In Norfolk I had written letters explaining our case. I called and e-mailed every number and address I could find, explaining why we couldn’t bear to be separated come September, when I would have to go to New York to start my job. My father’s boss found a lawyer with connections at the INS who helped us for free, but by summer’s end the application had made it through only the first of three governmental offices.
Every time I called the American embassy in London for advice, using the pound-a-minute help line, I got a different answer. Finally I was told: it was legal for him to come with me to the United States like any tourist as long as he understood that he’d have to come back to England to get the visa to allow him to go back to America to get his green card. Completely legal. Of course, it was also completely legal for the border official to turn him back immediately if he suspected that Edward had no intention of leaving the country to finish the process.
Edward dressed in his best clothing, bought a necktie at Heathrow, organized all his immigration papers, rehearsed his explanations, bought the round-trip ticket that would take him back to England after ninety days. We flew across the ocean, white-knuckled, hoping for a female agent. Or a sympathetic agent. Or anyone who was not the American equivalent of the man in Portsmouth. At Logan Airport in Boston, I flew through the U.S. Citizens line, then lurked against a wall, watching to see whose booth Edward would end up directed to: the blond man with the brush cut, the dark-haired woman closest to me. He bounced into the woman’s lane, and I saw him begin to talk, his shoulders up, his hands explaining. Don’t talk so much! I thought worriedly, but she had already picked up the stamp that would give him ninety days in the country, and minutes later he was next to me. We grinned and walked to baggage claim as though we didn’t care, as though we were being watched and assessed on closed-circuit TV. Now we could start worrying about the next step.
28
Our first night in the grubby rental house, we lay on an old futon and stared at the acoustic tiles in the ceiling. They reminded me of elementary school classrooms from my 1970s childhood. The combination of Febreze, mothballs, and old cigarette smoke seemed to fill my entire head: I could feel the chemicals muscle their way up my nose and into my skull, which got more packed with every inhalation.
“This can’t be good,” I said.
I had known I was pregnant again for eight hours. The world felt perilous. In France I’d been kept busy ducking pathogens in food. All raw vegetables are contraindicated by doctors in France, because of the high rate of toxoplasmosis in French soil; nothing is cooked through; you can’t count on milk being pasteurized; you are tormented by excellent but forbidden pâtés. Now I was scared of air. Our landlords were elderly and absentee, and when we told the woman they’d hired to look over the house that we needed to hire cleaners, she was dubious. “They had the place professionally cleaned in May,” she explained, though it was September. I had taken her on a tour of the filth, and though she couldn’t disagree of course she felt accused. “I don’t think they’ll go for it again.”
The next day I took myself to the head of the English Department to ask for advice on what to do about the house.
“You see,” I said to Linda, “I’m pregnant again — ”
“Oh, Elizabeth!” she burst out. “That’s the best possible news!”
I teared up and laughed at the same time. The best possible news! Of course it was! In my state over the house and my general fear, I’d forgotten. For a few months, Linda was the only person besides us who knew I was pregnant. I’d lean into her office and wink, or give the thumbs-up, to tell her that everything was fine. Even after I’d told a few friends, and then our families (we waited till we saw them in person), I didn’t go out of my way to tell people. My fantasy was that I’d turn up in a handful of months with a baby. “Oh, this?” I’d say. “This is what I’ve been working on in my spare time.”
29
All summer long we’d waited for the autopsy results. I wanted to read them and I didn’t want to read them: I was terrified that the verdict would say, essentially, Cause of death: maternal oblivion.
The report had finally shown up after a small international dance of paperwork. Using the Internet I could decipher the conclusion: chorioamniotitis, with no known histological cause. Lib knew a French-speaking doctor who spent an hour with me on the phone. The report had two halves. The first was about me, the blood tests they’d run, the umbilical cord and placenta and uterus. Olivier went through in a very calm voice, translating and then explaining the medical terms. There was some inflammation to the cord, and some dead spots on the placenta, but it was impossible to know whether these had caused Pudding’s death, or whether his death had resulted in them. I’d scanned the second half, which was entirely about his body, its perfection, its blamelessness. You couldn’t blame his kidneys. His heart was faultless.
“It doesn’t look like we need to go through that,” said Olivier. He’d been wonderful, calm, warm. “We could —”
“No,” I said. “Let’s not.”
“No,” he agreed, and I could hear the relief in his voice.
The midwives had said that the umbilical cord was looped around his neck and that the amniotic fluid was low, but we’ll never know what happened. I’m fine with that. No one explanation, no one moment I can worry over, rub at in my brain, saying, There. If only I’d done exactly that differently.
Still, pregnant for the second time, some days I just imagined that I had done everything wrong, and was doing everything wrong all over again. All chemicals seemed dangerous; ditto substances organic and dirty. Mothballs, mice, Febreze, mold, lead dust, flies — baby killers, every last one.
Anyhow, one of my kind and eloquent colleagues talked to the landlords, and they agreed to hire professional cleaners, and that was that.
30
No, I insist: other people’s children did not make me sad. But pregnant women did. In the waiting room of a Saratoga Springs ob-gyn practice, for my first visit, I watched the other women. The practice was next to Saratoga Hospital, which we could see from the back windows of the grubby rental house. One woman had brought a toddler boy, who held in his lap a plastic toy that played “The Wheels on the Bus” in a doorbell-to-hell electronic chime. A younger woman tugged at her low-slung maternity jeans as she backed into a chair, and then she patted her stomach. “When are you due?” asked the already mother, and the young woman answered, “Friday. I can’t wait.” I have nothing in common with you, I thought. That shows I had already forgotten the one lesson I’d vowed to learn: you can never guess at the complicated history of strangers.
All of a sudden I missed Savary, missed being the only woman in an unwed mothers’ home: I wanted to go away with Edward and not mention anything to anyone until we had an actual baby to show off. If we had an actual baby to show off. The waiting room end tables were piled high with pregnancy and parenting magazines, every one as sweet and awful and toxic as the Febreze-scented curtains back at the house. And then I felt toxic, outgassing pessimism, worry, bad luck.
Even the paperwork was intolerable. I checked boxes and wrote terse explanations. Previous pregnancies: 1. Living children: 0. Explanation. . The receptionists were being raucous behind the glass window into their office, but when the young woman took my clipboard and reviewed it she looked up at me, full of sympathy.