A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  Well, he could have let the name slip. Zoe. Even though he wasn’t supposed to.

  But he didn’t know I was breast-feeding till Tuesday!

  Why?

  Because it only happened the night after Zoe was born, when I was alone with my pain, and they have a rule in the hospital, if you’re not nursing, that you only get to see your baby every now and then. It seemed so damned unfair to me. After all I’d been through, at least I wanted my daughter, wanted her bonding. I called the night nurse, demanded my child. She refused. I cried, I screamed at her like a banshee. She said, well, why didn’t I try it? (They all seem to think that if you don’t breast-feed, you’re a bad Mommy a priori.) Finally, very early in the morning, I capitulated. She brought me Zoe, helped with the first latching. I was so damned clumsy. Panicky too, I guess, and hurting, with a whole network of plastic tubes running out of my wound.

  But there we are.

  But Larry knew nothing about it till yesterday!

  And if he didn’t know about it till yesterday, and if Harriet didn’t see him last night or this morning, then how does she know I’m breast-feeding?

  She must have seen him after all.

  But why would she lie about a thing like that?

  I can think of only two reasons.

  Either he didn’t come home at all and she is covering for him—but in that case how does she know?—or …

  With Justin in the next room!

  Every time I think about it, I flood. Heat just under my skin, little bubbles of sweat, in the overheated atmosphere. I’m on overload. Little things, little details, gestures. Right under my nose, the whole time! It all comes back to me. Stray glances between them. Her sometimes sullenness, his uncommunicativeness.

  With him, of course, that was The Deal. Always the Deal. He was so-o-o wrapped up in The Deal.

  God Almighty, not only did I bring her into the house, but I actually coaxed her into moving in! I coaxed her!

  But how did they manage it, all this time? I hardly left the house! Did he wait till I was asleep at night, then sneak upstairs?

  With Justin in the next room?

  That weekend before Thanksgiving, Friday, when I went off to my parents. She couldn’t stay, absolutely adamant, and then, all of a sudden—a miracle—yes, she was staying. (Who did she call, that morning? Larry?) And the next day, when he finally met me at Dubin’s office, so distracted, something about The Deal, always The Deal …

  But it was never The Deal!

  It was Harriet!

  And I keep seeing Justin in the next room!

  He calls. Full of apologies, he’s going to be late, won’t show up till late this afternoon.

  I want to tell him not to bother, don’t.

  They serve lunch. I push the tray away, uneaten. The nurse’s aide argues with me. I have to eat because of Zoe. I take a few bites, like chewing chalk.

  Instead, I swallow my rage. I call my mother. I imagine her saying I told you so, and I can’t face it. I invent some explanation, tell her not to come. I don’t want to see anyone except my father. I think: I could get my father to drive to New Jersey, fire Harriet on the spot, retrieve my son.

  But how could I do that to Justin? How would he react if his grandfather suddenly appeared and put him in a car and drove him back to Riverside Drive?

  I clutch my daughter for dear life. She stares at me, silent, beautiful blue eyes now open in a look of perpetual amazement.

  I explain to her: “We’re stuck, my darling. Your daddy’s been bad, very bad, but we’re stuck in this horrible hospital, and I hurt, I’ve got these damned pieces of metal in the place where you came out, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We have to wait till we get out. Then Momma will fix everything. It’ll be all right, you’ll see. But right now we have to be strong. And wait. We have to be very strong together.”

  The person I really want to fire, of course, is my husband.

  It is late when he shows up. He has on his big winter coat, the bulky one with the alpaca lining, and his most sheepdog expression. His left hand is jammed in his coat pocket, as though he’s clutching something inside the coat.

  I can see it in his eyes. For just a second, I think he’s about to confess. Oh, Georgie, I don’t know what got into me, etc., etc. That’s how he’d start, all contrite and serious.

  Instead, he shuts the door carefully behind him and, unbuttoning his coat, produces a bottle of champagne.

  “I thought we could drink a little toast to our daughter,” he says jovially, “with the good old Dom.” He waves the bottle in the air.

