Shining Through

by Susan Isaacs

  I couldn’t pretend anymore.

  “Come on, Linda, let’s go in the examining room,” Dr. Guber said, in the too-calm voice people use with people about to get hysterical. “Five, ten percent of the time, it’s something else that kills the rabbit—a heart attack, or who the hell knows. Anyway, their little pink noses stop twitching and people get nutsy for nothing. You could be fine.”

  His long legs took Texas-length strides, and I had to do double time down the narrow corridor. He opened the door to his examining room and stood back to let me go in first. The room had a black leatherette table in the center. He handed me a sheet and said, “Just take off your bottom stuff and your shoes and get up on the table.” He turned away and whistled “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true,” while I pulled off my pants and girdle and he pulled on a rubber glove. “You ever have an internal?” he called out.

  “No,” I said, and took off my shoes and stockings and stretched out on the cold paper that covered the table.

  “Listen, it’s nothing. Easy, just so long as you relax.” He turned back and started to pull the sheet first down and then up, as if he was a fussy housewife, so it covered even more than the vast areas I’d already covered with it. Then he began the examination, staring straight into my eyes. “So how’s your mother lately?” He pushed up with the gloved hand and, with the other, pressed down hard on my stomach.

  “Fine,” I gasped.

  “Fine, I don’t want to talk about her, or Fine, she’s quit boozing and is studying ancient Greek?”

  He was pressing so hard. If I really was pregnant, he could squash the baby. “She’s still drinking.”

  He switched on a floor lamp, then pulled over a stool and sat at the foot of the table. “Too bad. She looked like hell last time she was in here.” He lifted the sheet and bent over. “Such a beauty-ful girl. I remember when she first came in, years ago, pregnant with you.” All I could see were the tops of his ears.

  “Am I?” I asked. In London, the air raid sirens were screaming. In Dr. Guber’s office in Ridgewood, it was still.

  He looked up. “Yeah, Linda. You’re about two, two and a half months into it, I’d say.” Dr. Guber swallowed his discomfort; his Adam’s apple bobbled nervously in his long, scrawny neck. “Sorry, honey.” His hands appeared from under the sheet. He stood up and pulled off the rubber glove. It made a squeaky sound; I shivered. Before I could think of a thing to say, he lowered his head and stared at my toes. “Don’t…” he began. “Uh…I can’t help you with this.” Five or ten possible sentences came into my mind, but they couldn’t get from there to my mouth. The doctor moved his eyes and stared at his own feet. “And don’t go anywhere else, either. Don’t listen to your girlfriends.” Did he think we sat in the Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley conference room chatting about getting rid of babies over our cheese sandwiches? “These guys are dirty, filthy. You could die.”

  “Oh,” I said. Neither of us knew what to say next.

  “The fella…” he said at last. “Is he married?” I shook my head, and Dr. Guber broke out into a smile. “Then you got nothing to worry about! Listen to me. He’ll be surprised, yeah, sure. Maybe a little upset. You know bachelors. But then…he’ll be thrilled.” He pronounced it trilled. “You mark my words, honey. Absolutely thrilled.”

  The Monday after I went to Dr. Guber, I was sitting at my desk, in the middle of a tidal wave of nausea that came from some wandering secretary’s eau de cologne—and from my almost continual state of pure terror—when the phone rang. It was Mr. Leland’s secretary. “Mr. Leland has a bit of dictation for you. Would this be a convenient time?” Yes, especially if he’d like to see me throw up.

  Lucky for me, Mr. Leland wasn’t wearing any deodorant or hair oil or talcum powder—anyway, none with a smell. I sat across from his desk and started to take down another one of his strange letters.

  “Dear Felix,” he began. He was wearing a navy blue suit. A thick gold watch chain dangled from his vest, as if he was off to make a speech somewhere or attend a dressy funeral. “I hope you had a grand summer. It’s so refreshing, being close to the sea. I am enjoying the breezes, and the sight of birds diving into the water.”

