To Skin a Cat

THE MILLIONAIRE

It was merely a house beside a lake which had been rented. It was winterized to extend the period of time it could be let, though it was hard to see who would want its view after summer was over. The view was of places just like it, divided by water. It was furnished with the kinds of things owners wish renters to have within the limits of their anxiety about damage, impersonal things. Strangely, the owners stored their golfing trophies here. They were old trophies, and the miniature golfers on them, their bronze coats flaking, belonged to another age. One foot tipped too far; their swings were still British and lacked the freedom of motion American trophy makers later learned to suggest. Something of the reflected stillness of the lake was felt in the living room and the wraparound porch, where the outdoor furniture seemed out of place and the indoor furniture had inadvertently weathered.

Betty was a handsome blonde in her middle forties wearing a green linen Chanel suit. She walked into the house, stooping with two suitcases and managing to clutch the house keys with their large paper tag. Iris, her fifteen-year-old daughter, in the late stages of pregnancy, awkwardly looked for something to do. Betty set the luggage down and stared about with a Mona Lisa smile. She shot a glance at Iris, who was heading for the radio. Iris stopped.

“I guess the landlord saw us coming,” said Betty. Iris made an assenting murmur in her throat; it was clear she was yet to develop any real attitude toward this place. “Though blaming him for scenting misfortune seems a bit academic at this stage of the proceedings.”

“Mom, where’s the thermostat at? I’m getting goose bumps.”

“Find it, Iris. It will be on the wall.” Iris turned and looked off the porch toward the lake. Betty kept talking. “When we went to stay on the water in my youth — when we went to Horseneck Beach, for example — the water made a nice smell for us. It seemed to welcome us… the smell of the ocean. But this lake! Well, it has no odor.”

“It’s smooth out there. Nice for waterskiing.”

“In your condition?” Betty walked to the phone and picked it up. “A dial tone. Good.… So, anyway, let’s batten down the hatches. You pick yourself a little delivery room. I’m in shock. I have traipsed a hundred miles from my home for a summer surrounded by strangers and their weekend haciendas. If only I’d been clever enough to bring something familiar, my Sanibel shells, anything.”

“I’m familiar,” said Iris with a pout.

“Not entirely, you’re not.”

Iris sat down to rest, knowing she shouldn’t place her hands on her stomach complacently. She had come to view its swelling as something strange, and the acceptability of that view comforted her.

The porch and the room had fallen into shadow and the end-table lamps made a yellow glow. Betty stared past her drink while Iris, in her bathrobe, combed out her wet hair. When Jack, who was Betty’s husband and Iris’s father, came in the house, still dressed for business and somehow out of place in this summer cottage, he first peeked through the partially opened front door with either dread or uncertainty. But when he did come in, he did so as the house’s proprietor.

“Hello, Mother.”

Betty didn’t yield too quickly, so Jack tried Iris.

“How is our royal project?” he asked.

“Hi, Daddy.”

Jack clasped his hands before him and turned to Betty. “D’ja stock up? You got Scotch?”

“We have that,” said Betty. “We also have some terrifying concoctions belonging to the owner. Mai tai mix. Spaada wine.”

“Sid’ll be down. Save it for Sid.”

Betty asked, “Did you stop off?”

“Nope,” said Jack. “This is my first. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Betty. “No, Iris, no record.”

“Sid wanted to meet me for one quick one but I said, Do you realize what kind of miles I got in front of me?”

“I think I’ll watch sunset from the porch,” said Iris without being noticed. She went through the sliding door to the porch, where she felt day fade before the electric lights of the house. If she tried, she could make out what her parents were saying to each other, but she didn’t try.

Jack said, “Can she hear us?”

“Who’s supposed to bring my stuff up from home?”

“I’m seeing to it. I didn’t want to look like we were moving out. The Oakfields were staring from their lawn.”

“How come Sid’s coming up? Does he have to know?”

“Sid knows all. He’s bringing up a low-mileage Caddy Eldo he wants us to try. Burgundy. Vinyl top. The point is, life doesn’t have to come to an end. Oh, no.”

Betty drifted off. “Could be gorgeous,” she said.

“And I predict Judge Anse and his wife will come by. They want to make sure Iris doesn’t back out.”

“Remind me to thank them for finding us this priceless bide-a-wee. I could smell the wienie roasts from down the beach. This place is like a ball park.”

“You can always go home, babe, and return when it’s all over.”

“Let me get back to you on that.”

