Deadline

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “They’re probably all here by now. I’ll ask if it’s okay with them if you join us. Back in a minute.” Scanlon headed to the door.

  “Uh, okay.”

  Jake had the distinct feeling this whole day was going according to someone else’s plan. He knew for certain it was not going according to his.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The five men in Dr. Scanlon’s therapy room were an odd assortment. Two wore business suits. Jake assumed theyd come straight from downtown office jobs. From the cut of the suits he guessed one, the graying midfifties one on the left end of the couch, was a corporate executive. The other, on the opposite end, the meticulous ruddy-faced Ivy Leaguer with gleaming wire-rimmed glasses, had to be a lawyer. A tall long-faced man in old saggy Levis and tattered Reeboks sat on the same elegant white flecked couch, between the suits.

  In a separate chair that matched the couch sat a young man, perhaps twenty-five, in off-white slacks and a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt. The other, in an identical chair, was a very big man with powerful shoulders, dressed in gray slacks and a maroon sweater with an open collared gray dress shirt underneath.

  Dr. Scanlon pointed Jake to a third matching chair. Then the doctor took what appeared to be his customary seat at the far end, a sculptured wooden chair next to a coffee table, where he put down his notepad and pen.

  “Gentlemen, Jake Woods. Some of you read his column in the Tribune. Nothing you say today will leave this room without your specific permission, unless it’s sufficiently disguised to preclude any possible identification. Right, Jake?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’m not going to ask you to introduce yourselves, but feel free to use first names, and if you want to allude to your occupation or background or whatever, that’s fine. In other words, the usual ground rules apply.

  “The guys have agreed to have you here, Jake, because one of the things we’ve discovered is that we all share a desire to get the word out on this thing. We wish we’d heard about it ourselves, and maybe things would have been different.” Scanlon turned his eyes from Jake back to the others.

  “So, I think the best thing we can do is, everybody share your own story briefly. Bob, why don’t you start?” Bob was the man in the suit Jake had labeled the corporate executive.

  “Well, my wife got pregnant when she was forty. The whole idea cramped my style. Our youngest was in high school, and we were on the verge of freedom. We knew we wouldn’t have more children, and…suddenly, there we were. I felt like we didn’t have the energy to start over. I was kind of embarrassed, too. Kids are okay, in a limited quantity and at a certain time in your life, but in my circles it’s frowned on to have too many or have them too late. We already had three, and the childbearing years were long past.

  “The pregnancy surprised Donna, but I could see she was pleased. She told me later of course she was pleased, the way every woman is when she’s pregnant because she knows she was uniquely made to be a mother, and this is her highest destiny.”

  He looked tentatively at Jake, knowing he’d said something that might sound suspect.

  “Keep in mind I’m quoting Donna, that’s what she told me. I know it doesn’t fit what we generally think about women anymore, but that’s what she said…after it was too late.

  “I wasn’t just disappointed, I was determined to stop this situation in its tracks. I started talking about the risks to Donna, said she was too old, that the baby could be deformed, that a child deserved younger parents, and on and on. I even got the doctor to tell her the chances were higher for Down’s Syndrome and all kinds of horrible things, even though the truth was it was still a very small risk. It was all an excuse, of course. I just didn’t want the inconvenience.

  “Donna turned sullen, but she knew I always get my way, so she went along with the abortion. That was six years ago. Our life hasn’t been the same since. As she put it, part of her died the day she got the abortion. When she craved my love and support, I wasn’t there for her or the baby. She needed me to stand with her, to reassure her, to be proud of her, to be excited about our baby. She told me later I’d refused to even acknowledge it was a child, much less my child. She said I didn’t want a baby that was the ultimate expression of our marriage, our love for each other. And she was right on all accounts. She took it personally. It hurt her…I hurt her…more deeply than anything I could ever imagine.

  “After the abortion came the attempts at compensation. I took her to Hawaii, bought her a new BMW, tried to prove my love with money. But I’d already shown her what I was made of. I wasn’t a man. I was a coward, a self-centered pig.”

