Crossing to Safety (15 page)

I down my coffee, assemble my scattered senses, and resume my responsibilities. “I’ll put her down.”

I go to her and lift her up. Her eyes are on me in questioning or pleading. I lead her to the bedroom door, and there turn her and aim her back at the remnants of the party. “Bedtime. Say goodnight to the nice people.”

They crowd to kiss her. They really do love her, and I love them drunkenly in consequence. Affectionate, exhausted, and eager to be gone, she smiles back at them as I shut the bedroom door.

In the bedroom I help her off with the heavy metallic robe. Clumsily I rid her of her stockings and underclothes (whatever they were then, my mind refuses to replay the image), and drop her nightgown over her head and pull it down over her swollen body. With a sigh she lies back on the bed. “Ah, that’s nice. Thank you, sweet. I didn’t have sense enough to know how tired I was.”

I kiss her belly, solid as wood under the nightgown. “Neither did I. Lib and Alice had to tell me. I spent the whole goddamned party making the most of my sudden rise to fame.”

“But that’s what the party was
about.
” She puts her arms up and I bend down and am pulled tightly against her. I feel the bulge of the intruder between us, I feel that her cheek is wet. “I love you,” she says, squeezing me hard. “Oh, I knew you could! I’m so happy for you!”

“For us.”

“For us, yes.”

“Are you all right now?”

“Fine. A little tired, a little tiddly. Don’t make people go home. Tell them I’m sorry I wasn’t quite up to the occasion. I won’t mind if they make noise.”

“It’s gone on long enough. I’ll close it out as fast as I can.”

“But aren’t they wonderful!” she says. “You’d think it was
their
good luck. Hasn’t it been a day? I can hardly believe it. Spring really did come.”

Her voice is blurred and drowsy. I kiss her and taste bourbon. “Go to sleep,” I tell her. “The next act is yours. You don’t want to miss your cue.”

The only people left in the other room are the Abbots and the Stones. Lib and Alice have dumped ashtrays and paper plates and disposed of bottles. They are washing glasses, with Ed wiping, while Dave on the couch accompanies them on his recorder. After all the choral uproar, renderings of “I Am Jesus’ Little Lamb,” and “The Boll Weevil Song,” and “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” the breathy wooden sound is sweet and tremulous, the meditation of a solitary flute. The room, still thick with smoke, swirls in the draft from the open door. Night air bites like menthol in my congested nostrils.

The recorder stops. They all turn to look at me. “Is she all right?”

“She’s okay. I put her to bed.”

“It was too much for her. We should have realized.”

“
I
should have realized. But no, she loved it. She says for you not to rush off, she likes the sounds friends make.”

“She’s a sweetie,” Alice says, “and it’s been a great party, and we’re ever so proud of you and know you will
go far.
But now we gotta go. We’ve been here so long I don’t remember our address.”

“Somewhere on Lake Street,” Ed says. “Don’t worry, I can find it. Compass in the car.”

They sort out coats from the rack behind the door. As they are hunching into them, Sid returns. At first he is inclined to go straight away again, since the party is over, but I persuade him to come inside while the others leave. They go through their congratulations again. Sally is right, you’d think it was their good luck, not ours.

And now I am confronted by the two women who really produced and directed this revel, one strawberry blond with white eyelashes, the other thin and black-eyed and olive-skinned, both delightful, charming, sisters I wish I had. They stand on tiptoe, one after the other, and kiss me solemnly on the lips, immediately bursting into laughter. One tastes of Scotch, the other of sloe gin. I am flooded with a Turkish feeling of being surrounded by desirable, affectionate women.

“Don’t forget the remains of your ham,” I say to White Eyelashes. “It’s a shame what we did to it. But it was beautiful, it was loaves and fishes.”

“It’s for you,” she says. “While Sally’s in the hospital you can nibble on it and dream of me.”

More kisses.
Smooooch, mm.
Out they go into the cold, laughing, growing instantly aware of the noise they make, and shushing each other, silently stealing away. Lovely people, the best. As they go around the corner I hear a last word from Dave’s recorder— Papageno’s little fluty trill: Tweedle-eedle-eet! Tweedle-eedle-eet! Silence settles like dust after them, and I shut the door.

“Well,” Sid says, “how
does
it feel?”

“Sid, how the hell do I know? Nobody but the publisher has even seen the book. If there are ever any reviewers, they’ll probably tear it apart. First novels get filed in wastebaskets, readers never hear of them, they never earn their advances. Or so I’m told. Ask me next October, I’ll have a humble answer ready.”

“We had a word for that in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. Bushwah. You’ve broken through, your book’s going to be published. Isn’t that a powerful piece of evidence?”