“I thought Iris was your claim to fame?”

“That’s way too simple.”

Strangely enough, they toasted this too, touching glasses. Jack winked. Betty said, “You.”

That night when they played gin rummy, Betty was the only one who seemed to have any vitality. Jack leaned a tired, stewed face on one hand and stared at the deck with uncaring eyes. Iris played and kept score. Betty played like a demon; she was in a league of her own. She could shuffle like a professional, making an accordion of the cards between her hands.

“My final pregnancy was ectopic,” said Betty with an air of peroration. “Otherwise, Iris, you would have had a little baby brother or sister. The ovum — egg to you — the ovum developed in the cervical canal, not in the uterus where the darn thing was supposed to be, Gin!”

“Great,” said Jack, “it’s over.”

“I see the doctor tomorrow,” said Iris. “Right?”

Betty gathered all the cards together in a pile. “Iris, I would hope that it’s clear why you cannot — repeat, cannot — fritter around in the discard pile and expect to get anywhere.”

Betty and Iris worked closely together inserting leaves into the dining room table. As the table expanded, the living room-dining room combination became less of a no-man’s-land. Iris and Betty quit shoving and moved around the table, looking at all the comforting empty space on its top. Steaming pots in the kitchenette abetted the festivity.

“Your assignment is to set the table,” said Betty. “Are we ten-four on that?”

“Ten-four.”

“I will sit at this end, your father at that end. Dr. Dahlstrom goes right there and Miss Whozis, his girlfriend, goes there. If she has a poodle, the poodle remains in the car.”

“You don’t even know her, Mother.”

“I said if there is a poodle. Iris, I love dogs!”

“What about Brucie?”

“Brucie! Brucie was a mongrel, I don’t miss him at all. He might have been a dear dog if you weren’t designated to pick up after him. No, Brucie would have never been put to sleep if he had learned to potty outside.”

“My favorite part of this is the smell of the upstairs cedar closet.”

“My favorite part of the whole darn thing was when your father learned of your condition and burst into tears. Boo-hoo-hoo. Like Red Skelton.”

“I meant the house.”

Jack seemed to try to come in from work differently every time. That night he ran in the door carrying his briefcase like a hot cannonball. And his voice was elevated.

“Dr. Delwyn Dahlstrom and his chiquita are no more than five miles behind me,” he cried.

“What of it?” said Betty, smoothing her sleeves. “Our society is reduced to Iris, her gynecologist, and his bimbo. What difference does it make if they’re early?”

“I want a shower.”

“Not if they’re five miles back, kiddo. No way, José.”

“Grab me a pick-me-up. I’m gonna go for it.”

Jack rose to the occasion. When the doctor came, he pulled open the front door as if revealing the grand prize on a quiz show. Dr. Delwyn Dahlstrom, a portly, grinning Scandinavian, swung his arm to indicate Melanie, a bug-eyed redhead of twenty-five years.

“Melanie,” he said, doing the honors.

“We stopped off,” Melanie explained, “See, so if we’re late, that’s how come.”

“Who’s late?” Betty asked. Only Jack and Iris took it as a crack. Jack spread his arms for the coats. When he got them, he transferred them to Iris and then hurried around the center island to the bartender’s side and began pulling noisy levers on ice trays while the others tried to talk.

Jack said, “I remember Delwyn making bathtub gin in the urinalysis machine. Does that date me?”

“You wouldn’t happen to have mai tai mix?” Melanie inquired.

“And enough Spaada to sink a battleship,” said Betty.

“True,” said Dr. Dahlstrom.

“Betty’s right,” said Melanie. “My taste in drinks is corny.”

Dahlstrom’s spirits made the dinner a noisy good time for everyone except possibly Iris, who was too young to drink and came to seem almost frozen. And maybe Jack noticed it, even though technically Iris wasn’t his department, because he abruptly slumped into his chair and held his head for an odd instant of silence. The others looked at him and it passed.

“Are you feeling baby move regularly?” Dahlstrom asked Iris.

“Yes,” said Iris with a red face.

“Has baby changed position in the last month?”

“Not really.”

“Any unusual spotting?”

“Ugh!” said Melanie.

“No …” said Iris.

“And still our young man has not come forward?” the doctor inquired.

“Delwyn,” said Jack, “it goes like this: He has not come forward. Iris is fifteen. Iris is going on with her life. If the young man comes forward, Iris’s life doesn’t go forward. Use your brain, Delwyn. The story is, Iris goes on with her life.”

