Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  When they were finally set, Lainey declared that Mack got to be first, because he was the one who’d had to go to the hospital. Mack blushed and then asked for the package that he’d checked on earlier. Liddie, who delivered the presents on Christmas, found it and brought it to him. It was from David and Lainey. Mack pulled the shiny red paper back quickly, violently, and when he saw that it was a chemistry set, his face opened in sober, shy pleasure. He looked up at each of his parents. “This is exactly what I wanted,” he said. “This is the happiest day of my life.”

  David was moved by this, unexpectedly, and had to look away.

  One by one they opened their gifts, showing each to the rest of the family, in the custom Lainey insisted on. Each child slowly accumulated a pile of treasures—a big gift from David and Lainey, and then many smaller ones, from David’s parents and Lainey’s father, and from all the aunts and uncles and cousins, mostly on Lainey’s side.

  Liddie unwrapped Randall’s gifts for him. David and Lainey had given him an outsize gyroscope. Liddie set it spinning and held it out before him. It seemed to David that Randall smiled, watching it, though he quickly went back to a coiled ribbon he’d pulled from the heap of tissue and trash, breathily singing his pleasure as he twirled it.

  The children’s gifts to each other were small, inexpensive treasures: a little net bag of gold-foil-covered chocolate coins, a squirting flower ring, a tiny book whose pages you flipped rapidly to see the images move.

  “Nothing from Sarah this year,” Lainey said after they’d finished. “She just didn’t have time to get organized.”

  She had been up, in and out of the room a dozen times, checking on the progress of the meal in the kitchen. David watched her moving slowly around, bending over one child and another as they unwrapped something, calling out across the room, “Did you write that down? From Grandpa? From Auntie Lalie?” Her face, which had been puffy late in her pregnancy, had thinned dramatically over the last few days, he noticed. She looked years younger than she had when he took her to the hospital.

  When they were finished, Lainey stood again and moved slowly around the room, turning on all the lights. Suddenly the windows were black, the day was over. She went back to the kitchen to finish preparing the meal. David helped the children pick up the torn paper, the boxes, the ribbons, the name labels. They took turns stomping them down in the big cardboard carton Nina’s tricycle had come in—David lifted each child in and out.

  In the dining room, Sarah began to cry. It started slowly, the intermittent dry calls of hunger. But no one came, and within a few minutes, the carriage was trembling with her desperation. David went to the kitchen door. Lainey’s face was red from exertion, from the steamy fragrant heat of the kitchen.

  “Your newest is calling you,” he said.

  She slammed the lid down on the big kettle and spun to the sink. “She’ll have to wait, then,” she said. He stood watching her. “Oh, can’t you do it, David!” she burst out. “You can see I’ve got my hands full.”

  As he turned into the dining room, she called out, her voice suddenly remorseful, “Just rock her for five minutes. Or change her. I’ll be ready to feed her by then, I think.”

  Sarah had kicked her quilt off. The upheld wrinkled pads of her feet felt ice cold to David’s fingers. He lifted her and wrapped the quilt around her legs. Her sobbing diminished, and she curled into a tiny boneless crescent against his chest. Then he realized that she was wet—soaked really—and probably cold on account of that too. She began an earnest rooting against him with her head as he carried her toward the stairs.

  “Not me, little girl,” he whispered. “Not me.”

  He mounted the stairs carefully and went down the hall to the room Lainey had fixed for Sarah, full of the chipped, worn infant furniture Mary had barely finished with. He laid the baby gently down on the changing table. Her chuckering complaints shifted up; she squawked. When he pulled off her rubber pants, the ammonia odor of urine almost brought tears to his eyes. Carefully he unlatched one pin on the soggy diaper, then the other. He lowered it, then stood up straight: down its center was a vibrant streak of blood. For a moment he thought she was hurt; and then that it must be Mack’s diaper, that somehow Lainey must have pinned one of the diapers they’d used as a bandage back on the baby. But then almost immediately he remembered. He remembered it with his other daughters: the sweet-sad bleeding from deep inside, caused by Lainey’s hormones, the hint in infancy of what would come later. He felt a quickening tenderness for the ugly little girl lying under his hands. Gently he slid the diaper out from under her.

