TWO

THE TELEPHONE RANG AND her hand whipped toward it. Matthew had left at eight and she must have fallen asleep again. Asleep when this was Thursday?

“Good morning, Mrs. Gray.” It was Dr. Jesskin. It was the first time he had ever called her himself.

“It’s positive!” Her words seemed to jump at the telephone.

“Let’s not talk by phone. Can you come in at eleven?”

“Of course I can. But you have to tell me—it is positive, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God.”

Instantly everything else receded into the background, even Matthew. She was electrified by the core knowledge of that positive and yet was quieted by it too. A quiet seemed to flow through her veins and along her nerves, like the quiet shared after making love, completed, willing to put aside whatever required attention, saying “not now” to would-be interrupters: questions of work undone, of infidelity, of what weight and value their sudden lovemaking would prove to have in the days ahead.

Nothing else matters, she thought, her hands flying to her hips, the fingers splaying out, their tips touching over her navel. Nothing else. Suddenly she doubted herself about Matthew. Had it been as real as it had seemed? Was it so irresistible because it would help get her through all the deliberate hours until Thursday morning?

She fled from that idea, but it was possible. She could not know now; now was dressing and getting over to Dr. Jesskin.

She thought of all the past years of Dr. Jesskin, all the visits, all the tests and treatments, the biopsies of uterine tissue to check on progress, the familiar steel speculum still warm from the gleaming sterilizer—it was curiously pleasant to remember, even, as she entered the waiting room this bright Thursday morning, suddenly new again, vivid, present, and yet strangely remote from her nerve centers where pain and envy could twinge, peaceful now as she glanced around at the other women waiting too.

All those years ago when she sat in this same waiting room, she had looked at the girls and women in their various stages of pregnancy, not with envy, but with a mute amazement that each of them could so easily accomplish what was so impossible for her.

Then, she used to avoid looking at Miss Mack or Miss Stein, the doctor’s appointment secretary, both of whom knew all too well that she was one of his “other patients,” who were there not because he was the obstetrician who would guide them through pregnancy and one happy day deliver them, but because he was also a “sterility specialist,” a phrase he always quietly amended to “a specialist in so-called sterility.”

I’m not sterile, I’m not barren. Dori could still hear her too earnest assurance to him on that first visit, as she had faltered through her recital, see him writing in her folder; it had held only a first page then.

Had he already added a notation this morning after the report had come in? Had he already written down the gist of what he was going to say to her today? And the questions he planned to ask? But she had no answers yet—except one.

Miss Mack signaled her, and ushered her directly into his office, closing the door with a soft snap behind her. Dr. Jesskin rose, silent, studying her as if she were a new patient whom he had never seen before.

“Oh, Dr. Jesskin, will you help me?”

She had rehearsed what she would say, but these were not the words she had ready. She had meant to thank him first for persistence and the rightness of his beliefs, and then only to speak of the present.

“Sit down,” he said slowly, sitting down himself. “This is no time to hurry. That’s why I said not to talk on the telephone.” Before him was her folder, closed, but atop it was a single sheet of heavy stationery. He glanced at it and handed it to her.

She scarcely saw the letterhead of the laboratory or the half-dozen notations typed in at intervals, but the word positive leaped at her. Just seeing it there on the paper added stature to it, made it more true, no longer a guess or a possibility, but a fact.

“May I keep this?” she asked, her voice shaking.

Unexpectedly he smiled, and she put the report into her purse. “So,” he said slowly, “you are pregnant.”

“Will you help me?”

“Are you sure what you will do?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

He nodded but his face was expressionless—a routine look, one of interest and attention that he would give to any patient. Neutral, Dori thought, he’s being neutral again, and an undefined disappointment invaded her. “Are you able to take me as a patient even though I haven’t married again?” She was neutral too, determined to keep pleading or apology out of her voice.

“Let us see these dates again,” he said as if he had not heard her, and opened the folder. He seemed to be preparing his thoughts, laying them out neatly, as his instruments were laid out neatly on the tray by Miss Mack.

“You had intercourse only once since your last period,” he said simply, “and that was on October sixteenth. The first period you missed was due about November third. You may have missed a second, since today is December seventh.”

