by Sarah Blake
But here—she sighed—out there and upstairs, there was nothing of hers. She felt for the first time in her life the danger of other people’s things—how they might erase her if she weren’t careful. A sob caught at the bottom of her throat. It was that report on the boy in the Blitz; she leaned toward the coffee table to get her cigarette case. The report had reminded her of being little, that was all. She lit the cigarette and drew in a deep, long drag.
5.
THE WINTER AFTERNOON had set in and it was near dark, though the last of the sky hung indigo above the water splashing against the spars of the old pier. Maggie and Jim Tom lived in one of the fish houses right along the harbor’s edge, built by the fishermen before the pier to stow their tackle and gear. They were steep-angled tiny boxes, like a child’s drawing of a house, and without windows except for the big double doors in front, which slid aside to let out the spars and gaffs, the heavy lines and mast for the jib. Jim Tom and Maggie had moved into the Winthrop fish house in the days right after their wedding, and Jim had cut out windows, put down flooring in the sail loft, and promised they’d be in their own house after five years of fishing. That had been ten years ago. Never mind, Maggie laughed at him—and she didn’t mind. She’d look up and see Jim Tom steaming in around Land’s End after a long haul, and watch him heading straight for her.
Will could see the angle of the Winthrop fish house ahead, and could just make out the lamp that was burning by Maggie’s bed; but still feeling the warmth of Emma’s body in his, even as he was already outside and long past that moment, he stopped and looked back. The roofline of his house and that of the Nileses beside it bulwarked the oncoming night. Ought he to let Dr. Lowenstein know Maggie had gone into labor? Her labors are hard and long, the old doctor had said to Will the last time he had been in town, and this one will be her fifth in as many years. The porch light went on at Will’s house. He felt sharp sudden joy. No, no need to call. He was the doctor now. He turned his back on his own house and started again toward the Winthrops, letting his doctor’s bag swing in his hand. Jim Tom opened the door before Will could knock, and Will looked up to see if there was any hint of worry in his face.
But Jim Tom had been through this four times before, and he had, Will saw, entering the single big downstairs room, put on a large pot to boil hot water and prepared a basin. There was also a teakettle steaming. The house was calm, but ready. Up there, Jim Tom nodded in response to Will’s glance.
“I’ll wash up here, shall I?” He turned on the tap above the kitchen sink and ran the water over his hands several times, finding the soap tucked into the exposed board of the wall in front of him.
“And where are your boys?”
“Mother’s.”
Will nodded and climbed the open stairs. Halfway up, Maggie began to groan in the grip of a contraction. He took the stairs two at a time and followed the sound into a room that had been made into the sail loft by placing two armoires next to each other as a partition. On this side, the stacked-up gear of generations of Winthrop boats, sails tackle, riggings, and masts lay in orderly stacks. On the other side of the armoires there lay a bed pulled up to a window, freshly made, it looked like, the sheets pulled tight.
Maggie was creeping along the wall, one hand on her side, bent over and gasping, but when Will went forward to her, she waved him away. Her breaths came in rapid sighs and she walked in time to them. At the end of the wall, she stopped and straightened and turned around, walking back along the wall in the other direction.
“Shit,” she gasped out, leaning her head against the wall.
“Shit is right,” Will agreed.
Maggie nodded, her face contorted briefly. She gave a deep groan and he watched her shoulders relax. She sank onto the end of the bed, a little pale, Will thought.
“Whew,” she said.
“How long have you been contracting like that?” He moved around the bed and picked up her wrist for her pulse. Brisk. Her forehead was moist and her hair was damp against her temples.
“Off and on about four hours.”
“Pretty strong?” He counted her pulse against the hand of the bedside clock whose comfortable ticking sounded out into the room.
“Strong and long.” She nodded.
“Strong as that one?”
“And forever. That’s how all my babies are. Tommy, the littlest, took two days to come.”
Will helped her sit back against the pillows piled up on the bed, shook down the thermometer, and slid it in her mouth. “Well, let’s hope number five comes a bit quicker for you.”
Maggie shrugged, her mouth closed over the thermometer. It had started; they were both in the chute. Come what may, there was only one direction to go in now.
“Let’s check how far along you are.” Will pushed her knees gently up and open; he slid his fingers up the vagina to the cervix where he could feel the head, but not the bag.
“When did your bag break, Maggie?”
“Has it?” She frowned. “I don’t know. Day before yesterday? There was something then, though I wasn’t sure what it was, there was so little of the junk—and I didn’t have any cramps at all.”
He pulled his hand out and with it there was a slight unfamiliar odor, something he didn’t remember smelling at the births he’d attended before. He washed his hands in the bowl of warm water Jim Tom had brought up and left by the bed; he toweled them dry, frowning. Then he turned and slid the thermometer from Maggie’s mouth and saw that her temperature was slightly elevated. He sat down on the side of the bed.
“Okay,” he exhaled, pushing a faint wisp of worry away.
“Oh.” She pushed herself off the bed, needing to walk at the start of another contraction. Will helped her onto her feet and waited through the next one with her, all the time watching how she breathed. When it had eased, she focused back on him. “How far along am I?”
