Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  After each dinner, Murray, Georgina, and Murray’s cat Spinoza would sit on the lighthouse walkway watching sailboats and Revelationist cabin cruisers glide across the bay.

  “I have a present for you,” she said one evening as the fading sun marbled the sky with reds and purples. She opened her backpack and removed a set of novelty condoms from Smitty’s Smile Shop, the Boardwalk emporium she managed, their wrappers emblazoned with portraits of famous discredited clerics: William Ashley Sunday, Charles Edward Coughlin—collect all twenty-six. Murray was touched. Once, before he even knew Georgina, he’d bought a pornographic candle at Smitty’s, a birthday gift for Pop, who collected such things. Georgina’s life was measured out in paraffin penises, whoopie cushions, latex dog vomit, and windup chattering teeth. She spoke often of getting into real estate. The town was changing, she would note. The casinos were coming. “You got a girlfriend?”

  “I’m not very successful with women,” Murray confessed.

  “I know the feeling.” Georgina stood up, her pregnancy eclipsing the moon. She was in her seventh month, Murray in his eighth. “I was nuts about Laurie, I really was—but, Jesus, so noncosmic. I mean, get dinner on the table at six o’clock or the world will end.”

  Murray contemplated an Aimee Semple McPherson condom. “In college I slept with quite a few dental hygiene majors. What I really want these days is a child.”

  Georgina scowled. “A child? You want a child? You?”

  “You think it would be wrong for me to adopt a baby, raising it all by myself and everything?”

  “Wrong? Wrong? I think it would be wonderful.”

  Murray started toward the tower stairs. Good old Georgina. “In my laundry room there’s something that’ll interest you.”

  “I’ve seen plenty of dirty laundry in my time, Mur.”

  “You haven’t seen this.”

  They descended.

  Surrounded by glass, tethered to bottles, sitting fast asleep in her crib, Murray’s fetus looked less like a baby-in-progress than like one of the toys she would play with once she arrived.

  “What on earth is that?”

  The glow of the naked light bulb bounced off the bell jar, speckling the fetus’s head with stars. Such a face, Murray thought, all flushed and puffy like an overripe plum. “What does it look like?”

  “A goddamn fetus.”

  “Correct.” Murray tapped the nearest bottle, abrim with his own blood. “My fetus.” He’d followed Marcus Bass’s instructions exactly, dropping by Brigantine Fire Station No. 2 several times a week and eventually earning sufficient trust among the three paramedics—Rodney Balthazar, Herb Melchior, Freddie Caspar—not only to avail himself of their transfusion rig but to be included in their poker game. “Female.”

  “But where’d you get it?” Georgina asked.

  “The Institute.”

  “And it’s alive?”

  “Alive and developing. I stole it the day we met.” The oxygen pump chugged soothingly. “The semen was mine—nobody knows where the ovum came from. Inverse parthenogenesis.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “One of my sperm began meiosis without an egg.”

  “It did?”

  “An egg of indeterminate origin, at least.”

  Instantly Georgina’s dormant Catholicism awoke. Crossing herself, she whispered “Mother of God” and, quavering with awe, approached the crib. “Wow—I knew God had eggs, I just knew it.” She grasped the teething rail and took a deep Yogic breath. “You know what we’re looking at? We’re looking at one of those times when God herself comes barging into human history and gets things cracking.”

  “God?” Murray spun the Swedish mobile. “You say God?”

  “Not God God, I mean GOD God. The God beyond God.” Georgina splayed her fingers, ticking off her pantheon. “The Spirit of Absolute Being, the World Mother, the Wisdom Goddess, the Overmind, the Primal Hermaphrodite.”

  Murray said, “I don’t even believe in God.”

  “Listen, there’s no way to account for an event like this without bringing in God. This child has a mission. This girl has been sent!”

  “No, there are other explanations, Georgina. A God hypothesis is going too far.”

  “Growing a baby in your jism—in a bell jar—you think that’s not going far? You’ve already gone far, Mur.” Georgina wobbled pregnantly around the room, pounding piles of dirty laundry. “A virgin conception—sensational! Ever see The Greatest Story Ever Told? Jewish people probably didn’t catch it. John Wayne’s the centurion, right, and he gets up on the Mount of Skulls and he says, ‘Truly this man was the son of God.’ The son—and now the other shoe has dropped. Just sensational!”

