Three Daughters: A Novel (55 page)

“You do want a baby, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

It was their second year together. Delal hadn’t seen James during the summer, which he had spent in Italy with his parents. A postcard arrived with a picture of the
Pietà
.
I’m getting reacquainted with the sun
, he had written.
Italy is colorful, warm, and picturesque. Hope things go well for you at home. J.

Her immediate response was to hate him. He had climaxed over some part of her outer body many, many times. Should he have thanked her for sex on a postcard? No. He should have written something personal in a letter. She had a worse thought. Was this a duty postcard to assure him more hand jobs for next semester?

Her defense was to be unavailable, but the reality of James—broad chested, tanned, teasing, and smiling—made her desperate to be with him. She was relieved to be wanted and eagerly escalated their intimacy to real sex. He hesitated. She spread her legs and brazenly fingered herself until he complied. What triumph she felt that first time. She squeezed and pulled to make him go deeper. The first searing stream of liquid caught her by surprise. She felt giddy, then triumphant.

On the same day that Star felt her baby’s first really solid kick, Delal took James in her mouth. It was an oppressively gray afternoon, but the weather was obliterated by the performance on the wide, freshly made bed. Oral sex wasn’t her act of desperation to keep a restless lover from straying, because James, if not in love, seemed content. His gentleness and physical loyalty were endearing as well as puzzling. There was no mention of love, but she kept thinking he might love her and not know it.

Delal wanted him in her mouth and her eagerness made it easy to accept. She loved kissing his chest and back and the feel of his skin repeatedly drew her fingers and lips to it for tactile pleasure. “James”—she was inching down his body on her hands as her breasts bobbed seductively—“just lie there. No matter what, don’t move.”

“What if there’s a fire?” He was stretched out on his back, enjoying the rain outside from the warmth of her bed.

“Shh . . .” Her face was between his legs, kissing the insides of his thighs, her tongue darting out to test the firmness of his skin, her lips and cheeks nuzzling and rooting into him.

He couldn’t lie still. A statue couldn’t lie still under that assault. “Delal . . . how can I keep still? If you knew how that feels . . . I won’t last long at this rate. Come back here.”

“No,” she said firmly, as if she knew better what was good for him. “This is what I want . . . to kiss you here . . . and here . . . James, don’t get up. It’s all right.”

The delicate pressure together with the friction created by the grainy surface of her tongue made him hold his breath and recede into a private world of selfish pleasure.
Ecstasy
was no mere word. “Suck . . .” he urged, too aroused to leave that part to chance. “Could you,” he pleaded. “I can’t tell you how wonderful that feels. Delal, I can’t hold out too much longer . . . turn over.” She ignored him and continued with dedication until he groaned and called out to her like a man at the edge of the world. She felt triumphant. When he started to climax, she clamped her lips more tightly. She couldn’t abandon him now. It sounded as if he were whimpering, as if nothing on earth had ever moved him this way. He tried to rise and reached for her.
How could he leave this?
she kept thinking.
How could he possibly leave this?
She released him very tenderly, raised herself off the bed, and walked tall (and naked) to the basin.

Afterward she gulped down a glass of wine and got into bed beside him. Neither said a word. He lay on his stomach, his partly open lips tasting her shoulder. One arm was around her waist. She considered it a job well done and felt more peaceful. The crisp bed linens caressed her bare skin and sent out the reassuring smell of scrubbed cotton dried in the fresh air. She closed her eyes. God bless the laundress. God bless the landlady for finding the laundress.

Love and sex and the anticipation of sex had made her thin and her hips, stubbornly wide all of her adult life, were taut and bony. On top of the newly narrowed rib cage, her breasts appeared large and seductively round. She was proud of her body and she enjoyed being naked. She liked the look of her skin in the pinkish light. She liked drinking wine in bed and feeling it go down into her empty stomach.

She liked putting the cool glass to her forehead and cheek and then setting it down so she could free herself to be kissed.

“Delal?”

“What?”

“Will you ever do it again?”

“Do what again?”

“What you just did.”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t? What a pity.”

“I guess you’ll have to show me.”

“Clever. Very clever. You’re a wild creature. The boldest girl I’ve ever known. And smart, too.”

“Really? You think I’m smart?” She was murmuring, too relaxed and groggy to fully form the words.

“Of course.”

“Am I too bold for you?”

“Not yet.”

He had not said she was beautiful, but it was almost as satisfying to hear him call her smart. “If you weren’t here, I’d have gone raving mad in this town.” Her hands were moving across his chest. “Everything is so solidly gray. You know what Samuel Johnson said about Edinburgh?”

