A SHAFT OF STEEL speared upward and Dori woke with a small cry. She had never felt anything like it.
It was gone almost before she knew it. For a moment she wondered if it had been part of a dream, drug-induced, weight-induced, discomfort-induced. She glanced at the small clock on the table beside her; it was ten after one.
She closed her eyes thinking how it had been. It was like a metal wedge forced upward through the pelvic arch, a chisel driven into two halves of a boulder to break it asunder.
Then she knew. The image told her. It had begun.
She was wild with elation. She was to time the pains. That was the first order: Time the pains. How many dozens of repetitions had the admonition had, not only in the past weeks but all her life before, when the directive was not for her but merely part of the folklore of childbirth. You timed the pains; you didn’t call for help until the pains were coming every five minutes. Her instructions were different because she was alone. She was to call Cele the moment she was sure there were pains at regular intervals, no matter how far apart; Cele would come over in a taxi and they would decide when to call Dr. Jesskin. She herself would decide at what point to telephone Matthew.
She looked again at the clock. The minute hand had scarcely left the ten-after position.
Perhaps this was something all by itself, instead of number one in a series. Again she closed her eyes thinking about it, thinking, For once somebody is going to describe it; I’m a writer, or I used to be a writer anyway, and I’m going to remember every bit of it so I can set it down for the record. All anybody ever writes about is the cries and groans and the beads of sweat. She smiled, superior. She was a better reporter than that.
Her thoughts grew hazy with sleep. For the past two weeks, she had meekly obeyed the doctor and taken one of the glistening yellow capsules each night as she went to bed. Since the final process had begun, that final re-positioning within her, her center of gravity was changed. A personal center of gravity was one more thing she had never contemplated before.
The wedge again—the chisel, the boulder. The same, the same splitting apart, the same, no deeper, no worse, the same.
She looked at her watch. One twenty. Ten minutes since the other one. Twice; not what you would call a series. Maybe it was something else, some mishap, the first. She hadn’t expected this entering wedge anyway; she had been told she would have cramps, like menstrual cramps, yet deeper, and also toward the back. Something was going wrong, then, for there had been no cramps. But this was Monday, the—
She sat up suddenly, as suddenly as she could do anything. It was no longer Monday. It was Tuesday, the Tuesday she had waited for, the twenty-third of July.
There was no mishap, there was nothing wrong. She would wait for just one more, and if it came when it should, she would call Cele. She lay back, waiting, surprised in some far-off part of her, as if there were an exterior Dori observing her, surprised that she was so calm and so excited at once. She was alive with watchfulness, stirring with expectation, a little crazy with delight. If this should smooth out and go away and not continue, she would be savage with disappointment.
She glanced at the clock. Only a minute? Ridiculous. She closed her eyes. No woolly sleep now. The Nembutal might have flown clear out of her body. In another moment she once more sat up, but this time she left the bed and went to the kitchen. Tea or coffee? Or something cold? She put the kettle on.
She waited for the kettle to whistle, taking an almost clinical checkup on the way she felt. Shaken by anticipation and uncertainty, but otherwise good. If those two were the start, then nothing but good; if they were signs of mishap, then she was alarmed, since mishap had been so totally absent from all these nine months.
She started to glance at her wristwatch and stopped her eyes halfway in their journey. The timing would be reversed for this next one. She would look at her watch only if the third pain arrived, a confirmation after the event, not a possible psychic inducement beforehand. She felt very clever over this decision, poured scalding water over the tea bag in her cup and jeered at her self-approval as fatuous.
She took the tea carefully to her bed table, her eyes averted now from the little clock. She had left the camera for the last minute’s packing and as her tea cooled she thought, Just for luck, and placed it next to the suitcase, on the floor beside it. The suitcase itself she did not touch. Everything was already in it but her toilet things and her Grange checkbook.
She went back to bed and sipped her tea. God, ten minutes could be long. If pain number three didn’t arrive, ought she to notify Dr. Jesskin’s service at least, that something seemed to be wrong? She was to call him at home if labor had begun, but if she were not sure?
Her breath sucked in on itself. The chisel, deeper, rocking her whole skeleton, prying the halves apart. The first sweat spurted from her pores. She looked at the clock. One thirty. She dialed Cele.
“Cele, it’s me. It’s started.”
