Another Marvelous Thing

by Laurie Colwin

  “Ah, motherhood,” Francis said. “How odd it looks on you. In the old days you used to throw your keys into the pocket of one of your hideous jackets and off we’d go. Now I see you carry a little mother bag, with a blanket inside, and probably diapers, toys, and bottles too. How well organized you’ve become! Why, just days ago, it seems, you allowed me to wonder what sort of child we’d produce.”

  Billy had very accurate recall and reminded Francis that this had been his exclusive fantasy.

  “You played your own small part,” Francis said.

  “Stop trying to make me feel more awful than I feel, Frank.”

  “I don’t believe you feel awful,” Francis said. “You let me go without so much as a goddamned by-your-leave.”

  “We had a million by-your-leaves,” Billy said. “Besides, you had your baby. In fact, you had two.”

  Francis looked at her with an expression Billy had often suffered as fatherly tenderness. It made her wince.

  “All right,” Francis said. “As long as you ditched me for family life, you may as well tell me about it. How did it go?”

  Billy had heard Francis’s birth stories countless times. His son Quentin had been born in Paris on New Year’s Eve and the doctor had set off a bottle of champagne in the delivery room. Aaron was a labor so fast he had almost been born in a taxicab.

  Billy told Francis how she had been hospitalized for toxemia two weeks before William’s birth, and William had been born by cesarean section; how he had been slightly underweight and made to stay in the hospital for eight days after Billy was released. It had felt like eight months. Billy knew she had not quite gotten over it, and she was reluctant to tell Francis anything at all, but once she started, she found she could not stop. At one point Francis was amazed to see tears streak down her cheeks. Francis leaned back in his chair and listened with no particular expression on his face.

  “And the baby’s father?” he said conversationally.

  “Are you referring to my husband, Grey?” Billy said.

  “And what does he think of all this?” said Francis.

  Billy gaped at him. Did he really want to hear her tell him how wonderful and patient Grey had been, how he had taken a month’s leave of absence from work and had barely left her and William except to run errands, how tender and besotted he was?

  “He’s an excellent father,” she said.

  “And you are finding motherhood very fulfilling?” Francis said.

  “It’s very public.”

  “As opposed to your previous activities?”

  “Quite,” Billy said. “For instance, if I take William to the bank and he begins to squall, at least three people give me advice—to feed him, to give him a toy, or prop him up in his stroller. When I took you to the bank, no one told me those things.”

  Francis sipped his drink in silence. “What a change,” he said. “No more charming dalliance in that nasty study of yours, which I assume is now the child’s room.”

  “It isn’t,” Billy said. “We had that spare room, which is warmer than my study.”

  “A snug family group,” Francis said.

  “Oh, shut up, Frank,” Billy said. “You’re snug enough. Didn’t you used to drag me by the hair over to your little snuggery and show me album after album of happy family portraits? Don’t be so mingy.”

  “I’m not mingy,” Francis said. “Look, your baby is awake.”

  William looked up from the banquette. His cheek was pink from sleeping on it. Billy took him into her arms. “You look like a hungry boy,” she said.

  Francis suddenly looked alarmed. “I don’t suppose you’re one of those nurse-your-baby-in-public types,” he said.

  “Yup. I am,” Billy said. “But don’t you worry. I’ve got a nice bottle in my bag.”

  The lights of the bar gave the room an orange glow. Billy bent over her baby, who drank his bottle peacefully and stared up at her. Her hair fell into her eyes, but she did not have a free hand to push it away. Francis restrained himself from doing it for her.

  “From mistress to mother,” he said. “A tender scene. I wonder what sort of parent you are. Probably no nonsense. Schedules, enforced naps, and so on.”

  Billy, who found the experience of having a baby exactly like being madly in love, looked at Francis.

  “I only treated you that way,” she said. “Actually, I’m a very indulgent mother.”

  “It’s funny what we didn’t know about one another,” Francis said.

  “It’s entirely appropriate to the situation,” said Billy.

  “For instance, I never figured out you and Grey and your attitude toward money. He makes a lot, you’re an economic historian, and neither of you seems to care much about it.”

  “You mean what it buys,” said Billy.

  “I do mean that,” said Francis, who was interested in it for no other reason. How he and Vera loved things! English cars, early American sideboards, Swedish tables, trips to Mexico, houses in the South of France, cashmere jackets, kilim rugs.

  “Grey sees it as an abstraction and I see it as a force of history,” Billy said.

  Francis sighed. So that was that!

  William had finished his bottle and was sitting on his mother’s lap trying to take all the silverware off the table. Billy reached into her bag and pulled out his rubber giraffe and a set of plastic keys. When they both looked up, Francis could see what a replica of his mother William was. Billy kissed her baby’s neck and he began to laugh. A look Francis had never seen before appeared on Billy’s face. Francis sighed. He felt weak and depleted as if after a long swim.

  “It’s time to go,” Billy said.

  “One more thing,” said Francis. “I’ve always wanted to know. When you and I snuck off to Vermont for our little trip when Vera and Grey were away, what did you tell Grey?”

