Manhattan Lullaby (26 page)

Janie looked up at Maxine. “Can I talk to you in the kitchen for a moment?” Maxine nodded and the two women disappeared into the other room.

“Are you really sure?” was the first thing she said when the kitchen door swung shut behind them.

Janie nodded. “I saw the pictures. Rogue is the spitting image of his father. And I know Steve went to the City Cryo Clinic too because he told me once he was going to get a surrogate mother and then he changed his mind.”

Maxine hesitated before saying what was on her mind. She didn't think it was likely, but she had to be sure all the same. There was too much at stake here. “Janie, I've known you for a long time. And while I haven't always thought you were the one for my son … Anyway, that's water under the bridge. What I want to say is, we all know you don't want the baby. Are you sure that you're not just looking for a way to—”

Janie shook her head. “Maxine, believe me, I wouldn't do anything to hurt Bradley. I know how much that baby means to him. I wish I'd never seen the pictures of Steve's children. I really do. But you can't let Bradley go on thinking that Rogue is his son when there is a good possibility that he isn't.”

Maxine thought it over for a minute or two. Janie was right. “Well, there's only one thing to do. Tomorrow, first thing, we go down to that clinic and we find out just who that baby's father really is and why that dingbat out there thought it was my son's baby she was carrying around in that shopping bag.”

The next morning, just after nine, the two women arrived at the clinic on East 45th Street. Maria looked up from behind her desk as they came through the door, and her smile faded when she saw that it was two women and not two men who now stood before her.

The only women who ever came to the clinic were surrogates or women looking for a specific kind of baby to fit their lifestyle. These were quickly ushered out of the reception area, where they might make the donors nervous or, even worse, start up a potentially nonprofitable relationship with one of them, and into a room where thick folders outlined the physical, mental and creative potential of the sperm currently in inventory so they could choose the characteristics of the baby they wanted. It was something like shopping by catalog except of course there was no substitution and no sixty-day trial period.

However, Maria, who was a canny woman, could tell right away that these two women were not here to select a sperm sample or to offer to carry someone else's child. They were here for trouble.

“
Buenos dias
,” she said uneasily. “
En que puedo servirle
?”

“What did she say?” said Maxine to Janie.

“I think she said hello,” replied Janie, who had taken French as her foreign language in high school.

“That's all?” said Maxine. “
Hmmmp
! Not only does my son have to donate sperm, he has to do it in another language.”

Janie shrugged. “Maybe she speaks a little English.”

Maxine turned to the woman behind the desk. “Do—you—speak—a—little”—she brought her forefinger and thumb within half an inch of each other to show what she meant by little—“English?”

“
Si
,” replied Maria.

“
Si
. That means yes,” translated Janie. “She said yes, she speaks a little English.”

“Then why didn't she say it in English?”

“Good point.”

Maria wasn't about to give the game away just yet. She was a firm believer in the fact that you could find out more with open ears and a closed mouth than the other way around. And she was hoping that she could find out what they wanted before they found out that she spoke more than just a little English. Then she could be prepared to deal with it. However, her plan went awry because at that very moment Dr. Carter arrived.

“Maria,” he nodded at the receptionist and then acknowledged Maxine and Janie. “Ladies.”

“
He
speaks English,” said Maxine to Janie and then moved to intercept the doctor as he was about to go through the glass doors into the clinic itself.

Ten minutes later Janie, Maxine and Dr. Carter were sitting in his office and he was explaining how difficult it was to get good help these days.

“You see, the receptionist we had before Maria—her name was Carmelita—very pretty girl. And, well, to be perfectly frank, we had a … ah … problem with her, relating to the, um …” He looked around for a way to phrase the situation that wouldn't offend his visitors. “What I mean is, ah, there were certain irregularities with the inventory control procedures.” He looked at the two women to see if they had gotten the point around which he was circling with such verbal delicacy.

Maxine stared back. What did he mean “inventory control procedures”? What happened, they had a thaw? She leaned over to Janie. “What is he trying to say?”

