“Please,” he said, later still.
“A beautiful boy,” he said, and kissed me again.
He said, “You’re doing fine.”
And another time, “Home soon.”
I heard the loudmouth doctor say, “Built like a child to begin with,” and kept my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
Then another morning, and when the doctor came in, I was sitting up in the bed and had just finished a light breakfast. He folded the blanket down to my thighs to examine my incision, but this time with a polite caution I had not seen before. He even said, “If I may.” He touched the bandages with his fingertips. It occurred to me that I had become accustomed to looking down across my body to find his head hovering there. I knew his bald spot as well as I knew Tom’s. He said, “That’s fine, much better,” and then quickly, almost shyly, covered me again. He was, I thought, giving my body back to me. I felt a peculiar regret, the end of some intimacy.
He put his hand on my forearm. He was red-faced and gray-haired and strong-jawed. He looked like an old general. Someone had told me he’d had a bad war. Brutal. “Don’t have any more children,” he said. And then turned to the nurse in the doorway. “Bring this little mother her boy.”
At home—it was agreed that I would go back to my mother’s house until I was fully recovered—my mother said, “There is the ring. There is the sheath. You can take your temperature every morning and keep a record. You can sleep in separate beds.”
The baby, little Tommy, was plump and healthy, alive in my arms, and he woke every three hours. Once again, my mother and I were sharing the big bed. My mother was up at the child’s first whimper, always the warmed bottle of formula at the ready. The ordeal that had almost killed me was reduced now to the hot red incision that split my belly—so jagged and roughly sewn that my mother, seeing it, had whispered, “I’d like to wring his neck.” If I moved the wrong way, the pain from it would flare across my entire midsection, make me stoop to catch my breath.
My long ordeal, as I’d come to call it, reduced as well to the ache in my breasts that my own doctor had assured me would soon go away as my milk dried up. He was gentler than the general, but still he spoke of my breasts and the milk they were producing with a dismissive smile, as if the whole process was some vestige of a primitive time—an immigrant custom, as one of the nurses on the ward had called it when my mother, who kept asking why I didn’t nurse the child, was out of the room—a persistent biological habit that these young mothers, had they only the wherewithal, would have long ago managed to break. None of my friends nursed their babies, and the infection I’d had in the hospital would have precluded it, anyway. Not that this satisfied my mother, who watched the child rooting against my shoulder and said, “He knows what he’s missing.”
A married woman now, nearing thirty, with a beautiful child alive in my arms and a body that had been flayed, publicly, indifferently exposed, not to mention a memory of that solid, unyielding door—death’s door, yes, as I thought of it—remembering for a moment, with a stir in my spine, the exposed breast, lit as if from within, and Walter Hartnett’s mouth moving toward me.
Tom came to the apartment after work and had dinner with us, usually with the baby in his arms, and then sat in the living room holding my hand, chatting and chatting in his cheerful way, only, reluctantly, lifting his hat and kissing us both goodbye when I got up to go to bed. I followed him to the door—I was still to avoid stairs—but more often than not, Gabe walked him to his car. Gabe said, in the first days of this routine, he did it because Tom seemed such a lonely soul, going back alone to our apartment in Queens, but I began to suspect my brother had another intention in accompanying poor Tom down the stairs. There was the matter, after all, of the doctor’s injunction. I must not have another child.
When we were alone in the apartment, my mother said, “There is the ring. There was once a woman who lived on Joralemon, above the Chehabs’ bakery, who you could go to for the thing. But the right doctor could tell you as well. There is the sheath, if Tom will oblige. You can take your temperature every morning and keep a record. You can sleep in separate beds or separate rooms, and if he comes to you in the night, you can say”—she lifted her nose into the air—“ ‘And who’ll raise this baby when I’m dead?’ You can sleep with a soup spoon under your pillow and give him a whack with the back of it—I don’t have to tell you where.” Which got us laughing like girls. My mother knew things she had never spoken of before.
In the kitchen, the bustling sounds of diapers boiling, bottles roiling in the speckled pot.
