Keep the Baby, Faith

by William L. DeAndrea

  “This is Harry Ross,” I said. The Giants had the ball third and six on the Browns’ thirty-seven yard line. Simms went back to pass.

  “Where is my patient, Mr. Ross?”

  The receiver caught the ball out of bounds. I suppressed a groan. Instead, I said, “Dr. Metzenbaum?” I may have been cut off from the mundane affairs of the world, but there was only one doctor in the world who would call me up that day to ask me where her patient was.

  “I don’t know where Faith is,” I told her.

  “I don’t like being lied to, Mr. Ross,” the doctor said. “You must know where she is. The police didn’t tell me much, but Lieutenant Rogers told me that he got your approval before he took Faith into custody. Into custody! The woman is going to have a baby, she’s been the victim of these attacks—”

  “Did they remember to tell you it was protective custody?”

  She snorted. It was ladylike, but it was still a snort. “Whatever that means,” she said. “I’m her doctor, for God’s sake. I’m supposed to have access to my patient.”

  “Rogers told me you would be notified the second—all right!” Landeta had just put a punt out of bounds about three centimeters from the Cleveland goal line.

  “What was that?” Dr. Metzenbaum wanted to know.

  “Nothing, sorry. Just something that happened in the football game.”

  “Oh, God. No wonder. Look, I really want to talk to you about this. When will the game be over?”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I want to talk about it, too.” Then I made a little grunt as a Cleveland ballcarrier nearly fumbled.

  “No,” she said, “if you’re anything like the men I’ve known, you’re going to be worthless until the game is over.”

  She wouldn’t even let me try to deny it, which was just as well. If there has ever been something I wanted to forget for the length of time it takes to watch an NFL game or two, this mess with Faith was it. There was no handle to it.

  “I think it’s probably better to discuss this in person, anyway,” she said. “Can you be at my office at eight o’clock?”

  “Any time you say,” I told her. This time I really meant it. If there was anything that would help get my mind off football, it was a chance at a tête-à-tête with a woman I’d been fantasizing about for several days.

  “Eight o’clock will do it,” she said. She sounded as if she was smiling. “I have to drive in from New Jersey.”

  “What are you doing in New Jersey?” I asked.

  “I live here,” she said. “In Fort Lee.”

  “Oh,” I said. To Manhattanites, New Jersey is more incomprehensible than Queens, or would be, except for the fact that the Giants play there.

  “Eight o’clock, then,” I said,

  I got there at twenty of, having given up on the doubleheader game early and taken a cab downtown. She smiled as she let me in. “Dull game?” she asked.

  “Couldn’t concentrate on it,” I said. She led me to the room where we’d spoken before. “Well,” I said. “I know why I want to talk to you, why do you want to talk to me?”

  “I want to talk to you because there must be some way you can help me find out where Faith is. I don’t anticipate any problems, but she could go into labor any minute.” I opened my mouth, but she went on. “I know Rogers has promised to notify me immediately if Faith goes into labor, but I don’t like it. I’m going to call you Harry.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Barbara. I don’t like it, either. But what do you expect me to do about it, for crying out loud?”

  “I don’t know. If you’re not her fiancé, you’re at least her boyfriend—”

  “Damn right I’m not her fiancé. The lady’s husband happens to be alive. And I guess you weren’t listening too hard the first time we talked. Faith is my sister’s friend. Period. She is not my girlfriend. Nobody is my girlfriend. Nobody has been my girlfriend, or performed the functions of one, for months now.” It was out of my mouth before I remembered Lucille. Talk about a mental block. “Almost nobody,” I amended. It kind of spoiled the effect, but apparently, Barbara decided to take it at face value.

  “Oh,” she said. “What are we going to do, then?” She played with her pearls. She dressed like a farmhand during office hours; on Sunday she looked as if she’d just hit Lord & Taylor with a clean credit card. I didn’t try to figure it out.

  “What can we do? Call Rogers tomorrow and try to talk him out of it.”

