Terri rambled on about sweet babies in cradles surrounded by squeaking Donald Ducks and pink rattles. Mary Kate’s eyes never moved.
“This,” Joe said very quietly, “finishes it.”
Parks hadn’t heard him. He leaned over and said, “What’d you say, old buddy?”
He could no longer contain the rage. It was blood-boiling, bursting behind his eyes; it was bile that gathered in his stomach and rocketed, geyserlike, toward his mouth. It overcame him and suddenly he was standing, his eyes hot and wild, the glass of wine leaving his hand. The glass shattered with a loud, pistol-like crack! and wine smeared along the wall like a thick track of blood. It ran down in rivulets to an oval pool on the floor.
Terri squealed as if someone had struck her. She sat, her upper torso swaying slightly, giddy on her one glass of wine.
Joe stood staring at the eye of blood. His arms hung limply at his sides; he no longer seemed to have any muscle. The act of throwing the glass had drained him of all energy. Now even his speech was faint and weak: “I… I’ve made a mess. I’ve have to clean it up.”
A moment before, a candle had burned within him, something to warm him and give strength to go forward. Now someone had suddenly put it out; he seemed to smell the sharp odor of a smoking wick. He stared dumbly at the broken glass and the pool of wine until Mary Kate went to the kitchen and returned with paper towels and trash can and began to clean the floor.
Parks was struggling to maintain a smile. It was awkward and lopsided. His bewildered eyes made him look wild and embarrassed, as if he had just stepped onstage without knowing what the play was about. He took his wife’s arm and stood up. “We’d better go,” he said apologetically. “Joe, call me, okay? About your classes?”
Joe nodded.
Terri said to Mary Kate, “I think it’s wonderful. I hope he’s not too upset. Men are like that.”
“Good night,” said Parks, pushing his wife ahead of him, and Mary Kate closed the door after them.
She stood with her back to the wall, watching him as he continued nodding at his absent friend’s last question.
“A month?” he asked her finally, avoiding her face. Instead he studied the red drops that slowly ran the length of the wall. “A whole month and you didn’t tell me before this?”
“I didn’t know how to—”
He looked at her, his eyes burning. Over his shoulder King Kong glowered at her as well. “That’s impossible. Unless you’ve been lying to me about taking the Pill. You were lying to me, weren’t you? Goddammit!”
“No,” she said softly. “I haven’t been lying.”
“I don’t care about that now!” His anger sparked again. He took a step forward and she realized, with the harsh coldness of fear, that she was trapped against the wall. She had seen him lose his temper before. Once, after a heated telephone argument with her father over money, he had torn the telephone from the wall and smashed it to the floor; he had jerked lamps up off tables and hurled them crashing across the room until finally she left the apartment, wandering for two days until found by a police officer in the park. She had always been afraid of his unrestrained anger, though he had never before raised a hand to her. Now his red-rimmed eyes glared vengefully.
“I want to know,” he said in a loud, ragged voice, “when you decided we’d have a child! I want to know when you decided to forget every goddamned thing I have ever told you about our having a child!”
“I always took my pills,” she said. “Always. I promise.”
“Shit!” he yelled at her, and the word was like a hand across her cheek. She winced from the blow and stood breathless. He reached out for an ashtray, a ceramic bowl that had been given to them as a wedding gift by one of her uncles, and tensed to smash it across through the kitchen and into the far wall. The weight of it in his hand made him suddenly stop, realizing the utter futility of shattering bits of clay to avenge his bitter disappointment and, worse, to dispel his conviction that she had finally, utterly, overstepped her bounds. He let the ashtray drop to the floor and stood, his chest heaving, too confused and angry to do anything.
She sensed a gap in the tension. “I swear to you,” she said quickly before his anger could peak again, “I’ve never missed my pills. I don’t know. I felt that I should have an examination about two weeks ago and the doctor told me. I got the bill out of the box before you could find it and paid it myself.”
“He’s wrong!” said Joe. “The doctor is wrong!”
“No,” she said. “No.”
