Saint Maybe (44 page)

She used to seem so invulnerable. That may have been why he had married her. He had seen her as someone who couldn’t be harmed, once upon a time.

It was dark before they wheeled her to the delivery room. The windowpanes flashed black as Ian walked down the hall beside her stretcher. The delivery
room was a chamber of horrors—glaring white light and gleaming tongs and monstrous chrome machines. “You stand by her head, daddy,” the doctor told him. “Hold onto mommy’s hand.” Somehow Rita found it in her to snicker at this, but Ian obeyed grimly, too frightened even to smile. Her hand was damp, and she squeezed his fingers until he felt his bones realigning.

“Any moment now,” the doctor announced. Any moment what? Ian kept forgetting their purpose here. He was strained tight, like guitar strings, and all his stomach muscles ached from urging Rita to push. Couldn’t women die of this? Yes, certainly they could die. It happened every day. He didn’t see what prevented her from simply splitting apart.

“A fine boy,” the doctor said, and he held up a slippery, angry, squalling creature trailing coils of telephone cord.

Ian released the breath that must have been trapped in his chest for whole minutes. “It’s over, sweetheart,” he told Rita. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the racket.

The doctor laid the baby in Rita’s outstretched arms and she hugged it to her, cupping its wet black head in one hand. “Hello, Joshua,” she said. She seemed to be smiling and weeping both. The baby went on wailing miserably. “So, do you like him?” she said, looking up at Ian.

“Of course,” he told her.

It wrenched him that she’d felt the need to ask.

Eventually the baby was carted off somewhere, and Rita sent Ian to make phone calls. In the waiting room he shook quarters from the envelope she had prepared weeks earlier. He called each of the numbers she’d written across the front—first Bobbeen, and then his father, and then Daphne, Thomas, and Stuart (Agatha was still
at work), and Rita’s two best friends. They all sounded thrilled and amazed, as if they hadn’t understood till now that an actual baby would come of this. Bobbeen wanted to drive right over. Ian persuaded her to wait, though. “You can visit her tomorrow,” he said. “But stop by early. They’re letting her go home right after lunch.”

“Modern times!” Bobbeen marveled. “When Rita was born I had to stay a week, and they didn’t let Vic in the delivery room, either. You-all are lucky.”

It was on Rita’s account that he’d asked Bobbeen to wait till morning; he assumed she would be exhausted. But when he went to her room he found her sitting upright, looking ready to spring out of bed. Her hair was combed and she wore her flannel pajamas in place of the hospital gown. “Eight pounds, four and a half ounces,” she said. She must be talking about the baby, who wasn’t there yet. They kept them in the nursery for the first few hours. “He’s got your mouth: those little turns at the corners. And my dad’s Italian hair. Oh, I
wish
they’d bring him in.”

“Ah, well, you’ll have him for the next eighteen years,” Ian said.

Eighteen years; merciful heavens.

He sat with her awhile, listening to her rattle on, and then he kissed her good night. When he left, she was dialing her mother on the phone.

At home, a single lamp lit the front hall. His father must have gone to bed. It was after ten o’clock, Ian was amazed to see. He trudged up the stairs to his room.

Already Rita’s pregnancy seemed so long ago. The pillow laid vertically to ease her backache, the opened copy of
Nine Months Made Easy
, and Doug’s pocket watch, borrowed for its second hand—they struck him
as faintly pathetic, like souvenirs of some old infatuation.

He sat on the bed to take off his shoes. Then he realized he would never manage to sleep. He was tired, all right, but keyed up. Padding softly in his socks, he went back downstairs to the kitchen and switched on the light. He poured milk into a saucepan and lit a burner, and while he waited for the milk to heat he dialed Reverend Emmett.

“Hello,” Reverend Emmett said, sounding wide awake.

“Reverend Emmett, this is Ian. I hope you weren’t in bed.”

“Goodness, no. What’s the news?”

“Well, we have a boy. Joshua. Eight pounds and some.”

“Congratulations! How’s Sister Rita?”

“She’s fine,” Ian told him. “It was a very easy birth, she says. To me it didn’t look easy, but—”

“Shall I go visit her tomorrow?”

“They’re sending her home in the afternoon. Maybe you’d like to come see her here.”

“Gladly,” Reverend Emmett said. “Why, we haven’t had a new baby at church since Sister Myra’s granddaughter! I may have forgotten how to hold one.”

“You’re welcome to brush up on your skills with us,” Ian told him.

“God bless you for thinking to call me, Brother Ian,” Reverend Emmett said. “I know absolutely that you’ll be a good father. Go get some rest now.”

“I believe I will,” Ian said.

In fact, all at once he felt so sleepy that after he hung up, he turned off the stove and went straight to bed.

He stepped out of his shirt and his jeans and lay down in his underwear, not even bothering to pull the covers
over him. He closed his eyes and saw Rita’s glowing face and the baby’s expression of outrage. He saw Reverend Emmett attempting to hold an infant.
That
would be a sight. It intrigued him to imagine the incongruity—to try and picture Reverend Emmett in this new context, the way he used to try picturing his seventh-grade teacher doing something so mundane as cooking breakfast for her husband.

Apparently, he thought, there were people in this world who simply never came clear. Reverend Emmett, Mr. Brant, the overlapping shifts of foreigners … In the end you had to accept that the day would never arrive when you finally understood what they were all about.

For some reason, this made him supremely happy. He pulled the covers around him and said a prayer of thanksgiving and fell headlong into sleep.

