KATE BATTISTA WAS gardening out back when she heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. She straightened up and listened. Her sister was in the house, although she might not be awake yet. But then there was another ring, and two more after that, and when she finally heard her sister’s voice it was only the announcement on the answering machine. “Hi-yee! It’s us? We’re not home, looks like? So leave a—”
By that time Kate was striding toward the back steps, tossing her hair off her shoulders with an exasperated “Tcch!” She wiped her hands on her jeans and yanked the screen door open. “Kate,” her father was saying, “pick up.”
She lifted the receiver. “What,” she said.
“I forgot my lunch.”
Her eyes went to the counter beside the fridge where, sure enough, his lunch sat precisely where she had set it the night before. She always used those clear plastic bags that supermarket produce came in, and the contents were plainly visible: a Tupperware sandwich box and an apple. “Huh,” she said.
“Can you bring it?”
“Bring it now?”
“Right.”
“Jesus, Father. I’m not the Pony Express,” she said.
“What else have you got to do?” he asked her.
“It’s Sunday! I’m weeding the hellebores.”
“Ah, Kate, don’t be like that. Just hop in the car and zip over; there’s a good girl.”
“Sheesh,” she said, and she slammed the receiver down and took the lunch bag from the counter.
There were several strange things about this conversation. The first was that it had happened at all; her father distrusted the telephone. In fact his lab didn’t even have a telephone, so he must have called on his cell phone. And that was unusual too, because his only reason for owning a cell phone was that his daughters had insisted. He had gone into a brief flurry of app purchases when he first acquired it—scientific calculators of various types, for the most part—and after that had lost all interest, and avoided it now altogether.
Then there was the fact that he forgot his lunch about twice a week, but had never before seemed to notice. The man did not eat, basically. Kate would get home from work and find his lunch still sitting on the counter, and yet even so she would have to shout for him three or four times that evening before he would come to dinner. Always he had something better to do, some journal to read or notes to go over. He would probably starve to death if he were living alone.
And supposing he did feel a bit peckish, he could have just stepped out and bought something. His lab was near the Johns Hopkins campus, and there were sandwich shops and convenience stores everywhere you looked.
Not to mention that it wasn’t even noon yet.
But the day was sunny and breezy, if cool—the first semi-decent weather after a long, hard, bitter winter—and she didn’t actually mind an excuse to get out in the world. She wouldn’t take the car, though; she would walk. Let him wait. (He himself never took the car, unless he had some sort of equipment to ferry. He was something of a health fiend.)
She stepped out the front door, shutting it extra hard behind her because it irked her that Bunny was sleeping so late. The ground cover along the front walk had a twiggy, littered look, and she made a mental note to spruce it up after she finished with the hellebores.
Swinging the lunch bag by its twist-tied neck, she passed the Mintzes’ house and the Gordons’ house—stately brick center-hall Colonials like the Battistas’ own, although better maintained—and turned the corner. Mrs. Gordon was kneeling among her azalea bushes, spreading mulch around their roots. “Why, hello there, Kate!” she sang out.
“Hi.”
“Looks like spring might be thinking of coming!”
“Yup.”
Kate strode on without slowing, her buckskin jacket flying out behind her. A pair of young women—most likely Hopkins students—drifted at a snail’s pace ahead of her. “I could tell he wanted to ask me,” one was saying, “because he kept clearing his throat in that way they do, you know? But then not speaking.”
“I love when they’re so shy,” the other one said.
Kate veered around them and kept going.
At the next street she took a left, heading toward a more mixed-and-mingled neighborhood of apartments and small cafés and houses partitioned into offices, and eventually she turned in at yet another brick Colonial. This one had a smaller front yard than the Battistas’ but a larger, grander portico. Six or eight plaques beside the front door spelled out the names of various offbeat organizations and obscure little magazines. There was no plaque for Louis Battista, though. He had been shunted around to so many different buildings over the years, landing finally in this orphan location near the university but miles from the medical complex, that he’d probably decided it just wasn’t worth the effort.
In the foyer an array of mailboxes lined one wall, and sliding heaps of flyers and takeout menus covered the rickety bench beneath them. Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open. Inside she glimpsed a trio of women grouped around a desk where a fourth woman sat dabbing her eyes with a tissue. (Always something going on.) Kate opened another door at the far end of the hall and descended a flight of steep wooden stairs. At the bottom she paused to punch in the code: 1957, the date Witebsky first defined the criteria for autoimmune disorders.
The room she entered was tiny, furnished only by a card table and two metal folding chairs. A brown paper bag sat on the table; another lunch, it looked like. She set her father’s lunch next to it and then went over to a door and gave a couple of brisk knocks. After a moment, her father poked his head out—his satiny bald scalp bordered by a narrow band of black hair, his olive-skinned face punctuated by a black mustache and round-lensed, rimless spectacles. “Ah, Kate,” he said. “Come in.”
“No, thanks,” she said. She never could abide the smells of the place—the thin, stinging smell of the lab itself and the dry-paper smell of the mouse room. “Your lunch is on the table,” she said. “Bye.”
“No, wait!”
He turned from her to speak to someone in the room behind him. “Pyoder? Come out and say hello to my daughter.”
“I’ve got to go,” Kate said.
“I don’t think you’ve ever met my research assistant,” her father said.
“That’s okay.”
