by Nancy Thayer
He had to keep looking away. He knew his throat and cheeks were red from blushing. He had to leave, he had to get back to work, but he was as entranced as a man in a magic spell.
“Listen,” Pauline was saying, “what are you doing tonight?”
“Well …” Jack hesitated.
“A whole gang of us are going into Greenfield to the new Chinese restaurant and then we’re going to see the late show of Lady-Killer,” Pauline told him.
“Good God,” Jack said, “why are you going to see that? It’s supposed to be grisly.”
“That’s just the point,” Daphne said. “We’ve all decided we need something to offset all this good cheer and goodwill.”
“It’s supposed to be a first-class horror film,” Pauline went on. “The reviews have been raves. It’s an excellent body-slasher movie.”
“Sounds like a contradiction in terms.” Jack grinned.
“Come on,” Daphne urged. “It will be good for you. Get you away from your books for a while.”
“Douglas is coming, and Marcia Johannsen and her husband, and I think Hank and Ellie Petrie. It’ll be fun!” Pauline said. “Then you can drive Daphne and we won’t worry about her driving alone on country roads at night.”
Jack looked at Pauline. Are you blind?, he thought. Have you no eyes? Do you know what you’re doing?
He looked at Daphne. He was dazzled.
“All right,” he said as casually as he could. “That’ll be great. I’ll go. What time shall I pick you up, Daphne?” He felt a hot flush of blood rise up his neck and face, the source of which was surging powerfully at the base of his torso, so that he felt like a volcano rumbling and welling, ready to burst, and his skin was tense and sensitive with the pressure of holding him back.
8
After Christmas seventeen years ago, Laura had taken Hanno with her to Germany, where Otto was finishing his sabbatical year and having his affair with Sonya. That year while working at the University of Hamburg, he had lived in his parents’ home, the sensible thing to do because he was on half-pay from the college in Massachusetts and had to support his wife and child, to keep up the mortgage payments on their American house. Someday he would, perhaps, make money from the German-American textbook he was working on, but he had not received a large advance on it. Someday he would, absolutely, receive a lot of money from his mother’s estate—at least a million dollars, although the German death taxes would take their own lion’s share. Still, he could afford to be a poor college professor for a while, and it was in keeping with that role that he lived in his parents’ home while on sabbatical.
If his father, that unloving tyrant, were alive, Otto probably would have stayed elsewhere. But his father had died three years ago, and now his mother was weakening with her age and her loss: with her domineering husband gone, she was like an outline of a woman, the substance and color drained away. She did not know what to do with herself. Her life had been in every way ruled by her husband’s needs and wishes and demands. She did not say: “All I can do now is die,” but that was what she was trying to do. She slept, or sat, listless, through the days.
The Kraft family house in Hamburg was large, brick, with a splendid walled garden. There were many entrances, and Otto was a man now, so he came and went as he pleased. Once there had been live-in help, but now old Mrs. Kraft and Otto managed to get along with only one dough-armed middle-aged apple-cheeked woman coming in every day to clean and to cook a large hearty meal for the evening. Sometimes Otto came home to share a dinner with his mother, sometimes not. Mrs. Kraft livened up with her son around, and listened with respect if not with comprehension to his dutiful dinnertime conversation about his work, his text, current events, what was good on television, politics. She sat, old, curved, white-haired, trying to die, nodding with pleasure just to hear her son speak, not ever once thinking of agreeing or disagreeing with any one thing he had to say.
Of course she did not know about Otto’s lover, Sonya. If she had, she would not have been surprised. She would not have been even upset, for this happened, this was how men were. It had happened to her, it had happened to all her friends, it was life. And she wanted her son to be happy. Perhaps she suspected: many nights, especially in late November and early December, Otto did not come home to sleep in his old room in the corner of the second floor. Perhaps she suspected, perhaps not. What she thought didn’t matter, not even to Mrs. Kraft.
Laura did not tell Otto that she was going to come with their son to Germany. She was too smart for that. She was not a cipher like her mother-in-law. She drove Otto to the airport after their dreadful Christmas holiday and said a cool good-bye. Otto was addled by then, desperate only to get back to bed with his mistress. He had another semester of his sabbatical—another five months in Germany in Sonya’s bed—and he could not see beyond that. So he got on the plane, blind with love, unsuspecting, and Laura went home to pack. Three days after Otto arrived in Germany, Laura arrived, with Hanno in her arms and trunks and suitcases spilling out of the taxi. Mrs. Kraft, opening her front door, was so surprised she almost didn’t recognize her daughter-in-law, and when she saw her grandson, so blond and chubby and beautiful, she began to cry.
“We miss Otto too much,” Laura said. “We do not want to spend another semester without our husband and dada.”
She embraced her mother-in-law, who let her into the house, naturally, and by the time Otto came home from the university, there was the entire second floor of the house given over to a bedroom and playroom for his son, and his wife’s clothes unpacked in the closet of the corner bedroom, her silk dress hanging against his tweed jacket.
