Life Expectancy (4 page)

3

T
rembling with relief, Dad took me from Charlene Coleman and carried me to my mother.

After the nurse raised the head of the birthing bed and provided more pillows, Mom was able to take me in her arms.

Dad swears that her first words to me were these: “You better have been worth all the pain, Little Blue Eyes, ’cause if you turn out to be an ungrateful child, I’ll make your life a living hell.”

Tearful, shaken by all that had occurred, Charlene recounted recent events and explained how she’d been able to spirit me to safety when the shooting started.

Unexpectedly required to attend two women simultaneously in urgent and difficult labor, Dr. MacDonald had been unable at that hour to locate a qualified physician to assist on a timely basis. He divided his attention between the two patients, hurrying from one delivery room to the other, relying on his nurses for backup, his work complicated by the periodically dimming lights and worry about whether the hospital generator would kick in reliably if the storm knocked out electric service.

Natalie Beezo had received no prenatal care. She unknowingly suffered from preeclampsia. During labor she developed full-blown eclampsia and experienced violent convulsions that would not respond to treatment and that threatened not only her own life but the life of her unborn child.

Meanwhile, my mother endured an excruciating labor resulting largely from the failure of her cervix to dilate. Intravenous injections of synthetic oxytocin initially did not induce sufficient contractions of the uterine muscles to allow her to squeeze me into the world.

Natalie delivered first. Dr. MacDonald tried everything to save her—an endotracheal tube to assist her breathing, injections of anticonvulsants—but soaring blood pressure and convulsions led to a massive cerebral hemorrhage that killed her.

Even as the umbilical cord was tied off and cut between the Beezo baby and his dead mother,
my
mother, exhausted but still struggling to expel me, suddenly and at last experienced cervical dilation.

The Jimmy Tock show had begun.

Before undertaking the depressing task of telling Konrad Beezo that he had gained a son and lost a wife, Dr. MacDonald delivered me and, according to Charlene Coleman, announced that this solid little package would surely grow up to be a football hero.

Having successfully conveyed me from womb to wider world, my mother promptly passed out. She didn’t hear the doctor’s prediction and didn’t see my broad, pink, wonder-filled face until my protector, Charlene, returned and presented me to my father.

After Dr. MacDonald had given me to Nurse Coleman to be swabbed and then wrapped in a white cotton receiving cloth, and when he had satisfied himself that my mother had merely fainted and that she would come to herself in moments, with or without smelling salts, he peeled off his latex gloves, pulled down his surgical mask, and went to the expectant-fathers’ lounge to console Konrad Beezo as best he could.

Almost at once, the shouting started: bitter, accusatory words, paranoid accusations, the vilest language delivered in the most furious voice imaginable.

Even in the usually serene, well-soundproofed delivery room, Nurse Coleman heard the uproar. She understood the tenor if not the specifics of Konrad Beezo’s reaction to the loss of his wife.

When she left the delivery room and stepped into the hallway to hear Beezo more clearly, intuition told her to carry me with her, bundled in the thin blanket.

In the hall, she encountered Lois Hanson, another nurse, who had in her arms the Beezo baby. Lois, too, had ventured forth to hear the clown’s intemperate outburst.

Lois made a fatal mistake. Against Charlene’s advice, she moved toward the closed door to the waiting room, believing that the sight of his infant son would quench Beezo’s hot anger and ameliorate the intense grief from which his rage had flared.

Herself a refugee from an abusive husband, Charlene had little faith that the grace of fatherhood would temper the fury of any man who, even in a moment of profound loss, responded first and at once with rage and with threats of violence rather than with tears or shock, or denial. Besides, she remembered his hat, worn indoors with no regard for manners. Charlene sensed trouble coming, big trouble.

She retreated with me along the maternity ward’s internal hall to the neonatal care unit. As that door was swinging shut behind us, she heard the gunshot that killed Dr. MacDonald.

This room contained rows of bassinets in which newborns were nestled, most dreaming, a few cooing, none yet crying. An enormous view window occupied the better part of one long wall, but no proud fathers or grandparents were currently standing on the other side of it.

With the infants were two crèche nurses. They had heard the shouting, then the shot, and they were more receptive to Charlene’s advice than Lois had been.

Presciently, Nurse Coleman assured them the gunman wouldn’t hurt the babies but warned he would surely kill every member of the hospital staff that he could find.

Nevertheless, before fleeing, each nurse scooped up an infant—and fretted about those they were forced to leave behind. Frightened by a second shot, they followed Charlene through a door beside the view window, out of the maternity ward into the main corridor.

The three, with their charges, took refuge in a room where an elderly man slept on unaware.

A low-wattage night-light did little to press back the gloom, and the flickering storm at the window only made the shadows jitter with insectile energy.

Quiet, hardly daring to breathe, the three nurses huddled together until Charlene heard sirens in the distance. This welcome wail drew her to the window, which provided a view of the parking lot in front of the hospital; she hoped to see police cars.

Instead, from that second-story room, she saw Beezo with his baby, crossing the rain-washed blacktop. He looked, she said, like a figure in a foul dream, scuttling and strange, like something you might see on the night that the world ended and cracks opened in the foundations of the earth to let loose the angry legions of the damned.

Charlene is a transplanted Mississippian and a Baptist whose soul is filled with the poetry of the South.

Beezo had parked at such a distance that through the screen of rain and under the yellow pall of the sodium-vapor lamps, the make, model, and true color of his car could not be discerned. Charlene watched him drive away, hoping the police would intercept him before he reached the nearby county road, but his taillights dwindled into the drizzling darkness.

