7

“WHY DID YOU CUT YOUR HAIR, PEARLIE?” THEY SAID AT work, especially Ruby, who sat at the next desk. Mr. Glynnis was known to call them the Jewels.

“I got tired of long hair,” said Pearl.

Everyone accepted that but Ruby. “You always said you’d never cut your hair,” she said. “If I had hair like that, I’d never cut it.”

Pearl looked up at her. Ruby was passing her desk and had stopped to sort papers she was taking to different parts of the building. They hadn’t even been talking about hair. Ruby filed the letters going to Mr. Glynnis between her first finger and middle finger, the ones for Mr. Carmichael between her middle finger and ring finger. She had a system. When she had letters to go downstairs, where the company now had an accountant working, she put them between her ring finger and her pinkie. Ruby was short and her fingers were thick and stubby. Pearl had always liked the way she held them out with the letters gripped between them. Now Ruby looked back in a funny way as she left the cubicle. Over the partition Pearl could hear the sounds of the floor, where women packaged blouses and men hauled boxes. Soon Ruby returned, her hand empty, and stopped again at Pearl’s desk. “I hope I didn’t speak out of turn,” she said in a low voice. “I think your hair looks very pretty.”

“I didn’t mind,” said Pearl. She had finally had it trimmed at the beauty parlor. No one there had asked questions after all.

“Long hair must have been a nuisance,” Ruby went on.

“My husband liked it better before,” Pearl said. If that was true, she didn’t know. She and Mike were still barely speaking. The way things were at home reminded Pearl of a time when she’d been in high school. Her father had caught her with a boy he didn’t like and had threatened her. They didn’t speak for weeks except for things they couldn’t help saying: “Come eat.” “Mama wants you.” Once Pearl watched for ten minutes while he searched for his hat, and didn’t tell him she could see it on the floor behind the dining room table, tipped sideways where it had fallen.

“He was angry that you cut it?” said Ruby.

“Yes.”

Pearl thought her grief might kill her or kill the baby. She kept imagining herself shrieking. When Mr. Carmichael called her into his office to dictate a letter, Pearl could hardly wait for the moment when she could sit down. His habit was to keep her in the doorway while he explained where the letter was going, as if she might object to writing to a department store in Trenton. After she nodded, he’d clear a place for her to sit, moving papers from one chair to another. Waiting, an hour or so after her conversation with Ruby, Pearl was afraid she would hurl her face against the doorjamb, slamming it into the wood.

“I want to write to Mr. Montgomery,” said Mr. Carmichael. “Mr. John Montgomery, is it? James?”

“I’ll check,” said Pearl. “I think John.”

“John, John, yes, certainly John.” It took time for Mr. Carmichael to stop circling a letter and land on it, Pearl and Ruby used to say—though before, Pearl didn’t mind. He was patient with her own inadequate, slow shorthand. Now as she finally sat down, instead of just wishing she were dead or worrying that the baby would shrivel up in her unhappy body, Pearl had a new thought: she could tell Ruby a partial truth.

“I want to tell you something,” Pearl said to her later that day. She and Ruby brought sandwiches from home and always ate lunch together in a little room at the back of the floor where cartons were stacked. “Killington,” Pearl would read off the cartons over and over again—a supplier of boxes. Now Ruby was sitting between Pearl and the window. The boxes looked dusty in the bright winter light. “I’ve fallen in love,” Pearl said. “I’ve fallen in love with my brother-in-law.”

Pearl thought Ruby might not be too shocked if she didn’t say she’d done anything about her love. They could talk. It might help. But Ruby pulled her short body downward as if her stomach hurt.

“I think about him all the time,” Pearl said.

“But that’s how I feel about Billy,” said Ruby. Billy was her boyfriend.

“No, it’s different,” said Pearl.

“Because you’re married?” Ruby looked frightened.

Pearl ignored her. She was sorry she’d mentioned it. It was impossible to say how much she loved Nathan—far more than Ruby could possibly love Billy—how the dusty cartons and the dust in the air itself seemed different once you knew Nathan was in the world. And he didn’t love her. It would be unbearable even if she weren’t having a baby—yet it was also wonderful. Ruby couldn’t understand it.

“I’m sorry, Nathan,” Pearl whispered, running down the stairs at five, when it was finally time to go home. She stepped into the damp winter darkness. People were nearby but she could whisper. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “I’m sorry I told her.”

Sometimes Pearl hoped. Maybe, after all, Nathan would come to her late some night when Mike was not home and urge her to run away with him. “You don’t really want to,” she’d say, avenging herself. For she was furious with him and hated him, even while she loved him.

It wouldn’t have been possible for their night together to have taken place if he hadn’t loved her. Leaning back in the subway one day, her eyes closed, letting herself be shaken by the sloppy but rhythmic thrusting of the train, Pearl imagined a grain of something shiny in the middle of a dark waste. The shiny spot was the chance that Nathan loved her after all. She couldn’t remember now exactly what he had said the day of the malted. She had left so quickly, maybe she hadn’t understood.

She would never again speak to Nathan about what had happened, and he might never speak to her, but if she could believe in the shiny spot, she could live.

She had no morning sickness, which made the doctor look sober. “Are you sure?” he repeated.

“Yes. Isn’t that good, not to be sick?”

“Sometimes it’s better to be a little sick,” he said.

That made Pearl think something was wrong with the baby. Surely he couldn’t tell what she had done. She remembered that she had offered Hilda the baby. That was shameful. It was her baby. It was all she had. Of course the doctor did not rise from his listening posture to accuse her of bearing a child whose heartbeat revealed the wrong father. Nor could he tell, apparently, that Pearl was in trouble with her husband. He called her Mother, and advised her to eat baked potatoes and not too much salt.

