Orion sat forward to pull the blanket over her.
She pushed it away. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Genesis wouldn’t go to a hospital unless—what is it?”
“He was having a sort of, you know. Breathing problem.”
“Breathing?”
“Cricket, cut that out.”
She was struggling up. “When?”
“Twelve thirty or so. It’s been a couple of hours.”
“How did you get Genesis to?”
“Me? He just took off. Come on, Cricket, get back in bed.”
She was leaning on Genesis’ wooden trunk, struggling to open it, bending over, pushing aside credit cards, wallets, snips of paper with undecipherable writing, a small glossy she’d made of the poster negative. She fished out the Buick keys.
“Which hospital?”
“You can’t even stand.”
“I am standing. Genesis wouldn’t’ve taken him if it weren’t—which?”
“Peninsula Community, I think. Come on, Cricket, hey, please. You can’t drive.”
In the end he drove, inching cautiously through a continent of mud and dark. Cricket huddled toward the windshield, peering in headlight beams for a stalled bus.
As they turned on the Valley road, she fell back exhausted. And saw herself. Gauze above her eye, wearing Orion’s dirty poncho, doubtless leaking through her sanitary protection into unzipped Levi’s, white ones at that, searching a cold, wet night for her newborn son. Melodramatic. Sad. And neglectful to the nth degree.
Suddenly Cricket had a picture of the baby’s grandmothers. Together over a sisterly cup of coffee in the Mathenys’ decorator-decorated kitchen, her mother’s head back, throat moving with chuckles, a cigarette near her rosy cheek, Aunt Em’s carefully lipsticked mouth nibbling Bailey’s coffee cake. Whatever people said about women their age (and people said plenty), certain things they had done right. Very right. If, by some chance so mathematically remote that Cricket couldn’t believe it, either had found herself illegally pregnant, she would have insisted on marriage, no matter what, and twenty years ago would have been in St. John’s, surrounded by floral arrangements. The hypothetical infant would have been kicking in its incubator under the watchful eye of a private nurse, with a pair of top pediatricians consulting nearby. The baby would have been in excellent hands. The baby would have been fine. Because women their age had worked at making it fine. Aunt Em had given up her inheritance. Cricket imagined her own mother, in a different way, had sacrificed equally. They had been careful of new life. They never would have been shiftless where a baby was concerned.
How could I have come here? Genesis doesn’t believe in doctors, and I knew it. How could I have had my baby here? A single headlight blazed at them, and a motorcycle vroomed by. Orion said something. She didn’t hear him.
6
A medical scale was shoved into one corner of the window-less cubicle, a green bag stamped PENINSULA COMMUNITY HOSPITAL lay against a stretcher piled with cartons. Cricket had been led here by a wrinkled lady. Dr. Estaban, the admitting physician on Emergency, as she’d introduced herself. Cricket decided if she cataloged Dr. Estaban’s wrinkles she wouldn’t have to listen to that voice going on about premature births. The wrinkled doctor would make a fine subject, especially if you had a good flat light. Wrinkles at the corners of the eyes formed a geometric pattern, the brown cheeks were rippled like wet sand, canyons cut the forehead. One odd thing. The face wasn’t old. Why? The eyes. Yes, that’s it. The eyes are clear. Sharp. Young. The voice stopped.
Cricket said, “He wasn’t blue.”
“Noncyanotic,” the doctor agreed. “That’s what I’ve been explaining. Other things can go wrong.”
“Would he have made it,” Cricket concentrated on wrinkles under young eyes, “if he’d been born at the right time?”
“He wasn’t.”
“Or here?”
“He wasn’t.”
“Then, with a private doctor?”
“I am a Fellow of the American Board of Surgeons.” Stiff.
“It was raining and all muddy and I got careless, running. I fell.”
“Any baby can be premature.” Gentler now.
“If he’d been delivered here?”
“He was very small. Cricket, the odds are against preemies. However much we do, they sometimes die.”
Die.
