Through the open door of the emergency room, she watched the nurse, a small black woman, caught like a moth in the light that dangled over her desk. Far down the dingy corridor, a man was singing:
“We are poor little lambs that have lost our way.
Baaa, baaa, baaa!”
Erica lay motionless on the stretcher, longing for the fresh air of the summer night, and as she listened, she saw the sheep wandering among the huge pipes in the boiler room—every basement had a boiler room—and a surge of pity for all lost creatures brought tears to her eyes. Who was the last person to lie on this stretcher? Cupboards hung open above the dirty towels heaped on the floor; bottles of rosy fluid peopled the table and the sink.
The singing stopped; the singer came into the room. He was a small man with dark graying hair and a pointed beard. In spite of his green gown and surgeon’s cap, he still looked to Erica like a magician, and when he laid his hands across her swollen belly he seemed about to counter her fear with a runic spell.
“I should say the child weighs close to five pounds. If you woke up at three, you’ve probably lost about two cups of blood. Where’s your husband?”
“Theo’s parking the car.”
“I’m sending you to the labor room. The nurse will tell him where you’ve gone.”
A young woman in green carrying a clipboard pushed the stretcher, creaky as a baggage cart, to the elevator. The doors hushed themselves closed, trapping them both in the harsh light. Overhead, in hundreds of rooms, the sick were sleeping or tossing or crying out for pain in limbs that weren’t there and nerves that were.
“When are you due?”
“Not for six weeks yet.”
The girl said nothing more, but when the elevator lurched and stopped, she guided the stretcher through the doors, and turned into a small room, monastically white, furnished with a wall clock, a bed, and a nightstand which held a kidney basin. Handing Erica a shapeless white gown, she began flipping briskly through the papers on the clipboard.
“Let’s see—you’re Doctor Sloane’s patient, and he doesn’t believe in prepping.” She reached into the top drawer of the nightstand, pulled out a razor and a syringe, and dropped them into her pocket.
“Age?”
“Twenty-one and a half.”
Erica pulled off her dress, slipped the gown around herself and groped for the ties, but found none.
“Insurance?”
“I don’t know. My father has some.”
“Husband’s occupation?”
Erica thought about that one, for there were any number of appropriate responses, all of them true. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Theo cleans fossils for the owner of the Fur ’n Feather Pet Shop. On Tuesday and Thursday he sweeps out the cages for a nation of gerbils and myna birds. On Saturdays he makes frames at the New World Gallery for other people’s paintings.
“Sculpt-or,” she said, very clearly. “He’s studying to be a sculptor.”
“Student,” murmured the nurse, writing it down.
Erica was just settling down among the sheets, when her stomach sucked into a hard knot. The intensity of the pain astonished her. She grabbed for the kidney basin, held it cool against her cheek, and threw up. How they anticipated everything here, she thought. Knowing that she would grope for such a pan, they curved it to fit her cheek. Her teeth chattered as if they had muscles of their own, and her whole body quaked.
Hands urged her body to turn; she felt a faint chill as the back of her gown fell open, but the needle came and went, sly as a thief. And suddenly there was no more pain, only a change of light, like a palpable anticipation of something not yet known.
“Where is the way where light dwelleth? And as for darkness, where is the place thereof?
Hath the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the drops of the dew?”
She repeated it like a charm; it was a gift from Theo. Asking the right questions, he said, was a way of keeping your balance. The first time she came to his place he was asking questions; he’d flunked his geology midterm and was making up an exam to send Professor Leech.
“Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoaryfrost of heaven, who hath engendered it?”
Circle one: | Mother Leech |
Mother Courage | |
Jack Frost | |
Admiral Byrd | |
YAWEH |
“What’s YAWEH?” asked Erica.
“The secret name of the living God.”
“If it’s secret, how come you know it?”
“Because I am a student of the divine alphabet.”
He had waved conspicuously but casually at the books that cluttered his desk. Erica had never seen so many library books in one place, except in the library. She fingered the biggest one, bound in disintegrating leather. The All-Wise Doorkeeper, Exhibiting to all who enter, the Science of Things Above and Things Below. A postcard fell out, typed with frightening accuracy:
You have three hundred and two books charged to your name. Please return or renew them before the end of the term. Books must be brought in to be renewed.
