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He whispered, taking care not to wake Darcy, but Mary spoke in a normal tone. “Why, that’s very nice of you, Jeremy,” she said, “but I don’t believe it bothers her. She’s a very sound sleeper.” They both looked at Darcy, who seemed pale and waxy, with her eyes sealed and her arms and legs still for once. “Thank you for thinking of it, though,” Mary said, turning back and giving him a bright, social smile. She thought that was what he had come for—to offer her space. She expected him to go now. “Maybe I’ll quit for tonight anyway,” she said. “I do feel a little tired.”

“But nobody
knows
you’re still married,” Jeremy said suddenly.

She stopped smiling.

“They think you’re widowed, or divorced.
They
don’t know you’re not free to remarry.”

“Jeremy, really I—”

“Please listen. That’s all I’m asking, if you say no I won’t ever trouble you again. Listen. You see how well you fit in
here. Sometimes we have had new boarders come in one day and leave the next, they just don’t seem to like it. But you didn’t do that. You’ve stayed a whole season with us.”

“Yes, but you see I really didn’t—”

“You fit in here. Everybody wants you to stay. And you know it has a lot of advantages, kitchen privileges and Mrs. Jarrett babysits. As far as money goes, why, I do make a little money from time to time, not very much I know but enough so that you could stop knitting argyles, and besides Darcy needs a father, they say she’s getting out of hand without one—”

“Who
says that?” Mary asked, so loudly that Darcy stirred and murmured.

“Mrs. Jarrett does.”

“Well, I’m very surprised at her.”

“So this is what I was considering,” Jeremy said. “Couldn’t we just
pretend
to be married?”

Mary stared at him.

“Oh no, please don’t be angry,” he told her, stumbling to get the words out. “I know how it sounds. But you see, to me it
would
be marriage. It isn’t as if there were any other way we could do it. We could go out one morning all dressed up and then come in and tell the others we’d been married at City Hall. That’s all we’d have to do. Then we would be married in the eyes of everyone we know, and I would take care of you and you would start another life instead of going along on tag ends the way you are now, you could give all your time to Darcy and have more children if you wanted and never have to leave them to go out and work in sweatshops—”

“Jeremy, dear,” Mary said, “I’m sure you are saying all this with the best of intentions—”

“I am,” he said sadly. He understood now that she would refuse, but still he had to go on. “I am proposing, not propositioning.
I mean only the deepest respect,” he told her, and he looked up to find her nearly smiling, no longer so severe but kind-faced and amused, gently shaking her head. “Besides,” he said, beginning to mumble, “I love you.”

“Thank you, Jeremy. I do appreciate it.”

“What hope do you have for a better life, if you keep on saying no to everything new?”

But he was speaking mainly to himself now, offering himself consolation, and he had already turned to go. He saw the dining room lit into color from Mary’s doorway, a clump of dusty strawflowers turning orange on the table. Then her face appeared in his mind as it had looked at the moment of his turning—the smile fading, the eyes suddenly darker and more thoughtful. He turned back again. Mary took a breath, and he knew from the sudden shock and panic flooding through him that she was about to say yes.

