“You could rent a stall at Harborplace and offer to write people’s letters for them.”
Daphne looked perplexed. The only person who laughed was Ian.
There was a little wait before dessert because they had to freeze the ice cream. Bobbeen said, “You realize we don’t have a single child here? No one begging to turn the crank for us.” But the foreigners, it emerged, would love to turn the crank. They rushed off to the kitchen while Daphne and Agatha cleared the table. Rita stayed seated at Ian’s left, debating baby names with Mrs. Jordan. Curt was attempting to break into the fruitcake, and Thomas was telling his grandfather about his latest computer game. The idea was, he said, to show how dislodging one historical event could dislodge a hundred others, even those that seemed unrelated. “Take slavery,” he said. “Students would tell the computer that the U.S. has never had slavery, and then they would name some later event. The computer goes, ‘Beep!’ and a message flashes up on the screen: Null and void.”
“But why would that be any fun?” Doug asked.
“Well, it’s not supposed to be fun so much as educational.”
“I wonder whatever became of Monopoly,” Doug said wistfully.
Rita took Ian’s hand and placed it palm-down on a spot just beneath her left breast. “Feel,” she whispered. A round, blunt knob—a knee or foot or elbow—slid beneath his fingers. It always unnerved him when that happened.
Last week he had signed the papers for Rita’s hospital stay. She’d be in just overnight, if everything went as it should. On the first day he was liable for one dependent and on the second, for two. Two? Then he realized: the baby. One person checks in; two check out. It seemed like sleight of hand. He had never noticed before what a truly astonishing arrangement this was.
“So I took a shortcut through a side street,” Daphne told him, “or really more of an alley, and it was starting to get dark and I heard these footsteps coming up behind me. Pad-pad, pad-pad: gym-shoe footsteps. Rubber soles. I started walking faster. The footsteps walked faster too. I dug my hand in my bag and pulled out that siren you gave me. Remember that key chain with the siren on it you gave me one Christmas?”
They were heading down to the shop together to bring home the cradle. Ian was driving Rita’s pickup, which had a balky gear shift that was annoying him to no end. When the light turned green he had to struggle to get it into first. He said, “Very smart, Daphne. How many times have I warned you not to walk alone at night?”
“I spun around and I pressed the button. The siren went wow! wow! wow! and this person just about fell on top of me—this young, stalky black boy wearing great huge enormous white basketball shoes. He was shocked, you could tell. He backed off and sort of goggled at me. He said, ‘What the hell, man? You know? What the hell?’ And I was standing in front of him with my mouth wide open because I realized I had no idea how to switch the fool thing off. There we were, just looking at each other, and the siren going wow! wow! until bit by bit I started giggling. And then finally he kind of like shook his head and stepped around me. So I threw the siren over a fence and walked on, only making sure not to follow him too closely, and way far behind I could still hear wow, wow, wow …”
“You think it’s all a big joke, don’t you,” Ian said, turning down Chalmer.
“Well, it was, in a way. I mean I wouldn’t have been surprised if that boy had said, ‘Oh, man, that uncle of yours,’ while he was shaking his head. Like we were the old ones and you were the young one. You were the greenhorn.”
“At least I won’t end up dead in some alley,” Ian told her. “What were you doing in that part of town? How come you’re always cruising strange neighborhoods?”
“I like newness,” Daphne said.
He parked in front of the wood shop.
“I like for things not to be too familiar. I like to go on first dates; I like it when a guy takes me someplace I’ve never been before, some restaurant or bar, and the waitress calls him by name and the bartender kids him but I’m the stranger, just looking around all interested at this whole new world that’s so unknown and untried.”
They got out of the truck. (Ian didn’t ask how come she still lived in Baltimore, in that case. He was very happy she lived in Baltimore.) He walked around to the rear end to lower the tailgate, and he reached in for the folded blanket he’d brought and spread it across the floorboards.
“If I were a man I’d call up a different woman every night,” Daphne said, following him. “I’d like that little thrill of not knowing if she would go out with me.”
“Easy for you to say,” Ian told her.
