THERE WAS AN EERIE EXCITEMENT in being all alone with the baby. When Cele left in the late afternoon, Dori stood for a moment looking across the linoleum shine to the crib in the corner, to the small swathed creature within it, and she suddenly felt tense.
It was just the baby and herself now, alone for the first time behind a closed door. No friend to help, no nurse to advise or correct her or show her how, just that eight-day-old being and herself and whatever stumbling new knowledge she had about how to take care of him.
Suddenly she grinned. She was forgetting the baby’s help, forgetting that he would let her know when to feed him, let her know when to change him, let her know whether he was uncomfortable in any way at all. Advise and consent, she thought, like the Senate. She started the record player and crossed to the crib to look down once more. This time she did not have to seem matter-of-fact about it; she could just stand there and stare for as long as she wanted. How little time it took to regard this one baby as the only baby.
The hum of the air conditioner, the faint noise above it from the street, the muted music in the room, the week’s piled-up newspapers awaiting her, all combined to make a pleasing easy evening. Matthew was up at Truro early this week, something about a changeover in their house from the collapsing old furnace to a new oil heating system, though why that should be scheduled for the last day of July she didn’t remember. In any case, she was half glad that he was away for several days, or at least half pleased at being quite alone for a few nights. One needed interims.
He knew already that they were under orders not to make love until September. Dr. Wingate’s orders they were, on his last examination at the hospital. “You should not resume relations for another five weeks, especially if there is any discomfort.” The discomfort was negligible, though she still had a faint surgical tenderness, but medical orders were to be followed, despite Matthew’s quick protest. “Five weeks more? Good God, that’s not until after Labor Day.”
It was already two months since they had last made love, but for herself, she was not impatient at the dictum. Perhaps after the heavy final weeks of pregnancy and after the actual act of giving birth, it was instinctive for women to draw back for a while from any form of sex.
The trouble is, she thought ruefully, when there’s no sex, you can think. The body’s prohibitions of sex permitted problems to remain problems instead of letting them dissolve in the hot chemistry of passion. The word passion aroused her a little, but there was a tentative quality in her feeling, too, a willingness to evade it for a while longer.
I have to get used to everything first, she thought. It’s like starting all over, with a new set of rules to learn. Once I get back to my own place, get working again, seeing people again, the whole special new feeling will merge with everything else but for now it’s like being handed a whole new life.
Whatever had gone before was of course life, but now it seemed a half life, a partial life, full enough of love and pain and work and all the other ingredients of living, but it had always been her own life and now it was more than that. Now it was “our life,” a family’s life, a child’s life interwoven with hers for the next twenty or more years, and there was nothing partial or halfway about that. In the hospital she had thought about the future, and here it was lying quietly, entirely in her care.
Before the weekend was over she felt as if she’d been in sole charge of a newborn baby a hundred times before and when Matthew arrived for dinner Monday evening, she was actually impatient for the baby to wake, cry, and need changing so she could display her effortless prowess in her new tasks.
But when he finally woke, she was so wary of being the effusive new mother that she stiffened into an impersonal efficiency, a nurse in a maternity ward performing the duty she was trained to perform. It was an idiocy of shyness, but she was caught in it. She changed the baby in silence. Matthew watched in silence.
“I don’t think men react to them,” he said, “until they start to walk and talk.”
“I’ve always heard that. When I’m alone, I do react but I feel sort of funny in front of anybody, even Cele or you.”
“It’ll all shake down in a few days.” He moved away and stood waiting for her. “Don’t lose weight too fast, Dori, will you? You look the way you always did already.”
“It’s this new dress.” She paraded up to and then back from him, like a mannequin modeling at a fashion show, delighted with the dress and herself. It was a bright wild print, short and full-skirted, swinging easily about her as she moved. She had bought it just that morning while Cele stayed with the baby. “If you were Bill the doorman welcoming me home, would you guess I’d had a baby?”
He shook his head and swiftly took her into his arms. “God knows how I’m going to get through until the third of September.” She moved back and he at once changed his tone. “No doorman alive. Do you know when you can go home?”
“That’s what I meant when I said I had a surprise. I’m going tomorrow afternoon.”
“You got a maid!”
“I interviewed three on Sunday, and this one seems just right. She’s no geriatric but she’s not anybody I’m likely to meet in any friend’s house later. She’s not very good at English and she’s sort of fat and sloppy, but she looks kind and the agency that sent her says she’s reliable and good with children.”
