by Shem, Samuel
The nurse had paged him for a delivery of twins. He’d been tending the couple through the pregnancy, her first. They were poor and black, a man and woman he’d known vaguely as a girl and boy, friends of Hayley and her son, Whiz. They’d lived their lives smack up against the railroad tracks in the shantytown between the North Swamp and the Hudson River. Bill had never bothered with insurance, and by this time Orville had also given up dealing with that evil. This was charity.
As he arrived, the labor was stalling out. What was going on? He had delivered hundreds of babies in Dublin, at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. A baby an hour, the whole year ’round. Get drunk with the other medical students in O’Dwyer’s across the street, get pushed out the door tanked and cursing at the eleven thirty closing time, stand there wobbling in the night damp staring up at the building, and ask each other “Shall we pull out a few babies or just go to bed?” They’d take the rickety elevator to the top floor, deliver a baby or two, and bed down on the horsehair mattresses on the first floor behind reception.
Orville understood births, but this one required thought. Should he use a pitressin drip, as they did routinely at Holles Street? Do a C-section? “You make one hundred percent of the decision,” Bill always said, “on fifty percent of the evidence.” Orville made sure that the fetal monitor was working and left the delivery suite in the newly dedicated (by Henry Schooner) Maternity Wing of Selma Rose, Founder of the Women’s Auxiliary. He got the chart again, lit up a Parodi, and sat in a room overlooking the town to think it through.
“Hi, boychik.”
There she was, bobbing up and down gently outside the fourth-story window as if wearing a flotation device. Dressed in an Amelia Earhart khaki flight suit complete with leather cap with earflaps and goggles perched jauntily on her head. “Oh, God.”
“Not God, me!” She did a peregrine swoop. “Second Lady of the Air!”
“Go away.”
“I am away. You’re not. I am. Happy Chanukah.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Don’t do that to me don’t you dare. We’re Old Testament, remember?”
“You’re Old, I’m New. At most, New.”
“Jesus? The Bible Lite?”
“You’d prefer ‘an eye for an eye’?”
“You betcha. On this issue I stand with Penny and that cute Plotkin! Never again! I keep asking up here to go back down as a sabra. Those Israeli gals are tough. Chevy-truck tough.”
“Not as tough as you.”
“Me, hell, you! Have you cried for me? Have you shed even one teensy-weensy tear? I am your mother. I am dead, and you’re too selfish even to cry for—”
“Dr. Rose?”
“We’re boarding, honey-bunny. Catch you later.”
“Yes?”
“There’s something wrong,” the night nurse was saying. “Come quick.”
Wrong big-time, he realized. The tap of death on a baby’s shoulder. He explained that he’d have to do an emergency C-section. The couple agreed. He scrubbed in fast and did the section. Twin boys. One was well-formed, robust, squawling. The other was microcephalic, its head the size of a doll’s but with lips and nose and eyes crammed together and with no forehead—giving it a froglike look. Trunk and legs normal but for a remnant of tail. It was horrible to see, yet transfixing, like something you see in a bottle of formaldehyde in a medical museum.
The obstetrics nurse was more accustomed to seeing Columbian babies with a panoply of birth defects, at a rate soaring high above the national average, which everyone figured (and those responsible denied) was the result of the PCBs and other toxic shit dumped in the river by General Electric and sprayed on the fruit trees and soaking the rail bed with all the creosote of childhood. And the sempiternal cement dust. Abnormal APGAR scores were the norm. Orville wasn’t yet used to this.
The nurse took the healthy baby to the father, leaving Orville to wait for the other to die. Luckily, and quietly, by the time he had gotten done with closing the groggy new mother’s abdomen, it did. Orville went out to the father. He was still holding the healthy baby, in that awkward way that new fathers do. The nurse had told him the other had died.
“What happened?” the man asked, in shock.
“The other baby lived only a few minutes. It was deformed.”
“Can I see him, Doc?”