He didn’t have to use his key to get into the shop, which meant Mr. Brant must be working on a weekend again. He ushered Daphne inside and led the way across the dusty linoleum floor, passing a half-assembled desk and the carcass of an armoire. Through the office doorway he glimpsed Mr. Brant bending over the drafting table, and he stepped extra heavily so as to make his presence felt. Mr. Brant raised his head but merely nodded, deadpan.
When they reached the corner that was Ian’s work space, he came to a stop. He gestured toward the cradle—straight-edged and shining. “Well?” he said. “What do you think?”
“Oh, Ian, it’s beautiful! Rita’s going to love it.”
“Well, I hope so,” he said. He bent to lift it. The honey smell of Wood-Witch paste wax drifted toward him. “You take the other end. Be careful getting it past that desk; I spent a long time on the finish.”
They started back through the shop, bearing the cradle between them. Mr. Brant came to the office doorway to watch, but Daphne didn’t even glance in his direction. She was still talking about newness. “I’d call some woman I’d just seen across a room or something,” she said. “I would not say, ‘You don’t know me, but—’ That’s such an obvious remark. Why would she need to be informed she doesn’t know you, for goodness’ sake?”
All at once it seemed time slipped, or jerked, or fell away beneath Ian’s feet. He was fifteen years old and he was rehearsing to ask Cicely Brown to the Freshman Dance. Over and over again he dialed the special number that made his own telephone ring, and Danny picked up the receiver in the kitchen and pretended to be Cicely’s mother. “Yell-ow,” he answered in fulsome, golden tones, and then he’d call, “Cicely, dahling!” and switch to his Cicely voice, squeaky and mincing and cracked across the high notes. “Hello? Oooh! Ian-baby!” By that stage Ian was usually helpless with laughter. But Danny waited tolerantly, and then he led Ian through each step of the conversation. He told Ian it was good to hear from him. He asked how he’d done on the history test. He spent several minutes on the he-said-she-said girls always seemed to think was so important, although in this case it was, “He said mumble-grumble and she said yattata-yattata.” Then he left a conspicuous space for Ian to state his business, after which he told him, why, of course; you bet; he’d be thrilled to go to the dance.
Daphne said, “Ian?”
He balanced his end of the cradle on one knee and turned away, blotting his eyes with his jacket sleeve. When he turned back he found Mr. Brant next to him. “Hot,” Ian explained. It was January, and cold enough in the shop to see your breath, but Mr. Brant nodded as if he knew all about it and opened the front door for him. Ian and Daphne carried the cradle on out.
Rita started labor in the middle of a working day. Envisioning this moment earlier, Ian had expected it to be nighttime—Rita nudging him awake the way women did on TV—but it was a sunny afternoon in late February when Doreen came to the office door and said, “Ian! Rita’s on the phone.” The other men glanced up. “Sure you don’t want to change your mind, now,” one said, grinning. They’d acted much less guarded around him since the news of the baby.
On the phone Rita said she was fine, pains coming every five minutes, no reason to leave the shop yet unless he wanted. By the time he reached home, though (for of course he came immediately), things had speeded up and she said maybe they should think about getting to the hosp
ital. She was striding back and forth in the living room, wearing her usual outfit of leather boots and maternity jeans and one of his chambray shirts. His father paced alongside her, all but wringing his hands. “I’ve never liked this stage, never liked it,” he told Ian. “Shouldn’t we make her sit down?”
“I’m more comfortable walking,” Rita said.
For the last two weeks she had been allowed on her feet again, and Ian often felt she was making up for lost time.
It was the mildest February ever recorded—not even cool enough for a sweater—and Rita looked surprised when Ian wanted to bring her coat to the hospital. “You don’t know what the weather will be like when you come home,” he told her.
She said, “Ian. I’m coming home tomorrow.”
“Oh, yes.”
He seemed to be preparing for a moment far in the future. It was unthinkable that in twenty-four hours they’d be back in this house with a child.