“There’s a lovely sunset going on,” said Theo, “for anyone sitting on the holy mountain.”
Sitting on the fire escape, they could hear the bells of Saint Stanislaus and look across the vacant lot into the kitchen of Rumpus Mitchell’s Hot Spot, and watch the greenhorn busboys sneaking out for a smoke among the garbage pails. Sometimes huge, fiery-haired Rumpus Mitchell would come out to meet his wife, who was always just arriving from California with Rumpus Mitchell’s little boy at her side, and a little girl of uncertain origin still in her arms. The boy would lean against his father’s great belly and the little girl would lie with her cheek on his shoulder while he sang,
“Sinner, don’t you waste that Sunday.
Sinner, don’t you waste that Sunday.
The people keep comin’ and the train done gone.”
When he was not outside he was inside, harassing the customers. To shy boys who brought their girls for coffee after a movie, he would say solemnly, “Who was that wild-looking chick I saw you with last night?” Erica had once seen him cut a man’s necktie off with the breadknife, because he complained that the chili was too hot. The smell of chili flavored the whole block.
“I suppose you’re hungry,” said Theo.
The kitchen was cluttered with sketches of nudes and cats, and bishops turning themselves into flames. Erica was about to say yes, when she realized he was speaking to the battered orange cat that rubbed up against her legs.
“See if there’s some milk in the icebox for Saint Orange Guy.”
She opened the door and a slab of ice crashed from the freezer to the floor. On the bottom shelf, an ancient pork chop lay all alone, like a peculiar island.
“There’s no milk.”
“I wonder if Rumpus Mitchell will give me some fried liver on credit. It builds strong teeth and claws ten different ways.”
He opened all the cupboards and peered inside. “All the dishes are dirty. I’ll have to eat out.”
“You could eat at our house. Mother made a meatloaf.”
“No, thanks. I’ll run out and get a pecan ring.”
“A pecan ring! All you ever eat is pecan rings.”
“So? If I get a fresh one, it’ll last all day.”
He walked her home. All over the city, spring touched the maples with lime-colored blossoms.
“I’ll pick you up at nine for the free flicks.”
“No, you won’t. I have to finish reading Rasselas by Monday for my eighteenth-century class.”
“So what’s Rasselas?”
“A novel. Rasselas is the prince of Abyssinia.”
“Jesus! What a name!”
“My dad thinks your name is funny.”
“Oh, no,” said Theo. “Mine’s a lovely name. It means ‘the son of silk and music, the immortal one, the heavenly music maker.’”
“You told me you couldn’t carry a tune.”
Theo shook his head.
“I used to play the flute in third grade during arithmetic. It was invisible. The teacher told my parents I was mad.”
They stood on her doorstep, unwilling to leave each other. Out of the corner of her eye, Erica saw her father walking up and down the yard, tapping the pear trees that sprayed jets of white flowers into the air. Every fall the pears caught in the lawn mower; one year he had the trees injected to stop the harvest, and the next fall they bore twice as many. He hates anything that bears fruit, said her mother, who loved the trees and the overgrown forsythia and honeysuckle that ran wild in the backyard. Her father had taught chemistry and, according to legend, wrote caustic remarks on freshman bluebooks. At seventy-four, he walked slowly, like a mechanical toy about to run down.
“I’ll call you,” said Theo.
Her mother came out of the kitchen when she saw him go.
“You could have asked him for dinner. He doesn’t have much money, and I don’t think he eats very well.”
“I did ask him,” said Erica.
In the twilight of the dining room, crystal decanters and silver candlesticks gleamed along the sideboard. As a child Erica had laid out whole cities with them when they arrived, along with a grand piano, soon after the death of an aunt whom she had never seen. Most of her father’s family she had never seen, and the little daguerreotypes didn’t help much, for mildew had eaten away the image of a nose here and a shoulder there, and all the people in them were either children or brides.
“I’ve hidden the silver under the bookcase in the attic. You won’t be afraid to stay alone for a week?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Daddy would hate to miss the train trip and the banquet. He’s the oldest living graduate of Grand River High School. And the valedictorian.”
