“And wasn’t it?”
“No,” John said. “It was only a revealing one.”
Mother said impatiently, “And what did it reveal, John?”
Only two years ago, her use of his first name was a compliment, an expression of acceptance. Now it was a rebuke: He might wish to tell stories about himself in the third person—“Dr. Watson”—but she’d stick with a more common address.
“It revealed,” John replied, “that what most parents and grandparents really care about is enjoying themselves, not about doing what’s best for their babies.”
We were halfway through the meal when the stuttering cry came again and John looked to me, honestly confused. Hadn’t I said that Billy napped two solid hours, like clockwork? Why this awkward break from a well-established routine, only now?
Perhaps I’d exaggerated. An hour and a half, two and a half hours, and on exceptional days maybe a solid three hours of blissful rest—there was some variation and sometimes I lost track of the time. If he was sleeping deeply and I was busy, typing or folding laundry, I certainly didn’t wake him, unless I knew John was coming home on time that night—a rarity—in which case, I might even wake Billy a little early, to make sure he got enough wide-awake afternoon time that bedtime would pose no problems.
This nap had undoubtedly been on the short side, and as I watched my father chewing his last tough forkful of roast, oblivious, and as I noticed my mother hurrying to spear just enough of her vegetables to qualify as being done eating, should her grandchild appear, and as I heard the sound of a cranky distant cry gathering steam, I knew why. John and I had gone on that long, fresh-air walk together, before their arrival, never talking to Billy or lifting him from the buggy, and even when we’d come back, I’d been so busy doing last-minute cooking and cleaning that I’d chosen to leave him sleeping, still in the buggy parked in the entry hall, overly warm in his cocoon of blankets, cheeks scarlet red, head muddled with toasty dreams. John, eager to read a newspaper before guests arrived, hadn’t objected to the quiet one bit. Now Billy had slept far too much for so early in the day.
John didn’t realize that when I went to the park on my own, I wasn’t so different from those two women we’d seen. I didn’t smooch and nuzzle endlessly, but I did play with Billy. I dandled him on my knee, facing this bird or that squirrel, talking to myself, and even occasionally—yes, I’m aware we teased and scolded nannies for doing the very same thing, and so I had to be extra careful not to do it when others were in earshot—talking to him. It was how I tired him out before his nap. There was some strategy involved in training a baby, and even more strategy in helping a baby appear well trained, in protecting a mother—or a father—from seeing that a baby was less than perfect in his habits.
“How about that smoke now,” John said to my father, the first thing he’d said since shoveling a large serving of meat onto my father’s plate.
“I wouldn’t mind it,” Father said.
I was only midway through my own dinner, having been the last to start.
“I can go take care of Billy while you’re eating, dear,” Mother said.
I focused on my plate, cutting up the tough meat—I still wasn’t much of a cook—and turned toward my father, who was accepting a light from John. I fully understood my mother’s frustrations and her visceral longings. But it didn’t make me feel any better to be reminded of our similarities, especially since I was trying to be a more modern kind of mother. I was trying to do and be good: by John’s standards, by everyone’s. If only they could stop wanting such different things.
“Tell him about the brand testing you’ve been doing, John,” I said. “Father, I bet you think you can identify your favorite cigarette brand, isn’t that right? You said you prefer Luckies?”
“I do.”
“Or you think you do, rather,” I said with a quick grin and a wink toward John, so he would take up the thread.
Trials conducted at JWT had shown that smokers were responding not to a specific chemical signature in their preferred tobacco—as even John had expected—but to a yearning for less tangible satisfactions.
I said, “It’s opened up all kinds of doors for advertisers, because people can’t identify their brands. They’re not looking for a specific taste or chemical so much as an association, an emotional satisfaction—and that can be manipulated. Do I have that right, John?”
“That sounds a little funny,” Father said with a morose look on his face.
John grudgingly joined the conversation. “The test subjects didn’t like the findings any more than you did, Albert. Quite a few were forlorn. They didn’t enjoy discovering that a known, loved product couldn’t actually be identified reliably. We build our identities from these things. When we realize the foundations aren’t solid, it disturbs us.”
Even after John laid out the specifics of the trials, Father looked unconvinced. He said, “So you’re saying we can’t even identify something we experience every week or every day. We can’t even identify what we like. Careful, Rebecca. I’d thought I was fond of you, but maybe I was only mistaken.”
Mother turned at the sound of her name. “Oh, you’re talking nonsense.” She hadn’t been paying any attention to John’s science-of-advertising anecdotes. She had a talent for selective hearing; ears turned up high to catch the next peep from Billy, she could nonetheless manage to screen out some voices and subjects altogether. When Billy’s wail picked up again in earnest, she turned her body away from her plate, eyes fixed on the nursery-room door.
I’d prompted John to talk about smoking in part because I wanted my parents to understand he was doing real work—scientific work—at JWT; and also because I knew that once I got him rolling, he would warm to the topic and keep going with minimal encouragement, helping the afternoon pass. I needed to focus on finishing my dinner, barely able to attend to the conversation because Billy’s distant cry was unnaturally loud in my ears. I felt a warm needlelike tingle in my chest as my milk let down, leaking into the thick pads stuffed into my brassiere.
