by Sarah Blake
Whereas he was Fitch. Sure, the name meant enough to get him into the right house in his sophomore year, enough to warrant the right amount of interest when he was introduced. But then, in the next breath—Franklin? At the end of Cape Cod? Do people live all the way out there? Thought the whole place shut up tight after Labor Day.
Ha, ha, he’d grin. Ha, ha. You’d be surprised. Three or four hundred of us are left there after you all flee. Is that right, the other would drawl, interest waning. Will Fitch from Franklin. He was a curio, an exotic. Not dismiss-able, but not someone to contend with either. All the years he was in Cambridge, he was Fitch—from Franklin. Which was nowhere to begin from.
The wash of Johnny’s joke had sped all the way out. Someone suggested another round, and Johnny nodded without looking up, his hand cupped around the darting flame of his lighter. Any minute he’d turn and see Will standing there alone and talking to no one, a fool in the middle of a party.
Suddenly what to do next had been simple. It was clear. Will turned back around and headed straight for the window, afraid she’d have disappeared. But he picked her out, still standing there. Waiting for him, he realized with a thrill.
“Hullo,” he said, coming to stand in front of her.
“No more drinks?”
“No,” he smiled. “There are. But there are too many people. Let’s go have a drink somewhere else.”
She looked up again at him. “I’m Emma Trask.” She offered him her hand.
“All right,” he said, taking it in his. His long fingers touched the inner place in her wrist where her pulse beat and he felt it race forward, as though he’d got hold of her heart. He tucked her hand under his arm and led her out of the party.
WILL TURNED around to Maggie. “Let’s check again,” he said softly. He piled up two pillows at the end of her bed, and placed her feet upon them. She opened her eyes and watched his face as he slipped his fingers inside her once more, feeling for the baby’s head. He smiled at her, relieved. The cervix was nearly completely dilated and the head was ready to pass into the bony pelvis.
“You’re closer,” he said, comfortingly, and reached to take her pulse.
As soon as his fingers found the spot on her wrist, he knew it was wrong. He held on to her for another full minute, counting the beats again to be sure. It was definitely accelerated. Her pulse had been quick before. Now it was racing. The earlier worry he had dismissed charged forward. There had been that smell. Her temperature was up. And now her pulse was rapid and irregular. He glanced at her, worried for the first time that these were signs pointing toward sepsis.
She closed her eyes again and groaned, low and dark as the throttle of a cow, the sound seeming to seep up from the ground beneath his feet. Ohh, the groaning note widened and grew around the room. He had attended sixteen births and even performed two cesarean sections, but those women had never been this loud. There had been nurses in the hospital and there had been ether and the babies had slid out like seals. He had never delivered a baby by himself before. And somehow, here in the tiny upstairs room of the fish house, it was as though this was his first birth, the first time he’d understood how far below the training women take you, down into the thick of it, into the dark blood stew where life begins. Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh—the groans battered him. A scream, the high relief of a scream—like a whistle or a piece of music—that he could manage, but this low deep repetition took him down far underground. Her eyes were shut tight as if she were trying to remember something or make her way forward somewhere, while her mouth kept opening on the crest of the contraction, bellowing the pain.
Dimly, through the floorboards, Will heard the older children returning home; hearing them, Maggie smiled weakly.
“They ought to go back with their grandmother,” Will said more harshly than he meant.
“They don’t sleep if they can’t sleep in their beds,” she murmured.
“But—”
“They’ve heard it before,” she sighed.
The next groan started forward again, thick and deep. Will stood up from the bed abruptly. There ought to be more light in the room. In the hospital, scenes like this were reassuringly lit, there was never a question of not knowing where you’d put your things, where you might need to go to get hot water or towels. Light counteracted the horror Maggie was in the grip of, light. He strode over to the door and flicked the switch and the white ceramic bowl burst into brightness above his head, pushing away the desperation he was feeling. It was a simple bedroom with a dresser and three windows, a rocking chair and a round hooked rug beside the bedstead.
Downstairs were the other children, and Will thought of Lowenstein, who had brought those others into the world, and wished he were here to consult with, a pair of experienced hands, another set of diagnostic eyes. To have somebody in the room other than this woman groaning. This woman—he forced himself to look and smile as she rolled her head against the pillow and closed her eyes—this woman who was Maggie, who used to be Maggie in his classroom. Maggie on the waterfront, her long legs tangling in the riggings of her father’s boat above his head. Maggie who stared straight into his eyes when he examined her, his inquiring fingers sliding into her to see if all was in place, not like most who shut their eyes or looked up into the ceiling.
The old tenacious dread slid out into the shallows. It had always gone wrong for the Fitches. Why had he thought it could be any different? Why had he thought he could begin again in the same town, with the same name as his father’s? He nearly laughed aloud, the bubble of fear rising in his chest as he listened to Maggie now. This deep dark grunting dread, this was what held on. He had married Emma. He had come back to town a doctor. He had thought he could plan a future and kiss his wife like anyone else. But the truth was, the old dark feeling swam just there. It would never go away. And here was proof.