He worried less as she began to grow bigger. “Well, you’re a lucky girl,” he said finally. “Some mothers never do feel sick.”

“I feel fine,” said Pearl. Ruby said it was because Pearl was tall and so the baby had room and didn’t squeeze her stomach. Ruby was excited that Pearl was having a baby. Pearl had told her about it before she told anyone else in the office, and that secret went over better. It was two weeks after she’d told the first secret, which had not been mentioned again. This time Ruby sat up straighter and grinned. She gave a great sigh, as if she’d been worrying all that time about Pearl’s love for Nathan, and now she could cross off that problem.

Pearl thought about Nathan all the time. She could feel his sad stare behind her as if he followed her through her life, drawing his conclusions about what she did. He was always there. One bright day in midwinter, Mr. Glynnis sent Pearl to another office a few blocks away with some papers. Pearl walked slowly, watching as people hurried along the wind-polished pavement, and she thought that they held their hats to their heads like folk dancers, though their clothes were not colorful, like dancing costumes. Suddenly she thought of Nathan, with a rush of pain, and realized that for those moments, watching the people clutch their hats, she had forgotten him. She’d had a moment without him for the first time in weeks and weeks.

She liked that, and shook herself, reaching under her coat to follow the curve of her tummy. So far she could hide it with a sweater at the office, but not much longer. Some day, she thought, picturing herself with a baby in her arms, she would go an entire day without thinking of Nathan. Now he was her first thought each morning, and the shame and sorrow of it fell on her when she opened her eyes.

She felt better as the day went on. Sometimes, though she thought about Nathan, it was perfunctory: she’d drop a stack of papers on the floor and think, Nathan!—as if he might have caught it. It didn’t count but it did.

Ruby was having a hard time. Her boyfriend, Billy, was talking about going overseas to fight in the civil war in Spain. Pearl had met him. He was like a boy, a little like Mike but without Mike’s cynical shrug. Mike would never voluntarily go to fight in a foreign country for people he didn’t know, but Billy seemed to glory in that thought. If someone had told him that people in Spain were even more different from him than he believed, that they carried their young on their backs for three years and set their dead afloat in baskets on rivers, Billy’s luminous eyes would have grown even brighter and closer together and he would have been even more determined. It was hard on Ruby, a small woman with freckles who looked about fourteen. Pearl could tell by her wide-open, puffy eyes and fixed look when something had pushed Billy closer to a decision. Once it was a conversation with a friend who was going, another time the departure of the first American volunteers at the end of December.

“My husband thinks the volunteers are crazy,” Pearl said one day, as they ate their sandwiches in the little room filled with cartons. She swallowed hard. “But my brother-in-law thinks it’s wonderful. He’d go if he didn’t have a baby. I went to a rally with him.”

It was the closest she’d come to touching on that subject again, but Ruby ignored that part of it. “It’s not that I don’t think it’s important to support the Loyalists,” she said seriously.

“Of course,” said Pearl.

“But what good will he do anybody if he dies? If he stayed here, if we had children—”

Pearl stood and walked to the window. Her body was beginning to slope outward. She would look better pregnant than poor Hilda had. She knew Ruby was studying her with admiration, as if it were noble just to be pregnant. Pearl looked out the window. “Maybe Billy should talk to Mike,” she said. Listen to Mike, she amended it in her mind. Mike had stopped being so angry with her. He had not been able to sustain it for weeks and months, though she knew that he was still unhappy, and they still had not seen Nathan and Hilda, not since the day Hilda had made them come over.

“Oh, that would be so helpful,” Ruby was saying. “Maybe I could bring him over some night?”

“Sure,” said Pearl. “Whenever you want.” Mike would shout about foolishness. Of course Billy wouldn’t listen—people like that didn’t, and Mike was so loud and argumentative he nourished everyone’s spirit of opposition. He was turning Pearl into an arguer despite herself. “College kids,” he’d said the other day, talking about the volunteers. “What do they know about war? They’ll just be in the way.”

“What does anyone know about war?” she had answered. “Soldiers are always kids.” She had a stab of fear, then, that her baby would be a boy, and someday he’d go to war.

But for once Mike didn’t want to argue. “Where do you get your ideas?” he snarled, leaving the room. Maybe what she had said sounded too much like Nathan.

“My husband isn’t always very nice,” she said to Ruby.

“I’m sure he’s nice underneath,” Ruby said.

Pearl snorted inwardly, to think of what Ruby didn’t know about her family life. Mostly she was so busy thinking about Nathan and her sorrow that she lived in dazed inattention, but sometimes, when she and Mike were together in the apartment and she was alert, she didn’t know how she could keep on as his wife. She could feel his anger, although when he played the saxophone in the other room, she thought it sounded more fearful than angry. She heard the fear of a younger brother whose older brother can take away his treasure because he is bigger. Then she wished heartily that it had never happened—until she remembered the night with Nathan, and the days following it. She would not have been Pearl if it had not happened. She had been an ignorant woman.

Hilda’s birthday was coming. When Pearl first remembered it, she almost cried, to her surprise; she wanted to be with Hilda on her birthday. And Mrs. Levenson, her mother-in-law, would assume that the family would gather on this occasion. For days Pearl thought about it. They had to make up for Mrs. Levenson’s sake. They had to celebrate Hilda’s birthday.

Finally, one night after supper, when she was washing the dishes and Mike was loitering behind her, she said, “I want to invite Hilda and your brother and your mother next Friday.”

“How come?”

“It’s Hilda’s birthday.”

“It is?”

“Yes. We did the same thing last year.”

“If you say so.” Pearl didn’t know whether he was agreeing about last year’s dinner or this year’s, but while Mike was playing the saxophone in the other room, she phoned Hilda.

“This is Pearl,” she began.

“Hello,” said Hilda.