Daphne knew all this because this much, in detail, Laura had written to her. She had known, too, in advance, that Laura was going to do this. She had helped Laura pack. She had driven Laura and Hanno to the airport. Still, she could not believe it when Laura was really gone. The world became as blank as a white sheet of paper. Her best friend in all the world was gone. How would she get through her pregnancy without her? At this stage in her life, when she was bulging and lazily obsessed with her maternity, she would rather have had her husband gone than her friend. It was terrible.
After that first long, triumphant letter, Laura continued to write, but differently. Her letters were without the vivid warmth of their friendship. Perhaps she was afraid that Otto would get hold of her letters and read them. More likely she was hoping that this was only a horrid phase in her life and she didn’t want any written record to remember it by when it was all over. She did write lengthily, bossily, about Daphne’s pregnancy.
“Are you using that European salve on your belly twice every day? You’d better, or you’ll be sorry. Do you need me to send you some more?
“Are you eating liver for lunch every day like I told you? And don’t forget brewer’s yeast and wheat germ. Remember, you are making that child. Whether that child is healthy or not, superior or not, depends on each and every thing you put in your mouth.
“I hope you are remembering to take a long walk every day. It is good for your muscles and your stamina, you must build up stamina for the birth process.”
And finally, “It is time you are practicing your Lamaze breathing every day now. Seriously, and regularly, each day, so when the baby is coming you will be doing your breathing naturally and with experience. This is very important.”
Daphne was achingly lonely in January and February. She even cried, she missed her friend so much. It was strange how it was Laura instead of Joe she needed so much to talk to—about clothes, being pregnant, the nursery decor, TV shows, books, food, her mother-in-law. She had shared with Laura secrets of great or little importance that she could never have told her husband. Joe would rise and eat a sparse breakfast, go off to teach, and Daphne would sit at the breakfast table with her healthy cereal and decaffeinated coffee, looking down at her global stomach. Who was the most important person in her life now? Joe or Laura? Who was the most necessary? She felt like a traitor to
Joe, and she tried to get closer to him, to get back their old animal intimacy, but he was very busy with his course work, his committees, his scramble to the top. She read in women’s magazines that this was how it was with “young marrieds.” The woman was concerned with the new babies, the man with his career. So she relaxed and did not chide herself for missing her friend.
But she was so desperately lonely for Laura. Sometimes, when she was dusting or cooking, sentimental songs would come on the radio, and they would make Daphne think of Laura, and Daphne would cry. Especially she missed laughing with Laura. It seemed that with Laura, as it had been with her best friends in school and college, there was an element of lunacy, of hysterical, almost dangerous wildness. She had never laughed like that with Joe. Perhaps it was a female thing, that crazy laughter; perhaps it would frighten or repulse men to see women so loony, so witchlike in their cackling, helpless crowing mirth. And after all, in honesty, it was quite often something about a man or men that caused those shrieks. Or something foolish they had done long ago with a man or boy.
It was Laura who caused Daphne to get out and make new friends—although Laura had no idea of this. In one of her letters to Daphne she mentioned an afternoon she had spent with an old university friend, a woman who was recently divorced, and Laura wrote Daphne how intelligent this friend was, how beautiful, how fascinating, how sad and amazing that her stupid husband had left her, and so on. Daphne felt a real cramp in her stomach when she read that part of the letter, and then she felt a hot rush of anger. Why, she was jealous! She was as physically jealous that Laura had spent an afternoon with an old fascinating friend as she would have been if Joe had come home praising another woman’s looks.
Then Daphne passed herself in the hall and caught sight of her face in the mirror—what a harridan! She was wearing one of Joe’s old sweatshirts, which was stretched to the seam-breaking point over her enormous belly. Her hair stuck out all over—when had she had it shaped last? And her face! She was scowling like an old battle-ax, frowning and pouting and glooming away like a spoiled child.
“Very nice,” Daphne said to herself in the mirror. “Very attractive, I’m sure.”
After that low point, she got herself in control. She made an appointment to have her hair cut and styled that very afternoon, and she went on from there to search out other women friends. There were the other faculty wives she met at all the university functions. She especially liked Pauline White, although she was also a little shy around Pauline then, because Pauline, unlike Daphne, had followed through and gotten her Ph.D. and was not just a faculty wife but a faculty member. And Pauline was four years older than Daphne and had a son in kindergarten. Still, their friendship began then, in its own jerky, clumsy, cumbersome way, and that friendship lasted.
For a while she was very close to some of the other pregnant women she met at the Lamaze courses. Several of them were solicitous of Daphne, because Joe came with her to the first Lamaze meeting at the gym at the Y and would never come again. He thought the pregnant women were vulgar, showing off, all those bodies on the floor, stomachs swelling up in the air, all those fat legs spread out all over while the men knelt next to the women counting or rubbing backs. Daphne remembered how Joe had leapt to her defense long ago, and now she wondered if his courtliness, his protection of her right not to know that the word “cock” might have an earthy connotation, was perhaps at base symptomatic of some deep prudishness in Joe.