Suddenly with terrific energy, Maggie bolted up and turned her back around, looked at Will wildly but didn’t seem to see him, kneeling on the bed with her hands on the wall behind the headboard. She turned away from him and then back, groaning, stop stop stop, the word panting out as regular as a machine. Stop stop stop stop—her voice rose and then she arched her back away from the pain driving around and around inside her, and when it was over she groaned wordless, and slumped against the board. Will watched her, nervous. It was as though he’d seen a rag doll shaken in the mouth of a dog, her body flung this way and that, and then flung away, the doll left to lie flat and limp, pale and sweating.
The eerie sound of a child humming to itself came up from down below. It was a tuneless little sound and it came so purely up through the floorboards that Will realized the walls kept nothing out, that the children down below had heard their mother, that he and she might just as well be behind a curtain in the middle of a crowded public ward.
“Maggie?” he whispered, licking his lips.
She might have fallen suddenly asleep, though she lay pale and sweating with her eyes closed. The child’s tune snaked around in the air with no apparent destination or pattern. Will sat and listened, his own brain stuck and tired, the light slowly departing from the attic, leaving the old white sails to glow where they had been piled. Oh, sang the child, oh, oh, oh that opportunity rag. Will tried to remember the children’s names and ages. Who was the singer down there, and where were the rest? Oh, hummed the child again, his voice dipping lower. Maggie’s hand fell open on the bed. Had she passed out, or was she only asleep? She was asleep, Will saw now, deep asleep, her mouth parted a little and a flush spread upon her cheeks. The series of waves that she had been borne upon, crashing once and once again and then once more, had receded and left her to sleep. Will rolled his wrist over to check the time. Four minutes had past. The little boy—it must be a boy, Will had decided, the tone was so pure—had moved toward the front of the house and the voice now came from there, sliding backward and up through the floorboards at his feet. Maggie’s eyelids fluttered slightly. Did she hear the one child, he wondered, c
alling to the other? For that is how it seemed, this one sweet little bird down below humming in the middle of this terrible scene, the mother nothing but a string held in the fierce tiny grips of the unborn and the child already here and pulled on, mercilessly. He stood and pulled a washcloth out of the basin, wringing it damp.
“Maggie?” He placed the cloth on her brow.
“Oh,” she sighed. “Where’s Jim Tom?” She sounded like herself for the first time in three hours.
“Downstairs,” Will said, so relieved he nearly gasped. She was rousable, after all. She was right here.
“But who’s that?”
“One of your boys, I think. Jimmy, maybe?”
She smiled. “No. Jimmy can’t sing.” She opened her eyes and in the creeping dark, the whites had the same sort of dim glow as the sails. Will’s heart stuck for an instant with some sense that he was looking at a ghost. “Henry?” she called.
The singing stopped and footsteps ran to the bottom of the stairs. “Yes, Ma?” Henry called up.
“Sing some more, sweetie,” she called and fell back to sleep.
6.
SLIPPING INTO THE THEATER, Iris stood at the back letting her eyes adjust to the dark. The end of a newsreel was playing and lines of German soldiers marched toward her through frozen French fields. Their bodies moved like marionettes, the heads held stiffly and turning left to right as they came down the screen. Because she was standing up, they marched toward her at eye level and she had the sensation of being overtaken by a crowd.
“Goddamn Krauts!” someone yelled. The outlines of the seated people appeared against the wall of soldiers still marching, the ups and downs of their heads and shoulders like an old Greek pattern on the bottom of a vase. Iris took a step forward into the dark theater and chose a seat toward the back.
The newsreel ended and the lights stayed down as the credits introduced the picture. Iris leaned forward to slip her coat off her shoulders and then settled down into her seat. It was a movie from the thirties, one she had forgotten she had seen. But as the opening scene unfolded under the rich tones of the narrator, she remembered she had been here before. It was an old-fashioned love story broken by a war, and she felt herself slowly succumbing to the tug of the characters, into that bright English chatter of the actors as the love affair began. The movie played over her, and she didn’t remember enough of it to feel impatient. In fact, she had the delicious sensation of returning to a place she had once loved but had forgotten, like a room in childhood. The lovers had married, and now there he was, brave man, sailing off to war.
Her heart started to beat a little faster, as though she were walking down a long corridor with many turns. She had remembered what lay at the end of this movie, but she could not remember clearly how it all arrived there. The man had been caught behind enemy lines. He was surrounded, and now he was being marched to the commander. Iris sat up straight. She remembered now. She remembered it all, and the anxiety of what was to come made her heart pound still harder. He was not going to make it, that’s right. He was not going to make it, and the reason why he was not going to make it was because his signal—the flare he had shot up into the sky before capture—would not be seen. He had shot his flare, he had seen the bright white arc in the sky, and he had marched away, his head high, because of his faith that the signal would be seen. His men were only a mile away, he knew.
But what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t see: that was what Iris couldn’t bear. She almost stood to leave. Almost. She had forgotten this horror at the center of this lovely unfolding flower of a movie. She had forgotten that the men, his men, were dead. “Run,” she wanted to say to the screen. “Run,” she wanted to say to him, marching smartly away without a backward glance. “You’re on your own. There is no one left to save you. Run.”
