I'll Take Manhattan (27 page)

“Fun,” she breathed, “what heavenly, groovy, fabulous fun. Incredible fun. Oh, WHAT FUN!” She jumped up, lifted India, who was already an inch taller than she, and whirled her around the room in glee.

“Fun?” India squeaked indignantly. “Put me down, you damn fool! Fun?”

“A baby. A darling little baby. A little boy who looks just like Rocco. A bambino all pink and white and chubby with black curls. Oh, I can’t wait! I’ll learn to knit, I’ll take lessons in natural childbirth, I wish he could be born tomorrow … didn’t I tell you something would happen and everything would be all right? And to have all this fun too, on top of it … I can’t believe how lucky I am!”

“Lord have mercy.” India collapsed in a chair, disbelief in every bone.

“Is that your only reaction? What’s wrong with you?” Maxi demanded. “I thought you knew how to have fun.”

“Maybe my idea of fun isn’t the same as yours,” India said faintly. “And, Miz Scarlett, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies.”

“It’s my fault,” said Nina. “I was the one who thought she should have a job.”

“It’s my fault,” Zachary insisted. “I was the one who agreed.”

“It’s my fault,” Pavka insisted. “I was the one who put her in that art department. And Linda Lafferty says it’s entirely her fault.”

“Actually, Pavka,” said Nina, “it’s your secretary’s fault, the one who worships you. She picked
Savoir Vivre.
”

“Listen, you two, it isn’t anybody’s fault except Maxi’s. God knows Rocco can’t be blamed … the poor bastard
never had a chance once Maxi made up her mind,” Zachary said.

“What does Lily think?” Pavka asked Zachary.

“She’s too busy with the wedding arrangements to have time to think. As far as she’s concerned, barely eighteen is a good age to get married if you’re not doing anything else with your life. She wasn’t much older when we got married. But she insists on a big English wedding with all the nonessentials: bridesmaids, flower girls strewing rose petals, pages in velvet pants, the house turned upside down for the reception. The only problem is one of time … they should be married as soon as possible. They’d be married by now if it weren’t for Lily’s plans. But Maxi doesn’t care one way or the other … she’s having too much ‘fun’ to worry about
how
premature the baby will be … I’m beginning to have visions of her doing a two-step down the aisle carrying the baby instead of a bouquet.”

“And Rocco?” Pavka said curiously.

“What about him? Linda Lafferty says that the two of you agree that he’s doing a fine job,” Zachary said, slightly on the defensive.

“I don’t mean his work … what about his family?”

“They think anything he does is perfect,” Zachary replied. “We finally got everybody together for dinner and it went as well as any first-time meeting of future in-laws, better maybe. Joe Cipriani was in the Air Force in Korea, so we told war stories and Anna, Rocco’s mother, and Lily talked silver patterns and china patterns and wedding dresses, and Maxi just sat there looking as if she’d accomplished a miracle and won the Nobel Prize for reproduction, and Rocco didn’t have anything to say. He looked as if he’d been hit over the head with a club, or run over by a train, or both.”

“Then why on earth,” Nina wondered, “are the three of us sitting around here and worrying about something that everyone else thinks is perfectly fine?”

“Because we all know Maxi,” Zachary answered grimly.

Angelica Amberville Cipriani entered the great world in April of 1973, just a little more than six months after
Maxi and Rocco were married, a perfectly respectable degree of prematurity in any society high or low, since the world began counting on its fingers. Rocco had snapped out of his catatonic state once the wedding actually took place and Maxi had delightedly given up her senior year of high school to prepare Rocco’s loft for the arrival of the baby.

Lily and Zachary had both tried to insist that the baby should come home from the hospital to a comfortable apartment where Maxi could have a nanny to help her and someone in the kitchen to cook and someone else to clean. They took it for granted that they would buy and furnish the apartment and subsidize the salaries of the staff, but Rocco had firmly refused to take anything from them other than a traditional wedding present of a silver service. He was making thirty-five thousand dollars a year, and the habit of total financial independence was deeply rooted in him. His own parents had contributed nothing to his upkeep from the day he won his first scholarship to art school, and he had no worries about earning enough to support a wife and child. Maxi was now eighteen, and many other girls in the world in which he had grown up were capable mothers by that age, in competent charge of their modest households.

