I SHOULD HAVE TOLD HIM, she thought the moment he left. This would have been such a natural time to tell him, when he was hearing all the rest of it, caring about it, knowing how it must have been. He would have known about this too, he would have seen why, he would have been as sure as I am about it.
Why didn’t I? What made me pull back? I’ve got this fixed idea about waiting until the holidays are done with, but what’s so sacred about that particular timetable? I’m using it as some sort of excuse. I’m big and brave when it comes to Cele or Gene, but I run like a rabbit—
Oh nonsense. You didn’t know what it would do to him if you went on then and there, you wanted to give him time. You still don’t know whether it will infuriate him or hurt him or put him off you completely. You daydream that he will understand and approve, but suppose he did just the opposite?
How little she knew of him after all, despite knowing so much. Twenty days of being in love made you positive—if you were twenty—that you knew an entire human being, but at forty you had learned better, at forty you knew how complex and involuted and shifting any love could be, at forty you knew the awful risks in the unexpected.
Unexpected? That was understatement for you. Poor Matthew.
The brush of depression feathered across her mind. It wasn’t only with Matthew that she was being timid; she was putting off a dozen lesser problems that were still there to be solved, leaving them strewn all around her like assorted notes and reminders on a crowded desk, waiting to be picked up and disposed of. Suddenly that tranquil “one day at a time” seemed to be approaching its end, a bright bubble floating toward a brick wall.
In a week a new year would start and she would be in the eleventh week; her own body would be forcing her to positive action. She stripped off her nightgown and crossed to the dressing table, staring with clinical detachment as if at a stranger. She still looked, in this dimmed light, much as she had looked the first night Matthew had seen her, Matthew who had already wondered that she liked them to make love in the dark, who would one day hear that she loved to be made love to in the blazing sunlight. But even in the half-light there was more definition to the orbing, instantly seeable perhaps only to her own eyes but surely there. In a few days more he would see it too.
She slept restlessly as if she were in transit, in a plane or ship or train, always on the surface of sleep instead of burrowed down in the good depth of it. In the morning she woke suddenly, with a decisiveness of relief, as if she had at last solved some mystery while she slept. She jumped out of bed, thinking, If ever I was on an inexorable schedule, I’m on one now, and I’d better go in for some inexorables of my own. She crossed to her desk, dated a sheet of typing paper 12/26, and wrote:
DECISIONS TO BE MADE BEFORE Jan. 2, 1968
The tingle of danger ran along her nerves. This was no document to leave blithely around for Nellie to find. Nellie! What to do about Nellie was one of the decisions, minor, but one of them.
“Minor,” she wrote. “Nellie to go; two weeks’ notice today.”
Major: Hideout for Feb. 1 through July.
Major: Costs? Jesskin’s fee? Hospital? Can’t use Blue Cross under false name.
Major: Tell Dick T in letter? Wait till return? Not tell at all?
Minor: When Cele to shop for maternity clothes?
Major: Matthew.
My poor girl. He had felt how it must have been for her, he would know that following all those years there could be now no alternative for her, he would see that she had to go ahead, unmarried, married, alone, not alone, rich, poor, no matter any of those outer things. The primitive thing is what he would have seen, would have felt it as anybody feels the choice of life over nothingness, of birth over nothingness, of the filled vessel over the empty one.
She looked at the telephone. But he had a crammed week ahead, with only snatches of time between clients and flights and whatever bouts he would be having with Johnny; there was, after all, some good sense in the timetable she was following; it had to be right for Matthew too.
How different love was from sex itself, and how this with Matthew had transformed her life and needs in just three weeks. All the years with Tony seemed shorter in retrospect; Tony and she had been so young during their marriage—she saw it now and could even forgive him for tossing it all aside, for he had been operating then on the same young values. The young were always so sure they alone knew about love, but when they got to be thirty and then forty, they would see how much their lives had drawn from the passing years, how white and innocent and thin their first youth had been, and how muscled and complex and durable love could become.