“And Jack handles the private adoption,” Betty added.

Dahlstrom looked all around himself in search of something; then, his focus sharpening, he suddenly noticed Melanie. “Melanie,” he said, “go find yourself a snack.” This diversionary remark, right after a filling meal, failed to have its intended effect.

“What?” said Melanie. “Betty’s going to fill me up on Spaada.” Betty pulled a contraption out of the closet, something made of metal tubes and cloth.

“When I get back to the only home I’ve known since being dragged from Massachusetts as a young bride, it will be Indian summer. Indian summer! To think! I am very lightly complected. So this is going to make a difference on those long days ahead.” With a clattering rush of fabric and aluminum, a red and green and yellow beach umbrella sprang open.

Jack said, “Jesus H. Christ.” And the doctor said he didn’t get it. Melanie said she knew what it was, it was a beach umbrella, and Betty said she still didn’t have the dunes of childhood and that that stupid odorless lake out there didn’t have so much as a single Pocohontas or other legendary figure associated with it, unless it was the propane man she had been unable to reach on the phone all day.

“In my mind’s eye,” said Betty, “I will be able to sit next to the Atlantic.”

“Bearing Portuguese immigrants,” said Jack.

“I will hear — shut up, Jack — the cry of gulls and the moaning of sea buoys.”

“I don’t get it,” said Dr. Dahlstrom. “I thought she was from some burg near Boston.”

Jack’s sigh seemed to detonate. “Yeah, she is,” he said, well within her hearing. “But here’s the catch. It had a trolley stop near the water. I’ll never hear the end of this if I live to be a hundred.”

But Melanie took up for Betty. “I’m like Betty when it comes to mountains. I used to live with my dad in Denver. Even in traffic jams — like going to a Broncos game? — you could see right over the top of the cars all the way to … all the way to … what was it, Pike’s Peak?”

The doctor said, “My favorite is La Jolla.”

“I go right on standing for something,” said Betty. “Year after year.”

“Namely the eternal sea,” said Jack. Quite suddenly, he realized that Iris was at the foot of the stairs. She beheld the adults.

“Good night everybody!” she cried. “Thanks for asking!”

It wasn’t until she’d gone up and was safely out of earshot that Dr. Dahlstrom said, “Thanks for asking what?”

Everyone but Melanie fell into a kind of state; she stared from one distant gaze to another, then shrugged. Finally, the doctor said, “You got around the courts on the adoption, huh?”

“Yup,” said Jack.

“Who’s the pigeon?”

“A judge. Yes, a judge, and his hearty but barren wife of thirty years. I like the guy. A real diamond in the rough. State College. Babson-type portfolio of investments. Getting on in years. Wealth. Half hour a day on the rowing machine. Plus, if he morts out, she has family. Betty and I went over this one good.”

“How did you find this wonderful fellow?”

The question didn’t make Jack comfortable. “Through a thing down at the plant,” he said. “We tipped a few. This and that. Said his life had everything but kids. A bulb went off.”

Jack looked around to find someone to break the silence. He didn’t seem to like this silence at all, and no one was coming forward to break it. Just whose side were they on?

“You know,” said Jack, “I’m not the biggest guy on the block. Just a quonset building, a couple of presses. One shift. One time clock. One faithful foreman. I make the calls. I say to the plant, You build it, I’ll sell it. I call on everybody. I call on the competition. We make beautiful music together. And then one of my boys, a Polack, sticks his big mitt in a punch press. It goes up next to the roller and never comes out. I offer my most sincere regrets. I don’t say, What were you doing with your mitt in the roller? I’m sad for him, but that won’t do. No, he wants it all. He wants my business. You can’t have it, I say. It’s that simple: You can’t have it. You can have reasonable compensation, but no more. I want it all, says the Polack. And he has professional counsel who feels so confident, he has taken it on as a contingency bond. I say, You lean on me, I lean on you. I call on the judge, not as a finagler but as a red-blooded American with his own business. I sell myself to the judge. Meanwhile, the Polack’s lawyer is sending me poison-pen letters. Shit. You reach a point where you don’t know whether you’re part of what makes America great or not.”

“Eight hours from now,” said Dr. Dahlstrom, “I’ll be dropping gallstones in a porcelain pan. I can’t deal with this.”

“You know what I’m in a mood for?” said Melanie. “A diner. Some ham and eggs. The night shift. Neon.”