  Jake moved back in his chair at this blunt self-characterization of a man he’d never have suspected would think of himself in such terms.

  “She lost respect for me, totally. She finally told me that. And she lost respect for herself too. She was terrified our other kids would find out, still is. She feels she couldn’t face them if they knew we killed their little brother or sister. I tell you, the last few years have been hell.”

  A man obviously used to being in control, he shook his head at how out of control life had become.

  “Ditto,” the guy in the Packers sweatshirt chimed in. “We were on the front end of a family, but it was the same story for us. We were going to get married, but not yet. I didn’t feel we were ready. Besides, we wanted Sally to work so we could combine our incomes and get a decent house. The baby was there and I should have taken the responsibility, but I wanted a house first. Funny, we got our house, but no children to live in it. Sally can’t have children now. We found out that happens after abortions sometimes. They can cause infertility. It was mentioned in the fine print on that long form we signed, but of course we didn’t read it. Who wants to think about it? You just want it over with. We weren’t willing to take the child that was given us, so we can never have another one. If it wasn’t so tragic, it’d be funny, huh?”

  He was looking at Jake, but Jake didn’t respond.

  “We’ve gone through a lot of serious problems. I’ve been angry, really angry. For a long time I blamed the clinic. I wanted to kill those jerks, because they had to know better. Things have improved since we both started therapy, but you look back and always think how it could have been. We’re on an adoption waiting list now, have been for three years. Strange to be waiting so long when so many people are getting abortions every day. I want to say, ‘Hey, save yourself incredible misery, make us ecstatically happy, and let a child live and grow up in a home where he’ll be loved.’ Sounds like an ‘everybody wins’ situation to me. I’m so tired of hearing people talk about unwanted children when we’ve desperately wanted a child for years.”

  There was a long silence. Dr. Scanlon seemed comfortable with the silence, much more than Jake. Finally the doctor nodded at the man on the middle of the couch.

  “Clay?”

  The lanky, long-faced guy in the old Levis and Reeboks appeared almost in a daze. He said nothing for some time, long enough that Jake doubted whether Clay had heard the doctor say his name. Then suddenly he looked up and asked in a slow and measured, almost self-tortured voice, “Do you remember the date? I always remember the date. July 14, 1991. I didn’t remember the date till a year later. Didn’t even think about it. Till I came home from my swing shift at the store and found my wife lying on the floor next to an empty pill bottle. I called 911 and they came and took her in, pumped her stomach. The doctor said, ‘We’ve put Mrs. Dalinger on suicide watch.’ My wife on suicide watch.”

  Clay hung his head as if the disbelief was as fresh today as back then.

  “When I asked her why she did this, she told me it was the one year anniversary of the abortion. She was hurt that I didn’t even know it. I didn’t think anybody kept track of dates like that—I mean, it wasn’t like a birthday or Christmas. She kept saying ‘Our baby would be walking by now,’ and then ‘She’d probably be saying Mama now.’ It was torture
. She wouldn’t forget. By then I couldn’t forget either. I guess you’d say we became obsessed, right Doc?”

  Doctor Scanlon gave an affirming look.

  “Five months after the anniversary of the abortion she left me. December 14, 1991. I tried to see her, but she got a restraining order. She wouldn’t talk to me. She was drinking all the time and getting into drugs. I tried to talk her into getting help, but she wouldn’t. She said she could never put the abortion behind her unless she put me behind her. Got a restraining order against me, said I was bugging her. And then…”

  Clay suddenly let loose a sob from deep inside. Twenty seconds later he spoke again. “July 14, 1993. The second anniversary of the abortion. They found her in her apartment. She killed herself.”

  Jake felt like he’d been slapped in the face. Everyone knew this story but him. Yet there wasn’t a dry eye, not even Dr. Scanlon’s. Everyone waited for Clay to regain his composure.

  “So I lost her. I lost Janet. Because of that stinking abortion.”

  “Did you say Janet?” Jake blurted it out, and was immediately sorry.