“Great. So tomorrow night I don’t come here.”
“I’ll see how she is with the baby tomorrow and if she really is good, then I’ll leave around five. I’m suddenly so impatient to get back there again.”
“It will be damn good for me too.” He moved toward her and again she stepped back. “I won’t keep pestering you, Dorr, don’t look so watchful.”
“It’s just … it’ll be easier if we don’t sort of inch toward things.”
“No inching. It’s a deal. But you have a date for September third, right?”
“Right.”
He left after the eleven o’clock news and she was impatient for the morning and the arrival of Maria; she suddenly wondered whether she had chosen wisely, whether the woman, with her faulty English, had really understood what the arrangements were to be.
“I’m signed up for a two-bedroom apartment in that new building at the corner of Columbus Avenue,” Dori had lied easily, “but that won’t be ready for occupancy until around Christmas. And since there’s no second room here, I’m turning the whole place over to the baby and you for now, and I’m moving in with a friend of mine, Mrs. Duke. She has a spare room.”
Perhaps Maria hadn’t believed a word of it, but she had accepted it without expression. Dori had explained too that she would be in to stay with the baby for part of every afternoon and Maria could do her marketing then and whatever else she wanted to do, because she, Dori, would be working (she had waved vaguely at the typewriter on the desk) and would probably be spending three or four hours right there every day.
In the morning Maria arrived an hour early, looking pleased to be there, apologizing in her mixture of English and Spanish for the huge suitcase she had brought, which turned out to be only a quarter full of her things. They were her regular clothes, with no sign of a maid’s uniform, and Dori was oddly reassured. She was a workingwoman, not a proper maid, certainly not a baby nurse. Her own children were grown and married, and she was alone and needed the money, and that was why she worked.
The baby cried and it was Maria who attended to him, Dori watching, reassured again. Maria liked him. She was not constrained about showing it, either, but made little sounds and murmured over him and had an offhand way of turning him and diapering him that bespoke years of practice. Dori smiled. It was going to be all right.
Soon she went out for a walk. She was not yet up to any hard three miles, but she was on the way. She walked eastward through the park this time, nearing Fifth Avenue before she turned and began to go back. It was hard to believe that at last she was going home, back to the locked-up apartment where it had all begun. A sudden longing possessed her, to be there this very moment. She thought of her impatience to look up at the eighth floor of Harkness, of the bus ride uptown, of the way she had stood there on the street, counting the floors upward. And now she had the same impatience again, but this time for her own four rooms, the rooms that had been home for a decade.
If only she didn’t have to leave the baby behind. Now he would be the one in the hideout, one small baby hiding out in a vast city! But you won’t be in hiding from me, she thought swiftly, and it’s only for a couple of months. I’ve just got to go back to the world the way I left it—just me alone.
She was apologizing to herself, she realized, not to her baby. She was making obeisances to the necessities as she saw them; she was in the final stages of the long plan now and she was not going to balk and undo everything. It was crucial to get the next part right or the whole thing would collapse. She walked more purposefully.
By four in the afternoon she was satisfied with Maria in every way, even with her slightly shuffling movement about the room. She seemed to be without nerves; she seemed calm to the point of being lackadaisical. Fine, better than hustle and bustle around the baby, she thought as she finished packing her suitcases and the carryall. At her desk she wrote out, in clear large calligraphy, Cele’s telephone number, Dr. Baum’s telephone number, and finally a number unattached to a name, her own. “Some evenings I will be at this number,” she explained. “Just ask for Mrs. Grange.”
In the taxi crossing the park she stirred to a high excitement. After all these months, after all that had happened, she was going home. As the cab drew to a stop, she watched the doorman spot her, and her pulse raced.
“Welcome home, Mrs. Gray. Good trip?”
“Wonderful, Bill, but it’s grand to be home.”
“Your friend said to expect you, when she was here with the cleaning people.” He took her luggage, replete with airplane tags from Marshall’s and Cele’s bags, and as she followed him to the elevator, she felt the eagerness of a child.
But once upstairs silence greeted her. The place had been cleaned by a professional service, flowers stood on the low coffee table, sent by Matthew and arranged by Cele, but there was no voice to speak, no family or friend to greet her.
I want my baby, she thought, and I want Matthew.