Her father glanced up from his ear of corn; kernels hung like tears on his cheeks.
“How many in your class?” asked Erica.
“Four,” said her father, and sank behind the corn again.
“You can always sleep over at Mrs. Elderfield’s place, like you did last year, if you’re scared,” said her mother.
It was always “Mrs. Elderfield’s place,” though Mr. Elderfield lived there, too. Mrs. Elderfield had a parakeet which she fed from her own lips at breakfast, holding grains of seed between her teeth. Mr. Elderfield had insomnia and wandered about the house at night in a red plaid bathrobe. At two in the morning he would go out and work on his driveway, which he was paving with bricks; the old widow who lived behind the Elderfield’s told everyone he was digging a grave.
“I’ll be okay alone.”
Her mother lowered her voice.
“Don’t forget to lock the door. We have all those Oriental rugs in the living room; someone could just roll them up as easy as pie. Then they could walk out with the color TV; I’m sure it would fit through the back window. I stuck your diamond ring over the curtain rod. They’ll never think of looking there, though it would be a whole lot safer if you wore it.”
“Oh, Mother, I can’t. It looks like an engagement ring.”
How quaint! Theo had told her when she wore it with him once to a movie. Engaged to your mother.
“It’s a dinner ring. Everyone should have a dinner ring. I had mine made out of Grandma Schautz’s diamond earrings.”
A comfortable silence settled over the house as the taxi pulled away. Erica went to the kitchen and squeezed herself some orange juice, drummed on the piano for awhile and tried to play a few pieces from her mother’s College Favorites, the only music in sight. Then, unable to postpone it any longer, she picked up her battered copy of Rasselas and curled herself in front of the dark television set to read.
I cannot forbear to flatter myself, that prudence and benevolence will make marriage happy. The general folly of mankind is the cause of general complaint. What can be expected but disappointment and repentance from a choice made in the immaturity of youth, in the ardor of desire, without judgment, without foresight, without inquiry after conformity of opinions, similarity of manners, rectitude of judgment, or purity of sentiment?
Someone had written in the margin: up yours. Erica quit reading the text and read the comments. There were two voices: that of the first owner, whose comments ran to obscenities, and that of the second owner, who had underlined all the speeches in red and crossed out the most offensive opinions of the first owner. Far away, the campus carillon chimed eight; she gave a guilty start and brought herself back to the text again.
Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden, meeting by chance or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart and therefore conclude that they shall be happy. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness before had concealed; they wear out life in altercations and charge nature with cruelty.
Her mind wandered; ten minutes on half a page! She thumbed the pages yet to come and felt panicked. By the time Theo called, she had read five more.
“I’m coming to pick you up for the nine o’clock show.”
“I can’t go,” she moaned. “I have a hundred pages left.”
“What have you been doing for the last two hours?”
“Reading.”
A sigh breathed lightly through the receiver.
“We might as well have gone to the flicks. Do you want me to come over?”
She read on, listening for him, yet he did not come. At midnight, much disappointed, she locked the door, marched upstairs, kicked off her sandals and her skirt, and climbed into her mother’s bed, because it was the only bed in the house with a soft decadent mattress and two purple eiderdowns. Finding her mother’s book of Bible readings under the pillow, Erica pulled it out and lay there, listening to the dark till it blossomed into small cries.
Then she sat up and looked out of the window.
What green birds were these that pressed their masked faces against the pane? How cold we are! they pleaded, and fluttered their pale wings. Behind them, the pear blossoms were turning to snow. Kneeling on the bed, Erica unlocked the window.
I told you, said her mother’s voice, not to let anyone in.
But suddenly the bedroom was filled with them, chirping feverishly, and already they looked larger than they had outside, and now they were flying up and down the stairs.
Out! shouted Erica, clapping her hands.
How had she failed to notice their fine claws and the tiny whips they wore under their wings? They poured past her and flew into the living room, caught the edges of the Oriental rugs in their beaks, rolled them up smartly, and carried them out of the window on their backs. The teapots and silver spoons under the bookcase in the attic began to rattle and hum, and the birds hustled them gaily out of the front door, which burst open at their coming. As the last birds passed her, bearing the color television set like a sedan chair between them, Erica latched the screen.