  “Some joker put an egg in my donation, that’s all.”

  “We’ve got to tell the world about this! We’ve got to telegram the Pope! First the son, now the daughter! Get it?”

  Now the daughter. God’s daughter. Murray cringed. He didn’t believe in God, but he didn’t believe some joker had put an egg in his donation either. “The Pope? The Pope? I don’t want to tell anybody, I’m sorry I even told you. Baby bank aborted—remember? Whatever’s going on, somebody almost killed her. Already she has enemies. Enemies, Georgina.”

  His friend stopped pacing; she sat down in his laundry basket.

  As she usually did about this time of day, the fetus woke up, yawned, and flailed her stubby arms.

  “Hmm,” said Georgina at last, absently harvesting socks from the drying rack and pairing them up. “Mur, you’re absolutely right—the Mount of Skulls and all that. Jesus Christ’s very own sister would certainly have to watch her step, at least till she figured out her mission.”

  Murray’s heartburn returned, a fire-breathing worm in his windpipe. “She’s not Jesus’ sister.”

  “Half sister.” Georgina slammed her palm on the washer, startling the fetus. “Hey, friend, your little advent is safe with me. As far as I’m concerned, she’s just the kid down the street, she’s never even heard of God. Got a name picked out?”

  “Name?”

  On the morning of Murray’s fourth day at Newark Senior High she’d suddenly appeared on his bus, Julie Dearing, wealthy and spoiled—a Protestant princess, Pop would have called her—with a face so gorgeous it could have started a broken clock and a body that should not have been permitted. She had dropped her geography book in the aisle. Murray had picked it up. The relationship never got any deeper.

  “Julie.” Murray pointed to his fetus’s opulent black hair. “Her name’s Julie.”

  “Nice. You know, you’ve got a golden opportunity here, with Julie out in the open like this. You can begin her preschool education. Talk to her through the glass, Mur. Play music. Show her some flash cards.”

  “Flash cards?”

  “Yeah. Pictures of presidents. Alphabet letters. And fix up this place, will you? It looks like an outhouse. I want to see animals on these walls. Bright colors. This mobile’s a step in the right direction.”

  “Sure,” said Murray. “Gotcha. Animals.” A smile appeared on Julie’s face—ethereal, there and not there, like a cat weaving through the dusk. What enormous potential for intermittent happiness the world offered, he thought. Aberrant or not, this was the child that was his, no other, this one, whether she came from a cabbage patch, the Overmind, or the brow of Zeus. His. “I’m scared, Georgina. Baby bank aborted. I want her to have a life.”

  “The kid down the street. She’s just the kid down the street.”

  “But you really think…God?”

  “Sorry, Mur. She’s a deity. She’s here to shake things up.”

  Bong, bong, bong, came the glassy cadence from the laundry room, like a crystalline clock tolling the hour. They were dining by candlelight, all the electricity between Brigantine and Margate having succumbed to a thunderstorm. Georgina looked up from her plate and smiled, a noose of spaghetti dangling from her mouth. “Something is on the wing,” she said. The storm
was blowing out to sea; the world seemed scrubbed, the air squeaky clean. “Wing of angel.” Georgina the neo-Catholic. “Wing of phoenix.” Georgina the pagan priestess.

  Tree branches ticked against the kitchen window. Murray retrieved the Coleman lantern from the pantry and ignited the two testicle-shaped mantles. Georgina’s swollen belly, so tense and electric beneath her artsy tie-dye smock, bumped against him as together they marched to the laundry room.

  And there she was, caught in the Coleman’s roaring glow, an aborning baby, battering the glass with her tight little fist. Her sac had ripped, filling the jar to belly depth with amniotic fluid. Hard-edged shadows played across her resolute face. Condensed breath drifted through the machine, so that Julie’s efforts to enter the earth suggested the mute gyrations of a creature in a dream. A fissure appeared, then a fretwork of cracks.

