“Thank you,” he answered.
We continued to grip each other’s hand. It was warming for me to believe that despite the confusions between us — even the coldness, the hostility — we could confront each other on this special day with a decent amount of respect. Suddenly I sensed Paul’s helplessness in a way I never had before — that is, without even the thinnest overlay of suspicion or doubt. I thought I understood what he had felt and been made to feel toward the woman he had chosen, and by choosing, altered. I have been searching for a Libby, and I have found myself one. I have made myself one — Martha. A lacerating idea, but it hung on, and however it worked against me, it led me to my fullest understanding of what had happened between Paul and myself, of what his feelings had been for me. I now had an experience to go by; where Paul Herz had once had Gabriel Wallach, Gabriel Wallach now had Sid Jaffe.
“What are you going to call her?” I asked him.
“Rachel,” he said.
“Because we had to wait so long.” The explanation came from Libby.
“Congratulations, Lib,” I said, dropping her husband’s hand.
She gave me a smile, but neither extended her hand nor took a step toward me. And that was all right too, so long as everything was under control and we all coasted through the morning under the guidance of Jaffe. Sid was standing now with his hands on his hips, a soldierly posture; whenever she looked his way, Libby grinned. She held a hand out straight before her and showed him how it was shaking.
Sid said to Paul, “Well, how does it feel being a father? Have you got the shakes too?”
He had spoken just as I was about to turn back to Paul to say I was sorry to have heard of his father’s death; consequently, I said nothing, for it would have been a most inappropriate comment at that moment. The best thing for me was silence. Not leading, but following. In an hour or two (I told myself this at the very same time that I simply could not believe it) the Herzes would have their baby. Getting into the front seat alongside Jaffe, I found myself remembering a day back in Iowa, the day I had driven Libby out to pick up Paul, whose old Dodge had blown a piston. I remembered having asked Libby if she had any children, and her reply, her Oh goodness, thank God, no. It was our first exchange face to face.
“I’m sorry we kept you waiting,” Libby said, as we started off.
“That’s okay,” Sid said.
“We were just putting up the crib,” she explained. I turned around to look at her while she spoke. “We didn’t want to put it up until today,” she said to me, “not until everything was sure as sure could be. It would have been awful to come home to that crib …”
“Well,” I said, “it’s only a matter now of going down and picking up the baby.”
Libby became quite excited when I said that. She turned to her husband. “Isn’t that something?” He took her hand in his. “Is your heart thumping?” she asked him.
He smiled. “Oh no.”
“Oh I’ll bet,” she said.
Every time we had to stop at a traffic light, Sid turned around in his seat and teased Libby. “Well, are you still with us, Lib?”
“Still here,” she sang.
“Just wanted to check. You look like you’re really ready to take flight.”
“Run away? Oh no—”
“I meant fly. Sprout wings.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I am.”
The hospital had not yet been landscaped. It was a huge new concrete building, one wing of which was still unfinished. The grassless, treeless ground that sloped down to the street revealed the gutted markings of trucks and tractors; the light, reflecting off the packed-in earth and the flush cement walls of the hospital, had a powdery quality, as though it were not substanceless but a film of particles that upon contact would settle over one’s clothing and leave a coating on the teeth. At the sight of the hospital, the little jokes and pleasantries we had all of us been making — even Paul at the last — stopped abruptly.
The only ornament the gaunt hospital showed was a narrow-armed gold cross that hung over the central glass doorway and rose three stories high. Four nuns in flowing black habits happened to be standing under the cross as we drove by, and the cross, the flat, gray, sunlit walls and the four sisters all came together to make time seem at a standstill, nonexistent even, the illusion one is troubled by in certain anxious dreams. The surrealistic arrangement of the objects appeared to be the outward sign of a world static and impersonal, a world into which one moved with an overpowering consciousness of the sound of one’s shoes, and of the slight tremulous noise of the breath, the life, in one’s nostrils; where every human gesture, once made, seemed either an exaggeration or a diminution of the gesture intended; where words spoken into the boundless landscape were either inaudible or too loud — a place where one found oneself with little control over the image one wished to convey, or the effects one hoped to produce.
If no one in the car shared my several chilling illusions, they all seemed to share the solemnity that those illusions produced in me. None of us spoke as Sid continued right on past the crescent-shaped drive that led up to the hospital entrance; no one asked any questions when he turned left at the corner. Passing the unfinished wing of the hospital, on whose gently swaying scaffolds overalled workmen appeared carrying buckets and leaning into wheelbarrows, Sid proceeded halfway down the block before he pulled over to the curb and parked. We were in the shade now, and though neither nuns, nor cross, nor hard glary walls were before our eyes, my sense of imminence did not diminish. I had never been in this section of Chicago before and I had never been in a situation quite like this one either, and yet I had a very deep sense of repeating an old event. I had been through all this, precisely this, in another life.
But of course that is a feeling we all experience on occasion, and it too is illusion. If and when we allow ourselves to be convinced of other lives and other incarnations, it is to be spared the necessity of facing up to futility, of confronting the boredom and the limitation of our own predicament; for no one is particularly happy about those endless repetitions that make us predictable and contained and therefore sane — and therefore fallible, the subjects and objects of pain. Thus this event for me, this adoption we were about to set in motion, this rearrangement of people, was really not the repetition of an act in any other life; it was only a crystallization of several acts in this one. I felt the impact then of all the shufflings of parents and offspring that I had witnessed and been a part of in the last few years — the rearranging and the rearranging, as though we could administrate anguish out of our lives. I leave my father; the Brooklyn Herzes throw out their son; Martha cuts loose from her children; now Libby opens her arms to Theresa Haug’s bastard child …
After Sid Jaffe pulled up the hand brake, no one in the car moved, no one said a word. It lasted but a second, our collective inaction, but the uncertainty, the fear, the humility — whatever had caused us all to take in our breath and delay for a moment more that which we were about to do — seemed to me a recognition by the four of us of the powers outside ourselves, a tribute to a presence, or a lack of presence, so solid, so monumental, so stark and immeasurable, that it rendered quite inconsequential the blankness of those hospital walls we were about to enter. But then Sid turned a little in his seat and said, “Well …” and I felt a flow of energy in me, and for all that had failed to come out of the shufflings and separations we had each of us been party to in the past, for all the confusion that had grown out of the rejections and the yearnings, the demands and the hesitations and the betrayals, I put my hand to the door and half opened it.