Goodbye Without Leaving (10 page)

“Now, Herbert,” Dolly complained. “We had a lovely wedding.”

“I still have a bunion from those damned shoes, and your Aunt Lucy stepped on my feet when I took her for a spin. You've saved yourself years of wear and tear, footwise, johnno.”

I felt almost faint with gratitude. I was not used to parents who helped you out in this way.

As for Johnny's mother, I could not imagine why she was so happy that her darling boy had married a young woman who had spent her brief professional life jiving with black people, yet I knew that they had had few anxious moments about their precious angel. Perhaps they thought that with his own musical obsessions, he might find himself
married
to a jiving black person. Maybe they were happy that their boy had found the girl of his dreams. Johnny said that if he hadn't found me he would never have been happy. He might have married the dread Carol Adams, the bosomy blonde who had been on the
Law Review
with him. But as he pointed out, she couldn't dance, and her idea of rock and roll was what Johnny called “bubble gum music,” the rather sickly kind made by underage white boys for underage white girls.

I knew, however, that in the back of Dolly's mind someone like Carol Adams might have made
her
a little happier. Someone she could really talk to. Someone who knew what a daughter-in-law should know: the right posture, the right way to sink comfortably into a family. I was not that person and, to tell the truth, adults, especially in the form of parents, had always made me extremely uneasy.

24

Johnny began to make more and more determined noises about moving, and finally I gave in. It was a drag not to have heat in the winter, and it was depressing to have a cockroach run out to say Hi! every time I got up at night and turned on the light in the kitchen to get a drink of water. It was even more depressing when a whole chorus line of roaches appeared in broad daylight. I was also bored listening to Johnny talking about how nice it would be to have a study, that he was a partner now and it was time to live like a real grown-up, and so forth.

Like a fool, I began to read the real estate section of the paper. My well-connected husband pointed out to me that this was not the way to go. “Don't worry,” he said. “I'll ask around.” Within a month we had signed a lease on a floor-through apartment in a formerly grand neighborhood. Johnny was in heaven, and I had to agree that it was a very compelling space. It had a large front room overlooking the tree-lined street, with a fireplace, a dining room, a kitchen, two small rooms—a study and nursery, no doubt—and a large bedroom on a street inhabited by artists, ministers, young couples and old people.

Mary Abbott put her finger right on it. “It's so well organized,” she said as we wandered around the streets looking at the brownstones and peering into people's windows. “It's like a nice little village in which everyone is represented. Young couples with children, older couples with older children, grown-up couples with grown-up children, and then the grandchildren with their children.”

“Do I fit in?” I said.

“Oh, give it a year or so,” Mary said. “There's no reason in the world not to have a baby. You ought to. It would be good for you.”

“And why would it be good for me?”

“Curative,” Mary said. “Get some of those mother demons out of your hair.”

We walked in silence. It was a magnificent day. Low, silver-colored clouds floated across the sky, and when they parted, golden light poured down. The maples had turned red, the ginkgoes brilliant yellow. Little children triked up and down the street and the leaves drifted slowly down like big flakes. In the air was a smell of wood smoke. In front of the third house a woman was sweeping leaves off the pavement and scooping them into plastic trash bags. A handsome black woman took a wooden basket of apples out of the back of her station wagon. My heart contracted and expanded. I longed to slip into a proper place alongside these normal-looking people—or at least I longed to long to. And on the other hand, I feared it. A pleated plaid skirt. A cashmere sweater. A baby in a pram. A broom to sweep the leaves off the sidewalk and a basket of apples. A station wagon! What, I wondered, would be left of me? I said as much to Mary.

“Your essential self,” she said.

“Oh, don't be silly,” I said. “I haven't had an ‘essential self since I quit Ruby.”

“Nonsense,” Mary said. “I would know you anywhere. Even a nice plaid skirt and a string of pearls won't hide you. Not even being married to Johnny.”

