Mr. Adam

CHAPTER 1

I suppose it is up to me to tell the story in its entirety, because I broke it in the first place, and I lived with it from then on, and I grew to know Mr. Adam. My name is Stephen Decatur Smith, and before I got involved in the most important story in the world I was a feature writer on the New York staff of AP. I specialized in ship launchings, and sports spectacles, and indignation sprees at Town Hall, and the like. I inhabit the ground floor of a brownstone house on West Tenth Street. I am still married, which is a surprise to me.

I got a break on the story strictly by accident, which is of course the way you get most big beats. Most guys who win the Pulitzer Prize are also lucky at shooting craps.

It started on the night I covered the Zionist rally in the Garden. When the last resolution had been unanimously adopted I went hurtling out of the Garden, bound for Toots Shor’s. I never got there, because of my trick knee, and the fat lady. When the fat lady loomed up at the Eighth Avenue entrance I tried some fast evasive action and my trick knee went out on me. If it had not been for that medium tank of a woman the world would not have known for weeks, or perhaps several months, what had happened to it.

I let out a yell, and collapsed against the building, and the fat lady’s mouth flew open, and she put on a burst of speed and got out of there. I knew she thought I was having a fit.

Right across the street from the Garden is Polyclinic Hospital, strategically situated for hockey, rodeo, wrestling, and prize-fight casualties. Some of the very best surgeons in town are on the staff there. They like it, because they never know what will come into the Emergency Room next. As Dr. Thompson says, “It’s like an evac hospital plus a maternity ward.”

It was Thompson I saw after I’d hobbled across the street. He’s a friendly elephant of a man with brown, stubby hands. I’d known him in Italy, during the Gothic Line campaign, when he was running the station hospital outside Florence. I remember watching him with wonder as he worked among the wounded, using those great, powerful hands on the mud-caked doughs as tenderly as a woman touching an infant’s face.

He went to work with those hands on my knee, and in a moment there was one short, sharp pain, and then my knee was good again, as I knew it would be. “It’ll jump out,” he warned, “whenever you try any brokenfield running in traffic.”

“I know,” I said. “Come on down to Shor’s and hoist a couple.”

“Can’t,” Thompson said. “I’ve got a mystery. The board had a meeting today, and they discovered a mystery, and they delegated me to find out why.”

“What’s the mystery?” I asked.

Thompson hesitated a moment. Then he said: “I’ll brief you on it. But it’s not for publication. Not yet. You see, it’s the no reservations in the maternity ward.”

“No reservations. That’s strange.”

“Very. There’s never been less hospital space, compared to the population, than in the last few years, and it has actually been getting worse since the war ended. You see, the increase in the birth rate has been fantastic. You’d think everybody in the United States had settled on one occupation and hobby, and that was producing babies. Why, we’ve been getting reservations for our maternity ward as long as eight months in advance.”

“How can they be sure?” I asked.

“They cannot. But they just speculate. That’s the Broadway crowd for you.” Thompson examined the big loose-leaf ledger on his desk. “Then suddenly,” he said, “nothing at all!”

“You don’t mean,” I suggested, “that people have quit having babies?”

“All I know for certain,” said Thompson, “is that people have quit making reservations to have their babies in Polyclinic Hospital, as of June 22.”

I looked at the ledger. There were twenty names, addresses, telephone numbers, names of attending physicians, and amounts of deposit listed for every day in May, and every day in June, until June 22. Then, as he said, nothing at all.

I said, my finger on June 11: “What do you know, Dotty Fair’s going to be a mamma! Just for fun, I think I’ll scoop Winchell.”

“Now look,” said Thompson, “this is serious.”

“Ridiculous!” I said. “Preposterous! Imagine an institution like Polyclinic spinning in a tizzy because people have decided not to make reservations five months ahead! Hospitals are just money-grubbing, capitalistic corporations, as I’ve always suspected. The truth is that people have just got damned sick and tired of kowtowing to those sacred, omnipotent institutions, the hospitals, and have decided to have their babies at home. And I might remind you that up until about a century ago all babies were born at home.”

Thompson scratched his nose, and said: “Now if a lot of new hospitals had been built, or if we’d had a dysentery epidemic, and a lot of kids had been killed, it would be explainable. But I tell you, Stephen, nowadays they don’t wait until the honeymoon is over to call the hospital.”

