The Stork Club (30 page)

There was a moment when there was no sound but the crickets of summer, until Hank blurted out, "Yeah, well, now you better make a toast to Lainie."

The shock of the joke made everyone freeze, except for Lainie, who was so stunned by it that her first impulse was to laugh, and when she laughed, all of the others did too. The laughter woke the baby, who cried, and Lainie was relieved to have an excuse to walk away. She put the cookies she'd been carrying down on the table, and hurried into the kitchen to get a bottle of formula.

She stood in front of the open refrigerator, staring in, forgetting for a moment why she was there. When she remembered and pulled out a bottle, she dropped it, grabbed a dishtowel, and stooped to wipe up the broken glass and spilled formula. She could hear the baby outside crying, so she grabbed another bottle, which she took out and handed to Mitch.

By now, the others had forgotten the bad joke and were back to exchanging stories about the De Nardo parents. The evening ended with promises of "next time at our house" and "the kids loved seeing you," and the sisters and their husbands were finally gone.

"Thank you, baby," Mitch said, hugging Lainie, with little Rose between them.

When Rose was a little over a year old, Lainie started back to school, three nights a week. Mitch was thrilled to come home early on those nights to feed and care for the baby, letting the saleswomen in the store take over some of his responsibilities. Many nights he would take Rose to Sherman Oaks Park.

Lainie loved school. She would do most of her study
ing late at night after Mitch and the baby had fallen asleep, but some days she would sit outside on her back patio while the baby played in the playpen or slept in the pram. Today she was particularly exhausted after a long night of walking the floor with a fretting baby, and her weight was high, and when she caught sight of herself in the mirror, she found herself thinking how much she looked like Jackie. But as the year had gone along and she became increasingly involved in her school work, getting her studying done was far more important than wasting time in beauty parlors, or at health clubs and all the other places she would have to go to work on looking good.

The baby was asleep in the pram that morning and it was gloriously sunny and clear that day, so Lainie decided to put a few of her textbooks in the bottom of the big blue carriage and sit outside. While her daughter napped in the fresh air, she would read a few chapters. She was just out the door when she saw Mrs. Lancer, the older woman who lived next door, in her yard.

"Oh, is that the little baby?" the woman asked, hurrying over to the fence to look in the pram. "Isn't she darling? And you. You are so wonderful. The way you manage to take such good care of her, and you go to school, don't you? I mean forgive me, it's none of my business, but a few times I've seen you with all your books on your way out the door. And I just assumed . . . "

"I'm at Northridge in the English department," Lainie said, loving the sound of it.

"And yet you still have time to look so gorgeous," the woman said. Gorgeous. Lainie hadn't felt gorgeous in a long time. "Now and then when my husband and I go walking around the track at Sherman Oaks Park, I see you there with your husband and the baby. You always look so stunning, all dressed up to kill. I say to
my husband, How does she do it? I guess at your age you can do everything."

The woman continued to talk, but Lainie wasn't listening. Sherman Oaks Park, she was thinking. She hadn't been there in more than a year. Mitch went there with the baby all the time, but Lainie was never with them. Her neighbor must have seen some other couple there and thought it was the two of them. All dressed up to kill. So gorgeous, she had said. Well that made Lainie certain the woman wasn't talking about
her
. She felt like an overweight mess.

After a while the woman said good-bye, and Lainie wheeled the pram over to the little patio area, took out her books, and sat for a long time. Finally she realized she hadn't read a word. She was staring at the page thinking again about Sherman Oaks Park. Maybe while the baby was still asleep she would use the quiet time to do the laundry. She wasn't getting any studying done anyway. So she put the books back at the bottom of the pram, on top of the shiny pink comforter, and wheeled the pram back into the house.

"Right back," she whispered to the sleeping little girl, then hurried upstairs to her bathroom hamper to get her dirty clothes and Mitch's so she could take them down to the laundry room. Through the open bathroom window she could see the beautiful sunny day outside, and she smiled. Mitch, my Mitch, she thought. After all we've been through, at last our world is in place.