“How far apart?”
“Ten minutes, and I’ve had three. Not cramps at all, sort of being gored upward.”
“Are you okay? You sound shaky.”
“I’m terribly excited, that way shaky.”
“I’ll start out the minute I phone Dr. Jesskin. I think if it’s ten-minute pains, I’d better call him first.”
Moving slowly, Dori began to dress. The disappearance of the Nembutal amazed her; she might never have gone near it, so wide-awake was she, whereas her usual experience these past nights was to feel half drugged even the next morning when she awoke. That partly explained her aversion to sleeping pills; never had she taken them regularly except that one time when Tony left.
She dressed quickly, brushed her teeth and hair, and packed her toilet kit into the suitcase, along with the camera and checkbook. Then she looked thoughtfully about the apartment. There were last-minute checkups she had assigned herself to do.
The last page of her desk calendar; she tore it out and took it with her. She tried the lock of her other suitcase and felt for its key in her purse. She signed the note she had already written to leave for Mrs. Steffani, saying she would be back in a few days and would Mrs. Steffani take in her papers and magazines instead of letting them pile up at her door. She paused over her signature to be sure that in her excitement she signed it not Gray but Grange.
Again the shaft of metal, again the burst of sweat, this time an involuntary animal grunt from the back of her throat. She sat rigid, waiting for it to be over. Her wristwatch said one forty. Perhaps a fraction of a minute less.
With a start she realized she had not phoned Matthew.
She stared at the telephone, unwilling. The reluctance again. It was as if a hand had fallen on her shoulder, a light hand, a hint of a hand, accompanied by a voice saying, Stay, this is real, think about that.
She thought, Not tonight, not this one special night. As if someone were whispering on her behalf. Just don’t do that tonight.
This dialogue had sprang from nowhere, perhaps from the sedation, still at work in her mind despite its apparent disappearance. Don’t call Matthew; having him take you to the hospital is playacting and you know it, while this is real and you know that too. And her plea in reply: Let me alone, Uncertainty, let me alone, not tonight please, not on this one particular night.
She jabbed a finger at the telephone and dialed. “Matthew, it’s happening.”
“Darling. I’ll be there the minute I can.”
“Don’t shave or anything. I waited to be sure, so now a lot of time has gone by already.”
“I’ll not shave. How are you so far?”
“Excited.”
“Good girl. I’m on my way.”
“Cele is too.”
Again pain, different this time, like a blow, but still the feeling of cleaving, riving, splitting asunder. She was ordered to yield to it, not fight it, but she forgot the order until her whole body was clenched in resistance, when she suddenly let go, limp and collapsed. It was easier at once. Maybe her pains were harder right from the start because she was forty. Forty is not old, not medically. Cosmetically perhaps is a different matter, but you are a fine healthy young woman and forty is not regarded as anything but young today.
The bell rang and Cele’s voice sounded outside the door, with Cele’s key already in the lock. Absurd delight welled up in her; now it would be all right.
“Having one right now?” Cele asked as she came in.
“It’s passing. How did you know?”
“Anybody would know. Sit down again.” She crossed to the bathroom and came back bearing a bath towel which she tossed nonchalantly straight at Dori. “Dry off some of that. We might take it with us in the cab. I told him to wait.”
“Are we starting right off?”
“Dr. Jesskin thought it might be wise to get you settled in.”
“But Matthew’s on his way.”
“I told the driver we might be a few minutes. He’s willing. He’s got four kids, and this doesn’t faze him.”
“What did Dr. Jesskin say?”
“He said, ‘Yes’ and he said ‘Ten minutes?’ and he said ‘They will be expecting her, I will notify them myself.’ Cucumber conversation.”
“He’s always cool. Did he say when he would be there?”
“Lord, no. He’ll probably go back to sleep for a couple of hours. They’ll call him in plenty of time. He also said he told the Admissions desk to hold back on filling out blanks until you were installed in your room.”
“He didn’t want them asking Matthew.”
“Matthew? Does he know about Matthew?”
“Only that I’d be going up with you and a man, another close friend.”
“Who he assumes is the father.”
“He never assumes anything. Anyway I think I told him, way at the start.” She waved all that aside. “Oh Cele, I can’t believe that by tomorrow morning this will all be over.”