  The idea revolts me. I want to tell him: Why don’t you take it home and drink it with your slut? But I’ve made up my mind. I’m doing nothing, saying nothing, till I get home.

  He’s saying something about doing something crazy. Something about crossing the Rubicon, his personal Rubicon. (I’ll say.) About how he wants us to be proud of him, me, Justin, Zoe too.

  He says he’s a changed man.

  “I look at you with the baby,” he says, and he shakes his head, swallows, “and all I can say is … Well, it moves me. Moves me incredibly.” For God’s sake, is he about to cry? “The craziest thing about it, honey, is that I feel totally liberated.”

  Great.

  “I’d like you to go now,” I say. “I’m too tired to talk.”

  “It’s okay, honey, you don’t have to say a word. Just listen to—”

  “Please,” I interrupt. “I mean it, Larry. I want you to leave now.”

  He stares at me, uncomprehending, like some big bewildered animal.

  “Georgie, I—”

  “Just leave me alone. That’s what I want.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it now. Just go.”

  “But Georgie, I can—”

  “Just go. I don’t want any explanations. I want you to go. Now.”

  I put all the scorn I can muster into my voice, and all the humiliation, the hurt, the tears I’ve shed today with only Zoe for my witness. And if there’s any lingering doubt in my mind—could I have it wrong? have misinterpreted?—the guilty expression on his moon face wipes it out.

  “Georgie, what did you hear? For Christ’s sake, it’s not what you think! I—”

  But his voice trails off.

  You cheating, son-of-a-bitch bastard! Why don’t you go get sympathy from her?

  Eye contact gone. Confused, he retreats, turns, turns back, stumbles, opens the door.

  One last plea—“Georgie!”—but it fails to move me.

  He’s gone now. The champagne bottle still in his fist.

  Immediately I think: Why didn’t I challenge him? Then and there, in the damned hospital bed, with my daughter in my arms and the staples still in my belly? And if I’d never hired her, if I’d never married him, if and if and if. Oh God, I’ve been through it all a hundred times already!

  Because I’ve always given him the benefit of the doubt. All the late nights, the Holbrooks, the Mulcahys. And all along it’s been going on right under my nose!

  How long is “all along”? How do I know? How do I know anything about him?

  And her? She of the soulful glances, the tender, sisterly words?

  22 December

  Saturday morning, Larry’s already here.

  I was up most of the night, stewing. It’s not that I’m flinching from it, I know exactly what I’m going to say. But there’s Justin. How explain to him? And, once she’s gone, how am I going to cope with him?

  I must have dozed off for a little while, until Zoe woke me up, fretting.

  “It’s okay, darling,” I murmured to her sleepily, offering my nipple. “We’re going home today.”

  We both dozed off again.

  Everybody except Larry is late.

  Dubin, to examine and release me. And the staff pediatrician, who has to sign off on Zoe. Then there’s some complicated business with the hospital administration. Why didn’t somebody warn me about it
before? The floor nurse insists she needs a cashier’s receipt before we can leave.

  Larry’s gone off to deal with it. Dressed and packed, I wait with Zoe for what seems like hours.

  I feed Zoe again. Larry comes back. Done. But then the floor nurse stops us again. They have a “fail-safe” procedure for making sure I go off with the right baby.

  “But why couldn’t you have told me this before?” I shout at her across the counter at the nurse’s station.

  “I’m sorry, Georgia, we’ve—”

  “And what gives you the right to call me by my first name? You don’t know—”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Coffey.”

  I yell at her—this is my baby, does she think I don’t know my own baby?

  A year ago, she explains (with professional patience), a woman walked in off the street and out of the hospital, with a baby she had no claim to. That, I say, is really reassuring. That, the nurse says, is why they have the procedure.

  Finally, Larry leaves to get the Volvo, which he parked in a garage, and a black security guard, after checking Zoe’s plastic bracelet against his roster, escorts us down the elevator and out to the main entrance, where he waits with us until Larry drives up.

