Souvenir of Cold Springs (23 page)

Finally she called Teddy. “For Christ's sake,” he said. “Weren't you assholes using anything?”

“Rubbers,” she told him. She was beyond embarrassment.

“Eighty-five percent effective,” Teddy said. “Great. Why didn't you get yourself a diaphragm?”

“It's not that easy, Teddy. What am I supposed to do—go to Student Health and say I'm sleeping with my boyfriend?”

“Why don't you ask me these things, Lucy? What do you think brothers are for?”

“Well, I'm asking you now. Do you know anybody?”

He called her back. He had found a doctor in Binghamton who would do it. He'd pick her up Friday after her last class. She'd have to bring a box of sanitary napkins and a hundred dollars in unmarked bills—tens and fives. She could stay with him over the weekend, and she'd be back in school Monday morning. He asked her, “Is Nick going to pay?”

“Nick doesn't know,” she said.

“When are you going to tell him?”

“I'm not going to tell him.”

“Am I allowed to ask you why the hell not?”

She thought of Nick's face, the way he looked at her after they made love: how serene he was, how content with his life, with her. Gwen had said that when she told her boyfriend she was pregnant, he'd given her the money for Puerto Rico and then dropped her like a hot potato.

“No,” she said.

Teddy picked her up, and she arrived in Binghamton in good spirits. She had her camera with her, and she took photographs of Teddy and his girlfriend, Deanna, who went part-time to the state college, in front of the pizza parlor where Deanna worked, and then they all went inside and had pizza. Afterward the three of them drove to the doctor's office—a shabby frame building on Watson Boulevard. The building was dark. There was a sign in the front window, but Lucy couldn't read what it said. Teddy parked the car and said, “Wait here, count to a hundred, and then follow me around to the back and walk in the door fast—don't waste any time.”

It was like buying pot—there was a place in Ithaca where Nick ran in while she kept the motor running: the same secrecy, the same haste, the same elaborate planning. Deanna counted soberly to a hundred while Lucy fought the urge to either laugh or drive away, and then they groped their way through the dark to the back door.

Teddy was there to let them in. He locked the door behind them and led them down an unlit corridor. Lucy wondered if he'd been there before, if Deanna had. Teddy always bragged about his wild life in Binghamton, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and spent his weekends drunk in bars picking up girls from the college. Did that life involve arranging abortions?

At the end of the hall, Teddy stopped outside a closed door and flicked a light switch. The corridor sprang to life; it smelled bad—of what? Lucy couldn't place it—and looked as if it hadn't been swept in a year. There was a piece gouged out of the wall, as if someone had struck it with an axe. The closed door had a filthy glass panel. “Maybe we should just forget it,” she whispered, but so softly that no one heard her.

Then the doctor opened the door, and he looked all right. He was dressed in spotless white; even his shoes were white, and a surgical mask hung at his chin. The room contained an old oak desk, a kitchen sink, a folding screen, and a table with stirrups that was both ominous and reassuring—it was just like the one a regular doctor might have. There was one window, covered with a piece of plywood painted the same color as the walls, the ancient sepia of Caroline's convent parlor. Teddy counted out the money while the doctor watched; he made Teddy turn over each bill to show that it wasn't marked, and then he instructed Teddy to put the bills back in their envelope and the envelope in the drawer of the desk at the end of the room. His voice was both matter-of-fact and soothing: he seemed like any doctor, any ordinary gray-haired G.P. that you'd go to for a shot of penicillin or a throat culture.

He told Teddy to wait outside, but Deanna could stay. Lucy went behind the screen and took off her skirt and underpants. She draped herself in a white sheet and climbed up on the table. Deanna wandered around the room until the doctor said, “Please—stay with the patient if you don't mind,” and Deanna came over and stood next to Lucy, holding her hand, looking away while the doctor performed his examination.

He confirmed that she was three months gone. Lucky she hadn't waited much longer. And she should really get fitted for a diaphragm when this was all over. He said he'd be glad to do it himself if she came back after her next menstrual period. Lucy said that she would. The doctor smiled briefly at her, and then he asked Deanna to go over to the desk where Teddy had put the money, and turn on the radio, volume high. While something by the Beatles blared into the room, the doctor pulled up his mask. “You're going to feel just a little discomfort,” he said, and began to scrape.