Ah, Johnny! The golden mean. He managed to do good and make money at the same time. Doing good, he often said, was good for one's career, a beautiful dovetailing of civic-mindedness and self-interest. His secretary said of him, “Unlike some lawyers who would run over their dying grandmothers to get what they wanted, Johnny would move
his
dying grandmother to some nice, safe place and
then
go get what he wanted.” That, in a nutshell, I felt, was the man I loved.

I was constantly amazed at his ability to get things done, to get people to do what he wanted, to make sure the people he needed to like and the people he liked were one and the same. And they
were
the same! He did not even have to manufacture his feelings. In some ways, he was the best-adapted person in the world. Being married to someone like me gave his life an edge—I was his safe road to rock and roll, to the rebellious boy he had been in high school.

And so I settled into life on our street, and greeted my neighbors and swept the leaves in front of the house, but it was at the Race Music Foundation that I felt most like myself.

Once in a while I caught Ruby on television. She was now a solo act, in an elaborate wig and a dress entirely made of bugle beads. When she did some of her old songs I said to myself, “My God, I used to do that!” It seemed to me an eon ago, in some vanished era, in a time warp, in Never-Never Land, in some place that I had invented.

“All right,” I said to Johnny. “Let's have a baby.”

25

It seemed to me that about three or four minutes later I was in the office of my gynecologist, who, I learned, I was now to refer to as “my obstetrician.”

I told Johnny that Little LaVonda, or her brother, Little Milton, was definitely on the way. He was, needless to say, jubilant.

“Oh, how wonderful!” cried Johnny. “I'm so happy!” He grabbed me around the waist and hoisted me up in the air.

“Put me down,” I said. “I feel sick.”

“Lie down,” he said. “I'll get you a pillow for your feet. Aren't you supposed to put your feet up?”

“I think that's supposed to help conception, or something,” I said. “It's too late for that now.”

“Well, I'll get you some tea. Or are you not supposed to have caffeine?”

I said I had no idea.

“No idea!” squealed my husband. “No idea! The harbinger of new life, and you have no idea!”

“Somehow I don't think harbinger is the right word,” I said. “But look. I got this big bottle of pregnancy vitamins.” I shook it at him. “They have lots of things I've never heard of before, like folic acid.”

“Girl,” said my husband. “Get your thing together. We have to get educated. Let's go buy some books.”

“You go buy some books,” I yawned. “I'm sleepy. The fetus is a parasite and this one is making me very tired. Wake me when you come back.”

My sweetie came back with a shopping bag full of tomes. Advice for pregnant fathers. Nutrition and pregnancy. How the fetus develops. What you should and should not do while pregnant.

“Gee,” I said. “It makes me tired just looking at them.”

“And this one,” Johnny was saying—he had not even bothered to take his coat off—“this one is in living color. Jesus, I wonder how they did this. You can see the fetus develop week by week. Yours—I mean ours—is this tiny little speck. Imagine that”

“Imagine that,” I said, sinking into my pillow.

“Our parents will be thrilled,” he said.

“How about not telling them for a while?” I said. “Let's get the first three months over with, okay?”

“Why?” demanded my spouse. There was a truculent note in his voice.

“High rate of miscarriage for first pregnancies in the first trimester,”

“Oh, no, not my baby,” said Johnny.

“Aren't you arrogant,” I said.

“Not my baby,” Johnny said. “This baby's here to stay.”

“Because of your fine, fine, extra-fine sperm, doubtless.”

“Doubtless. Hey, let's tell 'em, for God's sake.”

I turned over on my side.

“Boy,” Johnny said, “you hate a public demonstration, don't you.”

I was mute. All I really wanted to do was go to sleep, preferably for nine months, and wake up when it was all over.

“Okay,” Johnny said. “It's a deal. After all, you're the mother.”