“That is Melanie,” said Dahlstrom. “That is her magic.”

“I’m going to let those dishes sit till morning,” said Betty, apparently overfaced by the magic of Melanie. Conversation trailed off; a car started up; things in the foreground seemed impossible to notice.

Jack wandered over to the bar and made himself a nightcap. He was already in a cloud. Betty went up the stairs and Jack slumped in the peculiar apelike repose produced by patent recliner chairs. But there was a slumberous burn still in his eyes. When Iris came down the stairs in her robe to get some ice cream, Jack smiled at her and kept smiling, finally smiling to himself. The burn went out of his eyes as the sweet sound of the scoop in the ice-cream container reached his ears.

“Daddy,” said Iris, “I know this isn’t what you wanted to happen.” She stopped to think. She was comfortable with Jack. “I realize … my condition. But me, so long as it’s healthy, at this point I don’t care. It did occur. I’m the first to admit that. But aren’t we trying to pretend that all this will go away here at the lake? Daddy?”

Jack unfortunately was sound asleep. Among the key effects Betty brought to the lake was Jack’s stadium blanket in blue and maize, his school colors. Iris covered him with it, knowing he had to work tomorrow and needed his rest. With the ice cream in one hand, she reached the stairs and turned out the light.

Passing time was a kind of sedative for Betty and Iris. They became like old friends, the kind who can’t leave each other on deathbeds. When Jack came home at night he thought they were babbling, and sometimes there was a genuine issue: Iris still wanted the baby; then Betty wanted the baby because of the one she had lost through her ectopic pregnancy; then Betty and Iris thought they could team up and raise the baby. Under the last plan, Jack would have to move out. Even Jack thought so.

They lay out on the lawn with bright tanning reflectors under their chins; they were stretched on lawn chairs; and the heat, the big midwestern heat, was everywhere.

“I realize this is crazy,” said Betty. “Sunbathing will make an old bag out of you in a New York minute.”

“Did you ever get the name of this lake?” Iris asked.

“Don’t move your head when you talk, Iris! You’re blinding me!”

“All right.”

“I don’t know, Lake Polliwog or some fool thing. Don’t you wonder what’s going on at home? I see grass growing knee high. I see four feet of morning papers on the porch; a storm door slams back and forth in the wind. Maybe the fire department broke in looking for bodies and stole my silver. The TV we left on to discourage burglars has become some kind of haunted Magnavox. It’s awful what your mind will do to you. We never got around to putting a decal on the picture window, so the birds with broken necks have gone on piling up. Life just rushes at you and the birds keep dying.”

“My feet are swollen.”

“This happens.”

“And my fingers too.”

“Mm-hm,” said Betty.

Iris held her hands up in the glare and examined their watery thickness. “I could go for a foreign film right now,” she said. “In the picture this girl is pregnant. Out of wedlock in Italy. It’s a spa, and Marcello Mastroianni is careless about cigarettes and their effect on the unborn. The spa carries extremely complicated pastries which resemble pretzels. There’s a bilingual midwife, and all the cars are low-slung. Sometimes the girl rides in the cars with Mastroianni. Sometimes they pass the evenings playing chess, which they call ‘shess.’ The girl only knows how to play checkers, which they call ‘sheckers.’ When she says ‘king me,’ they are pleasant about it and give the girl soda water, a ring, a buncha stuff. Finally the baby is born, so pink, so perfect and all. They call a wet nurse from the village but the baby won’t have a thing to do with this stranger. The baby returns to the girl … by suction.”

“Iris, that’s impossible. A baby can’t fly through the air by suction.”

“Mom, it’s a movie.”

“What about Marcello Mastroianni? Does he get around by suction too? When your father was courting me, it was like a real movie. He lived in a boardinghouse. The lady who ran the place raised enormous Belgian hares. And when the lady slept, the Belgian hares guarded the stairs. They had two big teeth in front, and if you didn’t go up the stairs in a slow and dignified fashion, one of those huge rabbits would have you by the leg like that!”

“What were you doing up the stairs of Dad’s boardinghouse?”

“Not what you think, young lady.”

“I’m sure.”

Silence; then Betty said, “I’m not going to let this pass.”

“So don’t.”

“I’m terribly afraid that you have confused my morals with your own.”

“What a lovely remark,” said Iris in a broken voice.

“The truth shall set ye free.”

“You bitch.”

The two were now sitting up, reflectored heads facing each other like two nodding, miserable sunflowers.

