MATTHEW WAS THERE ON the Thursday of the following week when Ellen telephoned. So surprised was Dori that she nearly said, “Ellen who?” Not once since the ugly visit about her “terrible mistake” had Ellen called her, not once written, not once sent a message by Gene. Now at nearly midnight here she was.
“Gene isn’t with you by any chance?” Ellen asked.
“No. Was he planning to come here?”
“I don’t know. Have you heard that they may shut the whole university down?”
“I saw it tonight on the six o’clock news.”
“Gene never got home and he never called. I’ve been trying to reach him or Miss Pulley. She doesn’t answer her phone either, so then I thought maybe he had stopped by to see you.”
“He’s probably in some faculty meeting and perfectly all right.”
“I asked the switchboard operator if there were any meetings this late and she said no.” Her tone implied that Dori might have taken it for granted she would have thought of a faculty meeting. “Anyway, if he were at a meeting, he would have been able to get to a phone and call me. I keep thinking about their holding the dean prisoner for twenty-four hours.”
“But they admire Gene and they know where he stands.”
“I’d go up to the campus myself and see if I could locate him, but if he should get to a phone, I’d want to be right here.”
Dori wondered briefly if Ellen was waiting for her to volunteer to go up and look. She imagined herself trying to push through the unruly crowds she had seen all week on the news programs, hundreds of students running, shouting, pushing, being pushed, blacks and whites, mostly men, many girls, as well as younger people from the city’s high schools, determined to demonstrate too. “Have you tried Jim and Dan?” she asked.
“They’re not in, either one. If you do hear anything, you’ll call me, won’t you?”
“Of course. I’m sure he’s all right though.”
She turned from the phone, wondering that she was so undisturbed. To Matthew she said dryly, “According to my sister-in-law, my brother Gene is missing.” Then not so dryly she added, “Can you imagine even imagining a college professor missing on the campus? Wartime! It’s all so unreal. So many things this year seem unreal.”
He began to defend the student protesters but she thought, extraneously, One unreal thing is how much of my life happens now by telephone or by turning on a radio or TV set. That’s what comes when you’re in hiding; you’re tied to the world by a thousand electronic umbilicals that you never thought vital before.
“I’m on the students’ side too,” she said. “You didn’t think I’d not be? Except for two things.”
“What two?”
“Their taking human hostages and their photographing private letters and documents. That just sticks in my craw.” He nodded but she suddenly grew heated. “Matthew! If you half think it’s okay, ‘to get the proof they need,’ then how can you ever object to the FBI walking in and photographing your private letters and documents to get the proof they think they need? Or Jim Benting’s letters, or anybody else’s?”
“Whoa, hold on,” he said, heated too. “I never said it was okay, did I? Even though they weren’t private letters and papers, but official ones proving the university’s hookup to the Pentagon and the army. I’m no believer in the-end-justifies-the-means crap.”
“But a lot of the students are.”
“So they’re wrong. Lots of them. But lots of them are also right. Who do you think forced Johnson not to run again, Lyndon Johnson, the most ambitious man in all politics?”
“I know who. And I love them.”
“You’re damn right. The young. The students. All those kids with their placards about Vietnam and the draft and napalm, all those students working day and night for Gene McCarthy, and now all the others backing Bobby Kennedy.”
As he went on, staccato, more excited than she had ever heard him, she thought, This is the way he is at his best, when he gets most involved, with the things he believes in, or with Hildy and Johnny. Suddenly she saw that part of this defense of the young, of the rebellious young, was a kind of a priori defense for what might he ahead for his own young rebel at home.
“Let’s hear the latest,” Matthew said and flipped on the radio.
“… and an estimated one hundred,” a voice was saying, “all wearing white handkerchiefs around their arms as signals that they are faculty, are maintaining their vigil before the five occupied buildings, to resist attempts by the authorities to eject students by force.”
“Gene!” she said. “That’s where he is.”
“Professor,” an interviewer asked, “could you tell us the purpose of this action?”
“Why, simply that we feel that with us out here, there’s less chance of their getting rough with the students inside.”
“Who, sir? There are no police here, are there? We were officially told not.”
“But there are hundreds of private guards, plain-clothesmen, detectives.”