Orville hesitated. The older doctor in him, the good old Doc Starbuck pushing Starbusol and paternal sense, would’ve patted him on the shoulder and said, “No, son, better you don’t.” The younger doctor applauded his wish, though knowing that once seen, it would be indelible.
Orville said, “You can, sure. I just want you to know that you’ll never forget it.”
“Him. I want to see him.”
The nurse took the healthy baby, and Orville and the father went in together to see the other son. He had been cleaned up, so he looked better, less frightening. The father reached out a hand and touched the perfect shoulder, and then the squashed head. He bowed his own head and crossed himself.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.” He looked up at Orville. His eyes were wet, sorrowful. He said, “Thank you.”
“And you,” Orville said, feeling in this man the power of facing into, in a world that as a rule turns away.
“I think she will want to see him, too.”
“Fine.”
The father picked up the dead baby to take him to his mother.
Orville got beeped away to tend to a drug overdose from the Bliss Towers Housing Project and a stabbing victim from a happy household and a car crash and several Christmas specials, including a shepherd from Austerlitz sure he was picking up Radio Free Europe through a metal plate recently placed in his skull.
Later during a break in the action, he walked out into the parking lot and searched in his pockets for the half-smoked Parodi and matches. The night was crisp. The little town was iced up and the air tasted like cold quarters and seemed stretched tight as an eardrum so it was like you could hear everything. He thought of the dead twin who would always be almost there, floating there like all the dead, and the live twin. He thought of Miranda, of her histories and of their lovemaking, and he whispered out loud, “This is the one that will survive.”
· 14 ·
By New Year’s Eve, whenever Orville said, “Hi, Cray,” the boy would look at him. Once, he might even have said something back, but too softly to make out.
Miranda and Orville were spending New Year’s Eve at the hot social event in Columbia, the dinner-dance-swim at Schooner’s Spa out at the mall on Route 9. They had arranged for Amy to babysit and sleep over. Cray liked having Amy around, and Amy liked being a big sister. And so Miranda and Orville bid them good-night and said they would see them next year. The kids were so engrossed with Amy helping Cray write his first novel that they hardly even noticed the adults were going and then gone.
Orville kept right on being surprised by Henry Schooner. Henry had done a similar party his first year back; this second one made the event a Columbian institution. Anyone who was anyone was there, and a few Columbians who were not really anyone were there too. The food—all you could eat from a room-long buffet—was a mix of Columbia and worldly: steak and fries, salmon and salad, pad thai and pork ribs, plantains and egg foo, Knickerbocker and Perrier, and Pepsi and Gallo. The ambiance was unheard-of in Columbia: all glittering chrome and mirrors and a whirlpool with steamy water bubbling at one end of the near-Olympic-sized pool. In the separate locker rooms the saunas were scented with stuff from Sweden. There were not only free weights but sparkly exercise equipment previously unseen in Columbia—Nautilus and StairMaster and high-tech pneumatic machines guaranteed against breakage that made weight training as painless as watching TV. Television seemed to be the leitmotif, not only the four TV monitors—one for each channel—suspended in a row from
the ceiling and facing the stationary bicycles and treadmills but in the persons of their hosts, Henry and Nelda Jo.
Orville had gotten into the habit of what he called “Schooner Watching.” Now he watched Henry, dressed in a dinner jacket with a pink carnation boutonniere and white hair slicked down tight, gliding as if on rollers here and there, filling glasses and egos, and doing that two-handed clasp and then in the same motion handing the person off so that he could handle the next—much like a TV game show host. He watched Nelda Jo, hair now platinum to match Henry’s, in a lavender spandex top that scooped and stretched timelessly across her breasts and a short flowered miniskirt also stretching athletically every-which-rounded-way, smiling and coaxing lesser-toned Columbians of both sexes to give the machines a try. She looked like that woman on TV at six in the morning who showed you how to improve your body, your life, your world. Her Oklahoman good humor was infectious. She was clearly the hit of the party.
