Sometimes Bob got into bed and, forgetting to even say good night, just turned his back on me. We were secretive: we never shared our ordeal with anyone, nor did we talk about it ourselves. We had been strong enough to hold up against the fury of family and friends at our marriage. How could our bond be breaking now?
* * *
Then came Bobby’s wedding in West Virginia.
On June 25, 1983, at 3:00 a.m., the fire alarm at our motel in Charleston was accidentally tripped. We stumbled, scantily clad, out into a soft summer night until a megaphone informed us it was a false call. Afterward, our blood still stirring, we crawled into each other’s arms, and somehow, in our lazy, unpremeditated lovemaking, a spermatozoon wrestled down one of my eggs.
We had been so excited by the prospect of Bobby’s marriage that we had recently declared peace, deciding that this existential estrangement was silly and agreeing to disagree on politics. So we merrily drove through the Blue Ridge Mountains, bound for Charleston, West Virginia, to the home of Bobby’s intended, Susan Moore, who was twenty-four to Bobby’s twenty-six. We sang endless verses of “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” as we took turns driving our eccentric diesel-fueled Peugeot, which happened to have been, in another life, a bright yellow New York taxicab. Bob thought the color was witty, but I was afraid people would try to hail us down, so I prevailed on him to paint it blue.
During the trip, I defied my gynecologist by assaulting my ovaries with forbidden caffeine, and at the wedding I drank wine and boogied the night away. In truth, the celebrations were an excuse for us to escape the little ruinations of infertility.
Just when the tension had become a foreboding, the Almighty took pity on us. In the Old Testament, Gideon, trapped in darkness, was told by God to break all his clay pots and the light would shine through.
When I didn’t get a period the next month, we were slightly optimistic. But how on earth? Had the earsplitting fire alarm roused my stubborn fallopian tubes? Since we had decided to take a vacation from scheduled intercourse during the wedding festivities, if we were indeed pregnant, the embryo must be spectacularly determined.
One morning, Bob stays home from work because we are waiting for the results of a pregnancy test. It is July 6, 1983. I am only a few days late, but I feel odd, physically tender, so for the hell of it I ask the doctor to give me a pregnancy test. We haven’t much hope, for there have been many of these tests, all negative.
I jump up when the phone rings. The doctor speaks. I drop the receiver. “Bob,” I scream, “I’m pregnant!” He comes charging out of the bathroom in his T-shirt. He stands there, staring, and then embraces me. I feel him shiver; I think he is shivering. In my dreams, our marriage has appeared like a Grecian urn, neglected, crumbling away. Now, in this moment, the pieces are put together again, the cracks seamless. Everything seems new, awash in clarity. The sheets, so crisp! And the gray-tar tops on the terrace walls, which I have always hated, flash with bits of sparkling crystal.
During the next weeks, we are joyful, certainly, but even greater is the relief. We have returned to normality. I feel like sending a thank-you note to Bobby and his bride for creating the magic that created the baby.
* * *
I had first met Susan five years earlier when I was a visiting professor at Vassar and she was rooming at the college with Bob’s niece Elizabeth Hirschhorn, the daughter of Bob’s sister, Joan. Elizabeth often brought her to the old Morgenthau homestead in Fishkill, where we spent weekends, and Susan and I had immediately taken to each other. She was an English major studying writing, as I had been, and we talked about the short story that she was working on. Susan was an original, almost a paradox. She was so striking with her flawless skin and strong features that she didn’t need to be as nice as she was. But she had established special relationships with everyone in the family. She made it her project to bring our blended brood together. She encouraged me to make overtures to them and went out of her way to sit next to me at family gatherings, ensuring that I was included in their conversations. Susan and I took long walks through the orchards, advising each other about the exigencies of being a married woman. Though she was loved by all Bob’s kids, she joked that we were the fellow outlaws of the clan.
I don’t think she ever forgot the party I threw one summer that would change her life. It was a joint celebration for Bob, Annie’s son, Noah, and myself because we all had July birthdays. Elizabeth decided to bring along Susan. Our terrace was aswarm with Bob’s extended family, but I noticed that Bobby, who usually had feet to the ground, was talking to Susan, bedazzled.
