Hard Rain Falling (36 page)

The actual birth of the child was slow and easy, but very painful to Sally. Her face was pale and wrinkled with pain. Jack, standing there holding her hand, did not know what to do with his eyes. He did not want to watch the baby coming out, and yet he could not bear to look at her face. He compromised on the doctor’s face until the baby actually began to emerge, and then there was no question of looking away. Jack felt anguish, but he felt much more than that, as if the dream were over and life was suddenly real; an experience of such immensity that he could only stand transfixed and watch his child being shoved out into life. Sally did not cry after the child started coming; her only sounds were determined grunts; and when the baby was free and the mess started coming out, she gave a sigh, not of relief but of accomplishment, and Jack looked at her face. She looked sleepy. He heard the vigorous slap, and turned to see an unlovely mess, all balls and slime, hanging down from the doctor’s hand, and braying faintly with life. As Jack watched, a tiny stream of urine sprang from the child and wet the front of the doctor’s gown.

“He’s a beauty,” the doctor said. “The good ones always pee on me.” He looked at Sally, admiration in his eyes. “You can be proud of this one. A fine boy.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the mothers,” she said in a faint voice.

“Of course I do,” the doctor said.

Myron Bronson telephoned to find out what had happened, and after Jack told him, he said, “Look, I’d like to be the boy’s godfather. Would that be all right with you?”

“Sure,” Jack said.

“That would mean he would have my name. Is that all right? Would you name him after me?”

“No,” Jack said. “I already have the name. I’m sorry. Can’t you be godfather anyway?”

“I suppose so. What’s his name?”

“Billy.”

He had known he was going to name the baby after Billy Lancing all the time, but he hadn’t mentioned it to Sally, and at first she objected, wanting him to be named John (for Jack) Myron; but there was something about Jack’s expression that kept her from insisting, and so the child was christened at Grace Cathedral as Billy Lancing Levitt. The function of the religious ceremony and paper work was to provide the child with a church background just in case he needed one; not because either of his parents was Episcopal. They decided rationally that they had no right to deny him the security of a faith, and they decided rationally that of all the faiths around, Episcopalianism was the most secure. Myron Bronson came through with the traditional silver mug, but containing a rolled-up thousand-dollar bill, and the child was driven to his christening in a Rolls-Royce. The whole business had an air of unreality about it for Jack, and throughout he tried to concentrate on the image of his dead friend. There was nothing to remind him though; even the name seemed not to belong to the old Billy but just to the new one, the small red face in the huge white bundle. At first it had seemed like a good idea but among these rich trappings it became just silly and sentimental. It wasn’t going to bring Billy back; it wasn’t going to commemorate his good qualities; Jack was not even sure the old Billy really
had
any good qualities except the strength to die. Anyway, it was all very stupid, and Jack did not care anything about the kid; he was just an added irritant. Except for the thousand dollars.

They spent a lot of the money on the child, and then Sally took the rest and got herself some new clothes. After the usual postpartum depression, in which she talked about things like being the wife of a parking-lot attendant and losing her looks, she became engrossed in motherhood, nursing the child herself, reading Dr. Spock when she could get the tattered paperback away from Jack, and taking Billy for long rides in his green-and-white stroller; and when the baby was asleep in its crib, which was most of the time, she would just sit in the living room and look contented. For the first time since they had been married she had enough housework to keep her busy, and it was a real pleasure to take a break and do nothing; not even daydream, just sit there and feel good. It was almost six weeks before they made love again, and by that time Jack was ready to lose his mind from desire, and they had a fine time of it.

Everything seemed marvelous; Jack was gradually learning to love his child, and he was not in any sense discontented with his life. When he would come home from work late at night he would peek in at the baby and even bend down and kiss him and think that this was amazingly good—to be able to love something that hardly knew he existed. But he did not want to analyze the emotion—it was too good to speculate about or attempt to define; it ought to be left alone and just
felt
.

He noticed other children in the street and felt a great connecting sympathy with them; he even began to wonder if, when the time came, little Billy would be able to hold his own among other children, and what he would be like when he got older. And then Jack seared himself with the masochistic pleasures of speculating on all the possible disasters that could overtake a helpless child, things Jack could do nothing about, like deformation or idiocy or smothering in the bed, or running out into the street and being killed by a crazy teen-ager on a motorcycle, or catching polio and spending the rest of his life in braces, or going blind or deaf, or not learning how to read; and then he realized he was torturing himself for his own grim pleasure and he stopped it. The hell with the future, he thought. And then admitted he was afraid to think of the future. What if he made extensive plans for the boy and the boy died or was crippled? All the plans would crumble and Jack would go mad from grief. Better, he thought, not to plan at all; let things happen as they will. Perhaps plan a
little
, but not too much. There were things he owed the child, and he had to plan for them.

He remembered that as a child he had never gotten anything from anybody except regimentation; and the toys they were given at Christmas were all used, repaired toys that you could tell other kids on the Outside had gotten tired of and discarded, just like the clothes they wore; and there were certain toys that kids never wore out and that never showed up at the orphanage, such as baseball mitts and electric trains that actually worked; and he remembered that everything they had in the home was the gift of the faceless authority that ran the place, and none of the children ever got anything he didn’t deserve.

