The Love Children

by Marylin French

  On the mornings I was home, I took care of my body—exercising, bathing, doing my nails (still a great luxury after the commune)—and did errands. Sometimes I had long telephone conversations with Mom in France. I’d had my own phone installed, so I had privacy and Dad couldn’t complain about the bills, not that the new Dad would have. He refused to let me pay anything toward the house. I put most of my earnings in my savings account. I was saving for the baby and toward buying a restaurant of my own. By the new year I would have enough cash to buy seeds.

  Artur’s served only dinner, but I went in several mornings a week to do the ordering and help him with the accounts. Artur came from a country where women worked in the fields until the moment they gave birth, so it never crossed his mind when I came waddling in that fall that I should quit when I got big. I went in because I wanted to learn all the nuts and bolts of restaurant work—ordering, buying, the characteristics of different jobbers, hiring, dealing with staff and personnel problems—everything. A restaurant couldn’t survive without good budgeting and prudent ordering of supplies.

  Still, getting around started to get hard. I became huge, skinny as I had been. A customer told me one night that you can carry across your body or all in front, and I was carrying in front. She said that meant I had a girl, something I didn’t necessarily believe. Dr. Bach had warned me that I might not be able to maintain my pregnancy because I had such a small pelvis. I didn’t believe him, either. I refused to worry about it. I was sure my body would take care of what it had to take care of. My only worry was the weather: I didn’t like the thought of Dad driving me to the hospital through winter snow and ice late at night after he’d been drinking.

  I hadn’t told Stepan about the baby. I didn’t want to live with him again and he could not support the baby. When I’d told Mom I was pregnant, she asked if I was going to tell him.

  “Why should I?”

  “Well, he might like to know that he’s a father. That he has a child.”

  “He might like to make a claim on it, too.”

  “And you don’t want that?”

  “I don’t want to raise my child in an atmosphere of conflict and hostility.”

  “Like the one you were raised in.”

  I shrugged.

  “Are you sure he’d be hostile?”

  “No. But why take the chance? What does he have to add?”

  “You think it’s better for the child not to have a father at all than to have one who . . . causes conflict?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought for a while. We were sitting in the kitchen, and she got up and poured herself a drink. “When you think about your own life, do you regret that your father was in it?”

  I thought about that for a long time. Mom smoked. I didn’t. Then I did.

  At last I said, “Sometimes. Oh, I guess not.”

  “What did he add, besides trouble?”

  “I don’t know. A point of view maybe. Even if it was a crazy one. But I guess I’d rather have him in it the way he was than not to have had him at all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love him.” I wept.

  Damned Lithuanian genes.

  15

  In the end, what I feared is what happened. In early February 1976, I went into labor around midnight on an icy night. I hadn’t been able to sleep and had been pacing around downstairs in the cabin. Dad was in no shape to drive—he was sound asleep in his chair. I called a taxi. I thought about letting him go on sleeping, but I felt too alone. So I woke him, and as soon as he understood what was happening, he started yelling that he could drive me, would drive me, insisted on driving me. I told him to shut up (realizing that I sounded just like Mom) and to just come along with me if he wanted. Disheveled, his face marked with creases from the chair pillow, he lurched into his coat and charged out to the cab. He belched and farted and sighed and groaned and smoked all the way to the hospital. The smoke was making me sick. When we arrived, he staggered into the hospital holding on to me, thinking, I guess, that he was holding me up, though it was the reverse.

  He waited for hours until the baby was born, and the next day he bought cigars and handed them out to every man he saw. I told him this was ridiculous, but I found it endearing, like all his behavior these days.

  The birth wasn’t fun. I had no idea. Was this what every woman had to go through for every baby that was born? Amazing. It was a wonder the human race had continued for so long. I wasn’t alone in the delivery room; four women were giving birth that night. But I was extremely proud of myself: I didn’t cry out loudly. One woman did; another moaned. After all the movies I’d seen in which women screamed their lungs out giving birth, I was surprised that not a single woman was shrieking. Even the one who did yell did not do so often. Mostly we grunted, stoically weathering the pain. I was proud of us, proud of our sex.

