A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

  I’d met Patricia, who was now a reporter for “Crime Time” (“Crime Time on Prime Time,” the promotions read), in my condo conversion class when I was getting a real-estate agent’s license. “Look where we’d be now,” Patricia liked to say as we watched the market bottom out. She enjoyed her job in television. She had tried various things, such as real estate, catering, and now “Crime Time,” where she was a researcher. She called up police officers and asked them what their favorite crime was that week, and they always told her because they weren’t fools and they wanted to be on television just like everybody else.

  Patricia liked to call me with the horror story of the week. She said that Americans couldn’t get enough of horror. Children stuffed in plastic bags, old women bludgeoned to death for their makeup kits, retarded people locked in closets for years. It wasn’t sex, she liked to say, that gives America its kicks. It’s blood, terror, the unthinkable crimes. “Americans love dismemberment, especially if it comes in sequence,” Patricia told me once over a cup of tea. Serial crime and mutilation; those were the biggest things. Randomness helped. Perhaps, I mused, because we lead such fragmentary lives.

  Once she had tried to work out a segment based on me. She had stared at the picture I keep on my dresser in a small silver frame, the one of me and Sam at Lake Meade the year before she disappeared. Two little girls in bathing suits, arms locked around each other. “You never know, your sister might see it. Mysteries have been solved this way.” But the producers balked. It wasn’t exactly a crime and it had happened too long ago.

  “So what are you working on now?” I asked innocently as Bobby quieted down. I stroked his black hair.

  She grimaced. “You don’t want to know.”

  I shrugged. “Tell me.”

  “Organ theft,” she said.

  “What?” This was something I had not heard of before.

  “Oh, it’s a big thing. A man goes into a bar, orders a beer. A beautiful woman sits down beside him. Soon he leaves with her. Three days later he wakes up in pain in a warehouse on a slab. He makes his way to a hospital and finds out that one of his kidneys has been surgically removed.”

  I shook my head. “This isn’t possible.”

  “But it is.” Patricia smiled; something about her relished these stories. “A kidney is worth ten thousand dollars. It’s capitalism,” she said, “supply and demand. People will pay good money.” She paused, gauging my reaction. I stared at her, incredulous, shaking my head. “There are worse stories, but I don’t want to upset you.”

  “Like what?”

  She gazed at Bobby. “Oh, children in some places in the world”—she spoke hesitantly—“are being sold … for spare parts.” I could feel the look of horror spread across my face. “But think of it, Ivy. If Bobby needed a kidney, a liver, eyes, what would you do? Wouldn’t you buy them if you could? No questions asked?”

  Patricia was infertile. She had reached that conclusion well before her doctors, who continued to probe, dig, test for compatibility. Like a patient with a terminal illness, she paid their bills, begrudging them every dime. “I waited too long,” she said. She had just turned thirty-eight; she’d been trying since she was thirty-five. Patricia was one of those women who were born to be mothers. She kept a birthday calendar tacked to her bulletin board. She always knew just what gift to buy. An occasion never passed without her sending a card. Phone calls to her never went unanswered. She was on top of her life. Except that something had happened—a form of infertility for which there is no discernible medical cause—and she and Scott were unable to conceive.

  Patricia had spent years having her womb swept, her tubes blown open like paper straws, her blood and urine put through every cycle like a stubborn stain in the wash. Scott had splayed himself on the paper-covered doctor’s tables and ejaculated endlessly into cups as if he were a prize bull, his seed spun like cotton candy, enriched, juiced up, and injected into his wife as if to help Patricia produce some new, healthier strain of life.

  She had taken pills that sent her into paroxysms of grief, others that made her lethargic as a sleeping bear. Twice she and Scott had tried “the gift,” at eight thousand dollars a try—all of which had failed. She had endured the humiliation of having her orifices probed, scraped until the doctors declared they could find nothing wrong. But when she still did not conceive, she had consulted a Chinese herbalist—a man of few words who worked in a musty room, surrounded by aging apothecary jars, who plucked her hairs, testing them in vials of acid—and told her to stop all previous medications, who made her drink a brew of grasses and twigs, dried petals, iguana bones, deer antlers, all ground fine and boiled into a steamy, sickening broth.

