Saint Maybe

10. Recovering from the Hearts-of-Palm Flu

She asked if he thought he might ever want children and he said, “Oh, well, maybe sometime.” She asked how long he figured they should wait and he said, “A few years, maybe? I don’t know.”

They’d been married just four months, by then. He could see his answer came as a disappointment.

But why should they rush to change things? Their lives were perfect. Simply watching her — simply sitting at the kitchen table watching her knead a loaf of bread-filled him with contentment. Her hands were so capable, and she moved with such economy. When she wiped her floury palms on the seat of her jeans, he was struck with admiration for her naturalness.

“I had been wondering about sooner,” she told him.

“Well, no need to decide this instant,” he said.

He watched her oil a baking pan, working her long, tanned fingers deftly into the corners, and he thought of a teacher he had had in seventh grade. Mrs. Arnett, her name was. Mrs. Arnett had once been his ideal woman — soft curves and sweet perfume and ivory skin. He had found any number of reasons to bicycle past her house. Her front bow window, which was curtained off day and night by cream-colored draperies, had displayed a single, pale blue urn, and somehow that urn had come to represent all his fantasies about marriage. He had imagined Mrs. Arnett greeting her husband at the door each evening, wearing not the bermudas or dull slacks his mother wore but a swirly dress the same shade of blue as the urn; and she would kiss Mr. Arnett full on the lips and lead him inside. Everything would be so focused. No distractions: no TV blaring or telephone ringing or neighbors stopping by.

Certainly no children.

You couldn’t say Ian and Rita lived that way, even now. They were still in the house on Waverly Street — partly a matter of economics, partly to keep his father company. (Daphne had a place of her own now.) His father still occupied the master bedroom, and Rita’s widowed mother was forever dropping by, and Rita’s various aunts and cousins and a whole battalion of woman friends sat permanently around the kitchen table waiting for her to pour coffee. Where would children fit into all this?

“Next birthday, I’ll be thirty,” Rita told him.

“Thirty’s young,” Ian said.

Next birthday, Ian would be forty-two.

Forty-two seemed way too old to be thinking of babies.

At the wood shop, one of the workers had a daughter smaller than his own granddaughters. He was on his second wife, a manicurist named LaRue, and LaRue had told him it wasn’t fair to deprive her of a family just because he had already had the joy of one. He had reported every detail of their arguments on the subject; and next he’d discussed the pregnancy, which seemed so new and exciting to LaRue and so old to Butch, and finally the baby herself, who cried every evening and interrupted dinner and caused LaRue to smell continually of spit-up milk. Now the baby was two and sometimes came along with her mother to give Butch a ride home after work. She would toddle through the shavings, crowing, and hold out her little arms until he set aside his plane and picked her up. “Ain’t she a doll?” he asked the others. “Ain’t she a living doll?” But the sight of his grizzled cheek next to that flower-petal face was disturbing, somehow, and Ian always turned away, smiling falsely, and grew very busy with his tools.

Ian and Rita went to church on foot that next Sunday because the weather was so fine. Besides, Ian liked the ceremony of it: the two of them holding hands as they walked and calling out greetings to various neighbors working in their yards. Rita wore a dress (or at least, a long black T-shirt that hit her above the knees), because she’d grown up at Alameda Baptist and considered jeans unsuitable for church. Her braid was wound in a knot at the nape of her neck. Ian couldn’t help noticing the unusually attractive way her hair grew, hugging her temples closely and swooping down over her ears in ripples.

“Did I tell you Mary-Clay went in for her ultrasound?” she asked. “Her doctor said she’s having twins.”

“Twins! Good grief,” he said. A shadow fell over him.

“Two little girls, her doctor thinks. Mary-Clay is just tickled to bits. Girls are easier than boys, she says.”

“Rita,” Ian said, “neither is easy.”

She glanced at him. He hadn’t meant to sound so emphatic.

“At least,” he said, “not according to my limited experience.”

They turned onto York Road. Ahead they could see a cluster of worshipers standing in front of the church, enjoying their last few moments of sunshine before they stepped inside. Rita said, “Well, now that you mention it, your experience was limited. Those children weren’t your own. You weren’t even solely responsible for them!”

“Right,” Ian told her. “I had both my parents helping, and still it wasn’t easy. A lot of it was just plain boring. Just providing a warm body, just being there; anyone could have done it. And then other parts were terrifying. Kids get into so much! They start to matter so much. Some days I felt like a fireman or a lifeguard or something — all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.”

Rita gathered a breath, but by then they’d reached the others. Sister Myra said, “Why, hello, you two!” and kissed them both, even Ian. She had never kissed Ian before he was married. Marriage changed things a good deal, he had learned.

They were the church’s only newlyweds at the moment, and almost the only ones ever. Their wedding had taken place at Alameda Baptist, but most of Second Chance had attended and Reverend Emmett had helped officiate, even donning one of Alameda’s flowing black pastoral robes so when he raised his arms to pray he had resembled a skinny Stealth bomber. Now they were passed from hand to hand like babies in an old folks’ home, with Rita saying those just-right things that women somehow know to say. “Brother Kenneth, how’s that sciatica? Why, Sister Denise! You’ve gone and lightened your hair.” Ian was impressed, but also disconcerted. This never seemed to be his Rita, who spent her weekdays bluntly informing customers that most of their lifelong treasures belonged in the nearest landfill.

