A Friend of the Family (5 page)

“What are you thinking?” Joe, my oldest friend, asked me.

“Nothing.” I forked tasteless, ridiculous food into my mouth. I wondered if he’d ever asked her: Was the child alive? I wondered what she’d said, if she’d even known.

Laura was bleeding profusely: uterine atony, postpartum hemorrhage. She must have been terrified, but she had her wits about her enough to take a cab to the hospital. The cab driver was going to testify for the state that the girl seemed calm, reasonable. The only thing out of the ordinary was the blood. He didn’t ask questions, and Laura didn’t tell anyone the baby’s whereabouts until the next morning. The police waited until the Ativan wore off and the family’s lawyers arrived.

“We buried her in Iris’s family plot,” Joe said. “Next to Iris’s mother.”

I swallowed.

“We had Rabbi Ross come, give a blessing. Iris and I went by ourselves. Laura didn’t want to come. That was fine. My mother stayed with her. Rabbi Ross came out, said a few words. Maybe we’ll put up a headstone some day. I don’t know.”

“Well,” I said, while secretly I was thinking, But won’t they need the body for evidence? I was thinking, Is that even legal? To bury the victim before the verdict? But isn’t the baby in New Jersey’s protection now? What I knew about the law you could fit in a teaspoon.

Lying in the sink of the Round Hill Municipal Library. Waiting for its skull to be crushed in like a can.

“We gave her a name.”

I blinked stupidly.

“The rabbi asked if we wanted to. I didn’t know what to say, but Iris said yes, we did. She said it was the right thing to do.”

He was whispering again, in that fluorescent-lit diner. Our big-bosomed waitress dipped by with her coffeepot, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap crooned on someone else’s jukebox, eggs cooled in front of us, New Jersey rush hour traffic whizzed outside. But in our booth, all was still.

“We couldn’t let her go to heaven as Baby Girl Stern,” Joe whispered. “We just couldn’t let that happen. She needed a name. Iris was right.”

“Heaven, Joe?”

“We named her Sara,” he said. “That was Iris’s mother’s name.”

“Well,” I said. “Well, that’s a nice name.”

Although I desperately wanted to, I couldn’t look away, so I watched a tear leak from his eyes and trace a spidery path down his cheek.

“Ah, Joe.”

But then, thank God, he blew his nose, rubbed his bald spot again, and apologized that he really had to go, he was sorry, he had a psychiatric appointment to make, and this goddamn doctor charged too much for him to risk being late.

“I’ll call you, Joe,” I said as I dropped him back at his car in the JCC lot.

“That would be great, Pete,” he said. “We’re busy with everything, but—”

“I’ll call you,” I said. But for some reason I kept imagining Sara
Stern in a Dumpster behind the library, her skull caved in like a soft piece of fruit, and it took me many weeks to pick up the phone.

I
’M A LUCKY MAN,
I know that. I was lucky that morning, listening to someone else’s terrible news, and I’m even lucky now, warm in my studio, an unpredictable shower awaiting me in the tiny bathroom, and then a lumpy futon, the squall of the Kriegers outside. The lingering scent of my son’s oil paints in the air in this large-enough room. My son, my wife, my job, my mother, my brother. I have done enough damage to lose them all, but something tells me that no matter how much I deserve to, I won’t lose them entirely. This doesn’t necessarily feel right, but I am chained to my good fortune.

And then the cell phone rings. My wife? No, it’s my old friend Joe, who must have sensed I was thinking about him. What does he want with me now? What’s there for us to talk about? Joe has my future balanced on his fingertips and he knows it. This whole malpractice case—one soft exhale, and he could blow my whole life and livelihood away. It’s an uncomfortable position for old friends to be in, but there it is. My cell phone stops ringing, catches its breath, starts up again. I watch it go, lights and vibrations and an electronic version of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons.
Joe doesn’t leave a message. I turn my cell phone off.

I miss talking to Joe sometimes, I really do.