  “Well, then,” she said brightly. “This was a fairly stupid trip we’ve taken. I’m sorry to have taken you away from the game.”

  She started to get up. I reminded her that I wanted to talk to her about a few things, and she sat back down.

  “First of all,” I said, “I want to explain the mixup about Faith’s going into custody. Rogers didn’t need my permission, he needed my cooperation. My mother would never have let Faith out of her sight if Rogers hadn’t scared me to death, then eased up. I was so relieved he wasn’t arresting her, I was glad to talk her into going with him. I’m sorry he used it to smooth things over with you, but I’m not sorry professionals are looking after Faith now.”

  “Can’t they look out for her without hiding her, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Probably,” I conceded, “but Rogers told me something—he swore it was true—that convinced me to go along.”

  “What was that?”

  “You know those attacks on Faith? The ones that led her to come looking for me in the first place?”

  “Of course.”

  “Louis Letron has alibis for two of the three.”

  “Oh,” she said. It was about what I’d said when Rogers had told me. And she was a lot quicker than I had been at working out the implications. Let us say that the attack on the car full of us was unrelated to the attacks on Faith. Nobody believed it, but let’s say it, especially since the cops would say it if the investigation went nowhere, and they had to pin the whole business on Louis or get stuck with a messy, not to say ridiculous, unsolved case. That is, they would say it if a woman named Clothilde Fernandes of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, had not told investigators that she and Louis Letron had attended the ballet the night the car tried to run Faith down, and she’d come to me. Especially since she went on to say they were accompanied by another couple, and the couple had backed her up. They had gone dancing later, still in each other’s company. This was an alibi to put in textbooks. It didn’t prove Louis had had nothing whatever to do with his own death (you know what I’m trying to say, here), but it sure made it look as though he had help.

  Unknown help. Help that was still at large. Help that just might be trying with all its might to find out where Faith was and finish the job.

  “Ah,” Barbara said. “I guess we’ll leave the lieutenant alone tomorrow. Do you want to know why I live in New Jersey? I was going into practice with a guy I was living with. We met in med school. We bought a condo and an office building. Couldn’t have done that in Manhattan.

  “We split up. He got the office, I got the condo. Happy? I could tell in your voice over the phone you wanted to know. What puzzles me is why I told you.”

  “Got me,” I said. “Do you have a date or something?” I indicated her clothes.

  “No, I like to dress this way, but after somebody’s water breaks on a two-hundred-dollar wool skirt, you learn to save them for weekends.”

  “Do you have to go back to Fort Lee? Have you eaten yet?”

  “No,” she said, “to both questions.”

  “I usually go all ethnic on Sundays and get a delivery from a kosher deli in my neighborhood. They have tables, though. Would you like to join me?”

  She smiled at me. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  SO WE GOT INTO BARBARA’S little Renault Alliance and went uptown to the Cornucopia Deli, where we let Puerto Rican waiters serve us Jewish soul food. I had corned beef on rye with mustard, she had brisket with horseradish on a hard roll, we both
had chicken soup with matzoh balls, and we would undoubtedly both have heartburn later, but I had Di-Gel at home, and she was a doctor. She ought to be able to look out for herself.

  It came out over dinner that she was a recently converted “Doctor Who” fan. She’d stumbled upon the show on one of the local public television stations, where she’d turned in search of a documentary on natural childbirth. Scoping out the competition. Anyway, she saw the show, got hooked, and started tuning in every Saturday night. It further turned out that the only actor she’d ever seen playing the Doctor was Tom Baker.

  This, of course, was all too good to be true. If she’d said she also read comic books, I would have proposed marriage to her on the spot. As it was, I proposed something else. I told her I had “The Five Doctors” on tape, the adventure that reunited all of the Doctor’s various personae, and if she wasn’t doing anything, I would be delighted to show it to her.

  She said yes.