  So while Patricia sat up night after night, insomniac and alone, drinking the bitter brew that made her shape her arms into hopeful cradles and would leave her as fallow and solitary as before, I had conceived a child on the one and only night I had ever, on a drunken whim, been careless with Matthew, who had been my lover on and off for years; we had a tacit agreement that marriage and children were not a part of our carefully shaped pact with the world. It seemed as if this child had come to me the way the Trobriand Islanders believe—not through intercourse, which serves only to prepare the way, but rather as a spirit that swims to you while you are standing, receptive, in clear water.

  “I envy you,” Patricia said. “You’ve always known what you’ve wanted.” She stared at Bobby. “And you’ve managed to get it.”

  I shrugged, wondering how she could think this was the case when I felt as if things had been thrust upon me. “I don’t think that’s true,” I said, pulling Bobby to me. “I think my life has been one long accident.” If this had been another century, a different world, I might have handed my baby over to Patricia. What was I doing with a child on my own? It made no sense, really, certainly no practical sense.

  “You have a lot, Ivy. You should consider yourself lucky.” Her voice was bitter.

  “I have almost no income,” I said, taking Bobby off my breast. “I have no one in my life.”

  “You have your work,” she said, “and you have your child. You might make a living from your art someday.”

  This was a big might. Already I couldn’t figure out how I was going to make ends meet. It was when I began trying to be an artist and money was tight that I had gotten my real-estate broker’s license. I had taken such courses as “Rentals, from the Ground Up,” and “Know Your Client,” and “Condo Conversion.” Patricia and I had sat in the back of drab classrooms, listening to teachers drone on about how to put a family of four in a two bedroom with a walk-in closet and call it a three bedroom. How to convince someone who is elderly or frail that a four-story walk-up is good exercise. On my first sale a woman bought a basement apartment because I convinced her that the garden brought in a lot of light. She called me a year later and said she’d actually thought about killing me.

  I took people in and out of other people’s lives. Sometimes the people moving out were on the up and up—new marriage, new child, a better job. They were in search of bigger space, a new way of living. But more often than not it was those in life’s difficult transitions I saw—the ones whose marriages were breaking up, who’d lost their jobs, the people growing old and weak, the had-to-sells, the must-leaves. From cheery yuppie couples in leather coats who clutched bundles of joy or who were expectant, brimming with life—people who couldn’t imagine anything going wrong any more than a healthy person can imagine illness—I moved into lives plagued with death, divorce, and financial ruin.

  One day an old woman who was moving from her house of forty years into a retirement home in Queens took me by the hand. She wept as we made our way through every nook and cranny of her house. “This is where my husband read the newspaper. This is where my sonny used to play,” the one who was putting her in the home. She spoke as if everything had just happened, but it was all decades ago.

  “Even if I starve,” I told Matthew, “I’m done with this b
usiness.” Patricia had not lasted very long either.

  She refilled my glass. “Do you have a beer?” I asked.

  “Sorry.” She shook her head. “We’ve given up drinking. The herbalist’s orders.”

  I smiled, sipping my seltzer, wishing it were a beer. She dumped more crackers and cheese cubes onto the platter before me. “You look tired,” she said.

  “I’m exhausted,” I confessed.

  “I hear it’s a lot of work.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said, shifting Bobby again as I ate. “It’s a lot of work for two people, let alone one.”

  Patricia sat beside me, staring at the baby. “Would you like me to hold him,” she asked tentatively, “so you can eat?” Her hands trembled as she reached for the baby. I was relieved to hand her my child.

  “Here,” I said, “take him.” She took him into her arms and held him in front of her as if he were glass, as if she might drop him and he’d break. Balancing him on her hands, she seemed amazed at how light he was, yet when I carried him for hours and hours, his weight grew in my arms. She pulled him to her, cradled him, and he moved his mouth to nurse. Patricia seemed to know instinctively what the nurse had had to teach me. She cooed, she smiled. His eyes lit up.

