He sat for five hours in the waiting room out front. He held a magazine in his lap, on the cover the lower branches of a Christmas tree and under them the same magazine, the same cover, the same Christmas tree, magazine, tree, magazine, falling away like a shaft. For four hours he heard her screams and sat motionless, his hands closed over his face. Between her screams he heard voices mumbling, but there was no one near. It grew light outside and the wind dropped off and the nurses changed shifts. A day nurse touched his arm and said, “Coffee?” He looked up and nodded, not understanding. He said, “My wife—” She came back with coffee and he sipped it and his mind cleared a little. “She’s stopped,” he said. For an instant he felt light, giddy; then a vague possibility came to him, and after a moment, staring at the magazine without seeing, he was sure of it: She was dead. It made his heart trip. “She’s dead,” he whispered. The nurse said, amused, “Nonsense.”
Doc Cathey and George came in, talking and laughing. George hesitated at the door. Henry called out, getting up, “They phoned you?”
George shook his head, still holding back. “Not me. Baby born yet?”
“She’s dead. I think Callie’s dead.”
Doc Cathey stood still for a second. “Chickenmanure. They ain’t that stupid.”
Henry shook his head, pulling at his hand so hard it hurt. “She was in labor for forty-eight hours, and then the bleeding. I don’t know. I think—”
“Faddle,” Doc Cathey said. He leered, but he pivoted away and went through the double doors. He didn’t come back.
George said abruptly, “You and I are going to have some breakfast. Come on.”
Henry stood there unsteadily, his seat and the backs of his legs numb, and then went for his coat. George closed his hand over Henry’s elbow as they moved to the door and out into the cold and down the steps. The brilliance of snow on the lawn, on trees, on rooftops, stabbed at Henry’s eyes. For an instant the ring of mountains around them seemed to be moving; then they were utterly still, blue-white.
George slid in behind the wheel and ground on the starter a minute before the truck motor caught and roared. The truck cab shook, and through a gap in the floor boards Henry saw the motionless, soft snow on the road. George slipped his hand around the wheel to the gearshift and pulled it to low, then shifted to high and caught at the wheel.
“You’re tired, Henry,” he said. “If this business kills anybody it’s gonna be you.” And then he said, “Or maybe it’s me it’ll kill.” He laughed.
It might have been a boy, Henry thought. A boy like George, maybe born unlucky, who’d grow up to be orphaned and go off to the army and half-kill himself for a Japanese girl sixteen years old and a prostitute, or that was what Lou Millet said, and would come back home after that and crawl back to farming, a worn-out farm with worn-out equipment that would eat him alive, limb by limb, and maybe after that his heart if there was anything left of it. They’d have named him James.
Henry said, “If Callie was to die—” It came to him that he didn’t believe any more that she would die. He’d stopped thinking it the minute he’d seen George and Doc Cathey. He felt better, then worse. He should never have left. They might call for him any time.
George said, “The hell with you. You’re gonna have a little boy with a big wide slit of a mouth like Callie’s and a three-foot span across the shoulders and he’ll love up the country cunts till a guy like Freund looks like a eunuch.”
Henry breathed in shallowly and held it, and after a second he saw that George was shocked too, afraid even to explain what he meant, if he could, because Henry might have missed it. Henry tried to think what to say. He watched the brown snow on the street flash by under the floorboards.
George stopped the truck at Leroy’s place, and they got out and went down the ice-coated steps and in. The air was too warm, greasy. The place was crowded, a few women but mostly the old men who came in every morning from houses and attics and furnished rooms to get breakfast. At both ends of Leroy’s place there were mirrors; they made the room go on forever. Henry thought again of how many people there were in the world—fifteen, twenty here, ten thousand in town, another six thousand in Athensville, still more in Albany, Utica—it was hard to believe: “All these people sitting here without a worry,” he said, “and my poor Callie—”
George slid into the booth, looking down, then grinned and said, “It’s a funny damn thing … human beings, horses, cats. …”
Henry nodded, uncertain what he meant. He remembered the blood on the sheet.
George watched him, then held a cigarette toward him. He said, as if thinking of something else, “They look like they’ve had a hell of a time of it, don’t they.”
Henry looked, frowning. There was an old man with whiskers and a wrinkled neck, a large blue lump on his temple. At the table beside him there was a younger man reading a paper, leaning close to it.
Henry said, “I guess you don’t remember my father.”
“Vaguely,” George said. “I was just a kid then.”
Henry leaned forward and folded his hands and looked at the boy with the newspaper. “He could talk to birds, all kinds of them. They’d walk on his shoulders like he was a stump. Fattest man you ever saw in your life. Three hundred and seventy pounds. It finally killed him.”
George waited.
“He was an elephant. He walked with a cane two-inches thick. I remember he use to read poetry nights. It would make him cry.”
“They say he was a fine man,” George said.