I said, soothingly, “I’ll come back tomorrow, and you’ll find it’s been all a mistake, and that some file clerk, fresh out of the WACS, has been bucking all the reservations to the next highest echelon.”

I decided not to go to Shor’s. When you get to Shor’s there are a lot of other newspapermen there and they drink, and talk, and sometimes one of them tells about a story he is going to write for the Sunday section, and then he reads it in another paper on Saturday. I took the Eighth Avenue subway, and walked into our apartment at midnight.

The fire logs were thin, bigger at the ends than in the middle, and in the middle only the blue flame of the dying fire spurted. Marge was on the davenport, asleep, with her long legs crossed and her hands folded across her stomach, and the New York Post shielding her face from the light. The headlines told of fighting in Palestine, China, Burma, and Syria, which is about par for peacetime, but the news didn’t bother me, because Marge was more interesting.

I tiptoed across the room and leaned over to kiss her hair, and she pulled the paper aside and winked at me, and I knew she wasn’t sleeping and kissed her on the mouth instead. I’m the old-fashioned monogamous species of man who loves his wife.

“What’s the matter,” she said, “coming right home like this?”

“A moment without you,” I explained, “is a moment wasted.”

“You’re just feeling lustful,” she said, “or you would be in a pub.” She looked up at me, speculating. It’s amazing, what a woman can find out about a man in four years. “No,” she decided, “it’s not that. You want to tell me about a story.”

“Uh-huh,” I admitted, and I told her about Dr. Thompson and the hospital.

“I think,” she said when I’d finished, “that it’s time we had a baby. The war’s over, the world is settling down, there’s space in the hospitals, and it is time we started building a family. Besides, you’re not getting any younger.”

“I’m only thirty-eight!”

“That’s practically middle-aged. Sometimes I think we should have had a baby right away.”

“Come on,” I said, “what do you think is wrong at Polyclinic?”

“Nothing at all,” Marge said, “except all my friends have been going to Episcopal. I think I’ll go to Episcopal. I want a big room, with a radio, and I’ll want my own nurse for at least the first three days. Weren’t we dopes not to subscribe to group hospitalization?”

“Maybe you have forgotten,” I suggested with what I considered to be irony, “that it takes two to make a baby.”

She kissed me again. “Darling,” she said, “I am so glad you came home early tonight.”

During the next week there was a blizzard in New England, La Guardia turned down the job of military governor of Germany, and prime ministers, jobless kings, and jobless generals arrived every day by plane from Europe. They all had to be interviewed, and I had forgotten about Dr. Thompson and his mystery.

I forgot, that is, until one day I found myself staring up at Episcopal Hospital, and I recalled that Marge preferred Episcopal, and just on a hunch I went inside.

I was inquiring, I told the red-headed girl in the office, about the possibility of reserving a room in the maternity section, say about June 20. The girl dipped into a filing cabinet. She came back to the counter, shook her head, and smiled. “Too bad,” she said. “We’re booked solid for June 20. Now if it was just two days later—”

“You mean,” I said, feeling my stomach knot up inside me, “that you have plenty of space for the twenty-second?”

“For the twenty-second,” she said, “we don’t have a single reservation. As a matter of fact, we don’t have any at all beyond June 21.” The redhead frowned. “That is peculiar,” she said. “That is very peculiar. Funny I didn’t notice it before.”

“Thank you very much,” I said, and I left, and noticed as I walked out into the snow that she was telephoning, and that the frown had not gone from her face.

I went to the AP office and called five other hospitals. Then I walked into J.C. Pogey’s inner sanctum, unannounced. I certainly was shaken, and I suppose I must have been white with fright and foreboding, because when J.C. saw me he said: “For Christ’s sake what’s the matter?”

I fell into the leather chair by his desk, and tried to light a cigarette. I couldn’t make my hands behave, and J.C. held a match for me. “It may be the most frightful thing!” I said. “The most frightful thing!”

“What?”

“No babies. No babies after June 21.”

J.C. Pogey is a very old, and patient, and infinitely wise man who has been the New York manager since, it is believed, the Administration of Taft. In that time all the most startling events of history have flowed through his ancient and delicate fingers, so what must have appeared to him as the spectacle of a reporter going wacky could not be expected to move him overmuch. He said, gently, “All right, Steve, take it easy and tell me the tale.”