  It is almost eleven and freezing outside.

  The city is dirty, bleak, and the crosstown traffic horrendous. I sit in the backseat with Zoe. I tried wedging her into Justin’s tiny old car seat, but she sagged and drooped no matter how I tried to prop her. Finally, danger or no danger, I unstrapped her, and I hold her cradled in my arms.

  We hardly talk. I ask Larry if the baby nurse arrived before he left. No, he says, but he called the agency yesterday. They assured him she would be there. Clotie and Harriet can let her in.

  Great, I think.

  Then, for no reason, I remember the tree. It almost makes me cry. Christmas is only a few days off—some Christmas—but for Justin’s sake, what are we going to do about a tree?

  I must have said it aloud, something.

  “Not to worry,” Larry says over his shoulder, from the driver’s seat, “it’s all been taken care of.”

  “What’s been taken care of? You mean you bought a tree?”

  “Not only bought but it’s already up and decorated.”

  Sign of the times. Always in the past, we bought the tree together, and I did the decorating, adding several new ornaments to the collection each year.

  “Harriet and Justie helped me,” he says.

  Oh great. Just great.

  He tries to use the tree as an opening. We have to talk, he says. It’s crazy, going on the way we’re going. For his part, he can explain everything. It’s not what I think, he says. He says it’s been a crazy time for him.

  I don’t bother to answer. I look out the window at the bleak city, the bleak tunnel, the bleak route west across the Meadowlands. I have it all planned. The minute we get home, I will hand Zoe over to the nurse. Then I’ll take Harriet Major aside and tell her exactly what I think of her. She’ll have till nightfall to pack her stuff and get out. (I can’t remember if I have enough cash in my secrétaire. Well, if I don’t, she’ll have to take a check.) Then I’ll take Justin and tell him she’s leaving and hope for the best. After that, Lawrence Elgin Coffey can do all the explaining he wants to.

  Heavy traffic, I notice. The Saturday before Christmas.

  Giants Stadium.

  The Giants are having a super season, Larry remarks. There’s a chance they’ll go all the way.

  Good for the Giants.

  It seems to be taking forever. Maybe that’s because I feel as though I’ve been away forever. Five days, and everything’s changed. Five days in a hospital bed, I think, and my whole life’s been turned on its ear.

  The thought makes me queasy, that and the back of my husband’s head.

  “We’re going home, my darling,” I whisper silently to Zoe. “In a few minutes, you’re going to meet your brother. And it’ll be okay, I promise you. Momma’s going to fix everything.”

  The streets of St. George, at long last. The north end near the highway, where the houses, as though they belong to some other town, are aligned in tight rows on gridiron streets—“starter homes” in real estate jargon, but you get the St. George School District in the bargain. Red lights, trees, bare branches forming gaunt alleys under a glassy sky. Christmas decorations. Somebody has a big plastic Santa on the front lawn, pulled by reindeer, with a bigger cartoon bubble coming out of his mouth. “Ho Ho Ho,” the bubble says.

  The cemetery sloping above us, then the Victorian pile of the St. George Inn, where the food is terrible and no one I know has ever stayed.

  We turn past the inn, under the stone arches of the railroad, and snake west toward the ridge line. Here the lots are larger, the cars in the driveways more expensive, the plantings elegant. Turn-of-the-century Victorians, center-hall Colonials, now and then a massive gloomy Tudor. Wreaths on the doors, glimpses of lit trees in the interiors. Then, a last blinking red light, and we’re across, winding into our neighborhood through the giant oaks and banks of rhododendrons, and finally, finally, home.

  It’s lunchtime.

  Clotie and the baby nurse are waiting for us. Justin and Harriet aren’t.

  Clotie says she got to work at eight. Mr. Coffey had already left. The baby nurse arrived about ten. Sometime between the two, apparently, Justin and Harriet went off in Harriet’s car.

  Clotie saw them; the baby nurse didn’t.

  “But didn’t she tell you where they were going?” I ask Clotie.

