But I’m running ahead of myself. Let me back up.
In the absence of an attending physician, Tiny Paul required a birth certificate. Because his parents had left Paradise Farm early on Sunday morning, there was no way for them to obtain a file form on which to apply for a certificate from the Hothlepoya County Health Department. On Monday, then, I drove to Tocqueville to pick up the form. I filled it out standing at the registrar’s counter. Surprisingly, she treated the application as a routine matter. When I questioned her, she told me that the form would now go to the Office of Vital Records in the state-government complex in Atlanta.
“What about the birth certificate?”
“Send in a three-dollar filing fee and they’ll send it. It really doesn’t take long.”
“If I write the check, should I specify that the certificate itself should go to the parents’ Atlanta address?”
The young woman—trim, deftly mascaraed—looked at me with a flicker of interest. “Why would they send the certificate to you? Writing the check doesn’t make you the child’s father.”
“Then it isn’t necessary?”
“Of course not.”
Irritated, I sought to shock her. “What if I did happen to be the kid’s father?”
“Then it’s awfully big of you to pay the filing fee,” she said smoothly.
I grunted, pocketed my checkbook, and left.
On Wednesday, I received a long white envelope from Atlanta, not from the Office of Vital Records but from RuthClaire and Adam. The notes inside were both in Ruthie Cee’s peculiar El Grecoish script—tall, nearsighted characters in anguished postures—but the second was reputedly dictation from Adam. Even in my ex’s etiolated script, Adam’s was the more original and perplexing document:
Well-loved Namer of our Son,
We are back, but are we home? My homes keep jumping around. Paradise Farm I love for there I met RuthClaire. For a while now it is the only one of all my homes that does not jump. Tiny Paul has just jumped into the world from my one home that stands somewhat still. You are like a fierce seraph that holds down the corners of my jumping Eden. Thank you, sir, for doing that.
I must say two more things and maybe a little else. First, thank you for bringing me books on your card about God and thinking on Godness. Some of these I have regotten on my Atlanta card, so much am I interested. Second, deeply sorry for throwing one book—even if it was my own—across your room in my bitter fit of not behaving right. It makes me laugh a little, with angry mirth, to say or see that title, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.
I am also sorry for attacking the vile man Barrington. I should write to him to say so, but he should write me to say himself sorry a THOUSAND times. He should write Miss RuthClaire. He should write YOU. He should quit his name from the station that sends him forth. God and thinking on Godness should quiet my anger, but (too bad) they do not. Barrington needs better etiquette and also probably religion. So do I. But I have a long walk to get there.
This is my last “a little else” to ask you. One day this year Miss RuthClaire may ask you to come see about her seeing about me. Some doctors at Emory are plotting now a surgery to humanize me for this time and place. Do please come when she asks. We will reimburse—a pretty word—all losses. If both agree to the niceness of using one bed during my hospital stay, I have no argument or jealousy to put against that wish.
P.S. Miss RuthClaire has written my last a “little else” in some anger. I must learn, she says, that no married person except maybe an Eskimo has a right “to dispose of the other’s affections.” I am telling her that I knew THAT already, and that the words if both agree prove I am not indisposing, without consideration, her body self. Good etiquette. Moral integrity.
P.P.S. Tiny Paul does well. Sleeping at night very well. Making no noise. Good baby etiquette.
P.P.P.S. I would like—much—a pen pal on spiritual stuff, but you undoubted lack for time?
I reread this letter closely several times. What wouldn’t a reporter give to lay hands on it? I thought briefly of letting different outfits bid for it, but once I had rejected this course as vile beyond even my notorious reverence for the profit motive, I never looked back. Adam was no longer my rival, he was my friend.
I tried to imagine what sort of surgery the specialists at Emory were planning for Adam, but could adduce only such routine operations as appendectomy, tonsillectomy, molar extractions, and, forgive me, circumcision. Then it occurred to me that the doctors might be contemplating more exotic procedures, viz., rendering Adam’s thumbs wholly opposable, surgically removing his sagittal crest, or increasing his body height by putting artificial bone sections in his thighs or lower legs. The first and third options would perhaps make it easier for Adam to function among us, but the second was a potentially dangerous sop to his or RuthClaire’s (vicarious) vanity—for which reason I struck it from my catalogue.
What then? What were they going to do to Adam?
I folded the notes back into their envelopes, feeling good about having decided to consider Adam my friend. Now I must act on that decision and enforce it by framing a reply. I found a grungy 13-cent postcard and wrote on it the following message:
Dear RuthClaire and Adam: I will come any time you need me. Just ask. No sweat about throwing C. S. Lewis across the room. I was once tempted to do the same thing. I’m the wrong pen pal for discussion of God and Godness, grace and salvation, extinction and immortality, even good and bad etiquette in situations with a moral angle. For that reason—not lack of time—I can’t promise anything.
Kiss the kid for me.
Christmas came and went. In Atlanta, the circus had begun. I wondered if my postcard had passed under prying eyes, thereby triggering the Montarazes’ ordeal with the press. In the future, sealed letters only.
Early in February, RuthClaire wrote to say they had received Tiny Paul’s birth certificate. She included three dollars to cover the cost of the registration fee. I sent the money back. But with the bills and the note was a printed invitation to Adam’s first exhibition of paintings at Abraxas. A wine-and-cheese reception in Adam’s honor would precede the show, and I was also invited to that. On the printed card RuthClaire had written, “You’d better be here, Philistine!”
The reception was on a Tuesday evening. I closed the West Bank after our midday meal, gave Livia George and the others both that evening and Wednesday off, put a sign on the door, and set off for the Big City… just in time to collide with rush hour.
Dristle kept my windshield wipers klik-klikking, and it was almost completely dark when I finally made my way up Moreland Avenue to Little Five Points and the Montaraz house on Hurt Street. That house, how to describe it? Its silhouette oozed a jolly decadence suggesting Mardi Gras, shrimp creole, tasseled strippers, and derby-hatted funeral processionaires. A pair of lamps on black cast-iron poles shone on either side of the cobbled walk, their globes like spheres of shimmering, honey-colored wax. By their light, I saw two indistinct figures come out on the front porch, down the steps, and hand in hand through the mistfall to my car. I let them in.
RuthClaire and Adam, of course, in polished boots and fleece-lined London Fog trench coats. From their bodies wafted the smells of soap, cologne, lipstick, aftershave, winter rain, and something peculiarly oniony.