Happy Family

by Tracy Barone

  When Sol arrives at the hospital, he’s told that his wife needed emergency surgery and is now in intensive care. By the time he learns exactly what the emergency was, and the remedy, he is standing over an incubator the size of a large breadbox, staring at the tiny, intubated form they say is his son. He puts his hand on the clear plastic; the fan of his fingers obscures the infant’s body. The shape of the incubator reminds him of a dog carrier, or an iron lung. There must be noise in the room but Sol hears none of it. He expects to feel something great, and yet all he feels is a small heat on his hand. He wants to see Cici, to touch her. He wants to charge into the recovery room like a husband who is overcome by the notion that he could have lost his wife. He wants to behave like a man who knows he’s about to lose his son.

  Sol cannot bear to look at the baby, and he cannot bear to look away. He is a doctor, trained in life and death, and yet he’s never experienced the crossing over—having to hold a patient’s hand at the moment of death. Telling a man’s wife, his child, that he did all he could do and his all was not enough. Leave that to the surgeons with their God complexes. Yet here he is, holding this child the only way he can, a thin shield the only thing and everything between them. Without seeming to move Sol, a nurse opens the incubator and takes the tube out of the baby’s mouth. Disencumbered, he looks so peaceful, he could be perfect. Sol thinks he hears the nurse say, “I’m sorry.” There’s a terrible moment where neither of them knows what to do. Shut the incubator? Wrap him up in a receiving blanket and transport him somewhere, wherever they take dead babies? They do an awkward shuffle. Now he hears the definitive cries of newborns; someone running water. Sol leans over the open container; brushing his hand across the infant’s curled-up fingers that make a fist the size of a penny. They’re already cool against the gush of warm air. “She’s starting to come to,” he hears Dr. Dubin say.

  Before Cici realizes where she is and that her throat is so sore from being intubated it’s hard to speak, she’s trying to say, “Dov’è il mio cavallino?”

  Cici swats the oxygen mask that’s on her face. Someone’s hands put an ice chip in her mouth. When she focuses enough to feel the crashing pain in her head, to understand that it’s not limited to her upper portions and seems to be everywhere at the same time, she’s waving her arms and using whatever voice she has to call out for her baby.

  If Sol had arrived at the hospital just five minutes later, he would have raced directly to Cici’s bedside to console and support her. But he catches Dubin before the doctor’s had a chance to tell Cici. As much as Sol hates being the bearer of horrible news, as much as he’s frightened about what this will do to his wife, he couldn’t live with his cowardice if he let another doctor say what he is going to have to say now. He strokes her hand over the IV catheter. She struggles to sit up when he says, in response to the question she’s been asking the ICU nurse over and over, “We lost him. We lost the baby.” She blinks and shakes her head. “My baby, I must see my baby.” It is clear that Cici will not rest until he honors her request, and, despite this not being protocol, Sol talks Dubin into allowing the nurse to get their son ready to bring to his mother like any other newborn. He stops her; it is his burden to bear, this small, heavy thing. Sol cannot look at Cici’s face as she pulls back the blanket and clasps the baby to her chest in anguish. But he hears the deep guttural moan she makes, like a wounded animal, and then the great O of a wail that is the sound of all hope and joy being extinguished. It is a sound he will never forget. When the nurse gives her more medication, Sol stays with her. He talks softly and strokes her head as she slips in and out of consciousness. He exists within this vacuum for as long as they’ll let him: five minutes per hour, per hospital regulations.

  Sol gets to know every inch of the waiting room. It looks the same as the one at St. Vincent’s except he’s never had to wait there, looking at the happy faces of a family who have just learned whether it’s a girl or a boy. When he’s called into intensive care for the last time that evening, Cici is sleeping. He looks at the space between her parted lips; he can’t begin to describe why that gap fills him with both dread and longing.

  When Sol gets home, he realizes he hasn’t had anything to eat since his morning roll. That feels like years ago. Now that Sol’s away from the hospital, his brain goes into overdrive. He feels like he did the night before a final exam: too hyper to sleep, brain whirring through notes, charts, definitions. As in placenta previa: implantation of the placenta over or near the internal opening in the cervix, through which the baby must pass to be born.

