Ever After: A Father's True Story

  Camille phoned me. It was evening and Danny was home so I asked him to watch Wills. I drove over to Camille’s and from there we headed to Emmaline’s. Neither of us was particularly concerned. It wasn’t the first time Emmaline had gotten so far out she didn’t answer the phone. But we weren’t looking forward to it, either.

  From previous visits, we knew how to climb through the bathroom window. We parked the car, walked up the hill to her apartment. We knocked several times and rang the bell, but nothing happened. We went around to the back. We promised each other this was the last time we’d ever do this.

  I pushed Camille through the little window and she came around to open the front door for me. It was dark, and we turned on some lights. We called out, then saw that the light was on in her bedroom, coming out from a crack under the door.

  When we went in, I almost fainted. Even Camille, who’s pretty tough, turned her back and screamed.

  Aunt Emmaline was stretched out on the floor beside her bed, practically naked. There was shit and piss on the bed, on her and on the floor. We could see right away she was dead. Camille turned back around and stared.

  “We’ve got to phone somebody, the police or somebody.”

  But the phone was beside the bed, just in front of where she was spread out. We stood there. Then Camille went around the other side of the bed, reached across and gathered in the phone. She sat down on the floor. I tried to move close to make sure Aunt Emmaline was really dead. She was. She was beginning to stink and it wasn’t just the shit and everything. I slunk around and scrunched down on the floor beside Camille. She had the phone on her lap and looked at me.

  “I think we ought to call Mom and Dad. They’d know best what to do. What time is it there?”

  We figured it had to be about seven in the morning. Camille made two mistakes dialing but finally got it. Her hands were trembling.

  She explained the situation as carefully as she could. Dad was on the phone and Mom was on the extra ear-extension they have on French phones. We could hear Mom crying. Dad wanted to know how we were, what we’d done so far.

  Camille told him. There was a long quiet pause; we figured he was talking to Mom.

  “OK, first look around and see if there’s any kind of a note, anything like that.”

  We put down the phone and started looking. Camille found a bunch of insurance papers all spread out on the desk. It was good having something to do. I kept trying not to look into the open eyes of Aunt Emmaline. We came back and told Dad what we’d found.

  “Put them back into the drawer of the desk, sort of spread around. Don’t touch anything else. Just make sure there are no notes.”

  We did that.

  “Now call the police and an ambulance. Stay there till they come. Then, as soon as possible, go home and, if you have any, take a sleeping pill. I’m sorry you kids had to do this, but it was bound to happen. Just remember, it’s what your aunt wanted.”

  We did all that and everything went off fine. They put it down that Aunt Emmaline had died of a stroke or something; a friend arranged this with the police so Aunt Emmaline could be buried in holy ground, and so Grandma wouldn’t know. It seems this kind of thing is always happening in that part of the world. West Hollywood is sort of the place where failed actresses and actors wind up their careers, one way or another.

  I don’t know if there’s any way I can contact Aunt Emmaline now, I’m not sure I want to, but I chose Aunt Emmaline’s day for the wedding: I guess because I’m the closest thing to a child she had. One good thing that came out of the experience was my determination never to drink or fool around with drugs, and I never have.

  After the wedding, I return to working at the school, but I begin having trouble with bleeding. I’m sick every morning and feel terrible all day. I’d had an emergency Caesarean with Wills in Los Angeles and the incision was done vertically, both through the stomach wall and the uterus: not exactly what you’d call a “bikini cut.” I want this one naturally, but the doctors in Germany say it’s probably impossible. However they also say they’ll try.

  I’ve found a Frauenklinik nearby, right on the Starnberger See. The baby seems to be growing nicely, but the contractions and bleeding continue. The doctor says I must stay in bed or I could very easily lose the baby.

  I tell them at school and show them the doctor’s certificate that I should stop teaching. Stan is very sympathetic, and comes several times to see how I am. Ruth, his wife, comes regularly to help keep the place up. I’m surprised how the faculty and parents all help. I knew I had some really good friends, Ellen, Pam, Cindy, Dallas, but I never expected they’d dash into the fray so willingly.

