘Babies are displayed at this window between ten and noon, three and five.’ They get a union break.”
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Joe asked, his breath fogging the window.
“I can’t see her very well,” I said from the wheelchair they’d put me in. It wasn’t exactly true—I could see her just fine—but I couldn’t tell her apart from any of the others. They all looked like wrinkly little newborn guinea pigs to me, all with the same downy spiked hair and red, uncomfortable faces, their pacifiers huge against their tiny mouths.
On the second day, my own mother spoke to me over the phone, in tears. She was relieved and even a bit tickled, it turned out, to have spoken to Joe. He’d called her after I was out of the woods. My mother promised to visit and help me once we were home with the baby, which I was doing my best to forestall.
During our stay in the hospital, I lay in bed, eating grayish hamburgers and black-bean salad to get my iron up. The nurses who’d tended to me, none of whom I recognized, fluttered around us. They didn’t seem to know what to make of me, an unwed mother with a doting father at hand. Several mentioned that there was a chapel right there in the hospital, if we wanted to tie the knot. They seemed nonplussed when I demurred, but I knew they meant well. “You were knockin’ at heaven’s door!” one older Irish woman kept saying. Every time she repeated it, I felt like crying.
Joe went home every night, to sleep comfortably in his own bed, while the baby—still nameless—suckled Vitaflo bottles in the nursery and I shivered in my cotton gown, dreaming vividly from the morphine. Once in a while, they took me to the nursery to see her, and I peered at her through the glass as a sturdy nurse held her confidently, one hand behind her neck, one under her squirming, tiny legs. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine leaving here with her, without any of these women to help. I felt we’d drown.
The night before I was scheduled to go home, I had a dream about Harry.
“Hiya, beautiful,” he said, descending the steps of an airplane. We were both on the tarmac, our hair blowing in the wind from the propellers. I had the sense that the plane was headed somewhere special, a tropical island perhaps, and that I should get on, but my shoes seemed nailed to the ground.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I said. He was standing on one of the wings, arms outstretched. There was also something I should ask him, I knew, but in the dream I couldn’t remember what it was. “It’s not safe up there.”
“I’m knocking on heaven’s door,” Harry replied, and I woke up in a sweat, panting.
I sat bolt upright, like a vampire, then gasped—there was someone sitting at the foot of the bed.
“Joe?” I said, my eyes adjusting. I could sense it was morning, but the sun hadn’t come up yet. The light filtering through the slats in the blinds was pale blue. “What are you doing here so early?”
He turned toward me, his lower lip between his teeth, which were drawing the blood out of the skin, blanching it white. “I have to talk to you.”
“Okay.” I sat up against the pillows.
Joe took a deep breath. His eyes looked hollow, shadowed, as if he hadn’t slept all night. “You were right about some things. I…When I thought I might lose you, I knew I’d never forgive myself for keeping you in the dark.”
My heart was beating wildly, pumping blood to my face and limbs. Other people’s blood: I’d had two transfusions. I couldn’t stop thinking about that.
He took a deep breath, keeping his eyes low, focused on the bed. All I could see were his dark eyelashes. “Listen. There are some men in the government, good men, who’ve taken it upon themselves to offer grants to worthy artists and publications. We happen to be one of them. The grants can’t be made public; otherwise, it would look as if they were favoring one political ideology over another.”
“When, in fact, they are,” I said. “And they’re censoring the ones they have in their pocket, aren’t they? They’re telling writers what they can and cannot say.”
“No, that’s ridiculous. To think the government would bother to”—he sputtered, looking at the ceiling—“send agents out to do copyedits, that’s horse crap.”
I clenched my jaw. This was supposed to be a coming-clean conversation, yet I still felt as if I were talking to a wall. “How can you claim that? I’ve seen it myself; my own work has been compromised to fit the agenda.”
“Well, Lou, it’s really my work. I gave you the Hemingway assignment. I’m giving you Malamud. You don’t have to take them.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. My breasts had been bound to stop my milk; they felt like two small boulders, hard and itchy, under the gauze. “So Downtown is part of some psychological-warfare effort.”
He ran a hand over his beard stubble. “How do you know that term—‘psychological warfare’?”
“Must have learned it from Popular Science,” I said sarcastically. “Answer the question.”
