Agnes Mallory (17 page)

‘So! Let's try a meditation exercise,' said Marianne, sprightly. ‘Think about the person who makes you angriest … Oh.' At this point, narrowing her brows, she stopped. Puzzled, she bent over herself, trying to peer down into her own lap. ‘I – I must've spilled something …'

Whereupon, the once-wealthy matron who had been robbed of both dignity and security in a relentless divorce gasped, ‘Oh Christ, Marianne, your waters broke.'

My ditzy wife, still transcendent, blinked at her. ‘What?'

And the divorcee, and the single mother, and the out-of-work executive, and the former cocaine addict and the stay-at-home feminist and the terrified spinster who didn't need a goddamned man to feel fulfilled, all cried out together: ‘Marianne, you're in labor, you're having your baby!'

Marianne, God love her, was speechless. Simply astounded.

It was a fourteen-hour thing, little Charlie coming. She wouldn't take drugs for it, not any. Natural childbirth was all the rage that year, and of course Marianne swore by it, one of the few women nutty enough to actually stick it through. She wouldn't even let the doctor do that spinal block that became so popular a few years later. She had that with our daughter – there were complications then – but not with Charlie. Charlie she did on her own.

We'd gone to classes about this, the two of us. They gave them at the hospital, at Lennox Hill. A pretty nurse with a model's figure put us through breathing exercises each week or blithely stood at the blackboard with a pointer, telling us what to expect and what to do. When the time came, I was there, phoned in from work by the receptionist at the Y. And I did my bit, sitting at Marianne's bedside, massaging her spine with a tennis ball, feeding her ice chips, coaching her through the contractions and all that. Yeah, and it worked great for the first ninety minutes or so. That, we found out later, was when the other girls in our class started screaming for the demerol. But not my Marianne. Now, as convulsions and agonies and exhaustion racked her, as I hunched fretfully beside her wishing she'd cave in, as the fur on that stupid tennis ball turned to algae in my sweating palm, now she, like a sorceress marshalling her fairy gang, called on all her mysticism, all her techniques, all those mantras and huffings and those stupid eye movements and all that ridiculous shit, and she took it, the pain – or let it pass through her or happened with it or whatever the hell she did – she took it, without a curse, with hardly a complaint, for twelve and a half hours more.

By eight o'clock or so on the next snowy morning, she lay sprawled on the blood-stained and piss-stained and shit-stained sheets with only her blue eyes bright in a face as white as paper. Her limbs lay limp at accidental angles all around her and all the energy seemed drained from her, so that it looked as if she was staring out at me all alive from within a dead thing, a log or a clump of earth. And yet, mercilessly, the contractions went on and on, wringing the dry rag of that poor body, while she murmured and breathed and zenned her way all through it. Even the doctor – an imperturbable Chinese woman – was popping in every few minutes now, begging her to medicate. Not Marianne. She never broke. She held the mystic line. Her mind and her body were one, see, there was no chance of her giving over.

Me, I was demolished by this time. I was the ruins of Harry, a pile of Harry rubble on the hospital floor. Any beliefs I had, any convictions or philosophies, you could basically forget them. I was praying to a God I didn't think existed, I was working out superstitious rituals to ease her pain – trying to appease Baal by pacing between the cracks in the hallway tiles or flipping a coin to prophesy if it would come to an end in the next half hour – generally cowering, as it were, in the reptilian stem of the brain for all I was worth. In fact, when the end finally did come, I was in direct confrontation with Jehovah in a men's room stall. Shaking my fist at the tiled ceiling, snarling, ‘Let up, you fuck.' Sweat and tears streaming down my face together.

Well, it wasn't exactly the Lord's Prayer, but it did seem to do the trick. When I stepped out into the hall, there was Marianne rolling toward me, her doctor pushing her, bed and all, to the delivery room with nurses dancing attendance. I grabbed a gown and a hat and went with them. The rest happened very quickly.

And this was the surprising thing:

When I saw my son Charlie born, I was posted close by my wife's tormented belly, clutching her damp, weak hand and looking down between her legs. The only man in the room, I felt worn down by the difficult hours to what seemed an almost edenic humanity, with no feelings but tenderness and protectiveness and dependency for these good laborers of the companion sex. I had a clear overview of Marianne's straining snatch – a part of her, by the by, for which I'd always felt enormous warmth and friendliness: such a raw, living orifice to be set so wittily beneath her delicate blond curlicues, with a bosky odor that was generally female but had a unique taste like sour red wine; I'd always liked it and I was surely rooting for it now. I had a clear view of it and all the proceedings, and was surprised to find I felt no queasiness, but if anything a heightened sense of normalcy. Despite my pulsing excitement and fear, despite the shouts on all sides of ‘Push!' and ‘It's coming!' and my wife's animal cries and the indifferent antiseptic wall tiles and the bright lights and the brutal metal instruments, it all seemed pretty much to me like the proper business of the day which, again, surprised me.

Anyway, in about ten minutes, Charlie came, and this is the point. It was a messy affair. The doctor said ‘Push,' and the nurses were all yelling, and I may have called out something too, and Marianne lifted up on her elbows with a nurse supporting her behind and her whole face balled up like a fist and she bore down. She gave a prolonged, wet fart and a gout of loose shit arced from her exposed anus and splatted dully across the sheets. Then, as she renewed the attempt, there was a great spray of piss from her, angry and yellow and pungent. Charlie's head squeezed out of her into the doctor's hands, not looking like a head at all but white and crusty and nearly featureless and the neck so twisted around that it sent my eyebrows clear up under my hairline. ‘One more,' said the doctor, all of us shouting, and the dear girl gave it everything she had. And what a geyser there was from between her legs of blood and water and fetal matter and God knows what else. And out between the lips of her vagina in the very midst of that gush, curled all the while between her bloody thighs as if in peaceful sleep, slipped the baby, our baby, to a chorus of grateful cries.

