Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  “Reverend Willhall,” I said “I think I have to quit.” As I said it I burst into tears.

  The Reverend blew his nose. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. He began to sneeze violently.

  “You have done fine work,” he said. A series of extremely loud sneezes followed. “But your future work is more important. The care of a newborn soul. Please have this pamphlet,” he said. He slipped into my hand a little bound tract entitled “New Life from Heaven,” which began: “The newborn child is an angel from God.”

  “You will not be replaced,” said the Reverend Willhall. “We are phasing out this part of our research and our next move is the development of the Race Music Foundation Gospel and Blues College in Natchez, Mississippi, under the direction of my brother, Reverend Archie Willhall, and my brother-in-law, Antoine Fontenez.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “We will put you on the mailing list,” said the Reverend Willhall, blowing his nose.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Well, goodbye.”

  “God bless you,” he said, and he shook my hand. The last I saw of him he was standing at his desk, in front of the poster that read I DO NOT PLAY NO ROCK AND ROLL, and sneezing.

  I said goodbye to Queenie, to Desdemona and to the Bopper’s mother. Finally, I said goodbye to the Bopper.

  “Hey, c’mere,” he said. “Before you leave, I want you to listen to something. But make sure the door is closed.”

  With the door properly closed, the room was totally soundproof.

  “Okay, sit down,” the Bopper said. “This is gonna put a cut in your strut and a glide in your slide.”

  I sat down. The Bopper threaded a piece of tape into his machine. At once the room was flooded with sound: a clear, beautiful voice singing the first lines of “You Don’t Love Me Like You Used to Do.” It didn’t sound like Ruby or anyone else. Perhaps it was some discovery of the Bopper’s

  “So?” said the Bopper.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Who is it?”

  “Baby, it’s you,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

  “Hey, I spliced it right off a piece of documentary footage. The Bopper has his sources. Now listen,” he said. “Let’s make a million dollars. Let’s record you singing some of those groovy old blues songs you catalogued. I provide the backup with some of my degenerate out-of-work jazz buddies. I make the demo and sell it. It’ll be our big break.”

  “I’m sorry, Bopper,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “I don’t get you,” the Bopper said. “You run with spades, you go on tour, you work up here. What’s your story?”

  “I’m like the Reverend Willhall,” I said. “A purist.”

  “So what’s impure about singing some folk songs, for crying out loud. This is the music you grew up with.”

  “I’m not a blues singer,” I said. “Going on tour was a kind of lucky fluke. I went for the music, not to have a career. I’m not a singer. I’m—I don’t know what I am, except a mother-to-be. Eventually I’ll have to find my next thing.”

  “Hey, I’m offering you your next thing.”

  “I’m very flattered, Bopper, really I am,” I said. “I just can’t do it. I love this music with all my heart but I don’t honestly believe it’s mine to sing.”

  “You and Willhall,” the Bopper said. “Boy, was he ever right to hire you. Who would have thought that a white chick would have the interests of Afro-Americans so close to her heart?”

  “Don’t be mad, Bopper,” I said. “I loved working here, and I loved working with you.”

  He sighed. “Maybe you’ll change your mind. I’m told changing diapers over and over can drive a person nuts.”

  I kissed him on the top of his head.

  “Let me know when you have your man,” he said.

  Unlike workers at normal offices, I did not have a big bag of personal possessions from my office to take home. All I had to do was close my desk drawer. My days as a researcher at the Race Music Foundation were over.

  I paid a last visit to Fred’s Out-of-Print Records. Luis and Ronnie were at lunch, and only Fred Wood was in, slumped over his counter, smoking a cigarette and looking morose. I hadn’t been there in some time.

  “Knocked up, I see,” he said.

  “Almost ready to roll.”

  “Still up at Willhall’s?”

  “I just quit. Too tired.”

  “Pregnant women are very groovy,” said Fred Wood.