  As soon as I recovered, I asked for a phone and called Mom in Lyon, and she screamed—with joy and excitement. She said she’d fly home the next day. I protested: she’d have to come to Dad’s house! She said she’d rent a car and stay in a motel and that she’d deal with Dad and not to worry. But I did. My stomach turned over and I wanted to cry. I didn’t want my baby and me to be surrounded by their fighting and shouting, to have my poor baby with her tiny pink ears that had just begun to hear the sounds of the world, a little bitty thing with no defenses who had never heard a fight, to awaken on the first day of her life to one of Dad’s drunken rants. No! But I couldn’t stop Mom.

  I slept.

  The next day, lying in my hospital bed, I picked up the phone and called Stepan at Pax. A stranger answered the phone. I’d left nine months ago; it could be anybody

  “I want to speak to Stepan, please. Yes, it’s important. I don’t care! Call him in from the goddamned fields!”

  It was ten in the morning; it wouldn’t kill them to fetch him. But a long time passed before he came to the phone. “Da?”

  Imagining a crisis in his hometown, I guess. “Stepan. It’s Jess. I wanted you to know you have a daughter.”

  Shock can be transmitted in silence.

  Eventually, he responded, “What?”

  “Isabelle,” I told him. “Her name is Isabelle.”

  He said he’d drive to Vermont to see me and the baby that very day. I said he didn’t have to bother; I didn’t need and wasn’t expecting anything from him. He said he was coming anyway. I was still in the hospital, I told him. He should wait until the weekend, when I’d be home. I gave him directions to Dad’s house.

  So a few days after Isabelle was born I went home from the hospital with a belly emptied of baby but full of dread. I was carrying a tiny creature wrapped in a blanket the size of a bathmat, whom I didn’t know how to take care of. My father, who had come to pick me up, was already asserting himself with vigor (if he couldn’t take me to the hospital, he’d damn well fetch me from it even if he’d had a drink even though it was only ten in the morning). He hovered behind me as though he expected me to fall and drop the baby—as if he would be any help if that happened. And on my other side, not speaking to Dad and looking at me as if I were a one-year-old who could barely walk, was my mother, who if I fell would not only catch me and the baby, but also would find a nurse to tend to us immediately, mortifying my father and provoking an outburst that wouldn’t end for a month. Newly arrived from France and dizzy with jubilation and jet lag, she couldn’t keep her hands off the baby. Waiting for me in my father’s recently redecorated Vermont cabin was my employer, who was regularly made a nervous wreck by the dinner hour, so heaven knew how he’d handle this, and the baby’s father, who until three days ago had not known he had fathered anything, who had parted from me involuntarily but in a state of bad faith, and who had no reason to feel anything positive toward me or my child.

  This quartet constituted my entire family, none of whom was actually related to any other member, except me, and none of whom could speak amicably to any other. I remembered my adolescent
self insisting that, unlike my parents, I would have a happy family. What I had was the family from hell.

  Still, there was nothing to do but deal with it.

  Artur had brought a gift, a beautiful baby carriage, an old-fashioned British pram. Artur also brought his extreme anxiety about when I would come back to work. Nightmare complete.