“Hush your big mouth, Dorr. Forget about tomorrow, forget about everything, and when they tell you to bear down, you bear down but good. Now let’s see: suitcase?” She took it and set it just inside the door. “Air conditioner? Let’s leave it on for now; it’s hell’s own furnace outside. I’ll not forget. When will Matthew get here?”
“Any minute. I told him I had already let a lot of time go by.”
“Clever girl. Thank God you’re not going in for natural childbirth—when it gets too rotten, yell for a shot of something. But for now, you just sit there and think how skinny you’ll be next week.”
When she stiffened with the next pain, Cele merely said, “Hang on, Dorr, I know it’s rough.” During the jagged clamor of the next moments, Dori thought, She does know; it’s one thing women know and now I know too. It’s not like pain, I’m sick or pain, I hurt myself; it’s pain for something and you’re not angry at it. She mopped her arms and the throat and face with the towel and the pain ebbed and the bell rang and Cele let Matthew in.
He went straight to Dori, leaning over her, free of self-consciousness despite Cele’s presence, kissing her damp face. “Is that our cab out there? I held mine too.”
They all laughed, Dori suddenly shrill in a mounting sense of occasion. “Oh, Matthew, I’m glad you’re here. You and Cele—” She turned abruptly away. How could she have thought, even for a moment, of not calling him? What madness would that have been, what careless slamming of a door? He was real too and everything they had was real. Limited, bounded on every side, circumscribed but real. Was she to tear it down because it wasn’t unlimited, like a frantic angry child?
“Matthew, why don’t you pay off your guy?” Cele said. “Mine’s all contracted for, big tip promised, I’m committed.” He nodded and disappeared to dismiss his cab. Cele said, “Come on, Dorr,” and picked up the letter for Mrs. Steffani and turned off the air conditioner. “Here we go.”
It was all in somebody else’s hands, Dori thought, in Cele’s and Matthew’s and Dr. Jesskin’s and the baby’s. The baby knew it was time to end the nine months inside and she was merely obeying, just as Cele was obeying and Matthew. From that first pain on, the baby had been in command. Nature then, but it was nicer to think, The Baby.
“What are you smiling at?” Matthew asked as he returned.
“Nothing. You feel good in between, that’s all.” To Cele he said, “What’s the schedule now?”
“We’re starting right away. This girl is still on a ten-minute rhythm, but they do seem to be blockbusters, and the doctor said to get her up there.”
“Right,” he said. “Come on, darling.” He held both his hands out to Dori and she pulled herself up and forward on their strength.
In the cab she sat between them, silent, listening to their spurts of talk, aware of their bodies close to her own. There was a core of detachment, though, a high pure knowledge that she was almost, nearly, not quite but almost at the culmination. She felt steady with the knowledge, steady within it, as if it were a frame built close around her within which she was tight and safe.
The pain came again, slicing through, sharper, more purposeful. It was no ten-minute lapse since the last one; she knew it without trying to see her watch. It was speeding up, it was fiercer, it was under way and nothing could roll it back now.
At the Admissions desk Matthew said, “It’s Mrs. Grange, Dr. Jesskin’s patient.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Grange.”
“I am not Mr. Grange.”
The clerk glanced at Dori and then at a card. “Yes, that’s right. ‘Two friends.’ You can go up with her for a while.” She rang a bell sharply. “Chair, please.”
“I can walk,” Dori said, but the chair was arriving and obediently she let herself be put into it. Flanked by Cele and Matthew, pushed swiftly by an orderly, she did not speak. The huge empty elevator stopped at the eighth floor, and again the swift silent progress began, down a dimmed corridor. At the door of her room, she looked eagerly for the two names she had so often visualized. They were not there.
Inside Cele said, “I’ll unpack,” and Matthew gave her the suitcase, saying, “Here’s where the useless feeling gets going.” Dori said, “Oh no, if you and Cele weren’t here …” and let her voice float away. In her ears it sounded strange, light and half muted. A nurse entered, young, smiling, saying, “I needn’t ask who’s the patient, need I?” and then a moment later, to Cele as much as to Matthew, “Would you wait outside for a while?”
