SHE NEEDED TIME. She couldn’t see Matthew tonight either; she would have to tell him so. Tomorrow was Friday and he’d be going straight to the airport from his office, so again it would be nearly five days before she saw him Monday evening. She needed that much time. Then she wouldn’t be blurting things out. Then she could say that she was troubled, that perhaps they should not see each other at all for a month or two while she thought about everything that was still strange in her new status as a woman with a child.
“While I get things into some sort of shape.” That’s what she ought to say, with a fierce justice behind the words. She would not say it; it would be a spiteful echo of his own words, but if she did say it, if she could say it, it would be an avowal that it was not so simple to remain sweet and tranquil with an affair that could never grow to anything, an affair in whose limitation lay its own mortality.
Just an affair, just two people making love. Suddenly she shrank back from the vision of them in bed together, suddenly she felt that lovemaking was over between them, that she no longer could respond and share in a sexuality that held in it no conceivable seed of any future life. At the beginning, there had been a reaching, unexpressed, unexamined, toward something they said in words could never be, but which each kept wondering about nonetheless. Now in the last weeks she at least had come to accept the reality.
She walked on and on in the park, heading north, past the reservoir, toward the pond that in winter turned into a shining skating rink. The wind rose and once she sat down to rest. At her right, through the fringing trees, were the buildings of Mount Sinai Hospital, of Flower, of the Academy of Medicine. She kept looking toward them. Then she rose again, found the nearest exit from the park and emerged on upper Fifth Avenue. To her left was the handsome building that was the Academy. She moved toward it and went inside.
Late Sunday afternoon, driving back from the country in their station wagon with three children and two dogs, Cele said to Marshall, “You might drop me at Ninety-sixth and the park.”
“What for?” the children all demanded but Cele only said, “To visit somebody I know. I’ll be home in half an hour.”
“Who is it?”
“Do I always ask who you kids see or where you’re going?”
That silenced them and as they neared the transverse that cut through the park, she left them and walked around to Dori’s. Within minutes of her arrival, Dori was telling of the dismissal by Dr. Jesskin, careful to draw no conclusions for her, but telling. How long it had taken her to offer a word about Matthew! How natural it was now to tell of the broken appointment with Dr. Jesskin, of the subsequent one, of his careful choice of words, of her burst of feeling in the park, even of her trip to the Academy of Medicine and the directory that had yielded nothing of what she had gone to find out.
“So I still don’t know and I can’t be sure what he really meant, Cele, but I’ve just got to call everything off for a while.”
“Meaning Matthew?”
“Meaning Matthew.”
In an impatient nonsequitur Cele demanded, “But when you were with Cox that time, couldn’t you have brought up the damn photographs on Jesskin’s desk? Maybe during the bit about the baby’s middle name?”
“ ‘Oh, by the way, Mr. Cox, is Dr. Jesskin’s wife conveniently dead?’ Like that?”
“Jeer all you like. You know what I mean.”
“I just couldn’t make myself; I’d have stood there with my mouth open and not a word coming out. And if I could, Cox would have told me nothing, not one solitary thing. They’re all the same, every doctor, every lawyer, their basic training is Confidential, Top Secret, In Camera.”
“And who are we to complain?”
“Exactly.”
“But suppose you were doing a story on Jesskin, you’d find out if he was married or a widower or whatever.”
“Not unless he tossed it at me. His work would be the story, any papers he’d written—the directory did say he’s published several, and I also found out in a couple of other places about various honors and degrees, even that he was born a Dane and came here when he was ten.”
“But if it were a personal story, including family, you’d manage somehow. You’d never let yourself be stopped cold.”
“I’d probably try bribing Miss Mack or Miss Stein and get thrown out on my ear. Or I’d go out to Huntington and ask his grocer and the gas-station attendant and the local post office if there was a Mrs. Jesskin around. Can you just see me?”
“Okay, okay. I was just speculating.”
“And don’t think I wasn’t.”
On Monday, Dori felt apprehensive as evening approached, and when the elevator stopped at her floor, she went to the door, opening it before Matthew put his finger to the bell. She was melancholy too, with a sense of impending change, perhaps impending loss and farewell.