  He cleared his throat. I looked up from my pad. “Is there a word in German for seagull?” he asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “Canary is Kanarienvogel.” God knows why, but I added, “We had a canary when I was a little girl.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “The usual canary things. It sang a lot, ate a little birdseed, and died.”

  The half of his mouth that seemed to work right smiled at me. We weren’t exactly what you’d call great buddies, but at least I was a lot less terrified of him. Gradually, I’d noticed—from the way he treated his own secretary to the way he talked on the phone during calls he’d take while I was sitting in his office—that Edward Leland was, for all his importance, all right. Sure, if you crossed him he probably would do something very, very horrible back to you. But as long as you did your job, you were okay. More than okay, because he had a sense of humor: joking to secretaries, witty to lawyers, hysterically funny to clients. Well, why not? He was so high up in the world he could afford to laugh. He was far beyond having to worry about being taken seriously.

  “No canaries in this letter. When you get back to your desk, find a seagull or a tern or some sort of ocean-type bird in your dictionary.” He paused and then added, “If you can’t find it, check with Mr. Berringer.”

  A new wave of sickness came over me at the mention of John’s name. And to make it worse, not only did Mr. Leland realize something was wrong; he had been waiting for it. He may even have tossed John’s name out for curiosity, or a test, to see what it would do. It did a lot. For the first time in those five weeks of acute afternoon nausea, I felt I really was going to throw up. I lowered my head; it would be terrific, a bright addition to the dark colors in Mr. Leland’s Oriental rug.

  “Are you all right, Miss Voss?” I could hear in his voice that he felt bad.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” I raised my pencil—and then my head—so he could see I was ready to get going again.

  But I must have looked pretty crummy, because he asked, “Would you like a glass of water?”

  “No, thanks. I’m okay.” He looked like he didn’t agree. “Really I am.”

  So he began to dictate again. My dizziness didn’t go away, but my stomach calmed down enough so that I felt assured Mr. Leland wouldn’t have to witness the reappearance of my ham and tomato sandwich.

  “I spent the month of August sailing with my three sons,” he said. Of course, I knew he didn’t have three sons (just one beaut of a daughter). But this letter was no crazier than any of the others I’d taken in the past couple of months. “Please send my fondest regards to Maria and the two little ones. I remain, Yours, Vincenzo. V-i-n-c-e-n-z-o.”

  I couldn’t help asking, “Vincenzo?”

  “That’s Vincent in Italian.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “You do? Well, Miss Voss, tell me what you see.” It was always questions with Mr. Leland, but working with him three or four hours a week, I’d learned that whether or not he liked my answers, he never held them against me personally. I was convinced the questions were completely impersonal, asked to get information or a reaction, not to test me—Linda Voss—in any way.

  “My guess is the letters are some sort of code to someone in Germany.” No reaction. “And maybe someone will be mailing this letter from Italy…” Annoyance. “Because of the Vincenzo business.”

  I typed the letters at an old Royal he kept in a closet in his office. I never typed envelopes for them. I never made carbons. When I gave Mr. Leland the typed letter, I had to give him the steno pad I’d used. Each time I went to his office, I needed a brand-new pad. I never knew who mailed the letters or where they went.

  “Any other deductions, Miss Voss?”

  “I hope I’m not…I don’t want to overstep my bounds.�
�

  “Go on.”

  “If this has anything to do with harbors or ships or aircraft carriers or E-boats or U-boats…” My stomach did a flop, but I clutched my pencil tight, as if grabbing on to a subway pole, and I got through that bump. “What I’m saying is, the Germans aren’t dopes. If this is a code, I hope it’s about something…” I paused. “Something not watery.” No reaction.

  But I was starting to be able to read him a little. My father had always said I was really smart about people, and that if I didn’t wear my heart on my sleeve about everything, I’d have made a good poker player because I could see past the faces people put on. And I think he’d been right. I bet most people wouldn’t have noticed Mr. Leland getting annoyed about a comment that the letter was going to be mailed from Italy. The change in his face was so small it wasn’t really a change at all. And I also knew that whatever the code was, it was okay; it had nothing to do with anything watery.