Less than a year later, they were married.
* * *
My obstetrician has put me on a disgusting diet, poached egg whites in the morning, naked tuna at noon, and fish and spinach at night. Starches and sugars are never to pass beneath my nose.
“It’s your fault I’m ten pounds overweight,” I grumble. “When I first got pregnant, you told me to eat everything I desired, and now you want to starve me.” Once she gets used to putting her legs in his stirrups, a patient and an obstetrician sometimes develop a flirtation, no matter how oblique. In this case, I am a wise-ass and he is deadpan. One day, Bob, my proper, modest husband, announces he wants to come in while I am being examined. The doctor stares at him, surprised, discombobulated. I guess he’s never encountered a husband who wanted to see what he saw. I am moved and amused by Bob’s jealousy but have to suppress a laugh. Finally, the doctor shrugs and says, “She’s your wife. Come in.” As the examination proceeds, Bob is very quiet, and afterward I notice that his face, which I hadn’t dared look at, is a bit pale.
* * *
A beautiful hell, this is my life. I cannot satisfy my urge to skip round the terrace or bend over to pick up a pin. I cannot take an aspirin or any other pill, cannot drink even a soupçon of wine, cannot subject my body to a hot bath, nor in any manner, any manner at all, sweat. And I must drink gallons of water, which, with no exercise, blows me up like a balloon in the Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Nevertheless, Bob and I, without much physical exertion, manage to become cyclones of energy. He takes up the Graiver case again, targets the heads of American Bank & Trust who had colluded with the crooked financier, and proceeds to prosecute the largest and most complex bank swindle in the history of the office. On a whim, we buy a neglected nineteenth-century house on a historic street in West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard. I teach as a visiting fellow in the Appalachians. Then, with my pregnancy in its seventh month, we fly to Israel in the dead of winter for another visit in swaying helicopters and rocketing jeeps, and after that I write another magazine cover story.
But before all that, we lie low, living in a bubble, never closer; sometimes Bob leaves the office to bring me dumplings from Chinatown or just to make sure I’m resting. We don’t challenge the gods by going public until after my third month, when I’m less likely to miscarry. I do tell one person who is about to leave on a book tour, though, and that is Judy Rossner, my mentor and the well-known author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. This is because some part of me believed she conjured up my pregnancy by putting a little bronze fertility goddess above my desk. “I have goose bumps,” she says, hugging me. “This will be the most wonderful and complicated adventure of your life.”
I never knew what it was like not to live with an undercurrent of dread. These days I feel a peace so unfamiliar it’s almost scary, a quiet joy that carries me along on a dream. When I lie on my stomach, I think I can feel her, or him. I love this baby so much, even now before it has given me reason to love it; it goes achingly deep, deeper than the lovemaking that merges you with another. Nothing interests me except this life that depends only on me. Dinner parties seem interminable, cocktail parties positively deadly, and movies and TV that I used to like seem silly or maudlin.
I refer to the baby as “him,” and Bob retaliates by calling it “her.” He thinks a girl would be nice because it would look like me.
The Morgenthau
children suddenly think me fascinating; I shine with happiness. It is reflected back on Bob, and he shines too.
But then I summon up instant disaster movies, as is my wont, reel after reel playing inside my eyelids. Will the baby have all his toes and fingers, will he ever grasp a spoon, be able to hold a book? Will he be part lizard, all Morgenthau nose and no chin?
* * *
October 14
He moved! It wasn’t a fetal flutter, like they say, but the shaking out of a silk handkerchief or maybe a mouse stamping its feet on my sacroiliac.
* * *
I am in my fourth month, and it is time for the dreaded amniocentesis. I lie on a table where they baste my stomach with cold jelly. I have to crane my neck back to see the sonogram machine, where everyone is marveling at a blurry black-and-white picture.
“There it is,” says the doctor, slowly moving the wand over the jelly. “Looks like a healthy baby. No gross deformities.”
“I can’t see it!” I say. “It’s like a nature film of water currents!”
“Look, right there,” Bob says. “It has your nose, love!”
Then I see it: a leg stretching, clenched fingers waving back and forth, a heart beating like a little tadpole. “Oh my Lord, he’s all head! He has your head, your big lovely head,” I say, weeping.