Matthew didn’t notice. He seemed troubled too, telling her quickly of “a rotten kickup with Johnny.”
“He wants to change schools,” he said. “And now that the analysis is only three weeks off, he’s refusing to go.”
Something unwilling rose in her, the reluctance again. She had never felt it before about his children. At once she felt herself a traitor, but immediately thought, I am not a traitor. But if I ever needed him at the same time Johnny needed him—oh, God, do I resent being second to a man’s child?
That wasn’t it. If there ever came a time when her child needed him at the same time his child did—
That wasn’t it either. These were fragments of it, but no more. It was deeper, the something that had been growing within her for months, the willingness to say, This is playacting too. I have never seen Johnny, never had a meal with him, never heard you talk to him, never heard him talk to you—how then can he be real? And in all the years ahead, I won’t ever know Johnny or Hildy either, then how can they ever be real to me? And if they are unreal, sort of half-people I hear about but never see, then you and I can never be real at the core, where our children live too.
“Matthew,” she said when he ended about the kickup, “I want to talk to you about us.”
“Us?”
“About me.” She looked at him without speaking, as if she were searching for the precise words she needed, and she remembered Dr. Jesskin, as he had stood there by his desk, doing the same thing.
“I’ve been searching something out,” she said, “and it’s become awfully important. I’m not sure when it started, except that it was toward the end, before I had the baby.”
“What sort of searching out?”
“It was about being big and pregnant, a good feeling, that this is for something. There it was, the opposite of aimlessness, the opposite of what’s-the-use-ness, the feeling of intention.”
Very slightly she stressed the word intention and then she glanced at him; his face was somber, reminding her of the many times she had found in it a look that said he wasn’t often happy. For a moment she faltered, as if to discontinue, but this time a small shock of power, like a spark, prodded her to go on.
“Pregnancy, God knows, is intention, is promise, is the future tense, and if you think of a relationship between two people, you can carry over the concept. I got to feeling that without intention between two people in love, there’s only the present and the repeating of the present.”
“But there is intention, there is a future—”
“I couldn’t get hold of any of this for a long time, and I kept turning away from it and telling myself to be happy in the present and not even look ahead at a lot of impossibles. I labeled those daydreams and sentimentality, and shoved them out.”
“You know that half of me wants us to marry—”
“But the other half says Johnny and Hildy and Joan, and I am accepting that and always have, from the beginning.”
“Accepting? You don’t sound as if you were accepting it.”
“All along I did accept it as the only premise we could go on. You know I did, we both did. But there was another premise for me, that accepting the limitations was better than losing you, better than going back to a year of nothing that used to follow the ending of any affair. That’s where the change began to happen.”
“Are you telling me you don’t want us to go on?”
“I’m trying to tell you that I don’t want to go on without any future tense.”
“There is a future tense. There’s always a future tense. Do any of us know what may happen tomorrow, next month, next year?”
“You mean I can pin my hopes to some taxi accident, some awful disease, hoping that Joan will be conveniently dead?” She used the phrase purposely and he flinched and she saw it and knew she had meant him to flinch. She wanted him to see it now, not three months from now; it was nothing to stay immobilized about for week after week. “You moved me terribly that night,” she went on, “when you said if a father figure was so essential in a child’s life, you’d be the father figure in my child’s life. But Matthew, that’s playacting, isn’t it? If he can’t have a father, he’d better grow up with only a mother, like a million other kids in this world, but a real solid mother, not a combination of mother and make-believe father.”
He was angry and she saw it, but there was no way to soften what she had said and keep it said. She felt an elation at not having faltered, an elation at managing words for this that she had been so slowly arriving at.
“Are you breaking with me?” he said. “Is that what it comes down to?”
“I think that’s what it comes down to. I was going to suggest staying apart for a month or two, seeing what that did, but it would just be more difficult, that way, in installments.”
He said abruptly, “Is there another man?”
“I don’t like your asking it in that tone.”
“Are you to call all the turns?” he demanded. “Haven’t I the right to ask if you’re having an affair with anybody?”
