Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  Bix was no less her patient than Phoebe. Just as her friend might return to the bottle, so might her husband slip into either his traditional nihilism or more recent religiosity. And yet, he seemed to be healing. “You have to understand,” he explained one evening during a roach hunt in the kitchen. “Your performance on that Space Tower knocked me out. I was completely unprepared—the South Seas native getting the white man’s head cold. Disaster.”

  “It’s all behind us now.” Julie removed her shoe, raising it like a hammer.

  “Will we ever get this behind us? Haven’t we been touched by some deep cosmic mystery?”

  “I suppose so. Sure.”

  “I mean, you did have powers, you were a deity.”

  Slap, Julie sent a roach to hell. “Cosmic mysteries don’t interest me much these days.”

  “It really helps talking with you, Julie. I think I’m becoming a normal person.”

  “Know what a normal person has, Bix? A normal person has a job.”

  Bix squashed a roach with a paper towel. “Job?”

  “We could use the money, sweetheart. We could use the damn medical insurance.”

  Ever since the turn of the century, the Philadelphia Public Schools had been short of English teachers, and Bix the former Midnight Moon editor was a shoo-in. The only mandatory credential was American citizenship, a status that everyone caught up in the Jersey secession still technically retained. A week after applying, Bix was deputized to bring “language arts skills” to one hundred and twenty-three eleventh graders at William Perm Senior High School.

  He was terrified. The eleventh graders bewildered him. “I never know what they’re thinking,” he told Julie. “There’s too much going on at once. I can’t keep track of it.”

  “Every teacher has that problem.”

  “They say I’m fat.”

  “You are fat. I’m proud of you. You’ve come a long way, Bix. Father Paradox to Mr. Chips.”

  Public education in America was not following a rigid curriculum that year, progressivism being on the upswing. As far as Bix could tell, only three standards held for everyone on the William Penn faculty: no blood on the floor, no sexual relations with the students, and leave all window shades half-drawn at the end of the day. It was an era of creativity and change, of innovation and relevance—Bix talked incessantly of something called “the curriculum of concerns”—and when Julie suggested he toss away the syllabus and have the students publish a newspaper instead, a rehabilitated and rationalistic Midnight Moon, his spherical face glowed. A newspaper! Sure-fire. Fabulous. Jack Ianelli would do the sports column. Rosie Gonzales would write the horoscopes.

  Julie could barely keep up with the transformation. The man who used to have difficulty loving his own mother had fallen for a bunch of adolescent zotzheads and thugs.

  And Phoebe. Talk about idealism, talk about rebirth! Phoebe now believed in everything—in resuscitated rain forests, lesbian pride, saved whales, full bellies, empty missile silos. “I have powers,” she liked to say. “I have powers coming out my ears.” She bought a truck, converting it into a kind of traveling soup kitchen. It consumed her life savings, the full fruit of her years on the streets, but there it was, parked in the driveway of 3411 Baring Avenue—a used United Parcel van, repainted a bright shamrock green. The Green Tureen, Phoebe dubbed her soup kitchen. Love on wheels.

  “You should see how these people live,” she told Julie and Bix. “Home is a packing crate, if that. Come with me on Sunday, Katz. You too, Bix. Plywood City.”

  “A lumberyard?” asked Bix.

  “These people sell their blood,” said Phoebe. “They sell their bodies. Will you come?”

  “We’ll come,” said Julie brightly.

  “We’ll come,” said Bix gloomily. Always this skepticism, this devout disbelief in Phoebe’s recovery. Walking on eggs, he kept saying.

  Plywood City: not a lumberyard, Julie learned that Sunday, but a West Philly shantytown, its splintery suburbs sprawling for half a mile between two sidings near 30th Street Station; it was as if the Penn Central Railroad had erected a theme park, Poverty Land, and this was the first exhibit. Phoebe drove the Green Tureen as far into the yard as she could, parking beside a Chesapeake and Ohio refrigerator car, a traveling abattoir whose hundred slaughtered haunches—Julie imagined them hanging in the car like subway commuters—could have nourished the shantytown for a year. Julie and Bix unloaded both serving carts, outfitting them with charity. Fresh coffee, sugar, milk, oranges, Hostess powdered doughnuts. Most importantly, Phoebe’s homemade soup, its broth packed with diced carrots and robust lumps of chicken.