  Before Bobby was born, Patricia told me that she used to sit up at night, drinking her third or fourth Chinese herbalist’s brew, using biofeedback to create in her mind the image of her child as a psychological researcher had taught her to do. Imagine the child in your womb, he’d said. Try to picture it. Try to feel what it is like to be expecting a child. He had sketched on her stomach with a black marker that would be difficult to remove the silhouette of a baby, and she was supposed to sit for hours and contemplate, literally, her navel.

  As she cuddled Bobby, talking to him, I pitied her for having had this denied her, yet how could I tell her I wasn’t even sure I wanted it myself? She had never given him a present. She’d said, “I want to find just the right thing,” but she hadn’t found it. She had stopped talking about it and I hadn’t asked.

  Now she took a sip from the herbalist’s brew. He had added a twig, she told me. It makes the outside of the ovary soft as the shell of dying turtles. It was supposed to make the egg shoot out like a rocket. Hard ovaries, that’s what the herbalist said. Petrified eggs. You must be an old soul.

  Patricia had argued with Scott about adoption. She’d told him, “I’d love whoever they put in my hands.” But then she’d read an account that said babies from foreign countries were stolen. Mothers in Salvador, Guatemala, were arriving with legal claims. Romanian children were being ripped off. As with spare parts, this too was big business. The brokering of children. There was that woman from Guadalajara who spent five years searching for the son she ultimately won, breaking the adoptive mother’s heart. Patricia wanted none of it.

  “So,” she said, letting Bobby rest precariously in her lap, “I think we’ll work out our life differently. We’re going to buy a house in the country with the money we’ve been saving for day care, that sort of thing. You know, we’ll fix it up.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” I said, “but I don’t think you should give up.”

  “Well”—Patricia sighed—“it’s been years. We’ve done what we can … And Matthew?” she asked, switching the conversation over to me. “What about Matthew?”

  We were trading grief for grief. Matthew hadn’t wanted the baby; he’d made that clear from the start. Though he was only slightly older than I, he had a boy who was almost grown. “A mistake from my youth,” he called him. Ricky was the product of Matthew’s one and only marriage, to a Venezuelan dancer, a woman named Serena. Ricky was the color of a cocoa bean and read backward. Everything he wrote was backward. Once I’d helped him with his homework, and I could see him struggling to turn it all around.

  “Kids,” Matthew had said to me after that visit, “they’re more trouble than they’re worth.” When I told him I was pregnant, he’d said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be there for you.” Meaning for the abortion. I had never intended to have this child, but when I went to the doctor, he put a stethoscope to my womb. I heard the sound of a heart, no bigger than a bird’s, resounding like a sonic boom. When I told Matthew I was going to have the child, he moved whatever belongings he had in my place back to his studio in Brooklyn. We hadn’t seen each other since just after Bobby was born.

  “I talk to him,” I said, “but I don’t see much change. He doesn’t seem to want the responsibility.”

  “No money?”

  “Some,” I lied.

  “Are you managing? Are you getting by?”

  I took a deep breath, feeling my stomach tighten in knots. “Oh, sure we’re managing. What choice do we have?”

  Patricia looked at me hard now and I knew what she was thinking. That life wasn’t fair. That she should have my baby and then my lover would come back to me. “Nothing is perfect,” I said.

  She nodded. “I suppose nothing is.” She handed Bobby back to me, her face flushed, her hands shaking as I extended my arms to take him.

  FOUR

  IT WAS LATE as I made my way to the subway, pushing Bobby while he slept. Although I’d promised Patricia to take a cab, it would have cost at least five dollars, maybe more like seven, to go uptown. The night was cold and miserable. A wet mist covered the city. The wind was penetrating, damp. A homeless man dragged a green plastic bag of tin cans that rose behind him like a helium balloon. A woman with matted black hair, stinking in her own urine, talked to her shopping cart. An old woman dressed as a baby sat in a doorway, sucking on a bottle. Panhandlers approached and receded into shadows, sensing that I was not good pickings. A garbage can was on fire. Nobody stopped.

