I think, perhaps, if we had been married, we would have had the grandmothers come. God knows, they were ready enough to set up residence. Marie said she didn’t want to be the focal point of a baby watch. We all have our own ways with anxiety.
It doesn’t matter how cool you are. It doesn’t matter how perfectly normal the doctor says the mother’s condition is. None of that matters. I don’t think there is such a thing as birth without fear. Not fear of the pain or the mess—that is something the woman goes through, God bless her—nor is it what she fears. The fear is of what is inside. Does it have two of everything it’s supposed to have two of? And one each of all those things that people are designed with one of? Two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, two kidneys, two lungs, two buttocks; one anus, one mouth, one nose; ten fingers, ten toes. Is its brain enclosed, does its heart have holes, can it process food, cleanse its blood; can it yell, excrete, feel? Can it think?
All in all, then, I was relieved not to have my mother there. Because in addition to birth fear, I had another fear. Would they follow her? The way most flown felons are caught is by going home. I knew that from the days when I used to chase them. It didn’t matter how heinous they were. The baby-rapers, the cop-shooters, serial killers—they all go home to see Mom. Or their woman. Or the hood. This was the inverse. I did not in fact know how closely watched she was. If there was a permanent wiretap and mail search on her home in Brooklyn. If there was an army of agents, or even one fanatic, obsessed with nailing me, waiting to follow my mom overseas. It would be too literary and ironic to be taken and extradited as my first child was being born. And I felt too distracted by the coming birth to arrange for my mother to break whatever surveillance she brought with her. How do you ask a woman in her mid-sixties to fly halfway round the world, then jump out of a train heading south from Paris into a waiting cab to the Gare du Nord, then onto a train to Charles de Gaulle; change her clothes, her hair, her passport in an airport bathroom; and catch a plane to Zurich, where she will begin a new set of evasive maneuvers. Not that she wouldn’t do it to see her first grandchild.
I wrote her and asked her to wait until after the birth, when we were certain that the mother was up to it and the father could cope. My letters take about two weeks. They go through Rome. Not via the Italian postal service, where the letters are lost as frequently as delivered and the delivery date is selected by lottery. They go through the Vatican post—the Church is an independent country in Rome—then by Vatican diplomatic pouch to New York, where they are passed by hand, or messenger, to her friend Father Guido. It’s a lot of favors and seems like an excess of precaution, yet it’s been a long time and I have had no trouble. So we continue.
I was making Marie lunch. Marie was timing the minutes between contractions. She was calm, I was pretending to be cool. When the sun came out it hit fresh fallen snow like a trumpet’s blare of jubilation. It was so happy that I opened a window to feel the warming air and the freshness of it all.
“I am glad you are not skiing today,” Marie said.
“I’m not. Look at that powder.”
“It’s dangerous, the first snow of the season.”
“Nothing would happen to me,” I said. “You bring me luck. You and the baby.”
“He is almost ready to come out,” she said. “And you will not ski until ’e does. You would do something like breaking of the leg and then someone else would have to help me and I would be very angry with you.”
I went around behind her and put my arms around her. I felt her breasts and that big full belly. Our child kicked. Marie held my hand to the kick.
“I am glad I’m here,” I said. “Not skiing. I’d rather be here with you.”
She leaned her head back against me. If it hadn’t been true when I’d spoken it was true then.
The intervals between contractions were decreasing. While it is overwhelming for the new parents, it is simply a signal to the doctor and midwife. Over and over again, in fractured English and less fragmented French, they had explained to us that we were not to come over to the birthing center—which was one room attached to the Sports Injury Clinic—until the contractions were coming every five minutes.
I helped her on with her shoes and her jacket and her hat. I helped her down the stairs. Then I made her wait while I ran back up for the duffel bag of stuff and her mittens. Inside each ski town, obscured by all the tourists and the business, is a tiny town of intensely ordinary people. Once you begin to participate in that town, particularly if you stay through an off season, you know a remarkable number of them. Of course, they know you are not really one of them. Where was your family in the eighth century when St. Boniface was defining the boundaries of the bishopric and when the Duchy of Bavaria was incorporated in Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom? Where were they in 1552 when Maurice, elector of Saxony, invaded? Did they repulse the Swedes at Ehrenberger Klause in 1632 and the Bavarians in 1703? What do you and yours know of the Pragmatic Sanction, the infamous Treaty of Pressburg, the ceding of the South Tyrol and Trentino by the Treaty of St. Germain? What secrets do they harbor from the Anschluss and the days of national socialism?
We had been told to walk the eight blocks to the birthing center. Both the motion and the position would help the baby. There was a foot of snow on the ground. The best that could be said was that it was packed down hard. Pregnant, wide, and prone to overbalance, Marie clung to my arm. Every yard of the journey, someone seemed to appear to say “Good luck” in one language or another.
Franz of the Gendarmerie, the federal police, was running across the street with his large and ill-tempered German shepherd, Rudi. Rudi is one of the few dogs in town. Austrians don’t seem to like them very much. That may say as much about their national character as the French obsession with canines says about theirs. Or it may not, Franz stopped to pump my hand and give the mother-to-be a kiss on the cheek. He apologized for running off. But there had been an accident near the pass. Two cars over a cliff, he said, and Rudi was needed. Rudi’s job was searching for bodies.
Halfway there, between contractions, tears of sentiment overwhelmed Marie. She held me close. “We can name him Michael,” she said, “for your father.”
“What the hell,” I said, “we can even name him Michael Gerard after both of them. Then maybe your father will stop calling him le bâtard.”