That inflamed them; the whips under their wings quivered; they rushed at the door with fierce faces, some hooded in black feathers like executioners, others masked in scarlet as for a dance. Hastily, she ran to the cellar, slammed the door, and turned the key. Crouched on the top step with her hands over ears, she heard—in spite of herself—vases overturning and drawers spilling to the floor.
Give some folks an inch and they’ll take a mile, said her father’s voice in her ear.
A pale green wing slipped under the door, groping. Erica backed down the stairs and clambered up on the big laundry tubs.
“Erica!”
A handful of pebbles hit the window by the bed. Pulling her skirt on, she ran downstairs to let him in. Drops of rain gleamed on his hair; his face was shining.
“So how are you, Ice-Maiden?”
She opened her mouth to protest and burst into tears.
“I thought you weren’t coming.”
“I had to arbitrate in a domestic quarrel. Rumpus Mitchell’s wife blew up and wrecked his guitar. He cut her new poncho into shreds.” Theo waited for her to stop crying, then he asked, “So what happened?”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Why, didn’t I promise to come over and guard you?”
She trudged upstairs with Theo behind her, rummaged through the big bureau in her mother’s room, pulled out a torn sheet, and handed it to him.
“Some layout!” he observed. “Purple curtains, purple bed, purple rugs—it’s a regular brothel!” He thumped the bed like a buyer. “Do you want to be tucked in?”
“Yes,” she said.
He tucked the blankets into the mattress so tightly that Erica felt as if she were being swaddled; then he sat down on the edge of the bed.
“If you give me a couple of minutes, I can think of a story.”
Once, when she had the flu, her father had come in to tell her a story. Once there was a little girl who took a walk through a city where everything was falling asleep. The trees curled up their leaves and slept, the dogs dropped down on the sidewalk, and soon the little girl herself fell asleep. He never came to tell another. That night she had dreamed curious dreams and forgotten them. In the morning, she felt she’d traveled all night in that land.
Now, years later, morning amazed her all over again as sunlight broke over Theo’s back. She lifted her head; she could not remember where she was.
The doctor was greasing her stomach and smiling at her astonishment.
“We’re going to hear from the unborn,” he explained, holding—for her inspection—a microphone which was attached to an amplifier on the nightstand.
Under the sheet she thrashed her legs. Pain ran beside her, as inseparable from her as her shadow. Ah, now she was pulling ahead, but she knew it would cut through the forest and meet her at the next bend in the road.
“Give me something to make me stop hurting.”
“You want a spinal injection after all? It will numb you from the chest down, and you won’t be able to push the baby out. Fix your eyes on one point. No, not the clock; that only makes time go slower. Forget about time.”
He pressed the microphone to her belly and adjusted the dials on the amplifier. Suddenly she heard a loud beating, a rhythmic thudding as from an invisible drummer, that seemed to fill the entire room and rose over the clatter of approaching wheels in the corridor.
“You see, he’s still alive,” said the doctor quietly.
She clawed her way onto the stretcher and felt herself borne down the hall with the slow majesty of a barge. Brass plaques on the walls passed her at eye level, with the discomforting solemnity of tombstones:
THE GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. LEANDER RICH
IN MEMORY OF HIS FATHER
IN MEMORY OF
DOCTOR JOSEPH O’BRIEN
A GIFT OF THE FAMILY OF
MR. AND MRS. JUDD CARUSO
The stretcher scraped against a small plastic box, quite empty, studded with lights and dials like an electronic reliquary. The legend passed her at eye level:
THIS INCUBATOR WAS DONATED—
Her feet touched bottom. The heavy metal doors swung open and she entered the cool air of the delivery room, where sunlight glanced off metal and glass.
“I’m giving you a shot in case I have to cut,” said the doctor. “You won’t feel it. If you watch in the mirror, you can see everything for yourself.”
A plump woman in green scrubs lifted her onto the table, set her legs into stirrups, and covered her with sheets, as if arming her for a long journey. High in front of her shone the mirror, without reflection, like a child’s dream of the sun. The nurse tipped it this way and that. Suddenly it caught someone: a man holding a syringe in one hand and an oxygen mask in the other. So strong a fear gripped Erica that she twisted her head back to see him.