“Have you proof of that, sir?”
“Plenty. And we hear the university may call in the police officially at any time.”
Dori waited no longer; she dialed Ellen. “About a hundred faculty are standing guard in front of Hamilton and Avery and Fayerweather and Low—have you heard that?”
“No. Where did you?”
“No wonder Gene can’t get to a phone.” She told her what radio station to turn to, and could hear the relief in Ellen’s voice. She accepted her thanks for having called back, and heard the grit of restraint enter as Ellen remembered the unresolved hostility between them. It suddenly didn’t matter. “If anything were to happen to one of those professors standing guard—” she said as she turned back to Matthew.
“Not with those armbands. What if any student got killed?”
“It’s unbearable to think of.”
“They’ll probably shut down soon.”
“Shut what down?”
“Everything. No classes. No lectures. No seminars.”
“God, it’s like a siege.”
They shut down the next morning. It was Gene who told her, having stayed up there all night and arriving home, as he said, “on a few hours’ leave.”
“They did attack us,” he added. “Sometime around twelve or one. They came charging right through us, and the hell with us being faculty.”
“Who, the police?”
“University guards mostly. Savage too. A young instructor in the French Department, I don’t know him, got a scalp wound five inches long and bled like a dying animal.”
“Were you hurt?”
“Shoved a bit. God, something snaps inside you when they start to straight-arm-you. I’ll be fine right through, don’t worry!”
“Right through? What does that mean?”
“I’ll get some sleep and then go back. Twice as many will be out today as before. And if they do call out the regular police, with the nightsticks and tear gas and guns, they’ll just galvanize ten times more supporters, students and faculty both.”
“Oh Gene, be careful.”
In the afternoon Matthew called to say he couldn’t be with her until after the weekend. There was an agitation in his voice, despite his obvious will to control it. “Johnny’s been hurt,” he said, “and I’d better stay close tonight.”
“Hurt how?”
“Not too seriously, but he’s pretty worked up. Another kid had his nose smashed and was taken to a hospital.”
“What happened? Where were they?”
“Up at Columbia. Another big contingent of high school boys, from lots of schools, like the crowd yesterday, to join the demonstrators. Five guys from Johnny’s class went, they’re all big enough to pass for freshmen. But he’s the only one who got hurt.”
“Oh Matthew, how awful. Will he be all right?”
“He’s back from the doctor now. He had five stitches in his hand, in his palm under the knuckles, and he’s a mass of contusions. I’d better stick around. Hildy and Joan are upset too.”
“Of course. Oh darling, I’m so sorry. What a gutsy kid he must be.”
“He’s that, but what a time and place to show it! I thought we’d have at least three years’ leeway before we got into this kind of thing.”
There was a fatalism in the way he said it, outlawing any if’s and but’s about Johnny and the next years. Three years more of high school, she thought as she turned away from the phone, and then four at college; it would be 1975 before Johnny could be regarded as educated and independent. But somewhere in there would be the draft and Johnny’s decisions about the draft board and whether to take that step forward or refuse induction and be sentenced to prison—
Her heart sank. In 1975 her own child would be seven, and she would be only three years from being fifty.
It’s the way it was during the war, she thought, when every family you knew was affected by it. Gene was in the air force then, Ron in the navy; only Alan, just sixteen, had remained out of it. If anybody with two brothers in action could be said to be out of it. Heaven knows she hadn’t been out of it.
Now here was Gene at fifty, haggard with his need for sleep, appointed to the new Senate of the Faculty in a nonfunctioning university and here was Matthew with no connection with campus or faculty, yet caught up in this violence because of Johnny. The stitches across the boy’s hand would be removed soon and the contusions were in their final purpling, but for the first time the headmaster of Johnny’s school had sent for Matthew and wondered aloud about the need for psychoanalysis for his son. It was Johnny, he said, who had argued the other four into going to Columbia the day the police were there; the others’ parents had charged him with being “an organizer” and ringleader. That was probably unjust, but Johnny did have a long history of insubordination, persistent enough perhaps to be termed neurosis.
“I’m not scared off by the word neurosis,” Matthew assured Dori, “I know better than the headmaster that Johnny isn’t exactly a nice normal well-adjusted member of the establishment.”
