“You’ll be all right again,” she says. “Ignore the light.”
“I can’t get over this feeling that you’re keeping some big secret from me,” Hugh tells her. “What is it? Have you discovered a new planet?”
“Not yet,” she tells him. My brother, my only family, I should tell him I’m pregnant and I’m going to have a baby in two months or less. “I’ve made a new friend,” she says. “A man who makes commercials.”
“Good,” Hugh says. “Well, listen. Take care of yourself, and let me know when you discover that planet. You should name it after me. Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Hugh. Keep me informed.”
“I will.”
She hangs up in a state of pure harmonic relief. Without knowing why it is necessary that Hugh not be told about this child, she thinks: well, from now on he’ll leave my mind alone.
Late in her eighth month, when Dorsey wakes up with another fever, she spends all day lying in bed, sipping water and listening to a classical music station. It is Dvorak’s birthday, so she hears the “New World” Symphony twice, once in the morning and again just before dinnertime. The music makes her homesick for Five Oaks. The next day the fever has not gone down. When Maude Ann comes in at eight o’clock, she aggressively projects a worried look and begs Dorsey to eat an egg, and Dorsey agrees, but when the cup is actually placed in front of her with its gloppy white and semi-liquid yellow, she can’t stand to smell it, much less eat it. Maude Ann threatens to call a doctor in the evening, to drag Dorsey to the emergency room of the hospital, to bathe her forehead with cool wet washcloths. Dorsey says she’s all right. Her body feels violated, but it’s not a feeling she knows how to get rid of.
On the third day of her fever, Dorsey is lying back on the pillows, too hot to stay under even one sheet. The baby is nudging her with soft kicks. She is dozing her way through a thin, superficial dream state that is remarkable at first only for the clarity of its details. She sees a color television bolted to a table and wallpaper with a Venetian canal motif: it’s motel wallpaper, naturally, and in turning around, she sees her brother in the motel room’s bed dozing next to a woman with short brown hair, and, in repose, a kind face: a Girl Scout leader’s face. The woman is not Hugh’s wife. Dorsey is pleased by this sight, by the possibility that her brother is in love with someone other than Laurie, a timid and unaffectionate woman, in Dorsey’s opinion. Well, good for you, Dorsey thinks, watching her brother breathe lightly. The woman next to him shifts her weight in the bed so that her breasts are pressed against him, and Dorsey feels a shiver of pleasure on her brother’s behalf that he has found a lover who, with graceful physical ease, has turned the warmth of herself in his direction.
The contractions start two weeks later in the afternoon during a ten-minute break she has taken from her work to watch a Laurel and Hardy movie, Saps at Sea. She is sitting in the living room in the rattan chair, her favorite for warm weather, and she is laughing quietly when she feels a pair of hands at once take her around the hips and begin to squeeze, gently at first but with conviction. Instantly she looks at her watch—it is twelve minutes past four—and gets out of the chair, pushing herself up with her arms, and wobbles out to the hallway to knock on Maude Ann’s door. She doesn’t answer. Dorsey comes back to her own apartment and sits down on the sofa, next to the telephone. But without Maude Ann, there is no one whom she wants to call except Dr. Hoffmann, whose answering service assures Dorsey that the doctor will call her back very soon.
Every half-hour she checks to see if her friend has returned home, with no luck. When the contractions come in five-minute intervals, she calls the cab company to take her to Findley-Blair County Hospital, where Dr. Hoffmann has told her to go. She tells the cabbie not to speed, that she has plenty of time, but upon seeing her, his eyes widen with panic and the dread of responsibility. In respect, he takes off his cap to show her his bald head. Once en route, he cannot resist hysterical braking stops and prolonged honking at intersections. His hacker’s licence says that he is Alan Chakmadjian. Dorsey looks at his sweating bald head, at the thick hair growing out of his ears. “Mr. Chakmadjian,” she says, “it’s all right. We have plenty of time. I’m not going to have a baby in the back of your taxi.”