She returned to her list. Major: Matthew. Her mind balked at anything beyond Matthew, but she thought, Oh no you don’t, no more stalling.
Minor: Pseudonym, alias.
Major: Mail forwarding; answers mailed from where?
Major: Bank and checks. New account under new name.
She stood up, read her list through with satisfaction and then went to the front door for her morning newspaper. In the kitchen for breakfast, she shivered; the window had been left open by Nellie and a nightful of blasting cold had come in through the careless half inch of space. She went back to her room for a long flannel robe and thought of flats in the ghetto with inadequate heat or no heat, their tenants endlessly calling up janitors to complain and threaten and beg.
Suddenly she knew where her hideout would be.
Not the Grand Tetons, not the Cape, not Washington—all these were fantasy places, absurd, impractical, valid in the first days of dream unreality but not worth serious thought now in the sure status of the third month. She was not the type to go unnoticed in any small town at any time; suddenly she remembered the vacation that had made her fall in love with Jackson Hole and the Grand Tetons so long ago. One sentence from her and somebody would ask, “Where are you from in the East? Boston? New York?”
Her clothes, the license plates on her old car, her letters, all from New York—everything would give her away now, and in the big months ahead. Alone, not staying at any dude ranch with a lot of other Easterners but really alone, living in some small rented cottage in a small town, she would within weeks trail question marks wherever she went. No matter what story she told—husband off in Vietnam, husband killed in an air crash—she would soon turn into a mystery lady, a personality, a Somebody Interesting.
Where did criminals go when they had to hide out?
Suddenly she laughed aloud. Why, she had had the answer all along, had seen it in a hundred movies, in a hundred crime shows on television, had read it in a hundred detective stories.
They hid out in the biggest city of all.
Not her own New York, not Madison and Park and Fifth, not in the Village, not in her own attractive neighborhood where all her friends were. Certainly not. But what about a furnished room in the Bronx for the six big months? How many of her friends would she run into in a grocery store up on Mosholu Parkway?
New York—it would be New York. There was something momentous in the decision. To stay right in New York, to abandon the travel folders of her imagination, to know she was half an hour away from Matthew, that she could phone Cele and ask her over, see Gene—
So of course, New York. If not the Bronx, then Brooklyn, out in Bay Ridge or near Coney Island. Perhaps good old Manhattan, just across the park, over on the West Side. Apart from Lincoln Center, she could probably wander all those side streets and avenues for hours every day without seeing one soul she knew.
The fact startled her. Life in New York was stratified, sectionalized, “segregated” not only as to black and white but also as to income, general style, general background. That awful word status. She knew her own segment of the city, that one narrow strip of attractive clean streets just east of Fifth and Central Park, where she had always lived, and where most of the people she knew had always lived too. There was a snobbery in it, suddenly horrid, a snobbery she had never caught before. She was angry at it now, glad to awaken to it at last. She would break through it, had to, wanted to. It would be part of the newness and goodness of everything else so suddenly happening.
She turned to the back pages of the Times, but at once realized she would do better with the Sunday Times where the real estate ads would be in the hundreds instead of in the weekday dozens. If not this Sunday which was the always shrunken post-Christmas paper, then in the next. Too early to look seriously, but just about right for some self-education.
She returned once more to her list of minors and majors and telephoned Cele. “Hi, I’ve decided to do it for myself. Do you want to come with me?”
“Do what yourself?”
“Get my own clothes.”
“Suppose you run into somebody, from the paper or wherever?”
“Couldn’t I be in a maternity shop buying a gift for a dear pregnant friend?”
“Sure you could. Okay, I’ll go along and buy one for a dear pregnant friend.”