She moved around each room of the apartment, seeing each picture as if she had just acquired it, sitting briefly at her desk, stretching out on the red sofa listening to one of the many recordings left behind. It was an old favorite; she might play it when Matthew came this evening. Tonight would be their first time here since that day in January.
No, she wouldn’t play a record; it would be wrong to create moods when there were rules and schedules and prohibitions hemming them in. It would be better to go out for dinner, much better, much less provocative and also rather fun. She suddenly had a vision of a delightful restaurant, any delightful restaurant, with large luxurious menus, gleaming silver, candles and flowers. A young eagerness bubbled up. It was a hundred years since she had gone out anywhere. Going out to dinner would be a symbol that her days in the hideout were over.
“Oh yes, Mrs. Gray, Mr. Cox is expecting you. Would you come with me?”
It was absurd to be seeing him so soon but the desire had been overwhelming and Dori had yielded to it and telephoned for an appointment. Only with this legal step under way would she be really ready to face the dozens of appointments she was making with everybody else.
The reception clerk led her past several heavy doors of paneled walnut. Unlike most offices, there was little of the slide and clack of typewriters, and she had a whimsical vision of all those law partners and junior clerks writing their briefs and letters longhand as they must have done whenever this venerable set of offices was first established. It pleased her, this lack of modernity at Cox, Wheaton, Fairchild, Tulliver, though she could not have said why. She even liked its being way down here in this old building near Trinity Church in the oldest part of the city, where, some eighty years before, the original Cox, Wheaton, Fairchild and Tulliver had begun their practice of law. She half expected her Mr. Cox to appear in appropriate nineteenth-century raiment though she knew perfectly well that he and Dr. Jesskin had taken their advanced degrees at Harvard together.
When he rose to greet her she was surprised. Far from being antiquated, he was amazingly young, seemingly in his forties, a little stocky and bald but tan, fit, smiling not with formality but with an outgoing warmth. “So you’re Mrs. Gray,” he said. “Congratulations.”
“How nice of you. Thank you.”
He indicated a leather armchair and moved around behind it to close the door before he resumed his seat on his side of the large table which served as his desk. “I suppose you know from Neil that I’m delighted to be your attorney. From Dr. Jesskin, I should say.”
“He said you felt a vested interest because it was his case.”
“That too. But I was also interested because it’s interesting in itself.”
“Is it going to be difficult?” She was opening her purse and now handed him an oblong of heavy paper, bearing a seal and official printing. “There’s the certificate.”
“Department of Health, City of New York,” he read aloud as if for her benefit. “This is to certify … yes, yes … James Victor Grange … sex, male … date of Birth, July twenty-third”, nineteen sixty-eight … place of Birth, Sloane Hospital.” He looked up at her. “Neil told me he was going to fake the hospital too, since he was faking a few other things.”
“He’s on the staff there also, isn’t he?”
He seemed not to have heard the question. He was folding the certificate lengthwise; he then reached for a long envelope into which he inserted it, sealed the envelope, and in ink wrote across the sealed flap on the back, “Private. Not to be opened.” Below this he wrote the date and his signature, and then handed the envelope back for her inspection. When she had glanced at it, he offered her his pen.
“I don’t need to,” she objected.
“Just to be legalistic.” He grinned. “Lawyers like to be legalistic, and new clients should pamper them, don’t you think?”
“Without a doubt.” As she signed her name under his across the sealed flap, she suddenly thought, But they were at Harvard together, they must be the same age.
“Now let’s get some details straight,” he said. “Your baby is not living at home with you as yet?”
She gave him the address on West Ninety-fifth and told him of her daily visits. “By the first of October,” she ended, “when everybody’s forgotten I’ve ever been away, I’ll take him home for good.”
“Ostensibly, then, he’ll have been in a foster home since birth, with people on West Ninety-fifth. Then he comes to you on a trial basis of six months. When we appear before the judge, of course, he will know that this is your natural child, that you are going through these several steps to protect that child.”
“I understand perfectly.”
He went on to tell her about the routine of the social worker’s calls, and the private documents, and she listened as if she had never before heard of any of it. “When the adoption is over,” he ended, “you’ll have a new birth certificate made out in the name of your legally adopted son.”
“Will there be any connection, any provable connection at all,” she asked, suddenly sitting forward, “between that new permanent certificate and this first one?”