  “Really, do you think?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Fred Wood. “Extremely. I just don’t get many in here. You might be the only one.”

  “Gosh,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he drawled, exhaling smoke. “They always look very … ripe.”

  I felt if I looked at Fred Wood the wrong way, he was going to take me into the stacks and do things to me.

  “Well, goodbye,” I said.

  “Yeah, take care of yourself,” he said, running his piggy little eyes up and down my body.

  There was obviously a breed of men definitely into pregnant women. Of course, it was about heat and sex and eros, but by the time you were very pregnant it was mostly about family, stability, crib toys and concepts of early learning.

  “When the kid cries,” Fred Wood continued, “sing it ‘Come On Baby Let the Good Times Roll.’ That’ll generally put it to sleep. If you get bored in the next month or so, come and see me and I’ll deal with it.”

  “What a good idea,” I said.

  I got on the subway and when I got out I found myself meandering into a toy store. There I bought a mobile of fish and frogs chasing each other, which you were supposed to assemble yourself. It had been made in Japan. At home, in a spate of heat and sex and eros, I attempted to put this thing together. Two hours later it was still unassembled, and I was awash in tears for what I had just given up and for what was ahead of me.

  32

  Now that I was unemployed, I found myself constantly rearranging the furniture. On nights that Johnny played squash with his friend Ben Sennett, I lay around the house with Mary Abbott, figuring out where to put what and listening to the B sides of obscure records.

  The nursery was ready. In it stood a plain wooden crib that had been sitting in the attic of the Listers’ country house, and an old pine bureau from Johnny’s mother, plus two of my mother’s best watercolors—one of me wearing a straw hat, and one of a baby curled up in a rosebud—were nicely hung on the wall in gold frames. The Listers had sent us a humidifier, with a long note from Betty about the delicacy of newborn skin and a copy of a hospital report attached. From the Race Music Foundation came a wicker basket lined with patchwork, for carrying the baby around. The secretaries at Johnny’s office sent striped receiving blankets and his partners presented us with a fancy pram that turned into a stroller. We were all set.

  “I feel like a time bomb,” I said to Mary. “Everything’s ready and waiting for me to go off.”

  “You are a time bomb,” said Mary. “Stop fussing about where to put the rocker. Put it in the baby’s room and shut up.”

  “I barely see you anymore,” I said. “I’ll have this baby and I’ll never see you. If I had any religion, you could be the baby’s godmother.”

  “Well, get some and I’ll be,” said Mary.

  “It’s too late to get some,” I said. “Will you be its unofficial godmother?”

  “Can’t,” Mary said. “In Catholicism it’s a real thing. I can’t be a pretend godmother, but I’ll be its courtesy aunt.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I do,” Mary said.

  “You’ll marry William,” I said. “You’ll move somewhere. Then I’ll never see you.”

  “I’m not going to marry William,” Mary said.

  “Then what are you doing with him?”

  “I’m having a friendship,” Mary said, settling in on the couch. “It’s a kind of friendship of struggle, and when I get through the struggle I’ll know
something important.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I knew I wouldn’t have to struggle.”

  “I see,” I said, but I never saw. What was a friendship of struggle? Did that mean she wanted to sleep with him but wouldn’t, or vice versa? The equation of our friendship was that I told her everything and she told me what she wanted to tell me. My role was to understand this—Mary liked to incubate an idea, and when she was ready she would present it to me. The fact was, she was very secretive about her dealings with men.

  It was now truly summer. We sat in the air-conditioning, drinking iced mint tea. I lay on the couch feeling my baby go thump, thump, thump inside me.

  “I think it’s going to happen soon,” I said. “I feel odd all the time. Imminent.”

  “It will be revealed to us in the fullness of time,” said Mary. She had brought a batch of brownies and we were polishing them off. Outside it was steamy and dark, probably as steamy and dark as where little LaVonda or Milton was working out.

