Corky's Brother (19 page)

At the office, his friends told him that she would begin feeling ugly and neglected, that her eyes would turn inward, that she would begin neglecting him—he waited, but none of these things happened. Still, he was afraid for her, for the baby. He went to see their doctor, and the doctor smiled at his fears. Gary considered, and then told the doctor about the time, before they were married, when Helen had been ill. The doctor nodded; Helen had told him all about it. There was nothing to worry about. If anything, giving birth to a healthy child would, he said, serve to close the door even more securely on that period of her life. What if the child wasn't healthy, he asked. The doctor replied that something could always go wrong, of course—there were never guarantees; as things stood, though, Helen was coming along beautifully and he didn't see any cause for worry: there was more chance of a safe falling on Gary while he walked in the street, he laughed, than of something being wrong with the child.

Without telling Helen, Gary telephoned her mother and urged her to come and stay with them, but Helen's mother said that she wasn't needed yet. She thought she would come to New York after the baby was born, when she could be more helpful. Gary said all right. When it came time to give up their own pleasures, he became wary again, he waited for something to happen, but she neither neglected him nor felt neglected; if anything, she became more affectionate than she had been before, and at night her only concern was that he might go to sleep unsatisfied.

One evening he tested her by opening the middle drawer of the living-room secretary and taking out the European travel folders they had collected. She smiled. “We'll go some day,” he said. “You'll see.” “We'll go some day,” she agreed, her hand touching his cheek. The radiance in her own cheeks disturbed him. On weekends they saw their friends, and when he would mention her “strangeness,” nobody seemed to understand him. Everybody said that she was beautiful in pregnancy and would make a beautiful mother. His friends teased him about being “put off,” and afterwards she would console him, more soft, more kind than ever.

Then he seized on something definitely amiss: she had not sensed his worry. There it was, he told himself. She was too placid, too understanding, much too free of all anxiety. He telephoned the doctor again and explained; wasn't it unnatural for her to have no worries whatsoever and not to sense the fact that he was worried? The doctor laughed. “Do me a favor, Gary,” he said. “Tell her what you've told me and see what happens.”

He did. “Oh, you're sweet,” she said, cuddling to him in bed. “Of course I know you've been worried. You've been so dear—”

“You knew?”

“Of course.” She laughed again. “Everybody knows. You're not very good at hiding things. But don't be glum, dear one. I like you this way. Somebody has to do the worrying for the three of us.”

Three weeks before she was due, she told him that she had invited Mrs. Hart to have dinner with them. Mrs. Hart had been their landlady before they were married. “Won't she be surprised!” she exclaimed. He didn't answer. She snuggled up to him. “I just thought she would get a kick out of seeing us together—you know, as a married couple. Remember the way she used to wink at me whenever she'd see us going in and out of your apartment?” He remembered. They had not seen Mrs. Hart for over two years. She giggled: “I liked living in sin with you. Do you know that?” He tried to smile. “You don't mind if she comes, do you? When I told her I was Mrs. FogeL she said, ‘Gary's mother?' Then I said, ‘No, I'm
Helen
Fogel, Mrs. Hart,' and she congratulated me and said that she'd seen the announcement in the
Times
. Do you mind if she comes?”

He said he didn't mind; he couldn't help but feel, though, that something stupid—something terrible—would happen if Mrs. Hart came. He thought, he waited. Then the day before Mrs. Hart was supposed to come, he telephoned their doctor and told him everything. The important thing was Helen and the baby, he told himself. He had been foolish to wait this long. The doctor didn't see anything particularly wrong, or antic, in what Helen was doing, but he suggested that Gary see a psychiatrist if Gary thought that would help. “I'll go,” Gary said. The psychiatrist listened to Gary and agreed with him that it was natural for an expectant father to worry, but he didn't seem to find anything fearful in what had happened. Still, until the baby was born, Gary could come for sessions twice a week if he liked. Gary felt uncomfortable, silly, and said that he supposed he was just a typical nervous father-to-be; he left before the time was up.

That night Helen told him that she had telephoned Mrs. Hart and canceled the dinner arrangements. “It would have made you uncomfortable, wouldn't it?” she said. “Anyway, it was a silly idea in the first place.”

