Moving On

  The real mystery was not just that people like the Tatums could tolerate her, but that they didn’t even seem particularly envious of her. Emma envied her her clothes, but that was about all. She was sure that if the situations were reversed she would be madly envious of everyone who had more money than she did.

  “Very puzzling,” she said to Teddy, who was in a brood of his own. As soon as he was home he climbed in Emma’s lap and began to recount his adventures. Tommy was sitting on the rug in his pajamas playing with some tinkertoys. He looked feverish and not especially glad to see either Patsy or his brother.

  “Thanks for taking him,” Emma said. “They fought all morning. I was about to strike bottom.”

  That night, sitting in her nice clean bed combing her hair and watching Jim tinker with a new television set they had bought, she thought of the Tatums again. When would she see them, through the years? They might vanish—she might never see them again. Or they might meet once a year, during the rodeo, in whatever town they were in, and sit and visit about the little they had to visit about in some bar or motel. Her memory of sitting with Pete under the carwash had grown very vague. She remembered that it had happened but not how it had felt.

  “It ought to be clearer,” Jim said. “It ought to be clearer.”

  “Maybe the trees are in the way,” she said, indifferent. Jim had reached that point in his graduate career where it was a handicap not to know more about pro football than he did. Their little portable TV had been given them as a wedding present and had gone on the blink so many times they had both lost patience with it.

  Two days later Jim went to see the Tatums and had a pleasant afternoon of beer drinking. Patsy found an excuse not to go, and when Jim returned looking cheerful she could not be sure whether she was sorry that she hadn’t, or glad. That night he was still fiddling with the new TV. “You take too dark a view of the Tatums’ life,” he said. “Rodeo isn’t bad. I think it compares favorably with graduate school.”

  “Oh, it does not,” she said. “Turn that stupid thing off and come to bed.”

  18

  “WHY DID WE WAIT?” Jim said. They were in the hospital; time was running out. Patsy had had a shot and the pains were getting noticeably more frequent. She was squeezing his hand hard and seemed giddy, though she was quiet. Her dark eyes had ceased focusing on him, at least for seconds at a time, and they still had not settled on a name. Patsy wore a blue gown and had so much color in her cheeks that it made her look feverish and a little wild.

  “We weren’t waiting,” she said. “We’ve been considering. I say David and Margaret. David, Davey, Margaret, Maggie. I like those.”

  “They’re okay. They just aren’t very inspired. After all, there are a lot of available names.”

  “You’re not naming my child anything inspired,” she said. “It’s ill-bred to go afflicting children with literary names. Look at the Wasatches.” The Wasatches were a graduate famliy at whose house they had endured one awful meal. They had a little girl Ariel and a little boy named Dylan.

  An elderly nurse came in and gave them a stern look; they both fell silent and felt guilty. “Give her a kiss and trot off,” the nurse said.

  “Okay,” Jim said meekly. Patsy’s lips felt dry and feverish.

  “David and Margaret,” Patsy said. “Remember, now.”

  He promised and went out. It was six in the morning and there was a warm gray mist on the streets of Houston. The Toddle House where he ate breakfast was very brightly lit. Back in the green waiting room of the huge hospital there was little to do but look down at the mist that hid the other hospitals. There were only two other men waiting. Jim had bought a paper—peace marchers were in the headlines. When he dropped the paper on the couch one of the men, a large florid man, asked if he could read it. He was very nervous, and his fingers seemed as red as his face.

  “I better find out what those goddamn bearded beatniks are up to today,” he said. “If there’s anything that upsets my potty it’s a goddamn bearded beatnik. You know what they are? Swindlers. They even swindled me.” His expression was ferocious but his voice was surprisingly mild.

  “How’d they manage?” Jim asked.

  “I’ll never tell you,” the man said. “I’m enough ashamed of it as it is—getting swindled by a bearded beatnik. My name’s Rawlins, since we’re getting acquainted.”

  Jim was tired and would have preferred just to watch the fog, but Mr. Rawlins was eager to talk. He asked Jim what his business was and then launched into a prideful account of his own career.