  “What they really want,” said Phoebe, “is for us to hold the broth and lay on the beer.”

  “No doubt,” said Bix.

  “How about you?” asked Julie, uncertain whether Phoebe’s mentioning liquor was good or bad.

  “A nice hot cup of Budweiser? I could go for that, sure.”

  Julie winced convulsively. “It’d kill you.”

  “Like a bullet,” said Bix.

  “Where are my parents?” said Phoebe.

  “Five more weeks,” said Julie. “Thirty-five days.”

  Phoebe tugged her gold earring so fiercely Julie expected the lobe to rip. “Where are they?”

  “Five weeks.”

  “I must say, Katz, I liked you better divine.”

  “Thirty-five days.”

  “Right. Sure. You bet.”

  Phoebe shrugged and took off, cart rattling along the rocky ballast, soup slopping over the rim of her pot. The old Phoebe would be a handy person to have around now, Julie thought—the crazy, alky Phoebe, the one who would’ve jimmied open the Chesapeake and Ohio refrigerator car and passed out the meat, Santa’s little redistributionist.

  Side by side, Julie and Bix started into the town, pushing their cart through the planet’s discards, through the olfactory cacophony of tobacco, cabbage, urine, feces, and beer. Zotz-heads with three-day beards sat on fifty-five-gallon drums, staring into space, brains running on empty. Naked preadolescent boys with muddy feet urinated against the sides of their homes, painting the plywood with curlicues. A portable radio blared Gospel music. By Phoebe’s account, the majority of Plywood City’s inhabitants were refugees of one sort or another, people for whom cold, cruel homelessness was preferable to their colder and crueler domesticities: their abusive husbands, molesting parents, fleabag orphanages, hellish reformatories. The second largest category comprised the winos and zotzheads, forever in need of transportation to Madison Memorial for detox or to the West Philadelphia Free Clinic for general repairs. Then, of course, there were the itinerant mental cases, a manageable group provided they remembered to take the free chlorpromazine that Dr. Daniel Singer, an iconoclastic shrink from Penn, dispensed from the back of his station wagon, Dr. Singer’s soup kitchen for psychotics.

  Each in his own way, Julie sensed, the inhabitants of Plywood City hated their benefactors. Charity was not justice. Let Julie, Bix, and Phoebe give out food all day, fine, but come nightfall who had to stay in this cesspool and who got to return to Powelton Village? Nor was their resentment wholly unrequited, for Julie could not exactly say she loved these people, could not even say she liked them. Yet here she was, paying her brother homage: hell below, Plywood City above, morphine below, chicken soup above. Here she was, dipping her ladle into the soup, pouring the soup into plastic cups, passing the cups to a narrow Malaysian woman, a puffy, rheumic-eyed Pakistani man, a raffish Puerto Rican boy…

  “I wish she went to A.A.,” said Bix.

  “Phoebe? She’s staying sober.”

  “A.A.’s the thing, I hear.”

  “Not her style.” Ladle into pot, soup into cup. “She’s been dry seven weeks.” Cup into the mistrustful hands of a crinkled old man with a gray tumbling beard, a rummy Ezekiel. “Our deal’s working.”

  “Seven weeks,” Bix echoed, sneering. “I’ve been looking into this business. You don’t make deals with
alcoholics, Julie. You maneuver them into rehab programs. Sometimes an alky’ll go through three or four before she gets well.”

  “That’s one approach, certainly.”

  “Seven weeks is zilch. It’s borrowed time. The disease will foreclose, always does. I’ve been reading about it.”

  “Phoebe has lots of willpower.”

  “Willpower has nothing to do with it. She’s got to feel things she’s never felt before. She’s got to find something bigger than herself.”

  “Like what? God?” Ladle into pot. Soup into cup. “Forget it.”

  “Like A.A. Until then, honey, we’re walking on eggs.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Really. Eggs. Crunch.”

  Julie’s bowels tightened, a gastrointestinal Gordian knot, hard, insoluble. “Did I ever tell you what happens after death?”

