Morgan's Passing (2 page)

“Mr. Kenny brought us,” said the boy, “in his panel truck. He's chairman of the Fund-Raising Committee.”

“You'd better come with me, then,” the doctor said. “I'll drive you over.” He seemed fairly cheerful about it. He said, “What about the puppets? Shall we take them along?”

“No,” said the boy. “What do I care about the puppets? Let's just get her to the hospital.”

“Suit yourself,” the doctor told him, but he cast another
glance around, as if regretting a lost opportunity, before he bent to help the boy raise the girl to her feet. “What are they made of?” he asked.

“Huh?” said the boy. “Oh, just … things.” He handed the girl her purse. “Emily makes them,” he added.

“Emily?”

“This is Emily, my wife. I'm Leon Meredith.”

“How do you do?” the doctor said.

“They're made of rubber balls,” said Emily.

Standing, she turned out to be even slighter than she'd first appeared. She walked gracefully, leading the men out through the front of the tent, smiling at the few stray children who remained. Her draggled black skirt hung unevenly around her shins. Her thin white cardigan, dotted with specks of black lint, didn't begin to close over the bulge of her stomach.

“I take an ordinary, dimestore rubber ball,” she said, “and cut a neck hole with my knife. Then I cover the ball with a nylon stocking, and I sew on eyes and a nose, paint a mouth, make hair of some kind …”

Her voice grew strained. The doctor glanced over at her, sharply.

“The cheapest kind of stockings are the best,” she said. “They're pinker. From a distance, they look more like skin.”

“Is this going to be a long walk?” Leon asked.

“No, no,” said the doctor. “My car's in the main parking lot.”

“Maybe we should call an ambulance.”

“Really, that won't be necessary,” the doctor said.

“But what if the baby comes before we get to the hospital?”

“Believe me,” said the doctor, “if I thought there was the faintest chance of that, I wouldn't be doing this. I have no desire whatever to deliver a baby in a Pontiac.”

“Lord, no,” Leon said, and he cast a sideways look
at the doctor's hands, which didn't seem quite clean. “But Emily claims it's arriving any minute.”

“It is,” Emily said calmly. She was walking along between them now, climbing the slope to the parking lot unassisted. She supported the weight of her baby as if it were already separate from her. Her battered leather pocketbook swung from her shoulder. In the sunlight her hair, which was bound on her head in two silvery braids, sprang up in little corkscrewed wisps like metal filings flying toward a magnet, and her skin looked chilled and thin and pale. But her eyes remained level. She didn't appear to be frightened. She met the doctor's gaze squarely. “I can feel it,” she told him.

“Is this your first?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, then,” he said, “you see, it can't possibly come so soon. It'll be late tonight at the earliest—maybe even tomorrow. Why, you haven't been in labor more than an hour!”

“Maybe, and maybe not,” said Emily.

Then she gave a sudden, surprising toss of her head; she threw the doctor a tilted look. “After all,” she said, “I've had a backache since two o'clock this morning. Maybe I just didn't
know
it was labor.”

Leon turned to the doctor, who seemed to hesitate a moment. “Doctor?” Leon said.

“All my patients say their babies are coming immediately,” the doctor told him. “It never happens.”

They had reached the flinty white gravel of the parking lot. Various people passed—some just arriving, holding down their coats against the wind; others leaving with balloons and crying children and cardboard flats of shivering tomato seedlings.

“Are you warm enough?” Leon asked Emily. “Do you want my jacket?”

“I'm fine,” Emily said, although beneath her cardigan she wore only a skimpy black T-shirt, and her legs were bare and her shoes were ballet slippers, thin as paper.

“You must be freezing,” Leon said.

“I'm all
right
, Leon.”

“It's the adrenaline,” the doctor said absently. He came to a stop and gazed off across the parking lot, stroking his beard. “I seem to have lost my car,” he said.

Leon said, “Oh, God.”

“No, there it is. Never mind.”

