by Anne Tyler
“I always go to fairs, any fair in town,” the doctor said. “School fairs, church fairs, Italian fairs, Ukrainian … I like the food. I also like the rides; I like to watch the people who run them. What would it be like, working for such an outfit? I used to take my daughters, but they’re too old now, they say. ‘How can that be?’ I ask them. ‘I’m not too old; how come you are?’ My youngest is barely ten. How can she be too old?”
“The baby’s here,” Emily said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The baby. I feel it.”
The doctor looked in the mirror again. His eyes were more aged than the rest of him—a mournful brown, bloodshot and pouched, the skin beneath them the tarnished color of a bruise inside a banana. He opened his mouth, or appeared to. At any rate, his beard lengthened. Then it shortened again.
“Stop the car,” Leon said.
“Well … ah, yes, maybe so,” the doctor said.
He parked beside a hydrant, in front of a tiny pizza parlor called Maria’s Home-Style. Leon was chafing Emily’s wrists. The doctor climbed out, scratching the curls beneath his ski cap and looking puzzled. “Excuse me,” he said to Leon. Leon got out of the car. The doctor leaned in and asked, “You say you feel it?”
“I feel the head.”
“Of course this is all a mistake,” the doctor told Leon. “You know how long it takes the average primipara to deliver? Between ten and twelve hours. Oh, at least. And with a great deal more carrying on, believe me. There’s not a chance in this world that baby could be here yet.”
But as he spoke, he was sliding Emily into a horizontal position on the seat, methodically folding back her damp skirt in a series of tidy pleats. He said, “What in the name of—?” It appeared that her T-shirt was some sort of leotard; it had a crotch. He grimaced and ripped the center seam. Then he said, “She’s right.”
“Well, do something,” Leon said. “What are you going to do?”
“Go buy some newspapers,” the doctor told him. “Anything will be fine—News American, Sun … but fresh ones, you understand? Don’t just accept what someone hands you in a diner, saying he’s finished reading it …”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don’t have change,” Leon said.
The doctor started rummaging through his pockets. He pulled out his mangled pack of Camels, two lint-covered jellybeans, and a cylinder of Rolaids. “Emily,” he said, “would you happen to have change for a dollar?”
Emily said something that sounded like yes, and turned her head from side to side. “Try her purse,” the doctor said. They felt along the floor, among the gym clothes and soda straws. Leon brought up the purse by its strap. He plowed through it till he found a billfold and then he raced off down the street, muttering, “Newspapers. Newspapers.” It was a cheerful, jumbled street with littered sidewalks and a row of tiny shops—eating places, dry cleaners, florists. In front of one of the cafés were various newspapers in locked, windowed boxes.
The doctor stepped on his cigarette and ground it into the pavement. Then he took off his suit jacket. He rolled up his sleeves and tucked his shirt more firmly into his trousers. He bent inside the car and laid a palm on Emily’s abdomen. “Breathe high in your chest,” he told her. He gazed dreamily past her, humming under his breath, watching the trucks and buses rumble by through the opposite window. The cold air caused the dark hairs to bristle on his forearms.
A woman in high heels clopped down the sidewalk; she never even noticed what was going on. Then two teenaged girls approached, sharing fudge from a white paper sack. Their footsteps slowed, and the doctor heard and turned around. “You two!” he said. “Go call an ambulance. Tell them we’ve got a delivery on our hands.”
They stared at him. Identical cubes of fudge were poised halfway to their mouths. “Well?” he said. “Go on.”
When they had rushed into Maria’s Home-Style, the doctor turned back to Emily. “How’re you doing?” he asked her.
She groaned.
Leon returned, out of breath, with a stack of newspapers. The doctor opened them out and started spreading them under Emily and all around her. “Now, these,” he said conversationally, “will grant us some measure of antisepsis.” Leon didn’t seem to be listening. The doctor wrapped two newspapers around Emily’s thighs. She began to blend in with the car. He hung a sports section down the back of the seat and anchored it to the window ledge with the track shoe she’d been holding all this time.
“Next,” he said, “I’ll need two strips of cloth, two inches wide and six inches long. Tear off your shirttail, Leon.”