  She looked suddenly so stricken that Francis realized their trip had been the occasion of the first lie Billy had ever told her husband.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  Billy pushed the hair off her forehead. She felt rather exhausted herself. “Okay, William,” she said. “It’s time for the horrible torture of your snowsuit.”

  She set William down on the banquette and started with his feet. He began to fidget and squirm. Then he began to cry.

  “They all hate this,” Billy said to Francis.

  “Ours didn’t.”

  “Really,” Billy said. “How totally unusual.”

  Finally William was bundled up and fastened into his hip carrier. Francis threw some money on the table and they walked into the street.

  It was misty and dark; halos formed around the street lamps.

  “It feels like snow,” said Francis. “It’s very odd seeing you.”

  Billy was silent.

  “Is it odd seeing me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Billy.

  “What a rewarding conversationalist you are,” Francis said. “I suppose now that you have so many motherly chores you no longer wonder what we were doing together.”

  “I think about it a lot,” said Billy.

  “And what brilliant thoughts have you come up with?”

  “Love seeketh only self to please,” Billy said.

  Francis grabbed her arm. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

  “It’s a quote from William Blake,” said Billy. “Now I get to ask you a question.”

  “Yes,” said Francis. Billy had never really asked him anything at all.

  “Where’d you get that paisley scarf?”

  Francis felt as if the air had been let out of his tires. “Is that all you want to know?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It belonged to Vera’s grandfather, who was quite a dandy. I’d be happy to give it to you as a good-bye present. You can keep it for William, and I can say I lost it.”

  “Oh, no!” said Billy. “I always think of you in that scarf.”

  Finally the three of them reached the corner. Franci
s was about to hail a taxi when Billy clutched his arm. “Are you in love with that girl?” she said.

  Francis spun around. “What’s it to you?”

  “I want to know,” Billy said. Her voice was shaking.

  Francis looked down at her intently.

  “Are you?” Billy said. She was clutching his arm rather painfully.

  “She’s my daughter-in-law,” Francis said. “Aaron got married last year.”

  Billy let go. Francis saw that her face was flooded with relief, which was instantly supplanted by anger.

  “You bastard,” she said. “Stringing me along like that.” She felt tired and sad. So Aaron had gotten married and she had never known!

  “It shouldn’t make any difference to you one way or the other,” Francis said. “Now that you’re a respectable wife and mother.”

  “Are you in love with anyone else?”

  Francis did not have to repress the desire to kiss her: it was not easy to contemplate kissing a woman who was holding a baby. Instead he hung his scarf around her neck and pulled her a little closer. William found this very entertaining and began to laugh.

  “Does that mean that if I can’t be in love with you, I can’t be in love with anyone else?” he said.

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Billy, slipping out from under the scarf.

  “I think you did,” said Francis. A few fine snowflakes began to fall. “I’ll get you a taxi so your precious darling doesn’t get wet.”

  Francis hailed a cab and opened the door. He bent to kiss Billy good-bye.

  She ducked her head to get through the door, so instead of kissing Billy, Francis kissed William on the side of his head, and as he watched them drive away, he could still smell that clear, benign baby smell of talcum powder and biscuits.

  The next day Billy and Penny Stern took William to the park. Penny, who was a month away from having her own baby, and her husband, David Hooks, were William’s godparents.

  The park was in the back of a private school and was open to local children. The walk was lined with hedge, and beyond a lawn were swings, baby swings, a play house, slides, and a jungle gym. In the center was one enormous old cherry tree used for climbing.

  Penny pushed William in his stroller, and Billy ambled along.

  “Do you realize,” she said, “this time next year we’ll both have children to take to the park?”

  “I realize it but I don’t believe it,” Penny said. “I can’t even believe how enormous William is.”

  “He looks more like Grey every day,” said Billy.

  “Not so,” Penny said. “He looks just like you. Of course, you and Grey look alike, so it’s hard to tell who William resembles most.”

  It took having a baby to see how true this was. Billy had spent countless nights nursing William to sleep in the red rocking chair trying to figure out how in this gigantic, overpopulated world you invariably found your true other: a person you could live with who even looked like you. Grey might have married someone else, or become an anthropologist and gone to Mozambique, or he might have gotten a job in Buenos Aires and the world would have swallowed him up. Instead, he was waiting for her, right where they had started out—in London, on a warm June night. She could not get over that she and Grey had created this remarkable child, who looked like both of them but also looked only like himself. Someday he would go off and find his other.

  And where, Billy wondered as she walked, did Francis fit into this? The fact was, he didn’t. He had never fit in at all. He and Billy had nothing in common and were as different as two people can be. Yet there was no denying they had fallen in love, a process as mysterious as creating a child out of two cells. A love affair was another amazing product of human ingeniousness, like art, like scholarship, like architecture. It was a created thing with rules, language, and reference. When it was finished it lived on in its artifacts: a million memories and gestures.

  William cooed in his stroller. Soon he would learn to talk. It often seemed unfair to Billy that she and Grey had not known each other as babies. His first word, according to his mother, had been “boot.” Since William had been born Billy had been through boxes of her own and Grey’s baby pictures. As far as she could tell, they all looked like William.