But the door opened wider, and a solid, muscular man with straight yellow hair stepped up to stand next to her father. His white lab coat was so dingy that it very nearly matched Dr. Battista’s pale-gray coveralls. “Vwouwv!” he said. Or that was what it sounded like, at least. He was gazing at Kate admiringly. Men often wore that look when they first saw her. It was due to a bunch of dead cells: her hair, which was blue-black and billowy and extended below her waist.
“This is Pyoder Cherbakov,” her father told her.
“Pyotr,” the man corrected him, allowing no space at all between the sharp-pointed t and the ruffly, rolling r. And “Shcherbakov,” explosively spitting out the mishmash of consonants.
“Pyoder, meet Kate.”
“Hi,” Kate said. “See you later,” she told her father.
“I thought you might stay a moment.”
“What for?”
“Well, you’ll need to take back my sandwich box, will you not?”
“Well, you can bring it back yourself, can you not?”
A sudden hooting sound made both of them glance in Pyotr’s direction. “Just like the girls in my country,” he said, beaming. “So rude-spoken.”
“Just like the women,” Kate said reprovingly.
“Yes, they also. The grandmothers and the aunties.”
She gave up on him. “Father,” she said, “will you tell Bunny she has to stop leaving such a mess when she has her friends in? Did you see the TV room this morning?”
“Yes, yes,” her father said, but he was heading back into the lab as he spoke. He returned, pushing a high stool on wheels. He parked it next to the table. “Have a seat,” he told her.
“I need to get back to my gardening.”
“Please, Kate,” he said. “You never keep me company.”
She stared at him. “Keep you company?”
“Sit, sit,” he said, motioning toward the stool. “You can have part of my sandwich.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said. But she perched awkwardly on the stool, still staring at him.
“Pyoder, sit. You can share my sandwich too, if you want. Kate made it especially. Peanut butter honey on whole-wheat.”
“You know I do not eat peanut butter,” Pyotr told him severely. He pulled out one of the folding chairs and settled catty-corner to Kate. His chair was considerably lower than her stool, and she could see how the hair was starting to thin across the top of his head. “In my country, peanuts are pigs’ food.”
“Ha, ha,” Dr. Battista said. “He’s very humorous, isn’t he, Kate?”
“What?”
“They eat them with the shells on,” Pyotr said.
He had trouble with th sounds, Kate noticed. And his vowels didn’t seem to last long enough. She had no patience with foreign accents.
“Were you surprised that I used my cell phone?” her father asked her. He was still standing, for some reason. He pulled his phone from a pocket in his coveralls. “You girls were right; it comes in handy,” he said. “I’m going to start using it more often now.” He frowned down at it a moment, as if he were trying to remember what it was. Then he punched a button and held it in front of his face. Squinting, he took several steps backward. There was a mechanical clicking sound. “See? It takes photographs,” he said.
“Erase it,” Kate ordered.
“I don’t know how,” he said, and the phone clicked again.
“Damn it, Father, sit down and eat. I need to get back to my gardening.”
“All right, all right.”
He tucked the phone away and sat down. Pyotr, meanwhile, was opening his lunch bag. He pulled out two eggs and then a banana and placed them on the flattened paper bag in front of him. “Pyoder believes in bananas,” Dr. Battista confided. “I keep telling him about apples, but does he listen?” He was opening his own lunch bag, taking out his apple. “Pectin! Pectin!” he told Pyotr, shaking the apple under Pyotr’s nose.
“Bananas are miracle food,” Pyotr said calmly, and he picked his up and started peeling it. He had a face that was almost hexagonal, Kate noticed—his cheekbones widening to two sharp points, the angles of his jaw two more points slanting to the point of his chin, and the long strands of his hair separating over his forehead to form the topmost point. “Also eggs,” he was saying. “The egg of the hen! So cleverly self-contained.”
“Kate makes my sandwich for me every single night before she goes to bed,” Dr. Battista said. “She’s very domestic.”
Kate blinked.
“Peanut butter, though,” Pyotr said.
“Well, yes.”
“Yes,” Pyotr said with a sigh. He sent her a look of regret. “But is certainly pretty enough.”
“You should see her sister.”
Kate said, “Oh! Father!”
“What?”
“This sister is where?” Pyotr asked.
“Well, Bunny is only fifteen. She’s still in high school.”
“Okay,” Pyotr said. He returned his gaze to Kate.
Kate wheeled her stool back sharply and stood up. “Don’t forget your Tupperware,” she told her father.
“What! You’re leaving? Why so soon?”
But Kate just said, “Bye”—mostly addressing Pyotr, who was watching her with a measuring look—and she marched to the door and flung it open.
“Katherine, dearest, don’t rush off!” Her father stood up. “Oh, dear, this isn’t going well at all. It’s just that she’s so busy, Pyoder. I can never get her to sit down and take a little break. Did I tell you she runs our whole house? She’s very domestic. Oh, I already said that. And she has a full-time job besides. Did I tell you she teaches preschool? She’s wonderful with small children.”
“Why are you talking this way?” Kate demanded, turning on him. “What’s come over you? I hate small children; you know that.”
There was another hooting sound from Pyotr. He was grinning up at her. “Why you hate small children?” he asked her.
“Well, they’re not very bright, if you’ve noticed.”