“How’s Racket?”

“She’s fine. She’s getting big.”

“Is she fatter?” said Pearl. It was March—more than four months since they’d seen the baby.

“Longer. Not fatter. She can crawl.”

This seemed friendly, so Pearl risked her invitation. Hilda accepted. Pearl found she couldn’t say Nathan’s name.

“We’ll bring Mom,” said Hilda.

“That’s fine.” Pearl would have to see Nathan—she was afraid but also excited. She was grateful to Hilda for being friendly. “Don’t forget Racket,” she said foolishly.

“Now is that likely?” said Hilda.

“Of course not, of course not,” Pearl murmured, overcome. Off the phone, she tried to think about cooking, but it was a difficult week.

Fifteen minutes after her guests arrived the following Friday, Pearl realized that Mrs. Levenson and Racket made anything possible. She and Nathan were unimportant. Mrs. Levenson wanted to hold Racket, who was still bundled up for the cold outside, and who objected to being held and wriggled out of the old woman’s arms. Hilda put her on the floor to show off her crawling, but Racket thrashed her arms and legs and tore at her hat. Hilda undressed her and smoothed out her dress, but now Racket wanted to crawl, and she was vaulting out of her mother’s arms before Hilda was done with her. Hilda set her on the floor again. “At first,” said Nathan—they were the first words he had spoken, “she could only crawl backwards. Her little face would get farther and farther away.”

Now Racket crawled expertly to a chair and began to suck on the chair leg. Pearl laughed, but Mrs. Levenson said, “Look, look what she’s doing!” and seized the baby.

Again Racket tried to get away from her. “What’s the matter, you don’t like your bubbi?” said the old woman. She lifted Racket into the air with her short arms, leaning her head back and laughing. She was ugly, and it made her uglier when she threw back her head and held her legs wide apart to steady herself, but Pearl, watching from the doorway, rather liked Mrs. Levenson for the first time. The uglier she was, the less ugly, Pearl thought, and didn’t know what that could mean. She ought to go into the kitchen and check on the dinner, but she remained at the edge of the group in the living room and watched Mrs. Levenson try to win over Racket, who cried, but then stopped and reached for her grandmother’s teeth. Mrs. Levenson had big false teeth that showed now, as she laughed at the baby. At last Racket settled into the old woman’s arms, and then her grandmother—who was something like the baby, Pearl noticed—tired of the game.

“You take her, Michael,” she said, thrusting Racket away. “You should learn, a baby coming.”

“I know how to hold a baby,” said Mike, who had been scowling and watching. He took Racket and she snuggled her head into his neck. Pearl saw the look in Mike’s eyes, and she saw Nathan watching. He glanced at her. Nathan would come to hate her, she thought, and rushed into the kitchen, where she took the roast chicken out of the oven and carefully lifted it onto a platter, her eyes filling. She didn’t know why the sight of her husband cradling Nathan’s baby made her feel that Nathan would hate her, but she was as sure as if hatred had come from his body in a long, cold, unpleasant stream. He couldn’t help it, she excused him to herself. She had separated him from his brother. “But it wasn’t my idea,” she said out loud, in a low voice. When she looked up, Hilda was coming in to help and Pearl wondered if she had heard. The table was set. Pearl had done everything before the others had arrived.

“Well?” said Hilda.

“What?”

“Are you cooking in here, or crying, or what?”

“I’m cooking.” Pearl smiled with tears on her cheeks.

“What do you want me to do with these potatoes?”

Pearl handed her a bowl. “She’s not so bad,” she said, inclining her head toward the living room.

“Mrs. Levenson?” Hilda said. “She’s practical. She comes to my house and gives Racket a bath. The baby slips out of her hands, and she shouts to her, ‘Rachela, Rachela, come back, come back!’”

Racket sat on Nathan’s lap during dinner, and he fed her bits of food she could suck on. Pearl marveled that she had ever imagined he might leave Hilda and the baby. Racket mouthed on a piece of boiled carrot, making loud sucking noises that convulsed Mike. The dinner was a success.

The doorbell rang as they were having coffee, and Mike went to answer it. He came back leading Ruby and Billy, whom he had never met. “Friends of yours,” he said to Pearl, and the old suspicion, never far away, was back in place—friends who had perhaps helped her connive with his brother, friends who knew. Pearl wanted to reassure him, but she couldn’t, and she had told Ruby she was in love with Nathan—only that, but still, too much. Now, as she introduced everyone, she was sure Ruby remembered that conversation. And Nathan would guess, and would hate her for yet another reason.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Ruby was saying. “You mentioned we could drop by.”

“It’s fine,” said Pearl.

“This is Rachel,” said Hilda, who was holding the baby now.

“She’s cute,” said Ruby.

“I didn’t know there was a baby,” Billy said, and he sank to his knees to be on Racket’s level, waving his long fingers to get her attention. His eyes seemed even bigger and lighter than when he stopped at the office to call for Ruby and stood there looking as if he’d come in on a shaft of sunlight. Now his eyes seemed lit almost as if to give the baby something to stare at.

“Billy likes babies,” said Ruby.

The kitchen was crowded. They barely had room for Nathan and Hilda and Mrs. Levenson, not to mention the baby, and now there were two more people. Billy remained standing after he stopped playing with Racket, and Mike brought in their only other straight chair for Ruby to sit on. Pearl had to wash her own coffee cup to serve them. She owned six cups and saucers and had never contemplated having so much company at once. Luckily there was enough cake. The kitchen was hot—the heat was bubbling up—and the window was steamy. Billy was wearing a sweater and he took it off. Pearl’s chair was empty, but she’d have to dislodge several people to get to it, so she leaned back against the sink.

“We’ve been arguing about Spain,” Ruby said, looking at Mike. “I brought Billy over because I thought maybe you’d talk to him.”