“I want to quit,” Emily said.
“Quit?”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
The cook came out of Maria’s Home-Style. He was a large man in an apron stained with tomato sauce. For a moment he watched Leon, who was standing by the car in nothing but his jeans, shakily tugging at his shirttail. (Leon’s ribs showed and his shoulder blades were as sharp as chicken wings. He was much too young for all this.) The cook reached over and took the shirt and ripped it for him. “Thanks,” said Leon.
“But what’s the use of it?” the cook asked.
“He wants two strips of cloth,” said Leon, “two inches wide and six inches long. I don’t know why.”
The cook tore again, following instructions. He gave the shirt to Leon and passed the strips to the doctor, who hung them carefully on the inner door handle. Then the cook propped a wide, meaty hand on the car roof and bent in to nod at Emily. “Afternoon,” he said.
“Hello,” said Emily politely.
“How you doing?”
“Oh, just fine.”
“Seems like he wants to come on and get born,” the cook said, “and then he wants to go back in a ways.”
“Will you get out of here?” Leon said.
The cook let this pass. “Those two girls you sent are calling the ambulance,” he told the doctor. “They’re using my free phone.”
“Good,” the doctor said. He cupped the baby’s head in his hands—a dark, wet, shining bulge. “Now, Emily, bear down,” he said. “Maria, press flat on her belly, just a steady, slow pressure, please.”
“Soo now, soo now,” the cook said, pressing. Leon crouched on the curb, gnawing a knuckle, his shirt back on but not buttoned. Behind them, a little crowd had gathered. The teenaged girls stood hushed, forgetting to dip into their fudge sack. A man was asking everyone if an ambulance had been called. An old woman was telling a younger one all about someone named Dexter, who had been a breech birth with multiple complications.
“Bear down,” said the doctor.
There was a silence. Even the traffic noises seemed to have stopped.
Then the doctor stepped back, holding up a slippery, bleak lump. Something moved. There was a small, caught sound from someplace unexpected. So fast it seemed that everyone had been looking away when it happened, the lump turned into a wailing, writhing, frantic, indignant snarl of red arms and legs and spiraled telephone cord. “Oh,” the crowd said, breathing again.
“It’s a girl,” said the doctor. He passed her to the cook. “Was a girl what you wanted?”
“Anything! Anything!” the cook said. “So long as she’s healthy. Soo, baby.”
“I was talking to Emily,” the doctor said mildly. He had to raise his voice above the baby’s, which was surprisingly loud. He bent over Emily, pressing her abdomen now with both palms. “Emily? Are you all right? Bear down again, please.”
While he pressed, she couldn’t get air to speak, but the instant he let up she said, “I’m fine, and I’d like my daughter.”
The cook seemed reluctant to hand her over. He rocked the baby against his apron, thought a moment, and sighed. Then he gave her to the doctor. The doctor checked her breathing passages—the mashed-looking nose, the squalling cavern of a mouth. “With such a racket how could she not be fine?” he asked, and he leaned in to lay her in Emily’s arms. Emily nestled the baby’s head against her shoulder, bu
t the wailing went on, thin and passionate, with a hiccup at the end of each breath.
“What’d you do with those cloths?” the doctor asked Leon.
Leon was standing up now, so as to get a glimpse of the baby. Something kept tugging his lips into a smile that he kept trying to bat down again. “Cloths?” he said.
“Those cloths you tore, dammit. We’re nowhere near done here yet.”
“You hung them on the door handle,” someone in the crowd said.
“Oh, yes,” said the doctor.
He took one cloth, leaned in, and tied it around the baby’s cord. For all the blunt, clumsy look of his fingers, he did seem to know what he was doing. “After the ball is over,” he sang in his beard-blurred voice. While he was knotting the second cloth, a faraway cry started up. It sounded like an extension of the baby’s cry—equally thin, watery-sounding in the wind. Then it separated and grew more piercing. “The ambulance!” Leon said. “I hear the ambulance, Emily.”
“Send it back,” Emily said.
“They’re going to take you to the hospital, honey. You’re going to be all right now.”
“But it’s over! Do I have to go?” she asked the doctor.