“At this age, all fetuses are mostly head,” the doctor says dryly. Then, wearing sterile gloves, he pours Betadine over my stomach. Bob, who thinks he’s really a doctor, is holding my hand behind me and reaches over and pats down a gauze pad that is catching the drips. The doctor raises his voice: “No, no, no! That was sterile. Now I’ll have to replace all the pads.” I was laughing, so I didn’t even feel the big needle go in and extract the fluid that will tell us if the baby has any hidden diseases. He asks us if we want to know the sex, and Bob says a strong no: “I’m superstitious. I don’t want Lucinda and me interfering with the natural order of things; we want to be surprised.” I tease him about being a Luddite, wanting me to give birth in the desert where there are no machines to tell the sex.
There is little doubt in our minds, however. He will be a boy. And we will call him Joshua.
We go to Hopkinton to tell my father first. He is the most visibly undemonstrative man I know—well, Bob’s a close second—and sinks himself in his myriad of hobbies. I am touched to see him wipe away a tear. He says he would prefer it if I had a girl. I look at him suspiciously. If Joshua is a girl, I tell him, he can teach her about the stars and the butterflies but not about guns. “No guns?” he says plaintively. “No guns,” I say firmly. When I was five, I shot a hole through my mother’s fashion wig, set out to dry on the porch rail, an event he thought hilarious but that deprived me of a week’s allowance.
Next, south, to Barbara; it is her response that really counts. A junior at Amherst now, where her father and brother went before her, her world revolves around things very far from us. When we enter, we trip over a mélange of khakis, books, and sports equipment.
She looks skeptical when we tell her, and then, unaccountably, she starts laughing. She looks up at me and laughs, looks down, laughs, looks up, and finally reddens. She gets up and says she’s hungry. At the cafeteria, she finally looks at me, and eyeing my slice of Boston cream pie, she says, “You better not eat too much or you’ll have triplets.”
If all the relatives and nosey parkers shook their heads at poor Bob’s being forced to have yet another child, they should see him singing songs to my stomach, bellowing “Give My Regards to Broadway,” with his two or three brilliantly resonant notes.
There is a reason Bob has had so many children. He cannot stand it if a little person is not circling around him, entertaining him with antics, begging to be picked up. He likes it when they inevitably attach themselves to him—sometimes too much—in a way his busy parents never did with him.
* * *
After the grand old house was sold, Bob told me we couldn’t afford to build a weekend house, but we could live in a trailer instead. It actually turned out to be very cute, like a dollhouse, and nicely tucked into a corner of the orchards overlooking a quirky pond that had almost silted over. On the weekends, we behaved like Hansel and Gretel. We walked in bare feet on a rug of shiny brown pile and ate on the floor, our plates balanced on a pink-striped futon couch. The bedrooms were about six by eight feet, and the ceilings almost grazed Bob’s hair. I loved our Lilliputian mobile home, even without central air-conditioning, which Bob thought too expensive. Until I got pregnant. Three months gone, I was suffering through a hot September. So he bought an inflatable baby pool that we called the rubber ducky.
“I’m too hot,” I said one day, wiping the sweat rolling down my cheeks.
“Go sit in the rubber ducky,” he suggested.
I gritted my teeth. “If you don’t get me central air, I’m not going to have this baby!”
The following weekend, I walked in to a blast of chilled oxygen. I embraced him and plopped down on the couch. I dozed, dreaming of the Arctic, and then woke to see him walking by, smiling at the sight of me. It was a moment I wouldn’t forget. Wonderful and sad, for somehow I knew that this was one of the last times I would experience such deep, sweeping love for him. Those moments would not be his anymore; the baby inside me would claim them.
Bob and I would sit together in love’s rocking chair, holding hands, attached but not merged, smiling out at the one who had taken the light: the longing, the agony, the passion that was once ours, his everlasting legacy.
