“Daddy?”
“What?”
“How soon will we go?”
“Right after breakfast,” his father says.
With the dirty dishes left to soak in soapsuds, and Hugh sporting a clean shirt, the boy and his father leave for the hospital. Hugh sits in front for once. The dashboard is so high he has to stretch to see out into the long passageway of the streets, even to see the sun running through the leaves of the trees passing overhead as they turn and shift into a lower gear for the short blocks of the white and blue and green houses of Five Oaks. It’s hard to remember ever being up this early, seeing almost no one awake, no one tending the yards or the stores, and, when they drive by the lake, no one out there fishing or water skiing, and no one swimming. He watches the telephone and electrical wires yanked up by the poles, again and again, and his father looks over at him.
“Are you excited?”
“I guess so.”
“She’s beautiful. You’re going to love her.”
“I know.”
“You’ll see. Don’t worry. You’ve never been in a hospital before, have you?”
“No.”
“It’s not so scary. Really, it isn’t. You’ll get used to it right away.”
“Is Mommy okay?”
“She fine. She can’t wait to see you. She asked me last night to tell you how much she was looking forward to seeing you this morning.”
“Is Grandma going to be there?”
“No. She’s home for the day.”
On Hugh’s right is a front yard where a collie sits, wagging its tail and smiling at them as they drive by. And there, past the blocks where the houses stop, is the lake, so bright it hurts Hugh’s eyes to see the sun reflecting off its blue surface. What will he tell his sister once she’s old enough to talk? He can’t think of a single thing he’ll say to her. She might not like him. She might go through life ignoring him and thinking he’s a creep. And here is a grove of pine trees, as they pass the outskirts of town, and an auto junkyard with broken pieces of Kaisers and Frasers and Studebakers and Hudsons and Buicks and Packards, and there is the county hospital, three floors high, white cement and glass, set back with a long sidewalk from its parking lot, where Hugh’s father parks the Nash two spaces away from anybody else.
“You do this,” his father tells him, “and they don’t bang their doors against you when they open them.” Hugh doesn’t know what his father is talking about.
Hugh sees that his father’s hand is trembling. He has butterflies in his own stomach. Standing in his clean shirt and pressed pants and black shoes out in the light of the parking lot, light that hurts his eyes so much he has to shade them with his hands to see his father standing there looking at him, he hears his father say, “Well, shall we go in, Chief?” Hugh has an odd spinning feeling. But it’s a slow spin, a turning sensation, not enough to make you sick and not like what the kids do at birthday parties where they blindfold you and whip you around so you get dizzy and can’t pin the tail on the donkey. This is more like someone rotating your whole body so slowly that you can’t quite notice where you’re being turned, or how. Then Hugh knows what it is. What he feels is the earth itself, turning, moving from night into day, and then from day into night. He feels it under his feet.
“Are you coming, kiddo?” his father asks, looking back at him. “Are you coming in to see her, or are you just going to stand here?” His father takes his hand. He closes his fingers around his father’s hand and watches with admiration as his father pulls out a cigarette with his other hand from his jacket pocket, puts it in his mouth, and, still with one hand, removes his Zippo lighter and, quicker than it takes to hear the click of the lid being opened and the flint struck, the cigarette is lit, and puffed from, and, as soon as they are inside the front doors of the hospital, snuffed out in the big standing ashtray in the front waiting room.
With one breath, Hugh knows this is a terrible place. The hospital smells of terror and pain. It’s not true that this hospital is not scary, and it’s not just the disinfectant, either, which he has smelled in Dr. Greene’s office. This is another smell, a basement smell, a pipes and plumbing smell, but worse, much worse than that, because it makes Hugh’s hair stand up, even as he walks with his father down the yellow hallways, past the front desk and the smiling receptionist who sees his father but not him, over the linoleum that smells of being scared and lonely and being left here to die.
