The Maples Stories (23 page)

That sounded more like Andy than the egalitarian Joan he had known. He said, ‘Don’t despair. I’ll take you in my car, and you can take a taxi back here in the morning.’

‘That’d be lovely,’ she said, swinging her body to keep warm, so that her coat shimmered in the faint street light. ‘Where are
you
?’

‘Good question. I parked on the street, but
I
was so excited I didn’t really think where. I remember I had to walk slightly uphill.’ He headed down the nearest slant of sidewalk, beside Joan in her mink, while Andy tailed behind them. The street came quickly to a dead end, next to what seemed tobe a boiler plant, a windowless brick building housing a muffled roaring of heat, and again Richard had to laugh. Joan did, too.

Andy whined, ‘Let me go back to the hospital and have them phone for a cab.’

‘Don’t be such a sissy. Think of yourself as a West African explorer,’ Richard said. His face was blazing in the cold and his thumbs in his thin gloves were quite numb. ‘It has to be around here somewhere. A gray Taurus, with three bridge stickers on the windshield. I remember noticing a row of boarded-up shops and wondering if kids looking for drugs were going to smash my windows.’

‘Great,’ Andy said. ‘Come on, Joan, let’s head back. This is a mugger’s paradise.’

‘Nonsense,’ Joan pronounced. ‘Everybody’s too cold to mug.’ She was still a liberal at heart. She turned and said, ‘Richard,
think
. What kind of shops? Did you cross any big streets? From what angle did you approach the hospital?’

Her hopeful voice, which he had first heard in a seminar on English-language epics – a dozen callow male faces around
an oaken conference table, and hers, shining – summoned up in him a younger, student self. Ruth was so much more decisive and clear-headed than he that he rarely had to think. A grid began to build in his mind. ‘One street over,’ he said, pointing, ‘and then, I think, left.’ Joan led the way, he and Andy numbly following; she was the friskiest of the three, perhaps because she had the warmest coat. They had not walked ten minutes before he recognized his car – its three stickers, its pattern of road-salt stains. It had not been broken into. The shops he vaguely remembered were on the
other
side of the street, oddly. He was pleased to hear the door lock click; he had known it to freeze in weather warmer than this.

Joan got into the back, letting Andy have the seat by the heater. The engine started, and as the car rolled along the silent, glazed streets, she put her face up between the two men’s shoulders, talking to Richard. ‘The baby. When they come out – I’ve never seen this described – they have an expression on their faces, a funny little bunchy look of distaste. He looked just like Judith when we’d try to give her prunes. Then there’s a gush of water, and the rest of the baby slips out like nothing, trailing this enormous spiralled umbilical cord, all purply and yellow.’

‘Joanie, please,’ Andy said, readjusting his muffler.

She went on, inspired, to Richard, ‘I mean, the
apparatus
. You think of the womb as a kind of place for transients, but it’s a whole other life in there. It’s a lot to give up.’ He understood what she meant; as always, she was groping for the big picture, searching for the hidden secret, in keeping with all those sermons she had had to sit through as a child. Life is a lesson, a text with a moral.

Whereas Andy listened to her as one does to second wives, in confidence that the search is over. Or that there is no
search. He patted her hand, where it rested in its mink sleeve next to his shoulders. ‘I shouldn’t have let you watch,’ he said. ‘It’s going to give you bad dreams.’

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ she said, a bit indignantly, Richard felt.

‘Tell me one more thing,’ he begged. ‘Who the hell is Leo?’

‘
His
father – didn’t you know? They’re not like we were – this may be their only child, or male child at least, and they had to load him up.’

Andy told Richard, ‘Go right up there, and then you have to go left – it’s a one-way street. You can let us off at the corner and we’ll walk up to the entrance.’

‘I wouldn’t
dream
of it. I’ll circle the block and let you off right under the marquee. Right under the damn doorman’s nose.’

Joan’s hand touched his shoulder. ‘When you see Judith tomorrow morning, give my love. We ‘re going to hurry right back in the morning, Andy has a meeting at ten.’

Richard thought of kissing her good night, but their faces were probably still icy, and his neck didn’t turn as easily as it used to.

