When the next contraction had passed, he gently pushed the dish towels (printed with teapots, printed with kittens) under Mrs. Keane’s white thighs, pulling away Jacob’s soaked jacket. He put one hand on top of her belly. “Isn’t it lucky that you’re here?” she whispered, holding on to his strong arm. And then, a little later, “Isn’t it good the hurricane caused the tree to fall and so you came by?”
And Mr. Persichetti said it was good indeed, although he knew the baby might not survive.
“The storm came,” she said, catching her breath, “and then a fireman came to the door in the middle of the storm, out of nowhere, and told us about the tree falling, and then you came by.” She grimaced and paused, squeezing his hand. “And came back,” she said as the contraction passed. “Because—who was it?” she said.
“The Krafts,” he told her, “down the street.”
“The Krafts lost a tree as well,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “Lucky for me.”
And then she breathed another “Mother of God.”
His T-shirt was soaked all across the middle. There was now the salty scent of her perspiration, and his, and the scent of blood. Her bare knee touched the side of his face. He saw the baby’s dark scalp, streaks of hair. She cried out and he was aware, too, of the sound of the ambulance somewhere. He raised the volume of his own voice, a string of reassurances against his own fear that the baby would not survive. Skull and forehead and closed eyes streaked with blood. He reached for the turkey baster, cleared the mouth even as he tugged, gently, at the head in his hands. The shoulders and arms and the surprising burst of the pale blue umbilical cord, thick and writhing, and then the baby was in his hands—“A little girl,” he told her—and the medics, the ambulance guys were in the room behind him, around him, a knee against his back as someone said, “Step aside,” and leaned down to take the little thing from him. The baby’s mouth opened and two fists went up in fury. And then it cried, but so thinly.
But of course, he couldn’t step. He discovered that he was kneeling at her side. He merely sat back on his bottom and then crawled a bit, avoiding their shoes. Someone was opening a medical bag and a stretcher was coming through the front door. He blessed himself and then said, “I’m in medicine, an RN,” lest they think him a fool. Then he leaned his back against a chair.
As they were hustling her and the child out the door (where the children from the tree had already gathered) he said to one of the medics, “Six weeks premature.” The guy shook his head. He had a crew cut and a broad face and his white coat buttoned across the shoulder. “That baby’s full-term,” he said. “Seven pounds at least.” Mr. Persichetti shrugged, rather nonchalantly, among men once more. “She said she had six more weeks.”
And the man shrugged, too, as if to confirm how well they both understood, being in the profession, that it was all a small matter, this coming into life and going out, merely part of the routine. “She can’t count,” he said bluntly.
And then he laughed. He paused in the tiny hallway, put his elbow to Mr. Persichetti’s strong arm. “My wife always knows exactly,” he said. There was a bit of tobacco on his wet lip. “But that’s probably because she only lets me do it twice a year, Valentine’s and my birthday, so it’s not hard to figure.” He stepped out the door and then turned to say, “I got two kids born in November, two in June. No kidding.”
The children gathered along the driveway briefly looked away from the ambulance as the man went down the steps, shouting back to Mr. Persichetti. “This guy,” he said, pointing at the house, “is a lucky man, if she don’t know if it’s been nine months or seven.” Mr. Persichetti raised a hand, agreeing, nodding and laughing, but also saying under his breath, Get going, get going. He would not rest easily until he was sure she was in a doctor’s care. Then he noticed her boys. They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a comforting arm around each.
CAREFULLY, dipping carefully—the broad backside in the good wool skirt—Pauline reached into the car and took the infant from Mary Keane’s arms. There was the pink receiving blanket, the long white shawl, the lace bib of her homecoming dress. Pauline stepped back, onto the grass that lined the driveway, the baby in her arms.