He hooted again. What with his hooting and the banana he held, he reminded her of a chimpanzee. She spun away and stalked out, letting the door slam shut, and climbed the stairs two at a time.
Behind her, she heard the door open again. Her father called, “Kate?” She heard his steps on the stairs, but she strode on toward the front of the building.
His steps softened as he arrived on the carpet. “I’ll just see you out, why don’t I?” he called after her.
See her out?
But she paused when she reached the front door. She turned to watch him approach.
“I’ve handled things badly,” he said. He smoothed his scalp with one palm. His coveralls were one-size-fits-all and they ballooned in the middle, giving him the look of a Teletubby. “I didn’t mean to make you angry,” he said.
“I’m not angry; I’m …”
But she couldn’t say the word “hurt.” It might bring tears to her eyes. “I’m fed up,” she said instead.
“I don’t understand.”
She could believe that, actually. Face it: he was clueless.
“And what were you trying to do back there?” she asked him, setting her fists on her hips. “Why were you acting so … peculiar with that assistant?”
“He’s not ‘that assistant;’ he’s Pyoder Cherbakov, whom I’m very lucky to have. Just look: he came in on a Sunday! He does that often. And he’s been with me nearly three years, by the way, so I would think you would at least be familiar with his name.”
“Three years? What happened to Ennis?”
“Good Lord! Ennis! Ennis was two assistants back.”
“Oh,” she said.
She didn’t know why he was acting so irritable. It wasn’t as if he ever talked about his assistants—or about anything, in fact.
“I seem to have a little trouble keeping them,” he said. “It may be that to outsiders, my project is not looking very promising.”
This wasn’t something he had admitted before, although from time to time Kate had wondered. It made her feel sorry for him, suddenly. She let her hands drop to her sides.
“I went to a great deal of effort to bring Pyoder to this country,” he said. “I don’t know if you realize. He was only twenty-five at the time, but everybody who’s anybody in autoimmunity had heard of him. He’s brilliant. He qualified for an O-1 visa, and that’s not something you often see these days.”
“Well, good, Father.”
“An extraordinary-ability visa; that’s what an O-1 is. It means that he possesses some extraordinary skill or knowledge that no one here in this country has, and that I am involved in some extraordinary research that justifies my needing him.”
“Good for you.”
“O-1 visas last three years.”
She reached out to touch his forearm. “Of course you’re anxious about your project,” she said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone. “But I bet things will be fine.”
“You really think so?” he asked.
She nodded and gave his arm a couple of clumsy pats, which he must not have been expecting because he looked startled. “I’m sure of it,” she told him. “Don’t forget to bring your sandwich box home.”
Then she opened the front door and walked out into the sunshine. Two of the Christians for Buddha women were sitting on the steps with their heads together. They were laughing so hard about something that it took them a moment to notice her, but then they drew apart to let her pass.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Anne Tyler
Title Page
1967
1968
1969
1971
1973
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
Extract from Vinegar Girl
Copyright
If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree
A Slipping-Down Life
The Clock Winder
Celestial Navigation
Searching for Caleb
Earthly Possessions
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons
Saint Maybe
Ladder of Years
A Patchwork Planet
Back When We Were Grown-Ups
The Amateur Marriage
Digging to America
THERE USED TO be an Easter Fair at the Presbyterian church every year. Early Saturday morning the long, gentle hill out front would be taken over by tents, painted booths, mechanical rides on lease from the Happy Days Amusement Company, and large wooden carts slowly filling up their windows with buttered popcorn. A white rabbit, six feet tall, would bow in a dignified way as he passed out jellybeans from a basket. In the afternoon there would be an egg hunt behind the Sunday School building, and the winner was given a chocolate chicken. Music floated everywhere, strung-out wisps of one song weaving into another. The air always smelled like cotton candy.
But the Baltimore climate was unpredictable. Sometimes it was really too cold for a fair. One year, when Easter fell in March, so little was growing yet that the egg hunt was a joke. The eggs lay exposed and foolish on the bald brown lawn, and children pounced on them with mittened hands. The grownups stood hunched in sweaters and scarves. They seemed to have strayed in from the wrong season. It would have been a better fair with no human beings at all – just the striped tents flapping their spring-colored scallops, the carousel playing “After the Ball,” and the plaster horses prancing around riderless.
At the puppet show, in a green and white tent lit by a chilly greenish glow, Cinderella wore a strapless evening gown that made her audience shiver. She was a glove puppet with a large, round head and braids of yellow yarn. At the moment she was dancing with the Prince, who had a Dutch Boy haircut. They held each other so fondly, it was hard to remember they were really just two hands clasping each other. “You have a beautiful palace,” she told him. “The floors are like mirrors! I wonder who scrubs them.”
Her voice was wry and throaty, not at all puppet-like. You almost expected to see the vapor rising from her painted mouth.
The Prince said, “I have no idea, Miss … what was that name?”
Instead of answering, she looked down at her feet. The pause grew too long. The children shifted in their folding chairs. It became apparent that the ballroom was not a ballroom at all, but a gigantic cardboard carton with the front cut away and a gauze curtain at the rear. A child in the audience said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Ssh.”
“Your name,” said the Prince.
Why didn’t she speak?
Really, the children saw, she was only a puppet. They sat back. Something had snapped. Even the parents looked confused.