“Spain,” said Nathan, and he put down his coffee cup and looked steadily at Billy. “You’re interested in Spain?”

“I’m very interested in Spain,” he said. “I’m a student at City College, but I’ve been doing some organizing—rent strikes and that sort of thing. You have time to think when you’re getting locked up every few weeks.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Nathan respectfully.

“I’ve been talking to some people about volunteering. The Abraham Lincoln Battalion—you know about that?”

“I know about that,” said Nathan, with sad kindness. “I’ve been reading about the fighting at Jarama. A terrible thing.”

“I think the Loyalists can win,” Billy said. “It’s an amazing chance—this is a true democracy that the military is trying to stamp out. The people of Spain—”

“Oh, what does a kid like you know about the people of Spain?” said Mike suddenly, and he sounded angry, with all the anger of the last months, the anger against Pearl and Nathan, in his voice.

“What do I know?” said Billy quietly. “Well, I don’t know much.” He sounded good-natured. “Do you know a lot about Spain? I’ve been reading....”

“Me?” Mike was disarmed, but still angry. “No, I don’t know much about Spain. But I also don’t know why a man would want to go fight in Europe if he didn’t have to. I don’t understand this Abraham Lincoln Battalion—I think they’re a lot of crazy idealists.”

“Hold it, Mike—not so crazy,” said Nathan, and it was the first time Pearl had heard the old tone between them.

“How do you stop fascists by dying?” asked Mike, standing, his jaw tight and the muscles standing out. “Hitler’s going to be impressed by the death count? And more impressed if the death count is a bunch of American kids?”

“Hitler?” said Mrs. Levenson. “War with Hitler?”

“They’re talking about Spain,” said Hilda.

“There are Jews in Spain, too,” said Mrs. Levenson. “There are Jews everywhere. Everywhere Hitler will find them.” She seized the baby and held her so tightly that Racket cried. “What a world we make for babies!”

Pearl had read about the dreadful fighting at Jarama. She had not known that Americans were already fighting in Spain until Ruby had told her. She hadn’t known that the group of Americans was called the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Ruby and Billy knew others who had gone—men who didn’t know anything about being soldiers. Nathan had wished he could go, and Pearl realized that many of those going were men just like Nathan, like Nathan if Racket hadn’t come along. Some of them probably had babies. If it hadn’t been for Spain and for the rally, she wondered what might have happened—or not happened—between Nathan and her. It was strange to think that Hitler had caused all this pain she’d been through—and the pleasure, too: the pleasure, even now, of loving Nathan.

Mrs. Levenson took her napkin and mopped her forehead. “It’s hot,” she said. Then she turned to Billy. “Tell me, young man,” she said, “you have a mama? You have a papa?”

“Yes. In the Bronx,” said Billy.

“And what do they think, in the Bronx, that you should go to Spain, maybe get killed—how does your mama like that?”

“I’m afraid she doesn’t like it,” he said. “I tell her, if I go, and the Loyalists win, maybe Hitler and Mussolini will stop trying to take over the world, maybe a bigger war won’t have to happen. I have a little brother—maybe if I fight, he won’t have to.”

“This makes your mama change her mind?” said Mrs. Levenson. “Excuse me I should mind your business for you.”

Billy blushed and looked at his shoes. “No, I’m afraid it doesn’t make her change her mind,” he said.

“And I can’t do anything with him, either, Mrs. Levenson,” Ruby said. She was sitting next to the old lady, her cake still on its plate on her lap, her fork in her hand. “I can’t talk him out of it.”

“You married?” said Mrs. Levenson.

“No, not married, but we’d like to get married. I’d like to have a baby,” said Ruby.

“I wish you luck,” said the old lady formally. “I wish you should have what you want.” She sat back, fanning herself with her napkin, rocking sideways a little bit. Then she began to sing quietly in Yiddish.

“I’ve been working with a group that’s raising money for Spain,” Nathan was saying to Billy in a soft voice. “But that’s all I can do. I’m a coward. I can’t go over there and fight.”

“You have a daughter.”

“I don’t know if I’d have the courage, even if I didn’t have a daughter,” Nathan said. “I do not find myself to be a particularly courageous person.”

Pearl saw Billy staring at him and she knew Billy was falling for Nathan, too. Billy didn’t believe Nathan wasn’t courageous. “To tell the truth, he isn’t,” she said inwardly, thought it in words as if she were speaking to Billy. Nathan hadn’t even had the courage to talk to her about whether or not it was his child she was carrying—yet she too couldn’t help but forgive him. Even now, she liked handling plates and spoons he had touched.

Ruby and Billy apologized for breaking in on a family party, but Pearl was glad they’d come. The dinner had been going well, but if Ruby and Billy hadn’t arrived just as the food was gone and the kitchen was getting hot, something bad might have happened. Mike might have turned on Nathan—though she couldn’t quite imagine that. Mike was angry all the time but he didn’t talk about Nathan or what had happened, as if he had lost the memory but kept the anger.

Or maybe Mrs. Levenson would have been difficult. Pearl assured Ruby, when they talked about it in the office on Monday, that her arrival had been welcome. But Ruby shook her head. Billy hadn’t paid much attention to Mike, but he’d admired Nathan and said Nathan understood him. “It isn’t your brother-in-law’s fault,” Ruby said quickly. “Billy would find a talking dog who’d agree with him, if nobody else came along.”

Ruby was troubled, and a few weeks later she told Pearl that Billy really was going to Spain. He was out buying boots and a canteen at an Army and Navy store. And Pearl was about to stop working; she was too big now to hide her pregnancy. “I’m going to feel so bad,” Ruby said. “May I come to your house sometimes? Just to talk? Will you be with me when he leaves?”

“Sure,” said Pearl.