Mary said, “Where’s her bonnet?” and then searched the floor, looking for it. Her husband was coming around the car to help her get out. Pauline held the baby in her arms, dipped her large, powdered face closer to its own, her eyes taking in, there on the grass at the side of the driveway, the cashmere shawl (her own gift, from Saks), the receiving blanket, the tiny body, the little face. Slowly, Pauline raised her left hand and cupped it over the child’s skull to keep her warm. The sun was high but there was a clean chill in the air. The smell of autumn, and of the sawdust left behind from the fallen tree. She held the baby against her chest and raised her elbow to bring the small sleeping face nearer her own.
“Here it is,” Mary said, lifting the bonnet from the floor.
Inside, the children were waiting around the dining-room table with their homemade cards and the frosted birthday cake their father had brought from the bakery this morning. Inside, Pauline’s overnight bag was packed and waiting in the vestibule. As Mary, carrying the new baby, preceded her into the house, Pauline slipped her jacket from the hall closet and lifted the bag, even as the three children gathered around their mother. She simply walked out again, through the front door. She went down the steps. She raised her hand without turning when they called after her. She raised her hand without turning as John Keane followed her down the steps to say, “At least let me give you a lift to the bus stop.”
“Go back to your new family,” she said without turning. “This is a precious moment. There shouldn’t be any strangers at this homecoming.” Meaning it, every word of it, but not turning to see how thoroughly her sudden departure had disrupted the homecoming anyway, how the children had looked away from their mother and the new baby to stare after her, how John Keane had looked back to his wife, their new daughter in her arms, to shrug, to show her his annoyance. The woman drove him crazy.
Without turning, Pauline walked with her bag the three blocks to the bus stop, then changed at Jamaica for the bus home.
At her building, she struggled with the six days of mail shoved every which way into her box (she’d had no time, when the call came, to leave her mailbox key with her neighbor), bills and advertising circulars and bank statements and a mailman who would probably keep pushing mail into her box even if she was gone for six months, dead for a year—only one of the phalanx of indifferent strangers she faced every day.
Upstairs in her apartment she unpacked her bag—two housedresses in polished cotton and a floral housecoat, another good skirt and sweater and the underwear, girdle, and stockings she’d have to wash out in the sink this evening. In the bottom of the bag, beneath her makeup case and her slippers, the card Jacob had drawn for her—a vase with six spindly flowers: a purple tulip, what seemed to be a red rose, and four simple daisies (she guessed that the success with the tulip had inspired the rose and the failure of the rose had led to the safer daisies). Inside the folded piece of blue construction paper he had written only, in careful cursive, From Jacob.
Although she preferred Michael, whose distrust of anything placid echoed her own, she put the card on her dresser.
Moving into her small kitchen, Pauline went through the refrigerator, tossing out the milk and the sliced ham she had not had time to dispose of last week, when the call came that the baby had arrived early and they were on their way to the hospital. A minute later and they would have missed her, she told John Keane, when the call came. She had just powdered her nose and put on her hat.
She rode the elevator down again to shop briefly—it was Sunday and the stores closed early—for what she needed: milk and eggs and bread and margarine. She told the lady at the deli where she ordered her h
am that it had not been a vacation by any means: three children to look after and a much neglected house to clean. The lady at the counter—Maria, in housecoat and worn slippers and swollen ankles—called her some good friend to do all that and Pauline said, “Oh, but the baby is beautiful,” a kind of reprimand, as if it had been Maria herself who had complained so ungenerously about the dirty house.
The grocery bag was light enough but still her back ached and her legs were tired. She had slept fitfully all week in little Annie’s bedroom, wall to wall with stuffed animals that the child never played with and that Pauline would have donated to an orphanage, had the choice been hers. And the little girl had cried herself to sleep in her brother’s bedroom every night, lonesome for her mother. And that little Italian man in the side yard two days in a row, with his chain saw and his hatchet, clearing the fallen tree. Standing too close to her, Pauline felt certain, when he came into the kitchen for a glass of water.