“A date that will live in infamy,” she said, smiling, but he only nodded.

“Usually we are uncertain about the precise date of intercourse and thus of conception, so to arrive at the most probable date of confinement we calculate backward three months from the onset of the last menstrual period, and then add seven days. But since you are sure of October sixteenth—”

“Quite sure. It was the date he was leaving for—”

He waved this aside as if he did not invite so personal a revelation. “In that case we can reckon forward two hundred and eighty days, which takes us to July twenty-third, nineteen sixty-eight. A few days earlier or later, but July twenty-third is our theoretical date.” He was obviously reading from the page.

She drew in her breath. He had already put down the probable date: that simple act, that new notation in her twelve-year-old folder of struggle and frustration, suddenly was more convincing than a dozen laboratory reports.

“Are you able to take me, Dr. Jesskin, even though this will be what they call an illegitimate birth? It’s not only that I am not married now but that I won’t be. I don’t want to fool you about that.”

He closed the folder once more. “Why are you so sure? I do not wish to interrogate you, please understand.”

“I do understand. I myself want to tell you. He—the man with whom I was having an affair—it was an affair, nothing more—we both knew all along that it was that, and we both knew it was ending.”

“Now that you are pregnant, though?”

“I haven’t told him. I don’t know whether I should tell him. He’s an awfully decent man, no scoundrel betraying me, and he assumed I was on the pill like everybody else until I told him once I wasn’t because I couldn’t get pregnant anyway.”

His expression changed slightly; for an instant he looked gratified. “Has he, perhaps, the right to know?”

“I suppose it is a right, yes. But he’s married and has four children, and we never talked of marriage, never. Anyway he’s away now, abroad, so I can take enough time to think that out.”

“Time, yes.” He leaned toward her earnestly. “This is why I asked you to come in so we might talk, the way it is impossible to talk on a telephone. You haven’t yet taken enough time to think of all the other matters you must think about.”

“But I have. I’ve thought about everything.”

“About everything as it is now, yes. But have you thought of six months from now when you will be big? Or a year from now when you will have a four-month-old baby? An adopted baby? A friend’s baby? A relative’s baby, after some fatal accident to the parents? You have to think through all these things, talk and discuss them, with whoever is the right person to discuss such matters with.”

“Why, Doctor, I already know—”

“We think sometimes with our minds, at other times with our emotions, at other times only with our instincts. It is important now to give you enough time for all three thinkings, and I am going to ask you to go off and come back in two weeks for another visit.” He saw her face change and added mildly, “Did you imagine I would then refer you to another doctor?” He touched the buzzer and as Miss Mack appeared, he said formally, “Please set up an appointment for Mrs. Gray for week after next.” He nodded goodbye, and again Dori felt strangely disappointed.

All three thinkings. Only at rarest intervals did he slip into a foreignism that revealed his Scandinavian childhood, Danish, Swedish, whatever it was, but there always was a pleasing measured way he used language and occasionally a phrase that stayed with her.

All three thinkings. The mind, the emotions, the instincts. But she had already engaged them all, she thought, and the results were final. I can’t possibly conceive of changing my mind, even if I were to think for months instead of weeks.

I can’t possibly conceive. That word—mysterious, powerful, ordinary, gigantic. I have conceived. I could never conceive, I did not conceive, but now I have conceived. What a conjugation for a woman of forty.

Think and discuss and consider. If Cele were in, she could go right over and, perhaps tonight, she would tell her brother Gene.

In the pale winter sunlight a glass telephone booth glinted at her from the corner of Madison and she opened her purse for a dime. Suddenly she felt an irrational impulse to call Tony and tell him. To telephone him this minute, though she had not spoken to him for ten years, call him right at his office and say, I told you I could, I always knew that someday it would be all right again as Dr. Jesskin said; it might have happened years ago but you ended that chance when you ended everything else. As quickly as the idea had come it fled. Tony? Why Tony at this late date? She stood contemplating the glass booth and remembered Tony’s voice that last night, telling her he had been having an affair with Hazel for nearly a year.