A few weeks later Billy did leave, on a passenger liner with a group of other volunteers. He’d explained to Ruby—and Ruby explained to Pearl—that it was all secret. The government had outlawed what he was doing, and his passport was stamped “Not Valid in Spain.” The volunteers had to go to France, pretending to be tourists or students, and sneak across the border through the mountains. Ruby mustn’t come down to the ship and wave.

She’d pointed out that if he were going to France to study, she’d go down and wave. “He said I wouldn’t look so miserable then,” she told Pearl, “but I’d look miserable, even then.”

Billy insisted, but when he finally left, on a sunny spring day, Pearl and Ruby went to see the ship depart anyway. “We don’t have to stand on the dock and look conspicuous,” Ruby said. “We could just be passing by.”

They had to walk many blocks from the subway station to the pier on the Hudson. They were shocked at the size of the liner. They could hardly see the passengers, far away, scurrying on the deck. They held back, the wind blowing their hair and blowing cinders into their eyes until Pearl didn’t know whether Ruby was crying or whether she just had something in her eye. It was hard to understand that Billy was on the big ship. At last its horn sounded, and after a while they realized it was moving. It slid away from the dock, and water appeared. At the last minute another woman, who had been standing behind a pillar where they hadn’t noticed her, rushed forward. “Leo!” she shouted. “Leo! Leo! Be careful!” Pearl and Ruby stepped forward, but they didn’t rush toward the ship like the woman. They stood and waved, and Pearl was sure no one could have told them from friends of a departing tourist. The woman who’d called to Leo stumbled as she left the dock. She was older than she had seemed at first, and Pearl wondered whether the woman was Leo’s mother.

Spring was easier for Pearl. She didn’t have to go to the office anymore. They had less money, but she was careful. She didn’t mind being pregnant—she thought she looked fine. She liked wearing maternity clothes. She was still unhappy about Nathan, but away from the office, and with Mike out of the house working, she was free to think about him. She avoided her mother, who wanted to come and visit often. Alone, Pearl could turn her mind into a little shrine to her brief happiness. She encouraged herself to do this because it was better for the baby. It couldn’t be good for a baby if its mother was unhappy all the time. Pearl took herself for walks in the park and neglected the house and the cooking. At last she realized the time was close and she began to get ready. She cleaned the apartment and bought a crib and a layette.

Pearl had her baby on June seventh. Her labor was not too bad and the nurses joked with her, but Pearl was frightened. The baby would be born looking just like Nathan, or something would be wrong with the baby, a punishment for loving Nathan.

Mike was sent to the waiting room. Pearl lay alone, covered with sweat. She thought of Ruby’s Billy fighting in Spain, and it was as if she were fighting in a war as well. Ruby had received a short letter from Billy. He had already made friends, and lost a friend who had died in battle. If Pearl and Nathan could have gone to Spain and given their lives for the Loyalists—perhaps she could have been a nurse—it would no longer be wicked that they had gone to bed together. The greater goodness would wipe out the lesser badness, at least if they died. She thought that maybe the same thing was true about having a baby. If she could bear the pain without complaining, she would be a good person who could be somebody’s mother.

The doctor had told Pearl that when it was time for the baby to be born, he would anesthetize her, but when it happened, late at night, he wasn’t there, and by the time he arrived the baby was coming. Pearl grinned at the doctor when he came into the delivery room. “I’m having a baby!” she said madly.

“Well, that was the idea, wasn’t it?” he said.

One of the nurses laughed and the doctor frowned at her, as if only he and Pearl were allowed to laugh. Pearl didn’t mind being naked below the waist, didn’t mind that nurses were wiping blood and feces from her body. She wanted to send a message to Mike, but all she could think of to say was, It isn’t what I thought it would be like. Of course, the nurses were too busy to carry messages. In another moment there was a great rip of pain—for a second Pearl thought that a stray bullet, somehow careening over from Spain, had hit her—and then came cries, a child’s cry and the nurse’s cry. “A boy, Mrs. Lewis, you got a boy!”

Pearl lay back exhausted. “Let me see him,” she said, but her boy, Simon, was carried off. By the time they brought him back she was asleep, but she roused herself. “Doctor says you want to try breastfeeding,” the nurse was saying to her. Pearl remembered now. She had said that—insisted. She reached for her son. His head was smaller than her breast, or not much bigger. She didn’t know what to do. “Not many of the moms try,” the nurse was saying. “Of course, I was breastfed. My mother can’t believe women don’t do it anymore. But she says it’s bad for your figure.”

“I don’t care about my figure,” said Pearl. She took the breast in her hand and stuck the nipple into the baby’s mouth. The mouth was damp and flaccid around her nipple, and then it slipped off and Simon’s eyes closed. Pearl poked him with her nipple some more. The third time, suddenly his mouth was muscular and busy, and Simon was sucking.

“Of course you don’t have any milk yet,” said the nurse.

“Well, he’s found something,” said Pearl with some excitement. She stroked Simon’s head with her free hand and traced the outline of his body with her finger. He kept his knees drawn up and his eyes closed, like a small swimmer bobbing and floating, trusting her.

Home from the hospital, Pearl sometimes heard Mike’s voice in the bedroom, talking to Simon as if he were an adult. The first time, Pearl thought that somehow someone had come along and gone into the bedroom when she wasn’t looking. Mostly Mike’s words were inaudible, but she heard, “how the hell anybody could think that would work,” and she put down her knitting needles to listen, uneasy. Her mother had taught her to knit and she was making a sweater for Simon, but she found it tedious, and she couldn’t remember to decrease for the armholes.

Mike had made love to her once during her pregnancy—wordlessly, almost brutally. He looked at her, red-faced, afterward, and Pearl wondered whether he had been trying to dislodge the baby from her womb with his penis. She didn’t know if that was possible. She hadn’t asked the doctor if it was all right to have sex when you were pregnant.

