Then it was night, ten o’clock, ten-thirty, eleven, and yet still nothing, though the contractions were coming faster now and Dr. Bergstrom was on the case, poking his head between the curtains every few minutes, inspecting Iris’s cervix for dilation and making encouraging noises. I should say, incidentally, that I’d been given permission to be with my wife throughout the process and to witness the birth itself, something Prok had encouraged me to do. He’d been present for the delivery of all three of his children, and he spoke very passionately both to me and Dr. Bergstrom about the significance of the experience from a scientific point of view, and I think he himself would have liked to be there with us if it wouldn’t have looked odd in the eyes of the community. Odd enough that the husband should be present, let alone another male, no matter how closely connected and how purely objective he might have been. And of course Iris would have refused him in any case. This was her show. Absolutely.
And then it occurred to me, as eleven o’clock slipped by and my stomach broiled and the bourbon lit me from within and all of my fears came rising to the surface like the corpses of the drowned, that there was actually something serendipitous in the delay, that something extraordinary was occurring here — if Iris held out another forty-five minutes by my watch, John Jr. would share a birthday with Prok. I told myself that everything was happening for a reason, that was all it was, and I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. Or auspicious. John Jr. and Prok. I saw a succession of birthday parties stretching on over the years, balloons, flowers, the cutting of the cake, Prok lifting my son to his shoulders and parading round the room with him, uncle, godfather, mentor.
I took a pull at the flask and glanced down at Iris. She lay there like a stone. They’d given her an epidural for the pain and Dr. Bergstrom had begun to talk about inducing labor or even operating because there was the danger now of an infection setting in, and the nurses had begun to bustle a bit because one way or the other the moment was coming. “Iris,” I said, and I suppose I was half-drunk at the time, the flask doing wonders for my jangled nerves, and I didn’t want to think about the delay and the consequences and the fatality that hung over the bed like a palpable nightmare, because I was going to look on the bright side of things, I was going to buck her up as best I could. “Iris, you know what?”
She was exhausted, drained, all her energy and her optimism gone. She barely lifted her eyes.
“Looks like John Jr. — or Madeline — is going to share a famous birthday.”
Nothing.
“With Prok. In forty-five minutes it’s Prok’s birthday, June the twenty-third, did you realize that? Isn’t it amazing?”
She let out a sudden gasp, as if a bottle of champagne had been unstoppered, and then, seconds later, another, and then another, and the curtains flew back and the nurse was wheeling the gurney into the delivery room, and as I sat there in surgical mask and scrubs and tried to contain the hammering of my heart, I watched my son come into the world at 11:56 p.m. on June 22, 1947.
I’d like to say that we gave birth to the male volume at the same time — and we should have, according to the schedule Prok had laid out for himself — but the parturition of the text was a bit more difficult and protracted than any of us could have imagined. As the summer broiled around us and we darted off for abbreviated field trips to this venue or that, Prok worked ever more furiously on the manuscript, writing everywhere — in the car, on the train, at home before work and in the office after the doors had been shut, composing the latter chapters even as the early ones came back to us in galleys from W.B. Saunders. He was putting in eighteen-hour days, sleep a luxury, food nothing more than fuel for the engine, Mac, Mrs. Matthews, Corcoran, Rutledge and I coopted into reading proofs, our offices a blizzard of paper, graphs and spread-eagled texts, always another chart to complete or a fact to check. The absolute final date for completed copy was September 15, and as late as the end of August there were five chapters yet to finish.
I’d never been so busy in my life, nor had Prok ever been so demanding — or short-tempered — and when I wasn’t at work there was the nonstop turmoil of the house, diapers in the laundry, boiling away on the stove, strung up like miniature flags of surrender on the line out back, bottles everywhere and the smell of formula hanging over the bedroom and kitchen till I began to think the walls themselves were lactating. There were late-night feedings, John Jr.’s symphony of shrieks, yowls and sputters, the aching quiet of the house at three a.m. and Iris’s maternal calm. And her mother, her mother, of course. Her mother was there for the first month, a sponge clamped in each hand, wiping down every horizontal surface till it shone, carting in groceries, sweeping like a robot and forever cooking up vats of lamb stew or succotash or four-inch pans of macaroni and cheese with hunks of sliced frankfurter spread like gun emplacements across the top.
I was neutral toward her. She was like Iris, only older, independent-minded, contentious, and she could never bring herself to address me directly, instead referring to me in the third person, as, for instance, “Is he hungry? Does he sit here?” But she took some of the pressure off me and kept Iris company and that was fine by me, because, as I’ve indicated, this was the busiest and most critical time the project had ever seen. Once she did leave, though, to go back home to Michigan City, the onus fell on me, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. I tried my best. Iris still hadn’t recovered her usual level of energy, and I did what I could to help out, picking up groceries, doing a load of laundry, that sort of thing, but naturally things began to slip and I couldn’t help feeling overburdened and resentful.
And yet I don’t mean to sound negative, because a kind of miracle grew out of it alclass="underline" I got to know my son. To this point he’d been bundled and diapered and whisked from one room to the other, from my mother-in-law’s arms to Iris’s, and if I got more than a peek at the reddened amorphous little face that was saying a lot, but as soon as her mother left — as we came up the walk on our way back from the bus station, in fact — Iris just handed him to me as if he were a sack of groceries she was tired of shifting from one hip to the other. “Go ahead, hold him, John,” she’d said, and there he was, the surprisingly dense bundle of him, thrust into my arms. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of dropping him, of failing to properly support his neck, afraid of his weight and his movements and the way he had of effortlessly sucking in air and letting it out again in a maddened inconsolable shriek. He was a time bomb. He was made of lead. He had the lungs of Aeolus. “It’s just a baby, John, that’s all — he won’t bite. He doesn’t even have any teeth.” She looked at me, at the expression on my face, and burst out laughing.