  What I was curious to ask him, and naturally I couldn’t, was how come he used me as a measure of how good his secrets were. I guessed I was his Miss Everybody, his Jane Doe, his Average American.

  What I was also dying to ask him was what I should do about my whole life. He was so smart. He advised senators, judges. Everyone said he even got calls from the White House. I need some advice, I could say—just like FDR would. See, I’m two months down, seven months to go, and how can I possibly tell John Berringer that I’m going to have his baby?

  I told him by just telling him. I went straight from Edward Leland’s leathery, lawyery office into John’s immaculate modern one and said, “I have to talk to you.”

  He smiled and said, “Later,” but did not look up from the letter of agreement he was marking with a red pencil. I didn’t move. My reflection in his shiny desk must have annoyed him, because when he glanced up, he took a fast, deep breath and then quickly forced his face into its I’m-not-only-handsome-I’m-a-nice-guy expression: His head tilted a little to the right; the corners of his mouth turned up just enough to show that despite the chilly blond superiority of his looks, he was truly good-natured. But I knew him well enough to know that at this moment he wasn’t—at least not toward me. Still, I was under the influence of Edward Leland’s world, where men with damaged faces made terrible, secret decisions, a world where a fringe of thick lashes over sapphire eyes didn’t count for a damn. It gave me courage.

  So I spoke. “I have to talk to you now.” Whatever was in my voice made him put down his pencil.

  “This can’t wait for tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Linda, I’m really under enormous pressure.”

  “So am I.”

  He cut me off. “I’m sure you are.” He glanced down at the letter he was editing. “I hate to be rude, but the longer you stand here, the longer it will take me to get this back to you to be retyped. Are you in the mood to be stuck here until ten, eleven o’clock? Because I’m not. I’d like to get home and…” He gave me a little smile. It meant goodbye.

  I sat myself down in the small, ugly modern chair by the side of his desk; it looked like a tilted soup plate.

  “Please, have a seat,” he said, really irritated now. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “What?” But he’d heard me, because it was as if he switched gears. Now you could almost hear his mind whirring, as if he was starting up the most intricate argument against the toughest opponent of his career. “Are you sure?” he demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “I’ve missed two—”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” he interrupted. He was talking fast. “There could be any number of reasons for a skipped period.”

  “Two periods,” I managed to say. To this day I can’t figure out how I was able to keep such control. I sounded so composed I could almost have been a match for him. “I missed two periods—please let me finish—so I had a rabbit test. It came out positive.” John’s fair skin went from pale to white. “And I went to the doctor to double-check. And I am.”

  “Didn’t you use anything?” he finally asked.

  “Use anything?”

  “Use anything! A diaphragm.” I shook my head. “Jesus Christ!”

  “I wouldn’t know where to get one.”

  “From the same damned doctor who confirmed your pregnancy!”

  “But he’s been our family doctor for years.”

  “So?”

  “I couldn’t go to him. I didn’t want him to think I was…” My hands were in my lap, clasped so tight my fingers began to throb.

  His hand turned into a fist, and he crashed it down on the desk. “You did this purposely, didn’t you? Didn’t you, damn it!” He banged again, harder. “The minute Nan left, you started planning—”

  Then came one of those moments that kill drama. John’s eyes turned dark with anger, I tried to shrivel up to invisibility in that disgusting chair…and the phone rang. Softly at his desk, but through the closed door I could hear it shrilling at mine. Automatically, I reached over, picked up the receiver and very calmly said, “Mr. Berringer’s office.”

  “Mr. Waring calling for Mr. Berringer,” a secretary at some other, more chaste law firm said. She sounded so efficient, so calm. No two missed periods for her.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Berringer is out of the office at the moment.” John’s eyes moved back and forth, as if he couldn’t decide whether to be grateful or grab the phone from me. “May I have him return Mr. Waring’s call tomorrow morning?” She said I could, and I hung up with a courteous “Thank you.”