  The cold air had struck her like a new insult, and she was shrieking now, a high, piercing noise. David moved quickly, rubbing Vaseline onto her narrow, pinched bottom, powdering her, pulling a dry double diaper under her. He watched her face, closed tight as a fist. A single adult-sized tear snaked down from under her lashless, blue-veined eyelid, landed in the delicate furred cup of her tiny ear. He wrapped her again in the worn quilt and cradled her in his arms on the changing table, his hands cupping her tiny skull. Her crying slowly stilled. He lifted her then, her swaddled body tilted up along his forearms, her head in his hands so he could look at her. She shivered once, a convulsion of her whole body, and then she frowned. With great effort she slowly opened her eyes. Their deep, unseeing navy blue questioned David’s face intently for a long moment, and he stared back at her. Sarah. She was utterly still in her concentration. Then she closed her eyelids slowly, as though they were unbearably heavy.

  David folded her carefully against his chest. Immediately she began the purposeful pushing with her head again. She made little ticks and grunts of hungry life as he carried her back downstairs. When he gave her to Lainey in the kitchen, her desperation increased. She cried out and struggled until Lainey got her to the living room and sat down to nurse her. David stood in the doorway and watched for a moment the desperate swinging of the tiny head, the grabbing mouth as Lainey opened her nightgown. When the baby’s lips closed on her, Lainey smiled; and then Sarah’s cheeks began to pulse rapidly with the sucking motion, she snorted and choked and swallowed. “She has enough determination for someone twice her size, doesn’t she?” Lainey asked. She stroked the baby’s lumpy head with her free hand.

  “She does,” David agreed.

  When everything was ready in the dining room, David called to the children from the foot of the stairs. They trailed down from their rooms, Mack hopped in from the living room, and suddenly they were all there, the dining room was noisy and wild with life.

  As Lainey was putting Sarah back into her carriage, David bent to help Randall into his chair. They straightened simultaneously and caught each other’s eye. Lainey pushed her shiny, swinging hair back from her face and smiled, an apologetic shy smile that made her suddenly pretty and young again.

  “Well,” David said, moving to his place at the head of the table. “God bless us, every one.”

  There was a second of silence, and then Mack said, “Was that grace? Can we begin?”

  “No,” Lainey said. “That was Dickens. We’re going to do the Doxology.” This too was part of custom on Sundays and holidays, a leftover, like all the other customs, from Lainey’s life in her family. “Liddie, will you pitch us?”

  Liddie hummed, and they began, tentatively: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow …”

  Even Nina knew the words, David saw. Her lips were moving, though he couldn’t hear her baby voice. “Praise him all creatures here below.” David came in at full volume: “Praise him above, ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Mack made his voice quiver with fear on these last two words, as he always did; and he and Nina were laughing through the amen.

  Chapter 5

  Summer 1956

  David had slept with a number of women when he was in college and medical school, but it wasn’t until the first year of the war, when he was working in a VA hospital in San Francisco, that he had a sense of himself sexual
ly. The city, which had seemed a sleepy town when David arrived, changed nearly overnight with the declaration of war. Suddenly it was flooded with women, women who in another life would have been saving themselves for the right man. Here, they were glad to give themselves away. The very air seemed charged, and David moved through it in a state of nearly constant sexual excitement.

  He became aware of women’s flesh, its texture and its smell, the way they exposed it or hid it. He could guess what a woman would be like in bed—how she would use herself—from the way she moved her mouth as they introduced themselves to each other, the way she held herself or touched the flesh on her own arms or face as they talked. What they talked about didn’t matter. It was always the same anyway—where they were from, what they were doing in San Francisco, how this band compared with the one in this hotel or that joint a week before.