Or perhaps he just truly found a gymnasium full of puffing, blowing, waddling, graceless women, women blown up and crassed out by biology, unattractive. It was true that as her pregnancy advanced, Joe was less interested in making love with Daphne. Some men found pregnant women sexy; Joe did not. He loved Daphne, but now in a rather abstract way. And that was all right, because he used up all his energy teaching, writing articles, grading essays. He was not out having affairs—he was in their dining room, working late at night at the table, drinking pots of black coffee, working in a world of words and ideas, far away from Daphne’s carnal realm.
Joe fainted before she had the baby. He fainted before they even got into the delivery room. Daphne had just been admitted to the hospital and had come from the bathroom, where she had put on a particularly skimpy cotton gown. She walked into the labor room, where Joe sat uncomfortably on a chair looking at the chart on the wall that depicted how his wife’s cervix would dilate wide enough to let a grapefruit pass through. She smiled at Joe, and her water broke. Daphne grunted—a woman in labor and delivery makes sounds of bestial intensity, sounds she never makes any other time—and grabbed the wall to brace herself against an enormous contraction, and her bare legs sticking out from the graceless gown went bowed as she bent, and a flood of colorless fluid gushed out between her legs and onto the floor.
Alarmed, helpless, Joe watched, turned white, and fell sideways off his chair onto the floor. When the contraction was over, Daphne called for a nurse to come help her husband. After he recovered, the doctor sent him off to the cafeteria for coffee, with orders to remain in the waiting room until it was all over. They were grateful that they had found out so early in the birth that Joe was not a delivery-room type. Fainting fathers often caused havoc for doctors.
Joe did rush down to buy a huge bouquet of flowers for Daphne when Cynthia was finally born. It was early June, and the college was out for the summer. He was working on papers for a journal, but this was as relaxing a time of the year as possible, and for a while—a day—he was caught up in Daphne’s euphoria.
“Look what we did!” she kept saying. “Look what we made!”
“She’s very nice,” Joe said, holding his new child gingerly.
“Nice! She’s beautiful!” Daphne insisted.
Cynthia was a beautiful baby, and not all babies are beautiful. But Cynthia was.
Daphne called Laura long distance to give her the news, and Laura whooped with joy.
“A daughter!” she cried. “This is wonderful, Daphne! She can grow up and marry Hanno! We can be mothers-in-law together!”
The truth was that Laura really seemed more excited about Cynthia’s birth than Joe did. Why was that? Daphne would never, ever, know. In any case, it almost didn’t matter, because Daphne was totally wrapped up in her baby. Her eyes opened and closed on Cynthia; Cynthia was the first and last thought of her waking day and Cynthia was the substance of her dreams at night—when she slept. There were all those middle-of-the-night feedings.
Two weeks after Cynthia’s birth, a large package arrived in the mail from Germany. It would be a blanket, Daphne guessed, cutting the thick cord, tearing off the brown wrapping paper. Or a soft embroidered baby dress.
It was a present for Daphne, a sumptuous red velvet lounging robe. Real velvet. It was very clever: it had a row of tiny glittering ruby-red buttons from the hem to the plunging neckline, but these were only decorative; the robe had a zipper hidden in a front panel, so that Daphne could easily unzip the bodice to nurse the baby.
“This is for you, my dear!” Laura had written on the enclosed card. “You deserve it for all your work—don’t you! I am so proud of you and I can’t wait to see Cynthia. Now, when you get depressed and feel dumpy—and you will, we all do—put on this robe, which will be splendid with your black hair.”
Daphne put on the robe. It was splendid with her black hair. And it made her seem slender again, it flowed and swirled around her body, hiding her widened waist. The workmanship and material of the robe were the most excellent Daphne had ever seen on any garment in her life—and seventeen years later, when Cynthia came home from her father’s to spend Christmas with her mother, it was that robe that Daphne wore to entertain. It was a timeless and superior garment.
Daphne was glad to have it that summer, even though it was too hot to wear most days. Laura was right: she put it on when she was feeling depressed and dumpy, and it helped her see into a future when she would look and feel attractive again. Daphne spoke on the phone almost every day with several of
the friends she had made in the Lamaze class; as the women had their babies, the conversation naturally changed in focus from their own bodies to their babies’ bodies. Daphne had never been happier in her life, for Cynthia was beautiful and adorable and good and gave Daphne immense pleasure. With her baby at her breast, Daphne felt a deep and complete sense of connection with the spiritual and physical source of the universe.
At the same time, that deep and complete connection was causing a chasm in her marriage.
The tenth day she was home from the hospital, she had to make an emergency phone call to Joe. Now that the baby was in the house, he had moved all his papers and his typewriter out to his office at the university, for as cramped and tiny as it was, at least it was quiet—no baby squalling there.
“Joe,” Daphne said, “I need you to bring me some medicine from the pharmacy right away.”
At the time Daphne called, Joe was sitting in his office talking with Hudson Jennings about Henry James.
“What’s wrong, Daphne?” Joe asked, alarmed. “Is the baby okay?”
“Oh, she’s fine. It’s me, Joe. I need to have a bowel movement and I can’t unless you get me some medicine.”
This information stunned Joe into silence.