  Sol’s drawn to the simplicity of bread. If it were Wonder Bread, it would be better, as that was verboten in his mother’s house and thus a great goyish delicacy. But Cici buys bread only at the local bakery. He cuts two slices off the loaf and closes it back up in its bag with its red twisty. He puts the bread in the toaster and depresses the button, takes the butter out of the fridge, opens a drawer and grabs a butter knife. Dubin didn’t need to be condescending, giving a lengthy explanation of the differences between total and partial placenta previa. He talked to Sol like he was a technician, not a physician of equal stature. Goddamned surgeons.

  Nobody needed to hand-hold him. Once Dubin said they couldn’t stanch Cici’s bleeding, there were only two possible outcomes. When Sol heard she was alive, he didn’t dwell on what had had to be done in order to keep her alive. He didn’t need justifications, he needed to see her, right then, right there. Now, while he’s listening for the pop of the toaster, he replays it all. The logic of the C-section, the medical necessity of a hysterectomy—anything to stop the bleeding, to save the mother; it’s always the mother first and that’s the way he’d want it, he’d insist. The mother. They’d told him every part of “the mother” they’d cut out, listed a scrum of side effects and postoperative risks—hair loss stood out, for some reason. Cici’s beautiful blond hair, he can’t imagine.

  The toast pops up, still pale. He presses the lever down again. Sol hates surgeons the way he hates lawyers. There was something smug beneath Dubin’s concern. The way he tossed out cesarean hysterectomy like a towel he’d used to wipe himself off with between tennis sets. How dare Dubin declare that discussions with Sol’s wife regarding the ramifications of her surgery were best left to the attending physician. As if Dubin knew Cici, as if he were better equipped to soften the blow than Sol. Too emotionally involved—that’s what Dubin had said. Of course Sol’s emotionally involved. It’s his wife. He wasn’t going to let them say, Sorry, Mrs. Matzner, your baby died and oh, by the way, we had to remove your uterus. Cici had barely had a moment to absorb today’s loss; to immediately follow that with the news that she could never have any more children would be too devastating in her fragile state. So Sol played the “professional courtesy” card and prevailed on Dubin to allow Cici some time to recover before she was told about the hysterectomy. He double-checked to make sure this instruction was noted on Cici’s chart—Sol had been around hospitals long enough to know you can’t be too careful, can’t follow up enough. He’d spoken to the head nurse and found out which nurses were on the next day and talked to them personally about how to handle Cici: She will wake up and have questions about the pain, the stitches—they had to make ugly vertical and horizontal cuts—and the bandages. She’ll be frightened and forget her English. He’ll be there first thing in the morning to help her through it, answer her questions.

  Sol is pulled from his thoughts by a waft of acrid smoke. Nothing works anymore, nothing’s made of quality, this piece-of-shit toaster. Now he’s sounding like his father and that makes him so angry that, without knowing it, he’s squeezed the now-burned toast in his fist. It rains black crumbs when he opens his hand.

  Sol will be vigilant this time. He watches the minute hand on his Bulova—a present from his parents when he graduated from Yale. When the golden toast rises, the Bulova says it’s been three minutes and two seconds. Their son lived for two minutes and forty-nine seconds—less time than i
t takes to hard-boil an egg; less time than it took Sol to make and eat his two pieces of toast.

  On his way to the bedroom, Sol stops outside the baby’s room. The door’s ajar; the phonograph makes a whirring noise and is hot when Sol switches it off. He has the impulse to clean out the nursery so there’s nothing left when Cici gets home. He’d enjoy the busywork, but is that what she would want? What’s worse, to have all vestiges of baby gone without a trace or to come back to things exactly as they were before? Sol can’t afford to make a mistake at this point—better to do nothing than do the wrong thing.

