Happy Family

by Tracy Barone

  The back-and-forth of the train jostles him and Sol can’t help thinking, What if this is it? What if nothing ever changes and this is his life? He has been so worried about Cici that he hasn’t factored himself into the equation. He wants to have children—his own flesh and blood—but he’s willing to accept that he never will. What he can’t accept is the idea that he’ll never make love to Cici again. He misses her raw, sensual mouth. Their intimacy became his touchstone. I’m home, he’d think when he entered her. Without that…well, there cannot be a without that. He had never felt truly alive until he met Cici. She gave herself so fully, so freely—it liberated him. During their courtship he’d told her that he was ruined; after experiencing the ecstasy of their connectedness, there could be no living without it, or her, ever again. He needs his sexy young wife back.

  When Sol gets home, he pours himself a tumbler full of vodka. He drinks it in one gulp, standing over the kitchen sink. The liquor makes him warm and woozy. Although it’s not that late, he knows he’ll find Cici asleep. He sheds his pants and lies down on top of the covers.

  Staring at the ceiling, Sol remembers Cici draped across her cousin Paulo’s couch, naked except for high heels. He’s fully dressed, kneeling in front of her on the couch. Watching as she circles her nipples with the point of her lipstick, making them hard and red. She takes his hand and puts it over her mound and he feels her heat on his palm. Her legs are open and he can see the folds of her labia through her forest of blond pubic hair. He leans down and inhales her scent, brushing his nose across her hair. She’s liquid, musky. He reaches underneath her, cupping her bottom in his hands, and she presses herself into his face. She is undulating slowly, moving the lipstick down her stomach. His tongue parts her, finds her, hard and quick. She moans and pulls him up, loosening his pants, saying Italian words that roll with her mouth as she takes him in, tracing her tongue up and around until he sees white spots behind his eyes. Then, when he’s close, so close, she stops, pulling him up and pushing him toward the mirror on the wall. Her damp hair clings to her face; her body is soft and round, with lipstick marks like tribal paint. She brushes her breasts against his back, her slender arms reaching around to stroke him. She folds his hand over hers and they watch her hand and his hand together, moving up and down and up and down.

  Sol gasps and comes into his fist.

  Now he lies in bed next to Cici feeling an ocean apart. There is nothing to do except wait to be released into sleep.

  The following morning, Sol sits in the kitchen listening anxiously to the newscast on the radio while he waits for Cookie. The world, which seemed relatively safe just twenty-four hours ago, is now unpredictable and rife with crisis. By the end of the day, the Organization of American States is likely to approve of the quarantine against Cuba. Cookie arrives two minutes early wearing a coat that’s three sizes too big. “Morning, Mr. M. How’s she doin’ today?”

  “Why don’t you tell me,” Sol says, holding up the breast pump. “This is yours, right? You gave it to her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And…?” Sol waits. When it’s clear Cookie’s not going to say more, he says: “It’s a pump, so she can milk—but you already know that! Are you making her believe she can have another baby? Don’t tell me she’s pretending…our baby—” He sputters to a stop before shouting, “I hired you to clean the house, not to put delusional ideas in her head! What on earth were you thinking? Are you crazy?”

  “I may be a lot of things, Mr. M., but I ain’t crazy.”

  “Well, then, explain it to me, because I don’t understand.”

  “No, sir, I don’t suppose you would,” Cookie replies, looking down.

  Sol realizes his anger won’t get results. “Why don’t you sit,” he says, “please, sit.”

  “Thank you,” Cookie says, but remains standing. Sol runs his fingers through his hair. Composes himself. “As you can imagine, I’m very concerned about my wife. And…I’m just trying to understand. I’m trying to understand what a woman who doesn’t have a baby is doing with this.”

  “Ain’t you a doctor?”

  “I know what she’s doing with it, for God’s sakes, what I want to know is why?”

  “All right,” Cookie says, leaning on the kitchen chair as if to brace herself for another outburst. “Sometimes people, they want to feel something they don’t got,” she says quietly. “Maybe they had it once and they lost it. Like a man who lost his leg, had it cut off, he still feel that leg. It’s like that with your wife.”

