The Stork Club

by Iris Rainer Dart

  The driver was the same man who had driven Ruthie and Shelly to the Emmys last year and he recognized her and wanted to make small talk, but Ruthie closed the window between the front and backseat, and immediately regretted hiring a limo because the long blackness of it felt so funereal. She would have to be strong and in charge to take care of Shelly now. This wasn't like taking care of Sid, a job for which she had help. Besides, there was a library full of books about what to do with a baby. But Shelly with this virus inside him. This was different.

  She realized as she looked up at the television screen for his arrival time that she should have called from home to check because she saw now that the flight from Houston would be late. Houston, Texas. He had gone there to be diagnosed. Afraid that if he went to UCLA he'd see someone he knew there, or be examined by a doctor who would tell someone.

  For a while she sat on a bench near the gate where Shelly's flight was scheduled to land, looking out the window at the airplanes. She hated to fly, tried to avoid it by traveling as rarely as possible, as if by remaining on the ground she could trick death into staying away from her. Death. In her mind now, she did what she'd been trying not to do since Shelly's phone call. She ran down the list of all the friends they had lost to AIDS in the last few years.

  Then she fished around in her purse for some paper, but all she had was a MasterCard receipt, so she turned it over and on it she wrote their names, sat in the corner of the airport on a bench near the window in the terminal and made an unbearably long list. Brilliant colleagues, cherished close friends, people who were gone too soon. With each name came the memory of the service she and Shelly had attended for that person. Some ceremonies were so dark and gloomy they could barely speak to each other about them later. Some were so filled with the love of the deceased's family, and relief from the pain they'd suffered that the memory felt as light as the balloons they had let fly at the close of the service.

  When she finished the list, Ruthie prayed silently to all of them to help Shelly have enough time left so that Sid could get to know and remember him. When she felt someone standing next to her, she looked up, into the sweet face of Shelly.

  "Sid's mother, I presume?" he said.

  Ruthie stood and threw her arms around his neck. In her embrace his body felt the same as always. Good, healthy, not thin or weak or sickly, but perfectly fine, and she stepped back to look at him again.

  "It's me," he said quietly, "and it wasn't a nightmare you had, Ruthless. However, there's a bright side. I'm leaving everything to you. So with your money and mine, you'll be the richest Jew in Hollywood, unless you count Marvin Davis, who is really four or five Jews in a very large suit."

  "We missed you so much," she said, hugging him again. He was carrying his suit bag over his shoulder and a duffel bag in his hand, and he didn't have any other luggage so they walked, arms around each other, directly to the curb and the waiting limo.

  "Mr. Milton," the driver said, "welcome home, sir," and opened the door. As the car moved on to Century Boulevard, Shelly slid his hand over the black leather seat and took Ruthie's.

  "I'm scared," he said.

  "Me too," she admitted. "Me too."

  "How's Sid?"

  "He doesn't sleep, he throws his food, he removes his diaper in the supermarket, in other words he's perfect," she said.

  Shelly smiled, a tired smile, and still holding her hand, he fell asleep with his head pressed against the back of the seat. When the car pulled into the driveway of the house, the stop awakened him. The driver carried the bags inside, and Ruthie and Shelly walked in with their arms around each other. When Sid saw his father, he broke away from the nanny, ran to him and threw himself at Shelly, crying long and hard.

  ''Daddeeeee. Daddeeeee.''

  Shelly knelt, and spoke gently to him.

  "Hi, Sidney. How's my boy? Don't cry, honey. Don't." Then he lifted Sid and held him tight.

  After he'd unpacked and presented Sid with some Corgi cars, he got into bed for a nap. Ruthie kissed him good-bye, covered him warmly, changed Sid's diaper and turned him over to the nanny, then she left to keep the appointment she'd made a few days earlier with Barbara Singer.

  "The first thing you must do is be tested and have Sid tested too," Barbara said to Ruthie when the painful story had been told and hung in the air between them. She could see that spilling it all out had been good for Ruthie, who seemed to relax in her chair for the first time. When Barbara reached to turn on her desk lamp, she realized she'd been so involved in and intrigued by Ruthie's story that she'd never once looked at a clock. Now it was night, and hours had passed since her arrival.

  "When I first made this appointment," Ruthie said, "it was to come in and ask you to help me to help my son grow up in a world where people like his father, who I love more than my next breath, are stigmatized, condemned, and dropping like flies from a disease that must be stopped. But I guess there was always a part of me that feared this day might be coming, and when it did I'd have to face the real dilemma of how to get the three of us through it.

  "I told Shelly today that I made an appointment to come over here and talk to you about raising Sid, and what kind of problems we were going to face. Only when I made the appointment I didn't know what I know now. He told me not to tell you he has HIV. We're writing and producing a new television series right now, and the executive producer is a nasty little bigot. Shelly's afraid he'll fire us if he hears about this. But I said you have to keep everything we tell you a secret, right?"

  "Right," Barbara told her.