  “Julie, no!” Murray lurched forward. The jar exploded like a teapot under a hammer, glass fragments hailing against the washer, the amniotic fluid gushing onto the mattress. “Julie!”

  On her forehead, blood.

  He lifted his wet, squalling baby from the broken womb, and, sliding her over the teething rail, held her to his breast, her cut leaking onto his white wool sweater. The more blood he saw, the happier he felt. His child had a heart. A real heart, like any other baby’s, not a ghostly spark, not a supernatural vibration, but a pumping lump of flesh. She was a child, an incipient person, somebody you could take to an ice-cream parlor or a Nets game.

  The umbilical cord, he saw, still joined her navel to the placenta. She was not entirely born. But now here came Georgina, Swiss Army knife in hand, cutting the funiculus and tying it off with the dexterity of a boatswain.

  “We did it, Mur. A natural childbirth.” She yanked a pillow case from the drying rack and pressed a corner against Julie’s snake-shaped gash. “Nice Julie, sweet Julie.” The baby’s squalling subsided into a series of hiccuplike pouts. “It’s just a scratch, Julie, honey.”

  Murray felt embarrassed to be crying this much, but there he was, awash in the arrival of his firstborn. Hefting the dense wriggling bundle, he realized mass was an art form, it could approach perfection: Julie’s every gram was correct.

  “Hello,” he rasped, as if she’d just called him up on the telephone. His hugs should have fractured a bone or two, but love, he sensed, had a high tensile strength; the harder he squeezed, the calmer the creature became. “Hello, hello.”

  “You’ll need a pediatrician,” said Georgina. “I’ll tell Dr. Spalos to expect your call.”

  “A woman, no doubt.”

  “Uh-huh. You should also send for a birth certificate.”

  “Birth certificate?”

  “So she can get a driver’s license and stuff. Don’t worry, I’ve been through all this with my midwife. In the absence of an attending physician, there’s a form you fill out. Mail it to Trenton, Office of Vital Records, along with the filing fee. Three bucks.”

  He looked at Julie. Her wound had stopped flowing; the blood on her cheeks was dry. When he pressed his face toward hers, the air rushing from her lungs pushed her mouth into a facsimile of joy.

  Three bucks? Was that all? Only three?

  Georgina’s marine biologist arrived exactly thirty days after Murray’s alleged deity—a female marine biologist, her skin the color of espresso beans, a wiry and spirited little bastard who, Murray argued, looked exactly like Montgomery Clift. Together the new parents went to the registrar in the Great Egg Township Department of Health and obtained the necessary filing forms.

  “I have to put her name down,” said Georgina. “Nothing sounds right.”

  “How about Monty?” Murray suggested.

  “We need something cosmic here.”

  “Moondust?”

  “What’s your opinion of Phoebe?”

  “Sure.”

  “You really like it? Phoebe was a Titaness.”

  “Perfect. She’s entirely Phoebe.”

  Phoebe, Georgina wrote.

  That a Spirit of Absolute Being or a World Mother or a Primal Hermaphrodite may have influenced Julie’s conception did not stop Murray from worrying about his parenting abilities. Her runny nose, for example. Dr. Spalos kept saying she’d outgrow it. But when? Then there was the milk question. The two dozen parenting books Murray had exhumed at garage sales and flea markets were unanimous in censuring mothers who didn’t breastfeed. Every time Murray mixed up a new batch of Similac he read the label, wishing the ingredients sounded more like food and less like the formula for Tupperware.

  On clear nights, he and Georgina always fed their infants on the lighthouse walkway.

  “Up here, Julie’s closer to her mother,” Georgina noted.

  “I’m her mother. Mother and father—both.”

  “Not a chance of it, Mur.” Georgina transferred Phoebe from one nipple to the other. “Julie was sent. The age of cosmic harmony and synergistic convergence is just around the corner.”

  “You’re guessing.” Murray started Julie on a second bottle. What an earnest little sucker she was. Her slurpy rhythms synchronized with the incoming tide. “Nobody knows where that egg came from.”

  “I do. She break any natural laws yet?”

  “No.”

  “Only a matter of time.”