They went inside and took two seats halfway up the aisle. Sister Nell was passing out hymn pamphlets. When Ian opened his he found the top corner of each page torn off as if gnawed by a mouse, and he smiled to himself and looked around for Daphne. (She must have some kind of deficiency, Agatha always said, to eat paper the way she did.) But he didn’t see her. The fact was that she attended less and less, now that she lived downtown. Just about all you could count on her for was Good Works on Saturday mornings.

Rita was talking with her neighbor on the other side, Brother Kenneth’s son Johnny, who used to be a little pipsqueak of a boy but now was studying for the ministry. Sometimes lately he had assisted with the services. Today, though, Reverend Emmett rose alone to deliver the opening prayer. Rita faced forward obediently and bowed her head, but Ian sensed she wasn’t listening. She failed to straighten when Reverend Emmett said, “Amen,” and she chewed a thumbnail edgily during the Bible reading. Ian reached over and captured her hand and tucked it into his, and she relaxed against him.

“Thus concludes the reading of the Holy Word,” Reverend Emmett said. “We will now sing hymn fourteen.”

The little organ wheezed out the first notes and Ian let go of Rita’s hand. But she didn’t draw away. Instead she looked directly into his face as they stood up, ignoring the hymnal he held before them.

“Listen,” she said in a low voice. “I think I might be pregnant.”

He had already opened his mouth to start singing. He shut it. The congregation went on without them: “Break Thou the bread of life …”

“It wasn’t on purpose,” she said. And then she whispered, “But I intend to be glad about this, I tell you!”

What could he say?

“Me, too, sweetheart,” he said.

They faced front again. Stammering slightly, he found his place and joined the other singers.

That was in July. By September, she was having to leave the waistband of her jeans unsnapped and she wore her loosest work shirts over them. She said she thought she could feel the baby moving now — a little bubble, she said, flitting here and there in a larking sort of way. Ian set a palm on her abdomen but it was still too early for him to feel anything from outside.

She bought a book that showed what the baby looked like week by week, and she and Ian studied it together. A lima bean. A tadpole. Then finally a person but a clumsily constructed one, like something modeled in preschool. They were thinking of Joshua for a boy and Rachel for a girl. Ian tried the names on his tongue to see how they’d work in everyday life. “Oh, and I’d like you to meet my son, Joshua Bedloe …” His son! The notion brought forth the most bewildering mixture of feelings: worry and excitement and also, underneath, a pervasive sense of tiredness. He told Rita about everything but the tiredness. That he kept to himself.

Now it seemed the household was completely taken over by women. Rita’s batty mother, Bobbeen, spent hours in their kitchen, generally seated not at the table but on it and dangling her high-heeled sandals from her toes. With her crackling, bleached-out fan of hair and snapping gum and staticky barrage of advice, she seemed electric, almost dangerous. “You’re insane to go on working when you don’t have to, Rita, stark staring insane. Don’t you remember what happened to your aunt Dora when she kept on? You tell her, Ian. Tell her to quit hauling other folkses’ junk when she’s four and a half months gone and all her pelvic bones are coming off their hinges.” But she didn’t actually mean for Ian to say anything; she didn’t leave the briefest pause before starting a new train of thought. “I guess you heard about Molly Sidney. Six months along and she phones her doctor, says, ‘Feels like somebody’s hauling rope out of way down low in my back.’ ‘Oh,’ her doctor says, That’s normal.’ Says, ‘Pay it no mind,’ and the very next night guess what.”

She could recite the most bizarre stories: umbilical cords kinked off like twisted vacuum-cleaner hoses, babies arriving with tails and coats of fur, deluges of blood in the lawn-care aisle at Ace Hardware. If Rita’s two married girlfriends were around they would tut-tut. “Hush, now! You’ll scare her!” they’d say. But their own stories were nearly as alarming. “I was in labor for thirty-three hours.” “Well, they had to tie me down on the bed.” Serenely, Rita circulated with the coffeepot. Ian retreated to the basement, where his father was repainting the family high chair. “Women!” Ian said. “They’re giving me the chills.”

“You want to close that door behind you, Ian,” his father said. “It was paint fumes caused your cousin Linley’s baby to have that little learning problem.”

In October Ian started building a cradle of Virginia cherry — a simple slant-sided box without a hood because Rita wanted the baby to be able to see the world. He obtained the materials at no cost but of course he had to contribute his own time, and so he fell into the habit of staying on in the shop after it closed. His metal rasp, zipping down the edge of a rocker slat, said careen! careen! Often he seemed to hear the other workers’ voices echoing through the empty room. “Drove a spindle wedge too hard and split the goddamn …” Bert said clearly, and Mr. Brant asked, “Why the hell you choose a plank with the sapwood showing?” Ian stopped rasping and ran a hand along the slat’s edge, trying to gauge the curve. All his years here, he had worked with straight lines. He had deliberately stayed away from the bow-backed chairs and benches that required eye judgment, personal opinion. Now he was surprised at how these two shallow U shapes satisfied his palm.