  “What does she want to feel?” Sol asks, sensing that, whatever the answer, he will have no cure.

  “Like she’s a mother.”

  Cookie’s words hang in the air. Sol looks down at his hands, not knowing what to say. “Thank you, Cookie,” Sol says after a minute. “But you can’t be planning on doing this forever. It’ll have to stop eventually.”

  “Yes, sir. But there be plenty of room between now and forever.”

  “Taper off, however it’s best for her to do it, but do it now.”

  “Oh no. I can’t do that.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can’t be taking that away from her. It’d be taking away the one thing that gives her hope, and if you do that, you’re in for a heap more trouble than you already got. Don’t mean to be rude, Mr. M., but given what y’all been through, that saying a lot.” Sol puts on his coat and grabs his keys, picks up the pump and shoves it in his pocket. He’s almost out the door when he turns around. He never thought he’d take advice from Cookie, but maybe she has a point. He walks back and lays the pump down on the table.

  At St. Vincent’s, the television set on Sol’s floor is always on. All day, news reports detail the showdown between the superpowers; no matter how Kennedy framed it, a quarantine against Cuba was an act of war and Khrushchev’s anger shows no sign of abating. The staff is transfixed by the reconnaissance photographs of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. Sol, not usually prone to fear, tries to rationalize it as just a high-stakes game of chicken. But this was for all the marbles and Castro was unstable enough that who knew who would blink first. The world certainly felt like it was on the brink of collapse; could a nuclear bomb already be aimed at New York? Sol thinks of his life with Cici, what it is now compared to what he imagined it would be. What could he possibly do to give their lives a glimmer of the promise and meaning he’d felt the day he married her?

  Later that afternoon, Sol tentatively knocks on the door of Dr. Tremont’s office. He finds Tremont is sitting behind his desk, a messy mahogany affair that’s covered with framed photographs of his golden retrievers.

  “I appreciated our discussion last night,” Sol begins stiffly. “I won’t take up much of your time, but I’d like to ask you about something that could help my wife.” He blunders on, despite his embarrassment. “The device we spoke about—it occurred to me that as illogical as it is, she’s been using it to give her hope. She needs something real, something she can hold on to.”

  Sol looks at Tremont, silently asking him to understand the words he cannot bring himself to say out loud.

  After a long moment, Tremont nods. “You’re talking about adoption. Of course, if you’re prepared to do this so soon after your loss, there are many good agencies.”

  “Given her circumstance,” Sol says, “I believe soon is essential.”

  “No waiting. No questions. No checks.” Walter Pembroke, Esquire’s accent, is vaguely Canadian. He sits at his desk across from Sol. “If you’re not interested, there are three other couples I represent who are.” Sol looks at a picture of a baby. Indiscernible sex, unfocused, bluish eyes. He’d get better odds in Atlantic City. “I’m interested,” he says.

  Don Tremont tried to talk Sol into taking his time and working with an adoption agency. He warned that it was dicey to proceed without Cici’s involvement, that given how unstable she was, she could potentially reject a new child. But Sol’s desperation prevailed and Tremont confided that he knew a lawye
r who could “cut through the red tape” and who was very discreet.

  So what if the logic of a rushed adoption is dubious; so what if Mr. Pembroke’s “Esquire” was most likely bought through a mail-order course? Sol has to do whatever is necessary to make his wife whole and happy. As shocked as he is to find himself in this position, as distasteful as it is to have to negotiate with Pembroke, Sol has to come up with four thousand dollars to buy his wife a baby.

  Jersey National Bank closes at five, and Sol floors his Olds to get there in time. He financed his house with that bank and has a relationship with the branch manager. He reviewed Mr. Carlton’s mother’s X-rays and had gotten her in with a top orthopedist, so he hopes that will help. Radiology was a prime choice of specialization for Sol; still, he’d had to moonlight weekends at Mount Sinai’s ER to pay for Carlotta’s canary-yellow two-carat diamond ring, even though he got it wholesale, and the down payment on the house has used up almost all of the money he’d made on his real estate investments. Crappy garages, vacant meatpacking warehouses in the far West Village he bought for almost nothing then sold to local hospitals to use as storage for their old medical records. Sol figures if he has to, he’ll run another line of credit with his percentage in the Bailey, Halpern, and Matzner practice for collateral. Which, it turns out, is what Mr. Carlton suggests in response to Sol’s fib that he needs the money to pay for Cici’s continuing home care.

