The Afterlife (38 page)

She snapped her profile at him, with a wisecrack: “So now who’s lecturing?”

By mutual agreement they slept, on this last night at sea, in separate cabins. But at four in the morning, Aurora Mergenthaler, their melodious chief stewardess, announced to every cabin over the loudspeaking system that the ship was about to pass through the Corinth Canal. The project, cherished by Periander and Caligula, and actually begun by Nero, had been taken up by a French company in 1882 and completed by the Greeks in 1893. The canal is four miles long, twenty-four yards wide, and two hundred sixty feet at the highest point. Dug entirely by hand, it transformed the Peloponnesus from a peninsula into an island.

In the dark of the hour, the walls of earth slid by ominously, growing higher and higher. There seemed to be many horizons, marked by receding bluish lights. The ship, formerly so free, plodded forward in the channel like a blinkered ox. The damp upper deck was surprisingly well populated by conscientious cruisers, some wearing ghostly pajamas, others sporting fanciful jogging outfits, and still others fully dressed for disembarkation on the mainland at Piraeus. Personalities that had grown distinct over the days now melted back into dim shapes: shades. Calypso was not among them. Or if she was—and Neuman searched, going from face to face with a thrashing heart—she had been transformed beyond recognition.

The former Maples had been divorced some years before their oldest child, Judith, married and had a baby. She was living with her husband, a free-lance computer programmer and part-time troubadour, on the edge of poverty in Hartford. Joan Maple, now Joan Vanderhaven, told Richard Maple over the phone that she and Andy, her husband, were intending to go down from Boston for the birth, which was to be induced. “How ridiculous,” said Ruth, Richard’s wife. “The girl’s over thirty, she has a husband. To have her divorced parents both hovering over her isn’t just silly, it’s cruel. When I had my first baby I was in Hawaii and my mother was in Florida and that’s the way we both wanted it. You need
space
when you’re having a baby. You need
air
, to
breathe
.” Remembering her own, efficiently natural childbirths, she began to pant, demonstratively. “Let your poor daughter alone. It’s taken her ten years to get over the terrible upbringing you two gave her.”

“Joan says Judith wants her there. If she wants Joan she must want me. If I let Joan go down there alone with Andy, the baby will think Andy’s the grandfather. The kid will get—what’s the word?—imprinted.”

Ruth said, “Nobody, not even an hour-old infant, could
ever think Andy Vanderhaven is one of your family. You’re all ragamuffins, and Andy’s a fop.” Richard had long ago grown used to Ruth’s crisp way of seeing things; it was like living in a pop-up book, with no dimension of ambiguity.

But the thought of letting his first grandchild enter the world without him near at hand was painful. Judith had been born in England, and had been tightly swaddled when he first saw her—a compact package with a round red face. She was the first baby he had ever held; he had thought it would be a precarious experience, shot through with fear of dropping something so precious and fragile, but no, in even the smallest infant there was an adhesive force, a something that actively fit your arms and hands, banishing the fear. The hot wobbly head, the wandering eyes like opaque drops of celestial liquid, the squinting little face choleric and muscular with the will to live.
We’re in this together, Dad
, the baby’s body had assured him,
and we’ll both get through it
.

And they had, through diapers and midnight feedings, colic and measles, adolescent tears and fits of silliness, flute lessons and ski lessons, grade school and high school, until at last, ceremoniously attending an entertainment by the graduating seniors, Richard had been startled by how his daughter, one of a leggy troupe of leotarded dancers, had in synchrony with the others struck a conclusive pose and stared unsmiling out at the audience. All their eyebrows were raised inquisitively. They were asking,
What are we?
And the answer, from the silently stunned audience, had become:
Women
. Richard had never before quite so distinctly seen his daughter as a body out in the world, competing, detached from his own. And now her body was splitting, giving birth to another, and he’d be damned if he’d let Joan be there having their grandbaby all to herself.