“I’ve been celebrating, you notice. But I doubt it’s going to change my life.”

“Brother, it would change mine!”

I flop on the couch beside him and put my feet on a chair. I am dog-tired, sleepy, beginning to ache dully in the front of my skull, but curious too. “Would it? Would it make that much difference? You don’t have to teach, you could quit any time you wanted. I couldn’t, even with a break like this. I need that paycheck.”

He gives this his considered attention. As always, he allows a notion contrary or oblique to his own to make its case. Then he shakes his head.

“It isn’t as easy to quit as you think. You forget Charity’s time-table. The kids are on time, I’ll say that for her. She’s living up to her part of the compact. But I promised her I’d stay with teaching, and give it my whole attention, without cheating, till we either get promoted or bounced. So far as she’s concerned, that means till we get promoted, she won’t admit the other possibility. She says our commitment to teaching is like a marriage vow. Once you’ve made a decision like that you should never look back. Well, I agree—sort of. Teaching’s okay. I like a lot of things about it—the people you work with, the contact with books and ideas, the institutional reinforcement, the sense of doing something visibly useful. My real problem is the old publish or perish business.”

“I still think you could write a few poems in your spare time without violating your parole.”

He pulls down his mouth. “I promised her I’d play by the rules. Poetry’s time will come, she says. She’s very happy about the textbook, incidentally. Something positive for the dossier.” He breathes out through his nose, audibly. “Damn the dossier. You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?’ ”

We have a laugh in the bleary basement. “Well,” I have to say, “I’m not a devoted teacher, and what I publish doesn’t cut any ice with the department, and nobody is going to mistake me for Jesus Christ.”

“You’re a liar on all counts,” Sid says, yawning. “They can’t overlook you. And I can tell you, if I’d done what you’ve just done, I’d be changed. I’d be a lot surer I could justify my life.”

His wool shirt is open at the neck, his wrestler’s throat is exposed. He laughs and throws his hands in the air and stands up. “I should be going. Charity is betting me I can’t finish an article before she comes home from the hospital. Of course I can’t. The more I work at it, the less there is to say. Who the hell cares about the revelations of Tennyson’s personal life in Locksley Hall? How about a turn around the block?”

Sid and I have a lot in common. He works as hard as I do, and that is a powerful compulsion on my respect. He reads every student theme with the care of a copy editor, he writes comments that are longer than the theme. His house is always open to students, half his women students are in love with him, his office hours stretch on past five o’clock, he prepares for his lectures as if each one were an oral exam. Yet my good luck makes me uneasy around him. Every piece of fortune that enhances me seems to diminish him, though he never fails to warm me with his admiration. He makes me feel bigger and better than I am, and somehow, in the process, manages to lessen himself.

Because I can’t say any of this, I kid him. “Still walking off your biological urges. I wonder if we’ll ever see you, once Charity’s well.”

His glance is hard and sharp, offended, as if he heard some hidden slur. Then he shrugs and laughs. “Look who’s talking. I saw you bussing Lib and Alice there. Being a gentleman you could go no further, but if Sally doesn’t get that baby born, Ed and Dave had better look out. How about it, is she asleep? Can you slip out long enough to stretch a leg?”

“Let me check.”

I crack the bedroom door and look in, expecting darkness and even breathing. Instead I encounter light, and Sally, bulky in her nightgown, standing by the bed pulling on the sheet. She turns her head and I see that she is crying.

I slide in and shut the door. “What’s the matter?”

She won’t meet my eyes. “Oh, Larry, I’m such . . . I’m ashamed. I guess it was the excitement. I wasn’t tight, I didn’t do more than sip my drinks. But I . . . I’ve
wet the bed!
”

Filled with a terrible premonition, I snatch from her hand the corner of the sheet she has been pulling on, and yank it halfway off, certain it will be red with her blood. It isn’t, but it is wet, and so is the pad. I pull them both off and throw them in the corner, I send her to the bathroom and hunt for a dry nightgown, which I finally find in her bag, ready packed for the hospital. I pass it through the bathroom door to her and then I go back into the living room, brushing aside Sid’s questions, and get on the telephone to the doctor.

9

An hour after the water sac broke, Sally’s pains began. I monitored them, watch and notebook in hand, while Sid sat in the other room and read a book and hoped to be helpful. At two he drove us to the hospital. A little after three, persuaded that he could do nothing for either Sally or me, he went home. Next morning before eight he was back with a premature pot of flowers for Sally, and some rolls and a thermos of coffee for me, in case, as it happened, I was too preoccupied to get out for breakfast. All that day, Sunday, he and Charity kept track of Sally’s lack of progress from Charity’s room down the hall, and they were both there, Charity having talked the nurses into letting her out in a wheelchair, on Monday morning when the obstetrician decided—I had been telling him for twelve hours—that Sally couldn’t take any more.