  Whenever Georgina dreamed up some bizarre new project for fattening Phoebe’s brain cells—a carnival, a street fair, a Bicentennial parade—Murray and Julie went along. “They’re putting up a casino on Arkansas Avenue,” Georgina would say. “I think the girls should see what girders and jackhammers and all that shit look like, don’t you?” And so they were off to the Boardwalk, watching a great iron ball swoop through the sky like a BB from heaven and bash down the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in preparation for Caesar’s Palace. Or: “Trains, Mur! Noise, smells, movement, adventures starting—trains have it all!” And so they drove to Murray’s hometown of Newark and toured the terminal, letting their infants soak up the presumably enriching chaos.

  The Primal Hermaphrodite—whoever—did not spare Murray the dark side of parenthood. Julie’s dirty diapers were no more appealing than any other baby’s, her ear infections no less frequent, her cries in the night no less piercing and unfair. Often he felt as if his life had been stolen from him. Hermeneutics of the Ordinary was a lost cause, not one sentence added since Julie’s birth. Day-care helped, saved Murray’s sanity in fact—Farmer Brown’s Garden, the best in the business, according to Georgina, who sent Phoebe there three afternoons a week—though the women who ran the place made him uneasy. They were all swooners and gushers, and of course the Katz child, so cute and precocious, gave them plenty to swoon and gush about.

  Precocious. Murray couldn’t deny it. Only five days after her birth, Julie had rolled over in her crib. By Yom Kippur she was tooling around the cottage on hands and knees. She uttered her first word, Pop, at a mere twenty weeks. By eight months she could walk upright, spine straight, left arm swinging back as the right leg went forward, an achievement that proved particularly disturbing to Murray when in the middle of her second year he noticed that among the several media on which she walked—sand, eel grass, the cottage floor—was the Atlantic Ocean.

  It was really happening. They’d come for their evening swim, and now, damn, there she was, skipping across Absecon Inlet.

  “Julie, no!” He ran to the shore and waded into the shallows. A show-off he could handle, even a prodigy. “Don’t do that.” But not this crap.

  She stopped. The water sparkled in the fading sunlight. Murray squinted across the bay. What a marvelous little package she was, standing there with the retreating tide lapping at her shins.

  She asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “We swim here, Julie, we don’t walk.”

  “Why not?” she demanded in an indignant whine.

  “It’s not nice! Swim, Julie! Swim!”

  She dove off the bay’s surface and into its depths. Within seconds she reached the shallows, toddling
toward him on the weedy bottom. A bit on the chunky side, he realized. Julie was a fast girl with a cookie.

  Perhaps he’d imagined it all. Perhaps the aberration lay not in Julie but in the water—an extra infusion of salt, causing super-buoyancy. Still, considering the stakes, considering the baby bank aborters and the Mount of Skulls, even the suggestion of water-walking was intolerable.

  “Don’t ever do that again!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, smiling softly. “I’ll be good, Pop,” his daughter promised.

  At dinner that night he told Georgina about the episode.

  “I believe there was a lot of salt in the bay this morning,” he hastened to add.

  “Don’t kid yourself, Mur. We’re experiencing a major incarnation here. Water-walking? Really? Sensational!” Georgina sucked a pasta strand through the O of her lips. “Let’s do the Philly Zoo tomorrow.”

  “I’m not a zoo person.” Murray shook the Parmesan cheese, the clumps rattling around like pebbles in a maraca.

  “Why? You afraid she’ll levitate the elephants?”

  “I’m not a zoo person, Georgina.”

  But the zoo went perfectly. Murray identified all the animals for Julie, naming them like Adam, and as she repeated each name in her reedy voice he realized he hadn’t known it was possible to love anyone this much, no one had informed him. A regular girl, he told himself. A fast developer, sure. A water-walker, possibly. But at bottom just a regular little girl.

  Later, they went to Fairmount Park for a picnic supper of hot dogs and Georgina’s health salad. “Look at us,” said his friend as evening seeped across the grass, bringing fireflies and cricket songs. “The all-American family. Who’d ever know it’s a hermit, a bastard, a dyke, and a deity? Who’d even—?”