They met in an hour and by noon Dori had chosen everything she would be likely to need for the half year ahead. This was a new world to her, a world of the young, judging by the other customers, a world she had never even shared beyond a passing glance at some coy headline in an advertisement about “lady-in-waiting” or “blessed eventuality.” She was not surprised that the clothes were so pretty, but their prices astounded her. A navy dress in a ribbed silk was a hundred dollars; a red checked housecoat, sixty; there seemed to be nothing for anybody poor. Suddenly she thought again of the girl who “got caught” and had to go on with her job, thought of her looking at these clothes, these price tags, thought of her going away empty-handed. There were thousands of such girls at this very minute of time, maybe hundreds of thousands, with their fear, guilt, shame, anger at the man who had “knocked them up.” She could suddenly see them as a group, as a part of society out there in the city, in all the cities.
There’s a minority for you, she thought; I guess it’s my minority from now on. She wondered how big it really was, what the world really knew about it. She might find out for herself, right away while she could still go to libraries and newspaper morgues, save up the research until she was ready to write a piece about it.
“That’s enough,” Celia said firmly. “You try these on before you get swamped.” The saleswoman showed them into a cubicle of fitting room, said, “When you decide, call me,” and disappeared.
Another surprise caught Dori as she tried on the navy dress, a distant pleasure she could foretell as she imagined herself bulky inside it one day, and an impatience for that bulk to come, meaningful, unmistakable, a commitment from which there was no escape except the good escape of completion.
A sudden desire to show herself to Matthew in this dress seized her and she unexpectedly announced, “This one I’ll take home with me, Cele. I just might wear it right away.”
“A preemie,” Cele said, laughing. But to herself she thought, Is she still seeing him? I thought they were winding it all up.
At home that evening, with some vague talk of cutting expenses, Dori gave Nellie two weeks’ pay in lieu of notice and then checked off on her list the minor about Nellie and the minor about clothes. Minor or not, victories. In the morning she slept late, relaxed and warm and free of wake-up compulsions; then, remembering, she dressed quickly and went to the library.
It was the main branch at Forty-second and Fifth, the very sight of which always gave her a rising sense of expectation. In the vast catalog room, she went to the B and C sections and searched the cards for Birth and Childbirth. A subhead on one card caught her eye: “Illegitimate birth; 302,400 in yr.” Three hundred thousand in one year, she thought, in this country alone; my God, are any of those three hundred thousand girls happy about it? She started for the reading rooms to get the book, but as she passed the A cards, she hesitated. Ab, Ac, Ad. She pulled out the Ad drawer and riffled through it half guiltily, telling herself that Adoption Laws could wait for another time. But she kept on, pausing at last over a card for a magazine article on “Single Parent Adoptions.”
As if she had no choice, she filled out a blank for it and went straight to the Periodical Room. She was excited, tingling and warm along her temples as if a pleasant headache were possible, and she began to read. Too quickly at first, her eyes racing ahead of her mind like searchlights on a road trying to pick up some valuable object far ahead. After a moment she made herself start again at the beginning.
There was nothing in the statutes of New York State that prohibited a single person from adopting a child, though it rarely happened. The public adoption agencies still clung to their old standards of what constituted acceptability in adoptive parents; the optimum still was the married couple with a reasonably good income, happy in marriage, stable in personality, still young though not so young that they had been childless for fewer than three years. But an experiment begun in Los Angeles a few years aback had proved that single-parent adoptions could and did work, and that they were often the only way to place the children most optimum parents didn’t wish to adopt: the handicapped child, the Negro child, the Mexican child, the child of mixed bloods or mixed religions.
After Los Angeles the new concept had been ventured upon in half a dozen other cities; by now eight states had shifted from their rigid two-parent rule, and New York was one of them.
Change, changing, she thought, new mores, new wisdoms. She read the article once more, this time taking notes. The agencies all were officialdom itself—she would never go near officialdom. Would that make a difference?
Matthew would know. Or a partner in his office would know. The moment she told him, he would begin to help her. Suddenly she wished this was not a crowded week for him, wished there were no clients, no crisis with Johnny, no three-day family weekend off there in the snow.
Cut that out too, she thought a moment later. Futile wishing is one more thing you’re never going to do.
