A MONTH OR SO LATER, OGDEN NOTICED THAT HIS WIFE’S shape seemed to be changing. The change surprised him, but he didn’t feel he should be asking questions. He knew very little about women—just what he could deduce from being with Dora; in all likelihood their shapes were supposed to change from time to time.
Dora, still mulling over her dilemma, decided to wait until Ogden asked before discussing the baby. But he was so slow to ask that it provoked her. Ogden’s deference was beginning to irritate her almost as much as Blue’s cheekiness had; with men, if it wasn’t one thing it was another. One morning in a fit of irritation she blurted it out.
“Can’t you tell I look different?” she exclaimed. “Don’t it interest you?”
“Your face looks the same,” Ogden said in his own defense.
“It don’t, my eyes are puffy,” Dora said. “The reason I look this way is because I’m going to have a baby.”
Ogden received the news calmly; for a time he didn’t connect it with anything he might have done. For some reason Dora got even more provoked with him and flounced off downstairs. She had been provoked with him several times lately; each time he was startled, but seldom said anything. It made him sad that he didn’t know how to behave. Usually he would conclude that each new failure meant he would have to go back to the lonely life, but before he could get himself moving, Dora would show up, in an improved mood, acting as if nothing had happened.
Only later in the day, thinking a little more carefully about what he knew or had heard about the genesis of babies, did it come to him that this baby could be the result of something he had done.
“Will I be the Pa of the baby?” he asked tentatively that night in bed.
Though in general Dora seemed to be looking forward to the baby, she evidently had not been looking forward to his asking such a question just at that moment.
Sometimes, even when they were in bed together, Dora seemed to live distantly from him. Ogden had no grasp of why that should be—he never wanted to live distantly from Dora, in his mind or anywhere else. One moment they would be holding hands; Dora would be right with him; then, because of some word, she seemed to move herself away, even if physically she didn’t stir or flounce out as she did when provoked. On the whole Ogden preferred it when she flounced out. He would be left alone to wonder what he had done wrong; but when Dora went away without actually leaving, he felt even worse.
This time, a long silence grew between them; Ogden wished fervently that he had had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and just wait to be instructed about the baby.
Dora didn’t look angry, though—she just sat on the bed and looked out the window. It was a cold winter night, but Dora liked the window open. He heard the creak of a wagon down the street. Ogden realized she might not even be thinking about him, or about the baby, either. She might be thinking about old times. Since Calamity had returned, the two of them often sat together for hours; it was old times they mostly seemed to talk about. Ogden relaxed a little, and yet he couldn’t completely banish worry. Dora kept looking out the window into the deep night. Her face seemed fearful; it seemed sad too—and Ogden couldn’t stand for his wife to be sad or afraid. It made him feel he wasn’t doing his part as a husband. It had been complicated enough even before he knew Dora meant to have a baby, but now that she did mean to have one—and he knew she did mean to; he could put his hand on her swelling belly and feel, now and then, a slight movement; Dora called it a kick but Ogden felt as if a very small fish, a mere minnow, had brushed against his hand—it seemed things were even more complicated. He wondered why people bothered to make babies, if babies only complicated their lives so. He meant to try to talk Dora out of making any more, since it made her more easily provoked, or else fearful and sad.
Dora had been prepared for Ogden’s questions; she could see his curiosity rising daily. She had discussed it with Calamity. Calamity had no actual experience of babies, but that didn’t mean she was free of opinion. Her opinion was that Blue was too unreliable to involve in fatherhood; Calamity liked Ogden, though the way she expressed her liking might have seemed disparaging to some.
“He’s a whopping piece of dough,” Calamity said. “But he ain’t set yet. You can roll him into any kind of biscuit you want—only do it quick. You can never tell when a boy like that will set.”
Dora didn’t regard it as particularly good advice, but she was grateful to Calamity anyway. Whether she knew what she was talking about or not, she was someone to share confidences with. When Calamity had first returned, her whole face had been bloodshot from drink; she rambled and got vomiting-sick almost every day. But with steady food and no chores and a clean room to stay in, she had improved somewhat, and was beginning to recover some of her ginger. The two of them, with Ogden, went on picnics, and all had fun. Once on a zero day she and Calamity had even tried on ice skates—the new fad in Belle Fourche—but this venture frightened Ogden nearly out of his wits. Neither woman had any caution—they skittered right to the middle of the river, where the ice was crackly. Of course, Ogden being so large himself, it would have been a chancy rescue, had either of them fallen through.
But they hadn’t fallen through, and she hadn’t decided what to tell Ogden about the baby, either. Doosie, her other oracle of wisdom, was of the opinion that it didn’t matter much. Babies came, and then you dealt with them; on the whole, men weren’t much help, whether they had happened to father the baby or not.
“Babies got to take what they find,” Doosie said. “They can’t be worrying about this Pa and that Pa. Let ’em have two Pas, if you can find two. It ain’t gonna hurt nothing.”
“Oh, blow your nose!” Dora said. “Everybody tells me something different. I should have stayed single. It’s how I’ve lived my life.”
Then she burst into tears.
Sitting on the bed with Ogden, she felt no impulse to tears. She just felt stuck in a crack, the crack between past and present. When she looked out the window she might become sad in reverie, remembering all the best parts of the past; she might become fearful that someday the window would close, and with it her passage to that part of her life. But there was no denying that on the other side of the crack a very large boy was waiting in her bed. Ogden was there; she had firmly and immediately made him her own; she might as well answer the question.
“Ogden, you’ll be its Pa,” Dora said.