The wrong thing to say. He speeds up, brakes harder, swears and mutters. At a suddenly stopped intersection, the small suitcase Dorsey has packed slides off the seat and falls to the floor. She resolves to calm herself and looks out the window, inwardly attentive to her contractions and the slow waves descending from the walls of her uterus to her cervix. Mr. Chakmadjian has chosen a route to the hospital that takes them through franchise alley, past a Hungry Penguin, a United Coney Island, a Midas Muffler and a One-Hour Martinizing, a Burger King and a Heap Big Hamburger. A few trees would have been nice, Dorsey thinks, closing her eyes and imagining a California redwood from north of here and a few elms and maples from the Midwest. Another contraction grips her, and she leans over, remembering to breathe steadily, imagining the maple tree in her parents’ backyard that she and Hugh used to climb. Reflected light from its leaves in the fall would turn the east-facing walls in the kitchen and dining room rust red for two hours in the afternoon. Opening her eyes, seeing an Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, she thinks: we never tapped that tree in the spring, though its bark was sticky with sap; we never did that. Above the fast-food restaurants she tries to find a stretch of sky, but with all the artificial light, no trace of a star is visible, nor is there any sign of the moon, her familiar. At last, beyond some gold arches, she sees the lighted upper floors of the hospital in the distance.
She gives Alan Chakmadjian a generous tip for his passionate driving, and she carries her suitcase through the automatic front doors and into the white-walled and blue-carpeted lobby. Under the badly adjusted color television set, showing cartoons, the men and women waiting in the lobby look at Dorsey, standing alone, and smile before whispering to one another. The children ignore her. Two weeks ago she pre-registered at this desk, so now she simply signs in and is taken after a ten-minute wait to an examining room. No, she says, this birth will not be assisted by the father. She is dilated to three centimeters, a third of the way. A young O.B. nurse, who says her name is Miss Lovingood, wheels her upstairs to the labor room. The hallways fan past her in a hurried, blurred rush of earth-tone paint and glass paneling and doors labeled NO ENTRY through which, she notices vaguely, men who look like doctors, but who may be impersonators, disappear. Each one of the wings is color-coded; they wheel their way through yellow and green before arriving at blue.
Alone, she lies on a white cloth-covered gurney in a vengefully well-lit chrome and tiled-block prenatal room. She’s wearing a hospital gown but doesn’t remember how she got it on. The point is, she thinks, I am doing this by myself. Look: there’s no one here. No man, and no woman. She tries, by herself, to remember the patterns of breathing, the cleansing breath followed by the shorter pants over the wave of the contraction. With her eyes shut and her mouth open, drying out, she tries to tell herself a story about the pain, until the pain magnifies and glistens and lets itself be known as what it is, pain, and not a character in a narrative. Her water breaks after she has made her bent way to the bathroom. In the periods between the contractions she thinks of the astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation. She opens her eyes and stares at a chrome-plated wall switch. An unknown period goes by until a peristaltic wave of pain travels through her lower back and stays there, and she concentrates on the switch, its two screws and beveled edges.
She uses one of the screws as a focus point as she breathes. It’s a dull screw, an ungrateful sight, so she looks above the switch plate at the notice in red letters glued to the wall.
PLEASE TURN OFF LIGHTS
WHEN YOU LEAVE THE ROOM.
SAVE ENERGY!
For the next contraction she focuses on the two Fs in “off.” Then she looks up at the speckled rash on the wall tile, small impurities in the building materia
l or spots where it’s been soaped and not rinsed, and she sees a pattern of five stars like Canis Major, with a large speck on the wall right where Sirius should be, and she imagines the constellation moving out of the sky onto the wall near her gurney for her benefit. Since she can see Canis Major on the wall above the switch, a side view, she focuses on that, and for the next contraction she moves her gaze up the wall to find Canis Minor, the little dog, only two specks. Then, contraction by contraction, by herself, alone in this room (where are the nurses? she wonders; they’ve forgotten about me) she sees on this wall the constellations that are easiest to imagine: Cassiopeia—herself—and the great bear, Draco and King Cepheus.