Then Cinderella flopped on to her face in a very unnatural way, and a human hand emerged from her skirts and withdrew behind the scrim. The children stared. On the stage lay her dead and empty shell, with her arms flung back as if broken. “Is it over?” a child asked his mother.
“Hush. Sit still. You know that’s not how it ends.”
“Well, where’s the rest, then? Can we go?”
“Wait. Here comes someone.”
It was a grownup, but just barely. He felt his way through the bedsheet that hung at one side of the stage: a dark, thin boy in khakis and a rust-colored corduroy jacket, with a white shirt so old and well washed that all the life had gone out of it. There was something fierce about him – maybe the twist of his mouth, or the defiant way he kept his chin raised. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Boys and girls …”
“It’s the Prince,” said a child.
“Boys and girls, there’s been … an illness. The play is over. You can get your money at the ticket booth.”
He turned away, not even waiting to see how this would be taken, and fumbled at the sheet. But then he seemed struck by another thought, and he turned back to the audience. “Excuse me,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair again. (No wonder it was so mussed and ropy.) “Is there a doctor in the house?” he asked.
They looked at each other – children, mostly, and most of them under five. Apparently there was no doctor. The boy gave a sudden, sharp sigh and lifted a corner of the sheet. Then someone at the rear of the tent stood up.
“I am a doctor,” he said.
He was a lank, tall, bearded man in a shaggy brown suit that might have been cut from blankets, and on his head he wore a red ski cap – the pointy kind, with a pom-pom at the tip. Masses of black curls burst out from under it. His beard was so wild and black and bushy that it was hard to tell how old he was. Maybe forty? Forty-five? At any rate, older than you’d expect to see at a puppet show, and no child sat next to him to explain his being there. But he craned his head forward, smiling kindly, leading with his long, pinched nose and waiting to hear how he could help. The boy looked relieved; his face lost some of its tension.
“Come with me,” he said. He lifted the sheet higher.
Stumbling over people’s feet, sliding past the children who were already swarming toward the exit, the doctor made his way to the boy. He wiped his palms on his thighs and stooped under the sheet. “What seems to be the trouble here?” he asked.
“It’s her,” said the boy.
He meant the blond girl resting on a heap of muslin bags. She was small-boned and frail, but enormously pregnant, and she sat cradling her stomach – guarding it, looking up at the doctor out of level gray eyes. Her lips were so colorless, they were almost invisible.
“I see,” said the doctor.
He dropped down beside her, hitching up his trousers at the knees, and leaned forward to set a hand on her abdomen. There was a pause. He frowned at the tent wall, weighing something in his mind. “Yes,” he said finally. He sat back and studied the girl’s face. “How far apart are the pains?” he asked.
“All the time,” she said, in Cinderella’s wry voice.
“Constantly? When did they begin?”
“About … an hour ago, Leon? When we were setting up for this performance.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows – two black thickets.
“It would be exceedingly strange,” he said, “if they were so close together this soon.”
“Well, they are,” the girl said matter-of-factly.
The doctor stood up, grunting a little, and dusted off his knees. “Oh, well,” he said, “just to be on the safe side, I suppose you ought to check into the hospital. Where’s your car parked?”
“We don’t have one,” the boy said.
“No car?”
The doctor looked around him, as if wondering how all their equipment had arrived – the bulky stage, the heap of little costumes, the liquor carton in the corner with a different puppet’s head poking out of each cardboard compartment.
“Mr. Kenny brought us,” said the boy, “in his panel truck. He’s chairman of the Fund-Raising Committee.”
“You’d better come with me, then,” the doctor said. “I’ll drive you over.” He seemed fairly cheerful about it. He said, “What about the puppets? Shall we take them along?”
“No,” said the boy. “What do I care about the puppets? Let’s just get her to the hospital.”
“Suit yourself,” the doctor told him, but he cast another glance around, as if regretting a lost opportunity, before he bent to help the boy raise the girl to her feet. “What are they made of?” he asked.
“Huh?” said the boy. “Oh, just … things.” He handed the girl her purse. “Emily makes them,” he added.
“Emily?”
“This is Emily, my wife. I’m Leon Meredith.”
“How do you do?” the doctor said.
“They’re made of rubber balls,” said Emily.
Standing, she turned out to be even slighter than she’d first appeared. She walked gracefully, leading the men out through the front of the tent, smiling at the few stray children who remained. Her draggled black skirt hung unevenly around her shins. Her thin white cardigan, dotted with specks of black lint, didn’t begin to close over the bulge of her stomach.
“I take an ordinary, dimestore rubber ball,” she said, “and cut a neck hole with my knife. Then I cover the ball with a nylon stocking, and I sew on eyes and a nose, paint a mouth, make hair of some kind …”
Her voice grew strained. The doctor glanced over at her, sharply.
“The cheapest kind of stockings are the best,” she said. “They’re pinker. From a distance, they look more like skin.”
“Is this going to be a long walk?” Leon asked.
“No, no,” said the doctor. “My car’s in the main parking lot.”
“Maybe we should call an ambulance.”
“Really, that won’t be necessary,” the doctor said.
“But what if the baby comes before we get to the hospital?”
“Believe me,” said the doctor, “if I thought there was the faintest chance of that, I wouldn’t be doing this. I have no desire whatever to deliver a baby in a Pontiac.”
“Lord, no,” Leon said, and he cast a sideways look at the doctor’s hands, which didn’t seem quite clean. “But Emily claims it’s arriving any minute.”