At the hospital they whisked her away while he dealt with Admissions, and by the time they allowed him in the labor room she had turned into a patient. She lay in bed in a coarse white gown, her forehead beaded with sweat. Every two minutes or so her face seemed to flatten. “Are you all right?” he kept asking. “Should I be doing anything?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Her lips were so dry they looked gathered. The nurse had instructed him to feed her chips of ice from a plastic bowl on the nightstand, but when he offered her one she turned her head away fretfully.
She used to seem so invulnerable. That may have been why he had married her. He had seen her as someone who couldn’t be harmed, once upon a time.
It was dark before they wheeled her to the delivery room. The windowpanes flashed black as Ian walked down the hall beside her stretcher. The delivery room was a chamber of horrors—glaring white light and gleaming tongs and monstrous chrome machines. “You stand by her head, daddy,” the doctor told him. “Hold onto mommy’s hand.” Somehow Rita found it in her to snicker at this, but Ian obeyed grimly, too frightened even to smile. Her hand was damp, and she squeezed his fingers until he felt his bones realigning.
“Any moment now,” the doctor announced. Any moment what? Ian kept forgetting their purpose here. He was strained tight, like guitar strings, and all his stomach muscles ached from urging Rita to push. Couldn’t women die of this? Yes, certainly they could die. It happened every day. He didn’t see what prevented her from simply splitting apart.
“A fine boy,” the doctor said, and he held up a slippery, angry, squalling creature trailing coils of telephone cord.
Ian released the breath that must have been trapped in his chest for whole minutes. “It’s over, sweetheart,” he told Rita. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the racket.
The doctor laid the baby in Rita’s outstretched arms and she hugged it to her, cupping its wet black head in one hand. “Hello, Joshua,” she said. She seemed to be smiling and weeping both. The baby went on wailing miserably. “So, do you like him?” she said, looking up at Ian.
“Of course,” he told her.
It wrenched him that she’d felt the need to ask.
Eventually the baby was carted off somewhere, and Rita sent Ian to make phone calls. In the waiting room he shook quarters from the envelope she had prepared weeks earlier. He called each of the numbers she’d written across the front—first Bobbeen, and then his father, and then Daphne, Thomas, and Stuart (Agatha was still at work), and Rita’s two best friends. They all sounded thrilled and amazed, as if they hadn’t understood till now that an actual baby would come of this. Bobbeen wanted to drive right over. Ian persuaded her to wait, though. “You can visit her tomorrow,” he said. “But stop by early. They’re letting her go home right after lunch.”
“Modern times!” Bobbeen marveled. “When Rita was born I had to stay a week, and they didn’t let Vic in the delivery room, either. You-all are lucky.”
It was on Rita’s account that he’d asked Bobbeen to wait till morning; he assumed she would be exhausted. But when he went to her room he found her sitting upright, looking ready to spring out of bed. Her hair was combed and she wore her flannel pajamas in place of the hospital gown. “Eight pounds, four and a half ounces,” she said. She must be talking about the baby, who wasn’t there yet. They kept them in the nursery for the first few hours. “He’s got your mouth: those little turns at the corners. And my dad’s Italian hair. Oh, I wish they’d bring him in.”
“Ah, well, you’ll have him for the next eighteen years,” Ian said.
Eighteen years; merciful heavens.
He sat with her awhile, listening to her rattle on, and then he kissed her good night. When he left, she was dialing her mother on the phone.
At home, a single lamp lit the front hall. His father must have gone to bed. It was after ten o’clock, Ian was amazed to see. He trudged up the stairs to his room.
Already Rita’s pregnancy seemed so long ago. The pillow laid vertically to ease her backache, the opened copy of Nine Months Made Easy, and Doug’s pocket watch, borrowed for its second hand—they struck him as faintly pathetic, like souvenirs of some old infatuation.
He sat on the bed to take off his shoes. Then he realized he would never manage to sleep. He was tired, all right, but keyed up. Padding softly in his socks, he went back downstairs to the kitchen and switched on the light. He poured milk into a saucepan and lit a burner, and while he waited for the milk to heat he dialed Reverend Emmett.
“Hello,” Reverend Emmett said, sounding wide awake.
“Reverend Emmett, this is Ian. I hope you weren’t in bed.”
“Goodness, no. What’s the news?”