“That’s Doctor Wong, our anesthetist,” said the nurse pleasantly. “We’re required to have him here for emergencies.”
“My glasses,” called Erica. “Where are they?”
“Right here. I’ll put them on your nose.”
As the blur of equipment splintered into bewildering and exact detail, the masks and gowns warned her of sinister disguises. Nothing showed her an honest face. The anesthetist waited just out of sight; she could hear him padding about behind her.
“Push,” urged the doctor. “One long push is worth ten short ones. Round your shoulders. Put your chin down.”
Closing her eyes, she gathered her strength into a noose around the pain that had so long tormented her and pulled it tight. In the silence, the doctor’s scissors snipped away at her flesh as if he were fashioning her from paper.
She gasped, and the nurse caught her head, and in that instant she felt something leave her and heard a faint watery cry.
He lay on her stomach, warm, wet, and crowned with blood. His skin flushed purple, white curds smeared the creases of his arms and legs, his eyes were cat-slits, his enormous mouth slobbered mucus.
“Into the world we come, pissing and crying,” sang the doctor.
A wild joy filled her; her arms moved restlessly under the sheets, trying to find their way out, but already he was clamping and cutting the cord that joined her to this secret she had carried so long, and the nurse was lifting the child up and carrying him away.
“The bassinets used to be made of wood,” she observed. “I like the clear plastic ones better. You can see through the sides.” And then, after a pause, “I think he favors his dad.”
Oh, when did he happen? In her mother’s bed, among the Bible verses and the purple eiderdowns? Or that night they’d walked back from the library and stopped at the park to play in the sandbox—was he created to the comfortable creak of the merry-go-round, emptied of children at that hour, pushed slowly around by the wind? Or that Sunday morning, when they rode the river curled together in the ribbed body of a canoe, while the wild flags snapped and sank under them, but rose again in their wake—did he happen then? Far off, the bells of Saint Stanislaus rang the faithful to worship. It was eleven o’clock. Her mother and father, tired from the train-ride home, were nudging into their pew at Saint John’s Lutheran and waiting for the opening prayer, which her mother knew by heart. Erica could not remember when she stopped saying her prayers. She used to pray before exams, and occasionally for advice, but she never expected an answer. During services, she ticked off the hymns and responses in her head, but came alive during the music and wondered what it would be like to meet God face to face. All flesh is grass, murmured the minister darkly. The Lord have mercy on us.
Let’s get married next Sunday. In the middle of a forest, said Theo.
Erica rolled up her eyes.
You haven’t got a job.
So? Behold the lilies of the field. They neither toil nor spin. We’ll get jobs on a ship. We’ll make love in every hotel in Europe. Then on to Asia. To Australia. There won’t be a tree on this planet that doesn’t know us, a stone we haven’t baptized.
In the shallows before them, a school of carp lifted their finned backs above the water, splashing and leaping. Though the canoe caught them in its shadow, they heard and saw nothing but their own dance.
“Here’s your son. Isn’t he beautiful?” exclaimed the nurse. “He’s a real peewee.”
The head poking out of the swaddling blanket was that of a tiny old man.
“How much does he weigh?”
“Five pounds, two ounces. He’s big for a preemie. I shouldn’t think he’d need the incubator.”
Through fear, through the craft of time and the cunning of pain she had almost lost him. The doctor, sewing her up like a turkey, had stopped singing. She saw herself leaving her inheritance for thieves to thrive on and setting out with the baby curled like a flower against her heart.
“Now we must get up,” buzzed a voice in her ear. “Hang on to me. Don’t look at the floor.”
What time was it? She looked for the clock, but it was gone. The room was new; the sun stained everything in it with the rich glaze of twilight.
Clinging to the nurse, she allowed herself to be eased out of bed, and the new seams in her flesh stretched and seared her. The nurse was short, with thick glasses and a little sign on her breast that read Miss Trout like a nameplate on a desk. Over her shoulder, Erica saw a girl sitting up in bed, cradling a telephone receiver under her chin, and arranging a vast collection of cosmetic jars on the tray that swung from a stand across her bed.
“I’m little,” said the nurse, setting Erica on a chair, “but I’m strong. You got some flowers while you were asleep.”