“And letting me go right on with Dr. Jesskin?” she had cried out. “How could you, oh why didn’t you make me stop trying? Letting me watch my ovulation dates? Making love to me on our special schedule? Oh God, how horrible, that you let me go right on.”

She turned quickly away from the booth. Dignity, the straitjacket. She would no more make such a call than fling a rock through the nearest shopwindow. Yet she had been lost for a minute in a reverie of revenge that she had long thought done with forever.

Another booth beckoned to her from the next corner. What she really wanted to do was to tell everybody in the whole damn world. She wanted to phone the paper and tell them, she wanted to call all her friends who had always been so polite about her being childless, she wanted to wire Alan and Lucia in San Francisco and cable Ron in London.

Matthew. Matthew Poole.

Memory filled her: the sound of his voice, his touch, the feel of his hands, his body, the way he took charge, solicitous yet taking charge—that male authority that made it so wonderful to be female. The morning had falsified something; from the moment Dr. Jesskin phoned the word positive, she had pushed Matthew aside, and distrusted their two nights as an episode to speed time along. An episode? For her who had never been able to go in for a two-day episode, never in all the years?

It’s more, she thought, and for the first time an unwillingness dragged at her. A few weeks was the longest they had. How many weeks? Two, three? At home, alone, naked? She saw again the way he had looked at her when she was at last naked before him, when they had left the sofa and the living room and gone decently to her bedroom, undressing, standing revealed to each other. She knew about her body, her one vanity perhaps, certainly her least wavering vanity.

He saw nothing of her “tentative orbing,” knew nothing of its newness, its meaning. But in two or three weeks—how soon would she be too changed to let him see her?

Don’t, she thought, don’t think ahead. She went into the telephone booth and called Cele. “The most incredible thing has happened—can I come over?”

“Sure. The plumber’s here. Give me twenty minutes.”

“I’ll walk.”

She walked along trying to decide how to tell Cele—spring it at her? lead her slowly along and let her guess?—and she found herself thinking of a thousand other things instead. Ab ovo, Martha Litton had said so archly in the interview and she had put aside her notes, knowing that here it was at last, the only kind of thing that ever explained anybody. But did her own childhood explain her?

If so it eluded her, for when she tried to think back about her own beginnings she found herself skipping from the story they always told—“I was born the night Lindy flew to Paris”—a story that struck her as sickening in its little-girl cuteness, skipping all the way to that line on the application blank for Wellesley when she had so hurt her mother and infuriated her father. “Episcopalian and or Jewish,” she had written, thinking herself so witty. What a row had ensued, what a frightful fracas with her father, one of the many and one of the worst. Though she was the youngest and the only girl and thus the supposed easy favorite with her father over her three brothers, she was in actuality a constant irritant to him from the moment she was turned New Dealer almost overnight by the simple act of going to a fine rich college where virtually the entire student body worshiped Franklin Delano Roosevelt and all his works. She who would tell anybody anything could barely admit to her new friends that her father hated labor, that he was part owner of a factory which fought unions, that he was rich and Republican and revolting about the poor.

She did admit it to her freshman roommate, and the sterling advice she received about “how to handle reactionary parents” was the first political solidarity she had ever experienced. That was Celia Kahn and that solidarity had never wavered thereafter. Perhaps that was why she felt that her real history began not with childhood but with Cele, although college too was like a prelude history, a preface, with the real Chapter One beginning four years later in the little furnished apartment Tony had on East Tenth, the first time she went there with him and knew that at last she was not going to pull back and say no. In 1948, three years after the end of war, she was still not only a virgin but a girl who had never much wanted to stop being a virgin. At twenty-one she had never really been in love. All through college, whenever she and Cele had one of their all-night talking bouts about boys and sex and how far you could go, she had never really had the kind of wild juicy episode that Cele so often told her about. “You’re a slow starter, Dorr,” Cele had once told her with great authority. “When it finally hits you, glory hallelujah.”