“What who said?” he asked.

Her words were muffled. “Samuel Johnson. He said the whole country was a wide extent of hopeless sterility.”

He took exception to such a harsh assessment. “This is a land of abbeys and castles, and they’re built to last for centuries.” He raised her up beside him and put an arm across her shoulders. “Besides, I sort of like the look of the place. Don’t you like the loggias and the arcades around the quadrangle? It looks medieval, like a true place of learning. The figure in the quadrangle, the one on the dome? What do you think it represents?”

“Don’t know.”

“It represents youth holding aloft the torch of knowledge.”

“Ah, yes. The torch of knowledge. I hope they’ll let me make use of it back home.”

“Having doubts about coming here?”

“Certainly not.” She sat up straighter. “You?”

“Me? I’m satisfied, but I would have probably contracted pneumonia in this constant drizzle if it hadn’t been for your warm, willing body. I can always raise a little heat by thinking of you.”

“I would say the same. Thank God for your warm”—she placed a grateful kiss on the center of his chest—“willing”—another kiss on his stomach where the hair grew symmetrically—“body.”

When they were snug in bed like this, she was tempted to say something emotional. Look how content and happy he was. The words—strung together just right and delivered with feeling—rattled around in her head.
James, I love you. James, have you any idea how much I love you?
Fear and good sense kept her silent. He wasn’t expecting words of love. He was expecting wisecracks and independence. “We really should make it our business to do some sightseeing. There are only five fine things in Scotland that should be seen.”

“Five? How’d you come up with five?”

“Trust me. I’ve researched it. First is Edinburgh, which we already know. Second is the antechamber of the Fall of Foyers. Third is the view of Loch Lomond from Inchtavannach, the highest island. Four is the Trossachs. And five is the view of the Hebrides from . . . from I forget where. These are not my choices. They are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s. He said the intervals between these five grand things are very dreary. Don’t you think we can trust Samuel Coleridge?”

“I’ll trust you”—his hand slid down her thigh and his leg nestled between hers and wedged them open—“and you trust Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”

38.

I’D LIKE YOU TO BE EXCITED, TOO.

W
hen Paul and Star Halaby began the second year of wedded life in 1956, America had reached a peculiar plateau. There were no burning issues. People were dedicated to personal security and getting ahead. Women read the
Ladies’ Home Journal
to learn how to cook and decorate. They wanted to be liked by other women and to keep up. The house of choice was multileveled. You stepped up to the bedroom and stepped down to the living room and stepped out a sliding back door to a patio with a barbecue for carefree entertaining. It was unthinkable to express doubt over marriage or find fault with the government. Pogo, the satirical cartoon strip, encapsulated the stubborn optimism: “Bug [Eisenhower] Sez ‘Jes Fine’ ” was the headline in Pogo’s newspaper.

Paul was no more venal than the next man. Perhaps, set adrift from the anchor of his culture, he was morally reckless regarding his marriage vows, but in any assessment he would have been tagged upstanding, humane, the salt of the earth, and social dynamite. Like the men around him he craved wealth, a fine home, the latest-model car, and at least four sons to send to Harvard or Yale. However, when his wife became pregnant, his need for wealth took a quantum leap and became an obsession.

He no longer was content to live in a three-room apartment on upper Connecticut Avenue. Neither did he want a townhouse on Massachusetts Avenue or around Dupont Circle. After a Sunday afternoon spent following a sales agent through a development in Silver Spring, he came home glum and thoughtful. He didn’t want to live in a house where the rooms were ill defined or L-shaped, where there were no full floors or where his neighbor’s lawn cojoined his. He wanted to settle in or around Chevy Chase or Bethesda, or Potomac, on half to one acre of land upon which was set a true center-hall colonial or a brick Georgian with proportioned pediments over the windows and a fanlight over the front door, or a true English Tudor constructed of half-timbered walls with stucco infill. He wanted a living room and a real dining room, a library and a foyer, a kitchen with a pantry, and the bedrooms had to be off a landing up a graceful full flight of stairs. Outside should be a rolling lawn and tall full evergreens that had had the time to mature.

These were the terms used by the successful men he knew to describe the things they considered desirable and necessary to their happiness and self-esteem.

Armed with this knowledge and dressed as if attending an afternoon wedding, he took his beautiful wife (dizzy from morning sickness) and presented himself to the most prestigious realtor in Bethesda. The woman flipped her cards and mused over her listings until she arrived at a card that revealed the proper information. “Come with me,” she said. “I think I have a house that will fulfill your requirements.”