His car was clearly a family man's—snub-nosed, outdated, with a frayed red hair ribbon flying from the antenna and
WASH THIS
! written in the dust on one fender. Inside, there were schoolbooks and dirty socks and gym bloomers and rucked-up movie magazines. The doctor knelt on the front seat and swatted at the clutter in the rear until most of it had landed on the floor. Then he said, “There you go. You two sit in the back; you'll be more comfortable.” He settled himself in front and started the engine, which had a whining, circular sound. Emily and Leon slid into the rear. Emily found a track shoe under her right knee, and she placed it on her lap, cupping the heel and toe in her fingers. “Now,” said the doctor. “Which hospital?”

Emily and Leon looked at each other.

“City? University? Hopkins?”

“Whatever's the closest,” Leon said.

“But which have you reserved? Where's your doctor?”

“We haven't reserved anyplace,” Emily said, “and we don't have a doctor.”

“I see.”

“Anywhere,”
said Leon. “Just get her there.”

“Very well.”

The doctor maneuvered his car out of the parking space. He shifted gears with a grinding sound. Leon said, “I guess we should have attended to this earlier.”

“Yes, actually,” said the doctor. He braked and looked in both directions. Then he nosed the car into the stream of traffic on Farley Street. They were traveling through a new, raw section barely within the city
limits—ranch houses, treeless lawns, another church, a shopping mall. “But I suppose you lead a footloose sort of life,” the doctor said.

“Footloose?”

“Carefree. Unattached,” he said. He patted all his pockets with one hand until he'd found a pack of Camels. He shook a cigarette free and lit it, which involved so much fumbling and cursing and clutching at dropped objects that it was a wonder the other drivers managed to stay clear of him. When he'd finally flicked his match out, he exhaled a great cloud of smoke and started coughing. The Pontiac wandered from lane to lane. He thumped his chest and said, “I suppose you just follow the fairs, am I correct? Just follow the festivities, stop wherever you find yourselves.”

“No, what happened was—”

“But I wish we could have brought along the puppets,” the doctor said. He turned onto a wider street. He was forced to slow down now, inching past furniture shops and carpet warehouses, trailing a mammouth Mayflower van that blocked all view of what lay ahead. “Are we coming to a traffic light?” he asked. “Is it red or green? I can't see a thing. And what about their noses, the puppets' noses? How'd you make the stepmother's nose? Was it a carrot?”

“Excuse me?” Emily said. “Nose?” She didn't seem to be concentrating. “I'm sorry,” she said. “There's some kind of water all over everything.”

The doctor braked and looked in the rear-view mirror. His eyes met Leon's. “Can't you hurry?” Leon asked him.

“I
am
hurrying,” the doctor said.

He took another puff of his cigarette, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger. The air in the car grew blue and layered. Up ahead, the Mayflower van was trying to make a left turn. It would take all day, at this rate. “Honk,” Leon said. The doctor honked. Then he clamped his cigarette in his teeth and swung out into the right-hand lane, where a car coming up fast behind
nearly slammed into them. Now horns were blowing everywhere. The doctor started humming. He pulled back into the left lane, set his left-turn signal blinking, and sped toward the next traffic light, which hung beside a swinging sign that read
NO LEFT TURN
. His cigarette had a long, trembly tube of ashes hanging from it. He tapped the ashes onto the floor, the steering wheel, his lap.
“After the ball is o-ver,”
he sang. He careened to the right again and cut across the apron of a Citgo station, took a sharp left, and emerged on the street he wanted.
“After the break of morn
 …” Leon gripped the back of the front seat with one hand and held on to Emily with the other. Emily gazed out the side window.

“I always go to fairs, any fair in town,” the doctor said. “School fairs, church fairs, Italian fairs, Ukrainian … I like the food. I also like the rides; I like to watch the people who run them. What would it be like, working for such an outfit? I used to take my daughters, but they're too old now, they say. ‘How can that be?' I ask them. ‘I'm not too old; how come you are?' My youngest is barely ten. How can she be too old?”

“The baby's here,” Emily said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The baby. I feel it.”

The doctor looked in the mirror again. His eyes were more aged than the rest of him—a mournful brown, bloodshot and pouched, the skin beneath them the tarnished color of a bruise inside a banana. He opened his mouth, or appeared to. At any rate, his beard lengthened. Then it shortened again.