  He thought of these women as unclaimed, as living out of time, in some sense. Their lodgings, the beds he slept in with them, were always temporary: hotel rooms, boardinghouses, cramped apartments they shared with other women. Often there were photographs sitting on their nightstands of lovers or husbands now overseas in Bataan or North Africa, but their faces seemed to have nothing to do with the urgent grappling they smiled down on.

  David was startled once to wake up and find himself staring into the sober brown eyes of a child, perhaps around two years old, who was standing up in a playpenlike bed next to the one David was sleeping in—a child who had presumably been there the night before too, when David and the woman who was now gently snoring behind him had pushed at each other drunkenly for what seemed like hours, making wild, animal noises. He felt called back, momentarily, to a world he’d allowed himself—or willed himself—to forget about.

  It was during this period of his life, too, that David began to be interested in psychiatry. In medical school, it had seemed so much voodoo to him, pure mumbo jumbo. But in San Francisco, his patients were more and more fresh from the war, traumatized by it, by their injuries, by the deaths of friends. Often they were referred to psychiatry in addition to whatever medical treatment was required. And slowly it began to seem to David that those wounds were the deeper ones, that psychiatry was the more important form of healing. He came to think of his own work with his patients’ bodies as simple, mere tinkering, like a mechanic working on a car. He went to Dr. Erdrich, who ran the psych ward, and asked for recommendations about what to read.

  The old man seemed amused at this autodidactic approach, but he jotted down the names of five or six books in a hurried, foreign-looking script. When David came home from being with some woman, he often sat up and read one of them for several hours. His hands turning the pages smelled of sex, and in his mind everything about those days merged together, everything seemed erotically charged and exciting: the slanted light in the hilly white city, the lectures and cases he was reading, the brassy energy of the music he danced to in hotels and jazz joints, the intense, serious nature of the games he played with various women’s bodies.

  He tired of it, finally; or he tired of this version of himself. When he went to Chicago to start his psychiatric residency, some balance seemed to restore itself to his life. In the analysis he began, he came to see that the energy that had fueled his desire in San Francisco was connected to the energy that had made him choose psychiatry—and that both had their source in his desperate need to break away from the net of family obligation and duty in which he’d felt completely trapped. In the year before he met Lainey, he slept with two more women, but he didn’t feel again as driven, as out of control, as he had for a while in San Francisco.

  And so he was willing, if not glad, to go as slowly as Lainey wanted, though they’d been lovers for months before they married. And he was comfortable with what seemed her reticence, her deep passivity. Sometimes, though, in the early days of their shy, orderly lovemaking, he would remember something he’d done with some stranger in San Francisco, some acrobatic position they had wound up in, and he would be filled with hungry yearning for a wilder passion.

  But he loved Lainey, and so he adjusted, he got used to her. And after Liddie’s birth, making love with her came to have another kind of power for him entirely, a power that moved him sometimes, over the years, to tears. It was only after she’d given birth that Lainey was able to come, and only then that he realized that she hadn’t been able to before. But in addition, the sense of everything her broad, strong body was going through as she had the children, as she nursed them—that, and the intense feeling she brought to their lovemaking—stirred him deeply in a way he wouldn’t have guessed himself capable of.

  The first time David pushed gently into her after she’d had Liddie, she was silent, staring up at him intently; and he felt certain she was thinking, as he was, of how her body had split wide, too, in giving birth. Afterward, as he lay next to her, she began to talk. “I just feel so open to you, for you,” she whispered. He was holding her breast, feeling her blood tremble under the soft flesh. “Open to have the baby, open to nurse her, and now open to take you back in me again and again.” He turned and put his mouth over her closer nipple. He felt almost immediately the rush of sweetish milk against his tongue—and in his hand, the warm drops flowing in sympathy from her other breast. He pulled her body to him in a burst of feeling. She moaned and pressed his head tightly against her breasts, her opened thighs gripped his waist. “I feel so used, David, so happy,” she cried. “I want you to use me. Use me all up.”