My mother said, “When the priest came to your bed that night, I told Gabe to send him away. All day I’d been watching out the window, and it may be that I had sun spots still in my eyes, but I didn’t like the look of him, that priest. In his black suit with his tiny bag. I’d been looking out the window all day. I watched the sun grow strong and I counted the shadows as the whole day went by, and I had on my mind that it was nighttime when your father died in this very same place. While you and I were home and asleep, and Gabe was asleep at the rectory. Slipped away in the night when none of us was near. I know I was afraid of the night coming, as frightened as any child. I was afraid that it was in the night that you would slip away from us, too.”
We were at the familiar table, my mother in her usual chair, folding the diapers she had just taken from the line. The summer heat had abated, but the window was still open. I was sitting at Gabe’s end of the table, to avoid the draft. I had the baby on my shoulder.
“The priest, to my eyes, seemed very dark in his suit,” my mother said, “with his little black bag, standing in the doorway and then coming toward your bed. I told Gabe to send him away. He was upset with me. He steered the man by his elbow, just out into the hall, and then he came back in and said that this was something we must do for you, to assure you’d get into heaven. The last rites. He was very serious. You know how he can be. A sacrament, he kept saying, as if I had forgotten.” She raised her chin, in some imitation of the defiance with which she had met Gabe’s words. “I hadn’t forgotten,” she said. “I just didn’t like the looks of the man, coming toward your bed like that. A black-suited banshee. I was desperate with the fear that I’d lose you.
“I said to Gabe, ‘She’s a young woman just after giving birth to her first child, who’s going to keep her out of heaven?’ I said to him, ‘How do you know she won’t see him praying over her and give up the fight?’ I said to him finally, ‘You’re a priest, aren’t you? You’re still a priest. Send that blaggard away and give her the blessing yourself. Didn’t you do as much for your poor father?’”
My mother, telling it, put her fingertips to her lips. The morning sunlight touched her downy cheek and crossed her lap where the white diapers were neatly arrayed. The lace curtain, her handiwork, stirred. “Which was terrible of me,” she said. “Reminding him of that heartache.” She looked at me. My mother wore glasses by then, and her salt-and-pepper hair was neatly permed. No longer for her the long graying braids of the immigrant. “He was barely ordained,” she said. “It was a terrible thing to have asked him to do at the time, and it was a terrible thing to throw in his face just because that mincing black priest made me angry.” She took another clean diaper from the basket on the table, folded it neatly.
The baby began to fuss, and I stood. I rubbed my fingers up and down his spine. I hadn’t known this, that it was my brother who had given my father the last sacrament. It made perfect sense, of course—Gabe was at his first parish then—but the time was a blur and I would not have thought until now to turn my imagination to it. Once, early on, my father had stood at a hospital window and waved to me out in the street—just a pale image behind the high-up glass—but my last real glimpse of him had been at this table, with the sabotaged soda bread, my own childish effort to stop time, in his hand.
I said to my mother, “I didn’t know.”
My mother nodded. “It was a terrible thing to have hi
m do,” she said. And she dropped her hands into her lap, as if from sheer weariness. “Terrible for him.”
She said, “He was all of what, twenty-three? Barely ordained. And your father so wasted by then. His bowels coming up to his throat, if you want to know the worst of it.” She fluttered her thin hand from her breast to her chin to illustrate.
I didn’t want to know the worst of it.
“Even as Gabe was putting the holy oil on him, the poor man was heaving and choking. Cruel. That cancer. Cruel of me to make Gabe go through it. I should have banned him from the room.”
“I don’t remember,” I said, moving to a corner of the dining room to avoid the draft from the open window—ever vigilant now against drafts, missteps, scalding water. I was a mother now and all the terrible things that could maul a child, snatch him from the world, had bared their teeth and trained their yellow eyes on me. The baby was warmly asleep against my shoulder. “I hardly remember that time at all,” I said.
