Mr. X (39 page)

“How did his name wind up on her marriage license?”

“Hold on,” Suki said, “let me tell you what I know.”

At the end of the semester, Suki transferred to Wheeler College in Wheeler, Ohio, ostensibly to continue training under a lithographer who had spent the previous year at Albertus. She had lost faith in Edward Rinehart and wanted to escape his sphere of influence. Erwin Leake, once a worthwhile English teacher, had become a drunken phantom; some of the boys Rinehart had declared artists of great promise were turning into drug addicts interested only in another handful of pills; her female friends thought of nothing but Rinehart and his satisfactions. Suki wanted out.

Late in the winter of the following year, Star Dunstan appeared in Wheeler, pregnant, exhausted, and in need of a safe place to stay. Suki relinquished half of her bed. For the next few days, Star said only that she had to
hide
, to
conceal herself
. Suki let her sleep and smuggled in food from her waitressing job. Star told her that she had married a man, but that the marriage had been a mistake. She trembled at the ringing of the telephone. When someone knocked at the door, she disappeared into the bedroom. After two weeks, Star recovered sufficiently to get a job at Suki’s restaurant. After another month, she began auditing arts courses at Wheeler. Eventually, she told Suki that her husband had abandoned her when a doctor told her that she might be carrying twins. At the next appointment, the doctor informed her that she might be carrying only one child after all, but this news could not bring back the vanished husband.

An obstetrician in Wheeler pronounced Star fit and healthy and predicted that she would deliver twins, although the evidence was not as conclusive as he would like. She packed her things and left for Cherry Street.

At the end of the school term, Suki drove to Edgerton, found a new apartment, and moved in hours before the descent of a powerful storm. She called Nettie, without response. Perhaps the Cherry Street telephone lines were out. She called Toby Kraft and got through. Toby told her that Star had been admitted
to St. Ann’s Community Hospital and was about to give birth. He was beside himself with worry. The river had overflowed its banks, and cables had blown down everywhere. Suki belted herself into her rain slicker, snatched up her umbrella, and went outside. Instantly, the umbrella flipped inside out and tore out of her hands.

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Floodwater sluicing around the low wall of sandbags rose over her ankles. Under the slicker, her clothing was soaked. Suki climbed over the barricade and waded toward the hospital’s entrance. The lobby looked like Calcutta. In the confusion, she managed to buttonhole a nurse, who focused on her long enough to tell her that only two expectant mothers, a Mrs. Landon and a Mrs. Dunstan, were up on the fourth floor in obstetrics. She advised Suki to take the stairs instead of the elevator.

Suki ran up to the cacophony of the obstetrics department. Babies shrieked from bassinets in the nursery. A nurse frowned at her muddy boots and said that her friend was in delivery room B, attended by Midwife Hazel Jansky. Suki grabbed her arm and demanded details.

Mrs. Dunstan had been in labor five hours. There were no complications. Since this was a first delivery, the process was expected to go on for hours more. Midwife Jansky was assisting at both of the night’s deliveries. The nurse peeled Suki’s hand from her arm and moved on.

Suki retreated into the waiting room. Behind the blurred reflection of her pale face suspended above a bright yellow slicker, the long windows revealed only a vertical black wall pierced by the lamp posts in the parking lot. Suki put her face against the glass, shielded her eyes, and looked out upon another black wall, this one stretched over the landscape and streaked with incandescent ripples. A dark, linear form she hoped was a tree trunk bobbed along in the wake of an automobile.

Some time later, a younger nurse ducked in to tell her that
Mrs. Dunstan was making progress, but if her baby had any sense it would pull the emergency brake and stay where it was for another twelve hours. The next time Suki cupped her face to look out the window, the lamps in the parking lot had died, and objects too small to identify were swirling downstream, like toys. She lowered herself onto the sofa and fell asleep.

A muffled explosion, followed by women’s screams, woke her up. The lights failed, and the screams lengthened into bright flags of sound. Suki groped toward the hallway and saw flashlight beams cutting through the darkness. She took off in search of Star.

Her hands discovered a wide seam in the wall. Suki felt her way sideways, pushed open a door, and charged into a dead-black chamber where an invisible woman wept and moaned.

“Star?”

A strange voice cursed at her.

Suki backed out. Further down, she came to the door of the second delivery room, which knocked her backward as it burst open. A figure put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her to the side. Suki groped forward and caught the door on its backswing. She stumbled in. Whoever was in the room whimpered. Suki bumped against a metal rail and reached down. She touched a wet, bare leg.

Star gasped and pulled her into an embrace. “Suki, they took my babies away.”

As abruptly as it had failed, the electricity jumped back into life. Star shielded her eyes. Thick brush strokes and random spatters of blood smeared her thighs. Suki cradled Star’s head and stroked her hair.

The midwife bustled in and placed in Star’s hands a doll-like infant tightly wrapped in a blue blanket. Star protested—she had delivered two children, one that felt like giving birth to a watermelon, and another who had his bags packed and his passport ready. The midwife told her that what she had mistaken for a second child was the placenta.

Hours later, a harried doctor came in to reassure Star that she had delivered a single healthy child. When asked about Mrs. Landon, Midwife Jansky’s other patient, the doctor said that Mrs. Landon’s infant had been stillborn.

Suki had stayed with Star until early the following evening, by which time the Fire Department had pumped the floodwater
from the basement and ground floor of the hospital. Crews labored to clean away the sticky, foul-smelling layer of mud deposited by the Mississippi. While Star finished a lily-white dinner of chicken, mashed potatoes, and cauliflower, Nettie, Clark, and May swept in. The aunts pelted her with questions. Was it a normal baby? Could she be sure the hospital was not concealing something from her?

Nettie collared a hapless nurse and demanded that Infant Dunstan be removed from the nursery. Blissfully asleep within the confines of a bassinet, Infant Dunstan was wheeled in, snatched up, momentarily cuddled, unwrapped, and subjected to a brisk examination. Nettie passed the wailing child to its mother for rewrapping. Some abnormalities did not show themselves immediately, was Star aware of that?

Suki’s indignation boiled over: what kind of late-blooming abnormality did Nettie have in mind, exactly?

Nettie turned and smiled.
I suppose her boy could wind up with different-colored eyes
.

Suki fled as if pursued by Gorgons.

Thereafter, Star maintained a resolute silence about her pregnancy and marriage. Suki had seen the child develop into a four-year-old, a five-year-old, a six-year-old, and ideas of his paternity had come to her, but she never spoke of them. The boy’s face declared it for her. Around the time Star began placing her son into foster care, Suki experimentally married a harpsichord player in the Albertus Music Department and moved to Popham, Ohio, where her husband had been appointed artist in residence at an obscure liberal arts college.

The Albertus circle had exploded into disconnected fragments, some to teaching positions, some to nine-to-five jobs, to mental hospitals, Europe, communes, death in Vietnam, law practices, jail terms, other fates. Edward Rinehart had been killed in a prison riot. Rachel Newborn had redesigned herself in a manner that dismissed Suki Teeter. Of her old friends, only Star Dunstan could still be seen, and Star returned to Edgerton only infrequently.

Suki took me in the golden haze of her embrace and apologized for talking so much.

“I’m glad you did,” I said.

Suki patted my cheek and said that maybe we could have lunch together after my mother’s funeral. “I’d like that,” I said, and a question came to me. “Suki, it was obvious to you that Rinehart was my father, but what about my aunts? Did Nettie and May ever meet him?”

“Huh,” she said. “Not when I was around, anyhow.”

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