“So, somewhere in this city,” Dr. Jesskin said slowly, “you will get thee to a nunnery, so to speak. That is very good. Certainly for the sake of this baby who will be your child, it is very good. You have thought it out, in my opinion, to a decision that is wise. I am glad.”
The grave tone, the unexpected quote, inappropriate to the point of being ludicrous—there was something so straightforward and so simple in the way he used them that she thought, I love him. He is so good and kind I really love him. He reached for his calendar and she waited.
“I have thought out some matters too,” he said. “In April, the start of the sixth month, you will no longer come here to the office, even as my first morning appointment. I will instead start making house calls. Hideout calls, you might say.”
“Oh, Dr. Jesskin.”
“And for your confinement in July,” he went on, glancing at her open folder, “where do you intend to go?”
“I hadn’t even thought that far ahead.”
“I already have to. Now that you do think of it, have you any idea where you will go to give birth?”
“Some small private hospital, I suppose.”
“My dear Mrs. Gray, no. You are not going to have this baby in some little medical setup somewhere, and certainly not in your rented room.”
“Then where? You have it all decided!”
“Yes, I think so. But it depends.” He checked himself. His face was animated again and she thought. He’s not only good, he’s quite good-looking.
“It depends on money,” he said firmly. “We must first consider money. My fee of course will be at your convenience, but I do not know if you can—if you are pressed—”
“I have thirteen thousand dollars in a savings bank,” she said simply. “Not from alimony—I hate alimony. My father left us each—” She broke off in confusion. She wanted his help and his approval, but why was she telling him this much, why putting in her proud little bit about no-alimony? She glanced at him in embarrassment. He was again his usual self, attentive, waiting, absorbed. “I mean, within reason I can afford whatever you think best.”
“Well then,” he said, “we can dismiss the rented room and the little medical setup.” The first hint of irony sounded. “In that case you are going to have this baby right in Harkness Pavilion, right on the eighth floor, the maternity floor. That is where.”
“Harkness?” She could not think he was joking, but Harkness? City editors always kept an eye on Harkness. The wealthy went to Harkness, the celebrated, the illustrious, people who made news, whose deaths and births and illnesses and recoveries were minutely reported in the press.
He was watching her, with delight in her disbelief. “One does not expect an illegitimate birth at Harkness, so that is where you will go, one of the pampered ladies there.”
Suddenly she laughed. “How marvelous! I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”
“The one thing different from the other ladies is that you will not be on orders to walk the corridors for exercise. You will stay behind your closed door all the time, before and after, and a NO VISITORS sign on the door. You see I am considering matters.” He held up his hand to ward off her thanks. “One more thing. On that door, along with the sign of NO VISITORS, will be two names. One will be Jesskin, but yours will be—what?”
“My false name? I’ve thought of a dozen—”
“I will need to know soon, to reserve a room for July twenty-third or thereabouts.”
Suddenly she leaned toward him, her eyes anxious. “There will have to be a false birth certificate, won’t there? Under whatever name I choose?”
“Yes.”
“But you will be signing it?”
“Of course.”
“Couldn’t you be disbarred or whatever it is, for signing a legal document you know is false?”
He picked up the paperweight, apparently examining its many facets. When he spoke, his voice was dry, remote, as if he had all at once become very nearly a stranger.
“We will be very clever,” he said, “and this will remain our personal business. But if I am found out, and charged with signing a false birth certificate, I would have to find a way to manage that.”
“But have I the right to let you run such a risk?”
“My dear girl, it is not you alone who are involved.” He rose and she thought, It’s the first time he’s sounded sentimental about the baby. “The other person now involved,” he continued as he nodded to her in farewell, “is me.”
It was a wild idea but she could not resist it. She had to see it, look up at it, imagine herself there on a hot blue Summer day. The bus to take was the No. 4, and she walked from Dr. Jesskin’s office to the bus stop on Madison and waited.
Harkness, eighth floor, the maternity floor—just saying the words made July twenty-third closer. Everything since she had made her list had done that, piling reality on reality. How much more there was to tell Matthew tonight than there had been one week ago.