Two neighborhood tomcats are fighting outside; they’ve both got the springtime joneses, but most of the female cats around here have been spayed. The pickings are slim. I like April, never mind Eliot; I like the tomcats, the optimism in the magnolias, the secretaries taking off their stockings, outdoor cups of coffee, smokers clustering again by the front entrance to the hospital. Joe and I used to take long
bike rides up the Palisades the first warm Sunday of the month, snow sometimes still receding into the hawthorns along the highway.

Roseanne Craig said to me once that in Northern California it was always springtime, until suddenly, for reasons she still didn’t quite understand, she woke up and it was winter.

A
FTER MY BREAKFAST
with Joe that morning, I went to the office, unsettled. My patients didn’t notice, but Mina did, and she made decaf in the afternoon instead of regular. I took off by six, no rounds, and back at home Elaine and I made spaghetti while Alec was at soccer practice. I poured us each a big glass of dolcetto before we even got started.

Although we both enjoyed it when it happened, Elaine and I rarely cooked together. She was content to do the lifting in the kitchen in exchange for my dish washing and coffee brewing afterward. Still, every once in a while the urge struck, and she and I would make something simple and happy together: fried chicken, spaghetti and meatballs. That night, still hopped up on guilt and shivers, I thought cooking with my wife would settle me. I downed my wine quickly, and she put NPR on the little kitchen transistor, the market report.

Elaine and I had been married long enough to feel as though the exchange of a few sentences was a momentous conversation, which was all right; what I mean is that we were as comfortably quiet together as most couples we knew, and relied on oldies-but-goodies (Alec, vacation plans, bills) to keep the engine of our marital discourse lubed. Now, of course, we had an enormous thing to talk about in the form of our oldest friends’ daughter, and I was glad not only to have Elaine to talk to, but also, perversely, to have something new to talk about with Elaine.

“They gave the baby a name,” I said as casually as I could, chopping oregano while she scraped carrots into the sink.

“Sara,” she said.

“You knew that?”

“Iris asked me if I knew what the rules were for naming the dead. We talked a couple days ago.”

“What did you tell her?” Elaine and I had been lapsed Jews for many years, but she’d been raised in a semi-Orthodox home in Squirrel Hill, the Jewish part of Pittsburgh; her father had been a cantor, and her mother the longtime president of the Temple Sisterhood. My wife had a religious streak she didn’t try to hide, and a certain depth of Judaic knowledge.

“I told her that whatever she wanted to name the baby was fine, as far as I knew. I was surprised, though. First of all, she never really liked her mother. Remember how she used to bitch? Second, you’d think the name would be up to Laura.”

I was surprised enough to put down my knife. “Why would Laura get to name the baby?”

“She’s the mother,” Elaine said. It was ten of seven, and the light in the kitchen was just starting to slant. I took a bulb of garlic from the basket hanging near the window and started peeling its papery skin.

“She also murdered the child.”

“Murdered? That’s what you think happened?”

“Elaine—”

“You don’t know that. We’re all so quick to condemn, all of us. But we have no idea if the baby was alive, we have no idea what was in that poor girl’s head—”

“She crushed its skull.”

“You don’t know why she did it.”

“So you’re pleading insanity?”

“I’m not pleading anything,” Elaine said. She threw the carrots into the salad bowl and wiped her hands on her jeans. “I just think we should show our friends a little loyalty, and Laura, too. We’ve known her all her life.”

I was honestly surprised at Elaine’s reasoning. Rarely did she disagree with me so staunchly. “I’m being disloyal?” I said.

“You’re not the judge here.”

“Who said I was?”

“Listen, I know how you think. You’re a moralist, you know? You live in black and white. Gray is beyond you.”

“What’s so gray about delivering a baby in a public restroom and smashing in its skull either shortly before or after it took its first breath?” Her whole line was making me feel unreasonable.

“You don’t know the entire story, Pete.”

“But those are the facts, Elaine.”

She looked at me, her hazel eyes colder than I would have preferred. I remember having the strange urge to rub her hair between my fingers, to feel its softness.

“You should know better, is what I mean. You have the moral code of a teenager, that level of sophistication. Right is not always right, and wrong is not always wrong.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Pete,” she said, “the world is not always as easy as you’d like.” Her face turned mottled, then pink. “And just because a teenager delivers a baby in a bathroom and disposes of it …” She paused. “You of all people should know the world is not as easy as you’d like. You’re a doctor, Pete. Come on.”

