Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Am I late?” he asked.

  “The doctor was just here,” I said. “Could be a couple hours.”

  “Oh,” he said. “How bout a hand, then?” and he pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket. “Just to pass the time.”

  It passed the time admirably. I was down twelve dollars when Dr. Greene came in to tell me about Emily.

  “How bout mine?” asked Bill.

  “Be a while yet,” said the doctor. “You have time for a hand or two.”

  “When can I see her?” I asked.

  “The baby or Joan?” he teased.

  “Both,” I said, then, “Joan first.”

  “Wise choice,” said the doctor, winking. “The baby doesn’t look like much yet.”

  “Did you see her?” asked Joan. She looked slightly ill, and her hair lay across her forehead in damp streaks.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “You’ll never believe it,” she said. “She’s got dark hair. Almost black. And the tiniest fingernails, like sequins.”

  Emily Margaret was beautiful, an apparently healthy baby; her hair was darker than Joan’s or mine, and her skin was a surprisingly Mediterranean olive, where the two of us were rather fair. We carried her home and laid her gingerly into the crib. In a few days, her eyes opened and turned from that cloudy newborn blue into a rich brown.

  Beth also had a girl; born two hours after Emily, her name was Amanda Joan. She was small, and the two of them had to stay in the hospital a few extra days.

  “They scolded me about the drinking,” Beth told us, when she had finally been released. “I told Dr. Greene to try getting through a pregnancy sober, and then come tell me about it.”

  We were sitting, all four of us, in the living room on Worth Street, fussing over the babies.

  “How’d she get so damn blonde?” asked Bill, poking at Amanda.

  “Stupid, from me,” said Beth.

  “You ain’t that blonde,” said Bill. “Some of that comes out of a bottle.”

  “You shut up,” said Beth. “I used to have hair that color when I was a baby. It’ll darken on her, too.”

  “Yours looks overripe,” said Bill agreeably, to me.

  “She was certainly brewing long enough,” said Joan.

  I have a photograph somewhere, taken that day, of the six of us. Amanda was asleep, a small white bundle in Beth’s arms, but Emily had turned her berry eyes toward the lens. Joan’s parents came to visit the next week, bringing their camera; after they left, a small package arrived from Pittsburgh, containing dozens of the glossy expensive squares. Emily in the bath. Emily asleep. Emily squinting at the flashbulb. We spent hours choosing one to put into the silver frame which matched the one holding our wedding picture.

  So many photographs; I could not put my hand on any of them now. I hid them, during the first miserable days of mourning, hid them so well that I never came across them again. I would like to see them now; they are our only physical proof of Emily, our glorious Emily, who mysteriously stopped breathing twenty-one days into her life, while Joan and I were sleeping down the hall.

  It was worse for Joan; she blamed herself. At the funeral, she was poised and solemn, and in the days right afterward she wrote a dozen thank you notes. Gently, then, quietly, she lost her grip on herself, and began to slip away from me. My reassurances did little to puncture the thick gloom of grief which had settled over her. I tried to pick up the old routine, going off to work in the morning, kissing her good-bye. She got into bed and stayed there, and I took up the slack, grocery shopping and cooking and even making a try at housecleaning, all the time hoping that Joan would magically rouse herself. Instead, she sank deeper into her twilight state, eating little, hardly speaking, not even dressing herself. When I came in at night, I found her exactly as she’d been when I left her; I had the uncomfortable impression that she hadn’t moved all day.

  The news spread ahead of me, so that upon leaving the house in the morning I was forced to run the gauntlet of opinion. People were voluble on the subject, pursuing me through Purdy’s with their comments on my misfortune. Some were not above catching me on the fly, so to speak, tapping on my car window where I idled at a stoplight. I ignored them, leaving the glass rolled up; still I could hear them: Sorry. So sorry. I nodded to everyone, saying nothing, averting my eyes. It’s not like he was the mother, I heard one of the ladies say, behind me. Sensitive, agreed her companion.

  I stopped going to Stokes’s. I went in there once about a week after the funeral; the men, some of whom had been there at the gravesite, seemed not to know me. Their eyes slid toward me, and away, and they stood me drink after drink in a confused fashion, until at one point I had two drinks before me on the bar.