  The very next morning, Pembroke calls to confirm a time and place for Sol to pick up the baby and hand over the money. Even though he chose Pembroke based on the man’s reputation for “efficiency,” Sol assumed the process would take a few weeks. Panicking, he thinks about all that needs to get done in the next few hours. Does he need to buy anything? Or are all of Cici’s careful preparations still there in the neatly organized baby’s room? He hasn’t been inside that room for weeks. He still thinks of it as his son’s room, and now another child—a girl, Pembroke told him—will grow up in it. She will have the life intended for their boy and never know the difference. Will Cici ever be able to forget their son? Will he? But he can’t allow doubt to creep in now; it’s far too late for that.

  Sol needs to get out of the house. He feels uncomfortable being around Cici and not disclosing his plan. Even though it’s hours before his meeting with Pembroke, he puts his four thousand dollars in the glove box and backs his Olds down the driveway. But the drive proves to be all the more unsettling; bomb talk dominates every radio station, and the news seems to be getting worse. With a click and a twist, he settles on something banal. “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl, Earl, Earl.”

  Bird shit hits smack in the middle of the windshield. “Goddamned birds,” he says and flicks on his wipers, making a streaky mess. “The whole world is going to shit.” He can barely see and thinks, Great, all I need is an accident. The closest place to pull over is Dick Shelton’s Cadillac dealership. The lot is festooned with American flags and there’s a curvy brunette standing out front in a short, checkered jumper who offers to wash his window for free, and, by the way, would he like to take a look at the new Eldorado convertibles while he waits? Sol doesn’t think of himself as a Caddy man—they are too ostentatious—but what the hell, why not check out a convertible? This could be their last day of—what? Freedom? Safety?—before going up in a mushroom cloud, so why not spend it enjoying a little luxury. The least he can do is try to make things right for Cici while there are still things to make right. Sol pictures Cici smiling in a way he hasn’t seen for months sitting in the passenger seat of a new Eldorado, hair streaming out of control like in La Dolce Vita. If his love alone can’t make her happy, then a baby in a red 1963 Cadillac Eldorado has to do the trick. Anyway, he still has two hours before he has to be at the HoJo’s parking lot off the highway, plenty of time to take a look.

  Billy Beal arrives at the HoJo’s parking lot early. He thinks about the past few days, how so much happened so quickly. It was only last Tuesday when they were all watching game seven of the World Series on the black-and-white Zenith. Moms with the baby sleeping on her shoulder; Pops pacing, yelling at Ralph Terry to strike the batter out. It was another World Series title for the Yanks, and the Beals were all on their feet, nobody louder than Moms, who caterwauled like an overgrown cheerleader. Pops tackled his sons and they banged into the coffee table, knocking empty bottles of beer into a couple of discarded BB guns on the floor.

  Later, when Moms came around for her good-night hug, she sat on the corner of Billy Beal’s bed and shook her head. “I tried,” she said. “Look at me, son, it’s important that you hear this right.” Billy Beal stared at the ceiling. “We can’t keep the baby any longer, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.” The week before, he’d heard Pops hollering bad at Moms and he’d discovered Pops sleeping on the couch the next morning. So Moms’s news didn’t exactly come as a surprise. Billy had also heard what Moms had to say about orphanages and state services; the baby deserved better. Billy Beal had touched the girl’s pendant, six times front, six times back, and asked the universe for an answer. He asked and asked until he remembered the man who’d come to the clinic.