He sensed her heightened concern. He ripped open the envelope they had each just signed and leaned toward her with the certificate in his hand. “See that big long number there?”
“Yes.” She read the digits out loud.
“That same big long number will show up on his permanent birth certificate,” he said slowly. “And nobody in this or any world could ever link the two together without going through some very stiff judicial procedures.”
He talked about the procedures and again she listened as if she had never before heard any of it. When he had ended he repeated the ritual of the countersigned envelope and then picked up his pencil once more.
“And now, what are you naming your adopted son? That’s the only name that will appear in your files here.”
“Eugene Gray.” She hesitated for a moment. “Eugene Cornelius Gray.”
For a fraction of a second his pencil paused and she said, “It’s a private way to say thank-you. You won’t have to mention it, will you?”
“I will mention nothing of what either of us says in this office.” He looked at her with a steady attentiveness that seemed new. “I wish it were not private, though, this one point. It would please him.”
“But it is private.” She sounded ill at ease. “I’m sorry, but otherwise I just couldn’t—”
“Of course, then it’s private,” he said briskly, again writing. “Eugene Cornelius Gray—that’s the permanent birth certificate you will receive and James Victor Grange disappears from the history books forever.”
“And that will be—let’s see, six months from October. That’s November, December, January—” She burst out laughing. “There I go, counting on my fingers again.”
He grinned at her as he had done before. “Better watch that habit—it can get you.”
On her way to the subway she stopped and called Tad Jonas at the paper. “Okay, be mad at me,” she began, “for not coming around before this. Can I drop by and say hello? It’s Dori. I’m down on Wall Street.”
“Who’d you think I thought it was? Sure, come on.”
She made for the subway and once inside glanced at the list of names she had scrawled on a slip of paper in her purse. For today, three more after Cox and Jonas. So it was going, day by day. “Can I drop by?” “How about lunch?” “Come on in for a drink on your way home.” The process of getting back into the stream of things with the peripheral people of a life was always easy, she was certain, because peripheral people did not care deeply about anybody but themselves; when she said she’d enjoyed her cruise, they asked a perfunctory question or two about where she had been and moved on to their own news, their own jobs, their own worries or triumphs or projects. Not one asked how long she’d been away. Not one, she noted a bit ruefully, had actively missed her.
With this visit to Tad Jonas she was very nearly through with the process. Earlier in the week she had even said to Gene, “I think Ellen and I might as well make it up now—how would you like to ask me over one night and not talk about having children?”
“What about a night when Dan and Amy are here too, or Jim and Ruth?”
“Do they know?”
“Not a damn thing. Ellen wouldn’t go that far. She’s not mean, Dori, just orthodox.”
“An orthodox family evening suits me to the ground.”
It had taken place just last night and she had enjoyed it. She had never faltered once over Dan’s and Jim’s queries about where she had been, shrugged off their “Long time no see,” and even found herself smug because Ellen was uncomfortable when they met while she herself was nothing of the sort.
There would be nothing uncomfortable now, she thought, as she opened the door to the newspaper office, waving hello to a reporter she knew. Across the city room Tad Jonas shouted, “Hi, just let me get this off,” and she went to his desk and watched until he finished marking copy for the boy waiting for it.
“Do you want to come back on the staff?” Tad finally greeted her.
“Thanks for asking, but no.”
“Still the free lance. Well, I’ve an assignment looking for a writer.”
“Election stuff? Mrs. Nixon or Mrs. Humphrey?”
He bridled. “There you go, charging me with the old crime! What I meant was a follow-up on Spock’s conviction. The appeal will take a year or more. While it’s hanging, what happens to kids resisting the draft? What are Spock’s long-range plans? Like that.”
“When would you want it?”
“Fast.”
The word was a stimulant. A specific task with a specific deadline or an implied deadline, that was a stimulant too. She wanted to get back to work, to earning money. “If you don’t crowd me, Tad,” she said.
“Could two weeks do it?”
“Just about.”
“And the price tag? Let’s say three weeks of your old salary.”
“Let’s.”
We all live at so furious a pace, she thought as her cab turned into West Ninety-fifth. She had forgotten such rush and hurry. She was exhilarated by the day, but tired too, and the stop here with the baby invited and beckoned as the promise of respite. As she saw the white stone houses leading away from the corner of Central Park West, geraniums in their green window boxes, their brass trimmings glinting in the afternoon sun, their stone still managing to look newly sandblasted and free of city grime, she felt nostalgic. There had been repose while she had her daily life here; there had been time to reflect, to think, to evaluate. Already the memory of it was slipping away; already she was looking back upon it with the faint poignancy of regret.