This was no geriatric; Dr. Jesskin must know that the routine part did not matter; in a sudden flash of understanding Dori knew there would be many nurses tonight, many orderlies, the anesthesiologist, the people in the delivery room, to all of whom she would be just one more woman in parturition, faceless, nameless, except for the strip around her wrist saying “Grange” and bearing a number, her Harkness number which she would never use again.
She went rigid to another labor pain, deeper, more savage; this time her breath caught hard and the nurse turned at her gasp, nodding as if to give due recognition to pain, otherwise unimpressed, except to note the time. “We’ll get you to bed,” she said, “and prepare you. With first deliveries you never can be sure.”
The pain did not stop. For the first time Dori screamed.
She could remember begging somebody for more anesthesia and she could remember being wheeled on a table and she could remember a brilliant light in the ceiling and she could remember voices but she could not separate anything from anything and she did not know whether it was still happening or whether it was over and she tried to open her eyes and could not and she went off again into a swarm of warmth and heavy softness. …
Somebody spoke and she could not answer. She knew it was a boy but she did not know how she knew, and when the voice came again it was Cele, calling to her, “Dorr, Dorr, it’s Cele,” and she tried to answer and nothing sounded and then she heard Matthew saying, “Dori, it’s over,” and she said, “Has he all his fingers and toes?” and fell back into the heavy dark softness again.
Quiet and darkness and a spurting upward like a fountain somewhere and it was happiness, the fountain, and she opened her eyes, and there was Cele bending over her and saying, “It’s all over, Dorr, it’s a boy,” and she saw Cele and then Matthew and suddenly she knew them and her eyes opened wide and she said, “Is he all right?”
“Yes, darling,” Matthew said, “and you’re wonderful, and you can sleep if you want to—we’ll be right here.”
The spurting fountain again, and a rushing of warmth and she sighed and went away from them again but somehow knowing they were there, and wanting to be back with them, and being unable to do it as if she were sliding away into something thick and clinging and marvelously comfortable.
A door opened and she heard Gene’s voice and everything went clear and she half sat up as he put his arm under her shoulder and said, “Congratulations, you,” and she said, “Oh, Gene, you know Cele and this is Matthew,” and she watched them shaking hands.
“Can I see the baby?” she asked. “What does he look like?”
“I’ll go tell them you’re out of it,” Cele said. “He’s huge and he doesn’t look like anybody.”
“How do you feel now?” Matthew asked. “Do you know what time it is?”
“What time?”
“Three in the afternoon.” To Gene he said, “Cele called you when she went into the recovery room, around twelve.”
“Did it take all that time?” Dori asked.
“Ten hours.”
“When can I see him?” She half closed her eyes and when she opened them again the room was empty. The light had changed at the window; it was yellower and deeper, as if the sun were way down toward the rim of the sky. There was a rustle of newspaper and she turned her head. Rising from the chair in the corner of the room was a thin little woman, smiling, white-haired, pink-skinned, with a starched cap on her head.
“Hello,” Dori said.
“I’m your four-to-midnight nurse, my name is Schulz. You’ve had a fine sleep and your baby is fine too.”
“Can I see him now? I thought I was awake but then I went off again.”
“That’s not only postnatal but post-surgical.”
“Surgical?”
“You needed some surgery at the end. Dr. Jesskin will tell you about it, but you’re to rest in bed.” She reached for her wrist. “No walking yet.”
“Could I see my baby first?”
“Of course. I’ll take your pulse later.”
For the first time Dori was aware of her bound and tender breasts. She knew about the tenderness and the binding as she “knew” about everything; Dr. Jesskin had told her that since breast-feeding was out of the question, she would be wearing a tight bandage-bra arrangement to support her milk-filled breasts until the production of milk stopped. She had agreed without discussion; if she was to live apart from the baby for most of the first two or three months, what discussion could there be? Yet now, in one swift longing, she wished it might have been different. It was over as swiftly as it had come. You cut out all the if-onlys and ah-buts; she had accepted that from the start. Tender breasts were part of the bargain, useless milk part of the bargain. How little a price. She watched the door.
Matthew and his stubbled face—she suddenly remembered his bending over her and saying she could sleep, they’d be right there. Ten hours, he had said, and then hours more in the recovery room, and he and Cele had stayed right there, waiting for her, watching her sleep after she came back to her room, wanting her not to wake to an empty room.