Maybe next year instead of just taking random classes, I'll start trying for a degree. And if business at Panache keeps up the way it's been going, pretty soon we can hire a nanny. Then I'll be like those women I always read about in magazines who have it all. Husbands and babies and careers, and . . . She had been hugging Mitch's shirt to her chest through all of those thoughts, but now when she held it up to her face, her
euphoria was drained in a wave of shock. The smell on the shirt, all over her husband's shirt, was very familiar to her. It was the smell of Shalimar.

In Barbara Singer's office she sat forlornly across from the pretty dark-haired psychologist, and couldn't believe she was saying the words, "I think my husband is cheating on me with the surrogate." It sounded so absurd that after she said it, she let out a little laugh, then stopped to catch her breath so she wouldn't cry. "Oh, God," she said, and then told Barbara everything.

After she'd heard it all Barbara asked, "Lainie, let's talk about what you're afraid will happen if you confront Mitch."

"That maybe he's not seeing Jackie and he'll laugh at me. We own a very chic women's store. Every day women come in and give him a big hello hug, and one of them could have been wearing Shalimar."

"And what about what the lady from next door said?''

"She's kind of scatterbrained. She could have seen anybody in the park and mistaken them for Mitch and me. I mean, I'd feel like a fool if I accused him and I was wrong."

"And how would you feel if you were right?" Barbara asked, looking into her eyes.

Lainie looked away, then answered, "I couldn't survive the pain."

"Lainie," Barbara said. "You're a very strong woman. You stood up to cancer, and won. Can this possibly be as bad as that?"

"Worse," Lainie said. "I love this man. He's my whole life. I only said yes to this whole thing because I was afraid that Mitch wanted his genetic child so badly that if I said no . . . " The rest of the words were too difficult to get out.

"That he would leave you?" Barbara asked.

Lainie was crying and could only nod. "People are passing AIDS around. I don't know what Jackie's life is like now. Or what it was
ever
like, for that matter, regarding men. But if my husband really is cheating on me, he could be killing me." Barbara didn't comment. "I saw your ad about the group in
L.A. Parent
. I was so excited because it looked like something for us. I was going to ask Mitch to come to it with me so we could discuss what we were going to tell Rose about her birth when she got older. Now I'm here to tell you that I need help about something more urgent than that. I'm so afraid."

"Bring Mitch to the group," Barbara said. "Maybe the group will give you the courage to confront him, because you can't go on much longer harboring these fears."

"I can't," Lainie wept. "You're right. I can't."

25

T
HE PEDIATRIC INTENSIVE CARE unit is a place you never want to be. Many of the patients who are being cared for there come directly from the rooms in which they were born, and when they finally leave in many cases it will be because they're dead. The parents who sit the vigil beside the cribs share a silent terror that they may be the next to go home. Without their baby.

When Rick, Annie, the by now barely conscious David, and the stern-faced Dr. Solway arrived at the hospital, they went directly to pediatric ICU. There were four other cribs besides the one in which they now placed the limp and silent David. Rick turned away while a nurse inserted an IV tube into the baby's arm, and when he turned back he saw the doctor placing a tiny mask over the baby's expressionless face. The mask, Dr. Solway told Rick and Annie, who hugged herself as if she was chilled, measured the level of David's breathing to
determine whether or not he had to be put on a respirator. He did.

For now, the IV would be used to give him drugs, in order to make tolerable the process they would have to do immediately, which was called intubating. Intubating, Dr. Solway explained carefully, as if she were teaching a class, meant that the doctors would insert a tube into David's nostril which would pass down into his lungs. The tube would be connected to a respirator, which would breathe for him. Rick and Annie were asked to leave the room during the intubation.

While they stood in the hall, Rick, trying not to picture what the doctors were doing, looked at the big black woman who still hugged herself with her chubby arms, over one of which hung the little blue sweater in which she had dressed David a few hours earlier. What was she thinking, he wondered. The truth? That because Rick was such a venal whoremonger, he had made his own son severely ill? Maybe even killed him? Annie must know
exactly
what had happened.