He appeared in the waiting room with his bloody rubber gloves held up at shoulder height—
her
blood, red as paint—and said, “I’m going to have to go get that babe.”

At once he turned and started back in. “Go
with
him!” Charity cried. “Make them let you.
Doctor!
Doctor Cameron!”

She got him to pause, she got him to agree. She was not a woman you could argue with. They led me in and a nurse got me into a gown and mask and I watched from the side of the room, watched as much as I could stand to. Times like that are a kind of paralyzed frenzy. I was imbecilic with shock, fatigue, and fear, and close to passing out. But I was furious when the doctor looked up across the sheet humped by Sally’s knees, and the eyes above the mask fixed on me. He paused. Everything paused.

“Is he all right? Get him out of here.”

I understood him. He didn’t want any husbands fainting on the delivery room floor while he tried to make up for having been too casual about that broken water sac. But I hated him for what he was doing and what he hadn’t done, and I snarled back, “Tend to her, not me!”

The eyes stayed on me for a moment; then he went back to work. That was when the anesthetist, bending over Sally’s head and watching her dials, said urgently, “She’s going, Doctor!”

I had no feelings that I remember. I watched from my torpor, shocked numb, incapable of response, while they hustled and bent, clustered and dispersed and clustered again tensely. Sally told me later that she heard, away down under the ether and exhaustion and pain, and thought in surprise, “She means me!”, and after a moment, “I
can’t.
”

In the flurry of hypos, plasma, oxygen, whatever they did to keep her alive, the doctor quit trying to rotate the baby into position, and literally tore it from her body.

When I came out, blind and nauseated, Sid and Charity were still there. I saw them with stupid surprise. Charity swung her wheelchair around. “How is she? Is it over?”

I couldn’t answer her. I found a chair and fell into it. My head reeled, the room rolled over, the membranes of my mouth were rank with ether smell. I put my head down between my knees and shut my eyes. After quite a while I felt a hand on my shoulder, and Sid’s voice said, “Here, take a sip.”

But even the motion of lifting my head to sip from the paper cup set the room to spinning again. My mouth was flooded with brine. I put my head down again and hung on.

“Find a nurse,” I heard Charity say far off. “Get some
smelling
salts!”

Heels on rubber tile, a vast expanse of time, a sense of white, enclosing, emetic space. Then the hand on my back again, the voice. “Try this.” A whiff of ammonia flamed up my nostrils. I coughed, choked, cleared. Another whiff. I waited, and after a while cautiously lifted my face from between my knees. The spinning room slowed, steadied, wobbled, slowed, fell still. Another flame of ammonia. I got my head above my belt buckle.

“Christ,” I said, ashamed. “What an exhibition.”

“Keep your
head
down,” Charity said. “Why wouldn’t you feel faint? You’ve been up for two days and nights.”

Things were steadier. I waited some more. Sid offered me the ammonia again but I pushed his hand away. “Hahhhhh!” I said, shuddering, and sat up straighter. They swam into focus, anxious-faced, she in her wheelchair, he in his house-detective teaching suit. The waiting room’s sterile lights had been overtaken by morning.

“Better?” Charity asked.

I nodded.

“What happened? Is it over? Is she all right?”

“The baby’s born,” I said. “I think it’s a girl. I don’t care what it is, so long as she’s rid of it.”

“But how is
she
?”

I sat up a little further. Charity’s face was putty-colored without any makeup. Her hair was in pigtails. “What about this doctor?” I said. “Did he do all right by you, with his unassisted-childbirth line? I was after him all night to do a caesarean, to save her from any more of it, but he wouldn’t. He kept trying to massage the goddamned baby around so it would appear politely. Even with the water sac broken, and a breech delivery, he wanted nature to take its course.”

“I didn’t have any such trouble,” Charity said. “I had it easy. But oh, I’m
sick
I recommended him to Sally. He should have. . . .”

The delivery room doors opened and a nurse came out, bearing a squalling bundle in a pink blanket. “Congratulations, Papa,” she said. “You can see your daughter in the nursery in a few minutes.” She wore a professional smile. Her mask hung on its strings underneath her chin.

I sat where I was, but Charity half rose out of her wheelchair, then wheeled it after the departing nurse. “Oh, let me! Let me look at her!” The nurse stopped and bent and folded the blanket away from the baby’s bawling face. Charity and Sid took a long, charmed look. I heard, “Oh, she’s lovely! She’s
all right!
Oh, what a dolly! It’s all right, Dolly, it’s all over. Now the whole
world’s
ahead of you.”

