The Stork Club (3 page)

"I sleep over too."

"That must be great. Do you have your own room at Daddy's?"

He nodded, was silent for a while, then added, "And Daddy sleeps with Monica."

"Who's Monica?"

A shrug. Then Scottie turned onto his stomach, made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, and with a hard ping sent the first marble across the floor, and then another. When all twelve of the marbles were against the wall, Scottie put his elbows on the floor and his face in his hands and said in a near whisper, the way Barbara often heard many of the children she treated state their hardest truths, "I saw her tushie."

"You saw Monica's tushie?" She spoke softly too.

She could only see the back of Scottie's head as he nodded. "In the morning in my daddy's bed. She was sitting on top of him and they were naked."

Now he put his face down on the floor and left it there for a long time, the gel on his hair glistening from the sun that poured in through the office window.

"It must have made you feel funny to see your daddy and Monica naked."

The little head nodded again, almost imperceptibly.

"Was it sad because of your mom?"

No answer. Barbara sat on the floor next to him. He was crying. When the hour was up she opened the door to the waiting room, and Scottie left with the Levines' pretty, Swedish au pair, who had been waiting for him. Barbara called and left a message on Ronald Levine's answering machine asking him to call her as soon as possible.

She was late, due downtown in twenty minutes and it would take her at least half an hour to get there. She was rushing to get out of the office, so when the phone rang she decided to let the machine answer it. But she
stood in the open doorway waiting to hear who was calling in case it was an emergency.

Beep
. "I'm Judith Shea, I was referred by Diana McGraw, who's in your Working Mothers group. I had two babies by D.I. and I need to talk to you as soon as possible. Here's my number."

Barbara pulled a pad out of her purse and jotted the phone number down, then locked the office door and rushed out to the parking lot to her car. D.I., she thought. D.I., and for an absent minute as she looked at what she'd written, she thought the caller was being strangely coy and giving her the baby's father's initials, but then she laughed at herself as she made the turn out of her office parking lot and realized what the letters actually meant.

3

T
HERE WAS a kind of glow around Judith Shea as she sat on the floor of the reception area nursing her baby. She was one of those women whose look Barbara always envied. Skin that was a naturally peachy color no cosmetologist in the world could ever recreate, green eyes so bright they might have been ringed with liner, though she wasn't wearing a drop of makeup. Her thick shiny auburn hair was cut bluntly in a perfect bob. Barbara realized with embarrassment that her own unconscious prejudice had made her assume that a woman who used donor insemination to conceive a baby would be homely.

The nursing baby looked over the full round breast at Barbara with eyes that matched her mother's, while her cherubic sister, a toddler girl with red ringlets, was asleep on the love seat. "We got here a little early," Judith said. "Jillian fell asleep. I hate to wake her."

"Don't move," Barbara said and hurried into her inner office to get a pad and pen. "You're my last family of the day, so there's no reason why we can't talk right here," she said, returning to sit across from Judith in a way that accommodated her own straight black wool skirt.

"So let's see. Where do I start? I was thirty-six years old with no boyfriend and not a whole lot of dates either. In fact, my friends at work always kidded me that Salman Rushdie went out more than I did. But I always had a powerful craving to be a part of a family. Maybe because I was an only child or because so much of my own family are deceased.

"I wanted to be a mother. But as independent as I am, it was the only thing I couldn't do alone. And I didn't see marriage anywhere on the horizon." She thought about what she'd said for a minute, then laughed a bubble of a laugh. "Marriage, hell! I couldn't find a man I'd risk safe sex with, let alone the kind without a condom that could make a baby." Her eyes tested Barbara's to see if the psychologist was making a judgment about what she was hearing.

"Go on" was all Barbara said.

"You don't know me yet but believe me, I'm not one of those women who won't buy herself a white couch in case she meets a man who might like a brown couch better. I've got plenty of my own money, a great career, I'm an art director in an advertising agency. Remember that quote from Gloria Steinem? Something about how we've become the men we wanted to marry? Well it's true. I love my life and don't have any enormous need to couple up.