  “You’re changing the subject. Eggs, Julie.”

  “Everybody’s damned,” she explained. Cup into a hag’s leathery hands, a stringy-haired creature right out of the Brothers Grimm. “Earth is as good as it gets.”

  “You have any pepper?” asked the hag.

  “Next time,” said Bix.

  “My ass,” said the hag.

  “I promise,” said Bix.

  Julie could practically feel the eggs underfoot. She could almost hear the crunch.

  On the morning of July 24, 2012, Julie awoke possessed by a conclusion so sharp and certain it felt like the climax of a dream. Encircling her husband’s bearish body with both arms, she told him the time had come for a new generation.

  “Huh?”

  Down in hell it had been a mere notion, back on the garbage scow a simple whim. But now…“I want a baby.”

  “A what?” Bix drew away, breaking her embrace.

  “I want a baby happening inside me.” She did. Oh, God of physics, yes. Let her mother procreate planets and black holes; her own ambitions would be sated by a fetus. “You know—one of those protoplasmic blobs that grows up to be an orthodontist or something.”

  “Got anybody in mind for the father?”

  She untied the drawstring of Bix’s pajamas. “Some of them become English teachers.”

  “Language arts.”

  “Language arts.” Julie thought: A blob, a baby, a squalling organic ball chained to her leg, dragging her down. Scary. But Georgina had faced it. Her father, for Christ’s sake, had faced it, all alone in his lighthouse, raising his problem child. “The clock’s ticking, husband. Burn your condoms. Let’s have a kid.”

  “Really?” Of all things, he seemed ready to cry. “Honestly?”

  She kissed his lovely lower chin and slipped off her nightgown. “Honestly.”

  “I want to be a regular guy, Julie. I really do.”

  He had a fine erection, angled like a flagpole. She rolled toward him, all her lushness, her big arms and thick black hair and irresistible thighs. Her throat thickened. A regular guy, the father of her child. She felt like a beautiful planet, and now here was Bix, becoming her axis, south to north, and when she climaxed she indeed experienced the proper Newtonian rotation, a wild swing into her own miraculous flesh.

  Almost forty: a perfectly safe age for a pregnancy, but she still resolved to get herself checked out. Her baby must have every advantage, the best preconceptual care. Studying the gynecological listings, she had trouble deciding between a classy-sounding Swede within walking distance and a Jew in Center City. If a girl: Rita. If a boy: Murray, little Murray Constantine-Katz.

  She hiked over to 40th and Market and took the bus downtown.

  Dr. Hyman Lefkowitz’s clinic was the most fecund place Julie had ever seen, its hallways lined with photographs of drooling, toothless infants, its waiting room jammed with back issues of Parenting. Swollen and wobbly, expectant mothers came and went. They all seemed astonishingly beautiful: fecund Madonnas, knocked-up Aphrodites.

  The nurse took a dozen sonograms of Julie’s baby-making organs. Phoebe should have come, Julie decided. She imagined her friend extrapolating from this technology. You know what we’ve got here, Katz, we’ve got a whole new kind of smut, we’ve got a pornography of the internal.

  “I’ll be frank with you,” said Dr. Lefkowitz as he ushered Julie into his office.

  He held up a sonogram. Fear rushed into Julie’s stomach like cold chicken soup.

  She said, “Oh?”

  “This news isn’t good.”

  “Not good?” Uterine cancer—it had to be. A true pornography of the internal.

  “Your ovaries…”

  “What?”

  “They aren’t there.” The doctor’s thick glasses gave him Peter Lorre’s popping eyes. “You don’t have any.”

  “Not there? What do you mean not there? Everybody has ovaries.”

  “You don’t. It’s as if they’d been”—Lefkowitz’s eyes came at her like headlights—“stolen.”

  And Julie thought: A bird. A luminous bird, ripped from its perch atop her heart, its beak clamped around an olive branch. An olive branch—or so it had seemed to her blurry vision when Wyvern had ablated her divinity.

  Not an olive branch. Never was. Something else. Two moist, pulpy stalks, the fallopian tubes of God’s only daughter. Wyvern…Satan…evil incarnate…deception made flesh.