This leaking of milk was one of those facts of life I’d never heard women discuss. From my early college years, when I first started menstruating, my prematernal “monthly” had always reminded me, more than I cared to be reminded, that gender was inescapable, that I was a woman, even when I was doing the work of men. But leaking breast milk made me feel like an animal. So why hadn’t I weaned Billy, who was already nearing three months old? Maybe because it was the only time I could touch and hold him with unquestionable justification. In the guise of nutrition, it provided a blind of sorts, more than I wished to admit. I had on more than one occasion offered Billy the breast even when I knew he could stretch between nursing sessions. At other times, I’d denied him, even when he was crying. It was just as John would have predicted—all my fault for being needy and most of all, unpredictable. A stranger would have done at least as good a job, I thought on my darker days. A machine, even better.
“Rosalie,” Mother said. “You don’t have to get up. I’ll take care of it. I don’t mind.”
I shook my head and kept eating, though the roast had all the flavor and moisture of sawdust.
“Well, I don’t believe it,” Father was saying to John about the cigarette brand trials.
A loud clatter made us all jump, as John dropped his fork and scooted back his chair, scraping the wooden floor.
“With all due respect, Mr. Rayner,” he said, voice hard, “I’m starting to think that you won’t believe anything I tell you.”
John dropped his napkin and stalked off toward Billy’s nursery door. I started to push back my chair. “John?”
“Finish your dinner. Visit.”
“I’m finished enough.”
“No. I insist. I’ll take Billy to the backyard for some air.”
My mother called after him, “Oh, John, this is ridiculous. I finished m
y dinner ages ago.”
Without looking up from his plate, Father said, “I don’t suppose he can change a diaper as well? A modern father, indeed.”
“It’s not like I changed all that many diapers myself,” Mother apologized—on Father’s behalf, on John’s, on her own. “I had more help. Rosalie, dear, can’t you simply hire some help?”
“Of course, we want to.” The telephone rang in the den, interrupting my thought. “I mean, we are. We have already, and we are again. It’s hard to find the right person.” Despite my efforts to stay calm, my voice, which had been gaining volume with every word, cracked from the strain. “It’s just hard, Mother, don’t you know that?”
She looked wounded. “Of course I know that, Rosalie. I hired plenty of help, in my day.”
“It just isn’t that easy to find help now,” I objected.
“Well maybe,” she said delicately, “we were less demanding.”
John stalked through the house again with Billy, wrapped in a blanket, red cheeked and wide-eyed, startled from his sudden exposure to the cold, crying successfully paused. He passed Billy off to me—bottom damp; John hadn’t taken care of the diaper after all, which didn’t surprise me—and dashed back to the den, catching the call by its fourth ring, too hurried to close the door. We could all hear his words. “This isn’t the best time, but all right. I understand.”
The rest was drowned out by Mother’s thrilled exclamations. “There he is! Our dear one! Rosalie, his little fists are like ice!”
Across the table, Father—a shock to me—was silently weeping. He did not speak, did not move, just sat with his eyes glassy, one big tear spilling onto his cheek, staring at our first child. My heart cracked, looking at him. Love, without theories. Pure, unbridled sentiment. But there was pain in Father’s face, too. Perhaps when it comes to love, there always is.
Mother was too enraptured to notice Father. She was too happy to see the baby at last to spend any more time worrying or criticizing. And she showed not a single sign of disappointment when John came back to the table, explaining that he had an emergency appointment to keep. Yes, on a Sunday, at dinner time. But it was about a boat, you see. A boat being kept down at the Long Island Shore Club, on which he’d made a casual offer. He planned to look it over and most likely pass, but he had made the offer, after all. He had to follow through or risk looking like a cad, which wasn’t good form, considering we hoped to join the Shore Club as members.
Oh, did we? It was news to me.
I didn’t reveal to my parents that I hadn’t been consulted about John’s supposed offer. Given his recent boat madness and his recent raise, it didn’t seem impossible. I believed him about the strange Sunday evening call, just as I’d believed him about all the wrong connections of evenings prior. John had a way of making unquestionable declarations.
Aside from the boat, and the telephone call itself, I was simply grateful for the relief of tension, the eased denouement of a nearly concluded family dinner. Now I could let Father sit in silence, staring at Billy, without trying to foster peace talks between him and John. Now I could let Mother hold her new grandson without limits. I might even run off and take a bath, in case she wanted to smother him with kisses without anyone watching.
After a diaper change and a quick nursing session (hard to tear Billy out of Mother’s hands and leave the room to fulfill these functions in private, but I managed), and delivery of grandson back to her arms, I went into the bathroom and locked the door. Tap running, I spent a minute in front of the mirror, trying to tweeze my eyebrows more carefully than I’d done a week earlier, during a rushed moment when Billy was fussing. Yes, they were a little severe, just as Mother had said. Nothing an eyebrow pencil wouldn’t fix, but who had time each morning for an eyebrow pencil?