  Bert does the laundry, keeps the apartment reasonably neat, takes care of Wills, feeds him, dresses him, all the things that have to be done. He comes home directly from school and gives up his basketball team. I feel spoiled. I keep thinking I’m better, that it’s passed, but after half an hour on my feet I’m dizzy and need to slide back into bed again.

  I’m glad when that seventh month passes. The doctor says, now, no matter what happens, he can probably save the baby, but he’s given up on letting me have a natural birth. He says it’s too risky, still I beg him to let me try anyway.

  By the middle of the ninth month, my contractions begin and we rush to the Frauenklinik, and during seven hours of labor, we try for a natural delivery. But the doctor finally says it’s too dangerous and performs a Caesarean. I cry.

  Dayiel weighs almost eight pounds. She has to be the most beautiful baby ever. She already has strawberry blonde hair and the biggest, deepest blue eyes anyone could imagine.

  Bert comes to visit me in the hospital during his lunch-time, eating sandwiches in the car. He holds the baby, fooling with it, his crazy beret perched on his head, while looking up at me and smiling like a demented fool. I know I’m smiling back in the same way. I have never been so happy.

  Then, right in the middle of sedate Starnberg, we have a typically Oregonian event. A group of Bert’s old cronies from his high school basketball team, five of them, decide, practically overnight, to visit us from the United States. They want to check out Bert’s new baby girl—as well as the famous German beer: a private Oktoberfest in mid-April.

  Bert’s at home when the local policeman leads them to the apartment. They don’t speak any German; to be honest, their English isn’t so hot. The celebrations had started at the first Gasthaus they came across.

  The next day, Bert brings them into the hospital. They’re all wearing heavy-knit sweaters, lumber jackets, jeans, hard-tipped boots with thick-ribbed woolen stockings folded over at the top. The boots have yellow leather thongs lacing them up. They all have different multicolored stocking caps with pom-poms.

  And loud! They seem to think they’re out in the woods. The nurses are running and buzzing around, yammering at them, like farmers in the Morvan trying to control a herd of cows as they move it down the road. Bert stops them all outside my room. He doesn’t have to explain much. I’ve figured it out. His Oregon animal buddies have somehow found us. I pull my nightgown shut—I’ve just finished nursing—and prepare myself for the worst.

  Bert’s all apologies. He’s sheepish, but I know that, underneath, he’s pleased they’ve come all this way.

  “OK, Bert. Let them in. We’ll just take it as it comes.”

  They’re quiet for the first few minutes. Bert gives one of them the baby, and he holds her like a cut log, and then she’s passed from one to the other, each holding her in a slightly different way, as if she were a water-bucket in a lumberjack fire brigade. Little Dayiel looks each one in the eyes as if this is the most natural thing in the world. Bert’s beside me, holding my hand, and as obviously proud as any proud papa could be. Any moment I’m expecting one of them to try a lay-up shot with this strange-shaped basketball. I’m glad when she comes back to Bert and then to me. She smells of cigarettes, sweat, and, I’ll swear, Oregon spruce trees.

  Finally they’re ready to
leave. Bert needs to return to school and he gives them the key to our apartment. It’s the one to the door at the top of the spiral staircase we use as an entrance.

  Just before dinner, Bert comes again on his way home. He and Wills ate at the pizza place but didn’t see the mob. He hasn’t been home yet. I hate to think of what these woodsmen will have done to our nice little nest—maybe built a fire in the middle of the living-room floor to keep warm.

  At about nine o’clock Bert phones, just after I’ve given Day her bedtime feeding. He still hasn’t heard or seen anything of his friends. He’d made arrangements to show them around town and maybe keep them out of trouble, but they didn’t show.

  “Lord, I hope they don’t mess things up, Kate. They can be real hellraisers when they get into the spirit of things.”

  “Don’t worry about them, Bert. They’re big boys and not our responsibility. Just go to bed. Make sure Wills drinks some warm milk to help him sleep.”