It hadn’t been glory hallelujah until Tony. Cele, then, was already married to Marshall Duke who was just starting out with a recording company and they quickly drifted into a related but quite different status. They, were two married couples, whose separate, past loyalties confused and complicated the new demands of marriage. But soon enough she and Cele had rediscovered their older closeness and it had never again lost its private vitality. When Tony left, Cele saw her through those first empty weekends, the first summer, and the first Christmas. Later, when her life had become normal again, it was Cele who played matchmaker, a role she had always avoided. Whenever she or Marshall met an interesting new person, young or old, married or single, she had asked Dori over for drinks or dinner to meet him.

It was Cele who had first urged Dori to quit the newspaper grind for good, particularly since the journalistic debacle that had robbed her of the daily paper she had been with for fifteen years and put her on a rather amateurish, though well-meaning, weekly. “You’ve got some cash stashed away,” Cele had said, “and you’re rent-controlled, so you could ride out even a bad break in free-lancing.”

“Thank God for that.” Her fervent tone had sprung out of her proprietary sense about her four-room apartment, not inexpensive since it was two hundred a month, but protected from the wildly rising prices all about because it was in an old building, still under rent control. She cherished its large square rooms, its thick walls and doors, its windows looking down on a sunny quiet street, even its slightly worn look that told of ten years of her life in it.

But she was glad too that she did have some money, about thirteen thousand dollars, from money left by her father, minus death taxes, which had come in equal shares to her brothers and herself on their mother’s death three years ago, minus further death taxes. And she had, more importantly perhaps, the equally solid fact that her special pieces had appeared in many magazines, little ones, big ones, occasionally in political ones and in the more literate women’s magazines, though never in the ones that prided themselves on being “service magazines” as if they were roadside service stations for offering the most humdrum of provisions to keep you going. Nor did she write for the fashion magazines, with their satiny vocabularies, or for the one magazine most young writers looked upon as their one particular goal, The New Yorker. She had sold one piece to it when she had just begun to write, a caustic tale about a smart hostess, and when they bought it she had been as elated as she was supposed to be. But then she had tried other pieces in her more natural vein, with some feeling, with some emotion, even indignation, and these had been turned down—with kindly notes instead of printed rejection slips, telling her the editors still remembered the nice irony of “The Party” and hoped to see more of her work soon. She gave up submitting to The New Yorker; nice irony was not what gave her pleasure in writing, though she made a mental note to check that for sour grapes when enough time had elapsed for perspective’s sake. She did so several times and each time decided it was true. “Keep your cool” was not her life slogan.

“You’re too intense, Dori,” her mother had once told her during the first year of her divorce. Then, before she could reply, her mother had added, “And thank God you are. It’s the best, on balance.”

“You blow your cool about this damn war,” Dick Towson had said more recently.

“I have no cool. I hope I never do have.”

Cool, cool it, cool it—the great desideratum of so many people in today’s world. It was a living-in-ice, a living away from, never impassioned about right or wrong, never hot under the collar, never half sick with pain or pity. Keep your cool—a whole generation was chanting the slogan and they thought it was just an in phrase of the young, never seeing the paucity within their own lives that led them to this revealing admiration.

Not a whole generation. Not the young protesters on the marches and picket lines, not the boys refusing to kill, not the fathers and mothers who supported them, not the lawyers who defended them in court. Matthew—

She wouldn’t tell Cele about Matthew. Not now. Not until she knew what it meant, what it would mean. Never had they confided to each other in the small tattling ways about men or marriage or sex, never since the half-bragging talk of college days. Cele did know about Dick Towson, vaguely, in large outline, and also knew that it was over or virtually over.

Poor Cele, she suddenly thought, she’s so sure it will be at least a year before anything new starts up for me. She’s probably all set for another one of my celibate years where she worries her head off about me.

“Mrs. Gray.” It was Cele’s maid, standing in the open kitchen door of the house to accept delivery of a parcel. “You going right past me like that?”

“Why, Minnie, I didn’t know I was already here.”

As she listened, Celia Duke’s face went bright with pleasure. “Then what?” she would prompt if Dori paused in her recital. “What did Dr. Jesskin mean by that?” At the end she said, “So you have two weeks to think and discuss. Think and discuss what?” She looked around the room, searching, and they both laughed. Then she suddenly went over to Dori and hugged her. “It’s so great, Dorr. Congratulations.”