Orville and Miranda felt shy and out of place, their long histories as wallflowers at school dances pushing them out from the action toward the walls. For a brief moment they were alone.
“Nineteen eighty-four, imagine?” Orville said.
“Yes.” She quoted Orwell, “‘We are living in a world where it is virtually impossible to be honest and remain alive.’”
But a small town won’t allow that aloneness, not in the presence of a palpable new happiness, and people sought them out, dragged them over, enticed them in to try food, conversation, normalcy.
“I always knew you two were meant for each other, old buddy,” Henry said, pumping Orville’s arm, having given Miranda a European two-cheeked kiss. “Your mom would be so pleased!” With a hint of reluctance, Henry let go and ushered him off to Nelda Jo and moved on to the next guest.
“You two be careful not to behave,” Nelda Jo drawled and winked.
Penny made a big deal of their being together, a more frank deal probably than she intended because she was champagne-drunk. “I can’ believe it, little brother, how you’re into fun. Y’know, Miranda, he never let himself go, never really got into just plain having fun. Cerebral, him. I never woulda thought it, especially not with you, Miranda, because if you’ll pardon th’expression, you’re every bit as much a character as himself.” She left, Orville and Miranda rolling their eyes at each other. Then she came back. “And what you’re doing with Amy is unreal. Keep that up too.”
“Except for the socialist part and so forth,” Milt said, munching a burrito. “What a spread, eh?” He watched Nelda Jo pass by. “And the food’s not bad either. Haha.” Laughter seemed to consolidate a thought. “Henry’s a comer, Orv. A real comer.”
The party got wilder. Columbians flopped and frolicked in the pool and pumped some iron and danced to ear-splitting oldies and newies.
“Sorry,” Miranda said. “I can’t dance.”
“Thank God. I can’t either. You know, it’s amazing. Even people who hate each other’s guts are talking, having fun.”
“Yeah, it’s small—”
The music blasted.
“What?” Orville shouted.
“It’s small-town life!” she shouted back.
“Community?”
“Not really, no,” she shouted. “Not since 1790—”
The music stopped suddenly and Miranda’s “1790!” rang out like nobody’s business. Everyone turned to look and then laughed and hustled to ring in 1984. As soon as possible Orville and Miranda left and were suddenly embraced by the arctic stillness of the night.
Orville held her arm firmly. “Careful, it’s icy.”
“Thanks.”
At the car, Orville looked up at the stars, pointing out the bright jewels on the sword and belt of Orion—Betelgeuse and the smudged seven sisters of the Pleiades—and gave a sweet little lecture on the mythology. They hugged and kissed, and he held open the car door and helped her in.
When they arrived back at Miranda’s house, they found Cray in his pajamas, asleep on the floor, clutching a large book. Amy was asleep on the couch. The TV buzzed white noise, the video having run its course long ago.
“Should we just let them sleep down here?” Orville asked.
“Yes.”
He took her hand and turned toward the stairs.
“Wait, love. Look, just for a second. Look with me.” Together they took in the beauty of the sleeping children.
“Momma?”
“Yes, dear. Orvy, too.” Cray shot a sleepy glance at both of them. “C’mon. To bed.”
“Wanna read this book.” He held up an orange book with elephants on the cover, two adults and three kids, Babar and His Children.
“Part of it,” Miranda said, readying herself for a fight. Cray hated half-measures. “It’s so late, cute-heart, and the book’s way too long—”
“Okay, but only if Orvy reads it to me.”
Orville was delighted. “Okay.”
Cray got up and climbed the stairs, the two of them following, and snuggled down in his bed. Orville, unfamiliar with fathering, perched on the edge. Cray motioned him to lie down next to him, which he did. But then Cray said, “No, no. Lion Army, Lion Army.”
“Lion Army? I thought it was about elephants?”
“No, I mean lie-on-arm-ey. Lie-on-arm-ey.” Cray raised himself up and turned around and took Orville’s arm and put it under him so he could lie on it and snuggle in.