“You’d hate it if he were. A square, aged fourteen?”
He smiled without much amusement. “But the idea of professional therapy carries such an or-else in it, it puts me in a sweat.”
“Just the same, it could be a great insurance policy against anything serious later on.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself.” He was moody tonight and she did not wonder. He had forbidden Johnny to return to the Columbia campus, but for the first time he knew that that would not keep Johnny from returning, if returning was what Johnny intended to do. To know that control was passing from your hands to your child’s must be a good feeling if your child was eighteen or twenty, but when he was fourteen and willful and driven to some endless battle with those in authority—there was nothing gratifying about that.
“Johnny may have had enough excitement by now,” she said without conviction, “to make him more amenable to what you tell him. Or enough of a scare.” But there was no response from Matthew and she felt a little hypocritical. There was nothing to make a boy like Johnny lose interest in the Columbia revolt. A thousand city police had finally been called in, some of them careful, some vicious, seven hundred students had been arrested, over a hundred had been injured, and the siege was officially over. But that was “officially.” Johnny still talked of nothing else.
“It’s part of something so much bigger,” Matthew said at last. “If it were only Johnny. Or only Columbia.”
“Or only ten Columbias.” Each day brought an explosion of student revolts, at Cornell, at Duke, at Ohio State and Northwestern and Stanford and fifty other campuses in the land; across the oceans other students were in rebellion in Prague and Rome and Tokyo and at the Sorbonne, especially at the Sorbonne, where people were already beginning to talk of “another French Revolution.” Somewhere she had heard the younger generation called the new international underground, and she responded as she would to any other resistance movement. But what lay ahead? Danger, she thought, and worse violence and even war.
She ought to be afraid. She ought to be thinking, What a time to bear a child, what right have I to bring a new human being into such a world? But she could not think it. At a hundred other times in the world’s turbulent life there were people who had said it, but birth had gone on undeterred by death. During the First World War there had been women giving birth; during the Second World War, during the first horror of the atomic bomb, there had always been those who cried, “What a crime to bring a child into so vile a world,” but steadily, surely, conception went on, pregnancies went on, birth went on, as if to flout the killing and the death.
“If ever I did get a divorce,” Matthew suddenly said, “you can imagine what it would do to him, therapy or no therapy.”
Unexpected, unforeseen, his words caught her, miles from what they had been talking about, miles from anything to say in reply. She gazed at him as if she were trying to understand the separate syllables of some unfamiliar tongue.
“Darling, look,” he went on, “you know by now that half of me wants to leave everything behind and start again with you.”
“I don’t think of it. I don’t let myself.”
“But I do. Especially since we’ve come back together. But then I immediately think of Johnny and Hildy, and of course Joan. There’s not much left for Joan and me apart from the kids, but she’s not one of these women who would be able to start again at forty-two and make anything of it.”
He looked depressed, sodden with a sadness she had never seen so plainly. She tried to think of the right thing to say but found nothing. “Perhaps I’m the one needs the therapy,” he added, and again she said nothing.
“I don’t mean just in general,” he went on. “I suppose everybody could use a psychic checkup just in general. But me—something’s been bugging me recently and I can’t shake free of it.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
It seemed hard for him to begin. He didn’t look at her when he spoke. “It’s something I wrote you once, that’s got into some cross-tangle with when my mother was alive. I see the connection and that’s supposed to rid you of it, isn’t it? Only it doesn’t.”
He had never said very much about his parents, but neither had she about hers, beyond sketching in her love for her mother and distaste for her father. In their first weeks there had been no time for reminiscence and anecdote except about themselves as adults, and in the month since Matthew’s return, they were once again too full of their immediate life. She knew that his father had died when he was a boy, but she was not clear about when he had lost his mother, or whether they had been close or distant. He had admired his mother, that she knew, had called her a fine lawyer, a remarkable person to have succeeded some thirty years ago when the law was still regarded as a man’s profession.
“Maybe talking it out would help,” she said quietly.
“I think it started that first morning I left you in bed,” he said almost irritably. “You were half asleep and I wanted to wake you and I didn’t, and then I tried all day to get you by phone and couldn’t, and I wrote you instead.”
“I remember.”
