Only Begotten Daughter (35 page)

Each in his own way, Julie sensed, the inhabitants of Plywood City hated their benefactors. Charity was not justice. Let Julie, Bix, and Phoebe give out food all day, fine, but come nightfall who had to stay in this cesspool and who got to return to Powelton Village? Nor was their resentment wholly unrequited, for Julie could not exactly say she loved these people, could not even say she liked them. Yet here she was, paying her brother homage: hell below, Plywood City above, morphine below, chicken soup above. Here she was, dipping her ladle into the soup, pouring the soup into plastic cups, passing the cups to a narrow Malaysian woman, a puffy, rheumic-eyed Pakistani man, a raffish Puerto Rican boy …

“I wish she went to A.A.,” said Bix.

“Phoebe? She’s staying sober.”

“A.A.’s the thing, I hear.”

“Not her style.” Ladle into pot, soup into cup. “She’s been dry seven weeks.” Cup into the mistrustful hands of a crinkled old man with a gray tumbling beard, a rummy Ezekiel. “Our deal’s working.”

“Seven weeks,” Bix echoed, sneering. “I’ve been looking into this business. You don’t make deals with alcoholics, Julie. You maneuver them into rehab programs. Sometimes an alky’ll go through three or four before she gets well.”

“That’s one approach, certainly.”

“Seven weeks is zilch. It’s borrowed time. The disease will foreclose, always does. I’ve been reading about it.”

“Phoebe has lots of willpower.”

“Willpower has nothing to do with it. She’s got to feel things she’s never felt before. She’s got to find something bigger than herself.”

“Like what? God?” Ladle into pot. Soup into cup. “Forget it.”

“Like A.A. Until then, honey, we’re walking on eggs.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Really. Eggs. Crunch.”

Julie’s bowels tightened, a gastrointestinal Gordian knot, hard, insoluble. “Did I ever tell you what happens after death?”

“You’re changing the subject. Eggs, Julie.”

“Everybody’s damned,” she explained. Cup into a hag’s leathery hands, a stringy-haired creature right out of the Brothers Grimm. “Earth is as good as it gets.”

“You have any pepper?” asked the hag.

“Next time,” said Bix.

“My ass,” said the hag.

“I promise,” said Bix.

Julie could practically feel the eggs underfoot. She could almost hear the crunch.

On the morning of July 24, 2012, Julie awoke possessed by a conclusion so sharp and certain it felt like the climax of a dream. Encircling her husband’s bearish body with both arms, she told him the time had come for a new generation.

“Huh?”

Down in hell it had been a mere notion, back on the garbage scow a simple whim. But now … “I want a baby.”

“A what?” Bix drew away, breaking her embrace.

“I want a baby happening inside me.” She did. Oh, God of physics, yes. Let her mother procreate planets and black holes; her own ambitions would be sated by a fetus. “You know—one of those protoplasmic blobs that grows up to be an orthodontist or something.”

“Got anybody in mind for the father?”

She untied the drawstring of Bix’s pajamas. “Some of them become English teachers.”

“Language arts.”

“Language arts.” Julie thought: A blob, a baby, a squalling organic ball chained to her leg, dragging her down. Scary. But Georgina had faced it. Her
father,
for Christ’s sake, had faced it, all alone in his lighthouse, raising his problem child. “The clock’s ticking, husband. Burn your condoms. Let’s have a kid.”

“Really?” Of all things, he seemed ready to cry. “Honestly?”

She kissed his lovely lower chin and slipped off her nightgown. “Honestly.”

“I want to be a regular guy, Julie. I really do.”

He had a fine erection, angled like a flagpole. She rolled toward him, all her lushness, her big arms and thick black hair and irresistible thighs. Her throat thickened. A regular guy, the father of her child. She felt like a beautiful planet, and now here was Bix, becoming her axis, south to north, and when she climaxed she indeed experienced the proper Newtonian rotation, a wild swing into her own miraculous flesh.

Almost forty: a perfectly safe age for a pregnancy, but she still resolved to get herself checked out. Her baby must have every advantage, the best preconceptual care. Studying the gynecological listings, she had trouble deciding between a classy-sounding Swede within walking distance and a Jew in Center City. If a girl: Rita. If a boy: Murray, little Murray Constantine-Katz.

She hiked over to 40th and Market and took the bus downtown.

Dr. Hyman Lefkowitz’s clinic was the most fecund place Julie had ever seen, its hallways lined with photographs of drooling, toothless infants, its waiting room jammed with back issues of
Parenting.
Swollen and wobbly, expectant mothers came and went. They all seemed astonishingly beautiful: fecund Madonnas, knocked-up Aphrodites.