  “You only got one mouth,” said Jack, coming up behind me, and appropriating one of them.

  When I spoke, all other conversation stopped, respectfully. It was ludicrous, as though no one had ever died in Naples before. Thinking longingly of the Irish wakes of my ancestors, I drank up and left, the brittle silence dissolving, normalcy restoring itself, behind me.

  Beth telephoned the second week.

  “How are you, G.I.?” came her warm voice through the receiver.

  “Oh, God, Beth,” I said.

  “You didn’t give her rutabagas, did you?” came a third voice. “Rutabagas what did my sister’s baby in.”

  “Shut up, ’Delia,” said Beth. There was a gasp, and a click.

  “Beth, you shouldn’t,” I said, smiling weakly. “Now she won’t put your calls through for a year.”

  “I know it,” she said. “It’s worth it, for a little privacy. How are you, Gil, really? How’s Joan?”

  “Um,” I said.

  “Stupid question,” she said. “I want to see her. Am I welcome?”

  “Of course you are,” I said.

  But when she arrived, Joan refused to see her.

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s Beth,” I said.

  “Leave me alone,” said Joan.

  “Joanie, look at me,” I pleaded.

  “Go away,” she said, stonily.

  Outside the door, I cried, a noisy weep; I collected myself, and went downstairs again.

  “It’s okay,” said Beth, when she saw me. “She doesn’t have to.”

  “But you’re her friend,” I said. “I don’t think she really likes anyone else.”

  “Except you,” said Beth.

  “Not even me right now,” I said, shaky.

  “Oh, G.I.,” said Beth, putting her hand out to me. I went to sit beside her on the sofa. “We have to be strong for Joan,” she said, holding my hand hard, “but there’s nothing says we can’t have a little cry all our own.”

  The news preceded me to work. There, I was greeted with subdued, skittish hellos, and the office manager, Benson, took me into his office.

  “You take it easy,” he said. “You need a coupla days off?”

  “No,” I told him.

  “I understand,” he said. “Work takes your mind off. When my wife passed, I put in eighty-hour weeks.” He looked blank for a few moments, rocking back and forth in his chair, and then his eyes came back to me. “But that’s no good,” he said shortly. “You take it easy. Any extra comes in, I’ll slide it over to Eddie. Don’t push yourself.”

  Back at my desk, I fingered the stack of meaningless paper. Rick Beller leaned over to me.

  “Hey, too bad,” he said. “Rough break.” Getting no response, he poked a stiff finger into my shoulder. “You gotta think positive,” he said. “When our old dog got run over, Sally said she’d never have another one in the house. But I just went ahead and brought home Juniper, and she’s never looked back.”

  I looked at him.

  “Have another quick,” he said. “That one musta been defective anyway, or it wouldnta died so young. Next one’ll be stronger.”

  “You asshole,” I said, quietly.

  He was taken aback.

  “What you want to
go and say that for?” he complained. “You got no call to say something like that.”

  I got up from my desk, and left the room. I knocked on Benson’s office door.

  “I have reason to,” I told him. “Believe that Rick Beller is stealing from the company.”

  Benson regarded me sorrowfully as I explained. When I finished, he turned his back to me for a moment, then turned back around sharply. “I know you’re under a lot of stress,” he said. “But this isn’t worthy of you.”

  “What?” I said, surprised. “I’m not,” I protested, “making this up.”

  “I’m sure you’re not,” he said. “But you’ve known about this a long time, haven’t you, before coming in here.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, “what to do.”

  “That’s hard for me to believe,” said Benson. He shook his head. “What hurts the company, hurts us all. I don’t mean to be harsh,” he said. “But I’m disappointed in you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I thought you were a company man.”

  “I was,” I said. “Confused.”

  “Well,” said Benson, holding my eyes gravely. “Better late than never, eh?” His expression relaxed a little. “We’ll follow this up,” he said. “We’ll keep your name out of it.”

  As I left the office, he patted my arm.

  “We all make mistakes,” he said.