Driving down Route
86
into the blinding splinters of a sunset, he heard the disc jockey crow, “Get your long johns out of the mothballs, Nutmeg Staters, we’re going to flirt with zero tonight!” It had been a dry January so far, but what little snow had fallen had not melted, because of the cold; tonight was to be a record-setter. The station played country music. Hartford had always struck him as a pleasantly hick city, a small forest of green-glass skyscrapers on the winding road to New York; when you descended out of the spaghetti of overpasses, there was a touching emptiness, of deserted after-hours streets and of a state capital’s grandiose vacancies. It was a city with nobody in it, just a few flitting shadows, and some heaps of plowed snow. The hospital complex included a parking garage, but he circled the inner-city blocks until he found a free meter. Not yet six o’clock, it was quite dark. Richard hurried through the iron air to the bright lights of the warm hospital spaces. He was the last of this particular extended family to arrive, and the least. A receptionist and her computer directed him to the correct floor, and after he had sat in the waiting room long enough to skim the cream from two issues of
Sports Illustrated
, Joan hurried out to him from some deeper, more intimate chamber of the maternity wing like a harried hostess determined to make every guest, however inconsequential, feel welcome.

She had put on weight with her contentment as Mrs. Vanderhaven—Andy evidently didn’t impose the slimming stress of her first marriage—and wore a beltless yellow dress, with small flowers, that seemed old-fashioned, a back-to-nature dress from the Sixties. Her face, broader than he remembered it, was rosy with the event overtaking her—she was becoming a grandmother—and the tropical warmth of the hospital air. “We didn’t know if you’d be coming or not,” she explained.

“I said I would,” Richard protested, mildly.

“We didn’t know if Ruth would let you.”

“How would she stop me? She thought it was a terrific idea. ‘Give them all my love,’ she said.”

Joan shot him a quick, blue-eyed glance, uncertain, as she often had been, of how ironical he was being. She seemed in the years since they were married to have lost her eyelashes, and her hair had turned gray above her wide brow. Factually she said, “They broke the waters an hour ago, and now we’re just sitting around waiting for the contractions to take hold. Judy is in good spirits, though a little apprehensive.” This last description seemed to fit Joan as well; she was shy with him. Their telephone conversations, which on the excuse of the children had persisted long into their second marriages, had dwindled these last years; months of silence between them went by now, and he did not know when he had last been as alone with her as he was in this hotly lit waiting room, with its rows of plastic chairs in alternating colors and its yammering television set up near the ceiling. It was the Sunday of the Super Bowl, and the announcers were revving up; even the female members of the news teams were supposed to be excited. Joan had been bending over awkwardly, to look him in the face, with her hands braced on her thighs, and now, perhaps in response to a pang in her back, she suddenly sat down, in the plastic chair next to his. His chair was dirty cream in color, hers scuffed orange. The molded shapes were for narrow people, and Richard and Joan had to edge away to avoid touching rumps.

“Who wouldn’t be apprehensive?” he asked. “And who is ‘we’?” He had taken off his overcoat but was still wearing a tweed sports jacket, and uncomfortably felt the heat of her proximate body.

But Joan seemed to be rapidly relaxing. “Oh,” she said, “Paul, and Paul’s sister—she’s a nurse, as you know, but not at this hospital, but they let her come sit with us, in the pre-delivery room—and Andy and me. And of course Judy and the little stranger.”

“Some crowd,” he said. “How’s Paul acting?”

His son-in-law, whose blond hair was already thinning in front, wore a pony tail, and had always seemed to Richard insolently tall, as if he had just drawn himself up a few extra inches in a kind of full-body sneer. Richard had never quite known what the word “weedy” meant, applied to a person, but Paul Wysocki had helped him to understand. A weedy person was a tall dry stalk you wanted to pull up and throw away. Richard was surprised the marriage had lasted five years. “
Won
derfully,” Joan said, with defensive emphasis. “
Very
tender with Judy, and very confident. He didn’t miss a single birthing class, you know, and is all set to breathe with her. He brought her favorite book of poems, E. E. Cummings, to read to her as a distraction if she needs it.”