  The scene felt like a dream. I felt as though I’d taken a sedative, as I watched myself walk through my role, remembering to express joy at seeing Mom and Dad, and pleasure at seeing Stepan and Artur, and to appear to be taking care of the baby, when all the while I was totally disconnected from my body and the baby and didn’t know what I was doing. I think Mom must have had some sense of this, because when we entered Dad’s house and stood in his big main room, she took Isabelle away from me and laid her in the bassinet, an exquisite basket with an organdy skirt and hood trimmed with pink satin ribbon standing on wheels. She had gone to Cambridge, intruding on the French family now living there (who were thrilled when she told them the reason) to fish it out of the attic and bring it in her rental car all the way to Vermont. The bassinet had been passed down in the Leighton family for several generations: I had lain in it after I was born and, Mom told me, under the very same blanket, which she had knitted of white wool and threaded with pink ribbons, that now covered Isabelle. Mom wheeled the bassinet into my office, leaving the door open so we would hear Isabelle if she woke. I followed her with my eyes, lying on the couch where Dad had deposited me. I was inert. Everybody was sitting around with a drink; Dad must have made them. Even I had a drink, a scotch and water with ice in it; why did he think I would drink that? And at that hour of the morning? Was that how you took care of a baby? You got drunk? He must have been right about my preferences, though, because I drank it.

  Mom came back and sat down and asked Stepan polite questions about Pax, while Dad looked at him with eyes that were black beads of rage and ignored Mom entirely. Stepan could barely speak, he was so terrified. Recognizing a man from his own region of the world, he kept looking to Artur for help, although he should have known that since he was Ukrainian and Artur a Jew from Georgia, there would be little forthcoming. Artur kept looking at me in outrage—a Ukrainian, the people who had been the worst persecutors of Artur’s kind, daring to implore him for help!

  I fell asleep.

  I woke up thinking I had drifted off in the middle of a movie about radicals planning the Russian Revolution. Labor, I heard. I knew about that: I’d just been in labor . . .

  “The basis of every economy, every political system, probably every religion,” a sullen, stubborn, lazy voice was saying. “I know from youth,” the thick voice continued. “Always I know. Of course Marx know too, is there in his writing, still is great secret, unspoken fact that everybody knows. That’s why, when I come to this country, I say I will live on commune, not to make money, not to succeed American way, no, but to try for what Gramsci write about, to merge political society and civil society, to merge labor with intellect . . .”

  “No! Smart ones should be in control, like Plato said,” said a sharper, more metallic voice. “In my religion, we understand. We cherish scholars, we take care, they no have to work, we work, support them, they read Torah, Talmud . . .”

  What was the name of that movie anyway? Ninotchka.Greta Garbo . . .

  “Intellectuals always claim to be part of an elite,” a scornful voice pronounced. “First, they took over as priests and rulers, making the laws and enforcing them; look at the Hebrews, they didn’t even have a king at the beginning. Look at Sumer: one guy, a guy with a powerful family, a commander, a military man, a killer, takes over all property and turns everybody else into bondsmen and -women. The leader appropriated everything, ran the church and the state. The priests of Sumer were the guys who invented prostitution . . .” My father knew history?

  “Yes,” a woman’s voice interrupted. She sounded vaguely like my mother. What was my mother doing here? “Except they weren’t just intellectuals; they were primarily men. Whether they were the priests, who I guess would have been the intellectuals, as in Israel, or the soldiers, as in Sumer, they wanted men to be an elite with rights over women; they forced women to be a servant class and eventually made them property . . . Elite men will do whatever they have to do to avoid manual labor . . .”

  “No, lady!” Artur cried. “Intellectuals are close to G-d, they must avoid soiling their hands! They must devote selves to learning and to guide us! In the Middle Ages everybody knew this! They had a sliding scale! Angels, archangels, G-d!”

  “What the hell is G-d?” the woman’s voice snarled.

  “Different god, Artur,” Stepan challenged. “Middle Ages god not your god, my god. Or what should have been, if I had one. But Marx and Lenin believed that everybody should be involved in the process of production, everybody should do the hard work, the intellectuals as well as the peasants . . .”

  “Marx! Marx’s daughters cleaned his fireplace and built his fire every day; they made his tea, and his wife cooked dinner while he lolled around studying and thinking like a good Jewish scholar. The women did his fucking laundry, and cleaned his fucking room. Equality! Don’t make me laugh!”