“I’m not having an affair. I won’t be having an affair. I don’t want any more affairs. I’m sick of affairs, even good ones like—like—the way ours was to start with.”
He made a rough gesture as if to brush all that aside: “But I asked if there was another man and you don’t answer that.”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It may be that there is. I can’t think about it too clearly, not yet, not right away.”
“What does that mean? Have you met somebody new or haven’t you? You must know one way or the other.”
“Please, not that tone.”
“What tone? Am I supposed to ask not even a simple question?”
“But not to cross-examine. You once said—”
“Right. I did say that. God, that was long ago.”
“It isn’t anybody new, it’s somebody I’ve known for years and years but still don’t know too much about.”
“And you’re in love all of a sudden?”
“I didn’t say I was in love.”
“Did he say it?”
“It’s so vague. You’re trying to box it, but it’s still so vague.” She turned and left him, going to her bedroom, going to the window, looking down to the street. She could hear him move about and she waited, to give him time to compose himself. After a while she went back and said, “This isn’t easy for me either, and I’m sorry.”
He put his drink down and stood up. “I suppose there’s no point in talking it out anymore now.”
She shook her head and they looked at each other. He moved toward the front door and she stood quiet, watching him go. Rue, she thought, what a lovely sad perfect word.
“Good night,” she said. “It’s true that I’m sorry.”
She worked. Tad had praised her piece on Dr. Spock and immediately given her a second, easier to do, with less research. She wrote a first draft, cut it hard, rewrote it, and set it aside for a day and then attacked it for its final version. Work was part of life, a big part, a good part. She had been in hiding from work too, all those months of pregnancy, but now she had regained full citizenship in an open world, a world where intention was part of life, where the old satisfaction could be had, of starting from nothing and trying to make it over into something.
She thought of Matthew often, wondering about what she had done. She told Cele about it, and Cele merely shrugged. “One thing’s sure, Dorr. If you wanted to prod him into some sort of definitive action, that’s the way to prod.”
“I didn’t want to prod him into anything.”
“Probably you haven’t.”
She turned her second article in; again Tad Jonas liked it and offered her a third.
“Am I pushing you too hard?” he asked. “You’re going great guns, but you said not to crowd you.”
“It’s good for me, I’m waiting for something and getting uptight about it.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“I might ask for a letter of reference.”
“For what, in God’s name?”
“Next month,” she said, “a baby’s going to get born and I’m supposed to be the one to adopt it. They might want references about stability and such.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, just waiting.”
“Through who? Which agency?”
“None. A private adoption, through a doctor I asked to help me.”
“God, Dori, way back on the Trib, when we first met, you were talking about adoption. You were still married. Remember?”
“Did I really? Well, it’s taken me this long, so wish me luck, will you?”
“I’ll be damned. Do you want a boy or a girl?”
“Either. I didn’t specify.”
“Well, good luck next month. I hope nothing slips up.”
“So do I. Look.” She held out two fingers, crossed hard against each other, and then left. It was the first time she had tried announcing it and it had gone easily, and with Tad of all people, tough and knowing Tad. She felt triumphant, the euphoria of certainty. She could do it and do it with conviction. One small final lie, a matter of three months off a baby’s age. She wouldn’t need to try it with anybody who’d be likely to see him close to, just with the world at large. And in a year or six or ten who would remember a little boy’s exact birthday?
She went home and again started on the new assignment, pleased that it had nothing to do with the election campaign, which she could scarcely stomach. She had to force herself to look at the evening news programs, laden as they were with inanities and lies about peace, but one night she saw that four specialists in foreign news were to discuss last month’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and one of the four was Dick Towson.
Alone in her living room she watched him and listened to him. How long since she had thought seriously about him, yet how calm and fond her feelings were whenever she did. This was the Dick Towson who had made her pregnant; this was the man who was the father of her child, though he was not the father in any sense except the physical sense of being the donor. A sudden impulse burned in her to let him know, to thank him, to tell him if only “for the record” of his own life. But long ago the decision had been made about that, and she could not heed any sudden impulse. Warnings sounded like bells: Careful, this is a test, this is a time for control, for silence.