“No, Downtown is not some propaganda machine.” His voice dropped, and he shifted closer to me on the mattress, his weight against my hip. “It’s a regular magazine, just like any other.”
“The Congress for Cultural Freedom,” I said. “The people you went to for funding, while we were in Italy. Are they CIA?”
“No, not at all,” said Joe, but he looked worried. He seemed to be realizing I’d connected more dots than he’d hoped. He wiped sweat from his hands on his pants. “And that’s it. That’s all there is to tell.”
I watched a silverfish slip down one of the walls. He was acting as if I hadn’t read the letter from Harry myself, the one in which he’d written, “It will be up to you-know-who.” Joe was referring to an oblique “they,” as if he had no part in it. “And what about you? You had an awful lot of strange questions for James Baldwin. You’ve been rather harsh to me about my Russian novel. How do I know you’re not CIA?”
“Keep your voice down. You know I’m not CIA because you know me. I am not a CIA agent.” If it was a lie, it was a lie confidently delivered. He never broke my gaze, keeping his eyes steady and open wide. Maybe he had been well trained. Or maybe he was telling the truth, about this at least.
After a minute, his fingers traveled over the white bedspread, toward my limp hand. His pointer finger tapped once, twice, on my middle knuckle.
“Your turn,” he said.
I pulled my hand away. “My turn?”
He nodded. His eyes were wide, brown, and clear. “Your turn to tell me a truth.” The tip of his tongue poked between his lips in an almost teasing smile. “I’ve always thought that was funny—you hear ‘tell a lie’ all the time, but not ‘tell a truth.’ It’s only, ‘tell the truth,’ as if there’s only one truth to tell. All I’m asking is for you to tell me a truth. Pick one.”
“That’s the most writerly quibble I’ve ever heard,” I said, to buy time. Adrenaline coursed under my skin.
His gaze didn’t budge. “Tell me a truth, Lou.”
I breathed. “You spoke to my mother.”
“Yes, your mother was very kind. And concerned about you.”
I huffed, “Sure she was. Now that Paul’s gone, she has a little bit of concern left over.”
“She mentioned that she had to work yesterday. Seems she’s a housekeeper?”
“Yes. There’s my truth. I’m the daughter of a housekeeper.”
“So what? I’m the son of a seamstress.”
“Sure, but your father sold insurance. Mine hasn’t worked since I was a little girl.”
His hand wrapped around my wrist. “So—you’re the daughter of a housekeeper and an unemployed man. I think you know that’s not the truth I’m after.”
An announcement crackled over the hospital’s loudspeaker system, rousing the patients. Soon they’d be in to take my vital signs, to bring my breakfast. It had been nine days. In all likelihood, they would be discharging me that afternoon. I would have to go home, with Joe.
Slowly, I sat up in bed and stretched my elbows behind me for support. I pulled my neck tall, so I’d be eye to eye with him. “Seems you already know something. You’re just asking for me to confirm it.”
He dropped his eyes. The lids were shiny with perspiration, shadowed with exhaustion. “I know you were working, at the party where we met.”
I tried to read his expression, but his face revealed nothing. “Who told you?”
“Oh, you don’t give yourself enough credit, Louise. I noticed you right at the beginning of that party, with your bright red hair. When you took off the apron and stayed, after all the other staff had left, I thought it was some kind of game. I thought you’d laugh about it later. But you never mentioned it again. Next thing I knew, you were a law clerk. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”
Something dawned on me then. Something incredible. “You thought I was a spy, didn’t you?”
He began waving this suggestion away with his hands, brushing it off like dust. “No, no, I’d never have thought that. Who would you have been spying for? You have spies on the brain, Lou. It’s making you crazy. No, instead I wondered, after all this time, why you never mentioned your past as a cocktail waitress. At times I thought you might be using me.”
“Using you?”
“Yeah, giving me the runaround.” His lower lip came out, just a tad. He looked pitiful. And handsome. Despite everything, I wanted to reach out and touch the smooth part of his cheek, run my thumb over that lip. “Getting close to me so that you could get closer to, say, Mort Clifton. Hemingway.”
“I was not using you,” I said gently. “I always loved you.”
