It's Alive! (2 page)

The only startling thing was that the doctor said the baby seemed to have grown unusually fast in the last couple of weeks. Any day now.

Frank spent the day roughing out the proposals for story ideas that he would suggest to various newspapers and journals. The key was to develop himself the questions they might ask, and the kinds of answers they might get—statistics, points of view, possible people to interview—stressing the importance of the subject The key was, in fact, to do most of the work himself. The press looked fondly on stories taking minimal effort. And the main thing for the public-relations executive to do was to give them good (good = positive) ideas, accurate information, and quick accessibility to the subject.

A good public-relations man knows that the press is lazy. Everybody is lazy. That’s why they take pills—the quick fix.

Frank had been able to capitalize on that fact in the campaign a year ago for Liebreich Pharmaceuticals. You couldn’t say that people who took Liebreich drugs were lazy, of course. Nor did you lie. You simply stressed the positive side which every controversy has, and is easy enough to accept if you don’t think too much about it.

The controversy had involved a lot of current articles suggesting that our society was too dependent upon drugs. Other drug companies ran and hid from the press. Liebreich did not. It was Frank’s genius to have them volunteer for a story. The key to the press was this: Lock your door to them and they will kick it down to expose your sins; open your door and they will look for nothing, so pleased are they for easy entrée. Closed is open, open is closed.

So Frank had Liebreich open up to them, which meant the company showed them nothing, and the lambs of the press sat at the feet of the executive vice-president, nodding in friendship and respect, as he said: “I see no particular value to society in having busy, productive people waste time feeling lousy.”

One of Frank’s better lines. The resulting stories identified Liebreich Pharmaceuticals with candor, warmth, and concern for improvement of the human condition; while other companies, in comparison, seemed somehow related to the secretive, street-corner profiteers bent on doping our society to death.

None of this was clear in the articles, of course. Images, in public relations, are not black and white, but pleasant, suggestive fogs.

Once in a while, quite divorced from that account, Frank thought about pills. Didn’t worry, just thought. Everybody lived on pills. Got through their days and nights by fooling their bodies with capsules. Frank didn’t take pills. Never. If he was going to take pills, he would have done it playing guard on the basketball team at City College, when he had to play tired or hurt. Everybody on the team took them except him. Painkillers of various types, and ups—mostly Dexes—to keep them going at full speed through four quarters of fast breaks. The center died from a liver ailment when he was thirty-three. Frank was as healthy as Jack LaLanne.

Lenore’s combination of birth-control pills and fertility pills seemed like a joke. What would now be the result of such a comic mix? The result, he thought, chuckling, was that after all those contradictory tablets, you just proceeded to have a normal baby, like anybody else. Pointless. Like vitamins. You felt however you thought you felt.

Which caused him to have some impatience with Lenore. Her mother had taken twenty different vitamins and pills every day. It took him some time to convince Lenore that pills were worthless,
or
even dangerous. Early in the marriage she had taken ups for energy and downs for sleep. He got her to stop that. But then, in the after-Chris panic about family planning, she had taken up the quick-fix stuff again.

Frank’s thoughts returned to his work.

“Ask Marcus if he has ever manufactured a dangerous toy.” The press would love it. The good public-relations man knows that you can sell a story to the press if you seem to be on their side, suggesting a way to controversy—while you know, privately, that it can be neatly resolved to the client’s benefit. And old man Marcus, well briefed by Frank, would have a splendid answer. He would welcome the question, shake his head and mutter something off-the-record about irresponsible toy manufacturers, and take the issue head-on. He would be concerned. He would give the press some pithy quotes, which Frank would compose. Something like: “My own grandchildren use my toys. I would no sooner give my granddaughter a dangerous toy than I would hand her a loaded gun.”

Grandpa would sell a lot of toys.

Lenore would be a lousy public-relations person. She fretted. She worried. Most important, she made people around her nervous.

She was afraid the baby wouldn’t be perfect. Who gives a goddam? If Frank were going to be a mother, he’d relax and let nature take its course. The public-relations approach would be: “Our babies are always fine, because we care, and so we take every precaution in the manufacture.”

She fretted. Why does he kick so hard?

Because he’s strong as an ox, like Chris.

Why is he suddenly so big?

Babies always feel big, near the end.

Why do I feel so strange, this time?

You’re going to have a baby, Lenore, that’s all, and the second is not the first.
We’re
going to have a baby. You feel strange because you
think
you feel strange. You seem fine to me, Lenore. Why do you look at me like that?

The day passed quickly. Frank worked into the evening, and arrived home at 8:30.

For a while he sat in his tan Cadillac and looked at the house. He thought briefly about his secretary, Mary, how good she was looking to him lately, how available. But he knew why he was thinking like that: the last couple of months are always a bit rough, wife-wise.

The Marcus account had kept him late again. Lenore would wish he had been home earlier. But it was things like the Marcus account that got them this house, what they had always wanted, split-level colonial with a trim yard and a kidney-shaped swimming pool, all rimmed with thick bushes on a nice, quiet street in suburban Westwood. Good place for kids to grow up.