The house, situated on Bradley Boulevard (which sounded like a busy highway but was just a winding country road), was white clapboard with two symmetrical wings adjoining a wide center portion. There was a detached garage with an apartment on top to house domestics.

Two towering and impressively symmetrical evergreens hogged most of the front lawn, but this was more than compensated for by the back, where a brick path led to a guest cottage covered with rambling roses. To the left of the cottage was a concrete lily pool and next to it a tennis court and a covered free-standing loggia with—the real estate agent seemed very pleased to point this out—an outdoor jack into which you could plug a telephone so as not to have to rush inside to answer a call. “Very handy for a doctor,” she purred.

The house proper more than met his requirements. It had two living rooms. One of them could conceivably be called a drawing room, which was better than a library. A short walkway between the two rooms was ornately paneled and, to Paul and Star’s complete amazement, the agent pressed one of the panels and it slipped open to reveal a secret compartment. “For your jewels,” smiled the woman, knowing full well these two had not had a chance to accumulate any jewels.

“This place is too much,” said Paul. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t love it. I love it. Isn’t it great, honey?”

“It’s lovely.”

“How much?” asked Paul.

“It’s priced high,” she said slowly, “but you have to remember that there are two peripheral dwellings. The guest cottage is essentially a complete residence with its own kitchen and bath. And there’s the garage apartment, again a complete dwelling. This is in addition to the main house, which is almost four thousand square feet. We won’t even discuss the built-ins and extraordinary detailing that would cost a great deal to duplicate. So . . . considering the uniqueness of it—a full acre and only thirty-five minutes to midtown, seventy-five thousand is really not exorbitant.”

He groaned and bent forward as if the figure were a punch to the gut. “What!”

“Dr. Halaby, you’ve only been looking at developer housing. You’re going to find that in the custom-built or in the older homes—this is actually in the mini-estate category—that figure isn’t really out of line. Remember you have the Montgomery County school system, the best in the area. Your next-door neighbor is the senator from Texas. He has small children who will, no doubt, play with your children. You have to think of the peripheral value and not look upon this as just a place to live. It’s brimming with opportunity on many, many levels.”

He was so quiet on the drive home; Star assumed he was crushed with disappointment. “Paul, I could write to my father and ask him for the money.”

“No.” He didn’t appreciate that. “That’s the last thing I’d do. It would look as if I couldn’t support you.”

“I’d be just as happy in a lesser house. Don’t feel you have to buy such a grand place to please me.” She said that, but another part of her was way off somewhere else. She couldn’t really think about the house. There were things that were happening between them that she couldn’t talk about. She hardly had the courage to admit that sometimes—really all the time, lately—Paul was using sex as an occasion to be physically rough. He had strong hands—long, graceful fingers—and they could press until her flesh throbbed. He liked to hold her down, one hand around each arm, pinning her to the bed. There were awful welts she could have shown him. But she was ashamed to admit that he could hurt her or wanted to hurt her. She was ashamed to admit it because there was so little she could do about it. Whom was she going to tell? Sometimes he raked through her hair, grabbed it directly from the scalp and pulled at the moment of climax. “Sorry,” he would mumble when she protested. It used to happen when he had been drinking, but now—in the last month—it happened every time.

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “That’s sweet, but I’d like you to be excited, too. Part of the fun is seeing you excited. The men at work make jokes about how grabby their wives are. They say, ‘My wife wants a whole new kitchen. We just got a new car but she’s not satisfied. She’s got to have the latest thing.’ They complain about their wives, but they’re really bragging that they can satisfy them. It makes them feel like big spenders. Penny Haywood keeps Tom hopping. She ridicules him about anything that’s not top-notch. She says, ‘I’ll pick you up in the heap, lover boy. When are you going to get me my Buick?’ ”

“That sounds awful,” said Star.

“Well, it keeps Tom on his toes.”

She was glad that Penny Haywood was putting the thumbscrews (Larraine’s expression) on Tom and that the house they’d just seen was outrageously expensive. She resisted the idea of moving out of the city. She didn’t want to leave Larraine. She didn’t want them to go so far into debt that her own plans would become impossible.

They had become McKay’s most avid pupils and he often stayed after class and kibitzed with them. He told them if they had the guts to bluff their way through, they could buy two houses and use one as collateral for the other without having enough money to really buy either one. It was the same principle as the trick of getting two VIPs to attend a party by telling each that the other was coming before either accepted. It was not really illegal. They wouldn’t go to jail or anything, but they had to be very fast on their feet and have nerves of steel. “Right up my alley,” said Larraine sarcastically.