Now then, the thing, the surprising thing that happened: I had a mystical experience. Nothing else to call it; it was none of your meditative states or exalted periods of understanding but a mental event, a thing that occurred. I felt a rush of love for my wife, and it became a tide – all this, by the way, in an instant – a tide of feeling on which I was washed clean out of my sense of physical presence and into Marianne's – what? – being, essence, whatever. I was washed from my body into her being and then with her into the new baby's – and then, all together, in the final squib of that second, began to mushroom out like a split atom into what I saw to be the Universal Thing. Imagine: a New York City lawyer. Then right away, back I snapped, the Harry we know and love, crying with joy and generally kvelling as young Charlie Bernard was laid, whimpering, between Marianne's bounteous breasts. I was no different than I was the moment before and knew no more than ever. But as I stood there in my stupid-looking paper hat and medical apron, beaming down on my ecstatic wife and murmuring son, I did have the anxious suspicion that something stinking of destiny had been set free in me, was slowly rising, like the kraken from its watery bounds, and I was half conscious of a painful and childlike yearning which I had repressed for ever so long, and which was attached in my mind to a long-forgotten prospect: the darkening sky above me, and the night's first stars.

In six weeks time, I was pretty well sick of the whole thing: the kid shitting, crying, my wife, all martyred, complaining of too little sleep, me trying to help, not wanting to help, not really caring. Marianne loved the boy so much she could not even begin to imagine my inner shrug at him. Well, he was my son and all that and I supposed I'd come to love him in time, but he didn't do anything and he didn't know me from Adam – why exactly
should
I have liked him, if it came to that? Naturally, at the time, I lied about all this, to Marianne and to myself, but the gibberings of the Inner Man were insistent. Every day, I fantasized that a plane would crash into the house and kill them both so that I'd be free.

I worked as much as I could. Made a great show of it too. Rubbing my eyes wearily, sighing over my workload and my responsibilities, my miserable clients and so on. I had to match Marianne burden for burden, you see, or she'd gain the moral high ground and want more out of me at home. Sometimes, I left for work early and subwayed under the west side down to lower Broadway only to spend the next hour or so alone doing nothing in the Starlight diner, a bagel joint south of Canal. I would sit there at a back table – salt and pepper linoleum littered with sesame seeds. I would sit very still with the
Times
draped over my hands and my bagel half-eaten and my coffee cold. And I would stare into space. Sad. Helplessly aching. Remembering and remembering, after these two decades of forgetfulness, all the details of that spring and summer I was nine years old. And I wanted it back, that season. More than words can say. I wanted to have it turn out right. I wanted it back.

My mother, fat as a peasant, had grown into her face somehow. It was as if it had been waiting for her to actually become what she'd looked like all her life: an old, frightened woman in a mind-maze of superstitious terror. Jowls of leather, lips white and tight with fear, eyes overheated with the ceaseless ratiocinative work of fending off any secret betrayals: that was Mom these days. The first time Marianne and I brought the baby out to the Long Island house, Mom could only hover over him and fret. She was afraid even to touch him: the Envious Gods, you know. Marianne, her sweet, whispery self, coaxed her as if she were a child, working Charlie by stages into her arms – whereupon Mom sat rigid with him in an absolute horror of joy, then, quickly, handed him back.

We were in the back room where we'd all gathered in the old days to watch TV. Marianne and Mom were sitting with the baby and his assorted bunny-bedecked paraphernalia on the braid rug. My father was slumped in the cushioned chair. Nearing sixty now, paunchy and bald, he exuded lethargy in long, moaning sighs.

‘It's so wonderful what you can do now with them,' Mom said, leaning wistfully over the blessed babe. ‘I see the young girls carrying them everywhere in those pouches, those Snuglis. Breastfeeding everywhere, right out in the open. In my day, they wouldn't let you do any of that. The doctors would tell you it was no good, your husband wouldn't encourage you. All the men – they'd get together and talk it over and then tell you what to do.'

‘They didn't get together,' my father groaned.

‘They got together,' she insisted. ‘They got together and talked it over and told you what to do.'

‘Where would we get together? What did we know?' he muttered mournfully.

But the women went on talking between themselves.

It was a Sunday afternoon in late February. There was a wet snow falling. I saw it melting on the empty branches of the old cherry tree.

‘So,' said my father, cranking around to me. ‘How's the job?'

I never meant to get talkative around my parents. I always meant to maintain my privacy, play the cards close to the vest and such like. But so many things came into play, so many impulses. I wanted my father to know what a success I was so he'd be proud of me. I wanted him to know what a success I was and he wasn't so fuck him. I wanted to show off my inside knowledge of political arcana, which I loved. And, maybe more than anything, I wanted my mother to know how honest I remained, how good, how golden with integrity. I didn't know why it mattered so much. I didn't know anything about her father then and the secret reasons behind her childhood poverty. But I felt just the same now as when I was a kid, when we sat at the breakfast table and I rattled off stories about my own heroism. I felt the same urgency to let her know this thing.

So I said, ‘It's incredible, Dad,' leaning over the sofa arm into his glazed hostility. ‘The things I'm seeing. There's never been a western city as layered with corruption as New York, not since maybe Rome. The
baksheesh
, the levels of bribery and influence. The intricate systems of legal graft – 'cause it's all legal, the way they work it out: legal fees instead of payoffs, hiring the councilman's illiterate brother to do your PR. The stuff you read in the newspapers is nothing – the newspapers are in on it …' blah, blah, blah, on and on, flaunting what passed for my expertise.