In all our years together, I’d grown to rely on Elaine’s support — to
lean on it like a post. She so rarely contested me or took serious issue with my interpretations of the challenges that buffeted our lives. So why now? What was different about now? If anything, I’d have expected her to take my line
more
seriously than usual, since this was a more-serious-than-usual event in our lives. In everyone’s lives. In the hospital, at dinner parties, wherever Round Hillers found one another, it was tough to talk about anything else.

“The poor girl, hemorrhaging, panicking, disposed of her baby in a Dumpster, which is, of course, outrageous, but” — Elaine gripped her wineglass — “but because of those very reasons, because of the
outrageousness
of it, and because we know Laura, we know she’s a good, moral person—don’t you think there
has
to be another reason this happened?” She put a hand on her hip, all earnestness. Maybe this was simply maternal of her—we had, after all, pushed the girl’s stroller around Fairmount Park all those years ago. “Don’t you think something else had to be going on? In her head?”

“How should I know what was in her head?”

“I’m just asking you to show a little sympathy, Pete.”

“Sympathy.” The market report was preaching the gospel of Berkshire Hathaway. Up five points: dispassionately, I listened to myself grow richer for a minute or two. In the morning, Kenny, my stockbroker, would call to congratulate himself on how he’d handled my money.

“Elaine, in my day, baby killers were baby killers. Or to rephrase, when I was growing up, if a girl got pregnant and had the baby and murdered that baby, the reasons
why
she did it would not overrule the fact that she did it in the first place. Perhaps it was a more black-and-white time, I don’t know.”

“In your day, girls had abortions in back alleys.”

“An abortion would have been a fine alternative. As opposed to murder.”

“You really think she’s a murderer?”

“I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

“It’s happened throughout history, Pete,” she said, using the voice she had used to explain human reproduction to Alec the previous fall. “Iris has talked to sociologists, psychologists. I put her in touch with people at Bergen. Girls who give birth alone, or who cannot support their children, or who consider themselves outcasts from their society—”

“Laura Stern’s an outcast?”

“Pregnant at seventeen? Of course she is.”

“Being pregnant doesn’t make her an
outcast.
She could have told Joe and Iris. What would they have done to her but been the loving and supportive and wonderful people they are?”

“Presumably she thought they would have punished her. Ostracized her.”

“Joe and Iris?”

“Of course it’s not what they
would
have done, but it’s what she thought they would have done. She probably felt she couldn’t disappoint them. They’ve always had very high standards for their kids, you know.”

“So it’s their fault?”

“That’s not what I said. It’s just that they expect certain things from all four of them. And pregnancy certainly isn’t one of those things.”

“I can’t believe you’re blaming Joe and Iris for this.”

“I’m not blaming Joe and Iris!”

“Listen to yourself.”

“Pete, why are you so angry about this?”

“Why aren’t you?”

“Pete,” she said, and nothing else. Which is where we ended it. Elaine made salad dressing. I set out the plates, still at a loss. How many years had it been since we’d suffered this sort of philosophical difference? And over something like this. A dead baby in a Dumpster.

But soon enough it was easy to focus on other things: We had dinner on the table. Alec got dropped off from soccer and sprawled himself across the wooden bench that served as our fourth, fifth, and sixth seats and wolfed down half his spaghetti in the time it took Elaine and me to finish our salads, but we were happy enough to have him home that we didn’t pick on him about anything. He was not yet allowed to watch television unsupervised, just to give you a sense of the innocence we tried to impose on the kid.

But later, after sliced-up pineapple in front of the second half of
The Adventures of Milo and Otis
and a shower and homework check and a lazy round of dishes in the stillness of the late-night kitchen, I washed my face and brushed my teeth and climbed into bed next to Elaine, who I thought was sleeping. I touched her shiny hair, then pulled the quilt over my shoulder; when we were newlyweds, I used to coerce her, every night, to cuddle against me and sleep with her head on my shoulder and her hand on my chest, but that was years ago. Sometimes I used to sandwich her between my legs, and if she tried to move in the night, I’d wake up, grab her, pull her to me, squeeze her like an anaconda.