"So I went to a sperm bank, and not only did I buy and use the sperm successfully once, but having Jilly was so much fun that I did it again. And I used the same donor both times, which means that my girls are full
sisters, with the same mother and the same father . . . in absentia though he may be."

"How much do you know about the father?" It was not the question Barbara wanted to ask. She would have loved to ask, "Aren't you dying to meet the donor?" or "Aren't you afraid he'll show up someday?" or "Weren't you worried there would be something wrong with the sperm? Genetic problems or God knows what?'' But she was working at keeping her professional distance.

"The truth? I know less about the co-creator of my children than I do about the Federal Express delivery man," Judith said, and laughed. "Actually the way these cryobanks work makes it very chancy, because all you get from them is a list of numbers that represent each donor. And all they tell you is his race, blood type, ethnic origin, color of eyes and hair, type of build, and then a one-or-two-word description of his special interests.

"It's funny how rational it all feels when you're doing it, and yet when I describe it to you, I can hear how weird it must sound. I mean, for example, I wanted my babies to have light hair and light eyes, so I picked donor number four twenty-one, and all I know about him besides his coloring is that he likes reading and music."

The baby on her breast let out a happy little shiver of a moan, and Judith gently patted its tiny behind. "I made it a point to buy the sperm from one of those places where the donor agrees to let the children meet him in eighteen years, which means that my kids have a chance of knowing their father someday if they like.''

"How do you feel about that?" Barbara asked.

"A little worried. But I've got a long time until I have to face it," she said, then added grinning, "Somehow I
get the feeling you probably don't get a lot of people coming in with this kind of story."

"You're right about that," Barbara said.

"For all intents and purposes I'm a single mother. And a hell of a lot happier than if I'd been divorced and had to go through all of the who-gets-custody issues. I mean, it's a very no-muss, no-fuss way to go. Not to mention the fact that you've never once heard any torch singer sing 'The Donor That Got Away' or 'My Donor Done Me Wrong.' "

Both women laughed. Barbara liked Judith Shea's spirit. "How can I help you?" she asked. And as if that was the cue Judith had been anticipating, her front of confidence fell away, her cheeks flushed, and she looked very young and full of emotion. It took her a while to pull herself together. For a long time there was no sound in the room but the
plink
of the numbers on the digital clock as they rolled over.

"Jillian's nearly two and a half, and she's already talking about penises and vaginas and babies. And I realize that pretty soon she's going to want to know how they get inside mummies' tummies. When I think about that I start to panic and I worry about her coming to me and asking, 'Whatever happened to good old donor number four twenty-one?' " She shook her head at her own funny take on the situation. "When I thought about having a baby I pictured going out to buy happy sets and pretty nursery furniture, and then having someone soft to cuddle. But not even once did I plan for what happens when the babies are children who have language and ask tough questions, which will probably be any minute."

"And when they
do
start asking you about their father, which they will, you'll have to give them some unprecedented answers," Barbara said.

"Sometimes at night before I drift off to sleep I think of elaborate lies I can tell them about their genesis. But then I know I won't be able to do that because I think lying to kids about anything is unconscionable. Don't you?"

"Yes," Barbara said.

"I know you have a lot of programs over at the hospital for single parents and widowed parents and working parents, but I also know my problems don't fall into the purview of any of those groups. So what do I do?"

"I don't know," Barbara said honestly. "As you said, this is a new one. But we'll work on it together."

"You see," Gracie said, "it's why I always tell you that you can't predict human behavior by scientific laws. That woman is a product of these times. Sexual relationships are unsafe, infertility is rampant, people are faxing their brains out instead of speaking to one another. And there's no rat in a maze who could have made the kind of emotional decision she made to have those babies."