He gave a little start, as did I; I hadn’t meant to say “loved,” in the past tense. Somehow I couldn’t make myself correct it, though. I couldn’t force my lips to form the words “I love you.” I still felt there was a wall between us, a scrim of some sort. I could see through it, I could see him, he was close enough for me to embrace, but something, some unspoken thing, kept us at arm’s length from each other.
For a moment, we said nothing, both of us staring in the direction of the window. Thin gray light penetrated the curtains.
“I’ve thought of a name,” Joe said finally.
“A name for what?” I said, lost in thought. I’d been biting my pinkie nail to shreds.
His eyes turned sharp, alarmed. “For the baby, of course.”
“Oh.” The baby had been the furthest thing from my mind.
“I was thinking ‘Aurora.’ It means ‘rebirth,’ as well as ‘dawn.’ And with what just happened to you, with us…I thought we could use a fresh start.”
We certainly could, I thought. “It’s nice,” I conceded. “How about if I choose the middle name?”
“Of course,” he said. His face had relaxed now. He looked relieved. I decided to give him the opportunity to tell the truth one last time.
“Joe. Was Harry’s death an accident?”
He let out a long sigh, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “Yes. He was reckless, you know that. He bought some bad dope, and that’s the end of it.”
A nurse knocked on my door. She entered without waiting for a response, as they tended to do. I looked up, expecting a breakfast tray, but instead she was holding the baby. I pushed myself farther back against the pillows, ready to make an excuse for why Joe and I had to be left alone so that we could continue our conversation, but before I knew it, the woman had put the little bundle in my arms.
“Oh” was all I could say, looking down at her. The baby was asleep, black eyelashes fanned over her downy cheeks. She had a wide button nose covered in what looked like tiny white pimples. Her lips were delicately formed, the soft peach of a spring flower.
I leaned down and kissed her. She had a buttery-sweet scent, and when my mouth touched hers she wrinkled her face up and yawned, a little kitten yowl escaping her lips.
“Her name is Aurora Francine,” I said, “after my grandmother.”
“Aurora Francine,” said Joe. His hair brushed my forehead, and I realized how close he’d come. He was practically lying beside me.
“I’d like to be alone with her for a minute, if you don’t mind,” I said quietly.
Joe’s arms snapped straight, pushing him up from the mattress. He looked almost as if he’d touched a light socket. He stared at me for a moment, resentment distorting his face. Then he excused himself to go sort out the hospital bills before we were discharged. I supposed our effort at a rebirth hadn’t yet taken.
Aurora—or Francie, as I’d secretly begun thinking of her—cried all the way to the curb, her face bright red, approaching purple. Joe ran ahead to open the door of the long black automobile waiting for us, which surprised me: I’d been expecting a Yellow taxi.
As I approached, I noticed the big car had a surprisingly plush interior, leather club seats, a bottle of seltzer with rocks glasses. “Fancy,” I muttered. “Did you call this boat?”
“Only the best for you, my dear,” Joe replied, without warmth.
I slid inside and shouted over the baby’s screams, “Get me the baby bottle, will you?”
Joe obeyed, then came around the car to sit beside me in the back. The silence between the two of us felt thick. The driver began pulling away from the curb as I tried stuffing the nipple into the baby’s mouth. Her lips stayed dilated, her tonsils vibrating from the screams.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I muttered. I let out a deep breath, watching midtown pass by us. People were still living their ordinary lives, meeting co-workers at the deli, working to fix a pothole. It was incredible, after all the death and birth I’d been involved in lately, to think these last few weeks could have been like any others for so many people.
“Here, let me try.” Joe did his best, tapping the nipple against the baby’s tongue. A few drops of formula dripped out, and she clamped down for a second. We both breathed a sigh of relief. Then she spit it out and began screaming again.
“For crying out loud,” said Joe.
“When you get home,” the driver butted in, “dip it in sugar water. That’ll do it.”
Who asked you? I thought, but I tried to remain polite. “Do you have children?” I replied, just a bit icily.
The driver laughed. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve got six.” He adjusted the rearview mirror so that I could see his face. “All six of them rascals.”
“Six!” Joe exclaimed, still wrestling with the crying baby and her bottle. His upper lip was beaded with sweat. “Never knew that about you, Bob.”
As for me, I couldn’t respond. It had taken everything I had not to gasp when I saw the driver’s face in the mirror.
He was the man with the red mustache.