“It is,” Emily said calmly. She was walking along between them now, climbing the slope to the parking lot unassisted. She supported the weight of her baby as if it were already separate from her. Her battered leather pocketbook swung from her shoulder. In the sunlight her hair, which was bound on her head in two silvery braids, sprang up in little corkscrewed wisps like metal filings flying toward a magnet, and her skin looked chilled and thin and pale. But her eyes remained level. She didn’t appear to be frightened. She met the doctor’s gaze squarely. “I can feel it,” she told him.
“Is this your first?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, then,” he said, “you see, it can’t possibly come so soon. It’ll be late tonight at the earliest – maybe even tomorrow. Why, you haven’t been in labor more than an hour!”
“Maybe, and maybe not,” said Emily.
Then she gave a sudden, surprising toss of her head; she threw the doctor a tilted look. “After all,” she said, “I’ve had a backache since two o’clock this morning. Maybe I just didn’t know it was labor.”
Leon turned to the doctor, who seemed to hesitate a moment. “Doctor?” Leon said.
“All my patients say their babies are coming immediately,” the doctor told him. “It never happens.”
They had reached the flinty white gravel of the parking lot. Various people passed – some just arriving, holding down their coats against the wind; others leaving with balloons and crying children and cardboard flats of shivering tomato seedlings.
“Are you warm enough?” Leon asked Emily. “Do you want my jacket?”
“I’m fine,” Emily said, although beneath her cardigan she wore only a skimpy black T-shirt, and her legs were bare and her shoes were ballet slippers, thin as paper.
“You must be freezing,” Leon said.
“I’m all right, Leon.”
“It’s the adrenalin,” the doctor said absently. He came to a stop and gazed off across the parking lot, stroking his beard. “I seem to have lost my car,” he said.
Leon said, “Oh, God.”
“No, there it is. Never mind.”
His car was clearly a family man’s – snub-nosed, outdated, with a frayed red hair ribbon flying from the antenna and WASH THIS! written in the dust on one fender. Inside, there were schoolbooks and dirty socks and gym bloomers and rucked-up movie magazines. The doctor knelt on the front seat and swatted at the clutter in the rear until most of it had landed on the floor. Then he said, “There you go. You two sit in back; you’ll be more comfortable.” He settled himself in front and started the engine, which had a whining, circular sound. Emily and Leon slid into the rear. Emily found a track shoe under her right knee, and she placed it on her lap, cupping the heel and toe in her fingers. “Now,” said the doctor. “Which hospital?”
Emily and Leon looked at each other.
“City? University? Hopkins?”
“Whatever’s closest,” Leon said.
“But which have you reserved? Where’s your doctor?”
“We haven’t reserved anyplace,” Emily said, “and we don’t have a doctor.”
“I see.”
“Anywhere,” said Leon. “Just get her there.”
“Very well.”
The doctor maneuvered his car out of the parking space. He shifted gears with a grinding sound. Leon said, “I guess we should have attended to this earlier.”
“Yes, actually,” said the doctor. He braked and looked in both directions. Then he nosed the car into the stream of traffic on Farley Street. They were traveling through a new, raw section barely within the city limits – ranch houses, treeless lawns, another church, a shopping mall. “But I suppose you lead a footloose sort of life,” the doctor said.
“Footloose?”
“Carefree. Unattached,” he said. He patted all his pockets with one hand until he’d found a pack of Camels. He shook a cigarette free and lit it, which involved so much fumbling and cursing and clutching at dropped objects that it was a wonder the other drivers managed to stay clear of him. When he’d finally flicked his match out, he exhaled a great cloud of smoke and started coughing. The Pontiac wandered from lane to lane. He thumped his chest and said, “I suppose you just follow the fairs, am I correct? Just follow the festivities, stop wherever you find yourselves.”
“No, what happened was—”
“But I wish we could have brought along the puppets,” the doctor said. He turned on to a wider street. He was forced to slow down now, inching past furniture shops and carpet warehouses, trailing a mammoth Mayflower van that blocked all view of what lay ahead. “Are we coming to a traffic light?” he asked. “Is it red or green? I can’t see a thing. And what about their noses, the puppets’ noses? How’d you make the stepmother’s nose? Was it a carrot?”
“Excuse me?” Emily said. “Nose?” She didn’t seem to be concentrating. “I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s some kind of water all over everything.”
The doctor braked and looked in the rear-view mirror. His eyes met Leon’s. “Can’t you hurry?” Leon asked him.
“I am hurrying,” the doctor said.
He took another puff of his cigarette, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger. The air in the car grew blue and layered. Up ahead, the Mayflower van was trying to make a left turn. It would take all day, at this rate. “Honk,” Leon said. The doctor honked. Then he clamped his cigarette in his teeth and swung out into the right-hand lane, where a car coming up fast behind nearly slammed into them. Now horns were blowing everywhere. The doctor started humming. He pulled back into the left lane, set his left-turn signal blinking, and sped toward the next traffic light, which hung beside a swinging sign that read NO LEFT TURN. His cigarette had a long, trembly tube of ashes hanging from it. He tapped the ashes on to the floor, the steering wheel, his lap. “After the ball is o-ver,” he sang. He careened to the right again and cut across the apron of a Citgo station, took a sharp left, and emerged on the street he wanted. “After the break of morn …” Leon gripped the back of the front seat with one hand and held on to Emily with the other. Emily gazed out the side window.