  I spent the rest of the day in a kind of fog. There were, it seemed, two codes between men. The men in Stokes’s had preached solidarity; Benson had rebuked my hazy morals and lack of company spirit. By the end of the day, I had figured it out. There was only one maxim, after all: Us against Them. A man, it appeared, had to choose his home team, his Us, and then pull hard and unstoppably for glory. But what, I thought, if no team was home?

  Joan continued to refuse visitors. Beth called every evening at nine; I put the telephone on the hook just before, and took it off again after we’d finished our conversation. I was getting used to the funereal hush that pervaded the house on Worth Street, and was just beginning to worry that it might never change, when suddenly it lifted. Three weeks after Emily’s death, Joan’s catatonia resolved itself. As I came through the front door one evening, I smelled cooking vapors. Joan sang out a greeting from the kitchen, and then appeared briefly, fully dressed, to kiss me before whisking back into the kitchen.

  “Gil,” she called. “Where are those pictures of Emily?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, bewildered.

  “Well, think,” she said, coming into the room again. “I need them.”

  “I don’t remember where I put them,” I said. “Maybe in the attic.”

  “I’ve been all through the attic,” said Joan. “They’re not there.”

  “Why do you want them?” I said, going to her, taking her hands.

  “It’s a surprise,” she said, kissing me. There was something slightly off-center about her expression, but I didn’t notice it then. How could I have known?

  Two days later, Beth called me at work.

  “Come get your wife,” she said, and her voice was unrecognizable, taut.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Is she okay?”

  “Just come,” said Beth, again. “Right away.”

  It was a strange tableau that greeted me. Beth was seated on the sofa, looking grim, and Joan was in the chair across from her, holding Amanda and smiling widely.

  “Honey, look,” she said, when she saw me. “I’ve found her.”

  “Found who?” I asked.

  “Emily,” said Joan. “It was all a mistake. But I’ve fixed it now. It’s going to be all right now.”

  I looked at Beth, who shrugged her shoulders.

  “That’s great, honey,” I said. “Let me talk to Beth for a minute.”

  “You explain it to her,” she said.

  In the kitchen, Beth told me what had happened. Joan had come over about an hour before, with a story about how the babies had been switched in the hospital, and how Beth and Billy had gotten Emily by mistake.

  “My God,” I said.

  “I would’ve called you earlier, but that damn ’Delia wouldn’t put me through,” said Beth. “I’ve been trying to call Dr. Greene, but same thing. I tried to calm her down by letting her hold Amanda, but she can’t take her.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Oh, Beth.”

  “It’s terrible,” said Beth, her eyes filling. “I’m so sorry about what happened, G.I. But I want to kill her when she talks about taking my baby.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  “That won’t help,” said Beth. “I’ve talked myself blue. Call the doctor.”

  Dr. Greene came within the hour. He persuaded Joan to let him lift Amanda out of her arms.

  “Just a checkup,” he said.

  “Gil, you take her,” said Joan, anxiously.

  I took the soft warm weight, and held it while Dr. Greene examined Joan. I closed my eyes, and could almost understand Joan’s unreason. It was the only cure for what ailed us—a baby bundle, the smell of talc, the hummingbird pulse. Dr. Greene touched me on the arm, startling me. He motioned me into the kitchen.

  “She’ll have to go into the hospital,” he said. “It’s been a nasty shock. She needs professional care.”

  “Um,” I said, confused. “Will she get better?” Shifting Amanda to my other arm.

  “Should be right as rain in a few days,” he said, reassuringly. He patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry.”

  I gave Amanda back to Beth.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I had no idea this would happen.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be all right soon,” said Beth, friendlier now that she had her baby safe again.

  Joan was in the hospital two weeks, and when she came home she was a little thinner but otherwise normal. We didn’t mention Emily. Though I watched Joan carefully, I couldn’t see any lingering traces of the brief madness.

  After a while, she started talking about going back to work.

  “It’ll take my mind off,” she said, “things.”

