Two If by Sea (50 page)

Claudia asked the boys to put the contraption together.

“This is for good, then,” Frank finally said. “And you're fine.”

“It is,” Claudia told him. “And I am.”

“The lectures . . .”

“Were wonderful,” she said. “I'm going to finish the last two next year. I met with the committee after it became clear that I needed a dispensation for medical reasons, as I kept having the persistent wish to barf all over the podium. In fact, I have that persistent wish still.”

“Medical reasons.”

“Ordinary ones,” she said with a smile.

“Are you expecting, Claudia?”

“I am,” Claudia said. “Hooray!”

Frank gasped, as elated, frightened, thrilled, and disbelieving as any father-to-be.

“I can't believe it,” he said. “Are you okay? Is the baby okay?” He put his arms around her, leaving a full six inches between their bodies, gently hugging her shoulders.

“Frank!” Claudia tugged him into a close embrace. “You know better. I could probably bounce down a black-diamond ski run and not have a miscarriage at this point. You went through this before.” A minor note plucked, distantly. Natalie.
So far? So early? So soon?
As she recognized her gaffe, she compressed her lips and turned to the children, who had set out the dozen bags of screws and bolts and the lengths of aluminum pipe on the floor around them. “How about that, boys? What do you think of another girl around here? A little bitty one?” she said. Ian and Colin smiled politely. “Just three months, and all systems are go, despite my very advanced age.”

Ian patted her flat belly. He said, “You'll be like Glory Bee. She's having a baby, too!”

“As soon as I can quit throwing up, I'll eat more than she does,” Claudia said. “I dream in scones now.”

Vaguely annoyed, Colin said, “You really are having a baby. This thing is a baby stroller! It's not a scooter.”

“Alas, not everything is for you,” Claudia told him. “But I saw these Razor scooters in New York that have motors. I think there might be a couple of them stashed in the truck with the rest of my stuff. And maybe if you're very good—”

“Are you sure it's a girl?” Ian asked.

“I am sure it's a girl,” Claudia replied. There was no way of knowing.

“Well, I want to name her Guinevere,” said Ian.

Frank and Claudia stared at him.

“What? It's a nice name,” Ian told them, trying to see if he could fit in the seat of the Kelso Speedster and propel it with his feet.

Life turned another page.

Frank asked which of the rooms Claudia wanted for a nursery, and she told him none, thank you, the baby would sleep in their room until she was ready to sleep in a bed. “There's never been a proven case of SIDS for a child sleeping in bed with the parents. All those stories about people who rolled over on their babies and suffocated them, well, either those people were drunk or they suffocated the baby on purpose. I don't approve of cribs. Maybe a little cradle for naps.”

“Okay, then,” Frank said, and went back to working on the new barn.

A few weeks later, they went to the Keighley Clinic for an ultrasound. Not having been to a doctor in the area, Frank expected something quaint and thatched, out of James Herriot, but the clinic was all cliffed verges of granite and glass, with vertiginous floor-to-ceiling windows in the examining rooms.

“Guinevere appears to be Arthur,” Claudia said as the incontrovertible image swam into view under the ultrasound technician's expert pressure. The technician gave them pictures, but she let Frank hold them. She let Frank make the next appointment and spun the door, and was gone. When he caught up with her outside, Claudia was sitting on an ornate wrought-iron bench, sobbing. Thinking himself wise and prescient, Frank veered slightly away to an outdoor stall, where he purchased a big cup of tea with extra sugar and a plain biscuit for Claudia. It always worked in BBC movies. By the time he got there, however, she was nearly inconsolable, shaking—way past the cup-of-tea-dear stage.

“Sweetheart!” Frank sat down, spilling the tea all over his knee.

“I needed that tea!” she wailed. Frank practically ran, hobbling, back to get another, this one with a lid.

When he returned, he said softly, “Claudia, are you in pain?”

“No!”

“Do you not want the baby? Are you so disappointed? That you had to give up the honor of the Hillerand . . .”

“Of course not, Frank!”

What was wrong with her? She tried to take small swallows of the tea, but only cried harder. Finally, Frank hit on it.