Miranda watched the two of them from the doorway, the awkward man and the sleepy little boy. She thought, Each of them is hungry for this.
Cray’s freshly baby-shampooed head against his cheek stirred up such feeling in Orville that he could barely focus on reading. As if a father, he thought. As if a father. “Elephants are my favorite, too.” As he read, Orville recognized this Babar book as one he had loved as a child. When he came to page 16—where baby Flora swallows a rattle and turns purple and Queen Celeste tries a pre-Heimlich slap unsuccessfully before the monkey Zephir pulls the rattle out—he found that he recalled every detail, even the position of the eight drawings on the page! It brought back the bufala mozzarella and Celestina, but he was surprised and relieved that the memory held no hurt anymore.
Miranda leaned against the doorjamb. Seeing this man she loved make the move toward fathering, she felt her heart lighten, lift, her whole being lift so it seemed she had to hold on to the door to stay down on the ground. Her face flushed, her eyes teared up, her heart opened like a new tulip. Orville had crossed a line drawn like diamond on steel, a line between parent and nonparent, and at that moment she felt no fear, no doubt. There was nothing shy about him right now. She felt her good hip cuddle into the molding of the doorway of the old house that must have seen everything, and the voice inside her say, Maybe there’s a God after all.
Lying on the man’s arm, Cray felt the comforter of sleep cover him. He yawned and murmured, “S’nuff,” and lifted his head and shoulders to give Orville back his arm. He turned over on his side and settled in under the quilt, riffling the edge of “Shirty,” a tattered soft shirt, through the fingers of one hand.
Miranda went to him and kissed him. “Good night, sleep tight. Love you.”
Orville said, “G’nite, Cray.”
Nothing—except from under the comforter maybe a giggle.
Orville said, “Hi, Cray.”
“Hi.”
“Hi, who?”
“Hi, Orvy.”
“Oh, I love that word!” Orville said, happily.
Cray peeped out from under the quilt, glanced at Orville, then Miranda, the look on his face saying, Who is this nut anyway?
Downstairs, on the kitchen table, they found Cray’s novel, each page illustrated with a drawing.
THE DOG
A novel by
Cray Braak
The dog livd on the strets
Becass he did not
hav a
Homm
He etss grbg
1 day he cam to a prkk.
A man sied I will tac you homm
The man wkt and wkt into a
Car. The dog flold him
So the man toc him homm to
Hss hos.
Wan he plld into the drivway
The dog lokd arownd.
THE END
· 15 ·
Two Columbian ice fishermen and their dog had a bright idea. It was the end of January. The Hudson was ice-locked. Even though they never caught anything much in the polluted river when it was free of ice, many Columbians imagined that when ice a foot thick covered it the fish would reappear. Their greatest difficulty in ice fishing was not keeping warm. After all, they would drink enough beer so that it acted like antifreeze, and they would drag portable gas stoves out to their huts on the river. The difficulty was cutting through the ice. Many male Columbians had a love affair with internal combustion. They often seemed at a loss when their hands were not wrapped around the shuddering steering wheel of a car, truck, van, tractor, bulldozer, wrecking crane, or Bobcat. And one of the sweetest moments in this love affair was when their manly hands were caressing a chainsaw. Yet in the dead heart of winter, a chainsaw required just that little bit extra presence of mind from inebriated Columbians to cut through the ice without shearing off a toe or a foot or a leg.
At dawn on this viciously cold day, the two Columbian ice fishermen and their dog had the bright idea of using dynamite to blast their hole in the frozen river. They drove their pickup out onto the ice toward the neglected old lighthouse. They got out, all three. They managed to identify the fuse end of a stick of dynamite, congratulating themselves on their creative intelligence and hardly able to contain their excitement. One held the stick of dynamite. From his cigar, the other lit it. It sizzled, a fuzzy phosphorescence. The Columbian threw the lit stick a long way away. It sailed in a high sputtering arc out toward the decaying lighthouse.