  She told him later that sex with him felt nearly holy to her now, that she thought of it in words that came to her with doubled potency from religion, words like riven, cleft. She said that even in church she was sometimes swept with desire; she had to lower her head when they read aloud the words of Scripture: flesh, blood.

  David had met Marie Lomassi a few times, but he hadn’t really noticed her until the week after the new psychiatric residents came in that summer—the summer of 1956—vulnerable young men with new neckties, new haircuts. David was sitting in the little darkened observation room with Marie, who was the head nurse on the ward, and three of these frightened young men, watching a fourth through the two-way mirror as he did his first patient intake. It wasn’t going well.

  The patient was an old man, violent, paranoid, and confused. He was moving rapidly around the room, stopping only to yell abuse at the seated resident, Dr. McGill. His wild shouts made the speaker mounted on the wall in the observation room crackle with static. McGill’s voice was lost behind it, an ineffectual murmur. He was a slender blond man, and he nervously tapped his pencil on the clipboard while he waited for the patient to calm down. There was the creak of chairs in the observation room as the other residents shifted and moved in sympathetic discomfort.

  “He’s got to take charge.” It was Miss Lomassi. David turned. She had leaned forward; her frowning face was inches from David’s. In the semidark of the room she looked very young. Her breath smelled of something sweet and butterscotchy.

  “Let’s let him play it out,” David said. He turned back. He was nervous on McGill’s account too. And he felt responsible for his dilemma, since he was in charge of preparing the residents for this first intake, and he knew very well he hadn’t prepared McGill for anything like this. The old man continued to shriek: “You’re so smart, you fuck! You fuck! I’ll kill you all, you fuckers! You think you know it all, you’re so smart.” He tore at his hair, then at his shirt. The resident sat, his lips moving in useless, inaudible phrases. They could see a looping, brown-stained undershirt under the shredded cotton of the patient’s shirt. They watched for three or four more minutes. “Doctor?” he heard Miss Lomassi say. David shook his head no.

  Finally the man began to circle the room, yelling, kicking at the walls. He seemed to be looking for something. He picked up a chair and held it out toward the resident as though he were an animal trainer and the resident a wild beast. “You think you can? You think you can? You fuck! You dead fuck! You’re all dead! I’ll kill
you all… .”

  Miss Lomassi had stood up. She was by the door. “Doctor?” she asked again, impatience in her voice. It was a formality. Before David said all right, she had yanked the door open, and seconds later she appeared in the intake room. The resident looked up at her with a mixture of startled shame and relief. For a moment she just stood there, leaning against the wall—pretty, small, dark, and a little plump in her white uniform. The patient had swung to her when she entered. Now he slowly moved the chair in her direction and began yelling again.

  Her voice was shockingly loud on the speaker, loud and calm. It pierced through the string of profanities. “Put the chair down,” she brayed. “Put the chair down. Now.” The man fell silent and lowered the chair. He stood looking at her. Miss Lomassi stepped forward, began speaking in a quieter tone, but her voice was still firm, it still had a hard edge. She had put her hand on the man’s shoulder, and David could see the soiled cotton pull under her fingers’ white grip. She was telling the man he needed to calm down, they were going to help him, they needed to ask him a few questions. Slowly the man seemed to collapse inward. He looked at the chair with a sense of recognition and lowered himself into it. Sitting there with his stricken expression, he seemed suddenly only what he was, a bewildered, confused old man. Miss Lomassi knelt by him and continued to talk, her hands always touching him—his shoulder, his knuckled dirty fingers.

  By the end of the intake, he was sitting next to her at the square table in the center of the room, weeping occasionally and trying to answer the questions the resident was feeding to the nurse. She’d repeat each one to the old man as though translating from a foreign language, and he’d struggle to puzzle the answers through with her: where did he live? did he live alone? when had he last been home? had he been seeing a doctor? had he been drinking? taking any medication?