She tries effleurage on her belly to no effect, and finally Miss Lovingood returns and says Dorsey’s room is ready, but Dr. Hoffmann hasn’t answered the calls, so the delivery will probably be done by Dr. Keenan, a resident. Dorsey is moved onto the bed in her room, and at last she sees a clock. It’s three-thirty in the morning, when every party is over and everyone’s gone home. The contractions are now beginning at her back, achieving full expressionist intensity below her navel, and then waving out in both directions toward her hips. The stars move backwards for a millisecond, and then move forward. Dorsey is full of time. Squeezed into the next contraction, she becomes a narrowing gate where the past and future are meeting. Time is flowing down the walls of the universe into her and then flowing out of her back through her vagina before it streams into the void. For another two hours she is a sentence searching around for its period. The Mississippi River flows backwards, the sun rises—already sick of itself—in the west, and Dr. Keenan says, “Give us a push, Miss Welch.” She can see the period, a dot, to end the sentence, and she tries again. It’s not so tiring as dying, but she couldn’t do this forever. Her feet are freezing. She is cutting her way through thick ropy undergrowth on her way to a clearing. Light is splashing all over her, the light of stars wheeling above her, and then, in great heat, pushing out from under her. She is about to give birth to a ball of light. “Push,” the doctor says. There is a one. Then there is a two. Then there is a three. At last there is a four.
The baby cries, and everyone in the delivery room laughs and congratulates her. They drop the silver nitrate into his eyes, test him and give him an Apgar of seven, and in half an hour Dorsey is back in her room, in the bed, not by herself this time, but with the baby, and a nurse standing in the doorway, watching over them with a smile. It turns out, Dorsey thinks, it turns out that people are acceptable after all. She holds on to the baby. Soon it will have to go back to the nursery. This infant has, is, a tiny replica of her own father’s face. At first she can’t quite believe it, this baby, looking like her father, but there he is, sheared out of time.
“Noah,” she says, unprompted, without thinking.
The next day she calls Hugh first, then Simon.
Dorsey is holding the baby in her arms when Hugh appears, looking exactly like himself, except that he’s carrying some cut flowers, carnations and baby’s breath, probably from the downstairs gift shop. Everything about his face is tentative. How much older he looks! Dorsey thinks. Of course he’s not handsome anymore—he hasn’t really taken care of himself—but at least he still carries around his own personal cloud of friendliness. As he comes closer to her bed, he smiles pleasingly, but he says nothing, as if he needs a prompt. He’s shy! He doesn’t know what to say. So Dorsey speaks up. “I suppose this needs some explanation.”
In his characteristic way, he shakes his head and moves his arms in a don’t-bother gesture. “I’m not clever,” he says, his usual disclaimer. “You know I’m not. You don’t have to explain things to me.” He disposes of the flowers on the windowsill and comes toward the bed to kiss Dorsey on the forehead. His lips leave behind a sensation of tickling pressure after he’s straightened up again. “Your baby is beautiful,” he says, his calmest tone. “He looks a lot like Daddy.”
“I know.” She waits. “You like the name?”
“Noah.” He nods. “Yes, I do. It’s a beautiful name.”
She is suddenly warmed by the presence in this room of her brother and her new baby. “Oh, love,” she says, “thank you for coming.” She feels tears threatening, and with her free hand she reaches out and squeezes him on the wrist. “I mean,” she falters, “with no grandparents, or parents, or cousins, you’re the only … the only …”
“The word is ‘family.’ ”
“Is it? Well, thank you anyway.”
“You’re welcome.” She slips her hand into his, feeling the old thickness of his fingers, their dull strength. “I can’t stay for more than a couple of days, just long enough to get you back to your place and set up.”
“That’s fine,” she says, not really wanting to ask him to do more than be around for a day or so. “The baby’s healthy. We’ll be going home today.”
“There’s something I want to ask you,” Hugh says, his face taking on its Serious Look, its investigator’s peer. “I’ll just ask you once, and you don’t have to tell me, but I want to do this, and then I won’t bother you again.” She sees him touch the baby’s forehead; everything he does is so tentative! “Will you tell me who the father is?”