  Julie pleaded, “Can you fix me?” A photograph sat on Lefkowitz’s desk, framed in K mart gold. The doctor. His buxom wife. Three perfect, shining children; boy, girl, baby. She hated them all, the children especially, the baby most especially, so smugly present, so cockily there. “Can you do a transplant?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Isn’t this supposed to be the future? Isn’t this 2012? I want a transplant.”

  Lefkowitz smiled wistfully. “Science doesn’t have all the answers.”

  She thought: You mean we don’t have all the science, asshole.

  All the way home, the city tormented her. Pregnant women shadowed her like KGB moles. The number 31 bus reviled her with its ads for day-care centers and well-baby clinics. She alighted near the Sundance Nursery School. Toddlers roamed the sandboxes like cruel mocking dwarves; birds chirped everywhere, a million little birdshit factories. Reaching 3411 Baring, she dragged her sterile middle-aged body up the steps and stumbled into the living room. You’ll be getting a full life, that malevolent angel had told her, that creature who held the patent on lies.

  A scream sawed through the air like a violin note played by a maniac.

  A Phoebe scream. Type one: despair.

  Julie ran. No, God, wait, Mother, this is the day I find out I’m infertile, not the day Phoebe falls off the wagon.

  Wrong. The window stood open, yet a dense malty cloud hung in the air, as if Phoebe had washed the walls with beer. On the vanity, five empty Budweiser bottles encircled H. Rap Brown Bear. Phoebe lay slumped in her chair, gripping the sixth. She was, as usual, well dressed: a clean white blouse, a madras skirt of the sort popular among the Powelton Village gypsies. A box of kitchen matches, half open, lay on the segment of skirt bridging her thighs.

  Julie felt as betrayed as on the day Bix ordered her out of his sewer. “Phoebe, how could you, how could you?”

  Phoebe quieted herself with a swallow of Bud. “Dead,” she announced, voice thick and lumpy, eyes small and dull as pearl onions.

  “How could you?”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Phoebe struck a kitchen match, alternately moaning and giggling. “You think Plywood City doesn’t have any Jersey immigrants? You think they don’t all know what happened to the poor old lesbo who ran the Smile Shop?”

  Julie studied the evil bottles. Bud, Bud, Bud, Bud, Bud. “That’s not all. Your father’s dead too.”

  “My father? Dead?”

  “I met him in hell.”

  “Dead? Dead? You shithead—for this you string me along? This? ‘Wow, Phoebe, guess what, you’re a goddamn orphan’?”

  Julie grimaced, making her S-scar bulge. What was driving her, some sadistic ur
ge, some mean-spirited wish to maximize her friend’s pain? No, in the end Phoebe would profit from this news, provided it came embellished with a benign untruth. “Listen, your father wants revenge. Really. ‘Tell Phoebe to get that bastard’—his last words to me.”

  “Revenge? Huh? What bastard?” Phoebe blew out the match.

  “Your father died when Billy Milk bombed the Preservation Institute.”

  Phoebe struck another match. “Milk? Milk? I can’t kill Milk. He’s the fucking poobah grandpastor.” The flame skittered down the stick and snuffed itself against her thumb. She pulled back her skirt, burying the matchbox in the folds.

  “You can kill Milk.”

  “I can’t even kill myself. Maybe this time, though.” Phoebe struck a third match, inserting the flame between her dark thighs.

  “Hey, you’ll get burned.”

  A coarse hiss, a cobra’s gasp—but not from Phoebe’s throat. Lower, where the match was.

  Julie rushed forward.

  And suddenly she saw it. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ in hell. She curled her fingers around the terrible stalk. Of all things, she thought of “Heaven Help You”—how she’d always counseled the despondent that, if they truly saw no other option, they should at least contact the National Hemlock Society and do it right. Hadn’t Phoebe read that one? Certain prescription drugs were quick and efficient. A plastic bag cinched around your neck served well. But never this. Oh, God, never this.

  Bix arrived just in time to see Julie yank the stick of dynamite out of her friend’s vagina. Ah, leave it to Phoebe to expand her husband’s horizons—even the Plywood City derelicts couldn’t offer him anything quite so baroque. “No!” he screamed.

  She had only to grab the sputtering fuse, the pain a small price…