He sat down slowly on the sofa and put his face in his hands. “You don’t get pregnant unless you… Shit. Oh man. Mary Kate, I cannot afford this. I’ll go under… I swear before God I’ll go under!”
She waited until she felt certain that his anger had subsided. She came over and quietly knelt on the floor beside him, taking his hands and pressing them against her cheek. “We can get a loan. Maybe from my father.”
“Sure,” he said. “He won’t let me have a dime!”
“I’ll talk to him. I mean it.”
He shrugged. After a moment he said, “You’ll talk to him?”
“We can get a loan from him and we’ll be okay,” Mary Kate said. “It’ll be rough; we know it will be. But other people have kids and they make it. They scrimp and save like hell but they do make it, Joe.”
He withdrew his hands and looked down into her innocent, wide-eyed face. Through tightly drawn lips he said, “I don’t mean a loan to keep the child, Mary Kate. I mean a loan for an abortion.”
“Goddamn you!” she cried out, drawing away from him. The tears burst from her eyes and streamed down over her cheeks. “No abortion! Nobody in the world could make me go through that!”
“You’re not going to break me,” he snarled bitterly at her. “That’s what you want to do! You want to finish my ass off!”
“No,” she said, her teeth clenched. “No abortion. I mean it. I don’t care what I have to do. I’ll work a double shift, night and day. I’ll sell my blood, I’ll sell my body. I don’t care. No abortion.”
Joe faced her, his lips working but no words coming out. He wondered if this was what made so many men just walk out the door and never come back, this sudden and terrible power she had obtained, this awesome force that came with the knowledge that she harbored a child in her body. The King is dead. Long live the Queen. But when the hell did I die? he asked himself. Two years ago? A minute ago? When?
Something was working its way out from a deep place of tissues and bone. It swam up through her blood and surfaced across her face. It distorted her features and left her glowering at him like an animal. She said, “The baby is mine.”
He slumped back on the sofa, wanting instinctively to lengthen the distance between himself and the woman whose white teeth glittered in the darkness. She had placed defeat like a crown of black thorns on his head. Her face, as lifeless and determined as some ancient concrete death mask, ate its way past his eyes and hung marionettelike in his brain, dancing there like a grim shade of what she had been only a few moments before. He shuddered suddenly and wondered why. In an empty, toneless voice he said, “You’re killing me, Mary Kate. I don’t know why or how but you’re killing me all the same. And this business about a child. This is the last nail in my coffin.”
“Then lie in it,” she said.
She rose and stood with her back to him. Her eyes, reflected in the window glass, were fierce and uncompromising. I will have my baby, she said to the wind that blew newspapers in the narrow street below. No one on earth will take my baby away from me now. And standing there she suddenly sensed someone standing beside her, a man whose pale thin hand touched her shoulder like a burning brand. I will have my baby.
Chapter 5
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THE CHILD WAS BORN at the end of a turbulent March, while the wind outside Mary Kate’s hospital room blew snow past the window in wild high flurries. She heard the scream of the storm both before and after la
bor, even as she was wheeled down linoleum corridors into Recovery.
The child was not beautiful. It was a boy with tight flat features and piercing, inquisitive blue eyes that she knew would dim to a much darker hue. But still she gratefully took the child from the nurse’s arms and held him close to her breast to feed. The child was very quiet, barely moving except to grab the flesh of her swollen teat with his tiny fists.
She didn’t care for Joe’s choice of a name for the baby, Edward, after one of his more obscure English poets. Instead, she wanted a name that had been in her family for years. So on the records of birth was written Jeffrey Harper Raines, over Joe’s mild protests that the name Jeffrey currently belonged to one of his least favorite of her cousins.
When they brought him home from the hospital they lowered him into a crib he would share with red-lipped rubber animals. Above the crib, attached to the ceiling, was a hanging mobile of grinning plastic fish. She would move the fish in a tight circle and Jeffrey always sat in silence, watching. They arranged the crib so the child could see the television. It disturbed Mary Kate in the first few weeks that Jeffrey was home, that the child so seldom cried. She complained about it to Joe, citing tears as a healthy response in children, and he replied, “So? Maybe he’s satisfied.”