The sparse trees along her block were showing signs of red and gold but there was also the smell of dog droppings and bus fumes and sun-warmed garbage in the air, which you didn’t have out on Long Island. And the Empire State Building across the river was useless, a painted backdrop at this hour on a Sunday, its offices empty, its very reason for being temporarily drained. Her company’s own building, her empty office within, not three blocks away. Home again, she changed into another housecoat, the red velvet one she had made for herself last Christmas, the covered buttons she’d found at A&S a satisfying perfect match. She boiled an egg for dinner. Mixed a Manhattan to sip with Walter Cronkite. She answered the phone only the second time it rang, Mary calling to say I wish you hadn’t run off (but not meaning it) and that the house has never been so clean (no kidding) and what did you put in your mashed potatoes that made the kids love them so (a little sugar and a little garlic salt, but Pauline wouldn’t tell).
Darkness had come down on the city by then, the lights in all the buildings had come up. With the phone still to her ear, Pauline dipped her head to notice through her own blinds that the couple across the street was having takeout Chinese again, in their kitchen. They were most likely newlyweds, only in the apartment for a few months. Pauline knew it did not bode well that the young bride never cooked.
“And you cleaned up that slipcover so beautifully,” Mary Keane said.
The little Italian man had pulled the slipcover off the couch, bundled it together with the tea towels and the jacket and brought it all to the washing machine in the basement, but Pauline had done the scrubbing and the bleaching and the dyeing. Pauline had restored order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion—what a mess it had made—restored order, made things right for the homecoming.
“And how’s my angel?” Pauline asked.
“At the moment,” Mary said, “she is sound asleep on Jacob’s lap.”
Her own hunger to hold the baby again struck her as just that, a hunger—the ache of hollow longing, an awareness, as if for the first time in her life, of her own arms being empty.
“I wanted to give you some time with your new family,” Pauline said, and meant it—although she couldn’t say, too, that she had not meant to disrupt the homecoming with her own dramatic departure. Nor could she deny that she’d wanted both: the thoroughly self-effacing departure and the attention such generous self-effacement surely earned her. She’d wanted to give the family their time together, but she’d wanted as well a more vigorous pursuit, after all she’d done. It wouldn’t have taken much, after all, for John Keane to have wrestled the overnight case from her hand.
“Kiss her for me,” she said and hung up the phone and faced the most terrible hours of any week, made worse now by the days she had spent in the busy household: the hours after sunset on a Sunday night, all her own usefulness temporarily extinguished, and the terror that good clothes, perfect stitches, the pursuit of just the right buttons usually kept at bay edging closer to the surface of things—the yellow light on the polished table, the black night through the slatted blinds, someone laughing at her out in the street. In another few years this terror would catch her by the throat, but tonight she would have another Manhattan with Ed Sullivan. Rinse out her clothes and brush down tomorrow’s suit and iron a blouse. Put on her nightgown and get into bed. There were worse things than this tinny loneliness, these last hours of a Sunday evening. Nice as he’d tried to be—he’d come home from the hospital each evening to put the children to bed, and thanked her profusely each morning for the coffee and toast she put before him, he’d gotten the children ready for church without waking her this morning—she would not want to be married to balding John Keane for all the tea in China. She’d heard him singing to himself in the bathroom, for instance, flat as a tire. Heard him clipping his toenails one night before he went to bed.
She recognized the simple pleasure of her own room and her own pillow and no child weeping for her mother across the hall, the boys whispering words of comfort but not thinking to call on Pauline for help.
In the morning there was the rattle of traffic and the wheeze of buses, the rising voice of the radio, the whistle of a teakettle. The slatted sunlight, as it did this time of year, moved across her bed and her quilted housecoat and her dresser and onto the construction-paper card that Jacob had made so that later when Clare (who last night had slept soundly in her brother’s arms) lifted it to read the simple message, she would not be able to say if the front of the card had once been gray or blue, only that her brother had used a ballpoint pen and had pressed so firmly into the soft paper that she could feel the shape of the letters in relief on the back.