  “No, ma’am. I just saw them go, that’s all. She had Justie all bundled up in his snowsuit, account of the cold.”

  “But didn’t you ask them?”

  “Ask them what?”

  “Where they were going? I mean, they knew I was coming home!”

  “No, I didn’t, ma’am. I was just doing my work, was all.”

  “But what time was that?”

  “I disremember.”

  “Maybe they went Christmas shopping,” Larry says.

  We’re all still standing in the front hall, in our overcoats, and I’m still holding Zoe.

  “Christmas shopping?” I retort. “On the day I was coming home? When they knew I was coming home and bringing Zoe?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe they’re stuck in traffic. It’s fierce out there, probably the stores are jammed too. I don’t know, maybe they went out for lunch. There’s no need to get so worked up about it.”

  “But she should have told someone. She knew we were coming home. It’s … well, it’s goddamned irresponsible!”

  It is also, I think, the last straw. Whatever shred of sympathy I might have harbored for Harriet Major has just gone out the window.

  The damned phone keeps ringing. Each time I grab at it, primed to explode, but it’s always somebody else calling to welcome me back.

  I cut people short. I punch the stepfather’s number. I let it ring eight times the first time, ten times the second. But what happened to the answering machine? Why would she have turned off the answering machine?

  I ask the operator for help. The line’s in good working order, she says. But no one is picking up.

  They’re not back at two, three. She always said her stepfather had a business in New York. I look up Smith in the Manhattan phone book. There are three Robert A.’s, one a doctor. I think the middle initial is A. And there are tons of Robert Smiths and as many R. Smiths, and how do I know the business is under his own name, and what would it be doing, open on a Saturday?

  I punch a few numbers. They lead me nowhere. Nobody knows what I’m talking about.

  They’re still not back at four.

  Larry suggests he drive off to search for them. That, I tell him, would be the absolute height of stupidity. Where is he going to look? Which direction would he go in?

  Finally I confront him. I don’t care anymore, I’m too crazed.

  “What do you know about this?”

  “Georgie, for Christ�
�s sake—”

  “I want the truth now! Do you think I don’t know what’s been going on between the two of you? How dumb do you think I am?”

  “Oh, Georgie, I—”

  His abject tone infuriates me.

  “Don’t you ‘Oh Georgie’ me! I want to know where they are, what you know about it.”

  “But I don’t know anything about it!”

  “Are you sure? Absolutely sure? Where they were going, what they were going to do?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I didn’t even see them this morning. When I left the house, they were still asleep.”

  “How do you know that? Were you up there on the third floor?”

  “No, I wasn’t. For God’s sake, Georgie! You’ve got it all wrong, I—”

  “Just answer my question! How did you know they were still asleep?”

  “I just assumed they were.”

  “But her car was still here when you left, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t notice.”

  “Didn’t notice? How could you not notice?”

  “Georgie, for Christ’s sake, it was still dark outside! I had to leave to get you! But what difference does that make anyway? Clotie saw them later. She saw them go off in the car!”

  “You bastard!” I shriek at him. “Don’t you dare raise your voice to me! They’ve been gone over six hours! Something bad’s happened to our son, and you’re responsible for it!”

  “But, Georgie, you don’t know that! That’s cra—”

  “You’re damned right it’s crazy! I’m crazy, the whole world’s crazy!”

  But I can’t stand it anymore, can’t stand the sight of him, the sound of his voice. I push past him, make my way painfully upstairs. The whole world is crazy. And something has happened to my son, something bad. Good God, my little boy!

  I realize I’m sobbing. BECAUSE I’VE KNOWN IT ALL ALONG! All my premonitions, my crazy forebodings, I thought it was about Zoe—no, I thought it was about me! My whining, puling, neurotic, hormonal, goddamn stupid-bitch princess self! But it wasn’t! It was real the whole time, and I knew it was going to happen, and it was going on right under my nose! Justin, my son, my little boy, oh God, and somehow I let it. I let it happen right under my nose!