  Ruthie took a tissue from the box on Barbara's desk, but her eyes were dry. "I hate to feel sorry for myself because I have had so much in this world where most people have so little, but goddammit, it took such a long time for us to hammer out a little niche for ourselves, after both being odd man out all our lives, and just when it was feeling like we had it together, there's this." Her head hung toward her lap and finally she let the tears come, and for a little while she cried quietly. Then she looked up at Barbara, her face a mass of red blotches, her bloodshot eyes large with fear.

  "I'll go get Sid and we'll both be tested right away," she said. "And I'll see if I can get Shelly to start coming in here with me to talk to you. We've got so much to work on, and nobody to ask how to handle it. I mean it's not exactly your run-of-the-mill situation is it?" She smiled an ironic smile beneath her despairing eyes.

  "Not exactly," Barbara said. "But I know you and Shelly and Sid and I can work out a way to handle it that will be right for your family."

  "Our family," Ruthie said, liking the sound of that. "We really are a family. Although I'm sure we're not the kind you're probably used to counseling."

  "True," Barbara said. "But things are changing." Then she told Ruthie about her idea for the group.

  9

  THE SENIOR STAFF MEMBERS were all women, and they jokingly referred to their weekly meetings as "the kaffee-klatsch." But after the first few minutes of commenting on the quality of the coffee and asking about one another's families, their meetings were far from social. In fact, they were sometimes so serious that during a presentation Barbara had the same performance anxiety that she used to get at University High School when she stood up to deliver an oral book report.

  "As you're probably well aware, there are sperm banks all over the country, selling sperm which has been donated by men identifiable to the purchaser only by numbers, and a few broad-stroke descriptions of their race, religion, and favorite hobbies." One of her colleagues let out a titter of a giggle over that information, and Barbara knew they had to all be wondering what this had to do with their child-development program.

  "It's a chancy way to go, but women who want babies badly are willing to take the risk. Donor insemination obviates the discomfort of dating, awkward sex, and uncomfortable relationships. The irony is that the same women who were freed up by the sixties to have sex without the problems of babies, twenty years later find themselves eager to seize the
opportunity to have babies without the problems of sex.

  "What's happened with all of the reproductive technologies is that some important issues are being created that will affect us, the child-development professionals. In this era of embryo transfer, in vitro fertilization, menopausal mothers carrying pregnancies for their daughters, and much more, it seems what many of these families may not be considering fully is the psychological and emotional effect the circumstance of these births will have on the people being created.

  "And I say it that way because even in our studies here of intact nuclear families, frequently the baby-craving is just that. I mean, there's little thought about what happens beyond the excitement of new babies, when the realities set in. When the babies become children who have language and begin to wonder about their genesis. In my private practice in the last two weeks, I've met with a single woman who's been donor inseminated twice, and a couple in which the heterosexual mother was inseminated by the baby's father, who is her homosexual male best friend. And in both cases the families have toddlers who are very verbal, and the parents are concerned." That got a few "Hmm"s.

  "It'll take a long time before there's real data on how those babies will feel when they're adults, but I suspect that the key to making it all work has something to do with creating a loving context for them. To find warm ways to deal with cold realities.

  "I'd like to alert pediatricians and run an ad in some publications in order to look for and then begin a group for those special families. I believe the world isn't prepared yet with a new way of thinking to go hand in hand with those newfound methods. That culturally, socially, ethically, morally, and legally, we don't have adequate rules or answers for the exquisitely complicated issues that have already come up around these methods. Nevertheless, we need to find some way for the families to operate now."

  Louise Feiffer, the director of the program, was a tall dramatically attractive woman in her fifties, with high cheekbones, ivory skin, and dark hair pulled back into a bun. Barbara was relieved to see her bright-eyed and smiling as she went on.

  "I want to conduct this group under the aegis of the hospital and our pediatric-development program, so I'm presenting it to all of you for discussion." She looked around now at the faces of the others. Hands went up, there were dozens of questions, surprise at the statistics, and a fascinated curiosity about Barbara's research.

  "It's undoubtedly an exciting new area," Louise said. "I think we should try to work a group like that into our schedule."

  An elated Barbara congratulated herself all the way home on the good job she'd done. She was glad to have the meeting out of the way before tonight. The romantic quiet celebration with Stan of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Impossible, she thought. A twenty-fifth wedding anniversary is something that happens to somebody's aunt and uncle. Not two youngsters like Barbara and Stan Singer.

  She had sworn to Stan that she didn't want a party. Just dinner, preferably with her family, but when she invited her mother, Gracie said there was some committee meeting she couldn't miss. Jeff apologized that he had to go to basketball practice. Because the anniversary fell in the middle of the week, Heidi told her sadly that she couldn't make it in from San Francisco.

  So after a fast shower, the application of some fresh makeup, and slipping into a dress she was proud she could still wear since it was about fifteen years old, she and Stan sat alone in a large booth at Valentino's. Maybe, she thought now, it had been a mistake not putting together a big blowout of an anniversary party. A quarter of a century of marriage was certainly something to celebrate.