He surprised her by switching abruptly to his early life with Joan, to the slow realization that they were never going to have a large easy circle of friends, to the time Hildy was born. He began to hurry his sentences, he slid over their difficulties with his mother, hardly mentioning Joan’s shyness, or unwillingness, making it his own unwillingness to go through awkward scenes. At last he talked of his mother sitting in silence looking down at the infant Hildy.
“That was fifteen years ago,” he said, “and for years I never thought of it, but now it keeps jumping out at me like a flash shot on a movie screen. So okay, I was thoughtless and stupid about family things, but how many young couples get in wrong with in-laws or parents? And why the hell should it start needling me at this late date?”
He broke off, angry, and she waited. At last she asked, “Your letter to me. Where does that come in?”
“My letter? Oh that. It’s mixed in somehow. Sometimes the connection is clear and sometimes it goes foggy, and right now the hell with it. I’ve said too much as it is.”
She wanted to cry, It’s not too much, Matthew, it’s not enough. Why can’t you say straight out, how and why your letter comes in? You must feel it or you’d never have mentioned the letter at all. But she thought of his friend Jack forcing his own words back. Jack knew you couldn’t give insight to somebody like a gift. She knew it too.
The sense of frustration would not go away. Long after he was gone she continued an interior conversation with him, depressed that she had thought it hazardous to hold it openly while he was still there. At the end of his recital they had dealt only in the small banalities that often follow revelation, when, spent with the emotion of telling, he needed only comfort, a kind of retroactive absolution, and she, giving both comfort and absolution, had wondered whether he would regard the matter closed and never return to it, or pursue it the next time they met. To be unwilling or unable to talk things out, even after one had started to talk them out, was no way to reach firmer ground in any close relationship. She should have made it easier perhaps, should have asked the questions that would have helped him dig for the answers that were already his.
“Darling,” she prompted him now in her mind. “Don’t you see why everything is cross-tangling?”
“No, do you?”
“It’s only a theory. It could be so wrong.”
“Tell me.”
“Why I think it happens whenever you’re afraid of hurting somebody again.”
“Hurting Joan?”
“Joan or me, either one. I wonder if you don’t know that it’s better to face things with somebody you love than to avoid a scene just to keep the peace, that if you do avoid scenes about something important, you end up by ‘diminishing’ the relationship, and feeling diminished yourself too.”
She could imagine his wincing at the diminish. Though he knew perfectly well about himself as a lover, the sexual association would be there, a major affront. She could see his look become distant, as if he had never mentioned the letter, the only letter he had ever written her, could see his look of distaste, of disbelief, then of a faltering acceptance. Yet it was Matthew who had cross-indexed the two lines of thought, he who had finally seen that he had been rather a weak man in that early crisis in his life and was perhaps uncertain whether he were going to go on repeating that kind of weakness. It was too difficult to say any of this to him; he did not wish to say any of it aloud himself. Not so far. If he were to end his marriage, he would again live with guilt, would again have the same inability to excuse himself for what he had done. And yet he also felt guilt about not ending his marriage, about keeping it “intact” while his real life was here with her. His instinct was to say, Let’s marry, but he had to stamp it down; her instinct also said, Let’s marry, but he had to stamp her down too.
So he lived with one guilt while fleeing from the other.
I was immobilized, he had told her when he talked about his three months away from her. Until I understood it, I was immobilized. Now wasn’t he immobilized again?
He would not put it that way. He would not put any of it the way she had just put it; for one thing he would speak not of leaving Joan but of leaving Johnny. Tonight was the exception, the one time he had ever permitted the formation of those words about leaving Joan, and he had negated the idea instantly. Joan was not a woman who could start life anew in the forties. She, Dori, was a woman who could, so she was elected to do it.
He would never have it out with Joan. He could not stand scenes, except in court where conflict was part of the modus vivendi. He would live on in silence, old guilt interweaving with new guilt, threading in and out of it, reinforcing it, warp and woof, dependent one on the other, inextricable. Poor Matthew. It was not a good way to feel.
And me? Dori thought. Am I immobilized too?