“You wanted a girl. Claudia, I'm so sorry. That's it.”

“I did want a girl!”

“But there'll be another time. We don't need to stop at three. The baby is healthy and, Claudia, I'm so happy . . .”

Her face swollen, she glanced up at him for the first time since they'd left the echoing clinic lobby. “Are you? Are you really happy? Do you mind?”

“Mind?”

“It's all so sad and broken. You can still love him, even though your first baby was a boy, and he died?”

Frank set the tea on the bench and used his fingers to brush back the sweaty curls from Claudia's cheeks. The day was shirtsleeve warm and bright as a shout, and all around them, there seemed to gather a sudden flash mob of parents strolling with children in push chairs and prams, curly-headed blond babies, babies with hair dark and straight as feathers, babies with a comic red frill sticking out of a cap. He could reach back, into the fastnesses of the dark, and wish he could hold the babe that was swept away before he could see the sky, but to let that shadow stand between them and the sun now would be a betrayal. He would betray Claudia, and, Frank now realized, himself, and everyone standing on the sturdy bridge they had built between them, trusting the soundness of the structure, of the future. “Claudia,” he said. “I can see why you wonder. But I love our boys, even though my first son died. And I love the baby. I'll love our little girl, someday, even if she's a boy, too. And if we have another child, and she's a boy, too. That will also be fine. I'm in . . . I'm in awe.”

She hugged his neck then, uncharacteristically yielding, letting herself be pulled close to him, his arms around her shoulders, her occasional catch of breath a sough against his chest.

“Awe,” she said. “That is the word. I've never been pregnant. Not even a scare. I can't believe how enormous this is. He's just so real to me. He's a person.”

On the way back, as promised, Frank phoned Hope. Then he and Claudia lingered for an hour over a big lunch of red curry and pad thai—Claudia noting that since her life roiled with ironies, this was the least nauseated she'd felt in weeks. When they pulled into the drive at Stone Pastures, the boys ran out. Hope trailed behind them and sat in the shade of the old chestnut, where Pat had built a wide plank seat encircling the trunk. Behind the boys' backs, she gestured to her son and daughter-in-law, little warning motions that included placing two fingers across her lips.

“You didn't really want a girl, Cloudy, did you?” Ian said. “They're not as good. You already have us and you know how to be a boy's mom.”

“They've made you something,” Hope added then, motioning Claudia and Frank to a large tray set down on the outdoor wooden trestle table where they sometimes ate their dinner.

The cookies were the pastry embodiment of paper dolls—the man huge, the woman curvaceous with frosting hair as luxuriant as a mermaid's. The mother's snow woman's arms wrapped around a baby with golden balls for eyes and chocolate hair, a baby made in exactly the shape of a figure eight. Then there was a tall woman with a dab of white frosting for hair, and the children, three identical-sized vanilla males.

“These are great. These are stellar,” said Frank, and Claudia was off again on another rolling breaker of tears.

Frank said, “But who is that third boy? That one is you, there's Collie, and then Arthur . . .”

Claudia said, “I want to point out that we're not really naming him Arthur.”

“That one is Patrick, of course,” Colin said.

Crimson with suppressed mirth, Hope headed for the car. She had an appointment for tea at the nicer of the two small restaurants in Stead. Just a couple of weeks after Hope had visited the local Anglican church, the two-years-widowed priest, a few years younger, asked her to go to a local string quartet concert. Frank persisted in calling this a date. Hope persisted in telling him that he would have to think of other ways to get her to move out. One night, Colin told all of them that in service of the Packard that would soon be his own, he had decided to become an auto mechanic. He added, “Ian will just be a farmer. So there's no reason we have to go back to school at all.”

All the adults, Patrick included, disabused them of that fact, and as September came and the weather at night occasionally swept the hills like a stiff broom, they took the bus to the consolidated school in Wherry. Colin joined the football team, part of the school's structure even for fifth formers, and when he was found to be just as certainly an ace by British standards as he'd been in the United States, his dance card filled with suppers at friends' houses and football matches. “It's in my blood,” he told Frank solemnly.