  The bag. Cookie must have taken Cici’s overnight bag with them to the hospital because it wasn’t in the kitchen. Why didn’t he listen to her? Would it have made any difference? Sol reminds himself to call Cookie first thing and tell her not to come in. There’s so much to take care of: he’ll have to call work, make arrangements with his partner; he needs to reschedule the man about the septic tank, find a neighborhood kid to mow the lawn. Lists usually bolster Sol, but he’s beyond easy comfort. His legs are suddenly so heavy they threaten to buckle from exhaustion and he barely makes it to the bed. There’s a lump underneath his back—he’s lying on Cici’s fur elephant. He pulls it out and it smells achingly of her. He pictures Cici’s yearning eyes looking up at him, asking for their baby. He had promised her he would give her everything; it is too cruel, too painful that he’s now helpless to give her the one thing she most desires. He folds his arms over the elephant’s trunk and collapses into dreamless sleep.

  A Few Crises

  Solomon, when do they say we can start again, when we can make another baby?” Cici’s pulled off her oxygen mask and is looking up at Sol. It’s her second day in intensive care and her voice is weak. “Quando?” she asks. Her innocence cuts Sol and suddenly he can’t respond with rehearsed words. He takes a deep breath, like a swimmer who knows he’s going to be underwater for a long time, and tells her the truth. “Sweetheart,” he says, stroking her hair, fighting to keep his own voice strong, “I am so sorry.”

  Cici refuses the shot to dry up her milk and the medications Sol and Dr. Dubin try to get her to take for her confused hormones. She’s moved down to the maternity ward, and whenever a baby cries, she starts to lactate. She falls into fits of weeping that threaten her stitches. She barely eats. She clutches at Sol’s neck one moment and then talks about how they’ll have a baby girl next, he’ll see. “Give her time. Time and the Lord’s love can heal all wounds, physical, emotional, spiritual,” the hospital chaplain tells Sol. Days pass in the hospital and all Sol can hang on to is things will be better once Cici is home, in her own surroundings. She will adjust. Time, it appears, is all he can give her.

  When Sol makes it back to their house, the front lawn is spattered with newspapers and the air inside is hot and smells of garbage. Mail litters the hallway. Sol gathers and organizes, settling into the den to pay bills. How did it get to be the week before Labor Day? It’s that last-gasp-of-summer, when families pack up coolers and kids and go to the Jersey Shore or Fire Island. The house seems to groan with neglect, and it’s not the only thing groaning. Sol can hear the muzzled Jew inside of him saying, Bury your child, for Christ’s sake, it’s time already. He’d spoken to the hospital chaplain about a funeral but didn’t want to go ahead with arrangements until Cici was well enough to attend. It’s disrespectful; the voice turns into his father growling at him when he asks if they can wait a day for Grandma Minnie’s funeral. Sol doesn’t want to miss capture the flag at summer camp. “I don’t care if you have to miss the president’s bar mitzvah, you don’t question the word of God. When He says bury, you bury. You think I’m tough? I’m nothing compared to God. I’ll die, but Him? You have to answer to Him forever.”

  But now it’s become clear that Cici won’t be up for a funeral even if he waited another week, when she’ll be released from the hospital. So he makes arrangements for the plot and a service. The procedural part is easy, but no one wants the task of calling family to invite them to a funeral. Moot point here. In his fantasy, Sol has a family like the Cleavers—people who resolve disagreements with handshakes and promises they keep. Family members who swoop in bearing starchy foods and know better than to ask you every two seconds how you’re doing. The family you want to get rid of until you’re alone and realize how much better you felt when they were around. Sol can’t allow himself to indulge in this kind of illusion, because then he’ll get in touch with the rage he feels. In reality, Sol’s parents disowned him when he married Cici. As if they had ever owned him. No question, he’s better off without them and their narrow-minded bullshit in his life.

  The story of how and why Sol was cut off from his parents is fodder for a joke: “Did you hear the one about the Jew who converts to Catholicism in order to marry the Italian bombshell?” But Sol prefers to think about the how-we-met part. Mainly because it makes him seem more adventurous, more heroic, than he actually is.