When the bath was full, I dipped one toe into it and heard the telephone ring. I pulled my foot out, drips pooling on the floor.
A moment later, Mother’s voice was just outside the door, with Billy—I could hear him grunting slightly—in her arms. “Darling, it’s your sister. She really is eager to talk with you.”
“One minute. Just have her wait.”
The sound of my voice alone was enough to make Billy start fussing again, with vigor.
A moment later I was wrapped in my robe, leaving wet footprints as I hurried to the telephone. The call was brief. Evelyn sounded anxious and apologetic, not necessarily eager to talk, as Mother had claimed, but dispatching the duty to make excuses. “I do want to come,” she kept saying. “It’s just not convenient, and there are things that I can’t really explain briefly. Things aren’t so good.”
It was her marriage, I knew. She imagined we had nothing in common, and I couldn’t bear to tell her any differently. To put my own confusion into words would make it real. The less we said, the more we might gratefully forget later.
“It’s a busy time,” she said again. “I can’t talk about it now.”
“That’s fine, Evelyn. Of course I want to see you, but I more than understand.”
“I’m not sure you do,” she said, sounding harried.
The back room was drafty. Billy was fussing in the living room. I may have sounded a little harried myself, which only made her more defensive.
“Oh, Evelyn, I just miss you, that’s all. I want you to see the baby. Of course it’s fine. We’ll reschedule.”
Sneaking back down the hall, back in the bathroom, I could feel the invisible pressure of their curiosity about the conversation with Evelyn, but I ignored it. The water had cooled. I turned on the tap, hot as it would go, steam pouring forth, and stepped as close to the fresh water as I could manage without getting scalded.
I sank lower and lower. Eyes under. Then lips. Finally, nose. Comfort. Forgiveness. Erasure.
Only once I was fully immersed under the water, holding my breath, trying to think about nothing at all, did the thought forcefully intrude: That boat for sale was, supposedly, at a club ten miles down the shore.
There’d been no call for a taxi, no knock at the door.
He’d left in an instant.
Yet John—still and always—didn’t drive.
Chapter 25
“Daddy go wook,” Billy said, rhyming the word with look. He was two years old now, still forming his words.
John was sipping his coffee, finishing the newspaper, a trace of jam on his cheek. Billy was seated in the kitchen, head peeking out from the space under the sink, running a truck along the floor.
“Daddy go wook.”
“Yes, in just a few minutes, Daddy will be going to work,” I said, pronouncing the word carefully for him.
Billy said it again, louder. He wasn’t making a prediction, he was making a demand. Time for Daddy to leave, so we could get on with our day without him, especially the best part, our hour alone, before Cora the baby nurse came. I tried to suppress a smile, not sure how John would take this display of toddler impudence, but less anxious than I might have been a year earlier. Maybe it was the natural sedation of mothering hormones in my blood, preparing for the change to come. Maybe it was my bovine girth: eight and a half months and nearly ready to pop all over again, and too aware of the chores ahead to get anxious over minor family tension, though I expected John would be mildly offended.
John folded the paper and looked down at our son with a serious expression. “What’s that, Billy? You want your mother all to yourself, do you?”
Billy didn’t know what John was getting at, but he was suspicious of the tone. He pulled his heels in closer to his body, knees up in a froglike posture, short-legged overalls riding up to bare his sweet, chubby calves. He leaned over his truck, as if John had been talking about taking it away.
“Oh, he’s just used to the routine,” I said. “You’re running a little late, and he can tell.”
John asked, “Is that it, Billy?”
Billy, neck bent and face angled downward, rubbed his palm against the textured surface of the tiny truck tire, rolling it back and forth.
“That’s very interesting,” John said, looking past me even as I leaned toward him to wipe the jam off his cheek.
“Very interesting,” he said again, not offended at all, but rather oddly pleased. I patted the knot of his tie for good measure and gave him a quick kiss that he seemed not to register.
The maternity clothes had been boxed up for only a few months when I’d told John to bring them down from the high closet shelf again. John and I thought it best to get the set finished in short order. (Two was plenty, we both agreed.) And maybe I was more eager the second time around, thinking a playmate in the house would be good for Billy, and another voice and bubbly spirit good for us all.
Maybe, also, I was competing, via my own reproductive competency, against some opponent I couldn’t see or name. How many more times since Billy’s infancy had the telephone been a wrong caller, or some secretary contacting John about a work matter, as late as 8 or 9 p.m.? How many more times had he spent Sunday afternoon out of the house, frustratingly unclear about his plans?
When he started to spend one or two evenings a week sleeping over at work, on the couch in his office, I questioned him. He reminded me of how many evenings he’d slept at Johns Hopkins, getting in his best hours—writing the bulk of his published papers and designing his most promising experiments—when everyone else had gone home. He had quite typically worked two separate shifts, napping on his office couch between them.
“Isn’t that true?”
Of course it was.
Then why was I pestering him with these questions?
“I’m not sure.”
The arguments increased over my final trimester. Did I want to be married to a less ambitious, less productive man?
“Goodness, no.”
Had I fallen in love with him because he was temperate, cautious, conventional?
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