The Stork Club (2 page)

At the family clinic where Barbara spent about a third of her workweek, there was a long waiting list of those. Troubled, anxiety-ridden children whose tiny brows were already permanently furrowed as if they'd seen it all, and many of them had. There were days when she looked into the very old eyes of those very young children and ached to see the absence of hope in them.

Some were referred by social workers, like five-year-old Jimmy Escalante, whose father was murdered while the two of them were having breakfast together one morning at a Bob's Big Boy as a robbery took place. Jimmy had survived the shooting by hiding under his father's jacket until the robbers left and the police came. Now he woke up screaming every night. Last week he told Barbara that someday he would "kill the world" to get even for his father's death.

Some were referred by pediatric clinics, and some children were brought in to her by parents who managed to find their way there by instinct. They were the ones who presented their hurting children to her as unsure of
what she could do as if they were handing them over to a witch doctor. The way Angel Cardone had with Rico.

"I think somebody at the nursery school is doing something funny to him."

"What do you mean, Mrs. Cardone?"

"I mean, a couple of times he tried to tell me somebody's been sucking his little pee pee."

"You think there's someone at the school who's molesting him?"

"I don't know exactly. But there's lots of people around there. Teachers, helpers, big kids who get paid to work there in the summer. Maybe one of
them
is doing it."

"Have you examined him? Had a doctor examine him? Is his penis red or irritated?"

"No. I mean, that's the thing. It don't look like he puts up a fight about it, 'cause he don't have no bruises."

"Is there anyone at the school you can trust to talk to?"

"There's nobody anyplace I trust."

"Why don't you bring Rico in?" Barbara asked, her mind racing to think of an open time when she could try to get through to the little boy, and wondering how she would approach him. "How about early tomorrow morning, before you take him to school? Maybe I can find out from him what's going on?"

"I can't pay for coming in again."

"Don't worry about paying. You don't have to pay. Will you work with me on this?"

"Yeah. Sure," she said, turning to go. Then she turned back and looked gratefully into Barbara's eyes. "You're a nice person."

Thinking about Jimmy Escalante's cries of revenge and fearing that Rico Cardone was being sexually
abused brought nightmares that made Barbara cry out in her sleep. Many nights Stan had to wake her and hold her and assure her everything was all right. But after he'd calmed her and fell back to sleep, she stayed awake and worried with a heart-pounding anxiety because she knew better. Everything was not all right.

"I'm losing it," she told Stan more than once at the end of a workday. "So often I see the parents look at me blankly, then look at the clock, and I know they're thinking, 'When the hell can I get out of here? And what does all this psychological crap have to do with me?' "

"At least those families have found you,'' Stan would tell her. "That means there may be solutions for them.''

At the end of a difficult day she'd let herself imagine how it would be if she let herself live a life in which Stan supported them completely with his law practice. Tried to picture how it would be if she woke up every day and did whatever she happened to feel like doing. Instead of shuttling between the families who had too much and the families who had too little, listening to the painful stories that seeped into her soul.

This morning while she waited in her Beverly Hills office for the red light on the switchplate next to the door to go on, signaling that her first private patient had arrived, she doodled absently on the coffee-stained postcard from Howie Kramer's office. After a while she picked up the morning newspaper and turned to the View section to find her horoscope.

"Even a scientist like you can't resist the magic," Gracie always teased when she caught Barbara checking in with her astrological forecast.

"It's harmless fun, Mother," Barbara would say defensively. But the truth was she
did
feel foolish about skipping the front page and going right to the astrology.

"Not to the countless people who are loony enough
to change their entire lives based on what it says," Gracie said, bristling. Bristling was what Gracie did best. But at least she had a sense of humor about herself. "Now read me mine," she'd always add with a mock-serious face.

Today for Pisces, Barbara's sign, the message read:
Unexplored territory offers exciting life-changing opportunity
. Barbara laughed a little burst of a laugh out loud, just as the red light came on. "I sure as hell hope so," she said, then she stood to open the door to welcome her first family of the day.

