Flashback
Christina Gombar
When I was growing up, the worst sin you could imagine committing was the murder of an innocent baby. My mother had Candida when I was five and Marybeth when I was nine and Fritz when I was thirteen. Sweet smelling, moist soft gurgling warm babies I held heavily in my arms.
The year Fritz came along, it suddenly became OK to kill babies. To me this reversal came out of the blue. One day it was the most heinous crime in the world, the next, something my older sister’s best friend mentioned in passing, like a bad acid trip, or shoplifting at Woolworth’s.
Once there was this murderous safety net, you lost the right to say no. Even if worst came to worst, the guy reasoned, you could get an abortion at Planned Parenthood, just down the road, or through the college clinic.
In London, riding the big escalators deep into the earth, amongst posters for multicolored tights and Silk Cut cigarettes and purple suede boots reaching way up the thigh, a poster said PREGNANT? In bold block white letters on black background. A number to call for terminations, as they called them.
But when push came to shove, I couldn’t.
Now I sit on a bench at the bottom of Manhattan, at the end of summer, the end of the world. Haze blurs the Wall Street skyscape. Mist rises, a film over the water, overhead through branches still lush, still green, still going on, all of it. Germans fall into line for the boat to the Statue of Liberty, a Jamaican plays his carnival tune amid a cluster of tourists. A faint ripe smell fills the air, and spiked, acorn-like things have begun falling on the path. I crush one underfoot.
Fall is coming. And in the fall, in October, I will rise above the clouds in a silver jet. The noise of the engines, my little tray shifting and shaking from the thundering blast.
In the fall I am going back to see my son, for the first time since he was born.
I’d rather not join up the past with the present. I am committed to staying here, continuing my life. Such as it is. Yet this vision of myself calmly looking out the window of the jet, of myself slowly walking down the path of another park, in another city, walking, then stopping in my tracks as I see him swinging off the monkey gym and running, small, sturdy, slightly pigeon-toed in baggy trousers like his father’s, running towards me across the grass – this vision overwhelms me.
I did not think they’d be amenable, the people who are raising him. I thought that now I am someone who can afford a transatlantic fare, they’d find me formidable. But the people who deserve to call themselves parents -- they know I am not formidable, know I forfeited all right to him long ago.
They sought me out, sent a simple note to my parents’ old address, a plain thin envelope that drifted here and there, and finally to me here in New York.
In this plain envelope they enclosed two earth-shattering pieces of information. One was of the existence of the child I thought died at birth. The other was that the child’s father, their son, had been killed. I’d thought it the other way round; that the baby died, and the father lived.
They enclosed an obituary: Lance Corporal Michael James Patrick Rafferty, aged 28. Died not in Belfast or Afghanistan, but in a motorbike crash, two blocks from home.
I’d assumed they’d dispersed from the address I knew years ago, but they were there the entire time. They found me out going through his things. He still carried my high school picture, address and phone number on the back. All those years, shifting from wallet to wallet, and he never got in touch. Not that I blame him.
Now I sit limply on the bench in the balmy September shade, and think about what I will wear. The parents -- it will be of no concern to them what I look like, so long as I sign the papers.
But the boy. I see him in the park where his father and I once whiled away the time, to get out of the house, escape the storm we created. Hours in the little park café, our companions shabby old men surreptitiously feeding scraps to dogs -- which amused us -- and haggard young mothers, overweight, overwrought -- who did not.
Ten years ago, another park, another autumn mist, a different damp rotting smell, other acorn-things crunching underfoot. I wore a much over-sized tweed blazer bought for a pound at Oxfam, to hide what was not even beginning to show, baggy jeans, an old red pullover, poorly cut hair, dyed in aubergine shades of youth, worn-out shoes, inadequate for city pavements. My feet hurt a lot then; it was the season of hurting feet. We walked all over town looking for work -- to pubs, restaurants, across bridges, to where the trains didn’t go.
When I took my shoes off in his small, slope-roofed bedroom, he knelt down and kissed my instep.
“I’ll buy you a new pair,” he said. How could I, for even one minute, have believed we stood a chance?
That night after supper he went down the street for cigarettes. Want anything? I knew he’d bring me back a candy bar. He always did. It was a quiet night. His father drove a limousine evenings.