And all his years here he had failed to understand Mr. Brant’s prejudice against nails, his insistence on mortise-and-tenon and dovetails. “You put a drawer together with dovetail, it stays tight a century no matter what the weather,” Mr. Brant was fond of saying, and Ian always thought, A century! Who cares? It was not that he opposed doing a thing well. Everything that came from his hands was fine and smooth and sturdy. But you could manage that with nails too, for heaven’s sake; and if it didn’t last forever, why, he would not be there to notice. Now, though, he took special pride in the cradle’s nearly seamless joints, which would expand and contract in harmony and continue to stay tight through a hundred steamy summers and parched winters.

Early in December Rita and Ian went with Daphne and her new boyfriend, Curt, to a bar downtown that featured pinball machines. Daphne had developed a passion for pinball. Rita was beginning her seventh month and she had lately cut her work hours in half, which left her with too much time on her hands. Any outing at all struck her as preferable to staying home. This was why Ian agreed to go to the bar, even though he didn’t drink. And Rita, of course, couldn’t drink, and Curt turned out to belong to A. A. So there the three of them sat with their seltzers while Daphne, merrily sloshing her beer, toured the various games. Her favorite, she said, was the one called Black Knight 2000, which she wanted the four of them to try if only the others would give them half a chance. She hoisted herself onto a stool and glowered at the crowd. There were so many people here that Ian couldn’t even see what kind of room it was.

Curt was telling Rita about his sister’s breech baby. (Did people actively collect these tales?) He didn’t look like much, in Ian’s honest opinion — a bespectacled and bearded type in clothes too determinedly rustic. Also, something unfortunate had happened to his hair. It stuck out all over his head in rigid little cylinders. Ian said, “What …?” He leaned closer to Daphne and said, “What would you call that kind of hairdo, exactly?”

“Do you like it? I did it myself,” she said. “You braid dozens and dozens of eentsy braids and dunk them in Elmer’s glue to make them last. The only problem is when he jogs.”

“Jogs?”

“He claims they bobble against his head and bang his scalp.”

Ian snorted, but all at once he felt old. In fact he was very likely the oldest person present. He looked down at the hand encircling his glass — the grainy skin on his knuckles, the gnarled veins in his forearm. How could he have assumed that old people were born that way? That age was an individual trait, like freckles or blond hair, that would never happen to him?

He was older now, he thought with a thud, than Danny had ever managed to become.

Rita was laughing at something Curt had said, unconsciously cradling the bulge of her baby as she leaned back against the bar. Daphne was humming along with the jukebox. “Madonna,” she broke off to tell Ian.

“Pardon?”

“ ‘Like a Prayer.’ ”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The song, Ian.”

“Oh.”

He took a gulp from his glass. (This seltzer smelled like wet dog.) “So anyhow,” he said to Daphne, “where did you and Curt meet?”

“At work,” she said.

Daphne had a job now at a place called Trips Unlimited. Ian said, “He’s a travel agent?”

“No, no, he came in to reserve a flight. By profession he’s an inventor.”

“An inventor.”

“He’s got this one invention: a Leaf Paw. This sort of claw-type contraption you hold in your left hand to scoop up the leaves you’re raking. We think it’s going to make him rich.”

Ian glanced over at Rita, hoping she’d heard. (They often considered the same things funny.) But Rita was staring fixedly across the room. He followed her eyes and saw a small, pretty girl in a Danzig T-shirt playing the Black Knight 2000 machine. An old friend, maybe? But when he turned back to ask, he realized Rita’s stare was unfocused. It was the glazed and inward stare of someone listening to faraway music. He said, “Rita?”

“Excuse me,” she said abruptly. She stood and made her way through the crowd, disappearing behind the door marked LADIES.

Ian and Daphne looked at each other. “Think I should go after her?” Daphne asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Well, she’s probably okay.”

Although he was nowhere near as confident as he sounded.

They fell silent. Even Curt seemed to know better than to try and make small talk. Now Ian noticed the noise in this place — the laughter and clinking glassware and the hubbub from the pinball machines, which whanged and burbled and barked instructions in metallic, hollow voices. Everyone was so carefree! Two stools over, a young woman with long hair as dark as Rita’s nonchalantly swung her pink-and-turquoise mountain-climbing shoes. A young man in a red jacket and a straight blond ponytail passed her one of the beers he’d just paid for. The jukebox had stopped playing, but some people in a booth were singing “Happy Birthday.”

Then Rita was back, white-faced. All three of them stood up. She told Ian, “I’m bleeding.”

He swallowed.

Curt was the first to react. He said, “I’ll get the check. You three head out to the car,” and he dropped a set of keys into Ian’s palm.

Ian had forgotten that they’d driven here in Curt’s Volvo. “Let’s go,” he said. He shepherded Rita toward the door. Daphne followed with their wraps. When they reached the sidewalk he stopped to help Rita into her jacket. She shook her head, but he could hear how her teeth were chattering. “Put it on,” he told her, and she submitted, allowing him to bully her arms into the sleeves.