2

E
VERY TIME Stan came home from a long trip he smelled like the inside of an airplane. The odd scent of fuel got into his clothes and hair, and when his relieved-to-be-home hug engulfed Barbara, so did that odor. Usually his eyes were ringed with red, and he'd say something like "I'm not fit for human consumption." Then he'd hurry upstairs to take a shower and put on sweatclothes. Barbara unpacked his suitcase, carried the dirty clothes down to the laundry room, and met him in the kitchen to make him a snack.

It was after those trips when she'd look appraisingly at him and be secretly relieved to see him looking his age, their age. For the longest time she'd been noticing the way her own face was starting to sag a little around the mouth, and wrinkle a little around the eyes. At last Stan's temples were gray and he was getting a pouchy place just under his chin, which, when he spotted it in the mirror, would make him decide to grow a beard.
But after a few days he'd look at the scruffy growth on his face and reconsider, deciding that the gray in the beard would be more aging. With or without a beard, the truth was that to his wife he was looking sexier than ever.

After she made him a sandwich she sat next to him at the kitchen table, watching him eat, and realized she was breathing differently, more easily, because he was back. She always felt safer when he was near. There were days when she had rushes of feeling as mawkishly in love with him now as she'd been at seventeen when they met, and at eighteen when they eloped. An act which had horrified all of their parents. Particularly Gracie, who still had what Barbara knew was a forced smile on her face every time she talked to her son-in-law.

"You don't get to pick, Mother," Barbara remembered saying when her mother had referred disparagingly to Stan's straitlaced style.

Today while he finished his sandwich, he held Barbara's hand, as if to say he felt the same romantic way about her, and she looked down at their two hands together. At the slim gold wedding bands they'd slid onto each other's fingers so many years ago she could barely remember life without him.

"Are you okay?" he asked. That was always the question he used as an opening to check in with her, to find out if she needed anything or wanted to report any new worry, to discuss something about the children, her mother, or her practice.

"Just my usual overwhelmed self," she said, picking up a thin slice of tomato that had fallen out of the sandwich onto his plate and eating it. "I'm worried that I'm working by rote, that nobody's getting the best I have to offer because I've taken on too much. I console myself all the time with the idea of an early retirement."

"No chance of that. I know you. You go through this from time to time, usually after you've had a few weeks of twelve- and fourteen-hour workdays. Then something happens to excite you and you're off and running again. A few months ago you told me you were cutting back. Too many private patients, too many groups, and did you?"

"Tomorrow I meet with a new family, and I'm meeting with another new referral on Friday," she said, feeling like a child confessing a misdeed.

"I rest my case. Sometimes it's like that. All the personalities and needs and pain get inside you and you start living them. I understand, because I do it too. My clients rail and scream and yell, I get involved in it, and then they feel better and
I
walk around with indigestion." They both smiled. "You realize, by the way, that as far as I'm concerned you can quit working any time you want. Take a year to read the classics, another year to putter in the garden. But I say that secure in the knowledge that you won't." Barbara sighed. Probably he was right.

"Of course we could have a baby," he said, putting the sandwich down and taking a big sip of some orange juice he'd poured over a glass of ice. It sounded like a joke, and she laughed an outraged laugh, sure the remark was just his way of getting sexy with her.

"What?"

"Just a thought," he said, and the look in his eye was mischievous.

"A unique one for a couple who's approaching their twenty-fifth anniversary, wouldn't you say?"

"I guess. But there was a baby next to me on the airplane on its mother's breast, and it was so adorable. I forgot how sweet they can be."

"I hope you're referring to the baby and not the breast."

He smiled. "Speaking of breasts, where's our son?"

"I'm curious and not a little bit concerned about how you made
that
linkage," she said, laughing and leaning forward, using the corner of a napkin to wipe a crumb from his chin.