The pain was immediately unbearable, a violent cramping that twisted inside her like death. She hadn't known there was pain like that: Was it worse than childbirth, some distant part of her brain wondered. The doctor paused, changed instruments, and the pain ebbed, lapped at her from a distance. Deanna asked, “Are you all right?” and Lucy nodded. She was all right, she would be sensible, it would be over soon, it couldn't take long, it must be over soon.

She saw the doctor's gray head again between her knees. The pain resumed, familiar now, expected. Lucy gripped Deanna's hand and tried to concentrate on the music. That was why the radio was on, of course: to give you something to think about besides the pain, the red pain. She couldn't see what was so special about the Beatles; they sounded like every rock-and-roll group she had ever heard: pound, pound, pound, a little falsetto, and very ordinary guitar work compared, say, to Big Bill. It wasn't until Deanna put her hand gently over Lucy's mouth and said, “Shh, Lucy, shh, please,” that she realized the music might be on to drown out her screams.

The doctor stopped his scraping and laid his hand on her stomach. The pain subsided to a whine, a shadow, a small crimson center. “You aren't allowed to move,” the doctor said. His voice was very calm. “It's important that you not move. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Lucy said, and when he began again she screamed and felt Deanna's hand over her mouth. The music seemed to fade. She wished, suddenly, that Nick was there: his calm voice, his hands on the guitar, his rough music would cut through all the noise, the pain.

“Hold her.”

“Lucy, please,” Deanna said. Lucy looked up at Deanna's face and saw it was contorted, her mouth stretched wide, teeth bared, tears dripping down her cheeks. A primitive mask that said, “Please, Lucy.” The pain struck again, and she screamed for Teddy; from behind the door he said, “Oh Christ, I'm here, baby, I'm here, Luce.”

She heard the doctor's quick intake of breath. He muttered, “Goddam it,” and then, “
Don't move
, for Christ's sake,” and then it was over. The doctor stopped scraping, she heard a metal instrument clink into a pan, and she opened her eyes. “She Loves You” was just finishing up. The doctor stripped off his gloves and dropped them into a plastic-lined wastebasket. The gloves were red. Lucy closed her eyes. Someone snapped off the radio. “Give her aspirin if there's any pain,” the doctor said. “If she bleeds for more than a day or two, call me.” He took the envelope from the desk drawer and left the room, still in his surgical mask. Deanna helped her down from the table, helped her get dressed. Deanna's right hand, where Lucy had held it, was red and swollen.

Back at Teddy's apartment, the bleeding became worse. The sanitary napkins were no good. Deanna made a contraption with half a box of napkins wrapped in a pillowcase, and it soaked through in a couple of minutes. The pain never completely stopped, and from time to time it intensified, so that it was difficult not to scream. Lucy sat on the toilet, listening to the blood drip from her, sure she was dying. Teddy tried to call the doctor, but there was no answer. Finally she put a wad of bath towels between her legs, and they took her to the emergency room.

The admitting doctor called it a spontaneous abortion. Teddy registered her as Mrs. Nicholas Madziuk. “My sister,” he said. “This is their first baby. She comes to visit me for the weekend and this has to happen.” In the hospital they gave her something for the pain, and the nurses thought it only natural that she should cry.

One of the
photographs of Teddy and Deanna showed them standing in front of Teddy's car, which was parked at the curb of Angelo's Pizza House. The car was a 1958 Chevy, a model strangely curvy and finless for its period. Teddy was wearing chinos, a plaid shirt, and a short jacket from the pocket of which protruded what looked like a paper bag with a bottle in it. Deanna wore a miniskirt with tights and had a leather drawstring bag slung over her shoulder. In the preceding shots, they had been mugging for the camera—grinning widely, heads together, Teddy making a V of horns behind Deanna's head, Deanna kicking up one leg like a pinup girl. In this picture, no one was smiling. Deanna was frowning off to one side; Teddy was staring straight ahead at the camera and he looked, for some reason, angry.

All her dreams
ended in blood. She entered a cafeteria; she was working in the art library; she sat at the front table at the Cellar, listening to Nicky Magic play his guitar; but always, eventually, there was the blood oozing from her like a red scarf.