She had come back early that morning, the morning after Rick gave the baby the honey on the pacifier. Come back early, as promised, from her sister's. The young secretary's car was probably parked in the driveway, where Annie usually parked. So Annie probably patiently found another parking place on the street, walked in the front door, and began to straighten up the living room, finding the girl's black dress still lying there in a heap.

And in the baby's room, which is where she undoubtedly went next . . . Rick's clothes. Everywhere. She must have taken those to the dirty-clothes hamper and then, with the baby on her hip, gone into the kitchen to do Rick's dinner dishes from the night before, to get the baby's breakfast. Maybe she was feeding David when the girl walked nude from Rick's room, where she and
Rick had spent what was left of the night and themselves, leaving Rick in an unconscious sleep. The girl could have even greeted Annie and made a fuss over the baby after she slid back into her dress, picked up her shoes, and left.

Twenty silent minutes went by until the doctor called Rick and Annie back. David was asleep now. Dr. Solway stood next to his crib. Annie let out a low moan when she saw what had been done to the baby, and Rick held on to the back of a chair for support.

"The nasotracheal tube is connected to the respirator, which you can hear is now breathing for him. Those are cardiac monitor leads, and of course that's the intravenous line. We'll continue to ventilate him mechanically and feed him this way for the next several days. After that, hopefully, he'll begin to come around. At least to be able to be fed eventually through a nasogastric feeding tube."

Rick was aware of a woman standing near the crib farthest from them. She was crying quietly as she looked at what had to be her own very ill baby.

"What medication will you give him?" Rick asked the doctor.

"We won't. In adults we can use an antitoxin, in infants the only treatment is to support them until they get better on their own. I'm sorry to tell you that there is nothing else to do now but literally sit this out. If you like, I can arrange a room for you to live in down the hall, so that you can be with him, or you can commute from home. I suggest one or both of you do the former. Because even though David is too weak to open his eyelids, there will be many times when he's awake, so he can feel and he can think, and at those times the sound and the touch of someone to whom he's bonded will be extremely important to his well-being."

Bonded. Part of the parenting lingo. The new father
was a total man who spent time caring for his infant. Trying to create the kind of deep connection which babies in the past usually only had with their mothers. This baby didn't have a mother, or a father who spent all the time caring for him. Annie. To David, hers was the most familiar voice, the most welcome and soothing touch, Rick thought. He was surprised at how envious he felt toward the large black woman, who couldn't take her eyes from the now unconscious child in the crib. David looked as if he were dead.

"Poor baby," Annie said softly. "Poor little baby."

"You can touch him," Dr. Solway said. The young doctor's jaw was set firmly and her eyes were emotionless. Rick wondered how much time she'd spent in this room, and how many babies she'd seen in such serious condition.

Annie put her large dark hand on the little pink arm of the baby that didn't have an intravenous tube connected to it.

"We're here, darlin'. Me and your daddy are gonna be here every minute." Then she looked at Rick. "I can sit by him all day, if you want to take the nighttimes. Or just the opposite. Whatever you say, Mr. Reisman."

"Annie," he said. "You can spell me. How would that be?"

"What does 'spell you' mean?" she asked him.

"It means you can be in and out, talk to him, touch him as much as you want. And if please, dear God, he ever gets off the respirator alive, even hold him. But except for getting a few hours of sleep, I'm going to stay in this room day and night."

Annie patted him softly on the arm.

"I'll go in to the nurses' station and check about getting you a room," Dr. Solway told Rick. She left Annie and Rick looking anxiously at what seemed to be a shell of baby David, listening to the constant repetition
of the sound of the respirator as it fed him the breath of life.

Dr. Weil was back from his vacation and he called in a specialist from the San Francisco area to confirm Dr. Solway's diagnosis. The specialist was able to extract a stool sample, which was sent to a laboratory in northern California. During the visits of various doctors to the baby's bed, Rick would move out of the way so that they could have better access to David.