World's End (69 page)

Later, much later, so much later he was sure Joanna had died on the operating table, sure his son was a fantasy, already dead and pickled in a jar as a curiosity for some half-baked obstetrical surgeon who'd got his training in Puerto Rico and barely knew which end the baby was supposed to come out of, Flo Deitz slipped up behind him in her noiseless, thick-soled nurse's shoes and tapped him on the shoulder. He jerked around, startled. Flo was standing beside Dr. Brillinger and a man he didn't recognize. The man he didn't recognize was wearing a scrub gown and rubber gloves and he was so spattered with blood he might have been butchering hogs. But he was smiling. Dr. Brillinger was smiling. Flo was smiling. “Dr. Perlmutter,” Dr. Brillinger said, indicating the bloody man with a nod of his head.

“Congratulations,” Dr. Perlmutter said in a voice too small to be hearty, “you're the father of a healthy boy.”

“Nine pounds, six ounces,” Flo Deitz said, as if it mattered.

Dr. Perlmutter snapped the glove from his right hand and held the bare hand out for Depeyster to shake. “Joanna's fine,” Dr. Brillinger said in a fruity whisper. Numb, Depeyster shook. Relieved, Depeyster shook. All around. He even shook Flo's hand.

“This way,” Flo was saying, already whispering off in her silent shoes.

Depeyster nodded at Drs. Brillinger and Perlmutter and followed her down a corridor to his right. She walked briskly—amazingly so
for a pigeon-toed, middle-aged woman who couldn't have stood more than five feet tall—and he had to hurry to keep up. The corridor ended abruptly at a door that read NO ADMITTANCE, but Flo was already gliding down another corridor perpendicular to it, her brisk short legs as quick and purposeful as a long-distance runner's. When Depeyster caught up to her, she was standing before a window, or rather a panel of glass that gave onto the room beyond. “The nursery,” she said. “There he is.”

It had been what—twenty, twenty-one years? How old was Mardi?—and he could barely contain himself. His heart was pounding as if he'd just sprinted up ten flights of stairs and the hair at his temples was damp with sweat. He pressed his face to the window.

Babies. They all looked alike. There were four of them, hunched like little red-faced monkeys in their baskets, hand-lettered name tags identifying their parentage: Cappolupo, O'Reilly, Nelson, Van Wart. “Where?” he said.

Flo Deitz gave him an odd look. “There,” she said, “right there in front. Van Wart.”

He looked, but he didn't see. This? he thought, something like panic, like denial, rising in his throat. There it was—there
he
was—his son, swaddled in white linen like the others, but big, too big, and with a brushstroke of tarry black hair on his head. And there was something wrong with his skin too—he was dark, coppery almost, as if he'd been sunburned or something. “Is there anything … wrong with him?” he stammered. “I mean, his skin—?”

Flo was smiling at him, beaming at him.

“Is that some kind of, of afterbirth or something?”

“He's darling,” she said.

He looked again. And at that moment, as if already there were some psychic link between them, the baby waved its arms and snapped open its eyes. It was a revelation. A shock. Depeyster's eyes were gray, as were his father's before him, and Joanna's the purest, regal shade of violet. The baby's eyes were as green as a cat's.

For a long while, Depeyster stood there in the hallway. He stood there long after Nurse Deitz had left him and gone home to her supper, long after the other proud fathers had come and gone, so long in fact that the janitor had to mop around him. He watched the baby
sleep, studied its hair, the flutter of its eyelids and the clenching of its tiny fists as it drifted from one unfathomable dream to another. All sorts of things passed through Depeyster's mind, things that unsettled him, made him hurt in the pit of his stomach and feel as empty as he'd ever felt.

He was a strong man, single-minded and tough, a man who dwelt in history and felt the pulse of generations beating in his blood. He had those thoughts, those unsettling thoughts, just once, just then, and he dismissed them, never to have them again. When at long last he turned away from the window, there was a smile on his lips. And he held that smile as he strode down the corridor, across the lobby and through the heavy front door. He was outside, on the steps, the cool sweet air in his face and the stars spread out overhead like a benediction, when it came to him.
Rombout,
he thought, caught up in the sudden whelming grip of inspiration, he would call him
Rombout. …

After his father.

The author would like to thank the following people for their assistance in gathering material for this book: Alan and Seymour Arkawy, Mitchell Burgess, Richard Chambers, Chuck Fadel, Ken Fortgang, Rick Miles, Jack and Jerry Miller and the crew of the
Clearwater.

1
Shortened from
Mohewoneck,
or raccoon skin coat, a reference to the only garment he was seen to wear, winter or summer. Apart, of course, from his breechclout.

2
Leaf-eye.

3
Literally “sitting in the pickle.”

By the Same Author

Novels

When the Killing's Done

The Women

Talk Talk

Tooth & Claw

The Inner Circle

Drop City

A Friend of the Earth

Riven Rock

The Tortilla Curtain

The Road to Wellville

East Is East

Budding Prospects

Water Music

Short Stories

Wild Child

Tooth and Claw

After the Plague

The Human Fly

T.C. Boyle Stories

Without a Hero

If the River Was Whiskey

Greasy Lake

Descent of Man

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 1987 by T. Coraghessan Boyle

AUTHOR'S NOTE
The following is an historical fugue. It bears small relation to actual places and
events, and none whatever to people living or dead. It is pure fiction

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the
following copyrighted works:
‘Gerontion,' from
Collected Poems 1909–1962
by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright © 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted
by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited.
Desire Under the Elms,
from
The Plays of Eugene O'Neill.
Copyright © 1924,
renewed 1952 by Eugene O'Neill. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin and New York

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7475 2934 7

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