We said we weren’t sure.
“Well,” she said, “I have a spare boy’s name, if it’s a boy.”
We stared at her, our hearts full of love, sure that this would be the best boy’s name ever.
“Lance,” she said.
Which immediately struck me as an unfortunate name for the son of a doctor.
Even happy labor stories can be excruciating in their details. The Pitocin drip went in at 9:30 a.m. I was hooked up to a fetal heart rate monitor and a contraction monitor, the same sorts I’d been on twice a week at the practice. After several hours I asked the young nurse, “Am I having any contractions yet?”
“ ’Bout every two to three minutes,” she said. I hadn’t felt a thing.
I was glad that Edward hadn’t been in the room for Pudding’s delivery: now, when I looked up at him from the delivery table it would be new, and when he told me we were almost there it would be new, it would be what I’d expected, and wholly unfamiliar. He opened a book to read to me. David Copperfield this time, which begins with a hair-raising birth. “Keep going,” I told him, admiring the great girth of the rest of the account of that baby’s life.
Dr. Knoeller stripped my membranes at 5:00. At 6:00 I asked for an epidural. At 7:36 —
I’m skipping some details: the baby’s heart began to decelerate during contractions. Dr. Knoeller came in to check me and was surprised to see that I was fully dilated. The baby’s heartbeat continued to decelerate during contractions. I became aware of the decelerations, even though I couldn’t feel the contractions: I could hear the beeping monitor. I started to watch the clock on the wall and could see that sometimes the heartbeats were in step with the second hand: sixty beats a minute, good for a grown-up but bad for a baby. My old fetish, the heartbeat. This monitor, threaded up me and onto the baby’s head, had a cold science-fiction beep. It was time to push, but it was hard when the effort came at the same time the heartbeat slowed: I tried to concentrate on my work, the work, but I couldn’t with that soundtrack. They put an oxygen mask on me so the baby would get more oxygen. Dr. Knoeller and the nurses told me that I was doing wonderfully, I was almost there. Edward was stroking my forehead and saying the same thing. Maybe they were lying. I suspected that they were. One of the nurses said to Dr. Knoeller — I didn’t hear her, thank God; Edward told me later — that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. They told me to rest, and the heartbeat sped up. They told me to push and it slowed down again.
Then the heartbeat stopped.
Then my heart broke.
And then — look, we’re at 7:36 again — there was suddenly a toasty warm, hollering, wet baby on my chest, and Edward and I were laughing, and laughing, and laughing. He was actual! An actual baby, pulled from the dream of my body into the shocking wakefulness of earthly life. Maybe he thought the same of us: all that warmth, those dim voices, the love taps, the questions — I thought I’d made you up.
“It’s a little boy!” said Edward.
“Did you see?” said Dr. Knoeller.
“A little boy!” Edward told her.
He was small and skinny, six pounds and change, twenty inches long.
When Dr. Knoeller left she kissed us, and hugged us, and said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m up for doing this again.”
Even so, we didn’t name him Lance.
In the hospital room, we tried out names. We hadn’t seriously played at this game since before Pudding was born. He looked absolutely unlike a Moses. He looked, in fact, like Edward, fair-haired and big-eyed and worried. “Isn’t he just like his father!” the nurses kept saying admiringly, as though this was a great trick the three of us had pulled off. Oh, he was beautiful, entirely himself.
We discussed Barnaby, Felix, Thomas, and Arthur. “The boy who wasn’t Mabel,” Lib said, when Edward called. We understood that Oscar was out: we were pretty sure that’s what Pudding’s name would have been, had he lived. This baby deserved a name of his own. But what would suit him?
“Barnaby Harvey,” I kept saying, and Edward shook his head.
“I’ve always loved the name Thomas,” he kept saying, and I shook my head.
“August,” he said, reading from the book of baby names I’d bought fifteen years before for fictional characters. “We could call him Augie, or Gus. Gus, I think.”
“Sidney,” I said.
“Maybe. Sidney. Sid. It’s a no-nonsense, tough name, Sid. Your mate down at the pub.”
The Sid I knew best was the husband of the president of my grandmother’s temple sisterhood, a sweet uxorious pharmacist. “Maybe not,” I said.
“Gus, then,” said Edward. “I think Gus.”
That night, when Edward went home to get some sleep, I tried it out. The baby was in his plastic hospital bassinet, swaddled into a neat and uncanny little package. I could see only his head in its mint green cap. “Hello, Gus,” I said. “Hello, Gussie. Hello, Gusling. Hello, Gosling.”
Sometime around 2:00 a.m., it had settled in my mind, and so I told the baby the story of his older brother. I really did: this isn’t literary fancifulness. He was a little, little baby, and I told him the story out loud, not knowing when we might tell him again: I wanted him to know how glad we were to see him, and how sad we were that he’d never know his older brother.
“I think your name is Gus,” I told him, and of course now I can’t imagine why we thought his name could ever be anything else.
42
Later that week, after we’d come home from the hospital, the baby clothes arrived from England. We’d thrown away anything really difficult, or burned it behind Savary. Still, for a while I just stood and looked at open boxes. Then I took out a piece of clothing, a pair of blue striped pull-on pants, and without thinking I brought them to my face and breathed in.
Of course they wouldn’t smell like him. He died in Bordeaux. What sentimental perfume did I think I’d find on them anyhow, what essence of Puddingness?
And yet they did smell of him. That is, they smelled of the sweet milky French baby soap we’d bought in Duras. Savary had a washing machine but not a dryer, and we’d washed everything and then hung it to dry on the lines on the south side of the terrace. Those lines were way over my head — I had to stand on tiptoe and grab them down — and the clothes were very small and sweet as they dried. So the pants and everything in the box did smell like Pudding, that is, they smelled of our last optimistic days at the house as we did the last bits of nest feathering before we brought our son home. I’d forgotten the smell (as you do of a lost person), but now here it was, three boxes full.
I found that my heart could take it, and I started to unpack. At first every now and then I’d get a flutter and think, I remember when I bought this for him, and then I’d look at the label inside — Baby Gap or Old Navy or Carter’s — and would realize it was a hand-me-down from the little American boy in Cambridge. A few articles of clothing felt very sad to me, items of clothing so charming and peculiar that they’d been part of the story we’d told ourselves, “Our Life with Pudding”: some particularly stylish clothing that my friend Monica had sent to us, the tiny pair of plaid wool knee pants that I’d bought in Bergerac for two euros. We’d often looked at this clothing when I’d been pregnant, and hurriedly packed it up when we’d returned from the hospital. We put away the sweaters that Edward’s mother had made, because they had been made particularly for Pudding. They’re his, and his alone.
But even the most fraught of the other clothing feels fine now. Of course it reminds us of Pudding, but when have we ever forgotten? Indeed, we want to remember him, and it doesn’t feel strange or grim to put Gus into a pair of pants that we’d imagined Pudding wearing. People wear clothing that belonged to their dead all the time: a father’s Irish sweater, a grandfather’s felt hat, a grandmother’s Peter Pan — collared shirt. I can look at those plaid pants and remember, for once, not Pudding’s death, but the pleasure I took in finding them for sale, for so cheap, how funny I thought those plaid pants would look on a little boy.