Henry nodded, then shook his head slowly. “He was an elephant. Christ, you should’ve seen the coffin. Biggest damn coffin you ever saw, big as the world. With him in it it must’ve weighed six hundred pounds.”
George was watching the old man with the lump on his temple. Behind the old man there was a woman with penciled eyebrows and a powdered face and lumpy hands. A boy was with her, thirteen maybe, weak-jawed and weak-eyed and grinning. He looked like his mother, trapped already in what his mother was. Maybe it was like that with everybody, Henry thought. The spindly, crochety night nurse who liked to deliver babies herself, dead or alive, she was somebody’s daughter. And Costard, narrow-shouldered, toeing out, pot-bellied under the vest, he had children, he said. Henry shook his head. “It’s funny,” he said. “Jesus.”
George drew in on his cigarette, then let smoke come out with his words. “It’s funny as hell. You know what every one of these people’s got? A mirror. Put a man on a desert island and the first thing he’ll set out to find is a clear pool where he can see how he looks.”
It sounded bitter, and Henry laughed uncomfortably. Then he covered his face with his hand.
“Matter, boy?”
“Nothing,” he said.
He’d forgotten completely. He’d been sitting here for ten minutes, and he’d never thought about her once, not even to wonder if she’d meant it when she’d shouted, “I love somebody else.” It had seemed a long way between where he’d stood and the bed where Callie lay. He’d stood there helpless, his head pulled in, old, as if past all human use. Maybe she had meant it, too. Because there was, even now, Willard Freund. You never had a chance. Maybe you’d find something you thought a lot of, but it didn’t matter, all you could ever count on for sure was someday your heart would quit. His hands clenched.
George said, watching him, maybe reading his thoughts, “You look tired as hell.”
He relaxed. The waitress came. She had a long, pocked face, and she had on pink lipstick. She smiled at George, a come-on, and when she left, Henry said, not looking up, “She likes you. You ought to marry her.”
George grinned. “Once burned, twice shy.”
“You ought to marry somebody,” Henry said. “I mean it. Callie says so too.”
He wasn’t prepared for what it set off. George sat still and didn’t speak, then abruptly crushed out his cigarette and stood up. “We better get back.” He grinned then, but on the way to the hospital he didn’t talk.
The woman at the desk said, “Mr. Soames, you can go down to Maternity now. Dr. Costard’s been looking all over for you.”
Henry wet his lips, then went to the double door. When he glanced back, George winked. He was sitting down now, over in the shadowed corner of the room, by the magazine table. His eyes, looking into the light, were shiny like the eyes of the owl. His face was the color of ashes.
At the Maternity desk Henry almost asked if either of them had lived, but he stopped himself, simply stood leaning forward, one hand clinging to the other, waiting.
“You may see your wife,” the nurse said. And so he knew that it was the baby that had died if one of them had, not Callie; but he held himself back. She hadn’t said that. And then they were leading him into a room and somehow he knew at once—though she lay still, as if unconscious—that she was alive. The guard rails were up on the bed. When you were dead you didn’t need any guarding. He touched her hand. The nurse said, “It wasn’t Caesarean. They cut from below and used Kjelland forceps.”
“Did the baby live?” he asked.
The nurse smiled, cat-like. “They’re cleaning up now.”
He started to ask it again, but she left him.
Callie opened her eyes a little, looking at him. He leaned toward her. “Doctor,” she said, her voice light, drugged, “isn’t Henry here yet?”
He stood perfectly still, puzzled, his back going cold.
Her fingers moved as if to grasp his hand, but she was too weak. She said, “You been good to us, Henry and me. Everybody’s been. I want you to tell Henry. …” She smiled, far away, as though she really had died, withdrawn to where none of them could reach her, and she whispered, “Doctor, my husband is a good kind man. Tell him I said so. Tell him I said it in my sleep.” She smiled again, mysterious, suddenly foxy, and her eyes closed. Henry blinked.
And then it was Doc Cathey beside him, leading him through blinding sunlight past wilting, burnt-up plants to the wall of windows that looked in at the cribs.
“Doc,” Henry whimpered, shaking now, off his bearings; his right hand pulled at his left.
“Don’t blubber,” Doc snapped. “You’d think it was the first brat born on earth. Cain maybe. You make me sick.”
The nurse said, “It’s a boy, Mr. Soames. A big, big boy. Nine pounds, one ounce.” It lay with its hands folded up like a monk’s, its mouth angular, like Callie’s. There were forceps scars across the cheeks and one ear was black and cauliflowered. The head was browless and misshapen. The mouth quivered, crying.
“Well?” Doc Cathey barked. He cupped his hand under Henry’s elbow.
Henry leaned his forehead against the glass, his chest flaming. He could hear the baby’s voice through the glass. Then he couldn’t see anymore, he was crying now, and things were in motion all around him, reeling. “He’s beautiful,” he said. Tears ran down and he could taste them. “He’s beautiful. Holy Jesus.”