He thought about the orphanage carefully now, not with any particular self-pity, but abstractly going over the things that had happened to him, sorting out the good and rejecting the bad. He wanted Billy to be properly trained and brought up, but he didn’t want to hurt him needlessly; certainly he should not be undertrained as Jack’s revenge on the orphanage, or overtrained and deprived as a reaction to this. The trick was to strike the proper balance. There would be no cast-off, shitty toys for Billy, no empty nights with no one to be comforted by; on the other hand there would be tears, injustice, cuffings, yellings-at, and discipline. But the boy would know deep inside that it was done with love by a human being, not abstractly by a machine. Of course, that was what it amounted to; the boy would be loved. It was that simple. He would be loved, and he would know it, and that would give him the strength to face any kind of injustice. Jack had not been loved as a child; he had not even been liked. And it had almost destroyed him. He had been nothing until he had been loved. From that moment (the moment, he thought with a pang, of Billy’s death) his life had begun to improve, and with only a few setbacks, it had kept improving. The more he loved and was loved, the better his life got. At once it seemed to Jack like a magical solution to everything. If only everyone loved everyone else! Then there would be no trouble in the world. It seemed so easy. If we all just reached our hands out to each other, what peaks of human joy could we not achieve!

For hours one night he kept this simple idea in his head, wondering alternately why it
would not
work, and why it
did not
work. He tried to think whom he hated most in the world, and ended up realizing that he did not hate anybody. What he hated was ungraspable. It was not a person or persons, it was a thing. He wondered if he could stop hating the
thing
, and decided he could not. It had done too much to him. And he thought about hate; it was a kind of passion, not altogether dishonorable in itself but, like love, capable of the most awful sorts of injustice. Like the way so many people felt about Negroes, a hate not for anybody in particular, but for an idea, an abstraction of a kind of people who were hateful. Because they were to be
feared
.

So it was not hate, but fear. And love does not conquer fear. Or does it? How can you love when you’re frightened? Jack knew what he did when he was frightened: he struck. But the joke was, he had never in his life struck the machine itself, only people. In his twenty-five-year battle against authority, he had not landed one single punch. It was a great fight, Ma; I didn’t lay a glove on him.
It
. “My boy don’t fight till we hear it talk.” And that Algren short story, what was the title? “He Swung and He Missed.” Beautiful.

Jack was rather pleased with himself for having come to so many interesting philosophical insights, until a few days later he realized that all he had thought of was crystalized in a single terse folk saying: “So go fight City Hall.” He had to laugh.

But something still troubled him. It could not be true that he had wasted his life up to now; it was not possible that fighting City Hall was wrong or futile. The folk saying had to be wrong. It was not like Don Quixote fighting a windmill, because a windmill wasn’t a criminal, and society was. Society was a criminal because it committed crimes. To fight society
because it was a criminal
had to be good. But was that what Jack had done most of his life? Had he fought to make society quit cheating, lying, robbing, and murdering? Or had he fought because he was scared? Search as he would, he could find nothing in his past to justify his fight. He had not fought the evil side of society; he was not even sure what it was. He had merely
fought
. It left him with an awful sense of frustration, because in his case society, too, had been fighting blindly and helplessly. There had been nothing else to do with him but what it had done. It was not society who had abandoned him, but his nameless and unknown parents; and they must have had their reasons for abandoning him. For all he knew, they were both dead and therefore blameless. Or they did not love one another, or did not have any money, or any of a dozen reasons for not keeping him. What if they had kept him anyway, and did not have any love to give him? What then? Mightn’t he have grown into a monster even worse than he was? Jack had known plenty of people whose home lives as children had been, at least on the surface, perfectly reasonable, and they were depraved maniacs compared to him. What about Dale Phipps, born into and raised by a solidly protective Catholic family, who liked nothing so much as murdering people? Jack could not even say with any certainty that Phipps had not been loved as a child. Maybe society didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe where you were born and who you were raised by didn’t affect things at all. Maybe some people were just naturally rotten and others just naturally good. But if that was the case, then what could he do to make sure Billy, his son, would turn out good?

Nothing.

It was an awful word. Nothing. It made him sick at heart. He refused to believe in it. He demanded that there be something he could do. He demanded that his love be worth something to his child. If it wasn’t, life was garbage. He had to rule out the idea that life was just a matter of accident, of percentages, because it was just too goddam much to stand for. Even if it was true, he was determined to live as if it were false. There had to be some way you could make yourself be
felt
.

One afternoon while Sally was ironing some of the things he had just brought back from the Laundromat, he said to her, “Don’t you think this is the answer to the whole goddam thing? I mean, society is just made up of people, and lots of them are rotten, so society’s partly rotten. So what we do is raise our kid to be good; and the more people who do that, the better the world gets. And, like, the more we do that, turn out good kids, the more of them there are to turn out more good kids. And the whole thing can snowball, dig, until finally all the rotten people are dead and forgotten.” He scratched his head. “Sort of. You know?”

She laughed at him. “What have
you
been smoking?”

“Listen, I’m serious. What can we do better than raise Billy so he doesn’t have any of the hang-ups we have?”

“You mean spend the rest of our lives on
him?
I’d like a little more than that.”

“Hell no, that’d wreck him. I mean, you know, making him a better person than we are.”

“How?”

That was the question, of course. “How the hell should I know?” he retorted. “Just do it as it comes up. Billy had this theory about life, you know. I told you about it. How we’re all
connected
. I mean, like the bad connections—do you remember?—well, the less of them there are, the better your life is. So the thing is to teach Billy to understand his
feelings
... .”

“That theory,” she interrupted. “Have you any idea how childish it is?`...never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ Sure it does.”

“Well, is that childish?”

She laughed again, and the steam iron hissed under her hands. “You know what I mean. Old-fashioned. It’s not a new theory, as you seem to think. It hasn’t done us much good, has it? That’s one of those ideas that float around.”

“I don’t think it’s the same thing,” Jack said lamely. “Anyway, just because it’s been around doesn’t mean it’s no good.”

“You’re certainly a philosopher these days. My, yes, having a baby makes a person
think
.” She held up one of his sweat shirts. “Do you think this needs to be ironed? It’s only wrinkled under the arms.”