She studied the face on the screen, trying to see in its features any resemblance to the small face that looked up at her from that crib or from her arms. Nothing definitive; perhaps something in the eye socket, perhaps something in the chin, nothing more. She had done the same thing when her brother Gene had dropped in one evening to see the baby. Gene had held him, bent over him, examining, studying, and all the time she was comparing the tiny head and face with Gene’s, but again she had found nothing definitive, only now and then a glancing recognition that came into being and was as quickly gone.
“He’s his own man,” her brother had finally said. “I’ll be damned if I can see you in him at all. Does he look like whoever the—?”
“He looks like Gene Gray and nobody else in the whole world.”
Dori was like all the rest, Matthew thought, starting with one need, the need for love, for companionship, for sex, and then ending with another, the need for marriage. She didn’t plan it, she hadn’t it in her to set snares, but it had worked out the same way.
That’s right, buddy, blame the other fellow, there you go again. Always the other, never yourself.
He had called her twice more; each time she had said, “Of course, if you want to talk,” and he had gone there and she had let him do just that, talk. She had not given him any of the good old stuff about remaining friends, but she had already changed from his Dori into being just Dori, anybody’s Dori. She hadn’t put on any big madonna act about the baby; he was grateful for that. She scarcely mentioned it at all, except to say she was already telling people she was adopting a baby. She was bringing him home for good next Tuesday.
“Cele’s moving his crib and carriage over in the station wagon,” she had said. “What I ever would have done without Cele!”
Damn Cele and damn everything. There was no use denying it, at times he even felt, damn the baby, or rather, damn the timing of it, damn the patterns life had followed, damn the schedules and calendars. If it had happened a year later, if it had happened between them, if he had made it happen, the whole story would have been different. Then he would have had to get a divorce; he would never want a child of his brought up without his name and he would have had to get a divorce. By now he would already have had it.
He imagined Joan, listening unbelieving, as he told her he wanted it, and the reason for it. He could see her face, could see Hildy’s direct young stare when he told her, see the disbelief and disapproval in her eyes: love and sex at his age? Johnny would be the only one on his side. “Wow, Dad, wild.” Or would he be?
He was bitter. They were all self-centered, seeing everything their own way, and the hell with putting out any effort to feel what he must be feeling. Even Dori was following her own God-given set of rules; she was through with affairs, she was sick of affairs, she was throwing him out because what they had been having was just an affair and there was no sign from him that it would ever be converted into something more than an affair.
Damn it, the insistence of women. October was coming up; that meant less than a year had passed since they met, and already she had run out of trust, out of patience. She’d rather sit there alone holding the baby—
The split-second image flashed, a woman sitting alone on a sofa, holding a new baby, looking down in silence.
Christ, again! He had been free of it since he had had it out with Dori; now here it was again, a new life for it, a new vitality.
He jumped up, outraged. It was long after midnight and everyone was asleep. Dori was asleep too, or he would call and try once more to make her see that since whatever else she was thinking of was still vague, it might yet prove to be nothing, might fizzle out, might remain vague forever. This time he needed no long period to get things sorted out in his mind; this time he knew at once what was roweling his gut: she had thrown him out, that was it, in the nicest gentlest sort of way, thrown him out. Usually it was he who got out of a relationship when the gears began to grind. Gears had been grinding for months, from the night she had told him about Bob Cox, but he’d had no ear for them.
He should never have let Cox take over on the adoption proceedings, true, but was that anything to hold against him? He should probably never have told her about feeling shut out, or about the damnable word diminish and how it crossed half a dozen other lines in his life. He should never have let her hear him phoning Joan to say he wouldn’t be home, probably should never even have told her about clearing it with the family that he couldn’t make it to Truro over the weekend of the twentieth.