Two and a half weeks later, three days ahead of schedule, she went to the hospital. She called him at his office, and by the time he arrived she was in the delivery room. When he was allowed into her room afterward, she was sleepy, but happier than ever. “I saw the whole thing,” she said. “It was beautiful.”

She came home from the hospital three days later, and her mother flew in from Cleveland and stayed with them for two weeks. The girl had weighed seven pounds four ounces at birth, and everyone agreed that she looked just like Helen. Gary's parents drove in from Boston, stayed for a week, and then left. As the doctor had predicted, his anxiety was gone as suddenly as it had come. The two of them spent endless, timeless hours watching their child; the hands and feet—the fingernails, the soft wrinkles at the knuckles, the tines across the palm, under the toes—they fascinated him most: so delicate, so perfect, so miniature. Proudly, he told all their friends that whenever the baby started crying, all he had to do was lift it and she would stop. Once in a while, out of habit, he supposed, he would find himself observing Helen, noting her behavior, but she gave him no cause for worry now, and he was pleased. He had been a bit concerned at first that she had experienced no pain whatever during labor, but the doctor assured him that her experience was not abnormal. “It happens,” he said.

At night they took the baby into their bed with them and watched her, talked to her. Then they would return her to the crib and talk for hours about how glad they were that they had not given her up. “I've never loved you so much,” he said. “Soon,” she said. “Soon.” He studied their finances, showed her the results of his calculations, and they agreed that they would have to be careful. They checked with their doctor after the first month and then put up a calendar next to their bed with the probable “evil days” circled in red.

Two days later the baby broke out in a rash that covered her arms and neck. They went to the doctor, and he told them not to be alarmed. He prescribed a skin cream and said that the rash would probably disappear in a week or less. “It's summer, though,” he said, “and the heat will tend to aggravate it. But don't worry. It's nothing.” They asked him the other question, and he smiled and said that it was all right. Hadn't he told them so the other day? They went home, happy, relieved. The baby started crying in the car, stopped, then started again when they were in the apartment. “Poor little thing,” Helen said as she smoothed the cream onto her daughter. Gary watched and felt helpless. The baby stopped, then started again a half hour later. They stayed in the bedroom, and he held her. When he offered her to Helen, she said to let her cry. “There's nothing to worry about,” she said. “You heard the doctor.” “But the rash is worse than before,” he said. “It's spreading to her chest.” “There's nothing to worry about,” she repeated. “Come to bed.” He rocked the baby gently against his shoulder, and she howled even more. “Come to bed,” Helen said, undressing. He put the baby in its crib, and she cried in a way that terrified him; she seemed to be gagging. “Please look at her,” he said. Helen got up, trailing her underclothes, letting them drop to the floor; she looked at the baby and the baby stopped crying. “See?” she said, touching his arm with her forefinger. “Now come to bed.” He went with her. “I'm so tired,” he said when she'd put the light out. They touched each other gently, saying that the baby would be all right in a few days, and then he kissed her and told her to get a good night's sleep. “I hope the baby sleeps until morning,” he said, but just as he spoke the baby started crying again. He turned on the night lamp and got out of bed. There were large red splotches on her face. “Shouldn't we call the doctor?” he asked. “Come to bed,” she said. The baby kept crying. He held his child for a while and tried to soothe her by rubbing more salve on the red spots. The baby's skin seemed red-hot to him. Gradually, the crying stopped. When he put her back in the crib, she whimpered.

A quarter of an hour later he asked Helen to get up. “Guess we'd better get the new safety valve out,” he said, nodding toward the calendar. “You never know.” She clung to him, her arms locked around his shoulders. “Do you want me to get it for you?” he asked. She moaned. “Do you?” he asked again. When she didn't answer, he stroked her hair and said that he would get it for her. But she wouldn't let him go. “Please,” he said. “We have to, honey. I don't want to, either, but we have to.” “No,” she said, clutching him. “No.” “But it's an 'evil day,'” he said, laughing. “I don't care,” she said fiercely. Their child began wailing again, and he tried, gently this time, to get away from Helen so that he could tend to the child. She was choking on something now, wailing, sputtering. “I don't care,” Helen said again. The baby's screaming stopped for a while. When it started the next time—louder, more painful than before—he tried to get away, but by then he knew that he could do nothing but agree with what she repeated endlessly in his ear, that there was nothing to worry about.

