A Private Sorcery (46 page)

When I come in, Rena points to the floor, where she's spread out a quilt. Your son is on his belly and he's lifted his head up in the air. “Look,” she says, “a body rising.”

Over dinner, Rena reads to me from one of her books about the settled baby, the baby who has acquired a rhythm for sleeping and eating, whose distress has shed its mystery. The baby for whom the world is no longer a trauma but contains within it the possibility of the womb, who now finds pleasure in an array of activities, whose caretakers can interpret his cries and without thought do what it takes to comfort him.

Rena laughs. “That sounds like Bernie. Only it's hard to know who it is that has settled. The baby or us.”

“All of us,” I say. Were you here, across the table, you would provide the catalog: Rena, your mother, yourself. Me. I suppose you would include me. Rena allows the
us
to hold who it may.

The baby wakes, and Rena lets him nurse while she finishes eating. The phone rings, your nightly call guaranteed by Marsden Stem, Grand Marshal of the Blackjacks, who insists that now that you're a father the others give you first chance at the phone. Rena holds the receiver next to Bernie's mouth so you can hear the gurgling sounds, and it is as if you were a father away on a business trip. Not in prison, not on the way to being divorced.

“It's been three years tomorrow,” you say when I take the receiver. For some thick-skulled reason, it is the first time I put it together, that
you were arrested on Rena's birthday. Despite everything, your mother was always the one who remembered birthdays, who wrote the cards. And even though it would be me she'd send to the mailbox, I never looked at the envelopes, never let the names and dates sink in.

I
T WILL SURPRISE YOU
, given all that I've said, to learn that every night I say a prayer for my grandson.
God bless our baby. God grant him a long happy happy healthy healthy wonderful life. God grant us all the wisdom and self-control and goodness
—yes, I do believe in such a thing—
to provide for him a joyous home in which he will flourish and thrive
. I repeat these words, shamanistically, ritualistically, superstitiously three times. I am embarrassed to reveal this piece of irrationality to you, and I hope you will only smile and be amused and perhaps touched but not disdainful of me.

I repeat these words three times lest, should I not, they not happen. I repeat them because I did not do these things for you. I repeat them because I love you, my second-born son.

Epilogue

It's two in the morning, her nightly break. No clock is needed. She knows. The tingling as her breasts fill, the dampness inside her nursing bra. She locks the door to the secretaries' lounge and unpacks her electric pump and the plastic bottles she carts back and forth from home. She pumps—the relief of her glands emptying, the satisfaction of watching the containers fill with the milk that will feed Bernie tonight while she's gone.

Afterwards, she places the bottles in her cooler pack, washes the pumping tubes, and gathers up her coat and gloves to get the taste of night air her lactating body has demanded since her return to work. She presses the down button, watches the panel as the elevator rises to the twenty-sixth floor.

Inside, she leans against the rear wall. There's a flutter in her heart as she detects the fall, her breath and muscles locking, her body knowing it first that the descent is too fast. Frantically, she pushes the red
STOP
button but the car continues to drop. She pulls the alarm, hears the bell sounding through the popping in her ears, crouches to the floor, arms covering her head. She screams. The elevator hits the bottom and like a yo-yo starts up again, all the lights flashing at once and then suddenly nothing as it comes to a halt.

She stays crouched, afraid to move. Five minutes, maybe more, then a man's voice: “Okay, we'll try and bring it up a little closer to nineteen.”

The doors open and she sees above her the scuffed tips of two work boots. Slowly, the car inches upward. A man's dark hands reach down to steady her as she climbs, first one knee, then the other onto the landing.

He cups her elbows as he brings her to her feet. “Got her,” he says into a walkie-talkie. He looks her over, head to toe. “Anything hurt?”

She shakes her head. Her teeth are chattering.

“Here.” He keeps an arm out for her to hold on to as he takes off his shirt and drapes it over her shoulders. The cloth smells of tobacco and sweat. On his other arm, there's a mermaid with a snake coiled around the tail.

Dizzy, she leans into him and then begins to heave, her face pressed against his white undershirt, her fingers squeezing the mermaid, as she thinks about the cable snapping and how she was certain she'd plummet, a free fall, to the bottom. The fear not so much of having all of her bones smashed, that would last but an instant, but of Bernie losing his mother, his future stamped with grief.

W
HEN SHE GETS HOME
, both Leonard and Bernie are sleeping. Still shivering, she puts on pajamas and wool socks. With Bernie's cry, she tiptoes into the living room and lifts him out of the crib. Settled in the rocker in her room, her breasts fill immediately. Bernie sucks avidly, happily, greedily. Outside her door, she can hear Leonard moving around. “Hungry little monkey,” she whispers. “Say happy birthday to your mummy.”

Leonard knocks while she's burping Bernie.

“Come in.” He's smiling, carrying a tray with a glass of orange juice, a mug of tea and a bud vase with two yellow roses. Tucked under his arm is a tube wrapped in Venetian paper.

“Happy birthday. The present is from Bernie and me.” Leonard puts down the tray and tube and reaches out his arms for the baby. With Bernie on his shoulder, he continues Rena's pats.

Rena takes the gift. Carefully, she undoes the wrapping. A sea swirl: lapis, moss, coral, sand. She pulls the rolled paper from the tube and spreads it out on her desk, weighting the corners with books.

It's an antique map, prepared for the
Valentine's Manual
of 1865 by a Mister M. Dripps. “Oh! It's wonderful.”

“Look at your neighborhood. The grid of streets was laid, but there was no Riverside Park, no Riverside Drive.”

She leans over the map. “The only marked buildings are a lunatic asylum and an orphanage.”

“The New York Lunatic Asylum. And the Leeke and Watts Orphan Asylum.”

Bernie burps. He twists to look at her and then breaks into one of his radiant toothless grins. “I'll give him his bath,” Leonard says. “You get some extra sleep.”

Rena kisses Bernie on the nose, Leonard on the cheek. “Thank you, my dears.”

Warm now, she cracks the window. There's a fresh dusting of snow on the sill. Icicles descend from the upper tree branches. Shimmying on the river are the reflections of the New Jersey shoreline, the towers doubled on the water.

She studies the map. The dozen ferry crossings from before the bridges. Downtown, Thompson Street where her mother grew up, Fulton Street where her grandfather's fish market had been. Leonard's West End Avenue not yet paved. The Bronx, where her father was raised, still farmland. The street where he resided as a law student, where, presumably, she was conceived, sandwiched between the lunatic asylum and the orphanage.

She finds the block where she and Saul had lived together. Crossing the parchment, west to the Hudson, north along what was then called Strikers Bay, she finds herself, where she is now.

Acknowledgments

My sincerest thanks to my agent, Elyse Cheney, who found my novel its perfect home, and to Antonia Fusco, dream editor; our collaboration has extended through every aspect of this book. For their generosity of spirit and time, I thank the many people who read the manuscript in various drafts or helped in other ways to shepherd it into being: Ann Braude, E. L. Doctorow, Mark Epstein, Candida Fraze, Alejandro Gomez, Marian Gornick, Vivian Gornick, Ken Hollenbeck, Lila Kalinich, Amy Kaplan, Carole Naggar, Michele Nayman, Arlene Shechet and Barbara Weisberg. Finally, my deepest gratitude to Shira Nayman and Jill Smolowe without whom this work would not have seen the light of day.

Published by

A
LGONQUIN
B
OOKS
OF
C
HAPEL
H
ILL

Post Office Box 2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 2002 by Lisa Gornick. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-367-2