She pointed: on the nightstand, between the bedpan and the kidney basin, stood a fat ceramic lamb rolling its eyes and spraying blue daisies from its head. The nurse picked up the card propped at the base, and read, “For that very special baby boy. Love, Mother.”
“Did Ron tell you? He has blond lashes and eyebrows,” cooed the girl in a singsong voice, pinching a clamp the size of a tooth extractor on her left eyelashes. “His nose is straightening out today. It looked so smashed. There was a little problem with his shoulder. It got stuck.”
“Come,” said the nurse. “I’ve made your bed.”
How smooth and cool the sheets felt! When the nurse bustled out of the room, Erica felt herself becoming invisible, as if she were returning from the dead and had lost her foothold among the living. The girl’s conversation seemed of immense importance, a token of the awful innocence of being alive.
“Today I had someone else’s menu. It was lousy. Tomorrow I choose my own. Bring me a milkshake, love. A lemon one.”
She hung up, and the eyelash curler clattered to the floor. Only when she climbed out of bed to pick it up, did Erica notice how tiny she was, no taller than a twelve-year-old child, with a round face and a large stomach that hung over her black bikini pajama bottoms. Erica moved her legs restlessly and the girl smiled.
“I’m Tina. You had the baby that came a month early, right?”
“Six weeks,” corrected Erica.
“Six weeks! Well, better six weeks early than six weeks late. Two days over your due date, and you feel like you’ve been pregnant forever.”
She worked her way into bed again and gave a curious little sigh.
“I got flowers with my first one, too. Yellow roses in a musical pram. We can’t have any more; we only have two bedrooms in the trailer. Does the smell of nail polish bother you?”
“No,” lied Erica. “I like it.”
“Thank Heaven! My mother used to send my brother and me outside when she did her nails. In the winter it was awful, sitting out on the patio in our snowsuits.”
Outside in the parking lot, doors slammed and voices drifted up through the window. Only later when the telephone woke her, did she discover that she’d slept through the visiting hours, and Theo had come, waited outside in the hall, and gone home again.
The line buzzed ominously. Her mother’s voice sounded stretched and faint, as if she were speaking under water.
“How’s the baby?”
“All right, I guess. He weighed five, two.”
Her mother clucked.
“My first one came two months early. I even heard him cry. I suppose nowadays they could have saved him. For heaven’s sake, don’t forget to boil everything. I used to boil all your toys till they warped right up. What did the flowers look like?”
“Blue daisies.”
“I told them roses. I’ve found a woman to help you. A trained nurse, so I’m pretty sure she’s sterile.” And then, a little hesitantly, “I’ve ordered you a sterilizer from Penney’s. You didn’t say anything about having one. You can’t be too clean around a new baby. Minnie read in the paper that lots of people have parasites in their eyebrows. She’s been washing hers every day. Just a minute. Daddy’s coming.”
“How is he?”
“About the same. He fell down again while I was going to the bathroom. One minute he’s watching ‘What’s My Line?’ and the next minute he’s on the floor. I wasn’t gone more than sixty seconds. ‘Al,’ I tell him, ‘When you want to get out of your chair, call me,’ but he always forgets. Sometimes I tie him in with the clothesline. Mrs. Elderfield offered to watch him while I’m in church. Last night I put the chest of drawers against his bed, and even then he got out. But when he tries to move everything, I hear him and I get up.”
The phone went silent, except for the sound of scraping and breathing. Then a high voice whisked over the line.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Daddy? How does it feel to have a new grandson?”
“What?”
“I said you have a new grandson.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“A baby!” she shouted.
“What?”
She gripped the receiver in despair; she could hear him listening eagerly.
“I can’t hear you.” He sounded genuinely sad. “I’m so sorry. I just can’t hear you.”
“Erica, how are you feeling?” exclaimed her mother’s voice.
“Better now.”
“That’s nice. Oh, isn’t it wonderful how once you see the baby you forget all the pain?”
As Erica hung up, the nurse appeared with a tray of paper cups.
“This is your sleeping pill. If your stitches bother you, you may have a pain pill also.”
What time was it?
Someone was drilling a hole in her sleep.