Janie, who had gotten the gist of his explanation, tried to rephrase it for Maxine's benefit. “He's trying to say that there were shortages because the receptionist, Carmelita, was misappropriating the potential inventory.”

“She was shoplifting the sperm?” Maxine was incredulous. “What for? She was doing a discount business on the side?”

“She was doing business on the side, all right, but it wasn't discount,” answered Janie, and then she leaned over and whispered something in Maxine's ear just to clarify things.

“She was doing what?” cried Maxine. “Every day?” She looked across the desk at the doctor.

He could see she had a firmer grip on the situation now. “All day,” he said, nodding his head for emphasis.

“
Oi vey
,” muttered Maxine.

Then he continued. “So you see, we had a big problem. There has been a lot of demand for our product in the last couple of years. Single mothers, older mothers, mothers looking to have children who sing like Elvis or play like Menuhin.” Then he got momentarily off track. “In fact, we had a sale on Elvis lookalikes just last week—clear out the old inventory, you know. Elvis is not as popular as he used to be … Now, where was I? Oh, yes. But generally we've had a lot of trouble keeping up with the demand for fresh sperm. It's like pasta these days, everybody wants it fresh.” And here he turned to Janie. “So when Mr. Curtis changed his mind about the surrogate … Well, we really didn't see any point in destroying his samples, so we put them into stock, as it were.”

“O.K., O.K., fine, I can accept that,” said Janie for the sake of expediency. “But what I don't understand is, how did Bradley get involved in all this? He and the receptionist weren't …?”

The doctor waved his hand to dismiss her question. “No, no. Mr. Kraft was always a very good boy.” He gave a little chuckle. “I think he was planning on getting married or something.”

“It turned out to be the ‘or something.'”

“Ah, so you are the young lady.” Dr. Carter nodded. “You are a very lucky girl. Mr. Kraft was a
very
frequent client.”

“Too frequent,” replied Janie, remembering the long, loveless nights before the wedding. “Now, can we dispense with my good fortune and get on with your explanation?

“Ah yes, where was I? Oh, that's right. So you see, we simply put Mr. Curtis's samples under Mr. Kraft's donor number. If you think that the baby may be Mr. Curtis's, you are probably right. A blood test will certainly help to clarify it one way or the other. And when the mother inquired about the paternity, she was naturally told the baby was Mr. Kraft's.” He smiled. It was all so simple. Then he noticed the women were not smiling back. “We had to put them somewhere,” he said, trying to defend the clinic's policies. “And please be assured that Mr. Kraft received the full reimbursement for these extra samples.”

“I feel so much better knowing that,” replied Janie.

“Good, good. I'm glad it's all settled. Now if there's nothing else?” The doctor stood up.

“But I still don't understand why you picked on
my
son,” cried Maxine, who thought it was far from settled. This man obviously had no idea that a baby was a very personal thing, not just a test tube full of blue eyes or brown eyes swimming about waiting to be introduced to an accommodating egg.

The doctor sighed and sat down again. He had a baby business to run. Evidently these women did not appreciate that time was money. “Madam, it's really very simple,” he said in tones of exaggerated patience. “Client numbers are assigned alphabetically. Mr. Curtis and your son both started coming to the clinic on the same day. They therefore have consecutive num—”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted Janie. “K and C are a long way apart in the alphabet.”

“You're right—in the English alphabet. But the letter K does not naturally appear in the Spanish alphabet. So Carmelita, whose attentions were not, shall we say, exactly riveted to her filing duties, simply put Mr. Kraft next to Mr. Curtis because they both have names that start with the K sound. Hence the consecutive numbers. And it was perfectly logical when Mr. Curtis changed his mind to just transfer the samples to the next donor number on the list, which was Mr. Kraft. Don't you see?”

Maxine looked over at Janie. She shook her head. “All this because there is no K in Spanish?”