“This is proper gift,” the foreigner named Buck told Ian. Or Ian
thought
he told him; then a moment later he realized it must have been a question. “This is proper gift?”

He meant the white plastic potty-chair resembling a real toilet, a pink ribbon tied in a bow across the seat like one of those hygienic paper bands in hotel bathrooms. Buck and Manny held it balanced between them on the top porch step. If Ian answered, “No,” they seemed ready to spin around and take it home with them. He said, “Of course it’s proper. Thank you very much.”

“In America, every what you do is proper,” Manny said to Buck. They appeared to be resuming some previous argument. “Why you are always so affrighted?”

“Wrong,” Buck said. “They
tell
you is proper. Then
catch your mistake. Ha!” he cried, startling Ian. “Pink ribbon. For boys should be blue.”

“We already have been discussing this,” Manny told him severely. “It is no problem.” He turned to Ian. “Pink or blue: is all the same to you. Correct?”

“Correct,” Ian assured him. “Come on inside.”

He stood back, holding open the door, and they carried the potty through the front hall and into the living room. Rita sat in the rocker with a large pillow beneath her. Daphne and Reverend Emmett shared the couch. “This is proper gift,” Buck told them. He and Manny set the potty on the floor.

“Well, certainly,” Rita said, “and it’s exactly what we wanted. Thank you, Buck and Manny.”

“Is also from Mike. Mike has been arrested.”

“Arrested?”

But before they could get to the bottom of this, Bobbeen called, “Yoo-hoo!” and let herself in. Her heels clattered across the hall and then she appeared in the doorway, wearing an orange pantsuit with a flurry of silk scarf tied artfully at her throat. She held both arms out at her sides; a vinyl purse dangled from one wrist. “Well?” she said. “Where is he? Where’d you put him? Where’s that precious little grandbaby?”

“Hi, Ma,” Rita said. “You remember Buck and Manny here, and Reverend Emmett.”

“Oh! Goodness
yes
, I do,” Bobbeen said, directing her squinty grimace solely to Reverend Emmett. He was standing now, looking uncomfortable, and Bobbeen stepped forward to grasp his hands in hers. “Wasn’t it Christian of you to take this time from your duties,” she said. Ian always suspected her of harboring a romantic interest in Reverend Emmett, but maybe she was just exceptionally devout. “Hey there, Daphne hon,” she added over her shoulder. She sat in the center of the couch, pulling Reverend Emmett
down beside her. “I can’t believe I’m a grandma,” she told him. “Isn’t it a hoot? I sure don’t
feel
like a grandma.”

She didn’t look like one either, Reverend Emmett was supposed to say, but he just smiled hard and clutched both his kneecaps. Bobbeen studied him a moment. She patted the ends of her hair reflectively and then turned to Rita. “So where’s that little sweetie pie?” she asked.

“Ian was just on his way to bring him down,” Rita told her.

He was?

Before the foreigners arrived, Reverend Emmett and Daphne had been about to follow him upstairs and peek into the cradle. But now there were too many of them, Ian supposed, and so he nodded and left the room. He was a little out of practice, was the trouble. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to support a newborn’s head.

As he started up the stairs he heard Bobbeen say, “Now tell me, Reverend Emmett, do you-all hold with christening? Or just what, exactly?”

“We believe christening to be a superficial convention,” Reverend Emmett said.

“Well, of
course
it is,” she told him in a soothing tone.

“Not to say there’s anything wrong with it, you understand. It’s just that we don’t consider infants capable of … but if
your
church favors christening, why, I certainly—”

“Oh, what do I care about christening?” Bobbeen cried recklessly. “I think it’s real holy of you to cast off the superficial, Reverend.”

Ian went into his and Rita’s bedroom, where they were keeping the baby for the first few nights. It lay facedown in one corner of the cradle with its knees
drawn up to its stomach and its nose pressed into the sheet. How could it manage to breathe that way? But Ian heard tiny sighing sounds. Long strands of fine black hair wisped past the neckband of the flannel gown. Ian felt a surge of pity for those scrawny, hunched, defenseless little shoulders.

He knelt beside the cradle and turned the baby over, at the same time gingerly scooping it up so that he held a warm, wrinkled bundle against his chest as he rose. This didn’t feel like any eight pounds. It felt like nothing, like thistledown—a burden so light it seemed almost buoyant; or maybe he was misled by the softness of the flannel. The baby stirred and clutched two miniature handfuls of air but went on sleeping. Ian bore his son gently across the upstairs hall.

“In fact I’ve been thinking of joining your congregation,” Bobbeen was telling Reverend Emmett. “Did Rita happen to mention that?”

“Um, no, she didn’t.”

“I just feel you-all might have the answers.”

“Oh, well,
answers
,” Reverend Emmett said. “Actually, Mrs.—”

“Bobbeen.”

“Actually, Mrs. Bobbeen …”

Ian grinned.

He was halfway down the stairs when he felt a kind of echo effect—a memory just beyond his reach. He paused, and Danny stepped forward to present his firstborn. “Here she is!” he said. But then the moment slid sideways like a phonograph needle skipping a groove, and all at once it was Lucy he was presenting. “I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life,” he said. His face was very solemn but Lucy was smiling. “Your what?” she seemed to be saying. “Your, what was that? Oh, your
life.”
And she tipped her head and
smiled. After all, she might have said, this was an ordinary occurrence. People changed other people’s lives every day of the year. There was no call to make such a fuss about it.