"I mean, if he's out and not due to come back looking for money or food, the only two reasons he ever stops in, maybe I could reacquaint myself with yours."

"I thought you'd never ask," Barbara said.

Upstairs in their bedroom, they slid naked between the cool soft sheets of their bed and moved close to each other. A thrill of familiar warmth passed through her as she felt his chest pressed against her breasts. At first their kisses were tender but soon he touched her in the way he knew would arouse her, and she felt her own passion rise and wanted the release, wanted him inside her.

Just as she was so familiar with his moves when they slow-danced, knowing that a certain lift of the shoulder meant they were about to turn or a certain swivel of his hip meant they would dip, when they made love she knew exactly at which moment he was going to move over her and then inside her, and she opened her entire being to his entrance, feeling the perfectness of their union.

"Welcome home, my love," she whispered.

Once their sex could make her weak with heat. Today as their bodies united it was as if some part of her own person had been away, and by the act of sex had been reconnected.

A baby, she thought. The idea interrupted her reverie. He had to be kidding. But while he filled her insides with his hard self, and kissed her, then kissed her again, as their lips and their tongues collided and then entwined, she was counting behind his back on her fingers to be sure it was late in her cycle. Hoping it was a safe
day, so that she could let her mind get lost in the joy of his return. Her love. How lucky it was that after so many years their sex was so delicious and loving and good.

"Ma?"

Barbara and Stan were in bathrobes, had just stepped out of the shower when Jeff got home.

"Hi, honey. Dad's home. Come in."

"Hey, Dad." Jeff pushed the bathroom door open and gave his father something that could be construed as a quick hug. "Can I take the car down to Orange County? There's this game down there some of my friends have been going down to play. It's called Photons and it's really amazing. It's like being inside a video game. You play on teams and you run around this maze in the dark and try to blast the other guys with your light beams."

"Sounds like
my
idea of a good time," Stan joked.

"Why don't you stay home, honey? You haven't seen Dad in over a week. Let's all have dinner together, eat at the dining room table, and . . . "

"Relate?" Jeff said, giving her a sidelong give-me-a-break look.

"Spoken like the son of a psychologist." Stan laughed.

"Can we relate tomorrow night, Mom? I really want to do this."

"I think it's all right if he goes." Stan looked at Barbara and grinned. "This is why people our age have babies.''

"You two having a baby? Oh, cool," Jeff said over his shoulder, and he was gone.

Later that night when Stan was turned away from her and she was snuggled close against him, knowing by his breathing he was seconds away from sleep, she
said to his back, "How serious were you about babies?"

She was relieved to hear his groggy reply, which was "Not serious at all."

"Scottie, what's going on?"

Scottie Levine, age four and a half, was dressed in a Ralph Lauren shirt, khaki pleated pants, a tan braided leather belt, tan socks, and brown loafers. And his haircut wasn't from the Yellow Balloon or any other kid's barbershop. It was shaped and gelled into some semblance of the haircut of a thirty-five-year-old man. He looked as if he should be carrying a portable phone and talking on it to his broker. Scottie was one of a group of children who had been nicknamed "chuppies" by one of Barbara's colleagues, children of yuppies.

Even his sigh was adult, a strained exhale that sounded as if it meant he was resigned to the fate of being the child caught in the middle of a warring, acting-out couple and forced to be the sane one in the family. Barbara watched him pick up a small black bag of magnetic marbles he'd played with before in her office, spill them out and line them up so he could flick them the way he liked to, one at a time until they hit the molding at the far end of the room.

"Do you go to your daddy's house to be with him?" Barbara asked. He nodded.

"And is it fun to do that?"

No response.

"What do you and Daddy do on your days together?''

"Nothing.'' He moved the marbles around, rearranging their order into groups of matching colors.

"Do you stay at home and play together?"

''We play Frisbee."

"Oh yes, I remember your telling me how good you're getting at Frisbee."