But Jeffrey never laughed either. Even on Saturday mornings during cat-and-mouse cartoons and Howdy Doody reruns, Jeffrey’s eyes roamed the tight confines of the apartment while his new teeth gripped at a pacifier. The lack of emotion in the child’s eyes worried her, they were like the eyes of a fish or a snake, desiring either the cold sea or the depths of a den.
Sometimes when she held the child she thought it didn’t seem to want to be near her. He would fight against her grasp and, when she pulled him closer, he would reach out to pinch her flesh between his fingers. Looking at Jeffrey, actually examining his features, unsettled her more and more as time went on. He didn’t seem to resemble her at all, nor did he resemble Joe, as much as she imagined this to be the case. He would comment dryly on how the baby would eventually look just like him but she knew it was far from the truth. And what was the truth? Was it perhaps locked away in her subconscious, lurking there where she remembered dimly a screaming ambulance and nurses white against emergency walls, groping, groping, groping?
Despite her disappointment, she never allowed herself to cry. She always stopped thinking about the child before the rush of tears, of mad whirling self-doubt, of figures framed in darkness, could begin.
Joe had begun working a double shift three days a week at the cab company. He came home on those days in the early morning hours, ready to drink a can or two of beer and fall into bed, sometimes without even undressing. Some days he went to work in the same clothes he had worn the day before and slept in; sometimes he went without shaving for days at a time; he had neither the time nor the energy to even consider a return to college, and always his sharp accusing eyes cut her to the quick. He barely spoke to her anymore unless he found it necessary, and she learned to turn her back on him in bed.
In three months’ time, as the apartment began to become cluttered with rubber toys and diapers and smelled of sourness and milk, Joe took to leaving on rambling walks, often not returning until Mary Kate had been asleep for some time. Wakened by the opening door, she would hear him enter, often drunkenly, and mutter to himself things she couldn’t quite hear. The bastard, she would say to herself. The stupid drunken bastard. And then she would say sharply, without looking at him, “Take your clothes off before you come to bed.”
Joe’s sleep was becoming more and more restless; often he cried out in the dark of night. Then she would hear him get out of bed, drink a glass of water in the bathroom and, oddly, rattle the door chain to make certain it held securely. But she never moved to show him she had awakened, and when he returned to bed she felt sure he lay for a very long while with his eyes open in the dark, just staring at her back.
More than once she awakened to see him framed in the square of light from the window, looking down into the crib at the sleeping child. He would stand rigid with his fists white-knuckled, staring down at the little quiet form in white baby pajamas. In the mornings she would find Jeffrey already awake, his hands curled around the safety bars as if he wanted to escape the prison of infancy prematurely. His dark eyes pierced her; he seemed to be glaring through her at her sleeping husband. Once when Joe held the child in his arms in a rare show of fatherly affection, his eye was almost jabbed as Jeffrey pointed with a finger at the fish mobile. Joe said, “Shit!” and eased the child back down into the crib, rubbing his injured eye.
She became fearful of Joe. He became increasingly short-tempered toward the child, as the hot summer fell upon them like a slavering animal. Jeffrey’s eyes grew darker. They became black slits that gleamed with some sort of childish intelligence; his hair became straight and black. His nose lengthened and Mary Kate saw, with a rush of alarm, that there was going to be a cleft in the chin. There were no cleft chins in her family, as far as she knew, nor in Joe’s. She traced the beginnings of the cleft with her finger, hearing somewhere the faint wail of a siren across the roof of the city. And Joe had noticed it as well. He would pop open a beer and watch the child as Jeffrey played on the floor. Mary Kate was certain that, if he could, Joe would lean forward and kick the child in the face.
As Jeffrey played with blocks strewn across the carpet one evening in late summer, she sat before him on the floor and examined his face. The black eye slits watched her incuriously, daring her to maintain a steady gaze, as he built towers of multicolored blocks. The thin fingers moved not with the clumsiness of an infant, but instead with a practiced adult grace.