DURING THE WAR, their mother lit a candle for the boys on her lunch hour, at St. Agnes or up at St. Patrick’s, and of course Pauline knew she did this without anyone ever having to tell her so, and although Pauline was estranged from the church—it had to do with something some nun had said—she nevertheless began to tag along. And how could you pray with any sincerity if you were preoccupied with the thought of avoiding lunch with the lonely and annoying girl who was impatiently waiting for your prayers to be over?
If you love me, Jesus said, feed my lambs.
They were at the dining-room table, eating the frosted cake their father had bought at the bakery to celebrate the baby’s homecoming.
During the war, Pauline’s mother passed away and there were really only a handful of people at the funeral—four of them girls from the office. Pauline sat alone on one side of the church and her brother and his family on the other. None of the dates Pauline had, many of which their mother herself had arranged, led anywhere at all.
It’s easy, their mother said, to love the lovable. There’s no virtue in that.
They were using the good china and the embroidered table linen. Milk had been poured into cocktail glasses. The woman at the bakery had written “Welcome Home, Clare” on the white cake. Annie had cried herself to sleep every night that her mother was gone, in full misery the first night, in anticipation, on all subsequent nights, of her brothers’ sweet solicitation as they climbed onto the cot with her and said kindly in the dark, without teasing, that their mother would be home soon, with a new sister for her to play with, and she shouldn’t cry.
Michael had thought himself indifferent to the new arrangements—Pauline, not his mother, there to greet him with her big, powdered face when he got home from school (and making him hang up his jacket and pick up his games), Pauline there at the dinner table with them, urging them to take more of everything they didn’t want and laughing only (but with real delight) when he said his teacher didn’t have a mustache but a nunstache, Pauline sitting behind him in the living room as he did his homework on his lap with the television on, asking every minute or so, “Doesn’t the TV distract you, doesn’t the TV keep you from concentrating?” He’d thought himself indifferent to it all until his mother came through the front door, the new baby in her arms, and he knew for the first time that he’d hated every minute of Pauline’s reign.
As had Jacob, although Jacob had known this to be true throughout the ordeal.
It wasn’t that they’d found Pauline unlovable. The entire world of adult strangers was more or less unlovable, with their huge earlobes and their smoky breaths, their yellow teeth, their intrusions. It was only that the house was empty without their mother in it. Recognizable still in all its familiarity: the vestibule where they dropped their book bags and (at Pauline’s insistence) hung up their coats, the living room where the slipcover was newly dark, the cluttered dining room, the Formica counters in the kitchen, the Dutch Boy cookie jar, the worn carpet on the stairs, the sunlight through the windows of their bedroom which seemed always, from the time they woke until darkness fell, the sunlight of four thirty in the afternoon, all of it familiar but seen, for the first time, as it might look when it was empty, with none of them there. This both puzzled them (because all three of them were indeed there, and Pauline was there, and by nine o’clock each night when visiting hours at the hospital were over, their father was there) and filled them with despair, which was what made them tell their mother, once she had returned, the baby in her arms, that they hated Pauline. That they hoped they would never again be left in her care.
It wasn’t true, they hadn’t hated her at all (Jacob had struggled with the choice between “From” and “Love” on the card he drew for her; Michael had laughed heartily himself when Pauline said that Mr. MacLeod next door, who looked like he dyed his hair with Orange Crush, should lay off that piano and find someplace else to tinkle; Annie now had three different vials of perfume samples tucked in her sock drawer, courtesy of Pauline), but it was an explanation that lingered, a conviction they would share for the rest of their lives.
“You choose likable people to be your friends,” their mother said. She sat back from the table, the baby in her arms, and moved the prongs of her fork, the good silver, through the white icing. “And you have to love your family whether they’re likable or not.” She brought the icing to her lips. “But the people you have to feel sorry for are the ones without family. Unlikable people without family or friends. Who’s going to care about them?”
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