At nine or ten tonight she would be telling him. This time there would be no backing away. She was suddenly impatient. If only it could be this moment instead. Or at lunchtime or at five. A No. 4 bus was bearing down on her but suddenly she drew back from the curb. They had never had luncheon together and they had never even met for cocktails.
She found a phone and dialed his office. She had called him only once before but she recognized his secretary’s voice and said, “Is Mr. Poole in? This is Theodora Gray.”
“Yes he is, Mrs. Gray. Just a moment.”
It was several moments before he came on and her heart began its familiar thudding. She must not think now of how he would take it; she never should have wondered how he would take it.
“Hello,” Matthew said in the receiver, and she said, “I hate disturbing you at your office. Happy New Year,” and he said, “I like to be disturbed,” in an artificial bright tone that was for his secretary. “Happy New Year to you.”
“I wonder if—I wanted to talk to you about something and I thought maybe you could drop by for a drink after the office.”
There was a pause, and then, almost formally, he said, “If you think best, I could make a free hour right now.”
“You could? In the middle of everything?”
“Of course I could.”
“Oh, Matthew, thanks.”
“I have a couple of phone calls first, and then I’ll be there. Let’s say about twelve. Perhaps you’d give me a sandwich.”
She hurried home and changed into the navy dress, finding a rightness in wearing it now for the first time. He was dropping everything, perhaps canceling a luncheon appointment; he had instantly understood that this was no idle impulse and he was responding without pause. It was part of him, part of what drew her to him, this responsiveness in him awakening total response from her.
The navy dress seemed frivolously short, shorter than she had thought it when she had tried it on in the store, shorter than her usual clothes, but she rather liked the frivolity of it. And she liked herself in it—if she stood tall in it, holding in hard, there was still nothing but the flat straight planes of the navy silk.
Making sandwiches and coffee, she tried not to rehearse what she would say. Rehearsed lines were always false, glib, revealing a poor thin worried tension in the speaker. But she rehearsed it anyway, framing the first thing she would say, then the next, hearing her voice speaking to him, his answering her, until by the time he arrived and asked, “What is it, darling?” she felt confusedly that she had, by some telepathic miracle, already revealed everything she had to tell him.
“It’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, but kept putting off and off.”
His face was sober and he looked at her with a concentrated attentiveness. She said, “Oh Matthew, thank you for coming right over,” and preceded him into the living room. His concern was so total. Men always expected total attention from the girl they were with, but so few returned it when it was the girl speaking. Her throat was dry but she ignored the bar table and sat beside him on the sofa, suddenly floundering for any words at all.
“What, Dori?”
“Oh Matthew, I’m suddenly so nervous, it’s so important to me.”
“Is it about us?”
“Not really, and yet it is, the way anything is now.” She saw her own fingers interlacing and clutching at each other. “You were so marvelous when I told you about all that time of my trying to get pregnant, you understood it, you really saw how it must have been.”
“Darling, are you pregnant now?”
He said it so swiftly, the impression of eagerness in his way of saying it was so fleeting, that she could never be sure it was there. For one flashing moment she thought, Women all over the world, but she flinched from it and the instant was lost.
“That first night we made love, I didn’t know yet—I was afraid to believe it. I had been to Dr. Jesskin that very morning for tests but the results weren’t in yet and it could have been nothing, a skipped period, it’s happened before—”
“That first night?”
“I’d seen Jesskin in the morning but he couldn’t know without tests—”
He stood up abruptly. He seemed very tall standing above her, tall and rigid and alien. He was not looking at her, he was not looking at anything, he seemed not to be breathing. Then he said, in a rough voice she had never heard, “Are you pregnant by another man? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“If I’d already known for sure that first night, I would have told you then and there—no, I couldn’t have told you yet, but I wouldn’t have let us start.”
“Are you saying you are pregnant?”
“Oh yes, and I—”
“Pregnant by somebody else. You are saying that too?”