After leaving Tad Jonas, she had kept her engagement for lunch, put off her other two until next week and gone instead to the main library to begin work on her new piece on Dr. Spock. Two hours had fled, her eyes had finally wearied under the spotlight of the microfilm machine, her note-taking had edged off into the mechanical, a sign always to quit, and she had for the first time found herself wishing she were not seeing Matthew that evening, not seeing anybody, just going to the baby and then on home to a long cool tub and hours of just reading or hearing music while she remembered every word of Bob Cox’s once more. And that involuntary pause of his pencil over “Cornelius.” And why she had not said, Tell him if you like.
Maria opened the door at the touch of her key. “He’s asleep,” she said, “such a good baby,” and at once Dori became Mrs. Grange again, the not fully explained woman who arrived every day without exception but who lived there only during Maria’s two days off.
“You can go out for quite a while, Maria. I’ll be here till about six. I’m dead-tired and it’s so cool here.”
Left alone, she took off her street clothes and put on the old loose smock with its pink carnations. It swung from her shoulders now, as free as a painter’s smock in an old-time Paris studio, and she loved to wear it and be aware of non-bulk as she had once loved to be aware of bulk. She put a record on, fixed herself a “water on the rocks” and moved toward her typewriter. She might try a fast draft of an outline.
Midway she paused and returned to the crib. The way they slept! How short they looked, even long ones like hers, with their legs still folded up in the fetal position. Gene Gray indeed. She still thought of him as the baby, or he, or when she looked directly at him, as “you.” Are you going to like the name Gene? Maybe you’ll want to use all of it, Eugene, so you won’t get teased as poor Gene always was about having a girl’s name, Jean. You could use your middle name if you feel like it. But that would be shortened too. Neil, Bob Cox had said.
Neil. She would have guessed Nils as the Scandinavian nickname, or something like Nelius, to rhyme with Delius. Her knowledge of Scandinavian nomenclature was a bit sparse, and she could at least have asked Bob Cox that much. She had gone rigid at the notion of asking anything about Dr. Jesskin.
The baby stirred. Everybody said how handsome he was, but she never thought the word “handsome”; she could get no further than “marvelous,” a kind of all-meaning word she needed. He still didn’t look like anybody; he was no unmistakable image of herself or of Dick Towson. The baby stirred again. Perhaps he would wake and give her a few minutes—no, he was already back in the depths of sleep.
She looked around vaguely, as if she had forgotten the typewriter and were searching for some pleasing activity to help her wait out the baby’s sleep. Then she crossed the room and called Matthew at his office. He answered himself and at her voice he said, “Telepathy. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I’ve been out since nine. Has something come up?”
“Not come up, but I’m a lunkhead and forgot. Jack and Alma Henning are in town for the evening, and it’s been a date for a couple of weeks, so I can’t ditch them. Is it okay if I’m fairly late?”
“Well, not so okay. That’s why I called you.”
“You haven’t a date you forgot?”
“No, silly, I haven’t.” The good old one-way street; the enlightened Matthew preferred it the way all males did. “What I have, though, is a headachy lot of fatigue from this frantic pace I’ve been in, and I thought I might go home and sleep from about eight P.M. to eight A.M.”
At once he was concerned. “You do sound tired, darling. You really have been pushing it too fast too soon.”
“So maybe it’s lucky you’re tied up with the Hennings—some benevolent genie taking care of me.”
“Then tomorrow night?”
“Tomorrow.”
She hung up, suddenly aware that the air conditioner was very loud. Illogically she remembered that tomorrow she was to see Dr. Jesskin and that the day after tomorrow the baby would be one month old. Another milestone, a different sort, shared, existing not only in her life but in her son’s.
Just after nine in the morning Miss Mack telephoned to say there had been a change in her appointment. “Doctor will be away until after Labor Day,” she said, “and he set up an appointment for you instead with Dr. Wingate. Will that be satisfactory to you?”
She was taken aback. A broken appointment, broken by Dr. Jesskin? “He’s not ill, is he?”