The door opened. Mrs. Schulz entered backward, her thin spare back pushing the door inward. Then she turned carefully, her left arm a cradle, which she brought close to Dori, saying, “Eight pounds and five ounces, this young man. I’ll go back for his bottle. It’s not full milk yet.”
Instinctively Dori’s hands cupped together but the nurse said, “This way’s safer,” and placed the baby within the crook of her entire arm. Dori looked down.
Her tears burned her eyes, impossible, but there they were, a shimmer of distortion as she looked down at the red little face, the eyes closed, the skin shining, the wisps of hair faint against the red skull. She heard the door close and was glad.
In a moment she peeled aside the crossed corners of the encasing blanket and saw the tiny clenched fists. She raised one, and saw the bracelet around the wrist. Grange, and a number, the same number her wrist bore.
She stared at the tiny breathing morsel, the shimmer slowly passing, the grip at her throat slowly easing, a burst upward in her heart. She did not think in words, her whole response was an intuiting, not strung out in time like the beat of a pulse, but as simultaneous as a chord of music. This, this sleeping being warm on her arm, this new life, this continuing of her life—
Simultaneously she remembered herself before the long mirror at home, toweling herself dry after that bath, catching again the first unbelieving glimpse that said her breasts were a little fuller, looking down again to see between the jut of her hipbones a most tentative orbing.
Let it be true, she had thought, let it be true. And now there was this new morsel of humanity living the first hours of its own separate life. If she were to die this minute, he would not die, he would go on, he would live.
A new human being, she thought, her heart filling. Nothing else matters.
Sometime in the night, Dori felt pain and half woke, fuzzily thinking that she was still in labor. Then she remembered the tiny red face in the circling blanket and she knew she had already given birth and that it was over. She stirred and saw a dim light, reached out to her bedside lamp and saw that her wristwatch had not been returned. A voice spoke to her in a heavy accent.
“I’m Mrs. Czennick, your midnight-to-eight nurse. How do you feel?”
Dori sat up. She saw a plump old woman, massive compared to the spare little Mrs. Schulz, her hair a roaring henna above a face crosshatched with wrinkles and grooves. But she seemed pleasant enough, even glad to have her awake.
“I think I was dreaming, but I feel fine. What time is it?”
“Three, and you’ve been sleeping like a baby—like your own baby.”
“Is he all right?”
“Wonderful.”
“I don’t suppose I could see him?”
“You better let the little thing get his rest, Mrs. Grange. He needs it too.”
Dori nodded. She had been reading as much as she could lay her hands on about the care of infants and she gathered that nothing and nobody could possibly rob a healthy baby of twenty hours of sleep a day. But she was acquiescent, willing to wait until daylight. She accepted the pulse-taking and other attentions Mrs. Czennick offered, understood that the discomfort she had dreamed about had been real—I’ll never use the word pain again, she thought, for anything less than that pain—and dismissed it since she knew it was a normal aftermath of the surgery, still unexplained but one of the matters Dr. Jesskin would tell her about when he came in the morning.
“You had several phone calls before I came on,” Mrs. Czennick said, consulting a slip of paper she drew from her pocket. “Your friend Mrs. Duke, just to check in, she said she’d be back in the morning, and a Mr. Poole, also calling in the evening, to see if he could drop in for a few minutes, and also your brother.”
“I can see people tomorrow, can’t I?”
“Oh yes. Your early nurse told them all you were resting easily and that the baby was fine and that tomorrow you could have visitors whenever you liked.”
“Any special visiting hours?”
“Here at Harkness, anytime unless the doctor says not; but he didn’t. He also called in for reports of course.”
“Did he say when he’d be here?”
“Early; that’s his usual way.” She offered Dori a glass of ginger ale and said, “You’ll sleep again now; you’ll be surprised.” She turned the light out without asking and went back to whatever soft rustling pages she had in her shaded corner of the room.
Dori closed her eyes and waited for sleep. A silky comfort came over her, gentling, soothing. The surgery could not have been too serious; she could feel a tenderness, but it was part of the slightly battered aftermath feeling, and she accepted it along with everything else. She did not care whether she slept or not. It was marvelous to lie here knowing that it was over, that the great ninth month—But this was Wednesday morning; it was no longer the ninth month. That was over and gone, as gone as the eighth month, as the seventh, as all of it. This was the tenth month.