Barbara and Gracie moved swiftly down San Vicente Boulevard on the grassy medial strip. As usual Barbara was huffing to keep up with her energetic mother, telling Gracie, as she had for years, about what was going on at work. She always left out the personal information to protect her clients' confidentiality, and knew she was leaving herself open for some disdain, like that pointed comment about the way psychologists studied laboratory animals to learn about human behavior. But she was sincerely interested in her mother's always passionate input. Today when she talked about Judith Shea, Gracie "tsked" every now and then as she listened.

"New arrangements, new technologies, in a world that's not ready for them," she said. "The quantifying of human life. Can you believe they freeze embryos,
then the couple get a divorce and fight to see who gets custody of the damned things? Frankly it all gives me nightmares about the future."

"Me too," Barbara said. As they approached the open-air marketplace at Twenty-sixth Street she wished they could just stop there for a cup of coffee. Gracie must have received her brainwaves, because just then she stopped walking in front of the open-air marketplace, said, "To hell with exercise, I need caffeine," and turned into the courtyard, where Barbara found an empty table for them while Gracie walked up to one of the stalls and ordered two cappuccinos.

"I think it's interesting," Barbara said as Gracie placed a steaming cup of white froth in front of her, "that she chose to bypass the human factor, obviating the messiness and the awkwardness and the commitment of a relationship. And she seems reasonably comfortable with that."

"Well,
she
may be, but I'm not," Gracie said, shaking her head. "I say marriage is better."

"Mother, you're not exactly a testament to the success of matrimony and the nuclear family."

"But
you
are, so do as I say, not as I do. I made mistakes, Bar, and not working harder on my marriage was one of them, but the older I get the more I believe that a strong and loving family is the basis for mental health. You and your sister were exceptions. You both came out okay, in spite of my divorce because I was such a brilliant mother." The smirk on her face told the truth they both knew.

"Absolutely," Barbara said. "And let's hope the children of this woman will be too." She watched a pigeon bob around the brick patio pecking at crumbs.

"You know," Gracie said, "I'll bet in this crazy city there are dozens like her. Women are buying eggs if they don't have any of their own. Then they're even
having other women carry the embryos for them. Have you read about the mother who did that for her daughter?" She put her hand on Barbara's arm and grinned. "Honey, I love you, but
that
far I will not go!"

They both laughed at Gracie's joke, and Barbara thought how she loved this crazy loon of a mother of hers. "Oh too bad, Mother," she said. "I was just going to ask you if you'd mind."

"So what
about
these people?" Gracie asked, dipping a
biscotti
in her coffee and swirling it around in the bubbles of milk.

"Families with issues for the new millennium," Barbara said. "Beyond the birds and the bees. I should form a group just for them. To figure out how to break through the technological and get to the human issues." When she looked up she saw an unmistakable glow in her mother's eyes.

"That's a hell of an idea," Gracie said, then she bit into the now soggy cookie.

"Thank you, Mother." Barbara smiled, thinking it was the first time she and Gracie had agreed on anything in years.

"After all, what is it that woman is trying for by having those babies?" she asked Barbara in the way she always posed questions, making it sound as if she were giving you a test.

"Normalcy," Barbara answered. "Oddly enough she's using high-tech reproductive techniques to create some kind of regular family life, some kind of intimacy for herself, by being somebody's mother." This was Gracie's meat. It was socially significant. Bigger than the everyday development problems Barbara dealt with all the time, and she heard the giddiness in Gracie's voice when she spoke.

"There are some interesting ethics involved here too.
I think it's the cutting edge of family practice. What do
you
think?"

"What
I
think," Barbara said, standing, "is that I'll have a croissant," but as she walked over to the bakery counter she felt a little zap of adrenaline she knew wasn't from too much caffeine.

In her office she picked up her mail on the floor where it had fallen through the slot, then pushed the button on her answering machine.

Beep
. "Yeah, hi, I'm Ruth Zimmerman, my pediatrician said I should call you. I'll leave you the phone numbers for me at my house and my office and the studio, and my car, because I'm in a state of urgency here. Please try me as soon as possible. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old son and I need to talk about him with you right away. You see, here's the thing about how he was born . . ."