“Six centimeters or so. You’ve got a ways to go still. But you’re doing swell.”
She smiled weakly, rising to sit on the side of the bed, holding her hand out to Will. He pulled her to her feet and they started walking again, first to the opposite side of the room, then back.
THE GULLS ROSE up suddenly off the pylons on the pier, the swift beating of their wings like hands shuffling cards, and Iris followed them as they wheeled into the sky outside the window. She crossed the wooden floor of the lobby, unlocked the front doors, and the blast of a northerly wind hit her. Quick as she could, she reached out and uncleated the line on the flagpole and the flag came sliding on its tether down the pole into her hands.
“Evening,” a voice said from below.
She jumped and clutched the cloth to her chest as though he had caught her at something secret. “Oh, hello,” she called over her shoulder, shivering. She should have put on her coat, she realized.
“Want help with that?”
She shook her head, releasing the flag from the metal clips on the line, and turned around. Harry Vale had one foot up on the bottom stair and one hand loosely on the railing. He smiled and she smiled back, embarrassed to be standing above him this way. It had the effect of making him appear very small.
“I’ve been using your mug.” She let her eyes down to look at his hand on the railing, the flag still crumbled into a ball in her arms.
“Good.” He nodded. But his attention drifted to the pole above her head. “Just the top three feet,” he nudged, smiling. “Would you give me the top three feet? Just to get it below the roofline.”
She cleated the line and rested her hand on the painted wood, not quite sure what she wanted to say. It had become something like a joke between them, a running patter, though it wasn’t a joke and she knew it. “I haven’t heard from the post office inspector,” she said.
He lowered his gaze to her face. “It doesn’t worry you?”
She flushed. “We can’t allow ourselves to take things into our own hands like that.”
“Why not?” He slid his hand along the ridge of
the gate.
With a small, efficient stab, the question pricked her. They were at odds, she realized, unhappily.
“Never mind,” he said gently. “Good night.”
“Good night,” she answered and he ambled off. That hadn’t gone at all the way she wanted.
She crossed the lobby with the flag in her arms and pushed through the door into the back part of the post office, shutting it firmly behind her. One couldn’t behave as though the post office was just another building, its flagpole just another piece of wood. It represented something. Order. And here at the very heart of the system, she let out her breath, carefully. Back here the open mailboxes stretched floor to ceiling, ready for her to fill. The broad wooden sorting table was cleared for the morning’s mail. If there was a place on earth in which God walked, it was the workroom of any post office in the United States of America. Here was the thick chaos of humanity rendered into order. Here was a box for each and every family in the town. Letters, bills, newspapers, catalogs, packages might be sent forth from anywhere in the world, shipped and steamed across water and land, withstanding winds and time, to journey ever forward toward this single, small, and well-marked destination. Here was no Babel. Here, the tangled lines of people’s lives unknotted, and the separate tones of voices set down upon a page were let to breach the distance. Hand over hand the thoughts were passed. And hers was the hand at the end.
Still. Harry’s gentle wave as he walked away took some of the pleasure out of it all. She climbed up onto the chair beside the sorting table, holding the flag above her shoulders so it did not touch the floor, and shook it out like a bedsheet, holding a corner in each hand. The certificate in its envelope lay perfectly safe up the hill in her cottage, among her nightgowns in the bureau drawer. It had lain there all these weeks since she’d gone into Boston, and every day he’d come into the post office and she could feel the tie between them tightening, sighing as it tightened, and she didn’t have the faintest idea what to do next.
The vision of her mother standing in the passage on the way to her parents’ bedroom flashed before her. Thin-framed but gone to fat, her mother’s body hung like too many coats thrown over a hanger. She was thick and mealy, but Iris had caught her laughing in response to something coming from her father in the bedroom that Iris couldn’t hear, turning her girlish. Iris appeared in her nightie at the end of the hall and her mother had turned, concerned, but still headed for the bedroom—her whole attention in there. In one hand she held a rubber pouch, like a hot water bottle, with a long tube snaking out of it and over her mother’s arm. In the other hand, Iris saw she held the glass bottle of vinegar from the pantry. “Iris,” her mother said, “you’re dreaming, dear. Go back to bed.” And Iris had.
How did the next part work? She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t think past the looking and the smiling to a moment like that with a douche in one’s hand, without any pretense what for. A woman standing like that, wide open. Like an announcement.
She folded the flag in half, then half again, then held it against her chest, smoothing it flat. Still holding to one corner, she let the other drop against the flat length, so that it made a triangle. And then again, she let the triangle fold against itself into a second triangle. This way and that she folded the flag until it was fully collected into a single triangle of cloth into which she tucked the ends.
The moon was rising as she latched the post office gate and stepped back into the matter-of-fact world where her bicycle leaned against the side of the building at the bottom of the post office steps. A fog was coming in and the foghorn sang its steady single note. Across the green, the light inside Alden’s Market shone fiercely down on the people inside. She could see Florence Cripps from here. And another woman. Leaning over the counter to talk to Beth, the grocer’s daughter. They looked like figures in a painting, stuck onto the light.