I started with my knee, and went through the whole chronology. When I had finished he did not speak for a time, but rubbed his bald head behind the ears with his thin thumbs—a sort of manual method he employed to induce rapid cerebration.

Finally he said: “It may be, of course, the most terrible and certainly the most important story since the Creation. We must make the most thorough check, and yet we must not reveal what we’re after, or do anything that will bring premature publication. It may be simply an extraordinary coincidence—but I’m afraid not.”

“That’s pretty pessimistic,” I said.

J.C. swung his high-backed chair until it faced the window, and he looked out upon the spires of the city, soft gold in the winter sun, and it seemed that he looked through and beyond. “If I were God,” he said, “and I were forced to pick a time to deprive the human race of the magic power of fertility and creation, I think that time would be now.”

We decided that I should check the story, as far as possible, by telephone. We didn’t want to send any more queries or cables than necessary, because when you start sending queries you get a lot of other people excited, and the story is likely to get beyond your control.

I armed myself with telephone directories for twenty big cities. I started by calling a hospital in Boston. I didn’t say it was the AP calling. I just said I was a prospective father. The Boston hospital was booked up for June 21, like those in New York, but I was somewhat relieved when they said they had a few reservations for the last week in June.

“I don’t think that is important,” J.C. warned. “I think you’ll find it is just a miscalculation by some Boston doctor. That’s bound to happen.”

I called Rochester, Philadelphia, Miami, and New Orleans, and then desperately swung west to San Francisco. The situation was identical. I called Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha, and then tried some small towns in the South. So far as I could discover, our July birth rate was going to be zero.

“Maybe it’s only in the United States,” I suggested.

“Try Montreal and Mexico City and B.A. and Rio,” J.C. ordered.

I found I was hungry, and that it was night, and we sent out for sandwiches and coffee, and I began combing the Western Hemisphere. Things didn’t change.

“This isn’t proving anything,” I said at midnight. “Maybe there isn’t any shortage of hospital space. The only people who really know about this are the obstetricians.”

“All right,” said J.C., “call some obstetricians.” I knew, by the way he said it, that his mind was set. A night fog had rolled over the city, and a Europe-bound liner was moaning its way toward the sea. He kept staring out into the night as if he expected to see something.

I only knew one obstetrician, Maria Ostenheimer, a friend of Marge who lives around the corner on Fifth Avenue. While I dialed her number, I noticed that J.C. was scribbling on an outgoing message form.

Dr. Ostenheimer was awake, and by the noise, she was having a party. I said, “Maria, I’ve got something serious, and very confidential to ask you.”

“Marge was over here, and she left a half-hour ago,” Dr. Ostenheimer said. “She came over here alone, and she left alone, and I think you’re a pig to even suspect…”

“No! No! No! This is nothing like that,” I interrupted. “This is strictly business, and damn vital business.”

“If you’re going to have a baby,” she said, “it’ll be both a relief and a surprise, because nobody else is having babies.” Her voice was just a bit hysterical, I thought.

“That’s what I called about,” I said, “this business of no babies.”

There was a pause, and I knew she had shut the door to her rumpus room, because the party noises ceased. “What do you know about it?” she asked.

“I know that the hospitals aren’t getting reservations in the maternity wards after June 21. That’s not only here, but all over the country, all over other countries too.”

There was no sound from the other end of the phone, and I thought for a moment that Maria might have fainted. But then she said, in a hushed, tense voice: “Stephen, at first I thought it was me. At first I thought somebody was spreading vicious lies about my work, and that I was being secretly blackballed. You know I’ve got a big practice, Stephen, and then suddenly, a few months ago, no new patients came. I start in the beginning with prenatal care, you know, Stephen.”

“You only accept a limited number of patients each month, but that quota is always filled, right?”

“That’s right. Well, it’s awfully hard, going to a colleague and announcing that you’re not getting any new patients, and I kept quiet until a few days ago, and then Dr. Blandy—he’s got a big practice in Westchester—dropped in to see me, and I felt that the same thing was worrying him, and all of a sudden he told me, and I told him that the same thing had happened to me. We’ve talked to six others—I suppose together they’re the top obstetricians in Manhattan—and we’re having a meeting next week to investigate.”