In the darkness she raised her head off the pillow. Far away, she heard the shrill cries of the babies, like tree-frogs on a summer night. Steps drew near and a policeman strolled past the doorway, his gun gleaming on his hip.
Now the cries mingled with the clatter of wheels. Tina stirred in the next bed. The nurses swept by, pushing trains of bassinets in front of them. The whole floor was a wailing corridor peopled with angels harvesting the newborn.
“Anapolous?” asked the young nurse in the doorway.
“Right here!” said Tina eagerly.
“Svenson?”
Erica raised her hand as if she were going to recite. The nurse snapped on the nightlight, rolled a bassinet against the bed, and lifted the baby into Erica’s arms. His swaddling blanket held him stiff, like upholstery.
“Here’s his bottle. You’ll be feeding him glucose and water till your milk comes in. Don’t worry if he spits up. You’re trying to clear the mucus out of him.”
Silence settled itself like a wing over the corridor. Erica took the bottle and touched it to the baby’s lips, which sucked once, twice, and stopped. Behind the cat-slit eyelids, his pupils lay hidden, like agates at the mouth of a cave.
Who are you?
For his face was as blank as a fine plaster mask, without lines, without eyebrows, without eyelashes. Veins laid their complex waterways just under the skin on the top of his head, where the soft spot pulsed in the star-shaped absence of bone.
She pushed the bottle against his lips, but he slept on, his fine breath brushing her hand, and she pushed him up against her shoulder the way she had seen other women do. His head lopped forward and struck her collarbone, and he let out a quick cry, and Erica propped him in her arms and gave herself up to admiring him, till the nurse returned.
“How are you coming?”
“He fell asleep.”
“You mustn’t let him fall asleep. Snap his feet. Like this.” As she unbound the swaddlings, his thin legs drew away like the amorphous flesh of a sea anemone. He cracked open his eyes and his arms stroked the air slowly and tenderly, as if he were feeling for the tides that had long since pulled out, trying to find the current that would take him home.
“I’ll be back. See if you can get him to drink something.”
“Five fingers, five toes. You beautiful little thing,” sang Tina, and added, glancing at Erica, “My husband was born with six toes on his left foot. A clubfoot it was. So that’s the first thing I asked: How many fingers? How many toes? Isn’t it funny, all the boys I dated were six feet tall, and I married a guy five foot six with a clubfoot. It was a blind date. He came for me on his motorcycle.”
Thunder muttered on the horizon. Outside, in hundreds of trees, squirrels were scurrying for shelter, foxes and moles were burrowing into their holes, and fawns were folding their matchstick legs under them. Erica shivered. Tina’s voice was as warm as a lullaby.
“My little boy asks me, Where do the birds go when it rains? Why does Daddy have to go to work? All day long, it’s why, why, why.”
When the nurse returned, Erica put the baby in her outstretched hands and watched her tuck him back into the bassinet, where he lay like merchandise under the label above his head.
BABY SVENSON. FIVE POUNDS TWO.
And then, in scrolled letters below,
This is God’s gift to you.
At nine the next morning, Theo peered into the room, holding a tumbler of wild honeysuckle.
“I tried to come earlier, but you were asleep. And last night the corridor was chained off. The nurse said it was feeding time. Jesus, I told her, what is this, a zoo?”
“Did you hand out candy hearts on Main Street?”
“I tried. Nobody cares anymore these days. I did all your crazy errands.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, searched his pockets, and brought forth a handful of cornflakes and a crumpled list. Erica recognized her own handwriting, but it looked strange to her, like a letter coming back because of an incomplete address.
“I got the undershirts, the diapers, the fruit juice, and the Borax. Also some loose catnip so Saint Orange Guy can roll his own mice. And I brought your watch.”
As he slipped it on her wrist over the plastic bracelet which the hospital had put on her, she stared, fascinated, at the items and tasks she herself had numbered; they seemed steps in the irrelevant ritual of a dead faith. And the watch, ticking fast and small, so that not one hour should escape—what were those hours but a purpose laid upon things which run their course untouched by numbers and twenty-four-karat hands?