“No, nothing wrong. We’ve already cleared this with Dr. Wingate, but if you prefer somebody else—”
“Of course not. But I—that is, will you give me Dr. Wingate’s address?”
“He’s right near here.” She gave her the address and said that eleven was still the time unless there was some reason to change it. “He expects you as Mrs. Grange, of course.”
“Of course. Thanks.”
“And your address on Ninety-fifth Street.”
“Yes, I’ll remember.”
“Doctor said he would suggest an appointment here sometime after his return in September.”
“If it’s a vacation, give him a ‘bon voyage’ from me, would you?”
“I’ll do that.”
Unpredictable disappointment invaded her as she hung up. Off center stage, of course, she had expected it, and this was merely the routine postnatal checkup, but she must have been looking forward to it as a chance to report on the baby, on her visit to Bob Cox, on being at work again.
Well, all right, sometime after Labor Day. Cele and Marshall were going away for the weekend, Gene would be away, Matthew of course. Suddenly the weekend loomed long and empty ahead of her. Labor Day was early this year, the weekend after this one, but she hoped to be finishing her piece for Tad Jonas before it ended, and then the day after would be the third of September.
She felt unsure suddenly, a throwback to her old self, not the new Dori she had been feeling recently, but the old Dori, aware of an empty weekend, lonely, aware of the need to get through time. Perhaps she too needed a vacation, a week or two away from everything and everybody, even the baby.
Another world cruise? She laughed aloud and felt better. Work was what she needed, and a nice tangible check in payment, something you could deposit in your bank and use to buy things with. No more transfer of money from savings, no more cheerful watching as the sum grew smaller. She had used about three thousand and that was enough. From now on she paid her way again. The money left in the bank would now become Gene Gray’s college fund.
College fund! Instantly she saw him as a tall young man crossing some campus, hair tousled—would it be shaggy and long? would he have sideburns and wild clothes?—a member of the class of, let’s see, Good Lord, of 1990, boys usually were twenty-two when they were graduated. Would he be a rebel like Johnny? Or by that time would there be new ways to register convictions, new mores for disillusioned youth? Probably. Techniques kept changing though protests there would always be. And Gene Gray, class of 1990, would never be a smugly satisfied member of the establishment.
She worked uninterruptedly for an hour, and welcomed the first cry from the crib. In the morning she went back to the library and time began to speed by again and she lost track of days, racing to finish her piece a day or two before her deadline.
Gradually August dwindled away in its own implacable heat, and on a Sunday morning September began. As she bathed and changed the baby she said aloud to him, “One more month and you quit hiding out and you come home with me for good.”
It was the night after Labor Day and Matthew had phoned to say he would arrive early. His family was staying for another two weeks at Truro, and they were still able to start their evenings by having dinner together. This time she prepared the things he liked best, a sense of occasion tingling along her nerves. It’s so damn girlish, she scolded herself, but the scolding changed nothing.
He brought flowers and a record, and talked of her piece for Tad Jonas and asked if he might read it.
“Of course, later.”
“Later? I’d better read it now.”
“We’re going to have dinner now.” She began to serve it, and told him that she had asked for, and received, Mrs. Steffani’s permission to sublet the apartment from October first. “ ‘Mr. Grange is coming home from Vietnam,’” she had said, “‘but he’s to be stationed in California, so of course I’m taking the baby there.’”
“Does Maria know?”
“I asked Mrs. Steffani not to say anything. I’ll give Maria plenty of notice or pay her instead. I’d keep her on if it weren’t for her knowing about Mrs. Grange.”
“Did Steffani promise?”
“She just gave me one of those shrugs, and reminded me that the deposit of the last month’s rent was all hers if I tried to walk out.”
“Nice.”
“Fine, as long as she won’t stop a sublease. Four weeks to go and he’ll be living here for good. I can’t wait.”
They lingered over dinner and then he said, “Darling, let’s go to your room.”
Moments later she was standing naked, letting him look at her, hearing him say, “You’re more beautiful than ever,” letting him kiss her, letting him take her to bed.
They made love, carefully at first, tentatively, then more freely. They were greedy for each other and responsive and quick, each creative for the other, neither of them a selfish lover. Then came the silence they always permitted themselves, a communication in its own style.
“You’re Dori again, the same Dori as before,” he said at last and looked down at her. At once he added, “Does it hurt now? Is anything wrong?”
“Nothing, why?”
“You look a little, I don’t know, sad maybe.”