“I always go to fairs, any fair in town,” the doctor said. “School fairs, church fairs, Italian fairs, Ukrainian … I like the food. I also like the rides; I like to watch the people who run them. What would it be like, working for such an outfit? I used to take my daughters, but they’re too old now, they say. ‘How can that be?’ I ask them. ‘I’m not too old; how come you are?’ My youngest is barely ten. How can she be too old?”
“The baby’s here,” Emily said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The baby. I feel it.”
The doctor looked in the mirror again. His eyes were more aged than the rest of him – a mournful brown, bloodshot and pouched, the skin beneath them the tarnished color of a bruise inside a banana. He opened his mouth, or appeared to. At any rate, his beard lengthened. Then it shortened again.
“Stop the car,” Leon told him.
“Well … ah, yes, maybe so,” the doctor said.
He parked beside a hydrant, in front of a tiny pizza parlor called Maria’s Home-Style. Leon was chafing Emily’s wrists. The doctor climbed out, scratching the curls beneath his ski cap and looking puzzled. “Excuse me,” he said to Leon. Leon got out of the car. The doctor leaned in and asked, “You say you feel it?”
“I feel the head.”
“Of course this is all a mistake,” the doctor told Leon. “You know how long it takes the average primipara to deliver? Between ten and twelve hours. Oh, at least. And with a great deal more carrying on, believe me. There’s not a chance in this world that baby could be here yet.”
But as he spoke, he was sliding Emily into a horizontal position on the seat, methodically folding back her damp skirt in a series of tidy pleats. He said, “What in the name of—?” It appeared that her T-shirt was some sort of leotard; it had a crotch. He grimaced and ripped the center seam. Then he said, “She’s right.”
“Well, do something,” Leon said. “What are you going to do?”
“Go buy some newspapers,” the doctor told him. “Anything will be fine – News American, Sun … but fresh ones, you understand? Don’t just accept what someone hands you in a diner, saying he’s finished reading it …”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don’t have change,” Leon said.
The doctor started rummaging through his pockets. He pulled out his mangled pack of Camels, two lint-covered jellybeans, and a cylinder of Rolaids. “Emily,” he said, “would you happen to have change for a dollar?”
Emily said something that sounded like yes, and turned her head from side to side. “Try her purse,” the doctor said. They felt along the floor, among the gym clothes and soda straws. Leon brought up the purse by its strap. He plowed through it till he found a billfold, and then he raced off down the street, muttering, “Newspapers. Newspapers.” It was a cheerful, jumbled street with littered sidewalks and a row of tiny shops – eating places, dry cleaners, florists. In front of one of the cafés were various newspapers in locked, windowed boxes.
The doctor stepped on his cigarette and ground it into the pavement. Then he took off his suit jacket. He rolled up his sleeves and tucked his shirt more firmly into his trousers. He bent inside the car and laid a palm on Emily’s abdomen. “Breathe high in your chest,” he told her. He gazed dreamily past her, humming under his breath, watching the trucks and buses rumble by through the opposite window. The cold air caused the dark hairs to bristle on his forearms.
A woman in high heels clopped down the sidewalk; she never even noticed what was going on. Then two teenaged girls approached, sharing fudge from a white paper sack. Their footsteps slowed, and the doctor heard and turned around. “You two!” he said. “Go call an ambulance. Tell them we’ve got a delivery on our hands.”
They stared at him. Identical cubes of fudge were poised halfway to their mouths.
“Well?” he said. “Go on.”
When they had rushed into Maria’s Home-Style, the doctor turned back to Emily. “How’re you doing?” he asked her.
She groaned.
Leon returned, out of breath, with a stack of newspapers. The doctor opened them out and started spreading them under Emily and all around her. “Now, these,” he said conversationally, “will grant us some measure of antisepsis.” Leon didn’t seem to be listening. The doctor wrapped two newspapers around Emily’s thighs. She began to blend in with the car. He hung a sports section down the back of the seat and anchored it to the window ledge with the track shoe she’d been holding all this time.
“Next,” he said, “I’ll need two strips of cloth, two inches wide and six inches long. Tear off your shirttail, Leon.”
“I want to quit,” Emily said.
“Quit?”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
The cook came out of Maria’s Home-Style. He was a large man in an apron stained with tomato sauce. For a moment he watched Leon, who was standing by the car in nothing but his jeans, shakily tugging at his shirttail. (Leon’s ribs showed and his shoulder blades were as sharp as chicken wings. He was much too young for all this.) The cook reached over and took the shirt and ripped it for him. “Thanks,” said Leon.
“But what’s the use of it?” the cook asked.
“He wants two strips of cloth,” said Leon, “two inches wide and six inches long. I don’t know why.”
The cook tore again, following instructions. He gave the shirt to Leon and passed the strips to the doctor, who hung them carefully on the inner door handle. Then the cook propped a wide, meaty hand on the car roof and bent in to nod at Emily. “Afternoon,” he said.
“Hello,” said Emily politely.
“How you doing?”
“Oh, just fine.”
“Seems like he wants to come on and get born,” the cook said, “and then he wants to go back in a ways.”
“Will you get out of here?” Leon said.