  “Walter Pembroke, Esquire,” was how he’d introduced himself. He’d come to the clinic right after the Fourth of July and spent a while talking to Syl behind the check-in window. Afterward, he’d walked up to Billy Beal and explained that he was a lawyer who represented good families who were looking to adopt babies. Billy Beal had never seen a man whose briefcase matched his shoes. He had no idea why this person was bothering to talk to him. “You look like a sharp fellow,” Esquire said. “I help people in difficult situations; you understand what I’m saying, son? You call me if you know someone who needs my help. A lady who, for whatever reason, can’t take care of her baby herself. I help. And if you help, there’s something in it for you too.” Just before the lawyer reached the exit, he trotted back to Billy. “Did I mention they should be white? White babies only.” Billy took the man’s card.

  After Moms said good night and left his room, Billy leaned over the baby’s crib. “Don’t worry,” he said, “everything’s going to work out fine, you’ll see.” Walter Pembroke, Esquire, was the answer.

  But Moms had caught wind of what was going on with Esquire—Billy was lousy at keeping a secret—and insisted on speaking to the lawyer-man to see if he and his potential clients passed her sniff test. Then and only then would she get in touch with the agency she fostered for and put them in touch with him. Moms further insisted that she personally deliver the baby to the new parents. Pops got in the game and said, “Make it farking sooner than later,” and before Billy Beal knew it, Moms had her coat on and the baby packed and was saying if he didn’t step on it she was leaving without him. Moms had a hinky feeling about meeting in a parking lot and wasn’t about to let the baby go to some kook. So Billy Beal’s standing outside of the station wagon in the HoJo’s lot, chewing a wad of Bazooka, waiting for Moms to come back with some clam rolls and soda. Billy Beal peers into the backseat and wiggles his fingers at the baby. He checks the parking lot for Esquire but the place is dead.

  Sol’s palms sweat as he turns the leatherette steering wheel to make an illegal U-turn. Pembroke said to meet at the HoJo’s near his office but Sol must have taken the wrong exit off the Garden State, because he doesn’t see the familiar orange-and-turquoise sign. It must be the next exit up. Does he see a cherry top in his rearview mirror, a few cars behind him? Did a cop see him make the turn? What if the police pull him over? How will he explain riding around with four thousand dollars in cash, enough for a down payment on a house around here? He’s a doctor, a good citizen; he doesn’t even have any points on his license. What if he’s busted for involvement in some left-of-the-law adoption scam? Sol relaxes when the car pulls into the next lane—the red placard on its roof advertises the E-Z Driving School. Sol looks at his watch. He hopes Pembroke isn’t late; he might lose his nerve if anything deviates from the plan.

  Sol pulls into the HoJo’s lot at exac
tly the appointed time and parks at the end that’s farthest away from the restaurant, as instructed. He turns off the engine and looks around: nobody in the lot except a teenager in a leather jacket who gets out of a rusted station wagon parked a few spots away from him. Sol will have to wait. He rubs the back of his thumb against his cuticles, feels antsy, has the impulse to flee. This is for Cici, he reminds himself as he switches on the new radio, twizzling the buttons—but it’s just more about the missile crisis, so he quickly switches it off. That is the last thing he wants to think about right now. In the rearview, the boy is staring at the Caddy. He’s about fifty feet away; close enough so Sol could read the expression on his face if it weren’t totally blank.

  The boy juts his chin out in a way that reminds Sol of the Irish kids he grew up with, the types his father labeled “goyish hoodlum delinquents.” Sol checks his watch. Where is Pembroke? The kid has lasers for eyes and it’s making Sol uncomfortable. What’s he thinking, that he’s going to rob a man in a new Caddy? Sol would lock the car doors but that would only make him feel more claustrophobic.

  A heavyset woman emerges from the restaurant carrying some bags of food. The boy says something to her and now they’re both looking over at Sol, who is about to sweat through his shirt when a Dodge Dart pulls in and parks next to the station wagon. Pembroke gets out, flaps his hands in front of the kid and the woman, then trots over to Sol. “Dr. Matzner. Terribly sorry I’m late. You weren’t supposed to meet like this.” Sol gets out of the Caddy and sees that the woman has put her bags in her car and is starting to walk toward them.

  “We haven’t met,” Sol says coldly. Pembroke takes Sol’s arm but Sol shakes it off. “You didn’t say there were going to be other people here. Who the hell are they?”