There. One syllable. Die. Nobody could cancel die by thinking about wrinkles. Die. Everything else had been small talk. Die, that’s the point. Die. An ugly sound grew, bouncing from windowless walls.
Cricket raised her hand to her screaming mouth, her small teeth fastening on the pad below her thumb. The doctor pulled at the hand. Cricket bit harder. She felt nothing. Dr. Estaban struggled, the awkward yankings of a woman retrieving her lamb chop from a toy cockapoo. A carton fell from the gurney. The doctor slapped Cricket’s cheek. Hard. Cricket let go.
She got the needle. Her hand was stitched.
She came to slowly.
“Awake?” Genesis. Blurry white.
“Sort of.”
They were curtained, maybe from a ward, maybe a room. Whatever, the place was empty. Silent. Genesis didn’t speak for a long time.
“I shouldn’t of brought him here,” he said finally in that rejecting bitterness he used when telling of his former life.
“It’s not your fault.” It’s mine, Cricket thought, and numbly added, “The odds are against preemies.”
“Who says?”
“The doctor.”
“Doctor! That Mex woman? Then why did she work on him? To prove she’s wiser than God?”
“She tried.” Cricket rolled over. Everywhere ached. “You did all you could.”
He rose. “Come on, daughter. We’ll go home.”
“Genesis, I mean it. You were really great.”
“You’ll be better there.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t go back.” An unplanned decision that once spoken became irrevocable.
“This was a mistake. It’s the last time I do anything against my belief.”
“I just can’t.”
He gazed down. She floated in the brown depth of his eyes, remembering how gentle he was during the birth, the encouragement of his voice. But she shook her head. No.
“Death is part of life,” he said.
Her lips trembled.
“Fill yourself with revelation,” he said. “You’ll be able to accept it.”
She stared out the window. The storm had cleared all softening haze. A cruel blue sky.
“It’s their drugs,” he said.
After a while he said, “Don’t come back, not today. But daughter, silence is a jail. Talk to me.”
So, uncaring, she asked, “Why’d you register him as Van Smith?”
“It seemed best. You’re connected to the market people, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“My mother.” Her hand throbbed. The sharp pain strung through nerves to her forehead.
“And your father, what’s he do?”
“President.”
“Of all the markets?”
“Yes.”
“And the cousin, the one you’re protecting?”
“He works there, too.”
“But you’re with me.”
She guessed from his tone that he felt he’d replaced one secret of her life—now deceased—with another. But she would have given him her background anytime he’d asked.
“You’ll be with us again.” The curtain ballooned and he was gone. No good-byes. Just You’ll be with us again.
At four Dr. Estaban released her. “Go home and get right into bed,” she ordered. The shift was changing, and nurses bustled in nylon uniforms. Cricket’s yellow mop was too vivid, too alive around her bloodless face. She moved slowly, woodenly. In the waiting room Orion hurried to her.
“What happened to your hand?” he asked with hesitant,
condoling embarrassment.
“I hurt it.”
The room was empty except for a middle-aged woman with hard blue veins knotting tan legs. She was staring at them.
“You meant that?” Orion asked: “About not coming back?”
She nodded.
“Then Genesis says you should have these.” And he handed her her car keys, Union Oil card, American Express folder—this he opened, counting eight twenty-dollar checks. (The rest she’d signed for Genesis.) He gave her the full, worn wallet. The fifty was still there. “Your camera stuff’s in the trunk.”
“Thank you.”
He moved at her labored pace down the corridor.
“You really hate REVELATION that much?” he asked.
“It’s a kind of symbol, that’s all.”
“Of what?”
“Everything I did wrong.”
“Like?”
“You worried,” she said bitterly. “Not me.”
A skeletal old man in a hospital robe shuffled by.
“Worrying’s not how you operate.”
“Well, I should’ve.”
“Cricket, it’s too brutal. Don’t think any of this.”
“How can’t I?”
He gave a nervous cough. “Look, in my whole life I never met anyone else who, you know, rings true all the time. Even Genesis the other day. Well, you’re the only one. Come on, quit beating yourself.”