I said, “How’s my wife? What are they doing in there?”

“She’s fine,” the nurse said. “They’re doing some little—repairs, is all.”

She carried her bundle away. Charity sat clapping her hands slowly and emphatically, beaming at me. Sid said, “Morgan, you and Sally do things dramatically, I must say. Now you’re coming home with me and going to bed.”

“I’d better stick around till she’s out of the woods.”

“She’ll just want to rest,” Charity said. “You’d better too.”

“You’ve got a house full—your mother, and the nurse she brought, and the nanny, and the hired girl, and tomorrow you and the baby will be home. You don’t need guests.”

“There’s a whole bloody household over there waiting for somebody to look after,” Sid said. “You’re their first chance.”

“I wish to hell they’d bring her out,” I said, and then, remembering, “Oh, Christ, what time is it? I’ve got classes at eleven and one.”

“Which I am taking,” Sid said.

“You’ve got plenty to do without . . .” But I let my protest die. I couldn’t have dealt with those classes in any case, and he would be seriously upset if I didn’t let him. “I’m not sure you’re qualified.”

“You’re afraid of being shown up, you mean.”

The delivery room doors opened again and two women in surgical gowns came pushing a gurney. I jumped up and walked beside it, looking down into Sally’s face. She was fish-belly white, remote, unreachable, out cold. One of the women, whom I recognized as the anesthetist, nodded and smiled at me. The gurney stopped. “She’s had a transfusion,” she said. “She’ll be all right.”

“Where are you taking her now?”

“Recovery room.”

“Can I go along?”

She looked at me kindly, I thought, her mask dangling and her cap pulled up on the top of her head and her imperturbability rumpled, I supposed, by the close call. “Look, she won’t need you. She’ll be an hour or two coming out of it, and then she’ll sleep. Why don’t you go home to bed and come back after four this afternoon? We’ll have her all pretty for you.”

“Now you’re talking,” Sid said.

“Is she really all right?”

“She’s fine now. Good strong pulse, blood pressure okay. You go along, we’ll take care of her.”

“What about the baby?”

“Didn’t you see her?”

“I guess I didn’t look.”

Her eyes had golden flecks in the iris, and when she laughed a gold tooth showed back in her mouth. She struck me as a cheerful, humane woman, too good to be assisting that butcher of a doctor. “The baby,” she said, “has a broken arm and a sore mouth. She came the hard way. But babies are like starfish, you can almost chop off a leg and they’ll grow a new one. Two months from now you’ll never know she had a bad time.”

A broken arm and a sore mouth. My grievance grew bitterer. “Where’s Dr. Cameron?”

“Washing up.”

“Come on,” Sid said, “you’re in no shape to talk to him. Let’s go.”

“Come back after four,” the anesthetist said.

They wheeled Sally away, corpselike. From her wheelchair Charity said, “Look on the bright side, Larry. It’s over, and they’re both safe. I feel
ghastly
about recommending that man, and I’ll never use him again if I have
twelve
children. I’d rather have a baby in a chamber pot. But at least it’s over. You and Sid go on, and you have an enormous breakfast and roll into bed. When you come back you’ll probably find Sally and me comparing children.”

Her color had come up. She looked radiant, undamaged. If they had let her, she could have gone home the day after having her baby. I felt envious for Sally, ghastly and etherized and patched together with twine. Good fortune was like money; those who had, got. As for me, I knew that I looked and felt and probably smelled like a cigar butt in a spittoon. Suddenly I could hardly keep my eyes open. I was really grateful to be going home with Sid, not having to drive, not even having to look.

“Did anybody ever tell you two how great you are?”

“Oh, pooh,” Charity said. “What are you going to name the baby? Have you got any he-or-she names picked out?”

“You mean in all that talking she never told you?”

“No.”

“There was only one name we could agree on. It was the same whether he or she. Her name’s Lang.”

“What?”
Sid said, four times too loud for a hospital waiting room. “You mean it? Oh, say, that does us honor.”

Charity was quizzing me with a speculative smile. “Really?”

“Really. Don’t you kind of like the sound of it? Lang Morgan? It sounded very distinguished to us.”

But Charity thought about it, pouted, and burst into a laugh. “Damn!” she said. “You’ve gone and spoiled everything. Why didn’t Sally
think
? We had a plot to marry her to David if she turned out female. What kind of name is that going to leave her?
Lang Lang.
She’ll sound like a
streetcar.
”