  These days William was her constant reference. She liked to sit quite still and let her feelings for him run over her, like pure, warm, water. Early in the morning when William got up, she brought him into bed between her and Grey, and she often felt at once content and quite wild with happiness.

  The park, when they got there, was full of children, but the baby swings were empty.

  “Give that child to me,” Penny said as Billy got William out of his stroller. “I need swinging practice.”

  Billy sat on a bench and watched a group of little boys climbing the cherry tree under a sky full of low, silver clouds. She watched her child being swung by her oldest friend. William loved the swing. He closed his eyes and shrieked with joy, revealing his four beautiful teeth. It seemed an instant ago he had been an infant. Soon he would be walking, talking, going to college and writing articles on third world economies, like Dr. Obutu. Or perhaps he would fulfill one of his father’s secret desires and become either a marine biologist or a forest ranger. He would grow up, get married, and have a baby of his own. The baby on the swing would be a sweet, distant memory.

  “We’re bored,” said Penny sitting down beside Billy. “Let’s go swing on the big swings. You take him. I don’t have a lap any more.”

  They sat on the big swings, side by side. William settled into Billy’s arms.

  “I saw Francis Clemens yesterday,” she said.

  “Really?” Penny said. “And what did he have to say for himself?”

  “He said his children loved their snowsuits.”

  Penny arched her eyebrow.

  “I saw him at that party,” Billy said. “He took us out for a drink.”

  They swung for a while and watched the children climbing on the jungle gym. In their bright clothes, they looked like a flock of parrots.

  “How was it?” Penny said.

  “Seeing Francis?” said Billy. “He was with a really beautiful girl who turned out to be his daughter-in-law. I was extremely jealous.”

  “Hmm,” said Penny. “What’s that about?”

  “When I think about him it’s always in the past tense, but when I saw him I realized how alive these things are, even when they’ve ceased to be,” Billy said. “The water doesn’t close over your head. I mean, it doesn’t close over mine. I realize that no matter what happens Francis is indelible. He’s part of my experience—like seeing Stonehenge or traveling in India.”

  “Or going to college,” said Penny.

  “He was more like graduate school,” Billy said.

  She looked down and saw that she had swung William right to sleep. She felt her heart open and expand: she loved everyone—William, Grey, Penny, Francis. Her baby breathed against her. He was growing so fast he seemed to melt away before she could get used to him.

  She wondered what William would look like at thirteen. She remembered Grey so clearly at that age with his wavy hair, and his round, wire-rimmed glasses and the ink stains on his fingers.

  She looked over to the street and gave a start. She thought she saw Francis walking toward the park but it was only a man about Francis’s height, wearing a familiar-looking coat.

  A Biography of Laurie Colwin

  Laurie Colwin (1944–1992) was an American novelist and short story author, most famous for her writings on cooking and upper-middle-class urban life.

  Colwin was born on June 14 in Manhattan, New York, to Estelle and Peter Colwin. She spent her childhood in Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island; Philadelphia; and Chicago. During her time in Philadelphia she attended Cheltenham High School and was inducted into its hall of fame in 1999. After graduation she continued her education at Bard College, the New School, and Columbia University.

  In 1965 Colwin beg
an her career working for Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, a literary agency in New York City. From there she went on to work at several leading book publishers, holding editorial positions at Viking Press, Pantheon Books, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and E. P. Dutton. Most notably during this time, Colwin worked closely with Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, editing and translating his works.

  An aspiring writer all her life, Colwin sold her first short story to the New Yorker in 1969 at the age of twenty-five—an auspicious start. Over the course of the next few years, her work appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Allure, Redbook, Mademoiselle, and Playboy. Many of these early stories were included in a collection, Passion and Affect, which was published in 1974.

  Food and the act of cooking played an influential role in Colwin’s life from early on. During the Columbia University campus uprisings of 1968, she famously cooked for student protestors occupying various buildings. “Someone put a piece of adhesive on the sleeve of my sweatshirt that read: KITCHEN/COLWIN,” she wrote in Home Cooking, published in 1988. “This, I feel, marked me for life.”

  As Colwin began crafting her short stories, she also became a regular food columnist for Gourmet magazine, and many of her columns were anthologized in Home Cooking. The release of this work secured a fan base of up-and-coming casual gourmands who loved Colwin’s unfussy, personal style and who remain devoted to her long after her death. Later in her life, even as she wrote about privileged Manhattanites, Colwin continued to volunteer and cook for homeless shelters in New York.

  By the late seventies, Laurie Colwin was writing full time. Her first novel, Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object, was published in 1975, and in 1977 Colwin received the prestigious O. Henry Award for short fiction. Her second novel, Happy All the Time, was received with much critical acclaim in 1978. By the time The Lone Pilgrim—a short story collection—and the novel Family Happiness were published in 1981 and 1982, respectively, Colwin had solidified her reputation as a writer to watch. She became known for her entertaining wit and wonderfully complex protagonists, whom readers understood immediately.