Hilda and Nathan came to see Simon the day after she and Mike brought him home from the hospital. They gave him a diaper bag fitted with baby bottles. Pearl wasn’t using bottles because she was nursing, but she didn’t say so. She was pleased. They stayed only a little while. At first Pearl couldn’t look at Nathan, then she allowed herself—or forced upon herself—one long look when he wasn’t looking at her. She noticed wrinkles on his face: he was beginning to look middle-aged. He seemed balder than he had been. He looked sad.

But she didn’t think about Nathan as much. She was busy taking care of Simon. When Mike was at work, she put Simon into his carriage and took him down in the elevator and out into the street. In the hot weather, she walked with him in Prospect Park. Sometimes she passed a small, unpaved playground where, she decided, Simon would play when he was bigger. It was rather far from where they lived, but it had deep shade and a wading pool with a sprinkler in the middle. As she walked, Pearl talked to Simon, who was awake, lying on his back and looking up at her, about the playground and what fun he’d have there.

Twice when she looked into that playground she saw Hilda there. Once Hilda was reading on a bench, shaking Racket’s carriage with one hand. The other time, she was crouching over the wading pool, and Pearl could see the baby, her arms flung wide. Simon was different from Racket, quieter and rounder. He liked being wrapped up, and lay with his arms and legs drawn up to his body even when he was unwrapped. He had radiant smiles. He fed eagerly at her breast.

One Sunday afternoon when she was nursing him, sitting up on their bed because the bedroom window caught a breeze and it was cooler in there, Mike came in and sat down on the bed. He watched silently for a long time. “I like that sound he makes,” Mike said at last. It was true. When Simon nursed, he made a grunting noise. “Do they all do that?”

“I don’t know,” said Pearl hesitantly. He sounded friendlier than he had for a while.

“He’s getting ready to be a musician,” said Mike. “Maybe we’ll start him on the clarinet.”

Simon finished nursing and Pearl burped him and laid him on the bed between them. She looked at the baby and at Mike to see if they looked alike, but Simon just looked like a baby to her, not like Mike or Nathan, though he was dark like Nathan. Of course he was Nathan’s, she thought, but maybe in some way he was Mike’s as well.

“He’s too nice,” said Mike now.

“Too nice? What do you mean?”

“A baby should yell,” said Mike. “This kid’s going to be a pushover. You can’t be like that. This world, you have to be tougher than that.”

“He’ll be tough,” said Pearl, but she didn’t want her boy to be tough. She didn’t want him to fight with other children.

“You have to warn him,” said Mike urgently, as if he were really criticizing Pearl.

“He’s only a baby!” she said sharply.

“Right. Only a baby,” said Mike, and now he sounded sarcastic. She was frightened, and it reminded her of the months when she’d been afraid of Mike.

“What do you mean?” she said in a low voice.

“I’m glad it’s so simple for you,” he said sarcastically. “I’m glad you think he’s only a baby!” He had been happy, and now he was angry, and nothing had happened. Pearl was in her nightgown, though it was afternoon, and it was twisted around her hips, sweaty, smelly with breast milk. She pulled it down as she stood up and took Simon to his crib, but Mike wasn’t watching her; he’d left the room.

Racket was a year old in August, and Pearl went to a toy store for a birthday present. The man in the store said that for a one-year-old, who would be learning to walk, she should buy a push toy. He showed her a rolling spool with a wooden handle. “Once she can walk, you buy a pull toy,” he said. There was a yellow wooden duck on red wheels, which was pulled by a red-and-white string with a big blue bead at the end, and Pearl liked that much better. “But is she walking?” said the man. She didn’t know, but she paid for the duck and put it into Simon’s carriage.

Sure enough, she spotted Hilda crocheting on a bench under a tree. Racket was standing at her knees. Pearl pushed the carriage into the playground.

“How’s Simon?” said Hilda, looking up.

“Fine,” said Pearl. “I came to wish Racket a happy birthday.”

“Thanks. I suppose we should go back to calling her Rachel, but I still like Racket.”

“Does she still make a racket?” said Pearl.

Hilda nodded. Pearl took the toy from the carriage. “Look, Racket, I bought you a birthday present,” she said.

“Nice of you,” said Hilda a little huskily.

“I wanted to,” said Pearl. “Can she walk?”

“She’s starting. It’s hard here because the ground is uneven. At home she can take three steps.”

“The man in the store didn’t want me to buy a pull toy unless she could walk,” Pearl explained.

They looked at each other and laughed together. Racket fastened her mouth on the duck’s yellow wooden beak. Hilda showed her how the toy could be pulled along, and Racket sank to her knees and pushed the duck back and forth on the ground. Then she began to crawl rapidly toward the fountain, leaving the duck.

“Not with shoes on,” called Hilda. Racket was wearing new-looking white leather shoes—real shoes—and socks, and Hilda carried her back to the bench and took them off her. “I let her get her clothes wet,” she said. “I bring extras.”

Pearl took Simon out of the carriage and crouched on the edge of the wading pool with him in her lap. She dangled his feet in the water. He hung limply, then kicked and smiled.

“He likes it,” said Hilda. Racket had seated herself in the water and was slapping it hard with her palms.

“Can she talk?” said Pearl.

“She has a couple of words.”

“She’s easier now?”

“Not really,” Hilda said. But she smiled at Pearl, who had thought Hilda would never smile at her again. Pearl looked down at her easy baby.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you,” said Hilda. “What happened to that boy? Billy.”

“He’s in Spain.”

“He really did go? Oh, I hope he’s all right! Things aren’t going well for the Loyalists.”