He slammed gaily out the front door, went down the street, and never came back.
This week, in one of the discount houses off lower Fifth Avenue, I bought a raincoat. A lush, draped, eggshell-colored raincoat over which my hair falls, now its natural chestnut brown, fluffy, long, well-cut. The blue crepe suit underneath looks expensive, though I got it at a discount shop on Fulton Street. It hangs well. No one, looking at my figure today, would ever guess.
Sheer black stockings, shin to instep, and on my feet, although I will be obliged to walk some ways across the park (as I, from a distance, solemn, torn, bleeding, frozen, see my son running towards me across the grass) on my feet, I think, the new Kenneth Coles. Black leather, high-heeled, long pointed toes. A bit tarty, but I would rather he remember me that way. He must never guess the poverty of his origins.
He calls his paternal grandparents Mum and Dad. She was thirty-six when he was born, he forty. But they’ll tell him someday, or someone will, when he’s twelve, fifteen, twenty. They’ll tell him the lady you met, x-many years ago in the park, the lady in the eggshell raincoat, the blue suit, with the cherry lipstick and pale blue eye shadow, was not your dead brother’s old girlfriend, but your mother. And your dead brother who you used to see only on holidays home from the army? Who played with you, who took you to the park? He wasn’t your brother, but your Dad.
After Mick gaily slammed out the door I hung on for a day or two. His parents did not take it as calamitously as mine would have. He’d told his father first, man to man. By the time I arrived, up from the summer country job where we’d met, his Dad had calmed to grim monosyllables and abrupt departures. The mother better. She sat at the kitchen table, young-looking, even in her distress, chain-smoking, blue eyeliner circling blue eyes, dark hair prettily curled down to her shoulders, managing, even in the fray to pay attention to her other, younger son, eight-year-old Frankie, who ran around the kitchen, throwing a ball, knocking things about, possessed of excess energy, a sieve for the household stress.
The mother (her name was Kath) tipped cigarette ash into a ceramic circle that said Whitbred Ale. “What about your parents, would they be sympathetic?”
I shook my head, tears welling. It would be utter disaster. They have so many problems as it is. (Though what were they, in the light of everything now, what were they really?) My father will kill my mother, I said, He’ll blame her.
Kath pursed pink lips and dropped mascara-thick lashes. Not refuting my version, merely indicating, What do you think this is doing to my family?
She said, gently, Have you considered a clinic?
Too far gone, I said.
Well, she rose, brushing her hands on the front of her neat wrap-around skirt, reaching down for Frankie’s small hand, You two didn’t waste any time, did you?
During the two days I stayed on after Mickey left, I helped Kath with the washing up, took Frankie to the playground. I was glad for the company, grasping at straws, trying to belong. Without him I felt I was missing an arm.
He’ll come back, I said aloud in the café, watching Frankie outside, running rings around nothing.
“Nasty little buggers, aren’t they,” commiserated a bloated young mother, whose lithe, blonde daughter on roller-skates screeched ceaselessly in circles.
He’ll come back, Kath said.
He may not, said the father, and I suspected collusion.
I saw what they saw. A nice girl, a mixed-up girl, a girl with her own parents, a big house, going to college in America. It was not for them to take me on.
After two days a mate of Mick’s came with the news that he’d joined the forces.
I told Kath I’d leave next morning. Could I call home, collect?
Is it your period, my mother said melodramatically, across the transatlantic wire. Though I was, at twenty, marginally too old for this to be scandalous. How much money do you need, she said, a woman who never missed Sunday mass, who was a saint, a martyr in her own life, who’d never consider aborting any of her own five, no matter how bad the timing.
Five hundred, I told her. We made arrangements for it to be wired to a bank near St. Paul’s. I told her about Mickey, and she said, I know honey, I know. But she did not say, We love you, come home, don’t worry, you can have it here. We have four bedrooms and three baths, what’s one little baby, more or less?
I told them all I was booking an appointment at the clinic. Dangerous, but not illegal. Don’t worry, I said, I have a girlfriend to stay with after.
I did have a friend in Finsbury Park. Pam, from my summer job, was leaving with her boyfriend for Jamaica, where he was shooting a film. They wanted me to dog-sit till Christmas. I crossed the river to wave the happy couple off.