His father opens a door to the stairway, and Hugh goes inside. The stairs are gray; they rise until they reach the wall, and then they turn around and go in the other direction. There’s a bare light bulb on the ceiling, and it makes his father’s shadow stretch out as they climb the stairs to the second floor. There are big pipes in the corner, where the stairs turn, and Hugh can hear water rushing downward toward the ground.
At the second level Hugh’s father holds the door open, and there they are, but when one of the nurses sees Hugh she shakes her head. “No children,” she says. “No children on this floor.” Then she looks over at Hugh’s father and smiles. “Bill,” she says, and Hugh’s father calls the nurse by her first name. They talk for a moment, and the nurse disappears and then returns with a surgical mask with which she covers Hugh’s nose and mouth. “So you don’t spread germs,” she says. “This one time.” Hugh doesn’t want to get dizzy, because if the dizziness overcomes him, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.
“What’s that smell?” he asks, puffing out the mask with his voice, as they pass by flowers in a vase at the nurses’ station. He raises his voice. “Daddy, what’s that smell?”
“Pretty bad, isn’t it?” his father says. “It’s ether. They don’t use it much here. They use it in the operating rooms, but not for mothers. They use it on other people.”
They’re passing by rooms now, rooms with their doors shut, and a few rooms with their doors open, but Hugh won’t look inside past those doors and into those rooms, where terrible people are lying on their backs, gasping and holding out their hands for him to take, to pull him into their beds and make him lie down with them, breathing their terrible breath all over him, touching him with their scars. Hugh almost wants to run out, but his father still has him clutched, and where would he run to? The sun is shining through all the windows on the hallway’s east side, throwing slatted light on the floor like horizontal flattened picket fences that Hugh must walk through to get to the room where his mother lies. She will be lying back in bed, he knows: her eyes closed, her face gone white, and this baby beside her that she and his father have somehow brought from somewhere into this world.
His father stops near a corner area of the hospital where they have set out hard green chairs for visitors near a window that looks out on trees and nothing. His father squats down and faces Hugh. He’s going to tell Hugh how to act. What not to say. But no: in a voice dropped so low that Hugh can hardly hear it, his father tells Hugh that he loves him, he will always love him, that he is a wonderful boy and he has a sister now, and he’ll have to love her and take care of her. And Hugh, behind his surgical mask, says, “Daddy, what did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything,” his father says. “Let’s go in.”
The fingers of his father’s left hand curl into the palm; the hand, now a fist, knocks once, twice, on the door to the room, Number 252, and Hugh hears his mother’s voice say, “Come in.” The hand uncurls and pushes at the door, and from right to left his mother’s room becomes visible at last.
“My two men,” his mother says, smiling. She looks at Hugh. “My two masked men.” Beyond his mother’s bed is another window, like the others facing east into the sun, and though it is partially curtained, sunlight is streaming, rushing, cascading, from behind his mother into the room, lighting each one of its corners and its objects: the glass of water, the box of bedside tissues, the table-lamp-sized vase of cut flowers on the windowsill, red and white flowers whose names Hugh doesn’t know. They might be roses, roses for love. “Hugh,” his mo
ther says. “Don’t stand there back by the door. Come in. Come see.” She smiles again, a smile as disturbing as his father’s statement that he loves him, because he hasn’t done anything to earn the smile, but now he walks forward into the room, the sunlight from the window hurting his eyes. Why don’t they do something to keep the sun out of these rooms? His mother is wearing white hospital clothes, and something has happened to her eyes, even though she’s smiling now. Her hair’s combed a new and oddly different way, pulled straight back and hardly parted at all. Her skin is terribly pale.
“Mom,” Hugh says, rushing forward to kiss her.
But now, at this moment frozen in sunlight, he sees her, inside his mother’s right arm, asleep. Hugh stops, stilled. He sees the tufts of blond hair on his sister’s head, and as his mother holds his sister up a little so that he can see her better, lifting her up into the sunlight that courses straight through her hair, he hears her say, “This is Dorsey.”
“Dorsey,” Hugh repeats.