My father a pale figure in the hospital window. All those strangers passing through the lobby, some crying, some carrying armloads of flowers. And then Fagin’s benign shadow. The Mc-Geevers with their mouths full of broken teeth standing over the coffin in the living room, telling someone in the crowd that a man so thin was a walking invitation to misfortune. And then that sweet sleep in the car on the way home from Calvary, one of the sweetest sleeps I’d ever known. Gabe in his collar then, looking down at me, his red eyes puzzled. “You slept? How could you have slept?”
“A blessing for you,” my mother said. “Not to remember.” And she once again touched her lips. “It was my fault, asking him. The poor child’s hands were trembling and the tears were running down his face. And your father was choking back the black bile, trying to encourage him. Trying to help him with the Latin.” She put her fingertips to her chin. “Moving his lips like he used to do when Gabe said his poems. Moving his lips because he couldn’t speak. There was a terrible odor. Rot and bile. The man’s body wasted to nothing. Radium was what they gave him to drink. Poison. His face a skull. The dear man.”
With her hand to her chin she paused and closed her eyes again. I could hear the water boiling in the pots on the stove. I could hear the traffic in the street outside.
“I think your brother’s vocation was squashed right there and then, in that room, if you want to know what I think.” And she opened her eyes again. Behind her thin glasses they were black with her anger.
“I think it was the end of that poor boy’s sweet faith, to see your father suffer the way he did. To see his body suffer. Here he was, newly minted, full up with all the words they’d given him out there, at the seminary, all the prayers, and here was the sight of his father’s body reduced to a whimpering, suffering thing.”
She paused and lifted one of the white diapers, struck it against her lap, once, twice, three times. A keening gesture I had come to know. “How was he to go back to his parish,” she said, her voice low, “and stand in the pulpit and tell the people looking up at him that there was any mercy in this world? How was he to console them?” She glared at me, although it hardly seemed it was me she was speaking to. Her lips were wet with her fury. “His vocation ended right there in that hospital, if you ask me. I’ve always thought it. I’ve thought it for a long while.” And then she suddenly looked at me directly. “But don’t you dare tell him I said so.”
I shook my head. I would not.
My mother began to fold the diapers once more. “So it was terrible for me to bring it up again, at the hospital, when that priest showed up with his black bag. Terrible of me to throw that memory in your brother’s face when what he was trying to do for you was what he still hoped was right. The very best thing he knew, still. Trying to assure me that you’d get into heaven after all your pain. But I wouldn’t be consoled. I didn’t want you in heaven, I wanted you alive, on earth, with your child. When the priest came in again, I swung my purse at his head.”
“Your mother did get her Irish up” was how Tom described it later, in his own version of the scene.
In both versions, Gabe simply put his hands on my mother’s shoulders and said, “Now, Momma, quiet down.” He showed her his empty palms, as if it should be apparent that whatever they once had held, they held no more. I knew the gesture. “Let Father bestow the sacrament,” he said. “He’s a good priest. I’ll stand by his side.”
“And wasn’t he right?” my mother said, smiling at me, changing allegiance, or so it seemed to me, simply by wiping the spit from her lips and shaking the anger from her eyes. She folded and smoothed and patted down the clean diapers on her lap. “Weren’t you better the very next morning? Almost a miracle.”
I nodded. I thought of that solid door and the slip of my shucked body falling against it. I supposed I now had in my own life an equivalent experience, perhaps, to Gabe’s dark night in our father’s hospital room or Tom’s long fall from the plane, or any of the lonely journeys the dead had taken, journeys that couldn’t be shared or even sufficiently described. Now I had my own mystery, mine alone, my singular experience never to be shared or even sufficiently described, try as I might, over the years: death’s door, I would say. Like being run over by the Coney Island Express. None of it sufficient enough to convey what I had been through. Now I knew the quick work pain could make of time, of a lifetime. Now I knew what it was to abandon modesty, body, the entreaties of those who loved you, who wanted you to live.
“It was just that the infection cleared up,” I said. “That penicillin did the trick.”