“Maybe you’ll find some sucker who will assume the mortgage himself for two women of childbearing age without jobs.”

“Say that again?”

“The owner, desperate to sell or looking to invest in his own mortgage, will lend you the money himself. You pay him just as you would a bank with an interest rate that’s preset.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this in the first place? Now we’re getting someplace.”

The call came from the chief administrator of the hospital at one in the morning. “Paul? John Beckwith here. This is important. Are you fully awake?”

“Yes.” He was instantly awake and intrigued.

“Can you come in ASAP? There’s a young woman here with a slight problem. She’s a VIP daughter and her father has requested that you handle it.”

“Be right there.” He hung up, puzzled but a little thrilled. Someone important had requested him. Beckwith, the haughty Brahmin who had never said much more to him than a cool “Morning,” had called him in the middle of the night. Beckwith needed him. Life was full of surprises.

When he arrived at the hospital, he realized that the young woman didn’t have a slight problem, she had a major one. She was in severe pain, vomiting repeatedly, and she was whiter than the sheet that covered her. The physical symptoms were suspiciously like appendicitis—right lower-quadrant pain, rebound tenderness, nausea and vomiting, rapid pulse, and slightly elevated temperature. The white cell count was abnormal but it was the red cell count that tipped him off to look elsewhere for trouble—and that he confirmed by doing the mildest vaginal investigation: moving the cervix and waiting to see if she hit the ceiling. She did.

He guessed a possible ectopic pregnancy. Then he felt the mass and knew for sure. She murmured and moaned and he leaned over her to ask, “Do you suspect you might be pregnant?” He might as well have asked,
Do you suspect you might be a whore?

“No,” she screamed, terror in her eyes. “Don’t even speak to me that way. Daddy! Daddy!”

Beckwith, who was in the hall, looked agitated, and Paul went over to him. “She’s hysterical. I asked if she might be pregnant and she went haywire. Who is she, anyway?”

“Paul”—Beckwith looked wan and strangely emasculated without his white shirt and tie—“discretion is in order here. We can’t afford to cause Daddy a moment’s worry or unhappiness. If the young woman says she’s not pregnant, she’s not pregnant. Period. The end.”

“Are you telling me to falsify records? From the examination, I suspect an ectopic. That could be a very tricky thing.”

“I’m not telling you to falsify anything as far as the records go. But as far as the girl’s concerned and as far as the operating room staff is concerned, the girl is not pregnant. We’re dealing with a highly sensitive culture here. You of all people should understand. Unwed pregnancy . . . well, I don’t want to think of the consequences. Take care of the girl. Make her well and your future here will be infinitely smoother.”

Paul shrugged. “I’ll do my best.”

“Of course you will. I’m glad he asked for you.”

“Who asked for me?”

“The father. He asked if we had any Arab doctors on our staff. He specifically wanted someone with a background like your own.”

“Son of a gun.”

He had to be very careful. Any conceptus that implanted outside the uterus behaved like a malignancy and eventually led to hemorrhage, because the muscles weren’t built to adapt to such a large mass. A full vaginal examination could precipitate collapse and shock with massive hemorrhaging.

She was already showing some of the signs of shock. She was thirsty and perspiring and had difficulty getting enough air. There was also scant but persistent uterine bleeding, which, he guessed from her paleness, had been going on for quite some time. He’d have to correct the shock symptoms before operating. He ordered the nurse to give her both morphine and oxygen and apply moderate tourniquets around the upper legs. Then he transfused six pints of blood and scrubbed up for the operation.

He ordered a stimulant anesthetic and cut her open. Fortunately for her (and for him) it was not a ruptured interstitial or cervical pregnancy, which would have required a hysterectomy. The mass was situated just where he’d guessed, in the right fallopian tube. He removed the products of conception and evacuated the gross blood and clots. He knew it was important to avoid adhesions if she were to avoid other ectopic pregnancies. For that reason he did not resection the tube. There were many things he could have done wrong, but he knew his job and he did it admirably.

She had been in the recovery room only twenty minutes when she began to come around. Her lips were stuck together in painful dryness. She had lost that sickening pallor, but she had a long way to go for rosy cheeks. Very young, too. Twenty at most, he guessed. The pain had been excruciating and she had handled it well, so he knew she was tough. Spoiled, maybe, but tough. He reached over and took her hand. He could see that her eyebrows had been tweezed in very stylized chunky arcs. For some reason it touched him that she had gone to all that trouble to improve her face.