Dorsey gazes at the sunlight, thinking of her baby and Carlo Pavorese. “Do you remember calling me and asking me who I was seeing? You said I was seeing this person, somehow.”
Hugh shakes his head.
“You said,” Dorsey continues, “that I was seeing somebody who had bad teeth and was maybe tall. I swear I don’t know how you knew.”
“I don’t remember any of this.”
“You don’t have to. You won’t ever meet him. I won’t let you. He’s a strange, wonderful, terrible man. I’ll say his name and then I won’t ever say it again. All right?”
He nods.
She speaks his name, then closes her eyes. She can see the old man in front of a classroom, robed in the light he himself has generated out of the power of his mind, and then the image of the fond old man is absorbed, slowly and then with increasing speed, by fire, until there is nothing left of him in her mind but ash.
IV
10
Hugh sits with his mother and father on metal folding chairs near the front of the Five Oaks High School gymnasium. The school has no auditorium, so graduation ceremonies are always held here in early June, the Five Oaks rainy season. Everyone in town connects graduation with the smell of varnish and the sound of the graduating girls’ high heels clacking on the slatted wood floors. Looking at his watch, Hugh wonders if the school superintendent, Mr. Vermilya, will misplace his reading glasses again, as he did at Hugh’s own graduation five years ago. His watch bores him, so he glances up at the basketball hoops that have been lifted on cable pulleys so that the backboards face the ceiling. The scoreboard is in its usual place, attached to the wall above and behind the stage.
VISITORS HOME
00 00
Hugh’s father clears his throat nervously. Dorsey is the class valedictorian and will be giving a speech.
“Come on, Dad,” Hugh says, turning to give his father moral support and a grown-up pantomime punch on the arm. “She’ll do a terrific job. It’s a good speech.”
Hugh’s father turns his hands over; the palms are damp, little rivers of sweat in the lifelines. “Of course it’s a good speech,” Hugh’s father says. “It better be. I helped her write it.”
The band strikes up “Pomp and Circumstance” at five minutes past one o’clock, and the graduating class marches in, the boys in black robes and the girls in white. Dorsey, wearing a small flower at the front of her robe—Hugh can’t tell what it is—walks in near the head of the line, carrying her speech and displaying her brave smile. She sits at the aisle side of the front row, for easy access to the stage. Hugh’s mother scrabbles in her purse for a piece of Kleenex; then, with furious gestures, she begins to clean the lenses of her glasses. “Urk,” she says, for no particular reason that Hugh knows of. She repeats the
sound, as if she had been right the first time. “Urk.”
“Whattarya doin’, Mom?” Hugh whispers.
From the side of his mouth, Hugh’s father, arms now crossed, says, “Your mother is making a peculiar sound. This is a sentimental moment for her, and she has the right to make such sounds. I think you should leave her alone.”
“I’m just cleaning my glasses,” Mrs. Welch whispers vehemently. She puts them back on and gives Hugh a sharp unmotherly look before checking the stage and the front row of seniors, Dorsey’s row. She gives the impression that her head is being buzzed by a mosquito. “Goodness,” she says. “What a large pile of diplomas.”
“It’s a big town. They have one for everybody who graduates,” Mr. Welch mutters.
“I know that!” she says, batting his arm with the program. “Shh!”
The audience rises while the Reverend Ewald Valentine reads the invocation. Hugh’s father and mother do not look down at their shoes as do most of the members of the audience. They watch Mr. Valentine with skeptical expressions, as if he were doing something silly, and in public. The minister is asking God to look down upon these children who will go forth from this room as men and women, no longer children except to God Himself. “What’s the matter with him?” Mrs. Welch whispers. “Doesn’t he read the newspapers?” Hugh has tuned out of both the invocation and his mother’s quips and is instead paying close attention to a girl sitting on the outside row of the clarinet section in the band: she has dirty blond hair and a free-thinking smirk. Hugh looks at her, and after a few seconds she looks back at him. It’s easy for Hugh to get girls to look at him. He flashes the dirty blonde his killer smile, then waits for her to grin. Right on cue, she almost does. Goddamn jail bait, he thinks. I wonder what her name is.