“Stop the car,” Leon said.

“Well … ah, yes, maybe so,” the doctor said.

He parked beside a hydrant, in front of a tiny pizza parlor called Maria's Home-Style. Leon was chafing Emily's wrists. The doctor climbed out, scratching the curls beneath his ski cap and looking puzzled. “Excuse me,” he said to Leon. Leon got out of the car. The doctor leaned in and asked, “You say you feel it?”

“I feel the head.”

“Of course this is all a mistake,” the doctor told Leon. “You know how long it takes the average primipara to deliver? Between ten and twelve hours. Oh, at least. And with a great deal more carrying on, believe me. There's not a chance in this world that baby could be here yet.”

But as he spoke, he was sliding Emily into a horizontal position on the seat, methodically folding back her damp skirt in a series of tidy pleats. He said, “What in the name of—?” It appeared that her T-shirt was some sort of leotard; it had a crotch. He grimaced and ripped the center seam. Then he said, “She's right.”

“Well,
do
something,” Leon said. “What are you going to do?”

“Go buy some newspapers,” the doctor told him. “Anything will be fine—
News American, Sun
 … but fresh ones, you understand? Don't just accept what someone hands you in a diner, saying he's finished reading it …”

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don't have change,” Leon said.

The doctor started rummaging through his pockets. He pulled out his mangled pack of Camels, two lint-covered jellybeans, and a cylinder of Rolaids. “Emily,” he said, “would you happen to have change for a dollar?”

Emily said something that sounded like yes, and turned her head from side to side. “Try her purse,” the doctor said. They felt along the floor, among the gym clothes and soda straws. Leon brought up the purse by its strap. He plowed through it till he found a billfold and then he raced off down the street, muttering, “Newspapers. Newspapers.” It was a cheerful, jumbled street with littered sidewalks and a row of tiny shops—eating places, dry cleaners, florists. In front of one of the cafés were various newspapers in locked, windowed boxes.

The doctor stepped on his cigarette and ground it into
the pavement. Then he took off his suit jacket. He rolled up his sleeves and tucked his shirt more firmly into his trousers. He bent inside the car and laid a palm on Emily's abdomen. “Breathe high in your chest,” he told her. He gazed dreamily past her, humming under his breath, watching the trucks and buses rumble by through the opposite window. The cold air caused the dark hairs to bristle on his forearms.

A woman in high heels clopped down the sidewalk; she never even noticed what was going on. Then two teenaged girls approached, sharing fudge from a white paper sack. Their footsteps slowed, and the doctor heard and turned around. “You two!” he said. “Go call an ambulance. Tell them we've got a delivery on our hands.”

They stared at him. Identical cubes of fudge were poised halfway to their mouths. “Well?” he said. “Go on.”

When they had rushed into Maria's Home-Style, the doctor turned back to Emily. “How're you doing?” he asked her.

She groaned.

Leon returned, out of breath, with a stack of newspapers. The doctor opened them out and started spreading them under Emily and all around her. “Now, these,” he said conversationally, “will grant us some measure of antisepsis.” Leon didn't seem to be listening. The doctor wrapped two newspapers around Emily's thighs. She began to blend in with the car. He hung a sports section down the back of the seat and anchored it to the window ledge with the track shoe she'd been holding all this time.

“Next,” he said, “I'll need two strips of cloth, two inches wide and six inches long. Tear off your shirttail, Leon.”

“I want to quit,” Emily said.

“Quit?”

“I've changed my mind.”

The cook came out of Maria's Home-Style. He was
a large man in an apron stained with tomato sauce. For a moment he watched Leon, who was standing by the car in nothing but his jeans, shakily tugging at his shirttail. (Leon's ribs showed and his shoulder blades were as sharp as chicken wings. He was much too young for all this.) The cook reached over and took the shirt and ripped it for him. “Thanks,” said Leon.

“But what's the use of it?” the cook asked.

“He wants two strips of cloth,” said Leon, “two inches wide and six inches long.
I
don't know why.”