Curt caught up with them as Ian was unlocking the car door. “Which hospital?” he asked, sliding behind the wheel, and he started the engine in one smooth motion. He drove as if he’d dealt with such crises often, swooping dexterously from lane to lane and barely slowing for red lights before proceeding through them. Meanwhile Ian held both of Rita’s hands in his. Her teeth were still chattering and he wondered if she was in shock.

At the Emergency Room entrance, Curt pulled up behind an ambulance. Ian hustled Rita out of the backseat and took her inside to a woman at a long green counter. “She’s bleeding,” he told the woman.

“How much?” she asked.

Instantly, he felt reassured. It appeared there were degrees to this; they shouldn’t automatically assume the worst. Rita said, “Not a whole lot.”

The woman called for a nurse, and Rita was led away while Ian stayed behind to fill out forms. Insurance company, date of birth … He answered hurriedly, scrawling across the dotted lines. When he was almost finished, Daphne and Curt came in from parking the car. “They’ve taken her somewhere,” he told them. He asked Daphne, “Do you know her mother’s maiden name?”

“Make one up,” Daphne said. She looked around at the faded green walls, the elderly black man half asleep on a molded plastic chair. “Not bad,” she said. “Usually this place is packed.”

How often did she come here, anyway? And Curt, standing behind her, said, “Lord, yes, there’ve been times I’ve waited six and seven hours.”

“Well, we might have a wait this evening, too,” Ian said. “Maybe you should both go home.”

“I’m staying,” Daphne told him.

“Yes, but,” Ian said. He slid the form across the counter to the woman. He said, “But, um, I’d really rather you go. To tell the truth.”

He could see she felt hurt. She said, “Oh.”

“I just want to … concentrate on this. All right?” he asked.

“I could concentrate too,” she said.

But Curt touched her sleeve and said, “Come on, Daph. I’m sure he’ll call as soon as he has anything to tell you.”

When he led her away, Ian felt overwhelmingly grateful. He felt he might even love the boy.

Rita lay on a stretcher in an enclosure formed by white curtains. No one had come to examine her yet, she said, but they’d phoned her doctor. She wore a withered blue hospital gown, and a white sheet covered her legs and rose gently over the mound of her stomach. Ian settled on a stool beside the stretcher. He picked up her hand, which felt warmer now and slightly moist. She curled her fingers tightly around his.

“Remember our wedding night?” she asked him.

“Yes, of course.”

“Remember in the hotel? I came out of the bathroom in my nightgown and you were sitting on the edge of the bed, touching two fingers to your forehead. I thought you were nervous about making love.”

“Well, I was,” he said.

“You were praying.”

“Well, that too.”

“You were shy about saying your bedtime prayers in front of me and so you pretended you were just sort of thinking.”

“I was worried I would look like one of those show-off Christians,” he said. “But still I wanted to, um, I felt I ought to—”

“Could you pray now?” she asked him.

“Now?”

“Could you pray for the baby?”

“Honey, I’ve been praying ever since we left the bar,” he said.

Really his prayers had been for Rita. He had fixed her firmly, fiercely to this planet and held her there with all his strength. But he had prayed not only for her health but for her happiness, and so in a sense he supposed you could say that he’d prayed for the baby as well.

She spent one night in the hospital but was released the following morning, still pregnant, with orders to lie flat until her due date. At first this seemed easy. She would do anything, she said, anything at all. She would stand on her head for two months, if it helped her hang onto this baby. But she had always been the athletic, go-getter type, and books didn’t interest her and TV made her restless. So every evening when Ian came home from work he found the radio blaring, and Rita on the telephone, and the kitchen bustling with women fixing tidbits to tempt her appetite as if she were a delicate invalid. Which, of course, she wasn’t. “I don’t care if it takes major surgery!” she’d be shouting into the phone. “You get those moldy old magazines away from her!” (She was talking to Dennis or Lionel — one of her poor frazzled assistants.) Her hair flared rebelliously out of its braid and her shirtsleeves hiked up on her arms; nothing could induce her to spend the day in her bathrobe. And constantly she leapt to her feet on one pretext or another, while everybody cried, “Stop! Wait!” holding out their hands as if to catch the infant they imagined she would let drop.

Ian’s father, who kept mostly to the basement these days, told Ian this was all a result of a misstep in evolution. “Human beings should never have risen upright,” he said. “Now every pregnant woman has gravity working against her. Remember Claudia? Same thing happened to Claudia, back when she was expecting Franny.”

“That’s true, it did,” Ian said. He had forgotten. All at once he saw Lucy in her red bandanna with her hair hanging down her back. “Just, you know, a little bleeding …” she informed him in her quaint croak. Lucy had been pregnant herself at the time. She had been pregnant at her wedding, most likely, and only now did Ian stop to think how she must have felt going through those early weeks alone, hiding her symptoms from everyone, trying to figure out some way to manage.

“It won’t be real fancy,” she said.

And, “Twenty twenty-seven! Great God Almighty!”

She said, “Do you think Danny will mind?”