Elijah

O
NCE
, I remember, Izzie tried to get up a petition for us to sign, saying that unless Hebrew school was changed to two afternoons a week instead of three, we would all get our parents to switch to another synagogue. But Mrs. Bluestone caught him with it before he'd gotten half a dozen signatures on it and by the time the rabbi got through with Izzie he wasn't in a mood to pass around any more petitions. He didn't hate Hebrew school any less. None of us did—in fact, if anybody had taken a vote in those days on what we hated most in the world, Hebrew school would have won easily. It wasn't so bad in the winter, when you couldn't do much outside, but in the fall and spring when you wanted to be playing stickball and punchball or going to the Parade Grounds for hardball, those three afternoons a week were enough to turn us all into Catholics.

While we'd wait for classes to start—or during the five-minute recess we had every day at four o'clock—we'd talk about what a lousy deal it was being Jewish, and sometimes when it was a really beautiful day outside and we felt brave, we'd parade up and down outside the bathrooms, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Louie would be lookout and when he'd see one of the teachers or the rabbi coming, he'd yell “Chickee!” and we'd break ranks and be sitting on the steps, making believe we'd been studying all along.

Usually, if the rabbi came, he'd lecture us about “desecrating the Temple of God” with what he called our “vulgarities.” I could never look into his eyes when he spoke—and the same went for most of the guys. He was a little man, short and stocky—not much bigger than we were then—but he had a way of looking at you that made you certain God was going to find some special way to punish you. “You have come to the House of God dressed like an iceman!” he said to me once, and I never came to Hebrew school without a tie again.

Probably the worst thing about Hebrew school was in the winter when it would be dark out by the time we left and these tough guys would be waiting across Bedford Avenue in the doorway to the Flatbush Boys Club or Al Roon's Health Club—they'd make fun of us for having to go to school so much. And then, when we'd hide our Hebrew books under our coats, the girls would walk next to us for protection—or they'd get the Negro janitor to come out from the synagogue and chase the guys from across the street. There was nothing we hated more than having anybody think we needed protection. It made the tough guys tease us even more about being sissy Jews, and then we could do only one of three things: feel bad, punch the girls around and throw their books in the air, or answer the tough guys back, cursing them the way they cursed us, calling them dirty Micks or Wops, and telling them they weren't such “rocks,” that they talked so big because they were scared to fight. A few times they chased us down Bedford Avenue, and a few times everybody kept daring and double-daring everybody else until we had a real fight. But the fights never lasted long—most of the time a grown-up from the Boys Club or the synagogue would break it up—and the worst anybody ever got was a bloody nose or a good shiner. Then, for a few weeks after, we'd all tell each other how tough we'd been or how many punches we'd connected on, and we'd get pretty brave in answering the Boys Club guys back. Izzie had a whole repertoire of lines about nuns and brothers and what dogs did to “rocks,” and we'd stand around the steps of the synagogue cheering him on as he shouted them across the street. The thing we'd all wait for would be when he'd say, “If you're so strong, let's see you pick that up—” and then he'd rear back and let fly with a tremendous gob of spit, which, when he caught the wind right, would usually land three-quarters of the way across Bedford Avenue. Izzie could spit farther than any guy I've ever met.

About the only time all year when anybody looked forward to Hebrew school were the few weeks in the spring when we got ready for Field Day. We'd get to the Hebrew school at about 3:30 but we'd only spend a half hour, maybe less, in the classroom and then Mr. Gleicher would take all of us over to the Parade Grounds for practice. Field Day was supposed to be the celebration for Lag B'Omer, a Jewish holiday, and all the Hebrew schools in Brooklyn got together for it at George Win-gate Field. There were a lot of speeches by rabbis and politicians, and some Hebrew music and pageants and dances that the girls would put on. The only thing we cared about was the track meet. Every Hebrew school in Brooklyn sent a team, and ours had come in first more than any of them. It was the only thing about the school that any of us were proud of.