The summer came suddenly and she walked with a little less than her striding energy. The park was nearly at full bloom; wherever she looked there were flowering trees, cherry, peach, pear, apple, or so she named them in her new status as botanist. She had never known before that there would be so many banks of rhododendrons, so many beds of tulips; the deep pinks, the pale pinks, the shimmering white and newly fresh green delighted her constantly.
It pleasures me, she thought; what a lovely old verb. Around a curve she came upon a girl out walking too, walking toward her slowly, apparently not seeing her. She was a young girl, in her late teens probably, or her earliest twenties, slender, pale even for the lightness of her skin and hair. Her cheeks gleamed wet in the sun, with tears streaming from her reddened eyes and her face ugly in the distortion of grief.
“Are you sick?” Dori asked without thinking. “Can I do anything?”
“No, thanks.” She looked up briefly but did not slow down or attempt to hide her face.
“Whatever it is, I’m sorry,” Dori heard herself say and they passed each other and the girl moved off behind her, around the curve in the path.
It left her shaken. A husband lost in Vietnam? A boyfriend unfaithful to her? The news that she was pregnant?
She was suddenly convinced—it was that, the news just given her in some doctor’s office or at some clinic. The lab report was in and it said “positive.” (“Oh no, oh God, what will I do, where will I go?”)
The words rang within her as if they were being cried aloud to her and again the extraordinary conviction came that she had guessed correctly. For weeks now she had forgotten that frieze of faces she used to think about; she had been too much immersed in herself, too grateful for the passing days and their ticked-off accomplishment, but now again, stark and vast, a multitude of unwilling frightened girls arose before her, three hundred thousand who were not grateful, who did not have the freedom she had to step aside for a while from jobs and salaries and offices and factories and earnings.
Of the two pieces waiting for her return to steady work, this one on the terrified and trapped was the nearest to completion, but she had put aside the final writing of it, afraid that in her continuing mood whatever she wrote might, despite herself, sound patronizing. Like that morning after Martin Luther King, she thought, when I wanted to talk to that woman I passed.
It would be better to set it aside until she began working again, in September or October. She was going to come back here with the baby after the hospital and live right here until she could show herself to the world once more, get to work once more for Tad Jonas and any other editor who needed pieces written. How fortunate that Mrs. Steffani had insisted on a lease for an entire year. She had known all along she could not be going straight from Harkness to her real apartment with a new baby in tow, had known she would have to return from that legendary world cruise as she had left, with the same two suitcases and the borrowed plaid carryall and nothing else. But she had also known that the shorter her total absence, the more acceptable her cruise story.
So, the interim stop would be right here in this blessed ugly familiar place, and as soon as she could show herself again she would have to hire a maid to live here with the baby, while she went home alone and resumed her “normal life.” She laughed at the words. Normal life indeed. With her coming over here every single day to spend hours with her own baby, and moving back in every Friday evening to take full charge while the maid took her two days off.
It was all part of her still-evolving plan. She was saving in every way she could and it was still going to be a big chunk out of her nest egg, but if ever there was a palpable nest involved in that phrase, this had to be it!
Two months would go by, three, and she would be seeing friends and colleagues again, magazine editors, newspaper people, and the vagueness of memory about other people’s goings and comings would have set in among all of them. Then only would she break the news that she was adopting a baby and arrive at home one fine day, no longer alone, but with the classic blanket enclosing a very new baby.
Classic, except for the lack of the proud husband beside her.
She thought once more of the weeping girl with the distorted face. She should have stopped, not walked on, stopped and said, Look, I’m in a fix too. You don’t know me, don’t know my name and I don’t know yours, so why can’t we talk about it? It might help, it gives people a release to tell somebody else, that’s why they go to priests, or analysts, or talk to strangers on a train or boat.
Daydreams. Fantasy. Fairy tales for the pregnant. Here she was holding unspoken conversation with Matthew, giving unspoken sympathy to the girl in disgrace, experiencing the outer world largely through radio and television news and the telephone.
But she was lucky. Compared to the weeping girl she had passed, how blessedly lucky. She could carve out a year of her lifetime and pay for it. That simple economic fact had made the difference between disgrace and delight.
Not just that, she thought in sharp rebuttal. There you go again, belittling, deprecatory, another way of being defensive. Damn it, you know perfectly well that even if you didn’t have a cent in the world you’d still be having this baby.