But she had loved him anyway. Nobody was ever better than they were in bed together. Nobody was ever happier than she was when he had come back after the bad time that had strapped him into immobility. And at the end? Had he not been right there to the end, taking her to the hospital, staying up all night and all the next day? If he’d been her own husband out in the hospital corridor—
Playacting. If she called anything playacting that would finish it for her, but there were situations where a little playacting was the only civilized way to manage. Another name for it was tact, diplomacy, even kindness. Dori knew all that, practiced it herself most of the time as any real woman did. But then at other times—God, in the last few months honesty had become an obsession with her. Maybe because she had been living a huge lie and was preparing to live it for the rest of her life.
He felt perceptive to have realized that. It comforted him. There were matters here Dori did not yet comprehend. He could make her see them. Damn it, he would have to make her see them, for he could not bear the idea of giving in to defeat when he wanted her so much.
Behind him a door opened and Joan asked, “Are you okay? Is anything wrong?”
“I’m just reading. I couldn’t get to sleep.”
“You’ve been upset lately. I can always tell.”
“Nothing special.”
“You’ve been in every night since we got home from Truro.”
“I told you, they’re painting our offices.”
He ought to face her now, ought to stop this playacting now, ought to say, Yes, something is damn wrong, and the only thing that can make it right is to start over and that means leaving all this here and getting a divorce and saying goodbye to this half-dead marriage. He could imagine her face at the words, imagine the scene that would follow.
“I’m going to make some tea,” Joan said. “Do you want some?”
He shook his head and watched her go to the kitchen in her nightgown. The words unspoken too long, the words unspoken forever. He put his head down on his arms.
The station wagon pulled up at the side entrance to the building and Dori said, “You take him, Cele, and I’ll get the back elevator man.”
Inside she said, “Joe, could you help me with a couple of pieces of furniture I borrowed for the baby’s room?”
“Sure, sure.”
She had told Bill the doorman a few days ago, leaving it to him to tend the grapevine, and apparently he had done so, for Joe showed no surprise at seeing the crib, the baby carriage, various small cartons and the lady at the wheel holding a well-wrapped-up baby.
Cele handed the baby back to her and they went up the back elevator with the furniture. In the elevator Joe said, “How old is it?” and Dori said, “Ten days, no, eleven,” in a voice that held no smallest quaver.
“Boy or girl?”
“Boy. Oh here we are. Cele, have you a dollar?”
Once inside and alone Cele said, “I wouldn’t trust you around the corner, madam,” and Dori said, “Thank you for the compliment. I hope the room won’t seem too small with the crib in it.”
The fourth room in her apartment must originally have been intended as a maid’s room since it was an old building, erected in the thirties when nearly all good East Side apartments had built-in maids’ rooms, but by a quirk in the architecture, caused by the setback and terrace on the floor below, it was about two feet wider than the usual cell-like space and Dori had always used it as a “guest room for one.” A narrow bed, narrower than twin-size but well made and prettily covered, a small dresser and a single chair were all the furniture it contained, but a plaid rug and plaid curtains made it bright and appealing. The miniature bathroom with a tub one could not stretch out in was pretty too, and Dori had measured off the space for the crib with minute care, finding that it would fit easily if one did not mind a bathroom door that would swing open only half its normal arc.
“It goes in my room for now, Joe,” she said as he came in with the crib. “He’s going in with me until I can get a maid. And better leave the carriage in my front hall.”
“There’s a carriage room downstairs, alongside the package room.”
“Is there? Good, I’ll have to find out about things, won’t I?”
Joe said, “Sure, sure,” pocketed his dollar tip and left.
“Not around the corner,” Cele repeated and this time Dori laughed. For the first time she freed the baby from the shielding blanket, held him high up, not forgetting to prop the small head with her entire left hand, but holding him at eye level so that they were face to face. “We’re home,” she said. “Did you ever think we’d make it?”
Two days later the phone rang, and without preamble Cele said, “Dr. Jesskin isn’t a widower, and she’s not ‘conveniently dead.’ She’s remarried and her name is Summerfield and she lives in Washington—state of, not D.C.”
“How do you know?”
“I did what you were too decent to do—I up and asked, and kept on asking.”
“Asked whom?”
“Asked everybody, everywhere I went, until I got me an answer.”
“From whom?”