She glanced up at the naked flagpole, then stared in the direction where Harry had disappeared, and flushed. She would go to the movies, she decided. She would not get her habitual chop at the café, she wasn’t hungry. She would not go back up the hill to her cottage.
INSIDE THE FISH HOUSE, nothing had changed much, either in the frequency or intensity of Maggie’s contractions. The clock beside her bed kept time like a supporter, the minutes passing as Maggie walked and slept. She had been right; she was in for a protracted labor. Will watched her as she breathed. When Will checked her again, the cervix was no wider. She fell again into a doze and Will went downstairs in search of coffee.
“How’s everything?” Jim Tom turned from the sink.
“Coming along,” said Will. “You want to come up?”
“I’d just as soon wait down here, thanks.” Jim Tom glanced at him. “How many babies have you caught there, Will?”
“Fifteen. No, sixteen,” Will answered abruptly.
Jim Tom nodded. “Then you ought to know how mean the ladies can get at the end.”
Will looked at him, quizzically.
“No?” Jim Tom smiled. “Well, maybe the Boston ladies hold their tongue.”
Above them, Maggie started to groan again. Will stopped and looked at his watch, timing the contraction. It lasted roughly the same amount of time as the others, though this one sounded lower than before, and maybe a bit more desperate to Will’s ear.
Will looked at Jim Tom. “Does that help her, do you think?”
“What?”
“Making that noise.”
Jim Tom stuck out his chin. “You bet,” he said.
Will nodded and made for the stairs. As he climbed, he could hear Maggie panting and he climbed a little faster. When he rounded the corner into the room, she was kneeling on the bed with her back to him, holding on to the headboard, her head down between her outstretched arms. He waited until she’d finished and then stepped in. She turned around and he saw that she was growing tired. Her eyes showed her weariness. And this worried him. “How are you holding up there, Maggie?” he said quietly. She nodded and exhaled. “Good,” she said.
He drew the fetoscope out of his bag to make an initial assessment of the baby’s heartbeat, and the sound, regular and steady, felt like a hand reached out to him from the other side, a greeting.
“He’s right there, waiting,” Will reassured Maggie. She nodded, blowing against the grip of the next contraction, and as Will watched her face, he had such a profound longing for Emma, for her quiet eyes on his, for her calm—yes, she was his calm—that he stood up and paced to the end of the room without thinking. He wanted to tell her again, firmly—he’d have found her.
When he’d first stumbled upon her at the hospital Christmas party two years ago, she had been staring out the grand windows draped for the season in holly and velvet with her back to the party. The doctors and nurses coming off duty entered with the cold air clinging to them, their bright voices bowling hard and tight into the cloudy good cheer of partygoers on their way out. She hadn’t moved for several minutes, and her absorption made all else in that room tiny. On a private dare, he wandered toward her. If she turned before he got there, he’d get a glance at her but not need to engage her. If she remained staring like that, her back to him, he’d offer her a drink.
But she stepped back from the window without turning, bumping into him. For an instant he felt her body light against him and smelled lemon in her hair. She leapt away from him and turned, her face gone pink. “I’m sorry!”
“I’m not.” He grinned and held out his hand. “Will Fitch.”
“Yes.” She took it, shook it, and quickly dropped it.
“Having fun?”
She looked directly at him then, with a slight smile on her lips. “No,” she answered. “Not at all.”
“Why not?”
“It’s Christmas,” she said.
“I see,” he said, noticing the tender line of her chin tipped as she watched him. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to say next.
“We’re not for Christmas?” he groped.
“Why’s that? If you don’t mind my asking.”
She didn’t answer. He leaned against the wall beside her. After a minute or so he realized she wasn’t going to answer. He slid his gaze sideways. “I guess you do mind my asking.”
She looked straight at him. “I don’t know you.”
He straightened up quickly. “True enough. I’m sorry.”
She turned away from him and faced the room. “I’m not very good at small talk. Can I have a drink?”
Will was suddenly, painfully happy. “What’ll it be?”
“Bourbon,” she answered quickly, “and water.”
He nodded and made his way through the thick crowd toward the bar at the end of the room. Johnny Lambert was standing in the alcove there, surrounded by two or three other residents. He was telling a story and the circle around him had leaned in slightly to hear. There was a beat and then the group erupted, one of the men slapping Johnny on the back as if keeping time to his laughter, and the sound broke over the rest of the crowd carrying the delicious joke, the thick, hot gaiety gathering everyone in. For a moment the room seemed to collect on the wave of the laughter sent forth by Johnny, whose grace and talent was to treat the world like a ball he spun on one long finger.
Will had seen it the moment he’d arrived at Harvard eight years ago. Johnny’s grace was repeated in the easy tilt of the Boston boys as they sat taking notes, their notebooks pushed away from them, the slow scrawl of their pencils across the white pads like some long, lean jazz, some foreign inscrutable music playing just beyond Will’s own ear. Hunnewell. Cabot. Phipps. Sure, they worked. They even worked hard. But it was without heat or worry; the prizes given to them at the end of the year were casually taken, and lightly worn. Those boys were finer than the challenges Harvard tossed them. Unimpeachably fine.