So Claudia watched the little babies in the Coney Island incubators as they raised their purple, webbed-together fingers in the air. And she was not alone. New York’s bereaved and grieving mothers came by the dozen to see the show. They came in the weeks after delivering stillborn babies, unbeknownst to their husbands, or in the days after apnoea or asphyxia had absurdly robbed them of their infants, paying their dimes to enter, which in turn paid for oxygen and milk and sterile warmth and profit. Some came to donate breast-milk, sobbing all the while. The women came to see the babies who had just and so survived, who were made of terrible colours like rust and rose and cardamom, who were raw under tiny handkerchief-sized blankets, no longer than the palms of their mother’s hands, but somehow living. It was a quiet exhibition, except for the croaking of a baby behind the window, and the occasional breakdown of a customer. But there was drama to the delicacy and frailty and the tenacity of the all-too-early lives, and specifically appealing drama it was too, as with every other Coney Island exhibition or ride or show, it hit the corkscrew nail on its tilted, twisted head. It was a show mostly women came to see. And they, and Claudia, loved and loathed the tiny babies, jealous and tender at once, because they were seeing miracles not granted to them, because these were children that were still closed, like mushroom caps, or sprouting bulbs, and their lives were hanging in the balance. There was love and pain and longing in the air, filling the muted exhibition corridor with something thick and enriching like fertilizer in soil, as if the pungent, solicitous emotions of the women might open the premature, closed children, and somehow help them live.
The women, similar, united, but oblivious to each other, came to watch the babies grow and fade into colours more befitting healthy newborn infants, they came because their own were dead, closed and red, and would not ever fully open or fade or grow. Or they came to watch them die, for fairness’ sake, to reassure themselves that God was evenhanded with his rescinding of souls. Sometimes the nurses would find a baby lying too still or too struggling, going from red to blue, squeaking through the tubing like a mouse, and they would smile, and very calmly lift the baby out of the incubator with white cotton gloves, as if to hold it, or comfort it. And then they would remove the child through the back door to a room beyond the view of the spectators, perhaps to see a doctor, and it would be absent when they reappeared, smiling, always smiling.
Claudia was incredibly patient. Claudia always waited. When a baby was removed she would linger all afternoon for the nurses to bring the infant back. They hardly ever did. Towards closing time she would finally slump to the wall, and her body would rumble with thunderous weeping, her eyes smeared black from the wetted shadow, the hairs on her chin dripping with tears, and the veins in her biceps standing stark and tense with suffering blood. She became known to the staff of the show as the grieving giantess.
After five months of this routine the management of the baby incubator exhibition decided to put a ceiling on the amount of time allocated to the entrance fee. It was considered unhealthy for some women in particular to spend all their time in there, too tempting a self-destruction for hysterics. They could not be relied on for self-regulation and the discipline required not to torture and torment themselves. Also medical costs had risen, more money was needed to maintain the exhibition, they said, so now a dime would only get an hour. Claudia did not care. Her muscled tattooed body made her plenty of money, as her husband’s ink and needles made him plenty of money, so there was more than enough to support her obsession. She revolved through the rooms hourly on her day off, repaying, weeping, repaying, weeping.
Grace always knew where to find her when her husband did not and she was missing. Grace could be relied on for discretion, she did not tell Turo why Claudia could not be found. They let her into the show for free, knowing she was there for the sole purpose of removing the weeping whale and not, in any case, daring to demand payment from her — for she had that look of Sonderkommando to her: detachment, appallingly intrepid workmanship. She would follow the wailing to find her friend collapsed on the floor. Then she would take the big, barbell-callused appendage, which had the astounding capabilities for hurling iron for the crowd’s enjoyment, in her own small hand. Claudia would pull Grace close and cradle her on the floor, holding her in her strong arms, and crooning.
— Kleines Baby, kleines Baby, zu klein.
And Grace would allow the psychotherapy and she would soothe Claudia’s crackling orange hair if she could free herself to reach, and make her promise not to come back any more. It wasn’t good for her, she said. It was as salt in an unhealed wound. Not come back, Claudia would repeat, but then the next week she always did return.
— And why is it that you ask about my friend?
Cy shrugged his shoulders, smiled at Claudia and turned back to watch Grace at the chess table. She was leaning far back on her chair waiting for her opponent to move his piece, with her hands on the table top, her fingers splayed out and lifting erratically as if she were playing the piano.
— No reason. I thought perhaps I … it’s not important. She lives in my building. I only recently found that out. She seems to be quite an extraordinary person. It’s sudden, but I thought perhaps I might quite like to, well, to learn to play chess. I never have.
He felt Claudia’s hand on his back, pressing along his spine. She forgave him the lie.
— Good. Don’t let her teach you, though, she’ll spoil it for you. And don’t listen to the rest of what you hear. It’s not important. She is just a person who knows about many things.
Three weeks after they met by the fountain Grace came to see Cy at his booth. A small midweek crowd had gathered, rowdy military boys, looking for relevant undertakings on their first official days of leave. Six or seven uniformed young men were waiting for their tattoo, the same dagger stencil for each of them, sharp up on its bloody tip on six or seven shoulders. All were gauging by the face of the first man on the stool — the smallest of the group, a blond, pockmarked chip of a lad — how it would be to get the work done. They had all taken their shirts off at once, solidarity in preparation, they said. Cy could smell the cheap, army-issue soap on them, the sweat and the scent of unwearied leather. Stiff army fatigues had left patches of dry irritated skin on their bodies, and were it not for their obvious excitement to be soldiers he could have ascertained simply from the telltale bands of eczema around the waist and cuffs and necks that they were newly signed. The skin could always be relied upon to provide information — battery, disease, scars over failed organs, souvenirs from assaults and from pubescent conditions, race, combined race, sustained dependence on alcohol, diet, and the marks of love, old and new, good and bad. Other than the superficial damage caused by the chafing uniforms they seemed healthy, their bodies were firming, becoming refined, and adjusting to a regime of less sleep, hard drills, economy of food. They would be broken only to the point where they would become good soldiers before eventually being shipped off to Europe, he guessed.
The noise of their voices rose when Cy started work, a swell of bravado to address the streak of colour being set indelibly on the youth’s shoulder. It was a ritual of no return that always elicited jeers, jibes, cheers, or laughter from groups of men who were taking part in the ceremony together. The boy began by taking the line-work well, on the verge of a smile, seeming more relieved that the discomfort was manageable than proud of his pioneering accomplishment. Then the smile turned into a half grimace as the needle nicked over the same red dripping patch again and again for the full deep colour of the shading. Sweat came on to his skin and blood, so that there was a time when rendition and reality were one and the same. His muscles began to quake uncontrollably.