The nurse took a dozen sonograms of Julie’s baby-making organs. Phoebe should have come, Julie decided. She imagined her friend extrapolating from this technology. You know what we’ve got here, Katz, we’ve got a whole new kind of smut, we’ve got a pornography of the internal.

“I’ll be frank with you,” said Dr. Lefkowitz as he ushered Julie into his office.

He held up a sonogram. Fear rushed into Julie’s stomach like cold chicken soup.

She said, “Oh?”

“This news isn’t good.”

“Not good?” Uterine cancer—it had to be. A true pornography of the internal.

“Your ovaries …”

“What?”

“They aren’t there.” The doctor’s thick glasses gave him Peter Lorre’s popping eyes. “You don’t have any.”

“Not there? What do you mean
not there?
Everybody has ovaries.”

“You don’t. It’s as if they’d been”—Lefkowitz’s eyes came at her like headlights—“stolen.”

And Julie thought: A bird. A luminous bird, ripped from its perch atop her heart, its beak clamped around an olive branch. An olive branch—or so it had seemed to her blurry vision when Wyvern had ablated her divinity.

Not an olive branch. Never was. Something else. Two moist, pulpy stalks, the fallopian tubes of God’s only daughter. Wyvern … Satan … evil incarnate … deception made flesh.

Julie pleaded, “Can you fix me?” A photograph sat on Lefkowitz’s desk, framed in K mart gold. The doctor. His buxom wife. Three perfect, shining children; boy, girl, baby. She hated them all, the children especially, the baby most especially, so smugly present, so cockily there. “Can you do a transplant?”

“Sorry.”

“Isn’t this supposed to be the future? Isn’t this 2012? I want a transplant.”

Lefkowitz smiled wistfully. “Science doesn’t have all the answers.”

She thought: You mean we don’t have all the science, asshole.

All the way home, the city tormented her. Pregnant women shadowed her like KGB moles. The number 31 bus reviled her with its ads for day-care centers and well-baby clinics. She alighted near the Sundance Nursery School. Toddlers roamed the sandboxes like cruel mocking dwarves; birds chirped everywhere, a million little birdshit factories. Reaching 3411 Baring, she dragged her sterile middle-aged body up the steps and stumbled into the living room. You’ll be getting a full life, that malevolent angel had told her, that creature who held the patent on lies.

A scream sawed through the air like a violin note played by a maniac.

A Phoebe scream. Type one: despair.

Julie ran. No, God, wait, Mother, this is the day I find out I’m infertile, not the day Phoebe falls off the wagon.

Wrong. The window stood open, yet a dense malty cloud hung in the air, as if Phoebe had washed the walls with beer. On the vanity, five empty Budweiser bottles encircled H. Rap Brown Bear. Phoebe lay slumped in her chair, gripping the sixth. She was, as usual, well dressed: a clean white blouse, a madras skirt of the sort popular among the Powelton Village gypsies. A box of kitchen matches, half open, lay on the segment of skirt bridging her thighs.

Julie felt as betrayed as on the day Bix ordered her out of his sewer. “Phoebe, how
could
you, how
could
you?”

Phoebe quieted herself with a swallow of Bud. “Dead,” she announced, voice thick and lumpy, eyes small and dull as pearl onions.

“How
could
you?”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Phoebe struck a kitchen match, alternately moaning and giggling. “You think Plywood City doesn’t have any Jersey immigrants? You think they don’t all know what happened to the poor old lesbo who ran the Smile Shop?”

Julie studied the evil bottles. Bud, Bud, Bud, Bud, Bud. “That’s not all. Your
father’s
dead too.”

“My father? Dead?”

“I met him in hell.”

“Dead?
Dead?
You shithead—for
this
you string me along?
THIS
? ‘
WOW
, Phoebe, guess what, you’re a goddamn orphan’?”

Julie grimaced, making her S-scar bulge. What was driving her, some sadistic urge, some mean-spirited wish to maximize her friend’s pain? No, in the end Phoebe would profit from this news, provided it came embellished with a benign untruth. “Listen, your father wants revenge. Really. ‘Tell Phoebe to get that bastard’—his last words to me.”

“Revenge? Huh?
What
bastard?” Phoebe blew out the match.

“Your father died when Billy Milk bombed the Preservation Institute.”

Phoebe struck another match. “Milk? Milk? I can’t kill
Milk.
He’s the fucking poobah grandpastor.” The flame skittered down the stick and snuffed itself against her thumb. She pulled back her skirt, burying the matchbox in the folds.