* * *
I have been crying all day. I have written six letters to Gram telling her about the baby and my plans to visit her. Today, they came back unopened. Then I saw the note from Uncle Billy: “Don’t bother coming here to Florida. Your grandmother won’t recognize anyone.” He wrote that she was frying bread in bacon grease when she suddenly left the kitchen and went to bed. He said all she talks about is her past—her beaux back in Watseka, flying around the dance floor in her feather boa. My quick-witted, strong-willed Gram! Could he be lying to me to keep me away? He always disliked me, the crazy nitwit. I need her. I think how sad and awesome if the life I so cherished in the past is ending while the one that I will cherish in the future is about to begin.
* * *
Dear Gram,
I hope that Billy is reading this to you. It’s Cindy, Gram, and I love you so much, and I wish I were there to tell you that I am going to have a baby. It’s barely the size of your hand, but it has a spine, a brain, and the beginning of muscles. This fragile, evanescent thing cuddled inside me is your posterity.
Our best friends are so excited. I’ve had four showers, a stork cake, and a slew of fancy little dresses. Wendy Gimbel, she lives near us in Martha’s Vineyard and she’s a romantic. She wants to buy a wicker carriage and stroll the baby down Music Street. It will wear your bonnet, the one you saved for me. I can see you rocking your grandchild, softly singing “Caro nome” like you sang it in the Chicago Opera House.
Our good friends the Kaufmans will be the godparents. And you, Gram, will be one of the most special people in her life, just as you were the most special in mine. Gram, listen, I could come down and get you; you could come here to live with us. We’ll play bridge and buy maternity clothes and go to the opera. I’m beginning to believe in God now, and I know he is sitting there next to you. Do you hear me praying for you? I am on my knees praying as hard as I can.
Much love,
Cindy
* * *
I have none of the symptoms of a pregnant woman: no nausea or dizziness or fatigue. Bob, on the other hand, has developed morning sickness. He also drinks so much water he has to pee all the time. It is a constant race for the bathroom. I have promised Bob that I will do everything I can to get him through this pregnancy as comfortably as possible.
* * *
Winter. Apples lying on the ground up at the farm. A sad time. Orchard stripped and a dull, dusty green. Garbage everywhere left from the pick-your-own customers.
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br /> Penny is working on the Cheers TV show now, but she may get away for a visit. She is one of many, including Bob, who claim to have brought in the baby: my sister, a Buddhist now, chanted Buddhist prayers.
We went to a dinner party last night, and I sat between William Safire and Bernard Malamud. Safire asked me what I was working on, and I told him I was very excited about these two plain lamps that for only $1.60 I had bought from the dime store and stenciled with pigs and giraffes. I don’t think I expected him to fall off the chair in admiration of my creativity, but he didn’t have to turn to his other partner so abruptly. That’s when I saw Malamud chuckling at me: “You better stop stenciling and get all your writing done because you’ll never do it once this creature comes.” We talked about his book The Fixer and how Tony Lewis is always writing New York Times columns criticizing Israel. He called Lewis one of the “neo-self-hating Jews.” Malamud is one of the country’s greatest writers, but he looked old and very tired, so I talked about all his books I’d read and praised every one for something. I hope it didn’t sound too much like a eulogy.
During coffee, Mayor Koch and Charlie Rangel offered to babysit.
The New York Post ran a cute little story headed “DA Morgy to Be a Daddy Again at 64”: “‘It’s her first baby,’ the DA said joyously.”
How could I ever have doubted how deeply Bob loves me? How many times now do I remember that when I am down, so is he? So this is marriage: the happiness of one springs from the other. It is a beautiful thing.
We bump bellies in the shower. He put a pillow beneath his undershirt and had Renia take pictures of us. He continues to be super kind and gentle and loving to me, doing things in public he never did before, stroking my cheek, twirling my hair, as though saying, “This fine specimen of womanhood belongs to me.”
Not so long ago, I was called a turncoat to the liberation movement for becoming the wife of an older, prominent man. And indeed, my life was so subsumed by Bob’s, I felt like an antifeminist. But Betty Friedan had faith in me; she wrote that soon I would get tired of self-subjugation. Now, suddenly, I am a harbinger of a new type of woman. “I love the symbolism of you guys having a baby,” says my journalist friend Ellen Fleischer. “You’ve blown away the old assumptions and conventions. Let’s go tell Gloria and Kate Millett, ‘Hey, we can have a career and a husband and a baby. We can have it all.’”
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