He pushed open the heavy door. Fog had rolled in, graying the Buick. She started to take off his poncho.
“Keep it,” he said. “A present.”
She managed a smile. “When I get home I’ll write.”
“Okay, I am a worrier. Can I help it if I care? Cricket, don’t drive for a couple of days.”
“I won’t.” I can’t.
“Where’ll you stay?”
“The nearest motel.”
She found a Best Western and slept for eighteen hours.
In the next block was a Sambo’s. She ordered their inevitable pancakes and a breakfast steak. An orange ball of tiger butter oozed over the steak. Her first meat in months. She didn’t reach for her knife and fork. She knew a mistake when she smelled one. That odor of charred, dead flesh! Dropping bills, she escaped.
The next morning her breasts ached. She dozed feverishly, dreaming that the baby was clutching her finger. Waking, she would find her other hand curled about the finger. Her sweat drenched the sheets. The squat black maid was concerned. “Took like this, you should be with your mama. How old are you? Thirteen?” “Seventeen.” “Don’t look none of it. Let me fetch in something for you.” Cricket gave the friendly, garrulous old woman money for Kotex, graham crackers, milk. She kept the milk carton on the ledge outside the bathroom. At twelve every day the owner, in a flowered muumuu, would come to collect. On the eighth day, the twenty-first of October it was, Cricket had no checks left to sign.
The fever had broken. Her breasts no longer ached. She unwound gauze from her hand. Black tags on pink scar. Dr. Estaban, she remembered, had said to have a doctor take out the stitches. Cricket used her nail scissors.
She examined herself in the washbowl mirror. The yellowish discoloration under her eye was gone. She looked exactly the same.
Of course she wasn’t.
First Vliet, then Genesis had inflicted secrecy upon her. In this all-beige motel room, the feverish hours had coiled around her. The net result? Van Vliet Matheny, no longer in her uterus, lay firmly embedded in her mind. A secret belonging neither to the past nor the future, but always current. I’ll never, never be able to talk about him, Cricket decided, turning from the mirror. The door to total frankness—especially with her parents—was being locked by the good old key of guilt. I just can’t discuss him, she thought.
She drove south on 101, passing towns with conquistador-haunted names, Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara. Light faded, traffic grew thick. She was home.
There are easier ways of growing up.
Chapter Eleven
1
A man, given happiness, either can accept it or he can hold up his gift to the light, searching for chinks. The chink seeker is not necessarily ungrateful. Often he is the man with a strong sense of ethics.
Roger, in Baltimore, had both medicine and Alix.
Yet he was, as Alix variously put it, “Straight,” “Fantastically decent,” or “Out of the nineteen-forties.” Living with her wasn’t enough. He needed to marry her.
Marriage was out. Impossible. The Reeds’ letters and phone calls never admitted Alix, thus Roger knew his mother had in no way altered her position. Married, he wouldn’t receive Em’s neatly written check, his trust income. The records in the bursar’s office proved he could afford Hopkins, so a student loan was out. God knows, they couldn’t manage on what Alix made.
Another chink here. Alix’s job. On arriving in Baltimore, she knelt over the Sunday News American. “‘Help wanted, women. No exp. nec.’—hey, that’s me!” And when Silver Fork on Madison offered her work, Roger was sure she got a perverse joy in writing both parents: i’m gainfully employed as a counter girl. Roger got no joy, perverse or otherwise, when she zipped into that short, skimpy uniform. He disliked her working while he was in school. Their setup was all wrong.
Yet they were very happy, and Roger knew it.
So did Alix. She shared none of his compunctions. To her, marriage guaranteed no permanence—hadn’t she watched her mother slip in and out? Her job lacked status, true, but the tips she pocketed in her blue-and-white uniform, the check she was handed every two weeks, liberated her.
The Grossblatts or Philip Schorer would stop in Baltimore “on the way to New York.” Alix would invite them to dine at the apartment. There was a warning in the lovely smile which halted questions—even from Dan. Roger could smell guilt oozing from his own pores. These evenings generally precipitated one of their rare arguments.