“It's not in my blood,” Ian said happily. “I hate games. I just like horses and TV.” His best friend, an Indian boy named Sanjay, brought a different tin of homemade cookies every time he came to play. They ate two dozen, every time, and still their ankles and wrists were as delicate as links of a lady's fine chain, their ribs little xylophones, their knees belled out at the bottom of their flute-sized thighs.

Claudia began working part-time at Hope of the Moor, the plan to take up full-time duties a couple of months after the baby arrived. Although at first she assumed an air of slightly aggrieved sacrifice, Claudia quickly grew to love the power that came simply with listening to her neighbors' travails—William's drink, Janet's spells of sadness, everyone's fear that Alex's attachment to the boy he met at the public school was more than a friendship. The questions that could only be answered by wait, accept, or walk away helped Claudia pick apart her own web of options. An academic, trained in nuance, she felt comforted, as the fall lengthened, knowing that she, too, could only wait, accept, or walk away. As it had done with Glory Bee, pregnancy relaxed her fierce grip on perfection. The bigger Arthur grew, the less eager Claudia became about having another go right away. She spoke of how it might be to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia, as a school friend of hers had just done. Frank reminded her how legally shifty they were, and would be until they were dead, or at least grandparents, and suggested it would be better to make a little girl from things they had lying around the house. Claudia protested. The older she was, the likelier she would gain thirty pounds and lose three teeth, Claudia told him. Frank promised her dentures and a girdle.

One night, he stood outside his own door and listened to gales of fifties music gusting out as far as the road and beyond. Hope was teaching Claudia the jive, and Colin was teaching Ian. They had done it, Frank thought, not daring to speak it aloud. They had come safe home.

A
LL I WANT
is cheese and onion, on the wheat bread,” Frank told Harry Aker. “Cheddar cheese is fine.”

Harry shook his head sorrowfully. “You'll want Wensleydale on the dill bread, with a bit of chutney.”

“The Wensleydale is fine, but with just onion, Harry.”

“And it's breakfast. You'll need a fried egg.”

“I can feel my arteries hardening.”

“Well, now you say it, Frank, you don't look good, and there's the truth of it.”

Frank didn't doubt that at all. He probably looked like death warmed up. He'd been awake for hours, in an agony of concern. He glanced over Harry Aker's shoulder into the wavy greenish mirror, a reflection that would have made a runway model look like a fresh cadaver. His eyes were bloodshot and his beard, two days of it, grizzled with new gray. “I'm beat. Up at two. My young mare, Glory Bee, was suddenly foaling, and . . . what do you know? Twins. The vet never left her side. We couldn't believe it. The foal's born, in twenty minutes. There was the vet cleaning off the little baby girl, and suddenly my son says, ‘Dad, there's another baby horse there.' It was all over within an hour, but what an hour.”

“Twin foals? I don't think I've heard of that in years, at least ones that weren't conjoined, you know, like Siamese twins. Must have been battle stations, eh?”

“You can imagine. The vet called her assistant, and he came running, and the Shepsons down the road and Thurman Ross from across the road and then all the Gerrick boys. It seemed like half the county showed up, all before the sun rose.”

“Be in the newspaper, as far as Leeds.”

“Maybe.”

“Those are good lads, the Gerricks. You know that Shipley Gerrick has those horses, well, draft horses, and those twins—boys, not horses, of course, but big as draft horses. Those two huge lads, giants, they're twins.”

“Arthur and Lance,” Frank said. Both men paused for a moment, in mutual sadness over Grace Gerrick's fascination with Camelot. The Gerrick twins, though built on the scale of redwoods, were biddable and bright. Frank had seen Lance heft a two-hundred-pound solid-oak door the way a man would lift a violin. The Gerrick twins did lift violins, in fact, because both were musicians of no small merit. “The foals, Harry. They are beautiful. Black as the mother, with not one white hair. That's unusual in itself. They say healthy twin foals occur in one in ten thousand births. One in ten thousand, Harry.”

“You're sure they're okay?”

“Vet says the way they get up and walk and nurse is a better indication than any blood tests or what have you.”