He would teach them now, oh God, he would really teach them now because he’d broken through and that was half the battle. He would give 55-206 the same story, and then he would give it to his seventh termers, and everything would be all right.
But he didn’t give it to 55-206, and he didn’t give it to his seventh termers because the messenger found him where he was sitting outside the Students’ Lavatory on the first floor opposite the entrance doors, and the message told him that his mother-in-law had called, and that Anne had been taken to the hospital in labor.
The subway stop was at 77th Street, and he ran up the steps to Lexington Avenue. He turned left on the corner, realized he was heading for 78th, and then changed his course and began walking fast — almost running toward 76th Street. There was a candy store on the corner, and he crossed 77th Street and the big brown bulk of the hospital filled Lexington Avenue between 77th and 76th. Across the street, on the other side of the avenue, he saw the stores, and he watched the stores as he walked rapidly opposite them: the grocery, the luncheonette, the restaurant, another restaurant, a stationery store, and on the corner, a florist. There was a florist on his side of the street, too, on the corner of 76th Street. He turned right at the corner, looking briefly at the big church on the other side of the avenue, and then walking past another candy store, and a toy shop, and a dry cleaner’s, and an electrician’s shop, and then the Einhorn Auditorium of Lenox Hill Hospital.
The green canopy of the hospital reached out for the sidewalk. White letters announced LENOX HILL HOSPITAL, added MAIN ENTRANCE in a sotto voce. The canopy covered the center arch of three arches. Plaques with the address 111 held the walls on either side of the center arch. He mounted the steps and he glanced upward, and the arch over the inner doors was inscribed with the legend ERECTED MCMXXX.
He noticed all these things, and he thought of Anne, and he cursed because it hadn’t happened while he was at home, and he worried about her at the same time, and then he was in the large entrance, and he looked first to the wall on his right, and then spotted the reception desk on his left and walked directly to it. The girl behind the desk was on the phone, and he waited impatiently, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. She put down the phone at last, and Rick said, “Mrs. Dadier.”
“Maternity, sir?” the girl asked.
“Yes, my mother-in-law just call...”
“One moment, sir.” She consulted some papers on her desk, papers he could not see, and then she said, “She is in the delivery room now, sir.”
“How long... I mean... is Dr. Bradley here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will you let me know... how... how do I find out?”
“The doctor will come down after the delivery, sir.”
“Thank you.”
He stood at the desk for a moment, and the girl smiled sympathetically, and then he turned and walked to the bench on the opposite wall. He sat and jiggled his feet and clenched and unclenched his hands, and when he saw Anne’s mother he almost didn’t recognize her. She came out of one of the arches stemming from the waiting room and walked directly to him, taking his hands.
“You made good time, Rick,” she said. She was a small woman, as blond as Anne was, miraculously blond considering the fact that she was fifty-four and hadn’t once used any tints on her head. She smiled now and held his hands tightly, and he asked, “Is she all right. Mom?”
“She’s fine, darling,” Anne’s mother said.
“I came the minute I got your message. I had to clear it with the office, but...”
“I was in the ladies’ room,” Anne’s mother said, as if she felt some compulsion to explain her recent absence.
“But she’s all right?”
“Yes, she’s fine. She called me the minute the pains started.”
“She should have called me,” Rick said. “I would have...”
“I took a cab,” Anne’s mother said. “I was there in fifteen minutes. I think it’s going to be an easy birth, Rick.”
“How do you know? I mean, how can you tell?” he asked.
“The pains were coming very fast when we got here. Dr. Bradley took her right upstairs.”
“He was here when you arrived?”
“Yes. He’s awfully nice, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Rick said, realizing he was whispering, and wondering why he was. His mother-in-law sat on the bench beside him, and Rick turned and looked up at the face of the clock in the wall, hanging over the list of names lettered in red and black scroll. He didn’t know what the names were all about, and he was too worried to read any of them. He turned from the clock without having consciously read the time, and then he looked at his mother-in-law and saw the nervousness on her face, too, and envied her for being a woman because she knew what it was all about, and he knew only the worry and the strain and the fear bred of ignorance.
His eyes roamed the room, and he knew he was consciously allowing them to roam, filling the time until Dr. Bradley appeared. He saw the sign TELEPHONES to the left of the entrance doors, and he saw the boards flanking each side of the entrance doors, the boards holding the doctors’ names, and the red in buttons and the black out buttons which flashed a white arrow when the doctor was in the hospital. He was tempted to walk over to the board and see if Dr. Bradley were indeed in, but the girl at the reception desk had said he was in, and his own mother-in-law had said she’d seen him, but he still wanted to walk over there and check. He rose abruptly, and then realized how foolish he was being, but since he was standing he began to pace, and Anne’s mother watched him and said nothing.
The wall opposite the entrance wall had an arch smack in its center. He could see a sign reading EMERGENCY jutting out into the corridor beyond the arch, and he wondered if Anne were considered an emergency, and then he realized that was foolish, too. Benches flanked the arch in that wall, and two windowed doors flanked the benches symmetrically. A water fountain hugged the wall in the left corner, and a high arched window with a bench under it was on the right-angle wall that held the reception desk. On the righthand side of the arch, over the bench there, a bronze plaque and a small sign commanded his attention. He could not read the plaque, but the sign said:
He wondered if Anne would need a transfusion, and he wondered if he should go up to the nth floor and give some blood, and then he reminded himself he was being foolish again, and he wondered why he was being so damned foolish. Women had babies every day of the week. In China, they dropped them in the fields and then picked up their hoes again. But this wasn’t China, and this wasn’t a faceless woman-who-had-a-baby-every-day-of-the-week. This was Anne, this was his wife, and she was up there in the delivery room all alone and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do for her. This was one battle that was all her own, exclusively, and the knowledge left him frustrated because he wanted to help her and he knew he couldn’t.
All he could do was pace under the big chandelier that dominated the ceiling of the room, the ceiling with its ornate circular design. He walked to the reception desk, and then to the glass-fronted case to the left of the desk, where the carefully scripted words Flowers For Sale were lettered onto the wood.