The cook let this pass. “Those two girls you sent are calling the ambulance,” he told the doctor. “They’re using my free phone.”
“Good,” the doctor said. He cupped the baby’s head in his hands – a dark, wet, shining bulge. “Now, Emily, bear down,” he said. “Maria, press flat on her belly, just a steady, slow pressure, please.”
“Soo now, soo now,” the cook said, pressing. Leon crouched on the curb, gnawing a knuckle, his shirt back on but not buttoned. Behind them, a little crowd had gathered. The teenaged girls stood hushed, forgetting to dip into their fudge sack. A man was asking everyone if an ambulance had been called. An old woman was telling a younger one all about someone named Dexter, who had been a breech birth with multiple complications.
“Bear down,” said the doctor.
There was a silence. Even the traffic noises seemed to have stopped.
Then the doctor stepped back, holding up a slippery, bleak lump. Something moved. There was a small, caught sound from someplace unexpected. So fast it seemed that everyone had been looking away when it happened, the lump turned into a wailing, writhing, frantic, indignant snarl of red arms and legs and spiraled telephone cord. “Oh,” the crowd said, breathing again.
“It’s a girl,” said the doctor. He passed her to the cook. “Was a girl what you wanted?”
“Anything! Anything!” the cook said. “So long as she’s healthy. Soo, baby.”
“I was talking to Emily,” the doctor said mildly. He had to raise his voice above the baby’s, which was surprisingly loud. He bent over Emily, pressing her abdomen now with both palms. “Emily? Are you all right? Bear down again, please.”
While he pressed, she couldn’t get air to speak, but the instant he let up she said, “I’m fine, and I’d like my daughter.”
The cook seemed reluctant to hand her over. He rocked the baby against his apron, thought a moment, and sighed. Then he gave her to the doctor. The doctor checked her breathing passages – the mashed-looking nose, the squalling cavern of a mouth. “With such a racket, how could she not be fine?” he asked, and he leaned in to lay her in Emily’s arms. Emily nestled the baby’s head against her shoulder, but the wailing went on, thin and passionate, with a hiccup at the end of each breath.
“What’d you do with those cloths?” the doctor asked Leon.
Leon was standing up now, so as to get a glimpse of the baby. Something kept tugging his lips into a smile that he kept trying to bat down again. “Cloths?” he said.
“Those cloths you tore, dammit. We’re nowhere near done here yet.”
“You hung them on the door handle,” someone in the crowd said.
“Oh, yes,” said the doctor.
He took one cloth, leaned in, and tied it around the baby’s cord. For all the blunt, clumsy look of his fingers, he did seem to know what he was doing. “After the ball is over,” he sang in his beard-blurred voice. While he was knotting the second cloth, a faraway cry started up. It sounded like an extension of the baby’s cry – equally thin, watery-sounding in the wind. Then it separated and grew more piercing. “The ambulance!” Leon said. “I hear the ambulance, Emily.”
“Send it back,” Emily said.
“They’re going to take you to the hospital, honey. You’re going to be all right now.”
“But it’s over! Do I have to go?” she asked the doctor.
“Certainly,” he said. He stepped back to admire his knots, which looked something like the little cloth bows on a kite tail. “Actually,” he said, “they’re coming in the nick of time. I have nothing to cut the cord with.”
“You could use my Swiss Army officer’s knife,” she told him. “It’s in my purse. It’s the Woodsman style, with a scissors blade.”
“Remarkable,” said the doctor, and he rocked on his heels, beaming down at her. His teeth seemed very large and yellow behind the tangled beard.
The siren drew closer. A spinning red light wove through the traffic, and the ambulance screeched to a halt beside the doctor’s car. Two men in white leaped out. “Where is she?” one asked.
“Here we are,” the doctor called.
The men flung open the back doors of the ambulance and brought a stretcher crashing to the street – a wheeled bed, too long and narrow, like a coffin, with too much chrome. Emily struggled to a sitting position. The baby stopped in mid-cry, as if shocked. “Do I have to do this?” Emily asked the doctor. And while the attendants were helping her out of the car (chairing her on to the stretcher, newspapers and all), she kept her face turned toward the doctor and waited to be rescued. “Doctor? I can’t stand hospitals! Do I have to go?”
“Of course,” the doctor told her. He stooped for her purse and laid it on the stretcher.
“Is Leon coming too?”
“Certainly he’s coming.”
“Are you?”
“Me? Oh.”
“Best if you would, Doc,” the driver told him, unfolding a sheet over Emily.
“Well, if you like,” the doctor said.
He closed his car door and followed the stretcher into the ambulance. There was another stretcher, empty, next to Emily’s. He and Leon sat on it – both of them gingerly, just on the edge, with their knees jutting out. “Pretty fancy,” the doctor said to Leon. He meant, presumably, the interior of the ambulance: the deeply carpeted floor, the gleaming tanks and gauges. When the men slammed the doors shut, there was a sudden, luxurious silence. The street noises faded, and through the tinted windows the people in the sidewalk seemed as soundless and slow-moving as creatures on the ocean floor. They slid away. A café and a pawnshop glided past. Even the siren was muffled, like something on an old-fashioned radio.
“How’re you feeling?’ the doctor asked Emily.
“Fine,” she said. She lay still, in a tangle of loosened braids. The baby stared severely at the ceiling.
“We really appreciate all you’ve done,” Leon told the doctor.