“Well, we have a boy. Joshua. Eight pounds and some.”
“Congratulations! How’s Sister Rita?”
“She’s fine,” Ian told him. “It was a very easy birth, she says. To me it didn’t look easy, but—”
“Shall I go visit her tomorrow?”
“They’re sending her home in the afternoon. Maybe you’d like to come see her here.”
“Gladly,” Reverend Emmett said. “Why, we haven’t had a new baby at church since Sister Myra’s granddaughter! I may have forgotten how to hold one.”
“You’re welcome to brush up on your skills with us,” Ian told him.
“God bless you for thinking to call me, Brother Ian,” Reverend Emmett said. “I know absolutely that you’ll be a good father. Go get some rest now.”
“I believe I will,” Ian said.
In fact, all at once he felt so sleepy that after he hung up, he turned off the stove and went straight to bed.
He stepped out of his shirt and his jeans and lay down in his underwear, not even bothering to pull the covers over him. He closed his eyes and saw Rita’s glowing face and the baby’s expression of outrage. He saw Reverend Emmett attempting to hold an infant. That would be a sight. It intrigued him to imagine the incongruity—to try and picture Reverend Emmett in this new context, the way he used to try picturing his seventh-grade teacher doing something so mundane as cooking breakfast for her husband.
Apparently, he thought, there were people in this world who simply never came clear. Reverend Emmett, Mr. Brant, the overlapping shifts of foreigners … In the end you had to accept that the day would never arrive when you finally understood what they were all about.
For some reason, this made him supremely happy. He pulled the covers around him and said a prayer of thanksgiving and fell headlong into sleep.
“This is proper gift,” the foreigner named Buck told Ian. Or Ian thought he told him; then a moment later he realized it must have been a question. “This is proper gift?”
He meant the white plastic potty-chair resembling a real toilet, a pink ribbon tied in a bow across the seat like one of those hygienic paper bands in hotel bathrooms. Buck and Manny held it balanced between them on the top porch step. If Ian answered, “No,” they seemed ready to spin around and take it home with them. He said, “Of course it’s proper. Thank you
very much.”
“In America, every what you do is proper,” Manny said to Buck. They appeared to be resuming some previous argument. “Why you are always so affrighted?”
“Wrong,” Buck said. “They tell you is proper. Then catch your mistake. Ha!” he cried, startling Ian. “Pink ribbon. For boys should be blue.”
“We already have been discussing this,” Manny told him severely. “It is no problem.” He turned to Ian. “Pink or blue: is all the same to you. Correct?”
“Correct,” Ian assured him. “Come on inside.”
He stood back, holding open the door, and they carried the potty through the front hall and into the living room. Rita sat in the rocker with a large pillow beneath her. Daphne and Reverend Emmett shared the couch. “This is proper gift,” Buck told them. He and Manny set the potty on the floor.
“Well, certainly,” Rita said, “and it’s exactly what we wanted. Thank you, Buck and Manny.”
“Is also from Mike. Mike has been arrested.”
“Arrested?”
But before they could get to the bottom of this, Bobbeen called, “Yoo-hoo!” and let herself in. Her heels clattered across the hall and then she appeared in the doorway, wearing an orange pantsuit with a flurry of silk scarf tied artfully at her throat. She held both arms out at her sides; a vinyl purse dangled from one wrist. “Well?” she said. “Where is he? Where’d you put him? Where’s that precious little grandbaby?”
“Hi, Ma,” Rita said. “You remember Buck and Manny here, and Reverend Emmett.”
“Oh! Goodness yes, I do,” Bobbeen said, directing her squinty grimace solely to Reverend Emmett. He was standing now, looking uncomfortable, and Bobbeen stepped forward to grasp his hands in hers. “Wasn’t it Christian of you to take this time from your duties,” she said. Ian always suspected her of harboring a romantic interest in Reverend Emmett, but maybe she was just exceptionally devout. “Hey there, Daphne hon,” she added over her shoulder. She sat in the center of the couch, pulling Reverend Emmett down beside her. “I can’t believe I’m a grandma,” she told him. “Isn’t it a hoot? I sure don’t feel like a grandma.”