  The weeks dragged by and suddenly I was almost two weeks past my due date.

  “Your baby has gotten itself into a weird position,” said my doctor. “It’s called the ‘transverse lie.’ It’s in there crossways. Here’s its little head, over here on the left, and here’s its little feet, over here on the right, kind of like a person on a couch. I hoped it would wriggle itself around, but it hasn’t. I think we ought to section this baby very soon. Why don’t I book you in? You go home and get your things and your husband, and I will meet you at the hospital.”

  “You mean today?” I said.

  “Certainly.”

  “But I’m not ready,” I said.

  “Are you packed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the baby’s room ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what?”

  “What?” I said. “I mean, I’m supposed to be someone’s mother by this time tomorrow?”

  “Why not?” said my doctor cheerfully.

  “Why not? Well, you’re not somebody’s mother.” I found this so overwhelming that I had to take deep breaths.

  “You’ll be a wonderful mother,” said the doctor. “You’ve been a wonderful patient. Now, go call your husband and let’s get this baby out into the world.”

  From that point on I felt that I was on a train hurtling out of control. I went home. Johnny met me. We drove to the hospital. I was put on a gurney and a large Algerian threaded a catheter into my spine which made the lower half of my body numb. I was wheeled down a hallway, with Johnny, all in green, running next to me. My heart was flopping like a caught fish.

  They painted my stomach with Betadine. “Don’t look,” said the doctor to Johnny. I, of course, couldn’t look, since there was a screen in front of my face. I felt something tugging at my stomach.

  “You can look now,” said the doctor. “It’s a big beautiful boy.”

  “Oh, boy!” said Johnny.

  Suddenly a little wet thing was put on my chest, a thing with dark wet hair and covered with something that looked like cold cream. He had entered the world with a loud shriek but seemed to have regained some equilibrium. He opened his little slate-colored eyes. I looked down at him, and I felt that he looked up at me. A wave of the most intense feeling came over me. So this, I thought, is a transcendental experience.

  With my tiny slimy boy in my arms, I felt suddenly and irrevocably that I had found my true purpose—or at least a part of it—for the first time in my life.

  PART THREE

  Little Franklin

  33

  Our son, Franklin Ross Miller, named in honor of Johnny’s paternal grandfather, the federal court judge from Savannah, was a winsome little creature from the moment he bounced into life, shrieking like a demented chicken. His chickenlike hair stood straight up. Johnny called him Frankie, but he would always be Little Franklin to me.

  I was totally swept away by this minute person whose hot, velvety head nestled so perfectly against my shoulder as he spit up mother’s milk all down the back of my shirt. There was much less spit-up than I had anticipated after all that talk.

  How smart he was! Just a few days old and he could yawn, make a fist, blink and stretch. It was love at first sight, just like in the songs.

  My adorable Little Franklin! Asleep in my arms, he was unaware that the person holding him was out of a job, had no profession and had in fact outlived an era. Little Franklin of course didn’t care, and I didn’t much care either. I had a purpose in life: to sit in a rocking chair mindlessly musing on my baby while I nursed him and burped him and rocked him. I sang him “Come On Baby Let the Good Times Roll” and “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” and when he was fretful I threw on “Everybody Is a Star” by Sly and the Family Stone and danced him slowly across the floor.

  The first question people asked me when I brought him home was “Where are you going to send him to school?” The second was “When are you going back to work?”

  Since I had no work to go back to, I concentrated on the school issue. “Johnny and I feel he should not go to school until he is at least seven weeks old,” was my standard response.

  We answered this question again and again, for as soon as Little Franklin was home and in his tiny Moses basket, it seemed that everyone Johnny or I had ever known showed up for a viewing.

  “Our child is just like the pope,” I said. “He has audiences.”

  Mary felt he looked rather like Queen Victoria, but I thought he resembled the poet Wallace Stevens.

  “Basically,” I said to Mary, “he looks like a little veal roast.”