  Sol met Carlotta D’Ameri because he was lost. He was in Milan attending a radiology conference, got confused, and stumbled into the Sierra Milano—a yearly textile convention housed in the same building. To escape the crowds of well-heeled Italians, Sol dipped into a booth with rolls of leather on display. It smelled of tobacco and tannin and then, suddenly, a deep, plummy scent, like fig or pomegranate. Sol saw a young woman, dressed in white, laughing and waving her hand at something a man in a suit had just said. She laughed like she smelled. Sol wanted to make her laugh like that. All he could think to do was offer her his hand. “My name is Solomon. Dr. Sol Matzner.” He points to the Dr. before his name on the identification card around his neck. “Apparently, I’m lost.”

  “Carlotta D’Ameri,” she said, pointing to her solar plexus and then reaching for the map he’d forgotten he was clutching in his hand. Their first touch came with a spark of static, a minor electric shock that caused them to recoil at the same time.

  A frowning man, apparently the woman’s boss, appeared and spoke to her in a tone that made it clear she needed to get back to work. Sol did everything short of charades to indicate that he was lost and looking for help. “Marco D’Ameri.” The frowning man said his name as though he were concluding a conversation, not beginning one, and directed Sol toward an exit sign.

  Sol mingled with his fellow radiologists for a short time and then went back to Carlotta’s booth on his lunch break. Later, after his conference ended, he snuck her out of the Sierra Milano and across the street to a sandwich bar. She ate prosciutto and finished with cherry gelato she made him taste off her spoon and, later, her lips, when she turned her head so the kiss intended for her cheek became the real thing. When Sol went back to his hotel room, he smelled her perfume on his shirt, or maybe it was just memory enveloping him, making him want to reexperience every detail of her. Sol felt sick, a desirous, can’t-eat kind of sick. He had to see this girl again. He had to know everything about her.

  Sol extended his stay in Milano and was undaunted by Carlotta’s warning that her family would not approve of her dating anyone who wasn’t Italian. He could handle Marco D’Ameri; he was an MD, top of his class at Harvard, an all-around stand-up guy. At least, this was the argument Sol made to Cici’s stepfather in the cavelike darkness of his library. Marco D’Ameri poured him a tumbler full of brown liquor. Without understanding a word of Marco D’Ameri’s terse, rapid-fire Italian, Sol understood exactly what he was saying.

  It was 1959, and Sol was no stranger to anti-Semitism. Although they hadn’t lost family in the Holocaust, Sol’s parents adopted the “never forget” mentality of survivors. Sol, however, was pragmatic about religion. What was the point in arguing about God when you could never prove or disprove His existence? And while his parents assumed that he’d marry a Jewish girl, religion was the last thing Sol thought about when it came to women. He would never have guessed that it would become one of the major issues of his life.

  It should have been easy for Sol to return to America and forget about an eigh
teen-year-old Italian girl with a fascist stepfather. He’d known her for only a few days, and he wasn’t a thrill-of-the-chase kind of guy. He pursued women in a haphazard, unfocused way; if they said yes, Sol just didn’t say no. But Carlotta D’Ameri was different. She vexed him. He might have been able to dismiss her as a limited, if beautiful, distraction, but her innocence was spiked with a sensuousness that made him feel off balance. The very act of his wanting her said yes, and while it made him feel out of control, he wanted to say yes again.

  Upon his return to the States, Sol took on more hours at work in order to negotiate more vacation time to get back to Milano to see Cici. From their first cherry-laced kiss, the connection was strongly physical. The language barrier intensified the need for touch, and Cici moaned, she sighed, she giggled. To her, it was all play; she wanted to explore, to discover, to wander in their sexuality like a garden. She’d nip and lick his nipples, ask him to roll a cold bottle of wine up and down her back and over her calves to see if it felt good-cold or bad-cold.

  Sol was overwhelmed at first. Thrown off by her contradictions—a girl who was scared to get into an old elevator because it creaked but would defy her parents and sneak into a near stranger’s hotel room? A girl who wept if she thought her hair looked bad but who had not an ounce of self-consciousness about her naked body? A virgin who was rapacious, so open to anything pleasurable as long as they avoided the Vatican’s dreaded “penetration” that it made him feel prudish by comparison. Cici would surrender completely to him, to his touch; “Tell me,” she would say and he would look into her eyes and tell her to come, and she would, again and again. It made him feel like the most powerful man on earth.