His room at the Best Inn was on the ground floor, its wall-to-wall shag carpeting laid over concrete poured right on grade. The walls seemed subterranean, breathing out a deep freeze, their surface cold to the touch. The baseboard heating was ticking but unequal to its task. Richard hadn’t thought to throw pajamas in with tomorrow’s fresh shirt; he shivered in his underwear between the clammy sheets, got up, robbed the other twin bed of its skimpy blanket and bedspread, and finally draped his overcoat on top of himself. Still, the cold pressed in upon him from the walls
like a force that wanted to compress his existence to nothing, that wanted to erase this temporary blot of heated, pumping blood.
It’s a lot to give up
, Joan had said of the womb, and indeed the cosmic volume of lightless, warmthless space hostile to us is overwhelming. He felt, huddled up, like a homunculus frigidly burning at the far end of God’s indifferently held telescope. He was a newly hatched grandfather, and the universe wanted to crush him, to make room for newcomers. He did fall asleep, a little, and his dreams, usually so rich in suppressed longing and forgotten knowledge, were wispy, as if starved by his body’s effort to maintain body temperature.

In the morning, checking out, groggy and still chilled, at the front desk, he complained of the lack of heat; the youthful clerk, fresh arrived from a cozy bed elsewhere, shrugged in scant apology and said, ‘We don’t get a night like last night very often. Four below, on my mom’s porch.’

By daylight the hospital looked different: more bustling, yet more shabby and temporary, a factory of healing staffed by weary people working half in the dark. A Hartford
Courant
Richard bought with his tea – no more coffee, he vowed; keep that blood pressure down – said that his team of bronze-helmeted heroes had lost in the last thirty seconds, to a forty-seven-yard field goal. Miracles are cheap.

When, at last, against the strict rules, they let him in to see his daughter, Judith looked unexpectedly neutral after her ordeal – neither drained nor jubilant, sick nor well, older nor younger than her age of thirty-one. She was wearing a hospital johnny under Joan’s old powder-blue bathrobe, and sitting on the edge of the bed. She had been feeding the baby, and the nurses had taken him back to the nursery. ‘I don’t know, Dad,’ she said. ‘It was a little weird. They put this thing in my arms this morning and it’s like
I had no idea what to do with it. I hardly even knew which end was up. I was afraid I’d drop it and felt very, you know, awkward.’

He sat down in the big leather chair Andy had taken last night and smiled paternally. ‘You’ll stop feeling awkward very quickly.’

‘Yeah, that’s what Paul says.’ Paul, the know-it-all. From just the way in which Judith pronounced his name, he had won an undeserved promotion. Richard found himself more jealous and resentful of Paul and the baby than of Andy. Judith said, ‘He’s a great father already.’

‘Maybe it’s an easier role. There isn’t all that – that apparatus. Maybe you’re still feeling the baby is part of yourself, like a foot. I mean, how much feeling can you work up right off the bat toward a foot? How did the actual – what’s the word – birthing go?’

Judith from infancy on had been a sturdy, independent sort, a little opaque in her feelings, with something of her mother’s detached honesty. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘It was good. Paul was great, with the breathing. At one point he began to sing, and got all the nurses laughing. But they were wrong about the Lamaze method. It hurt. They kept saying it was just pressure, but it
hurt
, Dad.’

Warmth swarmed to his eyes, at the thought of his daughter in pain. He blinked and stood and kissed her lightly on her forehead, that wide pale brow that from the start, love her as much as he could, held behind it her secrets, her sensations, her identity. ‘I should go. The nurses want to do something to you.’

‘Look at him around the corner. See who you think he looks like. Mom thinks he looks like Grandpa, the way his mouth has a little pinch in the middle, and turns down at the ends.’

‘Sounds like Andy’s mouth to me. You don’t suppose he’s the real grandfather, do you?’

It took Judith a moment to put it together and to realize that her father was being ironical. She was as groggy as he was; he had been compressed in the night, and she had been split in two. He told her, ‘Your mother by the way said to give her love. Andy was rushing her back to Boston bright and early, as soon as they could spring their car from the garage, where it got trapped last night.’

‘She told me all about it. She was in, she and Andy, right after breakfast. She talked him into it, I guess.’

Richard laughed. ‘It’s going to be hard to keep up with your mother, in the grandparenting business.’

‘Yeah. You should see
her
hold the baby.
She
knew which end was up.’

To him, too, it seemed clear, when a nurse brought his grandson to the window, that this reddish grapefruit, with its frowning closed eyes and its few licks of silky hair, pale like its father’s, was a human head, and that the tiny lavender appendages on the other, unswaddled end were toes. ‘Want to hold him?’ the nurse, who was young and black, asked him through the glass.

‘Do I dare?’

‘You’re the grandpap, aren’t you? Grandpaps are special people around here.’

And the child’s miniature body did adhere to his chest and arms, though more weakly than the infants he had presumed to call his own. Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.