  And then I turned to John. My voice was still secretary sweet. “Let me just tell you one thing. I didn’t lay any traps for you. If you happen to remember that first night, it was you, not me, who insisted on being friendly. I’m not a sneak, and I would never—”

  “Fine. Wonderful. You’re far beyond opportunistic intrigues. But somehow it never occurred to you in all these weeks that you might take precautions.”

  “I guess not,” I answered. “You’re the smart one. Did it ever occur to you?”

  There was silence that went on too long to be a moment of silence. At last he said, “Please go now. I have work to finish. We can continue this discussion later.”

  And then he picked up his red pencil, changed a colon to a semicolon. I returned to my desk.

  When you’re writing things down, no matter how detailed you try to be you always wind up leaving things out. So let me put in what I’ve left out. (You know what Dr. Freud says, that you don’t leave anything out by mistake? It had always sounded like a lot of Viennese Schlag to me, but who was I to say? I was the girl who left out a diaphragm.) Anyway, the details.

  After our first time together, I’d stopped saying Mr. Berringer, but I have never called him John.

  He never asked me anything about my family, or even if I had a family. Once I mentioned something about going home to Queens, and he said, “Oh, I thought you lived in Brooklyn.”

  He’d grown up on Long Island, in Port Washington. He told me his father had been in business out there. I asked what kind of business, and he’d said, “Financial.” He didn’t like to talk about his parents. They’d died in a car crash in 1929, when he was in his second year of law school, and I couldn’t tell whether or not it still hurt him to even think about them or whether maybe there was something about them he didn’t want to talk about.

  I’d asked him, “What church did your parents go to?”

  “What?” he’d asked.

  “What church did your parents go to?”

  “Episcopal.” He was staring at me like I was nuts, because we had just finished—we were still breathing hard, still sweating, actually—and most people wouldn’t dream of discussing church before they took a shower.

  “Both of them?” I inquired.

  “Yes.”

  Another thing: He had been an only child.

  Anot
her: John was in demand. Two weeks after Nan left, the phone started ringing. It was this or that partner’s wife, wanting him to meet this or that girl. How did I know? How do you think? Once, after John picked up in his office, I clicked the button fast, covered the mouthpiece, then eaves-dropped. “John, my dear, I have an absolute dream of a girl you must meet. Laura Steele. Of the Steeles.” John said he’d love to. Not yet, but very soon. “You’re not being naughty and seeing anyone else, are you, John?” the voice demanded. “No,” he’d told her. “No one.”

  He called me back into his office about seven o’clock that same night. It wasn’t dark yet, but the moon was out, full, risen so it was almost as high as John’s head, and it had the soft, slightly yellowish shine of a giant ball of taffy. His office lamp wasn’t on, so the room was illuminated by moonlight; it made the hard furniture—and John—seem more gentle.

  His posture, though, was so straight, businesslike, that for a second I thought he was going to give me the letter of agreement to retype. But when I glanced down at his desk, I saw he hadn’t gotten any farther than the semicolon he’d been working on three hours before.

  “Sit down,” he said. With the moonlight pouring through the open window, his hair glowed, as if he had a halo. “Let me be blunt, Linda. Are you willing to get rid of it?”

  “The baby?” I whispered.

  “Yes. I’ve learned of someone, a reputable physician. It can be done in a hospital in Puerto Rico. Very clean. And all on the up-and-up.”

  Here was this shining man, and all I wanted to do was make him happy. But as I started to nod, to think the words “Whatever you want,” I thought about my being pregnant in a way I hadn’t before. Maybe not in a goo-gooish maternal-instinct way, imagining something soft and pink and smelling of Johnson’s Baby Powder. But for the first time I comprehended that my awful afternoon sickness and the tight waistbands of my skirts were due to something more than a medical condition that was lousing up my life.