That evening while he and Rita were playing Scrabble, he rose and wandered over to Lucy’s framed photo above the piano. Daphne had hung it there some time ago, but he’d hardly glanced at it since. He lifted it from its hook and held it level in both hands. “I’ll trade you two of my vowels for one consonant,” Rita said, but Ian went on frowning at Lucy’s small, bright face.

Of course, she struck him as preposterously young. That was only to be expected. And everything about her was so dated. That leggy look of the sixties! That childish, Christopher Robin stance grown women used to affect, with their feet planted wide apart and their bare knees braced! She resembled a little tepee on stilts. A paper parasol from a cocktail glass. One of those tiny, peaked Japanese mushrooms with the thready stems.

He was noticing this to gain some distance. Surely he was able to see her clearly now. Wasn’t he? Surely he had the perspective, at last, to understand what Lucy’s meaning had been in his life.

But Rita said, “Okay, three of my vowels. For one lousy consonant. You drive a hard bargain, you devil.”

And Ian replaced the picture on its hook, no wiser.

This was going to be the first Christmas of their marriage and Rita had big plans. She sent Daphne on mysterious errands with shopping lists and whispered instructions. She phoned Thomas in New York and Agatha in L.A., making sure they were coming. She drew up a guest list for Christmas dinner: Mrs. Jordan and the foreigners and her mother and Curt. Ian had once mentioned how the Bedloes’ holiday meals used to be all hors d’oeuvres, and she decided to revive the practice even though it meant cooking from the living room. For days she lay on the couch with a breadboard across her lap, rolling pinwheels and stamping out fancy shapes of biscuit dough and mincing herbs that Doug obligingly toted back and forth for her. Ian worried she was overdoing, but at least it kept her entertained.

Christmas fell on a Monday that year. Thomas arrived in time for church on Sunday morning, and Daphne met them there, carrying her knapsack because she’d be sleeping over. Agatha and Stuart flew in that afternoon. For the family supper on Christmas Eve they had black-eyed peas and rice. Everybody was puzzled by this (they usually had oyster stew), but Rita explained that black-eyed peas were an ancient custom. Something to do with luck, she said — good luck for the coming year. Almost immediately a sort of click of recognition traveled around the table. Coming year? Then wasn’t that New Year’s Eve? They sent each other secret glances and then applied themselves to their food, smiling. Rita didn’t notice a thing. Ian did, though, and he was touched by his family’s tact. Lately he’d started valuing such qualities. He had begun to see the importance of manners and gracious gestures; he thought now that his mother’s staunch sprightliness had been braver than he had appreciated in his youth. (Last summer, laid up for a week with a wrenched back, he had suddenly wondered how Bee had endured the chronic pain of her arthritis all those years. He suspected that had taken a good deal more strength than the brief, flashy acts of valor you see in the movies.)

“To the cook!” Thomas said, raising his water glass, and they all said, “To Rita!” Rita grinned and raised her own glass. Probably for decades of Christmas Eves to come the Bedloes would be loyally eating black-eyed peas and rice.

It was afterward, in front of the fire, that Thomas announced his engagement. “You two won’t be the newest newlyweds anymore,” he told Ian. This wasn’t exactly a shock — he’d been dating the same girl for some time now — but they had been hoping he would get over her. They all felt she bossed him around too much. (He kept falling for these managerial types who didn’t have any softness to them; they might as well be business partners, Daphne had once complained.) Still, the women hugged him and Doug said, “What do you know!” and Ian suggested they call Angie and welcome her to the family. So they did, lining up in the hall to tell her more or less the same thing in several different ways. While Ian was waiting his turn at the phone he had a sudden memory of Danny presenting Lucy in this very spot. What was it he had said? “I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life,” he had said, and then as now the family had received the news with the most resolute show of pleasure.

On Christmas morning they opened their presents — most of Ian’s and Rita’s relating to babies — and then cleared away the gift wrap and started getting ready for the dinner guests. Rita directed from an armchair Ian had dragged into the dining room, except that she kept jumping up to do things herself. Finally Agatha put Stuart in charge of diverting her. “Show her your card tricks, Stu,” she said. “Oh, please, no,” Rita groaned. Ian and his father fitted all the leaves into the table, and the women added last-minute touches to the dishes Rita had prepared. Everyone was entranced to find nothing but hors d’oeuvres. “Look! Artichokes,” Doug pointed out. “Look at this, kids, my favorite: Chesapeake crab spread. It’s just like the old days.” Rita beamed. Stuart told her, “Pick a card. Any card. Come on, Rita, pay attention.”

The current foreigners’ names were Manny, Mike, and Buck. They were the first to arrive — they always showed up on the dot, not familiar with Baltimore ways — and Mrs. Jordan followed, bearing one of her sumptuous black fruitcakes with the frosting you had to crack through with a chisel. Then Bobbeen appeared with an old-fashioned crank-style ice cream freezer, fully loaded and ready for the ice, and last came Curt, looking as if he’d just that minute rolled out of bed. Those who were guests had to have the hors d’oeuvres explained for them — all but Mrs. Jordan, of course, who’d been through this year after year. Mrs. Jordan said, “Why, you’ve even made Bee’s hearts-of-palm dish!” And later, once they’d taken their seats and Doug had offered the blessing, she said, “Rita, if Ian’s mother could see what you’ve done here she would be so pleased.”