The way it used to be, I stayed home with the children while Jeremy took Mary to the hospital by taxi. This was before I had bought my little car. Mary would wake me in the night just to let me know I was in charge—“Now don’t get up!” she always said, but of course I
did
get up, I wouldn’t have missed the excitement for anything. I put on a bathrobe and ran downstairs to say goodbye, only then it would turn out that they weren’t quite ready to go yet. Mary was waiting at the front door with her overnight case and Jeremy was off trying to locate the house keys or change for the taxi. I kept Mary company. We just stood there smiling at each other. We
beamed
. Never mind that I am an old maid; I can still recognize a happy occasion when I see one. When Jeremy arrived, all worried and shaky, I would find his coat for him and help him into it. “Hurry now,” I’d say. “I hear the taxi. Don’t let him leave you.” I slid back bolts and flung open first the inner door and then the outer door, I burst into the
frosty night air ahead of them. I wanted to shout out a fanfare: “Make way! Make way! We have a pregnant woman here! A baby is being born!” Instead I opened the door of the taxi, meanwhile holding my bathrobe collar shut with one hand. “You get in first,” I would tell Jeremy. He always had this moment of hesitation just then, but when I gave him a pat he would climb on in. Mary laid her cheek against mine, leaning across a whole table’s width of stomach and overnight case, which made us laugh. We would have laughed at anything, I believe. Mary glowed all over, lighting up the sidewalk. “Take care of Jeremy for me,” she always whispered. And then, aloud: “I’m off!” She climbed into the cab. She rolled down the window and leaned out, waving. “Goodbye, Miss Vinton! And thank you for getting up! I’m off! Goodbye!”

I bought my little car when my knees grew too rheumatic for bicycling. I chose a ‘51 DeSoto, not much to look at but very steady and reliable. This was when Mary was well into her fourth pregnancy. (Her fifth, counting Darcy.) “One thing,” I told her. “You can go to the hospital in style this time. Well, maybe not
style
, exactly, but at least you won’t have to depend on the Yellow Cab Company.” Secretly I was a little nervous. I must have checked the route to the hospital a dozen times, although it wasn’t far and I had often been before. I kept reminding Mr. Somerset, “Don’t go anywhere in November. Promise me, please.” He was supposed to watch the children while I was away. Now, Mr. Somerset had not been gone overnight in the fourteen years I’d known him, so you can see how edgy I must have been. I kept wishing that Julia Jarrett were still alive. Or that they had replaced her, at least—found another grandmotherly type for that room instead of turning it into a nursery. What kind of babysitter was an old man with a fondness for bourbon? By October,
before Mary had even packed her suitcase, I had laid out a dress on the chair beside my bed and put a pair of shoes beneath it, all ready to hop into. I took to sleeping in tomorrow’s underwear. I kept dreaming that my car ran out of gas halfway to the hospital.

But it was mid-November, about four o’clock one morning, when the knock came on my door. I had been expecting it for so long that it hardly seemed real. I ran downstairs still fastening buttons and carrying my belt looped over my wrist, and there was Mary as calm as always, smiling up at me. She had on the blue maternity dress that she’d worn day in and day out for the majority of her married life, and over that the old black coat that didn’t meet across her stomach. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

“I’m fine.”

“How close are the pains?”

“Every four minutes.”

“Jeremy had better hurry,” I said.

“Oh, he’s not coming.”

“Not
coming?”

“I didn’t wake him.”

I stared at her.

“Well, I do have
you
to help,” Mary said. “It’s not as if I have to manage the taxi any more.”

“Mary, he wouldn’t want to miss being with you now for all the world,” I told her. If there was one thing I was sure of, that was it. Why, that man would move heaven and earth for her! You have only to look at him to see how much he loves her. But there stood Mary shaking her head, planted squarely in front of me like little Abbie when she has made up her mind about something. “You don’t know how hard it is for him,” she said.

I did know. I probably knew better than she did, but I also believe that everyone has a right to take his own leaps.
Of course, I didn’t tell Mary that. She has her rights too. And there might be other reasons I had no inkling of, so all I did was nod and bend to pick up her overnight case. “Suit yourself,” I said. “You got everything?”

“I think so.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said. It wasn’t even necessary to call Mr. Somerset—not with Jeremy at home.

But I felt that we were making a mistake, all the way to the hospital. Mary didn’t, apparently. She just looked out the window and talked about ordinary things—the house, the children. I have to admit I was relieved about
that
. I don’t like hearing too much of people’s personal lives. Sometimes she stopped speaking and her face would flatten and her eyes would get fixed on a point far away. That was the only sign she gave of being in labor. It wasn’t at all like in the movies, thank God. Then after a minute she would relax and go on with what she was saying before. “I wanted to get Pippi’s snowsuit out. That nylon jacket she has is not—”

“I’ll see to it.”