  Life returned to the way it had been before Joan’s pregnancy. We still didn’t talk about Emily. In a way, we healed around that one sadness, walling it off. Despite all of the shock and grief, she might have been a closed episode, a dark comma in an otherwise happy marriage, had we not had the ever-present reminder of Amanda, her spiritual twin, growing up in the house on the hill. Turning two, and then four. Joan and I were pressed into service as godparents, and went to the birthday parties with a kind of false cheer.

  The doctor had assured us that the odds of another crib-death were very small. He examined Joan, and declared her perfectly fit. We listened to his words together, but didn’t discuss them at home. It was months before Joan and I were able to make love again. The yearning seemed to have passed from us. It returned to me before it returned to Joan, and I tried to remain patient with her mourning, her long granny nightgowns, her sisterly bedtime kisses on the cheek.

  The night of November sixth, when Emily would have been six months old, I was lying wakeful while Joan slept next to me. Or didn’t sleep; suddenly she raised herself on an elbow, shaking the mattress slightly.

  “Come here,” she whispered.

  I went to her; she pressed tightly against me, and wound her fingers in my hair, pulling hard, so that I gave a little cry of pain.

  “Shh,” she said.

  She unbuttoned her nightgown slowly, and I lifted it over her head. Gently then, quietly as though someone were listening, we rediscovered one another.

  Afterward, we lay on our sides, turned toward each other. By the light of a streetlamp, I could see the tear tracks on her cheeks. She patted my hand, and I watched her fall asleep.

  But even after that, when we might have begun another child, Joan did not conceive. Or could not: it was impossible to tell what havoc grief might have wrought upon her internal organs. I envisioned my own heart as smaller, somehow, shrunken l
ike a winter apple, since Emily’s death.

  And all the time Amanda was growing bigger, crawling toddling then walking, stumbling across our front yard on weekends, while the two women sat together in the glider. Joan spent a lot of time with the child, who spoke Joan’s name before anything else, pronouncing Mama as a sort of after-thought.

  “She’s taken up with that crowd again,” Joan reported, disapprovingly. “She’s gone all the time, leaving her with that nanny, who never even finished eighth grade, did you know that?”

  “What’s that matter?” I asked, unwisely.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, that’s all,” said Joan, really angry now. “It doesn’t matter at all that a woman who calls herself a mother is out every single night, drinking and carrying on. It doesn’t matter that the father’s even worse, and that the nanny is a simpering fool who wouldn’t know what to do if something really serious happened. None of it matters a bit, I suppose.”

  “All right, all right,” I said, giving in.

  It was remarkable, really, how often people took Amanda for Joan’s child. She had a lot of Corbin about her; in photographs it was particularly striking, the three of us in a row pale as sunlight (Joan and I had nary a freckle between us), and she had blue grey eyes exactly the color of mine, gleaming out beneath her yellow hair. Looking at her, I glimpsed again the seed of Joan’s earlier delusion: apart from her hair, Amanda might have been a changeling, slipped into the Crawford home under cover of night.

  By the time she was four, we had all adjusted to the situation. All, that is, except Bill, whom Beth was divorcing. She had come home one night to find Amanda sticky with ice cream and asleep on the living room rug, and Bill sticky and asleep upstairs with Mary Sue Cudahy.

  “In our bed,” she told us grimly, the next day. “It was just too much.”

  She threw him out that night, and started divorce proceedings. He was belligerent at first, but after he got over his drunk he tried to court her again.

  “Can you believe it?” she said. “He’s sending me roses. Paid for on account. The florist called me to ask if he should deliver em.” She laughed. “I told him not to waste his time.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Joan.

  “Don’t pretend,” said Beth. “You never liked him. Hell, I never liked him. It’ll just be easier with him gone. Lucy’s having seven different kinds of fits, though,” she said. “Seems any kind of husband’s better than dee-vorce.” Something seemed to occur to her. “Also, I think she heard about Jack and Paula having trouble, and she’s thinking the worst. Old Lucy’s got a devious mind, all right. Oh, and listen to this,” she said. “My in-laws are trying to bribe me. Old Joe sent over a present yesterday, rolled it right up to the house. Four wheels and a big old bow on the side.” She giggled. “Guess what.”