  I was feeling pretty good as we walked the ten blocks or so to my apartment (it’s better to walk ten blocks in Manhattan than to give up a parking space). The good feeling continued all the way back to my building. Then two men got out of a parked car and confronted us.

  Yorkville is a pretty safe neighborhood as New York neighborhoods go, but the buses and the subways run everywhere, to say nothing of bridges and roads, and there’s no place the bad guys don’t have access to. Suddenly, New Jersey was looking pretty good.

  I was closing fists and shaping my mouth to tell Barbara to run when one of the apparitions said, “Mr. Ross? Peter Letron. I was here the other day.”

  Now that, I thought, was modesty. I was not likely at this point to forget any of the Letrons, especially the one who’d kept me from walking into a bomb blast.

  “The doorman wouldn’t let us wait inside,” his companion said. “I don’t really blame him.” This was Robert Letron. I remembered him, too.

  “You people are going to get me evicted,” I said. Now that I was breathing again, and relaxed enough to take in details, I could see Robert smile.

  “I am sorry about that,” he said. “Our big mistake, I think, was telling the doorman our names.”

  I nodded. The last time a Letron hung around that lobby, the landlord had to pay for redecoration. He was trying to come down on me for the money. Hi Marks was standing by.

  Barbara cleared her throat, reminding me of my manners. I introduced her, or rather I introduced them to her. If you’re going to remember your manners, you might as well go all the way and remember them right. Barbara was pleased, she said, to meet them, and I suspect she was, only not in the way they might have preferred. Dr. Metzenbaum, it seemed, had the same sort of upper-middle-class reaction to the Really Rich that I had. It was more the reaction of someone who was, against all rational expectation, actually laying eyes on a unicorn or a hippogriff, than the pleasure of making the acquaintance of some fellow human beings.

  Peter was oblivious to it. He was oblivious to everything tonight, manners included. “Mr. Ross,” he said, “we have to talk to you.” He looked at Barbara. “Alone would be best.”

  “About Faith Letron?” Barbara demanded. I had already noticed that however she dressed, the most appropriate professional attire for Dr. Metzenbaum would be a tiger suit.

  Robert looked at his brother, a mixture of surprise and scorn at the idea that the usually self-effacing Peter would pick this time to be so rudely outgoing. It seemed as if he almost had to tear his eyes away from the boy.

  Peter was oblivious to that, too. “Yes,” he said, “it is. I mean, Mr. Ross is a nice person and all, but we don’t have much to talk to him about except Faith, do we?”

  “If it’s about Faith, I stay,” Barbara declared.

  Peter was going to protest, but I got in first. “Dr. Metzenbaum is Faith’s healer,” I said. Nobody laughed.

  I tried again. “She’s Faith’s obstetrician. Anything that has to do with Faith concerns her.”

  Peter subsided. He looked at Barbara with interest, then made a gracious apology, which made me very happy, since I didn’t think I would enjoy being in the middle of a controversy between a man who had saved my life and the woman I was rapidly falling in love with.

  “Let’s go up to my apartment and talk,” I suggested. The doorman gave me a dirty look as I ushered them inside. I was glad it wasn’t the guy who’d been on duty when the bomb went off.

  Just before we got on the elevator, I muttered, “So much for ‘The Five Doctors.’” Robert begged my pardon. Barbara smiled and told him it was nothing, just a medical matter, and I almost kissed her on the spot.

  I used the elevator ride to thank Peter for saving my life. And Faith’s and Sue’s, of course.

  Peter seemed embarrassed. “It was the least I could do.” I assured him it had been plenty.

  Robert said, “Where’s your package?”

  “I left it in the car,” Peter told him.

  “Why? You want Ross to have it, don’t you?”

  “Have what?” I asked.

  Peter turned to me. His eyes were apologetic. The offensive young man had been left behind on the sidewalk. “Some of my work. Glass animals. I don’t know, a lion, a couple of bears.”

  “I like bears,” I told him.