“You won’t hear this child calling you what you called me,” said Betty. “You won’t hear it call you anything.”

Betty had always enjoyed her cocktails, but she never drank in the daytime. That changed. It didn’t make her sentimental or angry or any of the usual things. It just sped her up. She didn’t drink that much, but it was enough to get her darting around and creating an atomosphere of emergency.

One unseasonably cold afternoon, Iris sat dog-earing a paperback with the glass porch doors closed and the oven door open to supplement the baseboard electric heating. Betty was coasting past the windows about the time Jack was expected. Suddenly, she froze in place.

“Here comes your father followed by Sid Katzendorf in a Cadillac! It’s the low-mileage Eldo!”

When Jack came in, he was equally excited. Even Iris felt the desperation in this; there had never before been any conversation about Cadillacs. It was just desperate.

“A beauty,” Jack said, “and it’s loaded. But let’s don’t rush. You drive it. Try it in a few spots, the freeway, here in the neighborhood. At first it seems like the Queen Mary, but you’ll get the hang of it. If you like it, tell Sid to mark it sold. We can swallow the tab. I’ll spare you the details. Try the factory air.”

When Betty went out the door, things calmed down. Jack had bought Iris a Swiss Army knife, the one that must weigh a pound, and she immediately treasured it. Then they had some orange juice. It almost seemed as if the Cadillac were a decoy. Iris thought Jack loved her.

“Iris,” he said, “you’re going to survive all this. You’re going to finish school. You’re going to go to college. If that Polack and his squashed hand don’t take my company away from me, I’ll give it all to you. How’s that sound?”

“It sounds wonderful.”

Jack hugged Iris and said, “Then I’ll never lose you.”

The whole house seemed to go quiet. Iris marked her place and put the book aside. She opened and closed each blade and implement of the knife. He loves me very much, she thought. The evening sun got under the clouds and began to suggest a normal summer evening. The door burst open and Betty ran in, struggling for composure. When she spoke, her voice was tragic and bore the keening finality of a summing up. She quit talking like Massachusetts.

“We’re going along the freeway. I see this other Cadillac but it’s a two-tone. I’m sitting there trying to think which I like better. Obviously, the driver of the other Caddy is having the exact same thought. We get real close and head for the identical off-ramp. Suddenly it looks like we’ll collide. I swerve. I crash into a jalopy. The jalopy takes off.”

“That’s it?” said Jack.

“That’s it.”

“Where’s Sid?”

“Sid has gone.”

“What did he say?”

“He stared at me and said, ‘You own it.’ ”

“Oh, my God.”

“Whatever happened to us, Jack. Whatever happened to our luck?” She keened like her own mother out east.

“Is that a question?”

Iris was free to assume what she had brought upon them.

About halfway through the last month of Iris’s pregnancy, the adoptive parents came by to meet her.

Betty did it up as an occasion with fresh flowers on the end tables. Jack checked his watch, shot his cuffs, looked out the window at rapid intervals. Iris had been dressed in high-octane maternity clothes: a conical navy blue dress with a whimsical, polka-dotted, droopy bow tie.

At the very moment of the Anses’ arrival, Jack seemed to panic. He was frozen in the hallway babbling in a low voice. “They can’t find the door. They’re gonna walk into the lake!” He started to call out in a high, tinny voice, projecting crazy merriness. “Back there! Right where you parked! You missed it! You missed … the front door!”

“Iris!” said Betty. “Animate yourself!”

They finally came inside and the introductions were achieved as the judge looked carefully at everyone, settling finally on Iris, whom he examined at length until she said, “Don’t look at me like I was a horse.” But the judge took it well and said this was a happy day in their lives. Judge Anse and his wife, Mona, were a couple in their fifties. Judge Anse seemed unable to leave his judicial air at home and put a considerate pause before each remark, a pause that left one feeling scrutinized. His wife looked very scrutinized. It was easy to think that her desire for a baby was all she had left.

“We had a baby once,” said Mrs. Anse without varying the tone of her voice. “We had it such a short time we didn’t have time to name it. It appeared in the obituary as Baby Anse, comma, girl.”

“Are you familiar with ectopic pregnancy?” asked Betty of no one in particular.

“Is it a problem?” said Judge Anse.

“You can say that again.”

“Nothing she’s got, I hope,” said the judge, jerking his thick head toward Iris.

“No, it’s something I had,” said Betty.

“Oh.”

