He put Gail in a cab and walked back to his office in the humid, smelly midtown streets. Only when standing above the central air conditioning vent under his office window, feeling the cool billow his shirt, did he remember that he never got an answer.
Was it the divorce, Mom? Did that almost crush me?
Why wouldn’t she answer? Habit?
She didn’t want to answer. She admitted that herself.
The cold air snaked up his arms and chilled their hollows. He shivered. I am crushed, crumpled in her pocketbook like a forgotten phone message. Your son called.
Like a recalcitrant city agency, she just never got back to him. So what? He inspected himself for damage. He didn’t feel a thing. His mother was a vain woman who took out his father’s desertion on him. She neglected Peter to cater to her new husband, making sure she didn’t lose another. So what?
Diane would never do that. She loved Byron. Couldn’t stand anyone, not even Mrs. Murphy, handling him. Diane was ferocious, a lioness. There was no danger. At least he’d done that one thing right: found a real mother to his son.
“I’M GONNA drive you home from the hospital,” Eric’s father had insisted on the phone that morning. “I don’t want some schmuck cabdriver killing my grandson.” Eric had tried to dissuade him, knowing that Nina would want their first experience at home with Luke to be private, but lost the battle.
Later he and Nina sat together, ashamed to look each other in the eyes, while they knew Dr. Ephron was doing the circumcision in the nursery next door. Nina’s mother, Joan, interrupted with a phone call. She wanted to fly in for the weekend, along with Nina’s youngest sister, and “help with the transition home,” as Joan put it.
“I can’t talk right now. But I think you should wait until the following weekend. Give us a chance to settle in.” Nina listened for a second and insisted, “I can’t talk right now,” and hung up. Faintly they heard a baby wailing. Eric looked at her. Nina dismissed his silent question. “Could be anyone. We should walk around. Do something.”
Eric swallowed. He felt so stupid. The picture of his son’s penis, that pinkie between curled frog’s legs, being cut — Eric shuddered at the image, at the ease with which castration could occur. They weren’t having a bris because of Nina, but Eric was glad for selfish reasons. He could never witness the event, much less celebrate it in a ritual.
There was more wailing.
“Okay, let’s walk around.”
“No,” Nina said.
“But you just said—”
“They’re bringing him in afterwards to be fed. To help comfort him. I’d better stay. You go for a walk.”
“No,” he answered, angry that she could be casual about his presence. “I want to make sure it’s still on, for Christ’s sake.”
“Eric!” she said, laughing, but her eyes teared. “Don’t say things like that.”
“Well, that’s what we’re worried about! What’s the point in not saying it?”
“Nothing is going to happen,” she chided.
“You’re so full of shit with your brave act.”
“Come on,” she said, and offered her hand for comfort. “Shut up.”
He took her slim hand in his big, thick palm, disarranging her fingers so they were like pencils stored in a bowl. They waited.
“I can’t take this,” he whispered.
“Shhhh,” she said.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fabulous.” Her voice was listless.
“Seriously. How are the stitches?”
She winced at the mention of them. “I lied to them.”
“What?”
“I told them I had taken a crap. I haven’t.”
“You have to take a crap?”
“Before they let you go.”
“What? They won’t let you go until you take a dump? What kind of country are we living in?”
She tried to smile, but her worry weighed her mouth into a sorry grin. “They just want to make sure everything’s working okay. That the stitches and everything”—She shut her eyes, as if she could see the wound.
Eric nodded. The wailing could still be heard. “Maybe you shouldn’t be lying to them.”
“It’s nobody’s business whether I go to the bathroom!” Nina sat up with outrage, her back stiff with rebellion.
“Yeah, I think that’s in the Constitution.” He winked at her.
“That’s right,” Nina agreed. She tried another smile. Her skin was exhausted; even her freckles had paled into virtual nonexistence.
There was a knock on the door. A nurse looked in. “Put on your smock,” she said to Eric. “Baby’s here.”
Eric took the cloth gown from the hook on the door. It was wrinkled and stained with coffee from yesterday’s visit. “This is dirtier than my shirt.”
“There are laundered smocks at the nursery,” the nurse said, opening the door for Eric to pass. Beside her in the hallway, asleep in his bin, was Luke. Nina peered at Luke, an alert deer. “He’s sleeping,” the nurse told Nina. “How are you feeling? Haven’t done any more fainting, I hope?”
“Fainting?” Eric stopped on his way out, next to Luke. He looked down at his son. Luke’s exhausted head lay on its side. The eyelid looked puffy, worn-out.
“Nothing,” Nina said. “First night I was here, I got a little dizzy. Did they do the circumcision?”
“Didn’t the doctor come by?” the nurse asked with surprise.
“No,” Eric asked, afraid. “Why?”
“Supposed to,” the nurse said with disdain.
“Is everything all right?” Nina asked.
“He’s perfect,” the nurse said. “He’ll sleep for a while and then want to eat.”
Eric left and went to the nursery, finding a clean gown in a basket at the entrance. On his tall body, it looked like a short dress. The nurse on duty laughed at the sight. “You could use two of them,” she said.
He smiled pleasantly, but he wanted to punch her out. With their faint air of contempt and amused anticipation of nervousness and incompetence with children, the nurses made Eric feel he was a baby. When Eric got back to the room, the other nurse was lecturing Nina on how to change Luke’s diaper until his penis healed. Eric forced himself to listen. Some Vaseline had to be put on a gauze strip and placed on the wounded tip, “to prevent the raw skin from getting stuck to the diaper,” she said casually.
The image pushed Eric down into a chair and he crossed his legs. He wanted to laugh at himself, but couldn’t. His eyes went to Luke. Circumcision is insane, he judged, despite the ghosts of thousands of his forebears. More Jewish insanity, he thought. An image of the local Washington Heights temple, a tiny ugly modern building squeezed between two tall apartment houses, answered Eric unconvincingly. He remembered the first time his father took him to services. He was squeezed, like the temple, between the tall men, pushed along will-lessly, overwhelmed by their heavy smells and frightened by their low, rumbling voices. When the rabbi spoke of his people wandering for forty years in the Sinai, Eric imagined shuffling slowly amidst a crowd of the Washington Heights devout. He thought of the wandering as a rush-hour subway ride on the IRT, rather than a lonely journey in an immense desert.
“Poor baby,” Eric heard Nina say as she pulled the bin beside her. The nurse had left. Eric couldn’t speak. He watched Luke; his head rested heavily on the tiny mattress, revealing only a profile to study. The mouth worked from time to time for invisible succor. The bruises of birth were almost gone; Luke looked pretty, the small skull covered by a chaotic mass of black hair, curling up on the compressed fat nape of his neck. His back rose and fell with effort. His eye winced at a memory.