  “Well, I still want to give you the stuff. I just didn’t think it would be such a good idea to bring a package addressed to you in here, especially since we’d have to tell our names to the doorman.”

  Robert said, “Ah,” and stroked his beard.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “When we’re done, I’ll come downstairs with you and pick it up.”

  “Thank you,” Peter said. “It’s not much, but we want to show you we’re sorry for all the trouble we caused. I mean, I made the animals, but they’re really from Robert and me, and Lucille and…”

  “And Mother?”

  “Mother always wants us to do the right thing,” Peter said staunchly.

  Robert had a pained look on his face. I wondered if it was over Mother’s lack of enthusiasm for kissing and making up. Or, I thought, it might be that Lucille was a little too enthusiastic. I had a feeling the Lucille episode was going to make me feel stupider and stupider every time I thought of it for the rest of my life. I hoped that wasn’t what was bothering him now. Then I thought about it a second, and hoped it was. The last time I’d seen that look on his face was just before the heart attack. I was glad to get him into my apartment and into a chair.

  Peter looked around my apartment as if he was going to make me a cash offer for the place and contents. He went to my window and took a long look at my fabulous view of the north side of East Seventy-ninth Street. Then he took a chair across from his brother. That left the sofa for Barbara and me, which I didn’t mind a bit.

  Before I sat, I asked them if they wanted anything to drink, and got two noes. I sat down and looked at them look at each other. Robert looked more pained than ever, and Peter looked as if whatever his brother had was catching. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I said, “You wanted to talk?”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “Yes,” Robert echoed.

  More silence. “Well,” I said at last. “Did you watch the Giants today? Some game, huh?”

  “We didn’t see it,” Robert said. “We were busy.” He took a breath. “Mr. Ross—”

  “I thought I was going to be Harry,” I said. I shouldn’t have interrupted him two words after he’d gotten started. Now he had to apologize for not calling me Harry, and remind me I had to call him Robert, and Peter and I had to get on a first name basis as well. Barbara stayed out of it. Apparently she was content to remain Dr. Metzenbaum to these two.

  Robert started again. “Harry, have you heard anything from my mother lately?”

  “Since when?”

  “Since—ahh—since I was taken to the hospital.”

  Since your brother blew himself up, I reminded him silently.

  “No,” I said. “Not a word. Why?”
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br />   Peter said, “Thank God for small favors.”

  “This is very difficult,” Robert said. It was getting pretty difficult for me, too. “I hope,” he went on. “I hope Peter is right when he says Mother wants us always to do the right thing.”

  “Of course she does, Robert,” his brother says. “She’d say so if she weren’t…”

  “There we come to it, Harry. My mother is disturbed, or mad, or crazy, or whatever word you care to fill in for the one Peter couldn’t bring himself to say.”

  With a heroic effort, I restrained myself from saying the words that presented themselves to my mind, namely, “About goddam time.”

  Robert must have read the words on my face. “That woman you’ve met isn’t my mother,” he told me. “She’s been vanishing little by little since we found out Paul was sick.”

  “The strange thing is,” Peter said, “she doesn’t even love Paul. He’s not her son, after all. I guess she’s always thought of him as a meal ticket for us when she’s gone. She never dreamed he’d be likely to go first, and leave most of the money elsewhere. Not much of a vote of confidence for us, either, I guess.”

  “But that’s all beside the point,” Robert said. “There is nothing left of my mother but resentment and fear and anger. I won’t deny they have always been a part of her. They’re a part of everyone. But there used to be so much more: humor, and style, and enjoyment of life.” His voice trailed off, then came back like a new station on the radio.

  “But that’s all beside the point, too. The important thing now is to do what’s right. Mother has come up with the worst of her fantasies yet—”

  “She says Faith killed Louis!” Peter said.

  “How?” I demanded. “She almost walked into that explosion herself.”

  “Logic is another part of Mother that has been lost,” Robert said. “The worst part of the whole business is that she’s swearing revenge.”