“I believe it’s in the trunk. It’s that old one of Abbie’s, you remember.”

“Yes, yes.”

I had never realized how long some traffic lights can take.

“And Darcy needs a note of permission, she’s going on a field trip.”

“I’ll write her one in the waiting room.”

“But how will you sign it? How will they know who Miss Vinton is?”

I had assumed I would simply forge Mary’s name, but since that didn’t seem to have occurred to her I came up with another answer. “I’ll give it to Jeremy to sign,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Mary said. She turned and looked at me. Why did she suddenly become so beautiful? The corners of her mouth lifted, and she brushed her hair up off her neck and
tipped her head back until it rested on the back of the seat. “Jeremy can do it,” she said. Then she closed her eyes, and the light changed to green. I nearly stripped all the gears, I was so anxious to get us moving again.

At the hospital they whisked Mary away in a wheelchair, and I went into a waiting room I found at the end of the hall. It was huge and barren-looking, with linoleum floors and vinyl furniture and a stiff bouquet of hothouse flowers on a coffee table. On one couch a bald man was stretched out asleep. I took a chair at the other end of the room from him, turned on a lamp, and wrote a note on the back of a shopping list: “To whom it may concern, Darcy Tell has my permission to go on a field trip today. Signed,” and I left a blank space for Jeremy’s signature. Then I sat back and stared at the blank space. I kept wondering if I should just go and phone him. Wouldn’t Mary be glad, after all, once he had come? I know that Jeremy is supposed to be the weak one in that couple but he might surprise some people: if you are so scared of so many things, sometimes you turn out even stronger than ordinary men. I took a dime from my purse, but then I reconsidered. I haven’t lived fourteen years on the edges of other people’s lives for
nothing
. I could never interfere like that. So I stayed in my seat. I spent the next hour chain-smoking and reading torn
Life
magazines whose photos seemed very dim and long ago, the way they always do in waiting rooms. Then someone said, “Miss Vinton?” and I looked up to find a doctor dressed in green standing in the doorway. “Are you Miss Vinton? Mrs. Pauling sent me to tell you,” he said. “She has a boy.”

I said, “A boy? Are you sure?”

Which made him smile, but you can’t really blame me. The first three babies were girls: Abigail, Philippa, and Hannah. They’d been planning for an Edward so long that the name was getting stale. I think all of us had given up
hope. I said, “My, won’t Jeremy be surprised? I can’t wait to tell him!” but the doctor held up his hand and said, “That was the rest of her message. She’ll call her husband herself, she says. She wants to.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “I didn’t think.”

I watched him walk off again. Then I looked down at the warm dime in the palm of my hand. Other people save dimes for weeks. They spend hours in the phone booth as soon as the baby is born, telling grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends. Who could I tell? As far as I knew Jeremy had one solitary sister left from all his family—Amanda, who kept her distance. (She never did get on with Mary.) I couldn’t see waking her at five-thirty in the morning. The only friends were the women Mary sat in the park with, behind a row of strollers. I didn’t even know their last names and possibly Mary didn’t either. So in the end I put the dime away again, and got up to leave. The bald man was still asleep on the couch. I hadn’t seen a single husband pacing the floor in his shirtsleeves. Things rarely work out the way the magazines would lead you to expect.

By
the
time I got home it was almost light, and the children were up. They keep the most amazing hours. Darcy was in the kitchen fixing cereal for the little ones, Abbie and Pippi were quarreling in the parlor, and Hannah was sitting in her high chair sucking her thumb. “Heavens,” I said to Darcy. “Who’s watching over you? Where’s everyone else?”

“In bed, I guess,” Darcy said.

“Didn’t Jeremy tell you you have a baby brother?”

“No.”