  “I’m in relics,” he said. “You know, old stuff. Branding irons, wagon wheels, steer horns, spinning wheels, all that kind of thing. I’m the relic king—least that’s what they call me. Got a factory up in East Texas where we make ’em.”

  “I thought you found them,” Jim said.

  Mr. Rawlins looked at him as if he were a child. “No,” he said, “you can’t find actual relics no more. At least you can’t find enough of them, and what you do find’s sky high. Lot more profitable to make them. You know there’s six thousand antique stores in Texas alone, not to mention Arkansas and Louisiana? Where you gonna find that many kerosene lamps and wagon wheels? I tried to buy some rusty old branding irons from a man the other day and the son of a bitch wanted five dollars apiece from them. I can make ’em fer two and a half, already rusted. It’s a scramble, I tell you.”

  From time to time a nurse would open the door long enough for a few screams and groans to come through. None of them sounded like Patsy, but apparently all of them sounded like Mr. Rawlins’ wife.

  “I swear this is the last one,” he said. “Got seven. Don’t know what I’d do if my wife was ever not to make it. Hell, I’m crazy about my kids, but I stay so busy up at the relic factory that I can barely keep their names straight. If my wife was ever to die I’d have to get the neighbors to introduce us. How many you got?

  “How ’bout that,” he said when Jim told him the one being delivered would be their first. Mr. Rawlins fished in his pocket, took a printed slip out of his billfold, and wrote something on it with a ball-point pen.

  “Here you are,” he said, presenting the slip to Jim. “Good for five antiquing lessons at any of the shops listed on it. You know, antiquing, sort of like relics—teaches you to make your furniture look old. You don’t want to take ’em, probably your missus will. Women get quite a kick out of antiquing. Compliments of Charlie Rawlins.”

  Jim was trying unsuccessfully to read The Philosophy of Literary Form when the door opened and their doctor came in to congratulate him. He went into the hall. There was no sign of a baby but Patsy was being wheeled down the hall. Her hair was tangled, sweaty at her forehead, and she looked woozy but triumphant.

  “Hey,” she said. “It was a David . . . I think I’ll get to see him later.”

  “Fine, fine,” Mr. Rawlins said as Jim passed back through the waiting room. “Don’t let him grow up to be no bearded beatnik. We got enough of them. If you’re ever in Longview, stop by and see my factory. Might give you a discount on some of our nice relics.”

  “I’m afraid he has my capacity for fury,” Patsy said. “Of course you can’t tell it now. Look at him.” Davey, two days old, was at the breast. Patsy had on a bright new robe that Dixie had brought her, and her hair was loose. Jim looked and saw a baby at the breast, a nice sight; but somehow only a slight current of parental emotion flowed in him. He had not yet so much as touched the child and had a certain feeling of anticlimax. He had not been particularly worried, and nothing at all had swept over him at the first sight of his son.

  “I wish he’d open his eyes,” Patsy said. “He’s scarcely seen you. He’s so much better than the way I imagined him.”

  She was cheerful, shining. Davey stopped nursing, moved his head indecisively for a bit, then went back to the wet nipple. Ten minutes later Patsy was bawling. Davey had been squalling when the nurse took him away and it brought on a deep melancholy, followed by a gus
h of tears. “It’s awful,” she sobbed. “I feel awful . . . He barely got to burp. I wish we could take him home now.” She cried so streamingly that Jim could scarcely hand her Kleenex fast enough.

  “Stop it,” he said. “He’s perfectly all right. I’m sure they know what they’re doing. You’re getting your gown wet.”

  The stream slowed to sniffles and eventually stopped; she looked out her window at the huge late-evening clouds that seemed to hang in perfect stillness over the city. In time her face became calm again, even serene. She smiled, a little weary. Her lips seemed fuller. Jim had thought of her as permanently fixed at the age and with the looks she had had when they married. It was only now and then that he noticed she was older than that and that her looks were changing.

  “You must be lonesome, old buddy,” she said. “I bet you’d like a good sandwich. If I were home I could make you one.”