“Oh Cele. Dr. Jesskin was so professional and neutral, it’s lovely to have somebody happy about it.”

“He wanted to stay tentative so you could still change your mind in the next two weeks. It would still be safe two weeks from now—”

“To go back and say, ‘After all I think I’ll have an abortion’? He knows I’d never—God, it’s nearly thirteen years since I first went to his office. No, it must have been something else; maybe he wondered if now I’d be getting married. Maybe he was thinking about his own position. What do I really know about him? He might be the most churchgoing moralist alive.”

“Want to bet?”

Dori apparently did not hear her. “Cele, when will I begin to show?”

“Let’s see, this is the seventh week? Three more to New Year’s, four in January—not till February at the earliest. He’ll order you to watch your weight and stay thin anyway. They all do now.”

“Can you remember when you began to look big?”

“Well, me.” She looked down at herself. “I look a leetle bit, right now.” She was wearing her usual stretch pants despite the ten pounds she had gained in the last few years. “But you’re not weak-minded like me and you’ll stay thin for ages.”

“You mean I can keep on seeing people for another month, month and half?”

She said this so eagerly that Cele laughed. “What’s wrong with you? Do you think you get pregnant one minute and start bulging the next? What about all the nineteenth-century novels where the dear servant girl goes unsuspected right up to the time she bears the child?”

“Hoopskirts. Crinolines,”

“So now we’ve got tent dresses and shifts. Nobody will suspect for ages unless you tell them. Are you going to tell them at the paper?”

“Of course not.”

“I didn’t know. You didn’t say.”

“You mean—” She examined Cele’s expression with sudden interest. “You mean, be the emancipated female and not keep it secret at all?”

“I didn’t mean anything.”

“Do you think I should?”

There was a pause and then Cele said slowly, “Look, Dorr, that’s maybe the biggest of the three thinkings Dr. Jesskin meant. And it’s got to be all yours. I would be ghastly to try to influence you.”

“I guess I just took it for granted this wasn’t something you announced on a loudspeaker.” She hesitated. “I was already thinking of where to go until it was over, what name I’d go under, how I’d get mail, all sorts of cloak-and-dagger stuff like that.”

“Did you decide on a place?”

“Remember how crazy we were about the Grand Tetons? Not right in Jackson Hole where I’d run into people from the ranch, but some small town around in there.”

“Wyoming? With your doctor in Manhattan?”

“I guess I overlooked that small matter of mileage. How often do I see Dr. Jesskin? Once a month?”

“About.” She looked perplexed. “Isn’t it weird, the things you forget that you were sure you never would forget? Me with three kids and I can’t be sure. I guess once a month, to start with anyway.”

“Apart from Dr. Jesskin, I wouldn’t go that far because then I’d be cut off from the only people who know about it.” She hesitated. “How will Marshall take it?”

“The way you and I take it.” She spoke with vigor, but she looked uncertain. “Well, I don’t know, at that. He can be pretty square at times. He didn’t use to be, but he does seem to be changing.”

“Lizzie starting to date. That would do it.”

“The damn pill. He assumes Liz has a prescription on her own.”

They exchanged looks that said, Men. “Maybe it would be better not to tell him for a while.”

“I’d blow my top,” Celia said, “if I couldn’t tell somebody.” As the words were spoken, as they became entities, alive, she drew back from them, disowning them. “There’s the rub, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“Who else is going to know?”

“Only Gene and Ellen.”

“Oh.”

“What does ‘Oh’ mean?”

“Nothing.” Oh meant, Too bad Ellen has to be in on it, and Dori knew that it meant that, so there was no point in elaborating. “What about Ron and Alan?”

“I hadn’t even thought of them. Isn’t that family love for you? If my mother were alive she would have worried but been happy and I think my brother Gene will be, but Ron and Alan?” She made a face.

Gene was the only one of her brothers whom she admired completely and for whom she felt a family warmth that was not briefly assumed at Christmas. He was older than the others, being fifty, and the only one who had always lived in New York, but her separateness from the other two was due to far more than geographical distance.