“You are sweet,” she said, “but I don’t think so.”
Even into the delivery room we kept discussing the names. Jean-Claude because he was a ski baby. Sean because of my Irish passport. Phillipe for her grandfather, who she adored. Even Guido, for my mother’s friend. Or possibly even name him after me, after my real name, though I don’t like Juniors or people named the Second unless they are going to inherit something that comes with a throne or at least a coronet.
My love gave birth in a squatting position after just four hours of labor. She yelled, but not excessively. She sweated and strained and impressed the hell out of me. We were lucky; the baby was in the right position and seemed to be moving easily. I saw Marie’s vagina stretch wide and there was the matted, wrinkled, wet, hairy head of my firstborn, centimeters away, up the vaginal canal. Stunningly real. Poised at the demarcation point. Waiting for the final push and the starter’s gun.
“Push, push,” said Fraulein Glütz, the midwife with the umlaut, in German.
“Yah,” nodded Herr Doctor Ochsenboden. “Looks goot.”
Fraulein Glütz inserted her fingers into Marie’s vagina and smeared lubricating jelly all around the stretched labia and the emerging head. I kept saying, silently, to myself, “Holy shit, holy shit.”
Marie pushed. What a pusher. Push, push, push. One, two, three. Out came the head of my baby. Ugly. So ugly. It is another of the subtle biological differences between the genders that men clearly see how ugly a newborn is and women find them beautiful. But I was counting and the count was good. Two ears (check), one head (check), two eyes (at least two eye formations—they were closed, check)
, one nose with two nostrils (check and check), one mouth (check). Then Fraulein Glütz blocked my view as she reached in to help slide the shoulder out.
“Is goot, is goot,” she said. Doctor Ochsenboden looked over her shoulder so that he could accept his fee in good conscience. “Is goot, is goot,” he said, and nodded at me.
Then they were pulling the baby out, with the mess and the cord. Two arms (check), a bunch of fingers including two thumbs (check), a chest, a belly (check, check), two legs (check).
Then my eyes fell between its legs. “Oh-my-God!” I said to myself, as I saw my fears come true. My mind raced forward; the years of our future flashed before my eyes, like the endless hallway from a horror film—our flawed child, Marie’s heartbreak, the extra care, medical and psychiatric, and the constant explanations. “Oh-my-God! My son has no penis!”
“Yah, ve vas mistaken makin,’” Doctor Ochsenboden said. “You hev girl baby.”
“Is goot, is goot,” Fraulein Glütz said.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s what it is.”
Buy Foreign Exchange Now!
A Biography of Larry Beinhart
Larry Beinhart (b. 1947) is an award-winning author of mysteries, nonfiction, and political essays. He is best known for his novel Wag the Dog (originally titled American Hero), which inspired the blockbuster film of the same name.
Raised in New York City, Beinhart published his first book, No One Rides for Free, in 1986. A mystery about corporate corruption, it introduced the private investigator Tony Cassella, and won Beinhart an Edgar Award for best first novel. He returned to Cassella in You Get What You Pay For (1988) and Foreign Exchange (1991), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
The book Wag the Dog was listed as one of the seven best modern political novels by the Christian Science Monitor, one of the five best books on public relations by the Wall Street Journal, and one of the thousand great books of the millennium by Capital Magazine. Barry Levinson directed the book’s film adaptation, titled Wag the Dog, in 1997. The movie starred Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, garnered much critical acclaim, and was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Beinhart’s next novel was The Librarian (2004), a comic thriller about an archivist caught in a national conspiracy to re-elect a dimwitted president. He then published Salvation Boulevard (2008), a sharp-witted satire of murder and mega-churches, where the real mystery is the nature of God. A film adaptation starring Greg Kinnear and Pierce Brosnan was released in 2011.
In 1996, Beinhart published How to Write a Mystery, a well-reviewed guide for would-be Raymond Chandlers, and in 2005 he wrote Fog Facts, a nonfiction examination of information in the age of spin. Beinhart spent two years lecturing at Oxford University as a Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Scholar.
Beinhart has won many awards, including an Emmy and a Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, but has still not gotten over the joy he felt when No One Rides for Free was first published. He lives, writes, and works as a ski instructor in Woodstock, New York.
Beinhart in 1951, at age four. His grandparents, Ephraim and Selde, look on while his father helps him ride his first bike.
In his early twenties, Beinhart was a professional photographer in New York City. He honed his craft by sneaking into the darkroom at New York University to develop his photos.
Beinhart and his wife, Gil, during their wedding in February, 1988.
Beinhart in Aspen in 1989 with his wife, Gillian; sister-in-law, Kathy; and his baby daughter, Ana. During this trip, Beinhart developed the idea for his book Foreign Exchange, which is set in a ski town in the Austrian Alps.
During a family visit, Beinhart sits with wife Gil (far left), his mother, his two-year-old son, James, and Ana, his four-year-old daughter.
Beinhart and his son, James, in 1993. When he was young, James’s motto was “Why walk when you can ride?”
Beinhart’s family at Oxford University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar, in 1995: Gil, friend Betty, daughter Ana, Beinhart’s mother Ann, Larry, and son James. When his family first entered the centuries-old university, Ana, aged six, took a look at the medieval architecture and asked, “Daddy, is the king of this castle dead?”
Beinhart in Woodstock, New York, in spring 2002.
Beinhart in Spain, preparing to speak at the Semana Negra conference for mystery writers.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1988 by Larry Beinhart
cover design by Brenden Hitt
978-1-4532-5934-4
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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THE TONY CASSELLA MYSTERIES
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You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 41