“I’m not sad.”
“Thoughtful then.”
“I suppose so.” It’s the first time, she was thinking, that it’s plain and simple being in bed and making love. It’s two people having an affair and that’s all it is. It’s not his fault that it’s only that; it’s mine. Nothing has changed for him, only for me. “Don’t worry about it,” she said lightly, “or I’ll never look thoughtful again.”
She closed her eyes and he lay beside her, silent. When he began again to kiss her, she said, “Please not.”
“Something is wrong.”
“Nothing, but please not again.” I’ve caught up to him in a way, she thought; now he’s not the only one with something else at the core of his life, coming ahead of us, coming ahead of everything. “Matthew, don’t be mad at me,” she said. “It’s just—”
“I’m not mad at you. It’ll be different next time.”
When he left, she lay against her pillows, still thoughtful. She was not restless; she lay there pleasantly, willing and permissive as to the direction her thoughts took. They had come full cycle, she and Matthew, back to this same bed where they had made love at the start. They were still perfect as lovers, each for the other, attuned to the other, responsive, creative, still right together. She was the same Dori as before, he had said.
But I’m not, she thought. I seem the same, but I’m not. You give birth, you get born: You get to be surer about what is first-rate and what is a little less than that. An affair was not necessarily second-rate, but what was thoroughly first-rate was honesty, and an affair was anything but honesty. It could not be; by its nature it had to be hidden, laden with subterfuge, managed by lies and silences and absences unexplained.
She was not going to moralize about it; she could accept it, as Matthew himself accepted his own affairs, those others he had had, the ones that he had always brought to a close when the gears began to grind. Here at least she could be the emancipated woman, with as much ability as he to have an affair minus blindness, and enjoy what there was to be enjoyed. And now she could have the ability, as he did, to keep intact those other parts of life that needed to be kept intact.
Ten days after Labor Day Miss Mack telephoned to suggest an appointment. “I did see Dr. Wingate,” Dori said automatically, “didn’t he tell you?” and then quickly added, “I’m sure he did, and of course I’ll come in whenever you say.”
“Tomorrow at eleven then. Same time, same station.”
Another of Miss Mack’s locutions. It would be nice to see her again. It was months since she had done anything but talk to her by phone. Last April had been her last office visit, and here it was nearly fall, with the first crispness of autumn in the air.
In the morning Miss Mack greeted her as always, and Miss Stein also, but neither of them spent so much as two seconds gazing at her. She was not surprised; what did surprise her was that when Miss Mack signaled her turn, she barred the door to the dressing room.
“No need for getting ready,” Miss Mack said. “Doctor says he will see you in his office.”
He was standing as she entered. He was not wearing his long white coat; he was again in street clothes, and with a start she thought, he is as young as Bob Cox; I was making the family doctor out of him in my own mind, because the first time I ever came here I was in my twenties. She said, “Good morning,” and he answered without smiling. This was one of the times when he held the chair for her, asking how she felt, how the baby was.
“I had a good report on you from Earl Wingate,” he added, “and I gather that your visit to Bob Cox also went well.”
“Oh very.” She was about to go on, but he had picked up his pen, though her folder was nowhere in sight. He seemed more preoccupied than usual, and she decided this was not the time to talk either of Cox or of Wingate. He seemed to discover the pen in his fingers and hastily laid it down again.
“I have something I must say to you now,” he said gravely. He looked at her carefully, and a prescience stirred in her. This was not merely a reversal of the usual routine; this was not to be a regular visit at all and that was why she had not had to change to the plastic toga.
“I have thought this out most carefully,” he went on, glancing at her and then pausing once more. “I hope you will believe that.”
“I do already. Whatever it is.”
“I canceled our appointment and suggested Dr. Wingate as a temporary expedient because I was still not through thinking.”
“I see.” She had never heard him speak in this somber way. She sat immovable, waiting.
“It is not a simple matter, but now that your confinement is accomplished, I shall have to ask you, after all, to choose permanently another doctor.”
“Permanently? But why?”
He seemed not to hear the question. “Once I poked fun at you, I recall, and asked you, ‘Did you imagine I Would refer you to another doctor?’ Do you remember when I did that?”
“Of course I do.”
“But now I do have to refer you to somebody else. Perhaps Dr. Wingate—but permanently, under your own name, now that Mrs. Grange is about to leave us.”