She opened the door eagerly. “Good morning, Doctor.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Gray. Mrs. Grange—I beg your pardon. You see I had no problem with the bell. You look splendid. How do you feel?”
“Splendid too.”
He was alone, as she had known he would be. She had made up the bed in its daytime incarnation, and on one end of it she had flung an ostentatious sheet for draping. To get ready would take less than a moment; she was in a loose smock that was like a hospital garment, except that it was strewn with pink carnations.
He did not notice either her garment or the sheet. He was in street clothes, not in the starched white coat, and he looked different, not so remote as he did in the office. From his bag he was drawing out his stethoscope and sphygmometer, taking a swift look about the large room as he did so. He maintained his usual impersonal mien about whatever it was he thought of it and its decor, and already had managed at once to take charge of her the patient, as he did in his own office, signaling her to sit in the armchair while he drew up one of the small straight chairs.
“Good,” he said after using the stethoscope, and “good” after its second placing, and “good” at her blood pressure, and “good” once more when she had stepped oh her bathroom scale and he had read the dial. Then he had motioned, with one continuing gesture at the waiting sheet and the tidy bed, and said, “I’ll have a look at you now,” and busied himself returning his instruments to his black bag.
The visit was brevity and authority and reassurance. Without more than his repeated “good” he had told her again that he was satisfied with her progress and that he had again ruled out even the most minor of complications. Therefore she was surprised when he seated himself at her desk, drew out a prescription pad, and began to write.
“Mrs. G-r-a-n-g-e, Grange,” he said aloud as he wrote her name. “You see I practice too. When the time comes, I will practice on a birth certificate. These are Nembutal I am giving you, twenty should do it.”
“I still don’t need them, Dr. Jesskin.”
“So much the better. But if you do, they will be here. One at bedtime, the label will read. Now as to your walking. You will probably continue the full three miles as yet, but if you should begin to tire too much, cut away half a mile, even a whole mile.”
“So far that’s all right too.”
“I can see it must be. I am more than pleased with the way it goes.” He rose and looked about for the door. She had an absurd impulse to make him pause, to offer him coffee or some problem that would detain him. “Next visit, there will be measurements again and a blood sample, and until then, of course, telephone me at any time.”
“I will. Thank you.”
He left. The whole visit had taken less than twenty minutes.
She thought of the Nembutal one night because she was unable to get comfortable, but decided to turn her light on again and read a little longer instead. Over her book she looked down at herself and thought, Soon we won’t be able to. Except for the last few weeks, Cele had told her long ago, and it had seemed too far off to consider. But here it was the last week in May and soon it would be June, and after June, as everybody knew, there would come the magic of July.
She slept. In the morning, she walked past the gleaming windows of her bank and idly glanced at herself. She was big. She was startled to see how big, as if in the last week or two, when she wasn’t watching, nature had played a trick on her. The pitch of her body had changed; she walked now as if she were canted back, solid on her heels, though she knew she had not altered her posture. It gets going, she thought amiably; it may take a long time but sooner or later the bigness is there. And it’s saying, This baby’s going to get itself born in a few weeks.
Nine weeks. For the first time she was thinking in weeks, instead of in months. Wrong. At the beginning she had also thought in weeks; the sixth week, the tenth week. But then the reckoning had gone over into the more solid unit of months; she could remember when she had first thought “the third month,” and then “the fourth month.”
And here was the eighth month already begun, and she was back again to thinking in weeks. An orbit, a circle, perfect and harmonious. Though on the twenty-third of June she would be thinking in months again, since it would be the beginning of the ninth month, the final month, the great month of termination.
The great month. She was at last great with child, for all the world to see. At the corner where she turned east to go home, she paused, then retraced her steps, to pass before the bank’s expanse of plate glass once again. She wasn’t all that big; she would get bigger. But nobody could for a moment doubt that she was pregnant. This was not being overweight, this was being with child, in the lovely archaic phrase she had always thought so remote and unattainable.
It’s me, she thought now. Me and my good construction. She grinned at her image in the window and started for home.