  Jim said he would love one, though he had been rather enjoying being able to eat out randomly. Patsy stretched out her hand for him to hold, and she didn’t want him to leave when it was time. “After having Davey I get twice as lonesome when everybody’s gone,” she said. She looked so lonely when he left that it disrupted his evening. Duffin’s Eliot seminar of the fall had turned into a Pound seminar for the spring, and he had a report to make on the first five Cantos. He could make no headway with it. The Duffins had had him to dinner the evening before, by way of congratulations, and both of them had got drunker than he had. Lee had insisted on dancing with him while Bill sulked and complained of the choice of records. Then Lee too had grown sulky and told him he ought to be more affectionate to her, though to have been more affectionate he would have had to kiss her in front of her husband. The evening left him confused, and not having Patsy to go home to confused him more. Irritating as she often was, it was disorienting not having her at home.

  Soon, though, Patsy was home—or rather, Patsy and Davey were home. They were seldom seen apart. The baby bed, which had been a neat, clean unused piece of furniture sitting in the corner of the bedroom for two months, suddenly became the hub of the house, the place where everyone went when they came in, the object of all visits—and there were many visits, some wanted, some unwanted. Both sets of grandparents appeared within days, nervous, laden with presents, eager not to be in the way, and, invariably, to Patsy’s mind at least, squarely in the way of everything. Emma came, even Flap and the boys; Kenny Cambridge threw Davey a cursory glance in passing; the Duffins came and stayed eight minutes; and once Kenny and Jim even brought Clara Clark in—they had been having beer somewhere and she asked to see the baby. Patsy was polite and cool. It was the first time since the birth that Hank Malory had entered her mind, and he entered it vaguely then. All she felt was a mild anger that Jim would bring Clara to see her baby.

  Her feelings about the visitors were very mixed. Getting home was a great happiness to her and her spirits were high. Davey seemed a marvel to her. She was filled with pride and wanted people to come and admire him, but once they came, once they had seen him, she was ready for them to leave again, so she could have him to herself. Ordinary drop-in visitors, such as the ladies who lived on the block, those she welcomed; to them she unashamedly showed Davey off. But with others, particularly with Emma and her own mother, she was more ambivalent. She wanted very much for them to recognize how splendid he was, but it was when they were there that she felt the shyest and the most awkward. She found she could not do things smoothly with Davey when they were around. If he became fretful, she could not always quiet him, as she almost always could if they were alone. Their experience, the almost casual way they handled him and talked about him, bothered her; around them she felt like a novice and was worried that Davey too might sense that she was a novice and turn to one of them for comfort. She could not help being relieved when they went away and she was alone again with her baby. She talked to him constantly, whether he was asleep or awake, and one of the things she was frankest about was her own inexperience. No use fooling him. Besides, she had nothing to do but learn.

  It was for her a lovely spring, though it was half gone before she really began to appreciate it as a season. The afternoons and sometimes much of the morning she frequently spent on their big bed reading, with Davey on his blanket right in the center of it, where he could sleep, or kick if he was awake. Between chapters of whatever she was reading, she idled, watching him, a box of Kleenex at his head to wipe up spit-ups. She felt very relaxed, untense, even languorous, and enjoyed the afternoons one by one as they passed. Sometimes Davey held her finger as she read; sometimes she smoothed his short faint black hair; sometimes he slobbered and complained and she rubbed his back softly. Alternating with her comfortable languor were moods of great keenness, when life seemed sharper, clearer, and more wonderful than it ever had. Sometimes the spring winds blew hard and the great trees in the Whitneys’ back yard waved their branches. The edges of Davey’s blanket blew in his face and made him sneeze, or did unless she curved her body between him and the window, to knock off the draft. He used prodigious numbers of diapers, it seemed to her, but she had a diaper service and would block him in with pillows and leave him kicking and naked while she went to rinse out the diaper; then she would come back and powder him and sit watching him kick for a bit, touched with a kind of life wonder that she would have thought corny but could not help feeling at the sight of such a wiggly little boy. She often wished that Jim were there at such times; she felt that Davey was at his absolute best in the afternoons, and that if Jim saw him so he might feel as she felt. But Jim had started doing all his work in the library. When he was home she was continually involving him with the baby, so she didn’t really blame him for staying away to work; she only felt sorry that he was missing so much of his son. It was hard for her to understand why anyone would want to be away from him that long.