  “I’m going to call Matthew and tell him to come and get us,” I said to no one in particular. A woman turned and gave me a worried look. I smiled, pretending to be conversing with the baby; I had seen women with small children muttering to themselves before. Bobby squirmed in the cold, yet sweat covered his brow. What if he were ill? What would I do then?

  I wondered what would happen if I took Bobby right now to Matthew’s studio. If we just showed up, he would have to let us in. It was weeks since we’d spoken, and I felt a longing settle in. What was he doing now? Was he listening to his favorite jazz station the way he liked to do in the evening? Was he alone? I didn’t want to think about that. At least he’d see the baby he’d seen only once before. Maybe he’d even offer me some money so that I wouldn’t have to ask. In front of me a bedraggled man shouted into a cellular phone as he staggered across Sixth Avenue, dodging oncoming traffic. I hailed a cab, but when the driver saw the stroller, he drove off. I walked to the IRT.

  Reaching the stairs, I wrapped my hands around the stroller and heaved it into the air. Slowly, one step at a time, I made my way down. An uptown express pulled in, but I was only on the first landing. “Hold the train!” I shouted, but no one heard. I dragged the stroller down each step, the baby bouncing inside. My arms ached. My hands were raw. From the platform I saw a disposable diaper lying on the third rail.

  The local pulled in, packed with night travelers. Wall Street brokers coming home late, theatergoers, couples, crazy people, homeless people, single people. People who looked as if they got dressed and went to work every day of their lives. A small space was grudgingly made for the stroller and me. Then someone offered me a seat, and I collapsed into it.

  A large black man in a green workshirt and green pants, who appeared to be coming home from a long shift, sat across from me. He stared with watery, bloodshot eyes and I looked away. I closed my eyes, though I was afraid that if I fell asleep, I’d miss my stop. I looked up as we arrived at Sixty-sixth Street. Now the train was less crowded, but the black man was still sitting across from me, his eyes on me and on the stroller. I thought I might still get off this train and go to Matthew’s studio.

  The studio was in an industrial part of Brooklyn—the far reaches of the F or D train—and when I was
pregnant, I used to go to there unannounced. It was in a neighborhood of meatpackers and auto parts, of lumberyards and junkyards. Huge warehouses and abandoned factories. There was a prison not far from the studio, and at night I could see the hands of men clutching the bars. The city’s detritus seemed to lie along the avenues, which were ugly in a way that made life seem empty and pointless. I felt endangered even if I wasn’t, and I didn’t like to go there.

  When Matthew first rented the studio, I went to help him set it up. He was a photographer who had gained some success with his images of America. He had done three series—Rednecks, Cults, and Halls of Fame—that had earned him some acclaim. Once, when I had my first painting accepted for a show, I showed up with a bottle of champagne, but he seemed displeased. After that I couldn’t bring myself to go again. But in the months before Bobby was born, as I watched Matthew float in and out of my life, a disappearing act, I found myself going back. I went whether he asked me or not, and he didn’t seem to care. Still, it was not something I wanted to do, but he came back less and less to the apartment we’d shared.

  The last time I went was when I was four months pregnant. It was a muggy September night, and he made dinner—a summer salad, poached salmon, orange juice spritzers. Matthew was an excellent cook; he did all the cooking when we were together. He cooked and I cleaned up. The best meal he ever made was when we were staying in a cabin in Maine, the night we conceived this child. We bought vegetables at a farmstand and two bottles of wine. We caught rainbow trout in the river outside our cabin. Then we sat under the stars, eating the crispy fried trout, drinking. All night long I could smell the fire and taste the trout. Even now I can taste it.

  After dinner the night in his studio before Bobby was born, Matthew said he wanted to take a walk for some ice cream. So we walked down a street that stank of garbage, excrement, decayed meat. The air was thick and yellow, and I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. “I’m not sure how to say this,” he stammered after we bought the ice cream and were heading home. “Maybe I’ve already said it. I love you and I want to stay with you, but I can’t be father to this child.”