Of course, Lenore worked too, sometimes, substitute-teaching in kindergarten at the nearby Darwin Public School. She sure did like kids. If it had been up to her, they might have had a dozen. But they had always been in agreement, really, on spacing. Always.

The only light turned on was in the kitchen, which meant perhaps that Lenore was feeling better, and was waiting to have supper with him. A good sign.

Frank believed in signs—not omens, exactly, but signs—which he called, in his best public-relations style, indications. He acted on them. That’s what first attracted him to Lenore. Something in her eyes. Strange, large, beautiful eyes. An indication. A sign nobody else would recognize. They both had it: something in their blood, as shown in their eyes, indicating, mysteriously, that they belonged together, like a species. Chris had it too, in his eyes.

Frank could swear to have seen it in her eyes again the day she became pregnant—this time. He didn’t know it at the time, of course. But deep in her eyes, he recalled later, had been the announcement: at this moment she had conceived a child for them, another of their own, their blood.

This new child too would have that look in his eyes. Did he think, “his”? So big, so active, had to be a boy.

The light in the kitchen was a good indication. And so he went in cheerfully.

Lenore lay in bed, her hands lightly on the nightgown covering her swollen belly. She didn’t care what anybody said, this time she felt different. It, the baby, felt different. What nobody seemed to understand was that she didn’t feel so much worried as weird. It kept her awake nights, caused her mind to wander during the days.

She was sorry it kept Frank from sleeping too. But he was just going to have to get used to the idea that having a baby was a family affair. It was not, after all, just
her
baby, but theirs—just as Chris had been. He had been angry, or at least annoyed, when she became pregnant with Chris. As if she’d done it all by herself.

When their first baby was born, Frank quite naturally loved it. “I.” Or “her baby.” In time, however, Chris became
“his
son,” revealing quickly the same strengths and cat-like quickness of his father, with his father’s eyes.

But they could as well have been her eyes. All three had the eyes of the Davis family—large, round, dark. A look some people called “intimidating” or “piercing,” others described as “searching.” With them, there would never be a question of parentage; their eyes gave them away. Handsome family. She combed her wavy blond hair with her fingers.

She knew he was working late on the Marcus account. That was fine. He needed to work, loved it. She did not, as he sometimes did, see public relations as a clever game. She thought it was
important.
Marcus was important, because toys were important. They had kept all of Chris’s baby toys, which were good ones, and had them ready now, in the crib room, for the new arrival. Because she thought toys were so important, she had even managed to convince the school administration to stock the kindergarten at Darwin with similar toys—solid-wood toys or simple, colorful windups. No cheap metal with dangerous edges, or plastic so fragile that it cracked if you sat on it. Toys that allowed children’s imaginations to roam. So successful had she been in arranging for toys that the kindergarten room resembled the room with Chris’s toys here at home.

But Frank didn’t think it was all that important. For boys especially. They should be strong and quick and play ball. Frank wanted a boy this time too, she knew, though he never said. A boy would be fine with her. So long as it had all its fingers and toes.

If he wanted a child at all . . . He said he did, of course. But initially they had discussed an abortion. He worried about the pills or something. But in the end they decided they really wanted the child.

And the baby would be fine. There, in the dark room, she could almost feel it talking to her, reaching for her. Almost feel its eyes on her. Davis eyes. She could almost feel it trying to dig its way out of her womb.

She felt weird.

He called softly at the foot of the stairs. “Lenore?” He went up and walked into the almost-dark bedroom. He knelt next to the double bed and felt lightly around the covers. She wasn’t there. “Lenore?”

He stepped into the hall and started back toward the stairs. The door to the crib room was ajar. The room was dark. He gently pushed the door open. A shape moved along the floor in the corner. He switched on the light.

“Lenore! Jesus, you scared me. What in blazes are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Frank. I was just kind of sitting here, messing with the baby’s toys.”

“But why in the dark, for chrissake?”

She smiled and shook her head. “I know you’ll think I’m crazy, Frank, but the baby, well, it seems to like it better in the dark. It’s much calmer.”

“Sure.” He sighed. “You coming to bed?”

“Okay. Did you eat?”

“Baloney sandwich and a glass of milk.”

“I’m sorry, I should have made you something. There’s a porterhouse in the freezer for you, and—”

“I’m fine. I wasn’t hungry. Drank coffee all day. Where’s Chris?”

“He went to bed early, same time as me. I think he likes to feel like I do, like he’s sharing in the baby. He’s very excited.”

“Let’s hope he stays that way, when he’s got a little brother—uh, baby—to compete with.”

“Of course he will, silly. He’s been an only child too long. He wants the baby as much as we do. Everything’s all set up with Charley?”

“He’s ready any time we are. He’s planning to take some time off anyway, so he’s ready for Chris, any time of the day or night, for as long as we want to leave him there.”

“Just while you take me to the hospital, okay? He’ll want to be home with you, to get ready for me and the baby.”

“Right. Let’s go to bed. I’m beat.”

“Go ahead. I’ll be right there. Turn off the light, will you, Frank?”

Shaking his head, he turned off the light in the nursery, and went back to the bedroom. He threw off his clothes, fell into bed, and immediately went to sleep.