Maxi approached the future with blissful energy. She went to three different cooking schools so that she could offer Rocco a choice of French, Italian and Chinese food; she took classes in two separate methods of giving birth, just in case she changed her mind in mid-process; she shopped at Saks and Bloomingdale’s and even ventured all the way to Macy’s, in order to buy a layette complete in every detail. Sensibly, she stored the dozens of barrels of wedding gifts in a warehouse, except for pots and pans, a set of pottery, stainless-steel tableware and inexpensive glass goblets.

Fortunately, Rocco’s loft was spacious enough so that with the help of two neighborhood carpenters they were able to divide it into three separate areas: the baby’s corner, a kitchen and storage section, and a third space in which they would live, eat, sleep, and in which Rocco would have his work table. Rocco had suggested that the third room be further divided to give him a separate workroom, but, as Maxi pointed out, she intended to continue
being helpful to him when he needed her, so that didn’t make sense. It would be the perfect harmony of last summer, she thought, with the additional joy of the bambino sleeping snugly away in its own little domain.

Maxi sat on a hard bench in a small neighborhood park with two scrawny trees, rocking the English pram, conspicuous by its size, its brilliant blue finish, its high, elegant wheels and the fringe on the canvas cover that kept the sun out of Angelica’s eyes. It was August, and hot and humid as only August in Manhattan can be; the city lay enclosed in a monstrous bowl of airless, evil-smelling gray-yellow stuff that might be air but would kill most Amazonian Indians. Maxi wore shorts and a halter top and flat sandals. Although she’d pinned up her hair on top of her head to keep it off her neck, sweat-wet strands kept escaping. She fanned herself to no avail with a copy of
Rolling Stone
, fighting the urge to foam at the mouth, howl like a dog and demand a recount.

I will think about the fun things, she said to herself rigidly. Rocco is fun when he isn’t working on that double-sized Christmas issue. Angelica is fun when she isn’t screaming, and keeping us awake. Being married is fun when Angelica is sleeping and Rocco isn’t working. Cooking is fun when … no, cooking wasn’t really what you could call fun. Not when you had to clean up afterwards. That makes about one fun hour in every forty-eight hours. At least one hour that might have been fun if it weren’t so hot and humid. NOTHING is fun in New York in August, she thought savagely, unless the fucking air conditioning works.

Their two inadequate window units had both blown from old age when the heat wave started three weeks earlier, and getting new ones in the middle of the hottest summer in years was proving impossible. Day after day Maxi waited for their promised arrival and day after day she was forced to realize that once again they weren’t going to be delivered.

Each morning Zachary phoned to beg her to go out to Southampton with the baby, every night Rocco assured her
that she was crazy to stay in town, that he’d be perfectly all right on his own during the week, and promised to come out every weekend, but Maxi, stubborn as she had never been before in a lifetime dedicated to having things her own way, refused to budge.

The first summer, she told herself, was the time of testing, the exam that she knew everybody expected her to flunk. But she was going to stick it out in the city; she wasn’t going to run off to her parents’ like a child and abandon her husband when he was working so hard, leaving him bereft of wife and child and tender care. She didn’t intend him to be a weekend husband who missed seeing his baby grow up during these few precious months. To turn tail and run off to the cool breezes and the ocean and servants bringing cold glasses of freshly squeezed fruit juice … No! She took out a damp wad of Kleenex and mopped up the rivulets of sweat that crept down her neck.

Why couldn’t she stop thinking about white? White linen, white sand, little dabs of white clouds in a blue sky over a blue sea, virgin white Pampers, white tennis shoes, maids in white aprons, big, white wooden houses, white wicker tables set with crisp white lace cloths and white Limoges china. White seemed the last thing Manhattan had to offer this particular August, except for the filthy litter of once-white paper that blew about her feet.