Chapter Nineteen

It only took one day to get the results of the blood test. And it proved conclusively that there was no way Bradley Kraft was the father of the baby named Rogue. By then, though, Bradley had had time to get used to the possibility that instead of losing his son at the age of twenty-one he was losing him at the age of four months.

Janie and Maxine had both had long talks with Bradley, Maxine about the perils of parenthood and the vicissitudes of life, and Janie about a man named Steve who knew all about losing his children and who would no doubt be as thrilled as Bradley was saddened at having one more shot at being a father.

When both women were sure that Bradley was dealing, however shakily, with this newest turn of events, Janie put in the call to Steve. She didn't tell him anything over the phone. It wasn't phone-type news. But she got him to agree to come by Maxine's apartment at five o'clock by telling him there was something she wanted to show him. Steve wanted to know if it was a surprise and Janie said, “Oh boy, is it!”—leaving him in a state of suspended curiosity for the rest of the day.

Bradley spent the day with Rogue, working on saying his good-byes. Trying to patch up yet another tear in his heart, which, he reflected, was beginning to feel more bruised and bloody than Stallone's face had looked in any of the Rocky movies. First his bride, then his child. What next? The two women thoughtfully left him alone.

Just after five o'clock, Steve arrived. He looked ruddy and windswept from a day on his latest construction project and he smelled of cold, ionized winter air. Janie, who had answered the door, took his coat, and he removed his construction boots and padded in gray sock feet into the living room.

Maxine and Bradley were both sitting quietly beside each other on the couch. Both of them were curious to see who Rogue's real father was, even though Janie had already told them all about Steve, Steve's children, Steve's divorce, Steve's dog and Lavinia, Steve's … Well, there really hadn't been a good word to describe Lavinia, so Janie had dug around for a term from her Soc. 101 days and come up with
significant other
.

After the introductions were made and Steve had sat down, the silence resumed, since none of those who knew what was going on knew quite how to begin. And Steve, who smiled at first one face and then the other in the hopes of eliciting some sort of explanation for his presence, finally ran out of faces.

He looked down at his rough hands and picked at a lump of dry skin on the heel of his palm. Somehow, somewhere, in this group of people, lay some bad news. He could feel it. Though what bad news it could be he couldn't imagine since everything bad had already happened to him, starting with his divorce from Brenda.

Finally he looked up, ready for the worst. “O.K., I'm ready. You can let me have it now.”

Maxine looked first at her son and then at Janie. “He couldn't even call it a him? And how did he know, anyway?”

Janie turned to Steve. “We didn't know you already knew. Did the doctor call you or what?”

“What doctor?” Steve scanned the faces on the couch again.

“The doctor at the clinic,” replied Janie, frowning. She thought Steve would be a lot more happy than this at finding out he had a son. As it was, he was treating the whole business very matter-of-factly.

“What clinic?” Steve didn't know what the hell they were talking about. And then it hit him. “It's Tony, isn't it? Something's happened to Tony while I was at work and you called me over here to break it to me gently.”

“It's not Tony,” replied Janie. She realized now that Steve had no idea why they had asked him over.

“Who's Tony?” asked Maxine, leaning forward and trying to get Janie's attention.

“Tony is his dog,” said Janie.

“I thought
Lavinia
was his dog,” replied Maxine, looking at Bradley to get his consensus.

“No, Lavinia is his ladyfriend.”

“His ladyfriend!” cried Maxine. “When you said she was his significant something or other I thought you meant she was a pet.” The she turned to Bradley. “I thought Lavinia was a pretty funny name for a dog.”

“Wait, wait! Time out!” cried Steve, placing one hand palm down over the raised fingers of the other. “Somebody please tell me what the hell this is all about.”

“It's all about Rogue,” replied Bradley, saying the name with some sort of paternal reverence.

“A rogue what?”

In the end Maxine took charge. “I think it would be easier if you just went and got him,” she said to her son. And with a deep sigh Bradley departed to retrieve Rogue from his laundry basket. A few moments later he returned, and after taking one more longing look at the little bundle in his arms, he handed the baby to Steve. “He's all yours.”