Hazily she repeated the words. They had a new sound, unexpected, unexplored. The tenth month.
There was an appeal in that: the future. Once she had wondered whether the change in herself—not in her enlarging body but in her essential self, that change she kept catching glimpses of—whether it would prove delusive and transitory, would vanish when July twenty-third had come and gone. Now she knew it was still there; July twenty-third was not a finis but a beginning, not an ending but a becoming, a process—she had almost thought “a promise”—a process that would go on and on if she herself did not stifle it. The life process. Her own life.
In the darkness she thought of a phrase that kept repeating itself in her mind. You give birth, you get born. She was not sure what the words meant, yet she responded to the unseen equation within them. Cause and effect, the systole and diastole again. You give birth, you get born.
The tenth month. The first month?
The morning was a waiting for Dr. Jesskin’s visit. She had awakened at first light and lay tranquil and silent, remembering. She was at last fully awake, her mind clear, her spinal cord and blood and brain no longer host to the blessed anodynes and opiates. The nurse had heard her move and at once Dori had asked, “Can I see my baby now?”
“The moment we take care of you, Mrs. Grange. Your medication and making you comfortable.”
“Oh of course.”
This time the baby came in crying, his face contorted with his energy, his skin damp with exertion, and as she took him, she felt a sudden admiration for the ferocity of communication from this mite. Eighteen hours old he was, not yet one day of life behind him, and yet a million years of instinct were guiding him in this demand for sustenance and survival.
She offered him the bottle and he kept yelling. She experimented, tentatively poking the nipple at his mouth until suddenly his lips closed about it and he began to pull, his ferocity draining away into gratification.
I think of him as he, or it, she thought as he was again taken away from her. Or just the baby. I can’t think of him by his name yet. Maybe that’s good. I certainly don’t want to get used to calling him James or Jimmy while I’m here, just for the nurses’ benefit.
The private nurses. She had seen only two, but she was sure the third would give off the same faint aura of polite concern that she should be without her husband at this time. They had been briefed, she knew, by Dr. Jesskin, and the floor nurses would also be briefed, about the husband off in Vietnam, had been told that his absence upset her very much, that it would be wise to make no reference whatever to it, nor to her wish that he could be here.
Did any of them believe it—the private ones or the floor nurses to come? She glanced at the large woman and Mrs. Czennick instantly smiled back. Despite the garish hair and the raddled flesh, she looked like a friend and ally. Perhaps when you were generally considered too old to be employable you were thankful at being summoned back into the world of the needed, and showed your gratitude by pampering your patients.
Or perhaps it was simply that this was Harkness at a hundred a day. A cynical thought for so felicitous a time, but there it was.
At eight a Mrs. Smith entered and took charge. She looked older than either of the others, grayer, even a little shaky, but she exuded competence and greeted Dori by saying crisply, “Your doctor is down the hall. He seems good and chipper.”
A moment later he was there, a tap on the door to announce him and a simultaneous entry. As she looked up from her bed, he looked taller than usual in the long white coat, smiling at her, nodding dismissal to the nurse, with no sign of his usual detachment. He said nothing at all until the nurse left the room.
“May I offer my congratulations?”
“Oh thank you. Have you seen the baby?”
“Long before you did.”
They laughed together and then he became again all physician. “You will want to know how it went, when I got here, all that.”
“Do all your patients ask that?”
“All. It was about seven yesterday morning, and it went as it should go until I became concerned—after about nine hours of labor, quite within the normal range of labor—but I became somewhat concerned, not for you but for the baby, nothing drastic you understand, but concern.”
“Was he in any danger?”
“Not to say ‘danger,’ but signs to concern one, heartbeat and such. We avoid forceps deliveries of course and so I performed an episiotomy.”
“Which means?”
He explained and a swift imagined slash of the scalpel knifed through her. But he was continuing his explanation and her attention was riveted on it. “That is why you are not to get up for a day or so, and you may have to remain two or three days longer than I expected.”
“It’s nothing.”
“I am sorry at the miscalculation. Once again a miscalculation.”
“How can you be sorry about anything? Without you and the help you’ve given me all through—”
There was silence. She wished he would say something, move, change his position, but he did nothing and said nothing. She made herself glance back at him. He was simply looking at her. At the same time he seemed not to be seeing her, to be lost in some reflective gazing that focused nowhere except on thought. Soon he would say his usual “Now I’ll have a look at you” and this visit, this single time when he seemed to be friend as well as doctor, would be over.