Pam stood in pink quilted coat, arm in arm with the fiance to whom she had been vigorously unfaithful all summer. When I’m twenty-four, I wondered, will I inspire men to loyalty, protection, continued admiration, love?
Pam had an ex, an Australian who ran an American-style hamburger joint in Mayfair. I ordered the uniform a size large. I was slender, my stomach muscles strong. Only when all my clothes were off might one have guessed.
With the money my mother sent I bought a new pair of shoes. Got my hair cut at Vidal Sassoon for a pound. Served lager and burgers to Americans, to Germans, Australians. Painted my face white and lips red and men left phone numbers on cocktail napkins. Walked home unmolested, magically immune from harassment, on dark city streets. Looked at home lights burning in flats, thought of the previous man, Adrian. The memory of his gentle brush-off in the spring a nostalgic indulgence now. All his fault in a way. If he hadn’t gone back to the girl he’d lived with before, I wouldn’t have had to move out, wouldn’t have gone to work in that awful place, met that awful man, had that bad night that sent me running out to the country, then tripping into the vat of sweet, syrupy sentiment that was Mickey.
I got in touch with a Catholic charity, walked Pam’s dog in Hyde Park where leaves feel like rain. I’d read about unwed mothers, knew what to feel. But the girls in these books were appalled that their lives, their chances, were ruined. But my life, once such a hopeful, shining thing, had altered months before, changed the night of that terrible man.
In the movies the smell of popcorn made me ill. I stretched out the waist-band of my baggy jeans, piled on sweaters, hid in the oversized Oxfam jacket. Wandered through rush hour in the City, passed pin-striped blond men with closed faces who might have been my earlier man, Adrian, but were not. I looked at my own bewildered, fattening face in a reflective metal strip.
One rainy November morning I walked south of the river, back to Mick’s neighborhood. I passed bristle-haired young men with Rottweilers who looked at me and looked away, past a middle-aged man hosing down a Mercedes, who returned my glance sharply, past an Irish lace-curtained ground-level window, behind which a white-haired lady lifted a green plastic bowl for inspection.
Mick’s house a small, functional, faded yellow row house. Not a light, not a curtain fluttered. That was when I knew they’d fled, to get away from me.
The weeks passed, very slowly, very quickly. Editorials warned of American aggression: “Europe Must Speak or Perish!” In the wee hours after my long shift, my ears pricked for the sound of the missile that would do its harm in the unclaimed hours before dawn, when no one was looking and anything might happen. No one would stop it, like no one stopped what happened in that dark locked room.
I worked. The weight I’d put on could have been for other reasons. I tried not to binge, steered clear of beer, but couldn’t quite give up smoking. I’d have saved four hundred pounds, on top of the money my mother sent, by Christmas. Then I’d stop work, get in touch with the Catholic charity.
Only Tony, the restaurant manager, guessed.
“You’ve put on weight,” he said one evening. “A lot of weight.”
“I know,” I said, and went off with my tray of four plates and six drinks.
I cleaned out the popcorn machine, the last waitress to finish, carrying two full buckets of water to mop the floor around the salad bar.
“Put that down,” Tony commanded. “You shouldn’t be carrying things like that.”
He had the sun-aged skin of all Australians, the receding blond hair, the moustache.
We had a pint, even though I knew I shouldn’t, and talked. Tony said not to worry. At 3:30 we locked up and he drove me all the way home. He asked to come in. What difference would it make? He didn’t mind about me. He had a four-year old daughter from a previous liaison. Everything would be all right.
He sprang off the bed when he felt blood gushing.
Ring an ambulance, he said. Only there was no phone.
He drove me to hospital. I put two towels on the seat, they soaked right through. He dropped me off, saying he’d check in next day. It will be over, I thought. Death didn’t scare me. I’d spent a lot of time with death the night of that locked room.
What’s your blood type, what’s your National Health number, people shouted at me. Doctors spoke to me in Spanish, German, Russian. I wasn’t telling. I’d come without I.D. No one was going to find out.