His own parents he didn’t see until the end of his third year.
Em wrote: Dad has his vacation the last week in May. We plan to be in Baltimore. Alix, while not in on the full extent of the Reeds’ hatred, was aware she would be persona non grata. She hied herself to New York, locating in the Winstens’ lavish Essex House apartment. Gloria Winsten, Dan’s sister, arranged for men to show Alix the town.
Roger was terrified that Alix might prefer one of her Manhattan guides. He loathed himself for succumbing to cover-up. He couldn’t respond to Em and Sheridan’s pathetically open delight in seeing him. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Unable to admit he was living with Alix, he kept repeating her name, as if by hammering the two syllables into his parents’ eardrums he could overpower their minds and hearts. Sheridan or Em would change the subject. Em, though, would find herself looking into her son’s hurt eyes. Em, yearning to be fair. But how many mothers could find justice for a girl who had switched from sleeping with one son to another, for a girl who had cut a favored son from his education, who prevented the lesser but still well-beloved son from flying home—even for Christmas? Each time Roger said, “Alix,” Em’s thoughts would erupt like Krakatoa. Under makeup her small face would mottle. She either would get a headache, weep, or order another vodka martini, “Straight up, please.” Finally Sheridan, who agreed with Em’s prejudices, took Roger aside.
“We aren’t interested in your shack job,” warned the father. “And Roger, I advise you not to do anything stupid.”
They departed. The week had cost Roger and Alix. Cost them plenty. Alix never told Roger precisely the mental cost of that week. In New York she had panicked. What if Roger, exposed to his parents, were infected by their hatred of her? What if he decided he didn’t want her? What if? What if? Smoothing on new eye shadow and smiles, she charmed the dates Mrs. Winsten produced. In that single week, three men swore undying love. Two proposed, and the third, a recently burned divorcé, offered a trip to Bermuda. Alix did not believe a word. How could she? She was such a mess, so ugly. She fell prey to any witty, smart shop. By the
end of that week she had spent $897 on clothes. Floors and walls weren’t meeting properly. Sidewalks slanted at an alarming angle. She had shattered into a hideous swarm of anxieties. And on her return, Roger bickered with her constantly.
He didn’t understand why he picked on her. He couldn’t help it. She would respond in that bantering tone which further infuriated him. A chain reaction, continuing until somehow they were clinging miserably to one another, his breath moving strands of her silky hair.
The recuperation period lasted that entire muggy summer. By then, Roger had a reply of sorts to his conscience.
A ring.
Since their engagement could not be public, the ring had to carry more weight than an ordinary engagement ring. Furthermore, or so Roger decided, it must be presented in a meaningful place, their root place. California.
September brought his surgical rotation. After that, in the middle of October, came his break.
“Alix, let’s go to California.”
They were in the plant-hung breakfast nook. They lived in the same cruddy apartment he’d shared with Vliet, but you’d never guess it. Alix had worked miracles.
She put down her spoon. Her throat tightened around fruit salad. For her, California was the state of families and therefore hexed.
“Using what for money?” she asked. Neither was frugal, and Alix’s round trip to New York, including all those desperate clothes, was being paid off monthly by her Bank-Americard.
“My check,” Roger said.
“It’ll cover fares. What’ll we spend for food? Where’ll we stay?”
“San Francisco,” he said. “With Cricket.”
(Cricket, for reasons that had not seeped through her infrequent communications, two years ago come Thanksgiving, had enrolled in San Francisco Institute of the Arts, and as far as Alix could tell from penciled notes, was doing as she always had done, moving through life with her camera slung around her neck, no male or ambition in sight.)
“Roger, accept it. For us, family reunions are total disaster.”
“It won’t be a family reunion.”
“What then?” she asked.
“I haven’t been to California in more than two years.” Alix had been—she’d flown to Los Angeles, weeping, for her Grandfather Linde’s funeral. Roger said, “We won’t see any parents.” And under his starched white medical-student jacket was the familiar hunch of broad shoulders.
Rich Friends Page 32