“You see, I was coming to the end of an affair, and usually with me, a year or so will go by before I even meet anybody who interests me again, but this time you—”
He caught her wrist. “You are going to have a baby from that other affair and you’ve known it and you let us go ahead, deeper and deeper, with me not knowing one goddam thing about it. Christ!”
He flung her wrist free and she was hot with anger at the rage in his words. She squeezed her lids shut as if to hold back tears but she heard him cross the room to the bar table, heard him open the whiskey carafe and pour a splash of Scotch and drink it, without bothering with ice or soda.
“I meant to be more careful,” she said, “about the way I told you, I didn’t dream it would suddenly be said. For a long time I meant to write something to you first, or maybe just say I was going away for a while because of something that had happened before I ever met you.” He said nothing. His hand rested on the neck of the whiskey carafe, fingers tight around its filigreed silver collar. “But ever since I told you the first part of it I wondered what had made me pull back and then it all seemed banal to wait and try to think how to say it, as if I were afraid or ashamed.”
“Damn it, you’re thinking exclusively of what you felt and how you feel.”
“I’m not. I’ve thought a million times about how you would take it, I’ve worried so about the way you might feel, I kept thinking, ‘Just for one more week, and then I’ll find the right way to tell him—’”
“So you blast me with it like a load of buckshot.”
Dori winced at his roughness, but thought, You did blast him. How had it happened? How could things go so wrong? “I didn’t mean to blast you. I’m sorry—oh you have to know I’m sorry it came out that way.”
He made no reply. He went to the window and stood staring out at the raw winter day, the streets grayed with sooted snow. She suddenly thought of her brother Gene staring out the window that night she had told him and Ellen, and the dearness of Gene ever since, even after Ellen’s visit. But Gene was her brother.
She felt sad and compassionate toward him, a new sense of Matthew despite his rage. She started toward him, but halted. Everything she said now came out wrong.
He suddenly left the window. “Why don’t you look pregnant?” He looked pointedly at her stomach. “How long has it been?”
“I do look it when I’m not standing this way, straight up this way, holding myself in. It’s part of the exercises I do, it’s sort of a habit already.” She hesitated and then said, “See?” As she let her muscles relax, the flat planes of the navy dress altered; a delicate sphere took shape.
He looked away sharply. “How long has it been?”
“This is the eleventh week.”
“Then every time we’ve been together—oh my goddam Christ.”
She remembered his talk about cross-examining and nearly cried out that he had no right to put her through this quizzing. But he did have the right. She had given him the right by loving him and letting him love her.
“Are you going to marry the—the—whoever he was?”
“I haven’t even’ told him. He’s away now.”
“Going to blast him with it too?”
“I don’t know whether I will ever tell him at all.”
He started to speak but thought better of it. He went to the bar again and splashed more Scotch into the glass he had left there, still not bothering with ice or soda. Then he said, “I’d better not stick around. I’ll call you when I get this into some sort of shape.”
Dori watched him go to the front door where she had so often met him with an upsurging of pleasure, and the drag of depression pulled downward throughout her body. He took up his coat and hat, not putting them on, and left.
She turned back to the living room. On the coffee table the pretty plate of sandwiches, the fruit and coffee suddenly repelled her. She remembered the way he had looked at her after asking why she didn’t look pregnant. Again she squeezed her eyelids shut but this time the tears came anyway. She went to her room, took off the navy dress, hung it deep in her closet as if it were something to be hidden even from herself, and went back aimlessly to the living room. The thought of food was repugnant. She drank a cup of coffee, took everything out to the kitchen and started to wash the dishes. It was important at times like this to have something essential to do.
An hour later she was on the street once more, on the corner of Madison, waiting for the No. 4 bus. This time she took it eagerly, as if it contained some miracle comfort she could find nowhere else. She watched the store windows go by, watched the people, watched the traffic lights, her mind emptied by some primitive mechanism, draining it of pain and guilt. She felt guilty because she had failed in the way she had told him. Matthew deserved more of her, anybody deserved more of the person he loved, for there was an unwritten treaty between two people in love, to spare the other needless pain and shock. Pain and shock there might have been for him no matter how gentle she had been in the telling of this news, but she had multiplied them both by “blasting him with it.”