“Jeffrey,” Mary Kate whispered.
The child slowly looked up from his blocks.
Mary Kate was forced to avert her gaze from his intense black stare. Looking into those eyes made her feel breathless and dizzy, as if she had been drinking. His eyes were as immobile as those in a painting.
Mary Kate reached out to smooth his swirling mass of black hair. “My Jeffrey,” she said.
With one arm Jeffrey swung out and through the tower of building blocks. They scattered across the room, and one of them struck Mary Kate in the mouth. She cried out, startled.
Jeffrey leaned forward, his eyes wide and entranced, and Mary Kate shivered. She took his hand and slapped it, saying, “Bad baby! Bad baby!” but Jeffrey paid no attention. Instead, with his free hand, he touched his mother’s lip. The fingers came away with a single drop of blood.
Horrified and hypnotized by his black, unwavering stare, she watched him put his fingers to his mouth, saw the tongue dart from between lips to lick the red liquid, saw the eyes gleam briefly like a light shining far away in the night. She recovered herself and said, “Bad for baby!” trying to slap his hand again, but he turned his back on her and began gathering up the building blocks.
Autumn came, then winter. Outside the wind was unnervingly shrill, day after day. Leaves clattered along the gutters. Ice and snow caked the lids of garbage cans. Throughout the winter bleakness Mary Kate grew more distant from Joe. It was as if he had given up; now he ceased even to try to communicate with her at all. He had long since forgotten that she shared a bed with him and now she knew it was only a matter of time before he would leave the apartment one night for “a walk” and never come back. Already he was sometimes gone for a day at a time and, afterward, when she would scream at him about having to make up excuses for the cab dispatcher, he would simply spin around on his heel and disappear again through the doorway. And then, finally, he would come home unshaven and dirty, his body reeking of beer and sweat, stumbling through the doorway muttering something about the child. “You fool,” she would tell him. “You pitiful fool.”
And one night less than a week before the child’s first birthday, after leaving Jeffrey with Joe for a few moments while she went down to the delicatessen for groceries, she returned home to find him calmly undressing the child over a
tub of steaming water. The child’s hands were gripped around his shoulders; the eyes were narrowed and cunning. Across Joe’s unshaven face were red marks that looked like scratches. An empty wine bottle lay broken on the yellow bathroom tiles.
She dropped the sack. A glass broke. “What do you think you’re doing?” she screamed as Joe held the struggling child over the hot water. He looked around, his eyes bleary and frightened, and she twisted Jeffrey away from him to hug the child to her breast.
“My God!” she said, her shrill voice echoing from the tiles. “You’re crazy! My God!”
He sat, his shoulders sagging, on the edge of the tub. His face seemed drained of blood, the only color the gray circles beneath his eyes. “One more minute,” he said in a distant, dead, emotionless voice. “If you’d only stayed away one minute more. Just one.”
“My God!”
“Just one,” he said, “and it would’ve been over.”
She screamed at him, “You’re crazy! My God! Oh my God Jesus!”
“Yes,” he said. “You call out for Jesus. You do that. But it’s too late. Oh God it’s too late for that. You look at me. Look at me, I said! I’m dying…inch by inch… I’m dying, and you know it.” He looked around and saw the fragments of glass on the floor. “Oh no,” he whimpered. “My last bottle.”
As he stood up and began walking toward her, she backed away with the child in her arms. He caught himself in the bathroom doorway and stood there with his head down and mouth open, as if he were about to be sick. “I have good dreams at night, Mary Kate. Oh those dreams I have. You know what I dream about? You really want to know? I dream of faces that come flying around me screaming my name. A thousand…ten thousand times a night they wake me. And I dream of a child’s gouging out my eyes until I’m blind. Oh Jesus Christ I need a drink!”
“You’re crazy,” said Mary Kate, her tongue slowly going numb so she had to concentrate to get the two words out.