These words chilled me to the bone.
You're the mother
. Mother of what? Something that looked like a speck or blob, and yet this little speck would soon develop fingers and toes, vital organs, a personality. And to think that I was the harbinger of all this! I found these thoughts quite daunting. They made me hungry. I demanded that my husband take me to an expensive delicatessen for an enormous pastrami sandwich.

He actually brought along the book about nutrition in pregnancy and read to me, out loud, about nitrates and nitrites while I wolfed down my sandwich, demolished the pickles and drank a large glass of celery tonic.

“‘… the effects of which are unknown,'” Johnny read.

I looked down at my empty plate. I felt I easily could have polished off another entire sandwich but I contented myself by filching what was left of Johnny's.

26

It took about a month before anyone at the Race Music Foundation noticed any change in me. I did not look pregnant, but I began to look slightly less defined.

“Hey, you look terrible,” said the Bopper. “What're you, off your feed?”

I did feel rather off my feed. I felt I had shed whatever luster I had once possessed. Since the episode of the pastrami sandwich, I had lost my appetite, and although I was not sick, I could not have said that I felt precisely well. I found myself yawning a good deal. And curiously, I had a fierce desire to announce my condition to everyone, with the exception of my parents and in-laws.

Naturally I told Mary Abbott.

“It's all over,” I said

“Pregnant, huh?” said Mary, slumping onto her bed.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “July, right in the middle.”

“But you haven't told Gertrude, right?”

“Right.”

“How thrilled she'll be,” Mary said.

“Just for about five minutes, and then she'll discover that I'm not being pregnant the right way or not gaining enough weight or gaining too much weight or not wearing the right clothes. She always advised against summer babies. She thinks people should deliver before the middle of June to avoid the heat.”

“Poor old Gertrude,” Mary said. “She's always so anxious for everything to be right.”

“Poor old me,” I said. “I'm the thing that's never right.”

“Oh, you'll do,” Mary said. “William says the first three months are usually lousy.”

“Oh, how interesting,” I said. “And how does William know this?”

“He has three. He and Madeline live in adjoining houses since they have joint custody.”

“I don't get it,” I said. “Why don't they just live together?”

“They don't live together well and they can't divorce,” Mary said. “It's a moral issue—they're Catholic.”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

Actually, I never did quite see. I never really understood the way in which Mary was Catholic. At college she had gone off to Mass and once in a while she had dragged me along with her. Although I never told her, I stopped going because I could not bear it when she got in line to take communion. At that moment it was glaringly clear to me how different we were. Not only was this experience closed to me, but I could not believe that Mary believed in it. If she did believe in it, a huge and important part of her was totally mysterious to me. I felt I bore this stoically: I could not bring myself to discuss it with her, but it pained me.

If I said to her, “Do you really believe all that stuff?” she would peer at me over her glasses and say with a quizzical voice, “Just because it's difficult to believe it is no reason not to.”

On the subject of my impending baby, Mary said, “It will give your life some structure.”

“Structure? I get up every morning. I go to the foundation. I do my work, do my shopping, come home, make dinner, visit Johnny's parents, go to his friends' dinner parties, see my parents. How much more structure do I need, for Christ's sake?”

“Internal structure,” Mary said. “It's different.”

I looked around her stark apartment, once partially mine. Evidence of internal structure was everywhere, from the neat little bed she slept in, to the desk she worked at, to her books about the civil rights movement piled neatly on the floor. Chapters of her dissertation were stacked on various tables and shelves.

Part of William Hammerklever's role in her life was to help her with her statistical research. Many an afternoon I had appeared to find them bent over the calculator.

As I was lying on the couch, figuring out how to break the news of my pregnancy to my mother, I heard a key in the lock and William Hammerklever walked in. He was one of those small men with a handsome, leonine head, a head that seemed meant for a larger man. He had a full mouth, green eyes and curly hair. His hands were strong, large-veined.

“Oh, hello, you two,” he said, as if we were little girls. He put his coat in his room and came back and stood behind Mary at her desk.