Ron, three years younger than Gene, had long ago settled in London where he was a partner in some fine neocolonial oil company operating in the Middle East, and Alan, who was only about a year older than she, was farthest away in everything that mattered to her. He lived in San Francisco with his wealthy wife Lucia, who seemed another species, come from another world, the world of the Social Register, of the D.A.R. and genealogy, and he seemed to enjoy that world with her, enjoy their status as Important People, going to the right dinner parties, belonging to the right clubs, sending their children to the right schools and camps. When it came to books and ideas, Lucia was close to being an ignoramus, and Alan didn’t even seem to mind, which made him incomprehensible to Dori.

Alan was the only one of the four who had opted for the answer “Episcopalian” when the question “Religion?” turned up on a printed form; the other three wrote “None,” meaning it. Even that had not really satisfied her father, though he had merely grumbled with the others, reserving his explosion for her and her inspiration of “Episcopalian and/or Jewish.” Her mother who was Jewish by birth had only said, “You’re making it seem like a joke,” but her father had shouted, “if you’re ashamed to write ‘atheist,’” shouting it with a huger wrath than one indiscretion could have earned, even so monstrous an indiscretion. She had thought then that he was taking out on her all the rage he had suppressed over the boys, and had been infuriated at the injustice. Actually the one area of life where she could and did admire her father was religion: the amazing fact that he, Eugene Arling Varley, son of an Episcopal minister, had had the independence to declare himself not an agnostic but an atheist, to declare it as a youth and maintain it throughout a long life among traditionalists and conformists of every kind.

Suddenly Dori smiled. How predictable, that she thought of her mother and father now, in these first hours of discovery about herself. She looked at Cele as if she too must be smiling, but Cele was not looking at her at all. Her face had changed; it was somber.

“Look, Dori, here’s something I probably ought not to say, but I have to.”

“What?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“I’ve made it your business. Say it.”

“It’s something that’s been bothering me a lot, but I might—”

“Cele, stop fussing.”

“Okay, you don’t want to say who the man is, I’m not going to guess. But if it’s somebody who’s married and has lots of children and can’t get free, then how about finding somebody else?”

“Somebody else?”

“Lots of women in the history of the world have told somebody who wasn’t the father that he was.”

“But who? Just pick somebody off the street?”

“You could start an affair now, and then a month or so from now, tell him and get married.”

“Celia!”

“I don’t mean some stranger, but I thought just now, What if there’s somebody she likes, somebody she’s drawn to, who isn’t all tied up with a family?” She saw Dori’s look and drew back from it. “Oh, skip it. It’s a rotten idea. I’m the one could go in for finagling, not you, so forget it.”

Dori said nothing. The right words would not come. She could not say, That’s such a cheap trick; but she could not stop the words from forming in her own mind. There was a sudden sweetness pulling at her too, a sudden longing to try it, to do what millions of other women had done in the history of the world, the traditional silence to a husband when a child came from an adultery, the traditional means of snaring an unwilling boy into wedlock. In her mind’s imagery there suddenly appeared, tiny, floating as if they were suspended in a golden bubble, herself and Matthew, their hands extended toward each other as if to hold a sudden happiness, unexpected, unsought, all at once theirs. “If I thought I could carry it off,” she said at last. “But I’m such a rotten liar, I’d be sure to blurt it out sooner or later, and then what?”

“Forget it. It’s an n.g. idea. What about some small town around Washington? You could fly here on a shuttle to see Jesskin, I could meet you at the airport and drive you. How many people do you know down there that you’d run into?”

“Apart from Lyndon and such? Not anybody, and with Lyndon it’s not reciprocal.” She laughed. “If we’re talking of an hour by plane, then how about Boston somewhere? Or the Cape?”

“It would be all right in February or March, but what about hot weather when it’s mobbed?”

Dori was already rejecting the Cape. “It ought to be some place you get to by car; you always run into people you know at airports.”

“Oh let’s skip all that for now. We’ll hit on the perfect hideout when we’re not so jazzed up. Oh, Dorr, it keeps coming at me: it happened. After all this time, it finally happened.”