Judge Anse said he worked hard and there was no estate, no one to leave it all to and we can’t live forever. That seemed to anger him and he used off-color language. He asked the present company to excuse his French. Iris sat blankly in the middle of a discussion of what a difficult age it was for raising children. It was hard to tell whether this was a reference to Iris or to the age in which the baby would live. But it must have been the latter because Jack said conclusively that the country had nowhere to go but up.

Mrs. Anse kept a level gaze throughout this directed upon Iris. Iris felt this gaze and was ready for anything. When Mrs. Anse smiled and asked her question, Iris was ready. “What was the young fellow like?” she inquired.

“A real gorilla.”

“Have we mentioned Iris’s grades?” Betty asked. “Straight A’s.”

“You know,” said Mona Anse in a cracking voice, “the agencies wouldn’t talk to us. They told us we were too old.”

“That’s not exactly true,” said the judge patiently.

“It is for a Caucasian baby. Old. That’s all we heard. We heard it from the state, from the Lutherans, from the Catholics. Old. People suggested every crazy thing you can imagine: midgets, pinheads, boat people. I may be old but I won’t be taken advantage of.” The judge rested his hand on the back of his wife’s.

“Let ’em whine,” said Jack to the empty middle of the room. “They’re getting a bargain.”

Two days later, Iris found out how they met Judge Anse.

“Your father is being sued by a man at the plant who lost something in a machine,” said Betty, blandly.

“Lost something?” said Iris. “What?”

“A limb.”

“What’s that have to do with me?”

“That’s how we got to meet Judge Anse. He’s hearing the case.”

Iris thought for a moment and said, “You sold the baby.” It wasn’t an accusation.

The night the contractions began, the whole thing almost fell apart. Iris bolted and was found two hours later hiding in a boathouse clear on the other side of the lake. By the time they got her back to the house, Betty was behind with the buffet. Somehow, everything went back into place, and by the time Judge and Mrs. Anse and Dr. Dahlstrom arrived, Iris was secured upstairs. Supplies were laid out. Dahlstrom had been playing golf, and Jack had to lend him some carpet slippers to keep him from marking up the floor with his cleats.

“What are you hoping for?” asked Dahlstrom.

“We don’t care as long as it’s got five of everything,” said the judge. Dahlstrom made a Dagwood sandwich. Betty went up and down the stairs at frequent intervals. Jack seemed edgy but remarked that the leading indicators were up.

Dr. Dahlstrom was balancing his sandwich on one palm and building with the other, when Betty came down and said, “Delwyn, now.”

“Hold your horses.”

“I can hold mine but I can’t hold hers.”

“Betty, do me a favor and wait for the pretty part.”

Betty came back downstairs and sat while Dahlstrom ate his sandwich, holding it between bites in front of his admiring gaze like a ship model. When he finished, he said, “And now the good doctor will work his magic. You people pace and wring your hands, whatever blows your hair back.” And he went up the stairs.

There was no way to disguise the waiting. Betty mentioned a Big Band Era retrospective on FM but got no response. Everyone was quiet, but Jack seemed to be smoldering. He slumped down inside his suit coat and stared. After a while, he said, “A good deal was had by all.” This was not lost on Mrs. Anse.

“To whom do you think you are speaking?” she asked, simultaneously with a moan from the second floor.

“Simmer down, Mona,” said Jack. “Simmer down.”

“I don’t want this ruined.”

“Try the salad. Betty used walnut oil.”

“This end is well done,” said Betty pointing at the roast. “You can see the rare from where you are.”

“You’d think I’d feel young tonight. But I don’t. I wonder why?” asked the judge.

“Have you tried Grecian Formula Nine?” asked Jack.

“You’re a crumb,” said the judge. “You’re an insufferable crumb.”

“And why not?” Jack flared. “I’m about to become a grandfather. How do you think that makes me feel? And Betty, my childhood sweetheart, this whole God damned thing is going to make a grandmother out of her. You know what this means, Judge? This means we’re starting to die. That jackass doctor upstairs is shoving us into history.”

“If that’s how you feel,” the judge said.

“That’s how we feel.”

So, by the time Dr. Dahlstrom arrived at the top of the stairs to announce a successful birth, Jack and the judge were at a stalemate. Jack’s moment of vindication lay in his climbing the stairs alone, without looking back, to view the baby lying in its mother’s arms. Whatever was going on around her, Iris was too happy and too far away to notice the arrival of Judge Anse and his wife, or to realize that her baby was a millionaire.