“Remember the first time we tasted hearts of palm?” Agatha asked Thomas.

“Was that when we had the flu?”

“No, no, this was before. You were really little, and Daphne was just a baby. I don’t think she got to try them. But you and I were crazy about them; we polished off the platter. It wasn’t till five or six years later we had that flu.”

“Ugh! Worst flu of my life,” Thomas said.

“Mine too. I couldn’t eat a bite for days. But finally I called out, ‘Ian, I’m hungry!’ Remember, Ian? You were flat on your back—”

“I was sick?” Ian asked.

“Everyone was, even Grandma and Grandpa. You said, ‘Hungry for what?’ And I thought and thought, and the only thing that came to me was hearts of palm.”

“So then we all wanted hearts of palm,” Thomas told him. “They just sounded so good, even though I’d forgotten them and Daphne’d never had them. We said, ‘Please, Ian, won’t you please bring us hearts of—’ ”

“I don’t remember this,” Ian said.

“So you got up and tottered downstairs, holding onto the banister—”

“Put your coat on over your pajamas, stepped into somebody’s boots—”

“Drove all the way to the grocery store and brought back hearts of palm.”

“I don’t remember any of it,” Ian said.

They regarded him fondly — all but the foreigners, who were giving the hors d’oeuvres their single-minded attention. “My hero!” Rita told him.

“I said, ‘Ian, thank you,’ ” Agatha went on, “and you said, ‘Thank you. Until you mentioned them,’ you said, ‘I didn’t realize that’s what I’d been wanting all along myself.’ ”

Stuart said, “Maybe they contained some trace element your bodies knew they needed.”

“Well, whatever,” Curt said, “these here taste mighty good. You should go into the catering business, Rita.”

“Oh, I believe I’ve got enough to do for the next little bit,” she told him. And she patted her abdomen, which Ian’s borrowed shirt could barely cover.

Daphne said, “Have you heard? After this baby’s born, Rita and I are planning to be partners. Half the time I’ll do clutter counseling while she stays home with the baby, half the time I’ll stay with the baby while she does clutter counseling.”

Ian raised his eyebrows. He knew Rita had been considering various strategies, but she hadn’t mentioned Daphne. He said, “What about Trips Unlimited?”

“That’s not really working out,” Daphne told him. “It’s too personal.”

“A travel agency is personal?”

“Mr. X and Mrs. Y book two flights to Paris and one hotel room, say, and I can’t let on I’ve noticed. Or they cheat on their expense accounts with first-class reservations to—”

No one suggested that this new job would surely be even more personal — that she seemed to search out the personal. Finally Curt said, “Well, if you ever get tired of clutter counseling you could always become a scribe.”

“Scribe?” Daphne asked, perking up.

“You could rent a stall at Harborplace and offer to write people’s letters for them.”

Daphne looked perplexed. The only person who laughed was Ian.

There was a little wait before dessert because they had to freeze the ice cream. Bobbeen said, “You realize we don’t have a single child here? No one begging to turn the crank for us.” But the foreigners, it emerged, would love to turn the crank. They rushed off to the kitchen while Daphne and Agatha cleared the table. Rita stayed seated at Ian’s left, debating baby names with Mrs. Jordan. Curt was attempting to break into the fruitcake, and Thomas was telling his grandfather about his latest computer game. The idea was, he said, to show how dislodging one historical event could dislodge a hundred others, even those that seemed unrelated. “Take slavery,” he said. “Students would tell the computer that the U.S. has never had slavery, and then they would name some later event. The computer goes, ‘Beep!’ and a message flashes up on the screen: Null and void.”

“But why would that be any fun?” Doug asked.

“Well, it’s not supposed to be fun so much as educational.”

“I wonder whatever became of Monopoly,” Doug said wistfully.

Rita took Ian’s hand and placed it palm-down on a spot just beneath her left breast. “Feel,” she whispered. A round, blunt knob — a knee or foot or elbow — slid beneath his fingers. It always unnerved him when that happened.

Last week he had signed the papers for Rita’s hospital stay. She’d be in just overnight, if everything went as it should. On the first day he was liable for one dependent and on the second, for two. Two? Then he realized: the baby. One person checks in; two check out. It seemed like sleight of hand. He had never noticed before what a truly astonishing arrangement this was.

“So I took a shortcut through a side street,” Daphne told him, “or really more of an alley, and it was starting to get dark and I heard these footsteps coming up behind me. Pad-pad, pad-pad: gym-shoe footsteps. Rubber soles. I started walking faster. The footsteps walked faster too. I dug my hand in my bag and pulled out that siren you gave me. Remember that key chain with the siren on it you gave me one Christmas?”

They were heading down to the shop together to bring home the cradle. Ian was driving Rita’s pickup, which had a balky gear shift that was annoying him to no end. When the light turned green he had to struggle to get it into first. He said, “Very smart, Daphne. How many times have I warned you not to walk alone at night?”