  “Yeah. Why?” Clay’s eyes looked defensive and suspicious.

  “Oh, nothing. I know a Janet, a different Janet. I just happened to be thinking about her. Sorry. Go on.”

  Clay looked at Jake uncertainly. Jake sat embarrassed and self-conscious. He consoled himself that if ever he’d been with a group of men where he didn’t have to protect his image, it was this one.

  “We both decided to get the abortion,” Clay continued, “but I could have talked her out of it. I know I could have. I didn’t know better, I honestly didn’t, I swear to God I didn’t. They told us it wasn’t a real baby, that it was a blob of flesh. Two or three weeks later I was in line at the supermarket and I saw the cover of Life magazine. August 1991. Funny how all these dates stick in my mind now. As I stood waiting to buy a gallon of milk and a six pack, I looked at the pictures inside the magazine. They had to do a price check for the woman in front of me, and I was stuck in line flipping through that magazine, picture after picture. I read the captions: And I knew without a doubt ‘it’ wasn’t an it. It was a he or she, a real baby. There was no doubt. Heartbeat, brain waves, fingers, toes. It was a baby.”

  The word baby hung out in the center of the room as if suspended from the ceiling. Jake’s chest felt like a thousand-pound weight was pressing against it. He didn’t remember the date. He wondered if Janet did.

  With a zombie-like expression Clay said to Jake, “Tell the men.”

  Jake gave him a questioning look.

  “In your newspaper, tell the men that they lie to you. They lie to your girl friend, they lie to your wife, and they lie to you, and you don’t find out till it’s too late. Tell them. Somebody has to tell them.”

  Clay wasn’t crying. He seemed a hollow man who had no tears left. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “And they lie about your mother too.”

  His mother? What did his mother have to do with it?

  Dr. Scanlon paused almost’as if he was going to ask Clay to elaborate, but instead he looked over at the guy in the maroon sweater, who was quietly sobbing. The crying was incongruous; this was the man in the group Jake would have picked out as the resident stud. Now probably in his early thirties, he was easily 6’5” and 270 pounds of muscle. His impossibly broad shoulders looked even broader as he hunched them forward into the room, powerful arms propped under his square jaw and thick neck. Obviously a college football player, Jake guessed maybe from Nebraska or Ohio State, where they grew the farm boys so big half the team looked like the product of selective breeding.

  The thought of football brought up images of Doc and Finney, high school football, and the state championship. Then more football with his buddies at Bosworth College. And the last twenty years as weekend warriors, playing football or shooting hoops over at City Park, and being stiff and sore for the next three days, but not admitting it. Competing together, working together, sweating together, laughing together. It stung him violently, he missed “together” so much.

  The big man shook his head softly toward Dr. Scanlon and riveted his eyes to the floor. Jake felt a sense of loss. He really wanted to hear this man’s story. The wanting surprised him. This was exactly the kind of situation he’d always dreaded. It repulsed him, this touchy-feely stuff. It seemed effeminate and self-indulgent. Years ago he’d heard and read that as a modern man he was supposed to make himself sensitive and vulnerable. He even tried it for a few weeks. But he decided it wasn’t for him. Women were sensitive and vulnerable. He was a man. If he ever decided that wasn’t good enough, he could always have a sex change operation.

  As he’d read about the men’s movement, guys getting around in circles beating drums and telling their stories to each other, it had seemed so silly. Yet here and now, in this room, something tugged at him, drew him in. He felt something here he’d felt with Doc and Finney. Something he’d felt in sports, high school and college, and in the military. Almost daily in that one year in Nam, that year when the world was reduced to the man on his right and the man on his left. These men in this room—Bob the executive and Clay the sad one and the nameless athlete and the other two—perhaps had nothing else in common, but their experiences made them soul-mates, threw them together as Jake had been thrown together with Slider, Harvey, Chavez, and others in that Asian jungle. There was something surfacing in this room that society had denied men, stripped away from them. And there was something oddly refreshing and therapeutic about it. Jake pondered all this in the continued silence of the room, a silence he began to grow more comfortable with.