  With that, I hang up. And in a few minutes I’m asleep.

  The next thing I know is an awful clattering, shouting, and hollering. It’s almost like a chant but I can’t quite make it out. Day wakes too. I listen. It’s “WOODMAN!” Someone is chanting: “WOODMAN! WOODMAN!”

  My God! I know who it is immediately. What can I do? I ring for the nurse. She comes running in all excited. I explain in German to let one of them in, only one, and bring him to my room. She stares at me. I repeat. Just one, only one. Nur eins. She scoots out of the room.

  I don’t know how she picked the one she has but he’s absolutely stoned. Maybe he was the only one upright. He stands, more or less, at the foot of the bed, holding onto it, rocking back and forth, his head rolling on his shoulders.

  “Don’t you understand, this is a hospital? You can’t just barge in like this. What are you thinking of?”

  He looks up at me. It takes about three tries before he can get a word out.

  “The key—lost the key.”

  I almost laugh. It’s too much. I reach over to my purse on the table beside my bed.

  “Why didn’t you go to the apartment? Bert has a key.”

  Again, a long lapse before he answers.

  “Did. Nobody answered. We yelled and nobody came.”

  I believe it. Bert can sleep through almost any noise. I guess if you live around sawmills, you can ignore most sounds. I give him my key.

  “Don’t lose it! You know the right way to go in?”

  “Yeah, we’ll be fine now we have the key.”

  He’s holding it out in front of him like a gold nugget he’s found under a rock. He goes out the door to my room that way. What a crowd of idiots Bert grew up with.

  When Bert comes in the next day during his lunch period I don’t even have to say anything. They’ve told him. Bert’s holding out his hands, both of them, as if he’s a cop trying to stop traffic.

  “It’s OK, Honey. They’re all very sorry. They’re on the S-Bahn, leaving for Heidelberg, first to Munich and then onward. I know they seem like a bunch of untamed animals, but they’re a great bunch of guys. They just can’t handle this German beer.”

  I put out my arms and Bert comes to me. He’s such a shaft of strength coming from that tangle of wilderness. I’m so lucky to have him. I’m anxious to be home with him soon as possible.

  When I come home, there are flowers everywhere. My friends have cooked different meals for the whole week and put them in the refrigerator. All Bert needs to do is heat them up. I spend practically all that first week at home in bed, except for going to the bathroom. I play with Dayiel whenever I have the energy. She’s such a wide-awake baby, already looking around at everything. It seems like such a new start on things. I figure I’ll have one more baby seven years from now. That way I can have three children and each one will be like an only child. The older ones will be old enough to help me, too. I have it all planned out. Ha! What one doesn’t know.

  CHAPTER 4

  DAYIEL IS a doll but she’s a devil, too. At four months, she’s already biting my nipples when I nurse her, and she doesn’t even have teeth. Bert thinks it’s funny, and I think Dayiel does it because he laughs.

  She’s on her hands and knees almost as soon as she can roll over onto her stomach. She rocks back and forth, laughing out loud as if she’s just robbed a bank. It isn’t long before she develops her own way of crawling—not on her knees but on her hands and her feet—and is scooting around the apartment, like a dog or cat. Nothing is safe. I do everything to baby-proof that apartment, but nothing is Dayiel-proof.

  She never sleeps through the night. She’s up three or four times. Then after being nursed, she wants to play. Even at six months, she’s sleeping less than eight hours a day. She seems to love life so much she hates to close her eyes. It’s as if she knows.

  Bert and I become zombies. We take turns getting up and fetching her. Then we let her stay in bed between us. I think she’ll be safe that way, but she figures how to crawl out from the bottom. Bert wakes up with a start the first night she does it.

  “Kate, where’s Day?”

  I’m still groggy.

  “I don’t know, maybe one of us put her in her crib when we were half-asleep.”

  “I didn’t.”

  He leaps out of bed in one jump the way he can, like a jack-in-the-box. He leans back into our room.

  “She’s not there!”

  I sit up, scared now.