“You keep it quiet,” I said, thinking of the story, although when I look back on it now a news beat seems very small potatoes, and indeed almost irrelevant. “You keep quiet about this, but I’ll want to see you about it later.”

I hung up, and turned to J.C. “I think,” I said, “that the world has had it!”

“Perhaps not the whole world,” said J.C. “Perhaps only the Western Hemisphere.” He handed me the message form. It read:

“We’ll send this immediately,” he said, “to Pat Morin in Paris, and Boots Norgaard in Rome, and Frank O’Brien in Istanbul, and Goldberg in Budapest, and Eddy Gilmore in Moscow. And of course to the London Bureau.”

“They’ll think you’re nuts,” I said.

“They will until they’ve checked up,” said J.C. “Then they’ll be frightened, just as you are, and just as I am. We won’t get answers to these queries until tomorrow, so you go on home to that blonde wife of yours, and get plenty of sleep, because I do not believe you will be sleeping very much for a week or so.”

One of our best spies told me, once, that there were only two kinds of wives—those to whom you told nothing, and those to whom you told everything. I tell Marge everything, but on this night I kept my mouth shut, because I knew if we started talking about it I’d never get any sleep. Besides, I was afraid. I didn’t know how she’d react if I told her it didn’t appear likely that we’d ever have any babies. I felt desolate, and empty inside. I consumed a good deal of rye, straight, before I slept.

In the morning Marge brought coffee to bed, which was unusual, and she said: “Stephen, you’re not sick, are you?”

“No. I’ve got to get up. I’ve got to go to the office early.”

“Stephen, what’s the trouble?”

“Nothing,” I said, and put the covers over my head and crawled into the middle of “Smith Field.” We have the most enormous double bed in New York, built for lazy living. It’s surrounded by a shelf, and gadgets. On one side we have a radio, and a bookcase, and on the other a little refrigerator and bar. Our friends say our bed is decadent, and indecent, but we like it, and call it Smith Field.

“There’s no use hiding,” said Marge. “Come out from under there. You’ve either been gambling, or there’s been trouble at the office, or you’re sick. Something really bad has happened. I know.”

“It’s just that I’m a little hung over,” I lied.

“Is it that hospital business you talked about last week?”

I didn’t reply, but I knew that she knew. “I don’t know why,” Marge said, “but I’ve been worrying about it.”

“Nothing is certain, yet,” I said. When I left the house I kissed her with what I thought was reassurance. But I had never before seen Marge’s face so strained, and her eyes so dull, and lacking of life. On the way uptown it seemed that I stood apart and alone from all the others on the streets and in the subway. The bustle of New York going to work on a weekday morning seemed altogether futile and without meaning.

J.C. had a little stack of teletype messages on his desk, and I knew the verdict before I read them, simply by the set of his shoulders, and by his silence.

The answers were all the same. So far as anyone could determine, no more children would be born after the last week in June. In Paris and London, very secret official investigations had already been started.

“We’ve got answers,” said J.C., “from everywhere except Moscow,” but even as he spoke an office boy brought in another incoming teletype. It was from the Moscow Bureau. It read:

“That’s enough for me,” said J.C.

“It seems to me,” I said, “that the whole world knows about this thing, and is trying to keep it a secret.”

“I don’t blame the whole world,” said J.C. “The whole world is like a man who knows he has cancer, but won’t admit it, even to himself. However, it has to break some time, and as long as it has to break, the AP might as well break it.”

“We’ll have to put the Washington Bureau on it, for official statements, and the American Medical Association. But—why?”

“That’s it—why?”

“There must be a scientific reason.”

J.C. put the worn serge of his elbows on his desk and massaged his head behind his ears. “All night,” he said, “I kept thinking of something General Farrell said after he witnessed the first atomic bomb explosion in New Mexico. He said, if I remember the words correctly, that the explosion ‘warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.’”

I recalled a kindred phrase, after Hiroshima was atomized, about civilization now having the power to commit suicide at will. I thought about it, and I thought of the Mississippi disaster, and the thing began to come clear to me, and I yelled: “When was it that Mississippi blew up? Wasn’t it in September?”

J.C. straightened. “That’s it, of course!” he said. “The Mississippi explosion was September the twenty-first. Nine months to the day! Nine months to the very day!”