The hands tell her it is eleven o’clock. Her mother is nudging into her pew. Sinner, don’t you waste that Sunday! Her father is home, tied to his chair, dozing in front of the television under the watchful eye of Mrs. Elderfield. In the hospital, visitors are arriving; the new mothers have put on their best nightgowns and their brightest robes, and leaning proudly on their husbands, they take their first painful, uncertain steps down the hall to the nursery, where they stand in front of the glass window and search the rows of bassinets for their child.
Here is the big blonde woman who wanted a boy and just had her sixth daughter, and the black girl who had a boy and walks about in a black satin robe that fits so tightly over her protruding stomach that she seems to be carrying him still, and when Erica meets them in front of the window, they chatter like old friends about the length of labor and whether the milk is coming in, and the husbands listen, bewildered both at the intimacy and the new concerns.
Theo presses his face to the glass.
“What if he grew wings?”
Erica looks at him, puzzled.
“What do you mean, wings?”
“He could be the first man on earth to be born with wings. We’d have to learn how to take care of them. We couldn’t get them wet, or they’d lose their natural oils. Of course he couldn’t fly right away, but we’d teach him to zip around. And we’d fold them up for him at night. ‘Oh, Doctor Spock, my little boy has broken his wing, what should I do?’ We’ll walk him on a string, like a balloon.”
And then he said, very seriously,
“When we’re pushing eighty, he can fly us around on his back.”
She nods, she is beginning to understand. Distance from the world has fallen across her, as if she breathed a different air and moved in a different space; the distance that separates those who sleep at night from those who are most alive during those hours and hear the first birds calling each other awake while the sky is still dark.
She sleeps with her feet curled against her belly, the way the child slept all the months she carried him, and she feels her body becoming his body, her face becoming open and small like his face. The folds in the sheet show her grotesque mouths, dwarfs playing invisible flutes, the running of foxes and the folded wings of birds flying through that forest she has not visited since her own childhood, lying awake in her crib, watching the shadows from the cars outside unleash wings and mouths and paws. And now, heavy-eyed with sleeplessness, she sees them keep watch around her bed; kindly rabbits and comfy bears, offering her their backs to ride as in the old days, before she learned to tell time.
By the end of the second day, her hearing has grown sharper and her sight keener. Before the babies are rolled out of the nursery, she feels their crying like an ache in her back. Every bird, every door cries with a child’s cry, and she can pick out of all those sounds under the stars the one cry which she alone can answer. Outside, plans for the rape and salvation of the earth are going forward; factories rise up, and whole cities crumble away on command. Theo is performing all those tasks she laid on him before she realized that nothing is ever finished. With the baby resting against her shoulder, she is moving backward, away from the sun. Green birds turn their masked faces east and fly ahead of her, This way! This way! Make way for the son of silk and music, the immortal one, the heavenly music maker.
Behind the letters of the divine alphabet there is one face, just as behind every child’s face lies the face of its father. How then, can she tell her loss to the young nurse who that evening wheels in only one bassinet and says, “Doctor Sloane has your little boy in the incubator so he can keep a close watch on his breathing. He’ll be in to speak with you tonight.”
Before the nurse can stop her, she is running down the corridor in her nightgown. The incubator has been moved into the nursery. How many times have she and Theo remarked with mild interest on that delicate machine, sitting empty in the corridor? Pressing her face against the window, she sees the child’s belly heaving up and down inside. He lies in the intestines of an electronic bogeyman surrounded by more tubes than she can imagine uses for. One tube is taped to his nose, another to his arm, and they alone connect him to the cold air and harsh water of the new world. His belly flutters and grows still, heaves hard and grows still, like the body of a wounded bird.
So she arrives at last, and stands at the foot of the holy mountain, crying out to the Living God of Whom she has heard all her life.
“What’s it all worth, Lord? Our bodies tear and our hearts break. You think anybody would choose this life if they could avoid it?”
But there in front of her the babies are wailing to be fed and even now, in millions of men and women all over the planet, blood is gathering and preparing once again to shape those frail bodies. The sun is crossing the sky and calling all green things to come forth, the pear trees drop their fruit, and the field sends up sumac and wild honeysuckle. All flesh is grass, cry the birds, and all flesh is beautiful. And breaking free from the flesh of their parents come the children, who have already forgiven them.