  Finally, the fifth man, the one in wire-rimmed glasses Jake had pegged as a lawyer, spoke up.

  “Well, for me it was two abortions, two different girls. One in high school, the other in college. I told myself I was doing the responsible thing. My dad paid for the first one, I paid for the second. I told myself I was protecting their reputations. That’s funny. I guess the way you protect a girl’s reputation is to not sleep with her in the first place, huh? But that was the way of the sixties. ‘Free love, free sex.’ What a joke. Have it now, pay for it later, that’s what it really was. And no one ever told me about the interest rates, and how they keep accumulating the rest of your life, and you can never pay off that debt.”

  He cleared his throat again and laughed half-heartedly. “There’s an irony in that, now that I’m a tax attorney.”

  Bingo.

  “It didn’t hit me until our ten-year high school reunion. I was so glad to be with everybody again. See, I’d gone back east to college, so I’d missed all the homecomings and everything. I had such great memories of high school. I was student body president, all-state point guard, the whole deal. It was local boy makes good in the big time. Then at the reunion I saw Linda, she’d been a cheerleader—you know, the storybook romance. But the moment I saw her there was such an emptiness, such a shame between us. It took my breath away. I was totally unprepared. My wife was talking to someone else at the other corner of the room, and I was so glad because I couldn’t stand the idea of her and Linda even meeting each other.

  “Everybody standing around Linda and I kept saying they were so surprised the two of us didn’t end up together, and we still made such a cute couple. But both of us were so uncomfortable. When people backed away I started talking about superficial stuff, just like a guy, right?”

  A couple of the men chuckled.

  “Then she started crying. I could tell she was thinking about…our secret. Then she came right out and said it—‘Do you ever think about our baby?’

  “It blew me away. I was angry. It spoiled the whole reunion for me. I’d lived with this denial, always pushing it out of my mind. Whenever the prochoice issue came up, in college or at work or anywhere, I’d wax eloquent about the woman’s right to choose, like I was some great women’s advocate. And I’d refuse to listen to any evidence to the contrary. The truth was I was trying to convince myself. I
even joined a prochoice march and screamed at a group of prolifers. What’s that Shakespeare line? ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’? Sometimes we argue most heatedly for things we want to believe but really don’t. I wanted to believe what my sign and my bumper sticker said, because if it wasn’t true, it meant I had killed two innocent children. I just couldn’t live with that.

  “I guess I should explain the second abortion. It was with my wife, our junior year of college, a year before we were married. When we get introduced somewhere I always cringe when someone asks ‘And how many children do you have?’ My wife says one, but I know what she’s thinking, even though we never talk about it, I mean never. She’s thinking what I’m thinking. The answer is really two. There were two of them. But now there’s just one. If you had a child who died as a six-year-old, you could say ‘We have one child now, our daughter, but we had a son who died a few years ago.’ People would say ‘I’m sorry,’ but you wouldn’t be hiding anything. They’d know the truth. But we can’t tell them the truth. We have to lie. Because how can you admit the reason the other child died?”

  Jake felt connected to this man. His honesty, his ability to express himself. He was the sort of man who could have been his friend. Jake realized as he sat there he hadn’t had many close friends, and since Doc and Finney had died there was almost no one. Who was his closest friend, who could he really talk to? Ollie? Or Clarence—yeah, maybe Clarence. He missed feeling part of a platoon, being with men who shared the same sense of mission and destiny, who depended on each other to make it through the day and the night.

  “Our daughter is in seventh grade now. Her brother or sister would be a freshman in high school. I wonder if he’d be a basketball player, like I was. Or a four-point student like his mom. Maybe he’d find the cure for cancer or AIDS. I’ve found it real hard to bond with my daughter. Dr. Scanlon helped me see I’ve guarded myself against a close relationship with her because of what I did to my other children. At first that made no sense to me, but now it does. It’s hard for some parents to fully give themselves to one child when they’ve taken the life of another. It’s hard for me. I love her so much, but I have a real hard time showing it.”