With the threat removed, she returned to the delivery room just as Dad’s thoughts were flashing from the Lindbergh baby tragedy to Rumpelstiltskin to Tarzan raised by apes, in time to assure him that I had not been kidnapped by a homicidal clown.

Later my father would confirm that the minute of my birth, my length, and my weight precisely fulfilled the predictions made by my grandfather on his deathbed. His first proof, however, that the events in the intensive care unit were not just extraordinary but supernatural came when, as my mother held me, he folded back the receiving blanket, exposing my feet, and found that my toes were fused as Josef had predicted.

“Syndactyly,” Dad said.

“It can be fixed,” Charlene assured him. Then her eyes widened with surprise. “How do you know such a doctor-ish word?”

My father only repeated, “Syndactyly,” as he gently, lovingly, and with amazement fingered my fused toes.

4

S
yndactyly
is not merely the name of the affliction with which I was born but also the theme of my life for thirty years now. Things often prove to be fused in unanticipated ways. Moments separated by many years are unexpectedly joined, as if the space-time continuum has been folded by some power with either a peculiar sense of humor or an agenda arguably worthwhile but so complex as to be mystifying. People unknown to one another discover that they are bonded by fate as completely as two toes sharing a single sheath of skin.

Surgeons repaired my feet so long ago that I have no slightest memory of the procedures. I walk, I run when I must, I dance but not well.

With all due respect for the memory of Dr. Ferris MacDonald, I never became a football hero and never wished to be one. My family has never had an interest in sports.

We are fans, instead, of puffs, éclairs, tarts, tortes, cakes, trifles, and fans as well of the infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies and the Reuben sandwiches and all the fabulous dishes of table-cracking weight that my mother produces. We will trade the thrills and glory of all the games and tournaments mankind has ever invented for a dinner together and for the conversation and the laughter that runs like a fast tide from the unfolding of our napkins to the final sip of coffee.

Over the years, I have grown from twenty inches to six feet. My weight has increased from eight pounds ten ounces to one hundred eighty-eight pounds, which should prove my contention that I am at most husky, not as large as I appear to be to most people.

The fifth of my grandfather’s ten predictions—that everyone would call me
Jimmy
—has also proved true.

Even on first meeting me, people seem to think that James is too formal to fit and that Jim is too earnest or otherwise inappropriate. Even if I introduce myself as
James,
and with emphasis, they at once begin addressing me as Jimmy, with complete comfort and familiarity, as though they have known me since my face was postpartum pink and my toes were fused.

As I make these tape recordings with the hope that I may survive to transcribe and edit them, I have lived through four of the five terrible days about which Grandpa Josef warned my father. They were terrible both in the same and in different ways, each day filled with the unexpected and with terror, some marked by tragedy, but they were days filled with much else, as well. Much else.

And now…one more to go.

My dad, my mom, and I spent twenty years pretending that the accuracy of Josef’s first five predictions did not necessarily mean that the next five would be fulfilled. My childhood and teenage years passed uneventfully, presenting no evidence whatsoever that my life was a yo-yo on the string of fate.

Nevertheless, as the first of those five days relentlessly approached—Thursday, September 15, 1994—we worried.

Mom’s coffee consumption went from ten cups a day to twenty.

She has a curious relationship with caffeine. Instead of fraying her nerves, the brew soothes them.

If she fails to drink her usual three cups during the morning, by noon she will be as fidgety as a frustrated fly buzzing against a windowpane. If she doesn’t pour down eight by bedtime, she lies awake, so mentally active that she not only counts sheep by the thousand but also names them and develops an elaborate life story for each.

Dad believes that Maddy’s topsy-turvy metabolism is a direct result of the fact that her father was a long-haul trucker who ate N-o-D-oz caffeine tablets as if they were candy.

Maybe so,
Mom sometimes answers my father,
but what are you complaining about? When we were dating all you had to do was get five or six cheap coffees into me, and I was as pliable as a rubber band.

As September 15, 1994, drew near, my father’s worry expressed itself in fallen cakes, curdled custard, rubbery pie crusts, and
crème brûlée
that had a sandy texture. He could not concentrate on his recipes or his ovens.

I believe that I handled the anticipation reasonably well. In the last two days leading up to the first of those five ominous dates, I might have walked into more closed doors than usual, might have tripped more often than is customary for me when climbing the stairs. And I do admit to dropping a hammer on Grandma Rowena’s foot while trying to hang a picture for her. But it was her foot, not her head, and the one instance when a trip led to a fall, I only tumbled down a single flight of steps and didn’t break anything.

Our worry was kept somewhat in check by the fact that Grandpa Josef had given Dad five “terrible days” in my life, not just one. Obviously, regardless of how grim September 15 might be, I would not die on that day.

“Yes, but there’s always the possibility of severed limbs and mutilation,” Grandma Rowena cautioned. “And paralysis and brain damage.”

She is a sweet woman, my maternal grandmother, but one with too sharp a sense of the fragility of life.

As a child, I had dreaded those occasions when she insisted on reading me to sleep. Even when she didn’t revise the classic stories, which she often did, even when the Big Bad Wolf was defeated, as he should have been, Grandma paused at key points in the narrative to muse aloud on the many gruesome things that
might
have happened to the three little pigs if their defenses had not held or if their strategies had proved faulty. Being ground up for sausages was the least of it.

And so, less than six weeks after my twentieth birthday, came the first of my five ordeals….

PART TWO

M
IGHT AS
W
ELL
D
IE
I
F
I C
AN’T
F
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