“Oh, Ian, it’s beautiful! Rita’s going to love it.”
“Well, I hope so,” he said. He bent to lift it. The honey smell of Wood-Witch paste wax drifted toward him. “You take the other end. Be careful getting it past that desk; I spent a long time on the finish.”
They started back through the shop, bearing the cradle between them. Mr. Brant came to the office doorway to watch, but Daphne didn’t even glance in his direction. She was still talking about newness. “I’d call some woman I’d just seen across a room or something,” she said. “I would not say, ‘You don’t know me, but—’ That’s such an obvious remark. Why would she need to be informed she doesn’t know you, for goodness’ sake?”
All at once it seemed time slipped, or jerked, or fell away beneath Ian’s feet. He was fifteen years old and he was rehearsing to ask Cicely Brown to the Freshman Dance. Over and over again he dialed the special number that made his own telephone ring, and Danny picked up the receiver in the kitchen and pretended to be Cicely’s mother. “Yell-ow,” he answered in fulsome, golden tones, and then he’d call, “Cicely, dahling!” and switch to his Cicely voice, squeaky and mincing and cracked across the high notes. “Hello? Oooh! Ian-baby!” By that stage Ian was usually helpless with laughter. But Danny waited tolerantly, and then he led Ian through each step of the conversation. He told Ian it was good to hear from him. He asked how he’d done on the history test. He spent several minutes on the he-said-she-said girls always seemed to think was so important, although in this case it was, “He said mumble-grumble and she said yattata-yattata.” Then he left a conspicuous space for Ian to state his business, after which he told him, why, of course; you bet; he’d be thrilled to go to the dance.
Daphne said, “Ian?”
He balanced his end of the cradle on one knee and turned away, blotting his eyes with his jacket sleeve. When he turned back he found Mr. Brant next to him. “Hot,” Ian explained. It was January, and cold enough in the shop to see your breath, but Mr. Brant nodded as if he knew all about it and opened the front door for him. Ian and Daphne carried the cradle on out.
Rita started labor in the middle of a working day. Envisioning this moment earlier, Ian had expected it to be nighttime — Rita nudging him awake the way women did on TV — but it was a sunny afternoon in late February when Doreen came to the office door and said, “Ian! Rita’s on the phone.” The other men glanced up. “Sure you don’t want to change your mind, now,” one said, grinning. They’d acted much less guarded around him since the news of the baby.
On the phone Rita said she was fine, pains coming every five minutes, no reason to leave the shop yet unless he wanted. By the time he reached home, though (for of course he came immediately), things had speeded up and she said maybe they should think about getting to the hospital. She was striding back and forth in the living room, wearing her usual outfit of leather boots and maternity jeans and one of his chambray shirts. His father paced alongside her, all but wringing his hands. “I’ve never liked this stage, never liked it,” he told Ian. “Shouldn’t we make her sit down?”
“I’m more comfortable walking,” Rita said.
For the last two weeks she had been allowed on her feet again, and Ian often felt she was making up for lost time.
It was the mildest February ever recorded — not even cool enough for a sweater — and Rita looked surprised when Ian wanted to bring her coat to the hospital. “You don’t know what the weather will be like when you come home,” he told her.
She said, “Ian. I’m coming home tomorrow.”
“Oh, yes.”
He seemed to be preparing for a moment far in the future. It was unthinkable that in twenty-four hours they’d be back in this house with a child.
At the hospital they whisked her away while he dealt with Admissions, and by the time they allowed him in the labor room she had turned into a patient. She lay in bed in a coarse white gown, her forehead beaded with sweat. Every two minutes or so her face seemed to flatten. “Are you all right?” he kept asking. “Should I be doing anything?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Her lips were so dry they looked gathered. The nurse had instructed him to feed her chips of ice from a plastic bowl on the nightstand, but when he offered her one she turned her head away fretfully.
She used to seem so invulnerable. That may have been why he had married her. He had seen her as someone who couldn’t be harmed, once upon a time.
It was dark before they wheeled her to the delivery room. The windowpanes flashed black as Ian walked down the hall beside her stretcher. The delivery room was a chamber of horrors — glaring white light and gleaming tongs and monstrous chrome machines. “You stand by her head, daddy,” the doctor told him. “Hold onto mommy’s hand.” Somehow Rita found it in her to snicker at this, but Ian obeyed grimly, too frightened even to smile. Her hand was damp, and she squeezed his fingers until he felt his bones realigning.
“Any moment now,” the doctor announced. Any moment what? Ian kept forgetting their purpose here. He was strained tight, like guitar strings, and all his stomach muscles ached from urging Rita to push. Couldn’t women die of this? Yes, certainly they could die. It happened every day. He didn’t see what prevented her from simply splitting apart.
“A fine boy,” the doctor said, and he held up a slippery, angry, squalling creature trailing coils of telephone cord.
Ian released the breath that must have been trapped in his chest for whole minutes. “It’s over, sweetheart,” he told Rita. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the racket.
The doctor laid the baby in Rita’s outstretched arms and she hugged it to her, cupping its wet black head in one hand. “Hello, Joshua,” she said. She seemed to be smiling and weeping both. The baby went on wailing miserably. “So, do you like him?” she said, looking up at Ian.
“Of course,” he told her.
It wrenched him that she’d felt the need to ask.
Eventually the baby was carted off somewhere, and Rita sent Ian to make phone calls. In the waiting room he shook quarters from the envelope she had prepared weeks earlier. He called each of the numbers she’d written across the front — first Bobbeen, and then his father, and then Daphne, Thomas, and Stuart (Agatha was still at work), and Rita’s two best friends. They all sounded thrilled and amazed, as if they hadn’t understood till now that an actual baby would come of this. Bobbeen wanted to drive right over. Ian persuaded her to wait, though. “You can visit her tomorrow,” he said. “But stop by early. They’re letting her go home right after lunch.”
“Modern times!” Bobbeen marveled. “When Rita was born I had to stay a week, and they didn’t let Vic in the delivery room, either. You-all are lucky.”
It was on Rita’s account that he’d asked Bobbeen to wait till morning; he assumed she would be exhausted. But when he went to her room he found her sitting upright, looking ready to spring out of bed. Her hair was combed and she wore her flannel pajamas in place of the hospital gown. “Eight pounds, four and a half ounces,” she said. She must be talking about the baby, who wasn’t there yet. They kept them in the nursery for the first few hours. “He’s got your mouth: those little turns at the corners. And my dad’s Italian hair. Oh, I wish they’d bring him in.”
“Ah, well, you’ll have him for the next eighteen years,” Ian said.
Eighteen years; merciful heavens.
He sat with her awhile, listening to her rattle on, and then he kissed her good night. When he left, she was dialing her mother on the phone.
At home, a single lamp lit the front hall. His father must have gone to bed. It was after ten o’clock, Ian was amazed to see. He trudged up the stairs to his room.