And my mother, now that she had soothed herself, shaken off the memory of her anger at the priest, at Gabe, at the injustice of my own suffering, glanced at me with sly eyes, with that secret smile about her mouth that warned against the risk of drawing too much attention to the deepest joys. My mother reached out and put her hand to the baby’s back. He was curved warmly against my shoulder. “Nonsense,” she said.
On a Saturday in cool October, two months after my ordeal, Tom put the bassinet and my suitcase into the trunk of the car, tying the lid half closed with rough string. He was giddy, going in and out in his good overcoat. My mother went before us down the stairs with a shopping bag full of the meals she had cooked, Gabe was behind us with the baby in his arms. Tom put one arm around my waist and gripped my right hand with the other as I leaned against the banister, taking one step at a time at his insistence. “I’m really fine,” I said, although the cold air and the sunlight on the sidewalk made my head swim. He eased me into the front seat of the car, only a twinge in my abdomen as I sat—an echo of the insult. Gabe leaned down to place the baby in my arms.
As Tom and I pulled away from the curb, I waved to the two of them, my mother and my brother. They were standing on the sidewalk together—my mother looking very small beside him. Gabe as handsome as ever. I knew they would watch until the car rounded the corner, and then they would go up again together to finish out the suddenly quiet day.
At the apartment in Rego Park, all was Spic and Span and lemon polish and the lingering odor of the apple pie Tom had taught himself to bake that morning, only the beginning of his efforts to make up for a wife who would not learn. There were roses in a vase on the table in the small kitchen. The crib was ready in the single bedroom and our bed was crisply made. He carried up the bassinet and the bottles and the shopping bag of food, while I changed the baby’s diaper and fed him a bottle and put him into his crib. Then Tom made tea and cut two pieces of the pie. I admired the roses while we ate at the small table. Tom told a funny story about the two ladies in the grocery store who had advised him about the best apples to choose.
“While the baby’s asleep,” I told him, “I might go lie down.”
He brought my suitcase in, and I changed out of my dress and took off my stockings and put a housecoat over my slip. I put my glasses on the bedside table. He smoothed down the bedspread for me and took a throw from the closet—all wordlessly, so as not to wake the sleeping child
. He lowered the shades while I stretched out on the bed, and when he leaned down to kiss my forehead and whisper sweet dreams, I took his wrist and said, “You lie down, too.”
He walked around the bed, sat at the edge, and untied his shoes. He lay back, somewhat cautiously, I thought, and, with as much distance between us as there could be in a double bed, reached over and took my hand. He gripped it, briefly, to assure himself that I was there, perhaps, or maybe simply to convey that he was grateful for the assurance. I heard him sigh and knew without turning my head he had closed his eyes. I lifted his hand and brought it to my lips.
It was not that my life was less valuable to me now that I had glimpsed what it would be like to lose it. My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child’s need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable in a way that even the most abundantly offered love, my parents’, my brother’s, even Tom’s, had failed to do. Love was required of me now—to be given, not merely to be sought and returned. My presence on earth was never more urgently needed. And yet even the certainty of that fact seemed reason to throw away caution, not to heed it.
I kissed his hand and moved it to my heart. We turned to each other.
“Oh, Marie,” he whispered. “We have to be careful.”
“Why?” I asked.
And I saw that he couldn’t resist a smile at my answer. I was a bold piece. He made his eyes and his mouth grow serious. “You can’t endure another child.”
“Who said?” I whispered.
He shook his head. I still held his hand against my heart. “Your doctor,” he said. “Your brother. Even the priest who came to the hospital, who gave you last rites.”
“Fools,” I said. “Which one of them has ever had a baby?” But Tom closed his eyes and put his hand to his forehead. “What a terrible night that was,” he said. He whispered, “They gave you last rites,” as if the memory of it still took his breath away.
Gently, I touched his cheek to make him see me. I squinted in an effort to see him. “It was only the silly infection,” I said, and moved closer. I felt the ache in my abdomen, the muscle closing up around the ragged scar. “Next time I’ll know better,” I said. “I’ll bring my own ether.”
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