That night she shifted about several times in bed; her body had begun to demand a little planning before it was comfortable. Always before, though she had never noticed it until it was gone, there had been a firm hard line of contact as she lay on her side, her rib cage, her hipbone, her knee, her ankle making the points of contact with sheet and mattress. Now, between rib cage and hip there was a rounded extension, as if she had put down a package close to herself, which lay beside her, obedient to her movement but quite definable and apart too. She liked its presence; she felt fond of it. It keeps you company, she thought, and felt completely satisfied.
“You promised,” Cele said, “and you’re welshing on it. ‘When I’m a big hulk’ you said, ‘then I’ll get a maid.’ What do you think you are now, hey?”
“A big hulk. But, Cele, it’s so pointless. It’s nights you’re worried about and the maid wouldn’t be here then anyhow.”
“There’s no statutory regulation that things go wrong only at night.”
“You know nothing is going to go wrong. You’re just getting nervy.”
“That could be.”
“Well, I’m not and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Maybe I’m not one of the crinoline types that nobody suspects until the last minute, but I sure seem to be the peasant type that squats down between the furrows.”
“Some furrows. Harkness at a hundred a day.”
“For only four or five days. Thank the Lord for that or I’d really go broke. It piles up, doesn’t it?”
“Are you starting to worry about money?”
“Not ‘worry,’ no. I’ll probably bear down hard for a couple of years to make some of this up, but that’s okay.”
“Don’t talk so lightly about bearing down, Dorr.”
They laughed and Dori said, “So stop nagging me about a maid until I simply have to have one, to get working again. Where the devil would she stay in this place anyway?”
“You have a point there.” She glanced at an open catalogue of baby carriages and cribs and strollers, lying open on the desk. “Especially after a few of those little items arrive.”
“Cele, do be a goodie and go see them tomorrow and choose. In case there’s any snafu or warehouse nonsense or any of the usual. This is the third of June, after all, and we don’t want to wait too long.”
“July third would be plenty of time. You just want to see a crib and a baby carriage under your own roof.”
“That’s it. Will you? Tomorrow?”
“Yes, pest, tomorrow. Glory, will I be glad when this is all over and I can ignore you.”
Dori laughed. Matthew was again in Boston and she had asked Cele over for the evening. It was oddly pleasant, pleasant in some new way, and she speculated from time to time about what the newness implied. There was something in any good long friendship between women that was calm and solid, she thought, a shared knowledge that needed no mouthing or measuring, and this she had felt often before. She might even have fitted words to it in some piece or other that she had written; certainly this was not what gave her now a sense of discovery.
What was new then in this particular pleasantness of having Cele here this evening? She had told her of the girl in the park, of the vision of herself in the plate-glass window, of Dr. Jesskin’s brief visit (“sort of austere, Cele, almost curt. And sans Miss Mack. I’m glad he wasn’t that silly.”). They had pored over the catalogue’s pages of nursery equipment and Cele had been the old pro whose every nay and yea carried weight.
And then suddenly Dori thought, It’s a vacation from problems, that’s why it’s so nice. Ethics, morals, duty to one’s children, to one’s wife, the opposing duty to the other woman, to me, to my life—poor Matthew, it all does weigh on him and he can’t help it, and it also weighs on me and I can’t help it either.
“Matthew and I,” she said impulsively, “have been talking out some awfully big matters of late.”
“That’s good.” She sounded guarded.
“Probably Johnny will start with a child analyst when they get back from Truro after the summer. They’re driving up at the end of the week. School closes for both kids on Friday.”
“Does Matthew fly up every weekend?”
“We’ve never had weekends.”
“Suppose you—” She broke off, and Dori finished for her.
“Go to the hospital on a weekend instead of Tuesday the twenty-third? Then Matthew won’t even know about it until it’s all over.”
“Soon enough,” Cele said dryly. Then as if to cover up a slip, she swiftly added, “Do you still say you don’t know which you’d rather have?”
“A boy or a girl? I still say it.”
“Have you chosen the first batch of names?”
“For the falsies?” She laughed. “I’ll have to write it all out for poor Dr. Jesskin. If it’s a boy, his false birth certificate will be James Victor Grange, and if it’s a girl, Dorothy Victoria Grange.”
“That damned V in your monogram. Nobody’s ever going to see your towels or teaspoons at Harkness.”