  Stan seemed unusually nervous. He kept looking over at the door, and postponing ordering dinner presumably because, as he told Barbara twice, he'd eaten a late lunch and wasn't very hungry yet. Now he was watching as a stunning young girl in a tight black minidress was being led across the restaurant. When the maître d' stepped aside and Barbara saw that the girl was Heidi, she let out a yelp of glee, followed by another when she realized that behind Heidi, dressed in a sport coat and tie, was Jeff. And miracle of miracles, behind Jeff was Gracie. She looked great in a silk shirtwaist dress and long dangly earrings Barbara hadn't seen her wear in years.

  "Surprise, darling," Gracie said, and Barbara wondered if she was thinking the posh restaurant was excessive.

  "Happy anniversary, Mommy," Heidi said, sliding into the booth and giving Barbara a hug.

  "You planned this behind my back?" Barbara asked Stan.

  "Of course," he said as he grinned, and received a kiss from his daughter.

  "I knew I liked you," Barbara said.

  "Mother, you look fabulous," Heidi said.

  "Thank you, honey. I was just going to say that to my mother."

  Gracie laughed and slid in next to Stan and gave him a patronizing little pat on the arm. "Good work, kiddo," she said.

  Barbara felt warmed by the sight of her family all together in one place. Stan liked to call the need she had to see all of them assembled at a meal her barbecue fantasy. Now if the fantasy came true, which it never did, they would all be happy to be there, get along smashingly well, and leave full of love for one another and better for the encounter.

  "Your hair looks totally idiotic," Heidi said to Jeff, and the fantasy went the way of all fantasies.

  "That dress is so tight, if you fart your shoes'll fly off."

  "Time out, you two," Stan said. "You've been together one hour. Can you stay civil for one more, in honor of the celebration?"

  "Classic sibling rivalry," Gracie said. "My girls had it constantly."

  "No, we didn't. Not constantly," Barbara flared immediately, knowing as she did it was a mistake to rise to the bait.

  "Let's call New York and ask Roz. She has a mind like a steel trap," Gracie said.

  "Maybe that's why they had sibling rivalry, because you compared them, Grammy," Heidi said.

  "I never compared them."

  "Well, if Aunt Roz has a mind like a steel trap, what does my mom have?" Jeff asked.

  "I'm debating whether I should call a waiter or a taxi," Stan said, and everyone laughed.

  "I guess no dinner with our family would be complete without tears, insults, hurt feelings, and unfulfilled expectations," Barbara said.

  "In other words, we're normal," Gracie offered, then she lifted her arm to hail a passing waiter. "Could we have menus here pronto, dear boy? I'm starved."

  "Mother!"

  "The real issue you and your family-therapy associates ought to confront is why people jump through such hoops to conceive babies in the first place. All the babies do is grow up and mistreat one another, and you in the bargain."

  "You can understand why I'm such a shining example of mental health with a mother who has that philosophy," Barbara said.

  "Happy anniversary, sweetheart," Stan said, patting her hand.

  "You know what?" she said, smiling at him. "If we're still around for our fiftieth, let's just go on a cruise."

  They said good-bye to Gracie and made their way home, Heidi and Barbara sitting in the back of the car. When Heidi took her hand and held it, Barbara felt a surge of gratitude for being blessed with these two complicated creatures, her children. It was the best anniversary gift she could think of to be able to tuck Heidi into bed tonight in her old bedroom, even though the room now had a desk and a wall unit of bookshelves on one side and had been serving for the last few years as Barbara's at-home office.

  "Grammy looked adorable tonight, but she's such a cuckoo," Heidi said. She was turning down the daybed while Barbara stood watching.

  "Thank you for coming in for this dinner, honey," she said.

  "Are you kidding? I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

  Every time Barbara saw either of her children after not seeing them for a while, like the times Heidi came in from San Francisco to visit or Jeff got off the bus from spending a few weeks at tennis camp, she would be gleefully bowled over by the sight of them. Not by their beauty, because
she knew she had no objectivity about that, but by the miracle of genes. She would marvel as she gazed at one of her kids, for what they always found to be an annoyingly long time, at the way her own characteristics and Stan's fell together to shape them.

  Their carriage, their gestures, their speech, their respective senses of humor, the familiar amalgam of her characteristics and Stan's mixed in with each child's individuality never ceased to amaze her. The same kind of uncontrollable hair she tried to tame on herself in high school by rolling it around orange juice cans and plastering it with Dippity-Do, on Heidi was a wild, wonderful-looking mane caught stylishly in a headband, or worn hanging loose, showing off the girl's personal confidence, which was more than Barbara ever remembered having at that or any age. And the darkness around Stan's eyes, which had always been his least favorite feature on his own face, had been inherited by Jeff, on whom it looked exotic and mysterious.

  "Sit down, Mom," Heidi said, and Barbara knew it was an invitation to stay in the room to talk, so gratefully and obediently she sat on the desk chair across the room from the bed, and started the conversation with what she hoped sounded like a casual, not-too-probing question. "How's everything in San Francisco?"

  She'd been saving any girl talk for the time when they were alone, hoping she'd get real answers instead of the upbeat facile ones Heidi might give in front of the others. Or maybe she wouldn't get a real answer at all. That sometimes happened too. Usually after Heidi first arrived, there would be a kind of tense feeling-each-other-out time between them, until the familiarity took over and Heidi dropped the exterior of a chic San Franciscan.