  “It’s amazing,” she said. “There are bags of kitty litter that weigh more than he does.”

  “Why don’t you let me baby-sit, and you and Johnny go out?” asked my mother or Johnny’s mother.

  “Because Franklin is on a two-hour schedule at the moment.”

  “We raised children, too, you know,” they said.

  “As you know, I’m nursing him.”

  “Well, we certainly hope you’re not going to get carried away with that. All babies like bottles. Besides, he should have a bottle so you can have some freedom.”

  “I don’t actually feel like having any of what you call freedom. I’m very happy.” I said.

  “Well, breast-feeding is all the rage among you young women,” my mother said. “I can never quite get used to it. The other day I saw a woman doing it in a restaurant.”

  “Oh,” I said gaily, “I do it in restaurants all the time.”

  “Well, it’s awfully hard on people of my generation,” Johnny’s mother said. “We simply didn’t do things like that. Immigrant women did it, but not people we knew. How long are you intending to continue?”

  “I thought I’d wean him right before he goes to high school.”

  “Now, seriously,” said my mother. “I’m told three months is best.”

  “We’ll see how Franklin feels,” I said.

  Johnny’s mother said, “How Franklin feels. Geraldine! Little babies don’t have feelings about things like that!”

  And then there was Betty Lister. Once Franklin was born, every time I turned around she was standing at my door. Perhaps she felt I was some project her foundation might do a rehab job on. She usually came armed with data.

  “I’m just stopping by on my way to the Barradas-Elitzer Center. It’s right in your neighborhood. Do you know them? They’re one of our oldest outreaches. They do vocational and legal counseling. So I just wanted to bring you something that came in the mail. It’s quite fascinating. Early visual stimulation of newborns can lead to much better test scores in the later years. Now, are you two getting out at night?”

  “We’re not even sleeping at night,” I said.

  “Well, dearie. It’s all in Dr. Spock. You just encourage that little baby of yours not to want to eat every two hours. Take him outside, get him in the car!”

  “At four o’clock in the morning?”

  “Use your imagina
tion. All this breast-feeding. I know it’s supposed to be better for them, but all the reports say that formula is denser and they sleep better.”

  “I don’t care if he sleeps better,” I said. “I like getting up at night.”

  “Well, you look very tired, if you don’t mind my saying so. I’m telling you, one call to the Stein Agency and all your troubles would fly away.”

  “I don’t see this as trouble,” I said.

  “Oh, but you will!” said Betty. “You will as soon as you want to get anything worthwhile done.”

  As soon as I was alone with my baby, I sat with him in the rocking chair and sang “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman,” which began, “I gave my heart to you, the one that I trusted. You gave it back to me all broken and busted.”

  Little Franklin seemed to like this song, and he liked the songs I made up for him. One, based on Big Joe Turner’s immortal classic, “Feel My Leg,” began: “I want to bite your nose, I want to bite your toes.”

  When Johnny came home the first thing he said was, “Where’s my beauty?” This, I knew, meant Little Franklin. It did not bother me in the slightest. He was my beauty too.

  “Hey, John. How ’bout keeping our mothers off me, huh? And Betty Lister too.”

  “Oh,” said Johnny, holding his beloved in his arms. “Bum day with the old girls?”

  “They think only peasants breast-feed,” I said.

  “Did you tell ’em about all those groovy immunities?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Don’t answer the door,” said Johnny. “Gosh, this critter grows in the space of a couple of hours.”

  “Also, how about telling Betty that she’s bringing harmful contaminants into the house. Look at this! We’re supposed to get big black shapes and put them near his crib so he’ll have better test scores in later years. What are the Listers’ children like, anyway?”

  “To tell the truth, Bill Jr.’s a wimp and Penny’s a jerk.”

  “We don’t have to do any of this stuff, do we?” I said.

  “Naa,” said Johnny. “Our baby will have naturally high test scores without all this junk.”