But he did not say it. Instead he said, “I have a colleague, a Dr. Earl Wingate, who assisted in the delivery. He will look in on you later this morning—I have asked him to.”
She nodded and he began to move toward the door. Suddenly he smiled as if at some private joke. “I will hold the door wide, Mrs. Grange, so you can see that they are there.”
He swung the door far back on its hinges and though she could not read the typed names she saw the two cards affixed, one over the other, and a larger sign which she could read. NO VISITORS, it said, and as she glanced once more at him, he murmured, “Except for the select few,” and disappeared. She could hear his steps recede down the long corridor.
It was not only that morning that Dr. Wingate looked in on her, but every morning. Apparently, once the delivery was over, Dr. Jesskin assigned to others whatever postnatal and postoperative care was indicated, and remembering his crowded waiting room every morning she was not surprised. Dr. Jesskin, who had another patient on the floor already, still dropped by at about eight each morning to see her, reading the chart, asking how she felt, inquiring after the baby, giving an order to the nurse, but in five minutes or less he was once more on his way.
It puzzled her that he had not told her beforehand how it would be, he who had been so punctilious and so patient about preparing her for everything else. Dr. Wingate clearly stood high on his roster of colleagues; nevertheless a small feeling persisted that Dr. Jesskin was firmly moving her off center stage. She saw the folly of this but she could not quite dispose of it.
The baby was now center stage; center stage in the world of doctors would soon be occupied by the pediatrician, Dr. Baum, who had taken care of all three of the Duke children. She would probably have one final check by Dr. Jesskin after she left the hospital, but apart from that visit and the routine annual checkups, he too would be off center stage.
God, I’d like to start all over again this minute, she thought after one of his fleeting appearances. If only I never had to work again, if only I could stay in hiding for six years instead of six months! But, poor man, I’d never have the nerve to go to him for help a second time.
The door opened and there he was again, looking uncommonly pleased. He waited only for the nurse to leave once more and then demanded, “Do you not know a playwright named Martha Litton?”
“I wrote a piece about her, yes, and interviewed her for it.”
“You see why I ordered no walks in the corridor?”
“She’s not here having a baby?”
“But her daughter is, and the mother is here every day, and out at the desk giving orders and finding fault. I just heard the mother’s name out there.”
“But who told you that I know her?”
“The daughter is my patient, married to that young man who plays the lead in the mother’s newest play, I forget the name.”
“Time and a Half. But I still don’t—”
“Miss Mack put it all together. She reads many magazines and newspapers and if anything involves a patient, she does not forget. She read what you wrote of Martha Litton, and put it on my desk.”
“Good old Miss Mack.” It came out spontaneously, and he said, “Yes, indeed,” and laughed. Then, his mood changing, he added, “She also put on my desk the piece you wrote about Dr. Spock. That one, I’m afraid, she disapproved of. Which is where Miss Mack and I differed.”
Her heart jumped at the compliment. Center stage or offstage, Dr. Jesskin would always hold his special place in her life. If she were young she would have wondered before this whether she were being romantic about him; as it was, she knew that her feeling was an admixture of gratitude and a kind of personal dependence she had “never before felt toward anybody, not in her adult years. That would fade now, slide back into the past tense, recede as his footsteps receded down the corridor while the heavy door to her room was making its stately close.
Matthew motioned the cab away and turned toward the river. There wouldn’t be any air there either, but he was restless and somehow dissatisfied with the way the hour had gone. Dori was allowed out of bed now, and the floor nurses never came in unless she rang, but there was no real privacy and tonight something stilted seemed to attack him, as if he were seeing her off at an airport, one eye on the clock.
But then it’s always this way at the start, he thought heavily. Even with Johnny, I really didn’t feel much of anything until he was beginning to walk and talk. It was different with Hildy because she was my first, and there was that damn ego involvement of knowing you had reproduced yourself out of your own genes and DNA and all the rest of the biological hereditary miracle.
Of course I can’t feel it now, with a baby that’s only a week old. Even if it were Dori and me together, instead of Dori and whoever the hell it was, I still would be feeling this void where emotion about the baby is supposed to be. I can’t fake it, I’d better not try to fake it, not with Dori, she always knows what is put on and what is really there.