  “Maybe she’s in Wills’s room. Maybe he took her in bed with him because she was crying.”

  I crawl out of bed and stand up. I have a terrible headache. Bert’s running up and down the hall. Now I’m worried. Where, in a locked apartment, can a baby go? Could she have hurt herself?

  Then I hear Bert laughing. The baby is laughing, too. They’re in the bathroom.

  Day is sitting in the bottom of the shower, playing with the toys I put in there when I give her a bath. I know she likes to take a bath, it’s one of her favorite things, but in the middle of the night, without water, in the dark? She’s pointing up to the faucets, wanting us to turn on the water. She’s filthy from crawling around and soaked through. Bert leans over and starts undressing her. Day keeps pointing up at the faucets.

  “OK, Day. This one time. But no more baths at three o’clock in the morning. Understand?”

  She smiles and slaps her hands on the bottom of the shower the way she does when there’s water.

  “Bert, do you mind if I go back to bed? I’m pooped and I have a terrible headache.”

  “Go ahead, that’s OK, Babe, I can handle this. You go to bed, try to get some sleep. I’ll see if I can put her down after her bath. Boy, am I ever going to be a mean math teacher tomorrow.”

  He turns on the water and I can hear it running as I pad back and crawl into bed. I don’t even hear Bert come in; maybe he doesn’t, because he’s gone off to school when Day screams from her crib and wakes me up.

  Mom and Dad come to visit several times. Dad is wonderful with Dayiel. I never expected that. He follows her around the house, wherever she wants to go, letting her do what she wants as long as it isn’t dangerous. He says it’s like having a puppy, and that spending so much time on the living-room floor, crawling with her, he’s acquiring an entirely new view of the world. He also gives her airplane rides, pushing her up over his head or lifting her up on his legs or his feet or letting her sit on his stomach and bounce. I remember him doing all those things with me and Matt and Camille. I’d forgotten.

  Having a baby brings back so many things from your own life that you might never have remembered. If I hadn’t seen Dad with Dayiel, I wouldn’t have remembered these acrobatics he did with us. It’s funny how one forgets. Probably forgetting is the closest thing to death most living people ever know. It isn’t sleep.

  Mom reads to Dayiel. It seems to calm her. Mom tells me about a study that says a little child, from infancy on, should have three books read to it a day. The same study says that any normal child who has had 3,000 bo
oks read to it before going to school will do much better all the way through to university. My God! Three thousand books.

  As Day gets older and the weather improves, Mom takes her into our garden or down by the See to feed the ducks and swans. Day’s great, as long as you don’t try to make her do something she doesn’t want to do, or not let her do something she wants. Then she can be so stubborn I could almost kill her. But Bert and I also love her, despite, or maybe because of, all the devilment she gets into and the constant watching she takes.

  Everything is going along fine, but then I find out I’m pregnant again. Day’s only thirteen months old, and, naturally, still in diapers. Even Bert, who now knows enough about how hard it is to rear a child, is concerned.

  I go to the Frauenklinik and no one is too happy about my having another baby so soon after a Caesarean. But we decide to have it anyway, then Bert will have a vasectomy; or, if it’s possible in the middle of a Caesarean, I’ll have my tubes tied. We’ll never be able to afford rearing more than three kids.

  This time I’m sick from the beginning and I have very low blood pressure. I can hardly eat, and what I eat, I usually throw up. Bert’s worried. He says I ought to consider having an abortion; it isn’t too late.

  I sleep on the idea, but in the morning I know I want this baby. This way all our kids will be in school by the time I’m forty. We can carry on teaching together, maybe even here, at the International School, with the children at the same school with us. It isn’t the way I’d planned it but now it seems like a good idea, if only I can survive another Caesarean.

  Mia is born on December seventeenth. I beg the doctors to let me go home for Christmas Eve, and they agree, but I have to go right back in. On Christmas Day the doctor comes to see me. He says he hated to cut me open again and ruin all that neat embroidery he’d done before but that he’s done just as well this time. He’s thinking about taking up crocheting.