“We named her last night,” Hugh’s father says, from behind him. “Come closer, Hugh. Come closer.”
His feet take him nearer the bed. He looks up toward his mother. “Can I see her hands?” he asks.
“Of course,” his mother says. With slow care, she unwraps the blanket and covering from around the baby’s arms, first the right arm and then the left. His sister’s skin in the morning sunlight is almost yellow, with small streaks of purple. Hugh feels himself moving toward her, and as he says her name, “Dorsey,” he holds his right hand out, his index finger pointing down. His sister’s skin is the quietest human thing he’s ever seen: it hardly seems part of the world at all. She yawns, opening and closing her hands, tiny, the size of toy glass marbles. “Come closer,” his mother says again, her voice not coming from her mouth but from the room itself, the earth, the air, and with his right hand in front of him, the index finger still pointing out and down, he reaches forward and, with unpracticed tenderness, touches his sister’s hand for the first time.
ALSO BY CHARLES BAXTER
BELIEVERS
Charles Baxter has established himself as a contemporary literary master in the traditions of Raymond Carver, William Maxwell, and Alice Munro. This radiant collection confirms Baxter’s ability to revel in the surfaces of seemingly ordinary lives while uncovering their bedrock of passion, madness, levity, and grief. The seven stories and the novella in Believers introduce people who walk the razor’s edge between despair and faith: the young woman with a sweetly nurturing boyfriend who may have a secret history of violence; the housewife whose upstairs neighbor is either a child-killer or a pathetic fabulist; the man trying to discover the truth about his father, a Catholic priest whose involvement with a sinister wealthy couple toppled him from grace. Perfectly modulated, unerringly seen, and written in prose of transparent beauty, Believers is storytelling at its finest.
Fiction/Literature
THE FEAST OF LOVE
Late one night, Charlie Baxter comes upon Bradley W. Smith, a friend and fellow insomniac, who convinces Charlie to listen to the first of many tales that will become a luminous narrative of love in all its sublime, agonizing, and eternal complexity. We meet Kathryn, Bradley’s first wife, who leaves her husband for a woman, and Diana, Bradley’s second wife, whose cold, secretive nature makes her a more suitable mistress than a spouse. We meet Chloé and Oscar, whose dreams for their future together are more traditional than their body piercings and wild public displays of affection might suggest. We meet Esther and Harry Ginsberg whose love for their lost son persists despite his hatred of them. And we follow Bradley, ex-husband, employer, and friend, on his journey toward conjugal happiness. The community of souls in The Feast of Love is unforgettable—as is the perfect symphony their harmonized voices create.
Fiction/Literature
HARMONY OF THE WORLD
In these ten stories, Charles Baxter shows his genius in making his characters’ everyday sufferings—and occasional fragile joys—seem utterly unprecedented, even as he reminds us, gently and with a sly comic twist, that everything they feel is only the collateral damage of being human. Whether he is writing about the players in a rickety bisexual love triangle or a woman visiting her husband in a nursing home, probing the psychic mainspring of a grimly obsessive weight lifter or sifting through the layers of resentment, need, and pity in a friendship that has gone on a few decades too long, Baxter enchants us with the elegant balance of his prose and the unexpectedness of his insights.
Fiction/Literature
THROUGH THE SAFETY NET
A contemporary master of short fiction dives into the undercurrents of middle-class American life in these eleven arresting, often mesmerizing stories. Whether they know it or not, Baxter’s characters are floating above an abyss of unruly desire, inexplicable dread, unforeseen tragedy, and sudden moments of grace. A drunken graduate student hurtles cheerfully through a snowstorm to rescue a fiancée who no longer wants him. A hospital maintenance worker makes a perverse bid for his place in the sunlight of celebrity. A man and a woman who have lost their only child cling fiercely to the one thing they have left of her—their grief. Lit by the quiet lightning of Baxter’s prose, Through the Safety Net is filled with rare artistry and feeling.
Fiction/Literature
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
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Charles Baxter, First Light
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