“Certainly,” he said. He stepped back to admire his knots, which looked something like the little cloth bows on a kite tail. “Actually,” he said, “they’re coming in the nick of time. I have nothing to cut the cord with.”
“You could use my Swiss Army officer’s knife,” she told him. “It’s in my purse. It’s the Woodsman style, with a scissors blade.”
“Remarkable,” said the doctor, and he rocked on his heels, beaming down at her. His teeth seemed very large and yellow behind the tangled beard.
The siren drew closer. A spinning red light wove through the traffic, and the ambulance screeched to a halt beside the doctor’s car. Two men in white leaped out. “Where is she?” one asked.
“Here we are,” the doctor called.
The men flung open the back doors of the ambulance and brought a stretcher crashing to the street—a wheeled bed, too long and narrow, like a coffin, with too much chrome. Emily struggled to a sitting position. The baby stopped in mid-cry, as if shocked. “Do I have to do this?” Emily asked the doctor. And while the attendants were helping her out of the car (chairing her onto the stretcher, newspapers and all), she kept her face turned toward the doctor and waited to be rescued. “Doctor? I can’t stand hospitals! Do I have to go?”
“Of course,” the doctor told her. He stooped for her purse and laid it on the stretcher.
“Is Leon coming too?”
“Certainly he’s coming.”
“Are you?”
“Me? Oh.”
“Best if you would, Doc,” the driver told him, unfolding a sheet over Emily.
“Well, if you like,” the doctor said.
He closed his car door and followed the stretcher into the ambulance. There was another stretcher, empty, next to Emily’s. He and Leon sat on it—both of them gingerly, just on the edge, with their knees jutting out. “Pretty fancy,” the doctor said to Leon. He meant, presumably, the interior of the ambulance: the deeply carpeted floor, the gleaming tanks and gauges. When the men slammed the doors shut, there was a sudden, luxurious silence. The street noises faded, and through the tinted windows the people on the sidewalk seemed as soundless and slow-moving as creatures on the ocean floor. They slid away. A café and a pawnshop glided past. Even the siren was muffled, like something on an old-fashioned radio.
“How’re you feeling?” the doctor asked Emily.
“Fine,” she said. She lay still, in a tangle of loosened braids. The baby stared severely at the ceiling.
“We really appreciate all you’ve done,” Leon told the doctor.
“It was nothing,” said the doctor, turning down the corners of his mouth. He seemed displeased.
“If Emily didn’t have this thing about hospitals, we’d have made our arrangements sooner, I guess. But the baby wasn’t due for another couple of weeks. We just kept putting it off.”
“And I suppose you were on the move so much,” the doctor said.
“No, no—”
“But the style of your lives: I don’t imagine you can plan very far ahead.”
“You have the wrong idea about us,” Emily said.
Flattened on the stretcher, with the crisp sheet covering the newspapers and her sodden skirt, Emily seemed untouched, somehow—pristine and remote, with her gaze turned inward. “You think we’re some kind of transients,” she said, “but we’re not. We’re legally married, and we live in a regular apartment with furniture. This baby was fully planned for. We’re even going to have a diaper service. I’ve already called to set it up, and they said to let them know when she came and they’d start delivery promptly.”
“I see,” said the doctor, nodding. He appeared to be enjoying this. The disorderly beard flew up and down, and the pom-pom on his ski cap bobbed.
“We’ve planned out every detail,” Emily said. “We didn’t buy a crib because cribs are extraneous. We’re using a cardboard box for now, with padding on the insides.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said the doctor, looking delighted.
“When she gets too big for the box, we’ll order this aluminum youth-bed rail we happened to see in a catalog. You can fit it onto any mattress. What’s the point in all that equipment—cribs and strollers and Bathinettes? Besides, the youth-bed rail will even work in hotels and other people’s apartments. It travels well.”
“Travels, yes,” the doctor echoed, and he clamped his hands between his knees, leaning with the ambulance as it sped around a curve.
“But we’re not … I mean, it’s only that we travel to give shows sometimes. There’ll be someone wanting ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’ somewhere outside the city. But we’re almost always home by night. We’re never shiftless. You have the wrong idea.”