But the story wouldn’t save him. The men were dead and only she and the other people watching knew. As they watched it all play out in front of them, it was the terror of that knowing and the fear he must have felt the moment he understood. He was alone, they felt it. And the sorrow. To watch helplessly, thought Iris, was the worst part. But also, to see the pattern, too. To see the terrible, inexorable pattern of it—the dead and the dying, and the knowledge that he could have run, but didn’t. He took the wrong path. He made the wrong choice. And he died.
The lights came up with the music crashing loudly into the air. Iris stared straight ahead, not wanting to see the others move around her. She stayed where she was in her seat until the last of the movie flickered past and the reel clicked behind her. And then she turned her head and there, sitting six or seven seats over, sat Harry Vale.
She blushed. He might think she had followed him in here, that she had stayed on the porch steps and watched to see where he went. But she hadn’t, she thought crossly. She had finished her work and then she had gone to the movies herself. Why did he have to be in here at all? Perhaps he hadn’t seen her. She tried not to move or draw attention to herself. There was an aisle on his side and he could just stand up, anytime; there was no need to look over here. He could just stand up and leave. She decided to wait him out and leaned over as if she had to pick something up off the floor. When she leaned back he was standing up and looking straight at her.
“Did you lose something?”
“No, I—”
He nodded. She was sitting bolt upright in her chair, her coat half on and half off.
“I didn’t think I’d see you here.”
“Why’s that?”
He shrugged and that grin came again, like the grin on a bear. “War movie.”
“It’s not about the war,” she said too quickly.
“Could have fooled me.”
She pulled her arm through the sleeve of her coat. “I mean, I don’t think the war is what is important.”
He watched as she reached inside the opposite sleeve and pulled out her scarf. “What is important, then?” He made his way across the intervening seats between them.
“The fact that there’s nobody there in the end.”
He didn’t say anything, but now he was standing right next to her. She flushed. “I suppose you disagree.”
He shook his head. “No. There is nobody there in the end.”
“Except God,” she corrected, more for herself than for him.
“God,” he repeated, without inflection, as if he had said bar stool or pin.
“You sound as if you don’t believe He’s there.”
“Oh, He’s there, all right.”
He smelled of Old Spice and axle grease and one of his hands rested on the back of the seat in front of her so casually, so easily, it made her unaccountably happy.
“I know He’s there. Every time I catch a mistake at work, I know it’s Him. Or else how would I have seen it?”
“Because you’re good at what you do.”
“But”—she smiled, almost flirting—“why am I good?” She pushed herself up from her seat and turned to make her way out of the theater. The low light from the sconces along the walls was as dim as candles. She could hear him behind her.
“Walk you home?”
“I’ve got my bike.”
He didn’t comment, and not knowing whether she’d said yes or no, Iris turned in the direction of the post office. He followed. Other people’s voices and laughter ricocheted out of the dark, and the disconnected bursts of talk came and went like fire. She crossed her arms in front of her, her pocketbook hanging off one elbow.
“Nice night.”
“Yes.” She smiled to herself and agreed, again. Out here among all the others, the fact that the two of them were walking side by side made it clearer they were walking together.
“Hi, Joe.”
“Lo,” the other man said as he wobbled by on a bicycle.
“Where’s he off to at this time of night?”
“Night fishing, I’d guess—never mind the Germans.”
“The Germans,” Iris said firmly, “are bombing the Br
itish.”
He turned his head and looked at her, but she couldn’t read the expression on his face. He looked at her and then he looked away, and for the briefest instant she felt again that she might have been measured and fallen short. The bicycle spokes clicked around and around between them.
“Anyway, they’ll never allow them in this far.”
“I’ll say one thing about you,” Harry said easily. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of faith in God and the government.”
“I work for the government,” Iris observed, relieved by his tone. Perhaps she hadn’t disappointed.
“That’s my point.”
Iris looked over at him and caught his grin. She shook her head. “What’s your point?”
“Government’s just a bunch of human beings same as you and me.”
“With a plan.”
He whistled. “Who made up that plan?”
“People at the top,” she answered swiftly, “who have an overview of the whole situation. People who pay attention, who know. It’s their job.”
“Like you.” He stepped aside to let a group pass them by, but she kept on walking, wanting him to see what she meant, wanting him to get it.
“Not at all like me,” she said briskly when she heard him again beside her. He had tipped his head to hear her and his arm was just under her elbow as she spoke. “I’m paid to watch out for accidents, for cracks in the machinery. My job is to prevent the system from derailing.”
“How in the hell do you plan to do that?”
“I pay attention,” she said firmly. “All the time. I watch out. That’s my job.”
He chuckled in the dark. “You’re a little nuts, aren’t you?”
“That depends,” she smiled back, “on where you’re standing.”
“Hello, Frank, Marnie.” Harry had stopped short.
Iris swallowed and nodded to the couple in front of them. Marnie Niles was bundled in a long coat, next to her husband. Now she patted Frank’s hand, which was resting easily on her hip. Harry and the postmaster, that hand said. Think of it. Iris’s heart sputtered open.