“It was nothing,” said the doctor, turning down the corners of his mouth. He seemed displeased.
“If Emily didn’t have this thing about hospitals, we’d have made our arrangements sooner, I guess. But the baby wasn’t due for another couple of weeks. We just kept putting it off.”
“And I suppose you were on the move so much,” the doctor said.
“No, no—”
“But the style of your lives: I don’t imagine you can plan very far ahead.”
“You have the wrong idea about us,” Emily said.
Flattened on the stretcher, with the crisp sheet covering the newspapers and her sodden skirt, Emily seemed untouched, somehow – pristine and remote, with her gaze turned inward. “You think we’re some kind of transients,” she said, “but we’re not. We’re legally married, and we live in a regular apartment with furniture. This baby was fully planned for. We’re even going to have a diaper service. I’ve already called to set it up, and they said to let them know when she came and they’d start delivery promptly.”
“I see,” said the doctor, nodding. He appeared to be enjoying this. The disorderly beard flew up and down, and the pom-pom on his ski cap bobbed.
“We’ve planned out every detail,” Emily said. “We didn’t buy a crib because cribs are extraneous. We’re using a cardboard box for now, with padding on the insides.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said the doctor, looking delighted.
“When she gets too big for the box, we’ll order this aluminum youth-bed rail we happened to see in a catalog. You can fit it on to any mattress. What’s the point in all that equipment – cribs and strollers and Bathinettes? Besides, the youth-bed rail will even work in hotels and other people’s apartments. It travels well.”
“Travels, yes,” the doctor echoed, and he clamped his hands between his knees, leaning with the ambulance as it sped around a curve.
“But we’re not … I mean, it’s only that we travel to give shows sometimes. There’ll be someone wanting ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’ somewhere outside the city. But we’re almost always home by night. We’re never shiftless. You have the wrong idea.”
“Did I say you were shiftless?” the doctor asked. He looked over at Leon. “Did I?”
Leon shrugged.
“We’ve thought of everything,” Emily said.
“Yes, I see you have,” the doctor said gently.
Leon cleared his throat. “By the way,” he said, “we haven’t discussed your fee.”
“Fee?”
“For your services.”
“Oh, emergency services aren’t charged for,” the doctor said. “Don’t you know that?”
“No,” said Leon.
He and the doctor seemed to be trying to stare each other down. Leon lifted his chin even higher. The light caught his cheekbones. He was one of those people who appear to be continually ready to take offense – jaw fixed, shoulders tight. “I’m not accepting this for free,” he said.
“Who says it’s free?” the doctor asked. “I expect you to name your baby for me.” He laughed – a wheeze that ruffled his beard.
“What’s your name?” Emily asked him.
“Morgan,” said the doctor.
There was a silence.
“Gower Morgan,” he said.
Emily said, “Maybe we could use the initials.”
“I was only joking,” the doctor told her. “Didn’t you know I was joking?” He fumbled for his Camels and shook one out of the pack. “It was meant to be a joke,” he said.
“About the fee,” said Leon.
The doctor took his cigarette from his mouth and peered at the sign on the oxygen tank. “The fact is,” he said, replacing the cigarette in its pack, “I had nothing better to do today. My wife and daughters have gone to a wedding; my wife’s brother is getting married again.” He clutched Leon’s shoulder as they turned a corner. The ambulance was rolling up a driveway now. They passed a sign reading EMERGENCY ONLY.
“My daughters are growing up,” the doctor said, “doing womanly things with their mother, leaving their father out in the cold. Each one when she was born seemed so new; I had such hopes; I was so sure we’d make no mistakes. Enjoy this one while you can,” he told Leon. The baby started and clutched two bits of air.
“I had sort of thought she would be a boy,” Leon said.
“Oh, Leon!” said Emily, drawing the baby closer.
“Boys, well,” the doctor said. “We tried for a boy for years, ourselves. But you can always hope for next time.”
“We can only afford the one,” said Leon.
“One? One child,” the doctor said. He fell into thought. “Yes, well, why not? There’s a certain … compactness to it. Very streamlined. Very basic,” he said.
“It’s a matter of money,” Leon said.
The ambulance bounced to a stop. The attendants flew out their front doors and around to the back, letting in the din of a gigantic, sooty machine just outside the emergency room, and the smell of hot laundry water and auto exhausts and wilted cafeteria food. They grabbed Emily’s stretcher and rushed away with it, wheels shrieking. Leon and the doctor clambered to the pavement and trotted after it.
“Do you have dimes?” the doctor shouted.
“Time for what?”
“Dimes! Money!”
“No, I’m sorry,” Leon said. “Could you use a dollar bill?”
“For you, I meant!” the doctor shouted. They passed through a set of swinging doors. He lowered his voice. “Not for me; for you. For the phone. You’ll want to call about the baby.”
“Who would I call?” Leon asked, spreading his arms.
The doctor stopped short. “Who would he call!” he repeated to himself. He wore the open, delighted expression he’d worn in the ambulance when he’d been told about the youth-bed rail.
Then a nurse lifted Emily’s sheet, clucked at the blood-soaked newspapers, and ran alongside the stretcher as it rolled down a corridor. Another nurse took Leon’s elbow and led him toward a typist in a glass compartment. Everything spun into action – polished, efficient, briskly clacketing. The doctor was left behind.