“You can kill Milk.”

“I can’t even kill myself. Maybe this time, though.” Phoebe struck a third match, inserting the flame between her dark thighs.

“Hey, you’ll get burned.”

A coarse hiss, a cobra’s gasp—but not from Phoebe’s throat. Lower, where the match was.

Julie rushed forward.

And suddenly she saw it. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ in hell. She curled her fingers around the terrible stalk. Of all things, she thought of “Heaven Help You”—how she’d always counseled the despondent that, if they truly saw no other option, they should at least contact the National Hemlock Society and do it right. Hadn’t Phoebe read that one? Certain prescription drugs were quick and efficient. A plastic bag cinched around your neck served well. But never this. Oh, God, never this.

Bix arrived just in time to see Julie yank the stick of dynamite out of her friend’s vagina. Ah, leave it to Phoebe to expand her husband’s horizons—even the Plywood City derelicts couldn’t offer him anything quite so baroque. “No!” he screamed.

She had only to grab the sputtering fuse, the pain a small price …

No fuse. “Christ!”

She ran to the open window. A quick sky-hook from her old days on the courts and—

Midair, a thunderclap and a blinding blast, lashing against Julie’s outstretched arm, turning the window into a tidal wave of pulverized wood and shattered glass.

She looked at Phoebe. Bix. The teddy bear. The corral of brown bottles. And then, before the nausea, the jetting blood, the unspeakable pain, Julie saw in an instant of brilliant strobo-scopic clarity that she no longer had a right hand.

D
ESIGNED BY A PIOUS
and literal-minded architect, the new Seraph of Mercy Hospital on City Avenue looked, when viewed from the clouds, like an angel. An oval driveway sat poised above the administration building like a halo. A maternity ward occupied the hospital’s midriff. The two main wards sloped gently away from the central block and, arcing sharply, simultaneously enclosed restful green parks and gave the seraph its wings.

Julie Katz and Phoebe Sparks ended up in opposite wings—in the amputee unit and the alcoholism clinic respectively. They communicated through get-well cards from the hospital’s gift shop.

“Dear Sheila, I’m sorry,” Phoebe scrawled beneath the printed doggerel accompanying Correggio’s
Assumption of the Virgin.
“I’m so fucking sorry.”

“You
should
be,” Julie wrote back beneath Piero della Francesca’s
The Discovery and Proving of the True Cross.
Her left-handed printing was childlike, chaotic.

“Dear Sheila, tell them to cut off my hand and sew it on you,” Phoebe wrote beside Dürer’s
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“Too late for that,” Julie replied next to Signorelli’s
The Damned Cast into Hell.

“Dear Sheila, they have A.A. meetings here four times a day. I go every afternoon.”

“Go four times a day.”

“Bix said the same thing.”

“Listen to him.”

Bix. Dear Bix. But for Bix she’d be dead. The ride to Madison Memorial was lodged in Julie’s brain like a fossil in granite: Phoebe pushing H. Rap Brown Bear against the faucet that was her best friend’s wrist; the question mark of bone protruding from the stump; both women screaming uncontrollably. And throughout the nightmare—her husband at the wheel of the Tureen, moaning and weeping and shouting over and over that he loved her, he loved her.

“Feeling better?” Bix asked, setting a vase of pale, dispirited roses on the nightstand. For the third time that week, he’d snuck in before visiting hours.

“No,” said Julie. Roses: quite touching, actually. Her husband was truly becoming normal.

“You don’t like Seraph?” Bix had opposed the transfer to Seraph of Mercy—she’s not Catholic, he kept telling the doctors at Madison, leave her here—but they insisted that only at Seraph would Julie receive what they called a holistic approach to limb loss. “They aren’t treating you well?”

“I like it fine.” The Madison doctors were indeed right about Seraph. It was nourishing and spiritual. Sun-drenched rooms, glowing portraits of saints, spry wimpled nuns waddling around like little organic churches, soothing the city’s legless, footless, armless, handless. “It’s not this place. It’s not the hand.”

“It’s the ovaries, isn’t it? I wish I could comfort you. I wish I knew how.”

“Not one of your language arts skills, huh?” she said with more bitterness than she’d intended. She rubbed her nose with her bandaged stump. By some theories she was closer to transcendence now, less flesh dragging down her spirit, but instead she felt wholly corporeal, a broken piece of matter mourning its lost symmetry. “Nobody can comfort me. God couldn’t comfort me. Have you ever wanted to be dead?”