  By now I was sitting up and looking around the room. I saw Artur blanch at my mother’s language. It surprised me, to tell the truth. She didn’t used to talk that way.

  Stepan charged in. “What place more elite than Russia, tovarisch ? Even special lane on highway, just for intelligentsia, for nomenklatura! Not have that even in England, where is queen.”

  “Damn straight. The few claim privilege and foist systems of ideas on everybody else, systems that are horrible, inhuman, evil, but nobody can stop them once they get going. Here they invented racism to justify slavery! The Arab countries too! They wanted to justify keeping Muslim slaves! And look what they did to your country, Stephen—Marx and Engels and Lenin! Turned it into a nightmare! Who wants to live there, huh? Stephen’s right, everybody should have to work with their hands, everybody! Huh, Stephen?”

  My father, arguing about ideas! My father, being friendly to Stepan!—although he called him by the wrong name.

  Mom spoke fast and low. “What you are all refusing to see is that the basic paradigm is male/female. That’s how it started, and you’ve put your finger on why it started. No one wants to do the shit work, so a few men said they were descended from gods, superior to other men, and didn’t have to labor, but when the other men complained, they said, Well, you are superior too, guys, just not as good as us, but you’re better than the women, look at them, they labor whether they want to or not, it’s inherent for them, they give birth . . . Why don’t you admit that that’s the real reason for discrimination? Look at yourselves!” my mother cried, standing up, preparing to fetch the baby, who was mewling in the next room.

  They paid no attention to her. They were arguing hot and heavy. I got up too and followed her into my office and watched her pick up the baby. She spread some receiving blankets across my desk and removed Isabelle’s diaper.

  “Can you get me some warm water, Jess?”

  I went into the kitchen, found a pitcher, and filled it. I brought the pitcher back and poured water onto a washcloth, rubbed a little soap on it, and handed it to Mom. Isabelle was gazing at the ceiling. I couldn’t tell if she could see us. When her eyes lighted on Mom or me, she stared for a moment, wondering at us, meanwhile kicking her little legs and throwing her arms around. I could see she didn’t know us yet. I wondered if it was a delight to her to be able to move around after all those months confined in a womb. Although God knows she did enough kicking in there. I thought she looked happy.

  Mom cleaned her little bottom, then rinsed it and folded a clean, dry diaper up over her. Isabelle paid no attention to what Mom was doing, too busy looking around, studying her world. She she kept making tiny bleating sounds, like a baby lamb.

  “Hungry, you think?” I asked.

  “Probably. How long has it been? Three ho
urs?”

  I nodded. “You could try,” she said, lifting the baby to her and holding her close, her hand firmly held against the back of Isabelle’s neck, fingers splayed up to protect her head. She headed toward the living room.

  “I’ll stay in here,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

  My mother lifted her head. “You will not! You are not going to hide yourself! You’re going to be part of civil society!”

  We went back into the main room and sat down on the couch again and, miserably, I opened my blouse and lowered the cup of my bra and began to nurse Isabelle. She was hungry; she sucked avidly. Her tiny fingers clenched, her little toes curled. She was entirely concentrated on the act of sucking; she was ecstatic. Feeding was the most profound experience of her little life.

  The men paid absolutely no attention to me. Artur was angry now, defending the pious scholars of the Jewish community and the customs that maintained them; Stepan alternated between sullen silence and the explosive outrage of one who knows he is right and thinks the others know it too but refuse to admit it. My father was drinking hard, spitting scorn at Artur’s arguments, agreeing with Stepan but disapproving of him at the same time, and withdrawing into his drug of choice. None of them had even listened to Mom’s arguments. Civil society—was she kidding?

  I looked over at Mom and raised my eyebrows. She shrugged. We were not part of this conversation, even though she had tried to enter it. “I think I’ll start dinner,” she said. It was only three thirty in the afternoon. “I bought a brisket.” she said. “I’ll make pot-au-feu.”