  When he was home Jim was, if anything, overconscientious in helping her with Davey. He treated her as if she were much more fragile than she actually was. She was amused by it; she had not been really angry with him even once since Davey was born. It seemed to her that Jim had to be helped, that he didn’t know what to feel or how to feel; she felt so much more confident and so much more at peace than she ever had that it was a little saddening to think that Jim was still struggling with his psyche, still somewhat unhappy, still confused. She chatted with Davey about it while reading Vogue, but it didn’t really worry her. She was sure that Jim would soon awaken to his son. Certainly he would do so long before a father would be needed to teach him baseball and other masculine practices.

  It crossed her mind, once or twice as she watched Davey and the trees that it was really irksome of Hank Malory to have gone away. It was odd, but she had a stronger urge to show Davey to him than to almost anyone. She had a feeling that he would appreciate Davey as she wanted him to be appreciated, and she also felt that once he saw Davey he would understand why she had been the way she had—why she had not been free to give herself. It made her a little sorrowful to think of him laboring on some dry plain, amid sandstorms, when Houston was so beautiful and green, the lawns of Rice so good-smelling, the trees so lovely, the spring so well ordered, and herself looking so well and feeling so well. It had all been needless, his going away; another month and she would have ended their sweet but foolish and childish indulgence, and somehow done it smoothly, so that he would not have been hurt and could have stayed and gone on with his work. She felt, watching her son, that she had done too much ripping up of people’s lives, partly through carelessness, partly through ignorance, perhaps even partly through meanness or selfishness. But that had been an old Patsy, a self she had left, like a girlhood—it was a manner she would never resume. She could not understand it when Emma on her visits spoke so bitterly of Tommy’s cruelty to Teddy, so disparagingly of Flap’s laziness and neglect of her. She could not understand how anyone, particularly Emma, could have retained such a capacity for resentment and bitterness. She felt—her son holding her finger
all the while—that she had at last got beyond that sort of thing, to an age where she knew what she was doing and to a station where she could be content—not frightened and at a loss, not bitter and selfish, and, surely, not mean to anyone.

  19

  FOR PATSY, April and May were glorious months. It seemed to her for a time that Davey, separate and individual as he was, had somehow completed her just by being born and being hers. Small nervousnesses, fears that she might inadvertently injure him, afflicted her, but they were very small fears. She felt stable and capable, she felt useful and valuable, she felt at peace. It seemed to her that having a child obliged her to put her own childishness behind. It seemed to her that it obliged Jim to do the same, but she was prepared to be patient with him, as patient as she could be. Emma had told her not to worry about Jim’s low-key response to Davey. “It’s nothing unusual,” she said. “It takes about six months for men to turn on to their kids. Jim will discover him one of these days.”

  Patsy waited, hopeful that Emma was right. If Jim would really begin to care about Davey, in the way that she cared about him, it would knit them all together, and that was what she wanted. Too many times, before Davey was born, she had had the sense that she and Jim were not knit at all, but were merely drifting through life in comfortable, conventional proximity to each other, with only the formal accident of marriage keeping them in the same house. That was why Hank had been so scary. Whatever she had felt about him, it hadn’t been formal or casual. But that was over.

  They had had the garage air-conditioned, and as the muggy, steamy Houston summer came on, Patsy’s content began to diminish. By early June it had diminished to the point where it seemed to her it had been euphoria, not content. The change in her spirits was not the fault of Davey, nor did it relate to him. He continued to absorb her, to fascinate her, to delight her. Her days were still shaped by his needs—she still spent hours on the big bed, reading, tickling him, playing with his feet. He had learned to smile, and he gurgled constantly.