“I know,” said Pearl. “I don’t see Ruby so much, now that I’m not working.” Ruby had come to see Simon and had brought him a rattle. She promised to come again, but she didn’t.

Now Racket rolled over in the water. She was drenched and she began to cry. Hilda carried her back to the bench and took off her clothes. She pinned a fresh diaper on Racket, but when she set her down a moment to reach for her sunsuit, Racket began walking toward the pool, where Pearl was still sitting with Simon. She took one step, two, three, four. “Did you see that?” Hilda called, as Racket sat down hard in the sand and patted it, then rolled over to crawl once more. “Four steps!” Pearl nodded and smiled. Yes, she had seen the four steps.

She met Hilda in the playground twice more during the summer. Sometimes she looked for her but couldn’t find her. She was afraid to suggest that they plan to meet, and Hilda didn’t bring up the idea. Pearl didn’t know whether it was painful for Hilda to see her. Probably it was. Once when they met, Hilda was reading while Racket played, and she seemed to mind putting down her book. Another time they talked. Fall was coming, and Mike had a new job as a stenographer for the city department that heard workmen’s compensation claims. Pearl wanted to talk about Mike’s moodiness, about the hard things—and sometimes the friendly things—he said about Simon, but she didn’t.

“You could come over and visit some day,” Pearl said softly as they were preparing to leave the playground. She was lonely. Simon was no trouble but there wasn’t much to do for him, either. Pearl had never been one for cooking and cleaning. She didn’t have any friends, and her mother irritated her. It would be nice if Hilda and Racket would come over some afternoon. Racket could walk now, and she hurtled down the path toward the playground gate. Hilda got up to chase her. “I will,” Pearl heard her say over her shoulder as she ran.

Hilda didn’t come until the middle of November. Pearl had heard that she was sick. She met a neighbor of Hilda’s in the street and the woman said, “Your sister-in-law’s been sick with bronchitis.” Pearl called Hilda to see how she was.

“I’ve been sick and Racket’s been sick,” Hilda said. “Now we’re both really all right. I need to get out. Should I come see you?”

“You don’t want me to come there?” said Pearl.

“I’m sick of the four walls.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course.” It was cloudy out. It looked like rain. Pearl was just as pleased that she didn’t have to bundle Simon up and go outside yet—though she’d have to go later, because she needed milk and salt. She had forgotten to buy salt and had used it all up, even dumping the salt from the salt shaker into the water in which she was boiling potatoes last night. Even so, the potatoes had tasted flat, and Mike had asked for the salt shaker at supper.

She nursed Simon while lying on the couch looking over a magazine. She didn’t think nursing was ruining her figure. Maybe it would make her breasts hang down too much. She experimented, holding Simon a little higher in her arms so as to push her breasts upward. But it was tiring. It was Friday. Friday seemed like a gray day of the week to Pearl, and she played with that idea to find out whether she really held it. She laid Simon on the living room rug and began gathering ashtrays and old newspapers. Mike always left his saxophone out with the case open on the floor and sheet music spread out near it, but she didn’t move any of that.

At last the doorbell rang. Hilda was at the door with Racket in the stroller. “It didn’t fit in the elevator,” she said. “I had to pull it up the steps.” She was out of breath.

“The carriage fits,” said Pearl. “I’m sorry.”

“The carriage is narrower,” said Hilda, still gasping. She pulled the wicker stroller into the living room and sat down immediately. Racket climbed out. Pearl didn’t know why Hilda hadn’t left the stroller downstairs in the lobby. Maybe she was afraid someone would mind.

“Won’t she fall?” she said, watching Racket.

Hilda shook her head. “She just learned to do that last week. She climbs out all the time now.”

Racket walked over to Simon, who was lying on his stomach on the rug. She pushed at his face to turn it over. “Gently, honey, gently,” said Hilda.

“You’re still sick,” Pearl said.

Hilda was still out of breath. “I guess it was stupid to come,” she said.

“I’m glad you came,” said Pearl.

“Well, I wanted to.” Pearl helped Hilda take her coat off, and she put it in the bedroom. Simon was crying and she put him into his bassinet. Maybe he’d sleep. Racket’s nose was running. “She’s really still sick, too,” said Hilda. “I hope Simon doesn’t catch it.”

“He’s nice and tough,” said Pearl.

“He’s a pretty baby.”

“Thank you.”

Pearl made coffee. Racket got into Mike’s sheet music and cried when it was taken away from her. Pearl gave her a magazine to play with, but she wouldn’t be appeased. When Pearl brought the coffee into the living room, Hilda was trying to soothe her by showing her things out the window—a car, a man. Racket rubbed at her face and cried. “She needs to nap,” said Hilda.

Pearl set the coffee cups on the telephone table. They’d make rings on the wood, and she saw Hilda looking, probably thinking that Pearl should use coasters. Pearl had coasters—her mother had bought them—but she didn’t know where they were. She was squatting to put milk and sugar into her coffee, and she sat back on her heels, so her skirt touched the floor. She suddenly felt like a brave, interesting person. “I’m afraid of you,” she said recklessly, happily—over the noise of Racket’s whimpers. But although she didn’t know how it could be, she knew that even though she was afraid—oh, my, how afraid she was—she was also not afraid. She was taller than Hilda and had an easier baby, and that made a difference even if it shouldn’t—and she could do things Hilda couldn’t do. Hilda couldn’t say what Pearl had just said. And Pearl loved Nathan—even now. It was brave to keep loving him.

“I don’t know why you’re afraid,” Hilda said coldly.

“Oh, you know why.”

“Pearl, you can’t possibly expect me to have still another conversation about all that from last year,” she said harshly—as if they’d talked about it every day, Pearl thought. “I went through plenty at the time, but it’s over, and I wish you’d forget it. You think the whole world operates differently because you and Nathan went through some foolishness.”