“Did I say you were shiftless?” the doctor asked. He looked over at Leon. “Did I?”
Leon shrugged.
“We’ve thought of everything,” Emily said.
“Yes, I see you have,” the doctor said gently.
Leon cleared his throat. “By the way,” he said, “we haven’t discussed your fee.”
“Fee?”
“For your services.”
“Oh, emergency services aren’t charged for,” the doctor said. “Don’t you know that?”
“No,” said Leon.
He and the doctor seemed to be trying to stare each other down. Leon lifted his chin even higher. The light caught his cheekbones. He was one of those people who appear to be continually ready to take offense—jaw fixed, shoulders tight. “I’m not accepting this for free,” he said.
“Who says it’s free?” the doctor asked. “I expect you to name your baby for me.” He laughed—a wheeze that ruffled his beard.
“What’s your name?” Emily asked him.
“Morgan,” said the doctor.
There was a silence.
“Gower Morgan,” he said.
Emily said, “Maybe we could use the initials.”
“I was only joking,” the doctor told her. “Didn’t you know I was joking?” He fumbled for his Camels and shook one out of the pack. “It was meant to be a joke,” he said.
“About the fee,” said Leon.
The doctor took his cigarette from his mouth and peered at the sign on the oxygen tank. “The fact is,” he said, replacing the cigarette in its pack, “I had nothing better to do today. My wife and daughters have gone to a wedding; my wife’s brother is getting married again.” He clutched Leon’s shoulder as they turned a corner. The ambulance was rolling up a driveway now. They passed a sign reading EMERGENCY ONLY.
“My daughters are growing up,” the doctor said, “doing womanly things with their mother, leaving their father out in the cold. Each one when she was born seemed so new; I had such hopes; I was so sure we’d make no mistakes. Enjoy this one while you can,” he told Leon. T
he baby started and clutched two bits of air.
“I had sort of thought she would be a boy,” Leon said.
“Oh, Leon!” said Emily, drawing the baby closer.
“Boys, well,” the doctor said. “We tried for a boy for years, ourselves. But you can always hope for next time.”
“We can only afford the one,” said Leon.
“One? One child,” the doctor said. He fell into thought. “Yes, well, why not? There’s a certain … compactness to it. Very streamlined. Very basic,” he said.
“It’s a matter of money,” Leon said.
The ambulance bounced to a stop. The attendants flew out their front doors and around to the back, letting in the din of a gigantic, sooty machine just outside the emergency room, and the smell of hot laundry water and auto exhausts and wilted cafeteria food. They grabbed Emily’s stretcher and rushed away with it, wheels shrieking. Leon and the doctor clambered to the pavement and trotted after it.
“Do you have dimes?” the doctor shouted.
“Time for what?”
“Dimes! Money!”
“No, I’m sorry,” Leon said. “Could you use a dollar bill?”
“For you, I meant!” the doctor shouted. They passed through a set of swinging doors. He lowered his voice. “Not for me; for you. For the phone. You’ll want to call about the baby.”
“Who would I call?” Leon asked, spreading his arms.
The doctor stopped short. “Who would he call!” he repeated to himself. He wore the open, delighted expression he’d worn in the ambulance when he’d been told about the youth-bed rail.
Then a nurse lifted Emily’s sheet, clucked at the blood-soaked newspapers, and ran alongside the stretcher as it rolled down a corridor. Another nurse took Leon’s elbow and led him toward a typist in a glass compartment. Everything spun into action—polished, efficient, briskly clacketing. The doctor was left behind.
In fact, he was forgotten, for the moment. When Leon and Emily next thought of him, he was nowhere to be found. He’d just melted away. Had he left any word? Leon asked Emily’s nurse. The nurse had no idea whom he was talking about. Another doctor had been called in, a resident in obstetrics. He said it was a fine delivery, healthy baby. All things considered, he said, Emily should be thankful. “Yes, and Dr. Morgan is the one we should thank,” Leon told him. “Besides, we hadn’t settled the fee.” But the resident had never heard of Dr. Morgan. And he wasn’t in the phone book, either. It seemed he didn’t exist.