“I spun around and I pressed the button. The siren went wow! wow! wow! and this person just about fell on top of me — this young, stalky black boy wearing great huge enormous white basketball shoes. He was shocked, you could tell. He backed off and sort of goggled at me. He said, ‘What the hell, man? You know? What the hell?’ And I was standing in front of him with my mouth wide open because I realized I had no idea how to switch the fool thing off. There we were, just looking at each other, and the siren going wow! wow! until bit by bit I started giggling. And then finally he kind of like shook his head and stepped around me. So I threw the siren over a fence and walked on, only making sure not to follow him too closely, and way far behind I could still hear wow, wow, wow …”

“You think it’s all a big joke, don’t you,” Ian said, turning down Chalmer.

“Well, it was, in a way. I mean I wouldn’t have been surprised if that boy had said, ‘Oh, man, that uncle of yours,’ while he was shaking his head. Like we were the old ones and you were the young one. You were the greenhorn.”

“At least I won’t end up dead in some alley,” Ian told her. “What were you doing in that part of town? How come you’re always cruising strange neighborhoods?”

“I like newness,” Daphne said.

He parked in front of the wood shop.

“I like for things not to be too familiar. I like to go on first dates; I like it when a guy takes me someplace I’ve never been before, some restaurant or bar, and the waitress calls him by name and the bartender kids him but I’m the stranger, just looking around all interested at this whole new world that’s so unknown and untried.”

They got out of the truck. (Ian didn’t ask how come she still lived in Baltimore, in that case. He was very happy she lived in Baltimore.) He walked around to the rear end to lower the tailgate, and he reached in for the folded blanket he’d brought and spread it across the floorboards.

“If I were a man I’d call up a different woman every night,” Daphne said, following him. “I’d like that little thrill of not knowing if she would go out with me.”

“Easy for you to say,” Ian told her.

He didn’t have to use his key to get into the shop, which meant Mr. Brant must be working on a weekend again. He ushered Daphne inside and led the way across the dusty linoleum floor, passing a half-assembled desk and the carcass of an armoire. Through the office doorway he glimpsed Mr. Brant bending over the drafting table, and he stepped extra heavily so as to make his presence felt. Mr. Brant raised his head but merely nodded, deadpan.

When they reached the corner that was Ian’s work space, he came to a stop. He gestured toward the cradle — straight-edged and shining. “Well?” he said. “What do you think?”

“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.

Already Rita’s pregnancy seemed so long ago. The pillow laid vertically to ease her backache, the opened copy of Nine Months Made Easy, and Doug’s pocket watch, borrowed for its second hand — they struck him as faintly pathetic, like souvenirs of some old infatuation.

He sat on the bed to take off his shoes. Then he realized he would never manage to sleep. He was tired, all right, but keyed up. Padding softly in his socks, he went back downstairs to the kitchen and switched on the light. He poured milk into a saucepan and lit a burner, and while he waited for the milk to heat he dialed Reverend Emmett.

“Hello,” Reverend Emmett said, sounding wide awake.

“Reverend Emmett, this is Ian. I hope you weren’t in bed.”

“Goodness, no. What’s the news?”

“Well, we have a boy. Joshua. Eight pounds and some.”

“Congratulations! How’s Sister Rita?”

“She’s fine,” Ian told him. “It was a very easy birth, she says. To me it didn’t look easy, but—”

“Shall I go visit her tomorrow?”

“They’re sending her home in the afternoon. Maybe you’d like to come see her here.”

“Gladly,” Reverend Emmett said. “Why, we haven’t had a new baby at church since Sister Myra’s granddaughter! I may have forgotten how to hold one.”

“You’re welcome to brush up on your skills with us,” Ian told him.

“God bless you for thinking to call me, Brother Ian,” Reverend Emmett said. “I know absolutely that you’ll be a good father. Go get some rest now.”

“I believe I will,” Ian said.

In fact, all at once he felt so sleepy that after he hung up, he turned off the stove and went straight to bed.

He stepped out of his shirt and his jeans and lay down in his underwear, not even bothering to pull the covers over him. He closed his eyes and saw Rita’s glowing face and the baby’s expression of outrage. He saw Reverend Emmett attempting to hold an infant. That would be a sight. It intrigued him to imagine the incongruity — to try and picture Reverend Emmett in this new context, the way he used to try picturing his seventh-grade teacher doing something so mundane as cooking breakfast for her husband.

Apparently, he thought, there were people in this world who simply never came clear. Reverend Emmett, Mr. Brant, the overlapping shifts of foreigners … In the end you had to accept that the day would never arrive when you finally understood what they were all about.

For some reason, this made him supremely happy. He pulled the covers around him and said a prayer of thanksgiving and fell headlong into sleep.

“This is proper gift,” the foreigner named Buck told Ian. Or Ian thought he told him; then a moment later he realized it must have been a question. “This is proper gift?”