Dori ignored this. “But on the permanent birth certificate, after the adoption—” she began tentatively.
“You’ve changed your mind.”
“No. It’s still Eugene or Celia. That’s never changed, either of them, since I first told you.”
“Eugene Bradford Gray. Celia Varley Gray. I’ve never let on how that pleased me.”
“It’s the middle ones I’m thinking of changing,” she said uncertainly. “I’m not sure whether I ought to ask permission first or what.”
“Whose permission?”
“I got thinking about this, Cele, and it won’t go away. Suppose it were Eugene Cornelius Gray? Or Celia Cornelia Gray? I’m not so sure of that one—it sort of rhymes.”
“Why, Dorr, it’s quite an idea. When did you come up with it?”
“How do you ever tell a doctor thank-you for something like this? I got thinking about it and thinking about it and once the idea came it just wouldn’t go away. Ought I to ask him first?”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking him. Tell him when you’re out of Harkness. Or let your Mr. Cox tell him.” With sudden emphasis she added, “You’re so right! If it weren’t for Dr. Jesskin all those million years back, where would any of this be?” Her wave took in the room at large, the open catalogue and Dori herself in her ample smock of pink carnations.
Dori looked around too. “And not only the million years back,” she said. “What about right now, and all along since it happened? Without you and without Dr. Jesskin, it would have been a whole other ball game.”
Cele thought of Matthew Poole, but let it pass. In a switch of mood she said, “Apart from all that, I’ve got a surprise for you. In half an hour or so.”
“What surprise?”
“Marshall’s coming over. It’s all his idea.”
“Coming to see me? You’re making it up.”
“He’s bringing you something. A hospital gift, call it. I could have hugged him, it’s so right.”
Automatically Dori started for the bathroom mirror and brushed her hair. Behind her Cele jeered and called out, “Don’t forget the false eyelashes,” but Dori went ahead changing her lipstick, which was all the makeup she used now on her tanned skin. Then she stepped out of the smock and into a brief white skirt with a thigh-length tunic of turquoise. Apart from the heat, the navy silk was now tightly obsolete.
“You do look good,” Cele conceded.
“My party clothes.” She was amazed at how much an occasion it seemed, to see good old Marshall so unexpectedly. Cele, Gene, Matthew, Cele, Gene, Matthew—for all these months since January, it had been these three and not once had she felt deprived. Yet now the advent of another friend took on importance and excitement as if she had been off in exile.
When he arrived, she let Cele open the door while she stood in the center of the room waiting. She stood motionless, in profile, as if she were assuming a pose for a painter, and watched him look her up and down before she said, “Hi, Marshall,” and went over to kiss him. He returned her kiss with a warmth he had never shown before, and said, “This is blackmail night.”
He offered her the package he had brought, and she said, “Ooh, a present. I love it already.”
There was a solid heft to the oblong and she sat down to open it. As her present came into view, Marshall said, “The one sure thing is, you’ll use it; there’s something about them when they’re new that drives you nuts. It’s to take to the hospital.”
It was a camera, complete with film pack, flashbulb, automatic light-setting, and almost instantaneous outcome. She was delighted and oddly touched that so practical a man of affairs as Marshall should have visualized her taking pictures of a just-arrived baby. She kissed him again and began asking how to operate it but suddenly interrupted to ask, “What did you mean ‘blackmail night’?”
“Get up and stand the way you did when I came in.” He took the camera from her hands. “I may sell you the negative for a hundred thousand and then again I may not.”
“I never even thought of a picture of me pregnant,” she cried, posing with alacrity. “But do I ever want it! I’ll keep it in a safe-deposit box, but then I could always prove it, twenty years from now.”
An extraordinary vanity permeated her and she had to restrain an impulse to lean backward and look bigger than she was. How long did you keep a secret like this from the baby you gave birth to? Twenty years? Twenty-five? Forever? She did not know, nor could she know; life itself would teach her the answer to this one. But all at once she felt a desperate need for a photograph for that distant day, proof, evidence that it was not fantasy, if in that distant day no other evidence would still exist.
Marshall was opening the camera, and peeling off the picture. He glanced at it, showed it to Cele, and then Cele smiled and handed it over to Dori. “Real good-looking,” she said, “except for being straight as a board.”