“Dr. Baum. Ben Baum, your pediatrician and mine. I should have tried him right off. Every pediatrician in New York knows Dr. Jesskin, or has Jesskin babies for patients. And Ben Baum’s been our friend for most of the sixteen years he’s been the kids’ doctor, so finally I just asked him as gossip, and he told me, as gossip. It’s no secret anyway.”
“Oh Cele—”
“They were divorced eight or ten years ago. She couldn’t stand his hours, the night calls, all that. So they got a divorce.” Dori started to speak but Cele interrupted. “Remember what I told you, that time you got sore? Decent men get divorces too, not just rats.”
“Oh Cele.”
“His children were teen-agers then,” she went on dryly, “but they seem to have survived. They each got married about a year ago.”
“Did Dr. Baum know how they feel toward their father?”
“Like any young marrieds, I gathered. But Ben did know one more piece of family stuff. Long ago, Dr. Jesskin’s sister met his friend Bob Cox at some Harvard regatta and they married a year later. So maybe it’s her picture on his desk.”
“Oh Cele—”
“You’re not being too bright today, Dorr. Your conversation isn’t, anyway. Suppose you call me back when you can produce more than ‘Oh Cele.’”
“All right.”
She stood there clutching the phone after Cele had clicked off. Some tactile memory, apparently in her palm, told her that once, a long time ago, she had kept on gripping the crossbar of this very telephone receiver, gripping it after she had put it back into its cradle, as if at a lever to propel herself into action. She had wanted to just stay there, silent, commanding her mind not to leap ahead, but she had failed and had remained there yielding to her mind’s rebellion until the clock had reminded her she had to dress for a concert.
It was that first call she had made to Miss Mack, asking for a special appointment, that’s what it was, and she had held on and on, not wanting to break the thread that might connect the glimpse in the mirror to something more than an illusion.
Now again she was holding a thread that might connect a first glimpse to something more. Not that there had been any illusion. He had said all those carefully selected words, and she had heard them, and, when she had finally let herself, had understood them. She had tried not to think too much of them since then, but they had kept speaking to her at odd times, always with the picture of their speaker, standing there at his desk, tall, too thin, his color rising.
“Emotionally preoccupied,” he had said. He had remained silent since then, as she had known he would. He was no man of sudden compulsions, he knew life took time to grow and develop, he was giving it time. He was giving her time.
He would wait until she managed some sort of signal. There would be no flowers from him, no note under the door, no telephone calls. He would wait. And she had to wait too. Wait through the fall, perhaps through the winter. She had to get through the guilt that sometimes took her when she thought about Matthew. Guilt? Guilt that she finally had come to ask more of living than she used to ask?
Emotionally preoccupied. If Dr. Jesskin loved anybody with a baby, she thought half angrily, he would marry her and adopt that baby, not just be a father figure to it.
Eugene Cornelius Jesskin—oh God, more daydreaming. But sometimes daydreaming was for something. To show the way, to get you ready, to see if you were certain.
The one thing he couldn’t be certain about, he had said, was “whether it was all at once there or whether it had been a long time developing.” Everything else was clear but not that.
A long time developing? Probably for her it had been a long time developing too, long before the remarkable patient. Long long before had she not sat in his office and thought, He is so good and kind I really love him? She had meant it as a patient means it, a synonym for gratitude, a recognition of kindness and human response to a problem. But she had felt it and now, suddenly, was remembering it.
The fall, perhaps the winter. In January the baby would be six months old. Another milestone, a major not a minor. A half year since that night he was born.
Dear Dr. Jesskin, My baby is half a year old—As if she were already writing them, the words took tangible shape on some tablet in her mind, clear and warm, as if there were a sun shining upon them. And since you haven’t seen him since his first week, I wonder if you’d like to come and see him now that he has reached this immense age. He would welcome you and so would I. Always gratefully, Dori Gray.
She ought to write it down; she liked the tone of it. But she did not move toward her desk, She saw that she was still gripping the crossbar of the telephone receiver and slowly moved her hand away, stretching her fingers, opening out her palm. She didn’t have to write anything down. When the time finally came, words wouldn’t really matter.