It was harsh—there was nothing in her voice but harshness—and Pearl was more frightened than before, truly frightened this time. She was afraid she’d turned Hilda against her at last.

“I’m sorry,” she said meekly. And yet she was glad it had come to this.

Hilda sipped her coffee. “All right.” There was silence. Hilda had sounded disgusted with her, more disgusted for her foolish talk than for what she had done. Pearl wondered whether she had somehow done a greater wrong in talking and thinking about what had happened than in the thing itself. She still thought about Nathan all the time, and she was still sure that Simon was his. She never said anything about that to Mike now, and it was as if it were her fantasy—but it had happened.

Pearl looked down and kept herself from crying but Hilda said, “Would you stop it?”

“I’m trying,” said Pearl. Then she got up and stood before Hilda. “You have to let me speak,” she said quietly. “I injured you, and you have to let me say I’m sorry. I can’t bear to lose you.”

Hilda looked up at her. She was leaning forward, and she looked chubby but drawn, the muscles of her face still tight from illness. She coughed. “You haven’t lost me,” she said. “I’m—” It was hard for her to talk, Pearl saw. “I’m touched that you think about me.” The last words came out haltingly, and Pearl nodded and turned away. Nathan had used that word. Touched. “I’m touched that you say you love me,” he had said. Now it was important not to answer, not to cry anymore. They would talk about other things—indifferent things: babies, weather, bronchitis.

She tried. “Do you cough at night?”

“Sometimes,” said Hilda. Pearl wished she could care for Hilda at night, bringing her something warm and soothing to drink. All this was true, even though she loved Nathan and he was Hilda’s husband. Loving Nathan somehow made it more true.

She began to tell Hilda about Mike’s saxophone playing and other things he was doing. She suspected she might have told Hilda some of this before, when they met in the park, but Hilda listened politely. Racket had quieted, but every few minutes she tugged at her mother and whimpered to be picked up.

Maybe this was the best she and Hilda would have. Pearl should seek a friend elsewhere, yet it seemed that Hilda was supposed to be her friend, almost as if they were more likely to be friends because they had loved the same man. People who loved the same country or the same song or child were more likely to be friends.

It was starting to get dark out. They had tried to put Racket down in Simon’s crib, but she screamed and tried to climb out, and they found her hanging on the outside, clinging to the bars. She wouldn’t take an arrowroot biscuit or a cup of juice. Hilda was worn out, anyone could see that. “I have to go to the drugstore,” she said. “I have to get her prescription refilled.”

“I’ll go for you,” said Pearl.

“Why should you do that? I have to go home anyway. Why should you go out if you don’t need to?”

“I have to buy milk and salt,” said Pearl. “I was planning to walk you home.”

“Maybe it will be easier if you come,” said Hilda.

“Oh, I know what,” said Pearl. “I can take the stroller down the stairs. You go in the elevator with Simon.”

Hilda was looking for her coat. Racket was screaming now. “Okay,” Hilda said loudly over the screams. “I’ll take Simon and you take Racket.”

Pearl got her own coat and Hilda’s and they dressed the babies. Now Racket was crying without a pause. “She’s lost a lot of sleep because of her cough,” said Hilda. The little girl was fighting everything—fighting the sleeves of her coat, fighting Hilda’s hands when she buttoned it.

Simon’s carriage was just outside the apartment door, and Pearl put Simon into it, then went back for Racket. She picked up her niece and kissed her. Her face was sticky with tears. Racket was still thin, and her legs never stopped moving, as though she were running in the air. Pearl put her into the stroller and held her there with one hand while she pushed the stroller out the door. Hilda took the carriage and pressed the button for the elevator.

Getting the stroller down the stairs with Racket in it was a struggle. The baby tried to climb out, and Pearl had to keep her hand on her all the way down. At last, after bumping her shins more than once, she reached the bottom of the stairs, where Hilda was waiting. Hilda held the outside door open and Pearl pushed the stroller out. They turned toward Flatbush Avenue, where the stores were. Racket was still crying, but she was lying down. Her cries sounded, now, as if she’d given up.

“If I go very fast,” said Pearl, “maybe she’ll fall asleep. It’s worked with Simon. I’m going to run ahead.”

“Where will I meet you?” said Hilda.

“Go to the drugstore,” Pearl said. The drugstore was nearer than the grocery. “I’ll go on to the grocery, and you meet me there.”

“This is nice of you,” said Hilda. “Maybe she’ll sleep.”

Pearl set out briskly, almost running. Sure enough, after a block Racket stopped crying, and when Pearl slowed down a block later and looked into the stroller, she saw that the baby was asleep. Racket stirred when Pearl slowed down, so she speeded up again.

It was getting dark and it was chilly. It felt like rain. Racket was warmly dressed, though. She’d be all right. Pearl passed the drugstore and glanced back. She thought she saw Hilda coming with Simon, about a block away. She had two blocks to go.

When Pearl reached the grocery store, she wasn’t sure what to do. Racket was now fast asleep. The stroller probably wouldn’t fit through the door of the store, which looked narrow. And if it did fit, the warmth and people and brightness inside would waken the baby.

There were people around. Racket would be all right, sound asleep outside the store for a moment.

Pearl stopped and waited for a long time to make certain Racket didn’t wake up when the stroller stopped moving, but the baby lay still. Her breathing still sounded hoarse from her illness, and her nose bubbled. Sleep would do her good.

Pearl hurried into the store. Two people were ahead of her on the line. She had set the brake on the stroller, but she was nervous. She wished she could see it as she waited on line. Finally it was her turn, and she asked the grocer for the things she wanted. She was reaching out her hand to touch the brown paper bag in which he had placed her milk and salt when she heard sounds—people shouting, the sound of a car’s brakes, a woman’s terrible scream.