“How do you read E. E. Cummings aloud? All those staggered letters and open spaces.”

“We heard him himself do it, don’t you remember? The year he gave the Norton Lectures.”

Cummings had been a small, quite bald man in a tuxedo, very precise in manner, reading everything—Wordsworth, Dante, his own prose and poetry—in a fluting voice that never faltered or slipped, up there on the cavernous stage of Sanders Theatre. Richard and Joan had stood together in line in the Cambridge winter to get into the theatre, whose vast neo-Gothic space was murmurous and steaming with student excitement. For an instant he and this plump elderly woman beside him had become a pair of worn binoculars focused on that animated bright-headed homunculus lodged deep in the
transparent mass of lost time. He was jointly and privately theirs, fluting Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, stanza after stanza, while the student audience around them grew restless, wadded in place with hundreds of overcoats.

Joan went away, promising she’d be back. She did not invite him to join the crowd around Judith, nor did he want to. He took the elevator down to the cafeteria, to have a cup of coffee and a lemon Danish. Something about hospital cafeterias freed him from all dietary restraints. If it was bad for you, they wouldn’t be selling it. He called Ruth, collect. “Well, I’m here, honey. Nothing much is happening yet.”

He liked calling his wife, because her voice over the phone had a throaty, shapely quality he didn’t easily hear when they were face to face; it was a young voice, the voice of their old courtship—secretive, urgent, humid. Yet what she said was typically crisp: “Well, of course not. Whoever said anything
would
happen? You could be stuck there for days. Where are you staying?”

Richard smiled; she always asked that, as if his staying in any hotel or motel without her were a kind of infidelity. “At a Best Inn just off
84
. I thought I should grab a room before I came here. It’s going to be record cold tonight. Is it zero yet in Boston?”

“How would I know? I was watching
Sixty Minutes
—a
fas
cinating exposé of the pharmaceutical companies, and now I’ve missed the conclusion, thanks to you. Mike Wallace was being absolutely relentless with some wishy-washy Squibb CEO.”

“I don’t think, once they induce, it takes days.”

“Well, I never thought I’d wind up a grass widow while my husband runs around watching his children have children. How is Joan? As darling as ever?”

“I only saw her a minute. They’re all in some other room
timing Judy’s contractions, and I’m outside in the waiting room reading old
Smithsonians
.”

“How un
fair
,” Ruth said, and it sounded as though she was, at last, touched.

“No, Joan understands. I don’t need to be in the same room with that willowy Pole.”

“But you love Judith so.”

“All the more reason, not to get her distracted.”

After hanging up, he went back into the cafeteria and bought an Almond Joy. He hadn’t had one for years. He had returned for less than a minute to his perusal of outdated magazines when Joan came back. “Where
were
you? Judy’s pace has picked up and she’s gone into the labor room.” His former wife’s cheeks bore a hectic, spotty flush; with her wiggly gray hair and waistless figure she was looking like one of those art-loving Cambridge ladies Cummings had written about sardonically but who had shown up at his reading anyway, decades ago, among the hot-bodied undergraduates. “The doctor says Paul and I can stay with her, but not Andy. Andy hates waiting rooms, he thinks they’re full of germs, and the nurses said why not wait in Judy’s room? It has a television set. We thought maybe you’d like to go in there, too.” Joan looked slightly alarmed at the idea, as if her two husbands hadn’t known each other for years, through thick and thin. “Judy’s worried about you sitting out here alone.”

“Well, we don’t want to worry Judy, do we? Sure, why not?” Richard said, and let her lead him down the corridor. Her hair looked less gray from behind, and bounced as it used to when she would wheel her bicycle ahead of him along the diagonal walks of Harvard Yard.