She’s the one I’m in love with anyway, not her baby. I’m not letting her down if I do have this uninvolved whatever-it-is toward the baby. Interest in it, affection for it, love for it, all of that will come later; it must come. It comes to people who adopt children; after a while they love them as much as any parents ever loved their own child. You hear that over and over, you read it over and over. Even though you’re sure it could never be more than an approximation, you have to admit that what evolves in these happy adoptive parents is apparently a mighty close second, so close that nobody in the world could tell you definitely whether it is the same or not.
He had no worry about a year from now, but right now, when he was at the hospital and the baby was mentioned, he had to force himself. Not that Dori gurgled or crooned over the baby; actually she rarely spoke of it herself. Perhaps it was he, Matthew, who brought the baby into their conversation. Self-consciousness, that was. She had shown him the several pictures she had taken, and others of the baby and her, but that was about it.
She didn’t even talk very much about the birth itself, nowhere near as much as Joan had done. She had reported Dr. Jesskin’s explanation of the surgery and had been rather funny and bawdy about it.
“I gather,” she had ended, “that it was one swift zip of the scalpel in the right places, and if you won’t think me vulgar, I gather also that the patient is stitched up tighter than ever, afterwards, so not to worry.”
That was when he had said, “God, Dori, I ought to be arrested.” Crassly, ignominiously, desire had roared upward through him. “I ought to go home before I rape you.”
“In Harkness? Lovely.”
Now it was almost time for her to leave the hospital, but it would be another month or so before they could make love again—he couldn’t remember what the prescribed time for abstinence was. Too damn long. Dori would be impatient too. He saw again the gesture she had made the first day they were alone there; apart from patting her stomach and crowing over its flatness, she had suddenly said, “And look, all nice and skinny and no puff-up,” and from under the sheet at the end of the bed she had extended one slender foot, the anklebones sharp under the taut skin. She must have known that this was a kind of sex shorthand telling him that she would be slim and firm and tight again soon, with the distension gone and the need for care gone and all the nay-sayings and prohibitions gone.
Dori, Dori. If the baby made her happy, then the baby made him happy. If it fulfilled the denied part of her, then he welcomed it. If he were to resist it, he would be a more selfish man than he was. He did not resist it. He would not let himself resist it.
“Better let me carry the baby,” Cele said. “Then if we run into anybody, they’ll think I just had him. Come on.”
Something like outraged possessiveness streaked through Dori as Cele picked him up and started down the corridor ahead of her, but she followed, docile enough, carrying only her suitcase and a small shopping bag with a bottle of formula and some of his things.
“You’re thinner than I am right now,” Cele grumbled as they waited for the elevator.
“Still bosomy though.” The arithmetic of it tickled her: the baby had accounted for over eight pounds of her eighteen-pound gain, and the amniotic fluid and placenta and all the rest for another four or five, so thirteen pounds had gone, whoosh, in that one night, and she herself had remained accountable for only five. Ten days of three-mile walks and then a new dress and let any doorman examine her all day long.
It was still too early for visitors and outside there was no taxi in sight. Already it was hot in the blaze of the July morning and they stood on the pavement, side by side, two women and a newborn infant. Momentarily Dori felt forlorn, thinking wryly, What’s wrong with this picture? At last a cab drove up, discharging, first, a young man, and then slowly, carefully, a very young woman, her face tense, her shoulders constricted. Dori stared at her, as Cele hailed the cab, stepped inside, and gave the address on West Ninety-fifth. Automatically Dori followed, and there at last Cele transferred the baby to her arms.
Dori gazed down at him but she was thinking of the young woman just now beginning labor, being wheeled down to the elevator, being wheeled down the long corridor of the eighth floor. Was she afraid? Did she have that wedge of steel cleaving her apart? Don’t be afraid, she thought. It’s not pain-I’m-sick or pain-I’m-hurt, it’s pain for something. You won’t even know what to call the something. You’ll call it the baby and think that’s what you mean, but it’s something else too, something bigger than any baby, even your own baby. Much bigger, vague, all-the-world-big, the-whole-human-race-big, and maybe you’ll be smarter than I am and not even try to find words for it.