Defensive, Dori, always defensive. For such a long time now those words had not sounded in her mind, not once, but here they were again, like old antagonists one had hoped to be rid of forever but who persisted in coming back at unlikely times, unbidden but undismissable. But this time she could not ignore them.
This was a major, more major than anything she had written into her happy list. She knew that losing Matthew for good was what she had been afraid of all along, the threat through all her delays and timetables. And she also knew that to lose him for good would entail no minor adjustment; it would be no peaceful and willing ending of an affair as it had been with Dick Towson, but total upheaval as at the end of her marriage. She shuddered.
Outside the bus window the streets grew unfamiliar and strange. Dori tried to pin her attention to them, like some sightseer from a foreign land, but she could not concentrate. Delay was so false, so much the opposite of what she really was. She should have told him that first night, before they had ever touched each other, there on the red sofa; she should have blurted it out right then, “It’s probably all a mistake, but there is one chance in a billion that I am pregnant, and I won’t even know until Thursday.” That would have been shock too, but a protective one keeping them back from a worse danger.
Instead she had thought, Just this once, and then through the hours that followed, just these wonderful days. No matter how natural that had been, no matter what her motives, the delay and then the planning were so out of character for her, she should have known better than to rely on them even for a short while. She had been called tactless too often not to know that she lacked the small graces of subterfuge. And she had been called oversensitive too often not to know that she was not one of the thick-skinned of the world who never got hurt. Faults, both of them, but together they added up to something that was the basic truth about her.
For the first time, Dori felt comforted, and by the time she left the bus and stood looking up at the great blocks of white buildings between her and the river, she began to recapture at least part of the eagerness she had felt that morning when she had left Dr. Jesskin’s office.
There was Harkness Pavilion, a separate unit from the main hospital, closer to the river. She counted upwards; there was the eighth floor. The maternity floor. The arctic wind whipping at her from the Palisades across the Hudson suddenly lost its meaning; she could imagine a July day of piercing blue sky and yellow morning light and somewhere in there herself in the very act, the everyday, commonplace, unbelievable act of giving birth.
She began to walk toward the river. She stood at the crest of Riverside Drive and looked up once more. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—one of those windows on the eighth floor may belong to my room. She could see herself standing by the window, looking out at the water, and something in her seemed to stretch forward toward that distant day, as if one could crane toward a point in time.
She retraced her steps and again stood on the Broadway comer where she had left the bus. But she was too restless to enclose herself in the specific space of a taxi or bus, and she began to walk, not the crisp positive walking she did every day as part of her orders, but an aimless, sightseeing walk, not ambling only because the wind was too sharp for meandering along. The stores interested her, the movie houses, the neighborhood in general. For all she knew she might find her furnished room somewhere near here; this might become the hideaway.
A store caught her eye because of its name, Tots and Toddlers, and though she smiled at the mawkishness, she stopped to look at the window display. Then with no prior decision to do so, she went in and said to the only clerk there, “I’d like to buy a present for a newborn baby.”
“Boy or girl?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed in confusion and said, “It just happened and I haven’t even heard that much. Does it matter?”
“Not if you don’t care about blue or pink. What sort of present were you thinking of?”
“Anything, nothing fancy.”
The woman looked at her with less interest, as if she had received a code message that this customer was not ready to be lavish. She turned to a series of shelves behind her, stacked one above the other, but each open on its front face like a bookcase. “A wrapper,” she said. “Like a bathrobe, you know?”
Dori accepted the scrap of white flannel she had handed her and instantly said, “Why, the whole sleeve isn’t as long as my middle finger.”
With a voice tinged with the faintest scorn, the woman said, “Have you ever seen a real newborn baby?”
Dori laughed outright. “Only from a distance,” she said. “This will be the first time close up. I’ll take it.”