“But why? How could I ever go to any other—?”
“It is not now a question only of wishes,” he said slowly, his finger raised in that cautionary inch of his, asking her to consider, to avoid rashness. “It is now also a question of possibilities. My possibilities, perhaps I should say.” He looked at her again, and then away. “Have you ever been analyzed?” he asked unexpectedly.
“No.”
“Do you know anything about the relationship between analyst and analysand?”
“Only what I have read.”
He picked up the pen again, but then he sat silent, staring down at the tip of it. She instantly was back at that concert so long ago, staring at the conductor’s baton, staring at it as if it were the one point of solidity in a light swarm of fever.
“It is an unwritten rule of analytical ethics,” Dr. Jesskin went on slowly, “that if an analyst should find himself beginning to be emotionally preoccupied with a patient, he should send that patient to another physician for further treatment. He could no longer maintain the necessary objectivity, could not maintain that professional distance which is so fundamental to any analysis.”
“Oh.”
“Each branch of medicine has its own unwritten rules—” He broke off and stood up, facing her in silence. She stood up also. She did not look at him. She swallowed and she heard the dry tight noise of the swallow and thought he must have heard it too.
“Fools and vulgarians,” he went on, so carefully that it seemed it must be physically painful for him to speak, “think that a gynecologist takes some personal interest in his patients. Of course he does not.”
She shook her head for no.
“But if he finds, in the course of circumstances, if he finds that he builds up an admiration for a patient, that over a period of time this admiration grows and even becomes tinged with—it is hard to say it clearly. I have probably said it all anyway.”
“Oh, Dr. Jesskin.” She turned sharply and went to the door. There she stopped, her hand on the knob, unwilling to open it. “When did you—could I ask when you decided this, about sending me to Wingate or another doctor for good?”
He did not answer at once. He was still at his desk, standing as if at attention; she had a moment to think his color had risen.
“I am not entirely certain,” he said, choosing the precise words he needed. “It was after the baby was born, sometime during the next hours perhaps, perhaps during the next evening, surely before I returned to the hospital the following morning. As to the necessity that led to my decision—” He threw open his hands, palms up. “That is what I cannot be certain about, whether it was all at once there or whether it had been a long time developing. That I remain uncertain about, only that. Everything else is clear.”
She nodded and quickly opened the door.
She could not go home. She had expected to put in several hours of work before going to the baby, but work was impossible. Orderly thought was impossible. Her mind was like a starburst, in all directions at once, bright with light of some kind, bedazzled with it so that comprehension was shattered.
She crossed Madison and then Fifth and went into the park, dear and familiar over on the West Side, but still strange over here on the East Side. The morning coolness was already conquered, but she did not care. She had to walk, move, go from here to there, no matter where, just to give herself the illusion of direction.
What was he telling her? Probably nothing, except that he had become involved with her as a human being through all the long secret story of the pregnancy and the actual birth. He looked on her as a special patient, not just one more woman in his waiting room. “A remarkable patient,” he had said that morning on one of his last visits, and it had sent her spirits on a rollicking spin. Now he was reiterating that and adding that it was improper to have patients one regarded as special in any way.
That’s not what he was telling me. I know what he meant. Why am I running from it?
But I don’t know anything about him and he knows everything about me. He knows about Matthew, but he can’t possibly know whether I am totally happy with Matthew or partly happy or not happy at all.
And I am still happy with Matthew. I know the limitations on us, I’ve always known them from the first minute we met. There are always limitations, there are no simple solutions—
Limitations. God, there I go again, like the time I wrote “wretched.” I am forty-one and this may be my last chance at finding something more than a love with limitations.
It would indeed be the final chance if she fell into a comfortable year or two or three with Matthew, with the sex drive satisfied, so that she would have no instinctive dynamo impelling her on to continue searching. A long affair, replete with those limitations, she had always accepted. That was the name of the game: my family comes first, you must accept that.
Why must I always accept? Isn’t that being defensive too? Unsure, accepting what there is because you never really believe you can reach out the way other women do, to a life where you do not have to be willing to do without?
Suddenly she was crying. Where did these wild angry rushing tears come from? What longing and deprivation came with them, shattering her self-control? ‘
All three thinkings. How long ago Dr. Jesskin had told her to take time, to think with her mind, with her feelings, with her instincts.
She thought, Oh, God, why did I never see it before?