Angelica woke up howling. Maxi picked her up and fanned her frantically. In spite of constant sponging and cool baths the baby had heat rash or prickly heat or some sort of other irritation in half the folds of her plump, four-month-old body. She was a pretty baby, except when her face was screwed up in misery, as it had been for most of the summer. “Poor baby,” Maxi crooned, and felt tears come into her own eyes. “Poor, poor little baby. I feel so sorry for you, really I do,” she sobbed into Angelica’s neck, “oh, poor, unfortunate, brave little baby, what a good little girl you are, and nobody gives you any credit for it, no they don’t, they don’t, they don’t!” Angelica stopped crying and opened her eyes and pulled on a stray piece of Maxi’s hair and smiled at her. “
Oh
,” wept Maxi harder than ever, seeing the smile, “you poor little thing!”

She leapt up from the bench and, running, wheeled the pram out of the park. A small cab stopped, seeing her frenzied wave, and Maxi simply abandoned the imported, five-hundred-dollar object on the corner without a second thought, scooped up Angelica and slid into the taxi.

“The Saint Regis Hotel,” she told the driver. “Hurry, it’s an emergency.”

Amberville Publications kept a permanent suite at the St. Regis for visiting customers and everyone at the reception desk knew Maxi on sight. She was escorted to the five-room suite with as much chucking and concern as if she had just been pulled into a lifeboat from engulfing waves. Maxi flopped down on one of the beds, clutching her baby, and for a while nothing mattered except the cool air. As soon as she felt enough energy returning, she filled a tub full of tepid water, took off everything she and Angelica were wearing, unpinned her hair and stepped cautiously into the water with the baby in her arms. She lay back in the big tub and floated Angelica above her breasts, supporting her under her armpits and nuzzling her tiny nose. She made little crooning noises and swished Angelica back and forth; a mermaid and her young.

Soon, restored to full efficiency, Maxi bundled herself and the baby into huge towels and attacked the telephone. First she called Saks for baby shirts and nighties, a crib, another pram, baby bed linen and a rocking chair. Then she called Bonwit’s for an assortment of negligees, short silk pajamas and cotton shirts and shorts for herself. Next she telephoned the hotel florist and told him to send up a dozen white vases filled with white flowers. The druggist was instructed to bring up baby oil, baby powder, Pampers and shampoo. Then she phoned F.A.O. Schwarz and ordered a mobile to hang over the crib and duplicates of all her own favorites among Angelica’s stuffed animals. She called the hotel desk and dispatched bellboys in every direction to pick up her purchases immediately, and then she called room service and ordered lunch. Yes, they could puree carrots and white meat of chicken, they assured her. Finally, Maxi called Rocco at the office.

“Darling,” she said excitedly, “I’ve just discovered the
most marvelous place for us to spend the summer, and it’s only a few blocks from your office.”

August heat waves are normal in New York but, as any native knows, they can be almost as bad in September. “Autumn in New York” is a song that should clearly specify October, just as “April in Paris” is a song that should mention the necessity to bring umbrellas, warmly lined raincoats and waterproof boots. Maxi, Rocco and Angelica were sheltered by the friendly walls of the St. Regis for another five weeks. Although Rocco couldn’t help realizing that the room-service bills alone were more than his weekly salary, he forced himself not to protest. No matter how he felt, he reasoned, he couldn’t insist that the baby be subjected to the heat of the loft. Time enough for them to go home when it was cool again.

“I think we should move back tonight,” Maxi said to him one morning in late September, as he left for work.

“I thought you were trying to hold out till the first snow,” Rocco said, smiling at her flushed, happy face, and nibbling the tip of her impudently pointed nose.

“I’m tired of room service,” she murmured, licking his chest as high up as she could reach between two of his shirt buttons, underneath his necktie, a maneuver at which she had become expert while holding the baby.

“I’ll try to come home as early as I can and help you pack.”

“Don’t bother, sweetheart, I have all day and the hotel staff promised to do most of it for me … just come back and pick the two of us up.”

That evening, when he reached the hotel, he found Maxi and Angelica waiting in the lobby to meet him.

“Everything’s done,” she said triumphantly. They got into a cab and the doorman gave the driver an address and waved them farewell.

“Why is he going uptown?” Rocco asked.

“I wanted to stop by and see my family first,” Maxi said gaily.

“Then why has he passed your parents’ house?” Rocco said patiently, realizing that Maxi had planned one of the
surprises she loved so much: learning to make tortellini for instance, or framing a group of his sketches with her own inexpert hands, or finding an old dress for Angelica in a thrift shop and producing the baby trailing a cascade of Victorian lace.