He meant the white plastic potty-chair resembling a real toilet, a pink ribbon tied in a bow across the seat like one of those hygienic paper bands in hotel bathrooms. Buck and Manny held it balanced between them on the top porch step. If Ian answered, “No,” they seemed ready to spin around and take it home with them. He said, “Of course it’s proper. Thank you very much.”

“In America, every what you do is proper,” Manny said to Buck. They appeared to be resuming some previous argument. “Why you are always so affrighted?”

“Wrong,” Buck said. “They tell you is proper. Then catch your mistake. Ha!” he cried, startling Ian. “Pink ribbon. For boys should be blue.”

“We already have been discussing this,” Manny told him severely. “It is no problem.” He turned to Ian. “Pink or blue: is all the same to you. Correct?”

“Correct,” Ian assured him. “Come on inside.”

He stood back, holding open the door, and they carried the potty through the front hall and into the living room. Rita sat in the rocker with a large pillow beneath her. Daphne and Reverend Emmett shared the couch. “This is proper gift,” Buck told them. He and Manny set the potty on the floor.

“Well, certainly,” Rita said, “and it’s exactly what we wanted. Thank you, Buck and Manny.”

“Is also from Mike. Mike has been arrested.”

“Arrested?”

But before they could get to the bottom of this, Bobbeen called, “Yoo-hoo!” and let herself in. Her heels clattered across the hall and then she appeared in the doorway, wearing an orange pantsuit with a flurry of silk scarf tied artfully at her throat. She held both arms out at her sides; a vinyl purse dangled from one wrist. “Well?” she said. “Where is he? Where’d you put him? Where’s that precious little grandbaby?”

“Hi, Ma,” Rita said. “You remember Buck and Manny here, and Reverend Emmett.”

“Oh! Goodness yes, I do,” Bobbeen said, directing her squinty grimace solely to Reverend Emmett. He was standing now, looking uncomfortable, and Bobbeen stepped forward to grasp his hands in hers. “Wasn’t it Christian of you to take this time from your duties,” she said. Ian always suspected her of harboring a romantic interest in Reverend Emmett, but maybe she was just exceptionally devout. “Hey there, Daphne hon,” she added over her shoulder. She sat in the center of the couch, pulling Reverend Emmett down beside her. “I can’t believe I’m a grandma,” she told him. “Isn’t it a hoot? I sure don’t feel like a grandma.”

She didn’t look like one either, Reverend Emmett was supposed to say, but he just smiled hard and clutched both his kneecaps. Bobbeen studied him a moment. She patted the ends of her hair reflectively and then turned to Rita. “So where’s that little sweetie pie?” she asked.

“Ian was just on his way to bring him down,” Rita told her.

He was?

Before the foreigners arrived, Reverend Emmett and Daphne had been about to follow him upstairs and peek into the cradle. But now there were too many of them, Ian supposed, and so he nodded and left the room. He was a little out of practice, was the trouble. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to support a newborn’s head.

As he started up the stairs he heard Bobbeen say, “Now tell me, Reverend Emmett, do you-all hold with christening? Or just what, exactly?”

“We believe christening to be a superficial convention,” Reverend Emmett said.

“Well, of course it is,” she told him in a soothing tone.

“Not to say there’s anything wrong with it, you understand. It’s just that we don’t consider infants capable of … but if your church favors christening, why, I certainly—”

“Oh, what do I care about christening?” Bobbeen cried recklessly. “I think it’s real holy of you to cast off the superficial, Reverend.”

Ian went into his and Rita’s bedroom, where they were keeping the baby for the first few nights. It lay facedown in one corner of the cradle with its knees drawn up to its stomach and its nose pressed into the sheet. How could it manage to breathe that way? But Ian heard tiny sighing sounds. Long strands of fine black hair wisped past the neckband of the flannel gown. Ian felt a surge of pity for those scrawny, hunched, defenseless little shoulders.

He knelt beside the cradle and turned the baby over, at the same time gingerly scooping it up so that he held a warm, wrinkled bundle against his chest as he rose. This didn’t feel like any eight pounds. It felt like nothing, like thistledown — a burden so light it seemed almost buoyant; or maybe he was misled by the softness of the flannel. The baby stirred and clutched two miniature handfuls of air but went on sleeping. Ian bore his son gently across the upstairs hall.

“In fact I’ve been thinking of joining your congregation,” Bobbeen was telling Reverend Emmett. “Did Rita happen to mention that?”

“Um, no, she didn’t.”

“I just feel you-all might have the answers.”

“Oh, well, answers,” Reverend Emmett said. “Actually, Mrs.—”

“Bobbeen.”

“Actually, Mrs. Bobbeen …”

Ian grinned.

He was halfway down the stairs when he felt a kind of echo effect — a memory just beyond his reach. He paused, and Danny stepped forward to present his firstborn. “Here she is!” he said. But then the moment slid sideways like a phonograph needle skipping a groove, and all at once it was Lucy he was presenting. “I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life,” he said. His face was very solemn but Lucy was smiling. “Your what?” she seemed to be saying. “Your, what was that? Oh, your life.” And she tipped her head and smiled. After all, she might have said, this was an ordinary occurrence. People changed other people’s lives every day of the year. There was no call to make such a fuss about it.