She was at her father's house, resting. He had picked her up at Teddy's in his new white Bonneville, and had made her lie in the backseat all the way to Albany. Teddy had told him about the abortion, a fact Lucy still couldn't take in. She kept trying to imagine Teddy and her father having this conversation, Teddy saying the words “pregnant” and “abortion,” her father apparently taking it all calmly, saying Lucy needed to rest, arranging to drive down and pick her up.

He put her to bed in her old room and went downstairs to make her some lunch. She dozed: she was in the library, the pain was like a knife in her belly, and the blood pursued her down the stairs. When her father came in with soup and an English muffin on a tray, she woke and began to cry. Stewart stood there with the tray for a moment. Then he came over to the bed and patted her arm while she cried. She heard him take a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and light it with his ancient Zippo. She stopped crying and kept her eyes closed, listening to him smoke—the small breathy sound on an inhale, pause, the cigarette tapped against the side of an ashtray, then a noisy exhale which meant that he had something on his mind. She tried to guess, out of all the possibilities, what it could be.

“What is it, Dad?” she asked finally, and turned her head to look at him. Nice sad old Daddy, gray hair falling over his forehead, his thin old lips pursed around his cigarette. She and Teddy speculated endlessly about whether Stewart had women. There had never been a shred of evidence. As far as they could tell—even though she had walked out on him, divorced him against his will, refused to communicate with him, and now was trying to get Rome to declare their marriage null and void so she could enter the convent—he was still faithful to Caroline. One of her glamorous 1940s photographs was in his bedroom, framed, on the wall. “Your mother and I are still married, as far as I'm concerned,” he had said once when Teddy hinted.

The tray was on the dresser. She could smell the soup, and she realized she was hungry. Stewart exhaled a stream of smoke and said, “I guess I just wonder about the boy involved, Lucy.”

There was a silence, and then a cough caught him by surprise—the fierce, painful smoker's cough that could jerk his body back like a gunshot and leave him red-faced and breathless. But it didn't last long this time, and when he finished Lucy said, “What about him?”

“I just wonder why you chose this route. Why marriage wasn't an option.”

“I just didn't think it was.”

“You mean you don't want to marry him?”

“I mean I didn't think he'd want to marry me.”

He stared at her. “He wasn't consulted about this at all?”

“I might tell him eventually.”

“It's this boy Nick you talked about at Christmas?”

Boy
. She turned her head away. “Yes.”

“You made him sound like a reasonable young man, Lucy. I don't understand why you wouldn't tell him a thing like this.” She didn't speak. “Lucy? It does seem to me that it's his business, as well as yours. Not that I don't think you should make the final decision, but it seems unfair that this should be a secret from him. I can't believe he wouldn't want to take some responsibility.”

The pain came again—not a bad one, just a cramp—and she could feel blood gush out onto the sanitary napkin. She might bleed slightly for several days, they had told her at the hospital. “But nothing to worry about,” the nurse said. “Just treat it like a normal period.” Then the doctor came in and said, “You may have trouble getting pregnant again, Mrs. Madziuk. We may have to get you in here for some repairs.” He had refused to look her in the eye: he knew everything, of course, and he had pronounced the name wrong, three syllables.
Magic
, she thought. It's pronounced
magic
. “These old magic fingers,” Nick had said, touching her. One of the blues songs he liked to sing contained the line,
You gave me seven children, and now I'm givin' them back to you
.

“Lucy?”

She pushed herself up, bunching the pillow behind her, and smiled at him. “Could I have my soup now, please, Dad?”

He sighed and went across the room for the tray. When he set it in front of her, she was already crying again.

There was still
film in her camera, and she photographed Stewart that Monday morning before she got on the train for Ithaca. He was dressed for the office: suit, tie, white shirt, overcoat, shiny black shoes. The photograph was taken at the train station, and he was flanked by posters advertising
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
? and Dewar's scotch. Stewart was smiling. He looked like what he was: a successful lawyer posing patiently for his daughter the photographer because he loved her. He didn't look at all like what he also was: a sad wreck of a man, whose life had let him down at every turn.