I woke up and it was dark and I couldn’t move. This seemed right, as I was dead. At least not in hell. Limbo perhaps? Then why was I breathing? My eyes adjusted, saw shades of grey, light bouncing off metal tubing, below, a curtain. Sound of heavy rain outside, or a fan. People muttering. I was strapped down, but loosely. I extricated one arm, then another, and with a pinch pulled out my IV drip. I leaned on an elbow. My stomach was nearly flat. I reached over and pulled back the curtain. Next to my bed, not two feet away, a cot. With a small baby. Streetlight coming from the window gave enough illumination for me to tell it’s skin was dusky. I didn’t reach for it; I was afraid I’d strangle it. I pulled the curtain shut, lay down and closed my eyes.
When I woke it was bright. My curtain still shut, but outside noise, footsteps, babies wailing. I felt lucid and strong, but dirty, sticky, and sore. I had to go to the bathroom, but had wet myself apparently.
Outside the curtain at least twelve beds, most filled with women. The little cot next to me, and the bed beyond, empty. Rising I felt light-headed, stunned, but really, fine. No shower in the lav, but when I returned, an Arabic woman nursing the dark-skinned baby I’d encountered in the middle of the night occupied the bed next door. I sat down on the edge of my bed and tears of relief welled. Now I could go find Mick.
The woman was Iranian, spoke English well. She talked in a high, piercing, sing-song voice about her baby, a daughter, about its father, a twenty-year old African musician who wanted nothing to do with either of them. But she didn’t care, because she now qualified for her own council flat. She said not to worry about the crying. She had cried at first. Sometimes, she said, looking down at her child, Sometimes I feel like hitting her.
“What about yours?”
“Mine?” I said.
“Your son.”
Then a nurse and doctor bore down on us, barged into my cubicle, and pulled the curtain firmly shut. They came armed with forms. They were impatient, condescending, but not unkind. Surprised I spoke English. They asked me if I knew who the father was and I said yes, although there was in fact, some doubt. It concerned the baby. Yes, the baby. In addition to many other problems, which they would shortly fill me in on, the baby was having trouble changing over his blood from my type to the father’s.
So no miscarriage, but a real, live, premature, nearly three pound baby. Six months, I told them. That was what they doctor had surmised.
The doctor, who was young, dark, and somber, with receding hair, began to tell me, quite grimly, all that was wrong, described all they had done to try to preserve his life, and the remarkable success, the remarkable luck they’d had in being able to do this, considering they’d had no medical information, no history, nothing to go on at all.
There was a problem with the lungs, he said, which would get worse as he grew. The heart was touch and go, problems also likely to develop there; surgery likely. He was being fed intravenously, warmed, the blood-changing accelerated by ultra-violet light.
Other risks: nerve damage, mental retardation, blindness.
I knew I ought to be crying.
The doctor looked at me expectantly, accusingly.
“So you think he’s not going to be all right, then?”
He sighed and asked how old I was, if I was in touch with the father, if my parents knew. Was I planning on keeping the baby?
I was going to give it up, I said, Now I don’t know.
He handed me the stack of forms and left.
I sat up in bed and put down the name of a girl from California I’d roomed with freshman year, a fanciful phone number. My correct medical history. I put down Mickey’s name, address and phone number, but explained in parenthesis that this was his parents’ home, and added, dramatically, Whereabouts Unknown.
The other doctor came, pulled the curtain around and examined me. (It hurt.) I asked the nurse after if I could take a shower and wash my hair, and that I’d wet the bed, and where were my things? She gave me shampoo and even some fresh underwear and sanitary towels.
When I was clean I felt much better, had lunch and then slept.
It was a busy hospital. When the doctor came around again he said he didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to see the baby, especially if I was planning on giving it up if it survived.
I watched the T.V. and felt strangely safe. The news reports from America all far and away in the dark outer world, and no one knew anything about what I’d done, here in this warm bright place.
That night I fell asleep quickly, while the visiting hours were still on, clean and fresh on my hard high hospital bed hidden behind my curtain.
But in the middle of the night, a commotion, footsteps down the hall, and a Jamaican nurse shook me awake.
“Your son,” she said. “You must see your son.”
I followed her, wrapping my blanket around for cover. The row of beds filled with mothers, cots filled with babies, past a window showcasing two mildly premature babies in their incubators, down another hall, into a large room. The nurse gave me masque, gown and rubber gloves, attired herself in the same. She opened the door to a smaller room. I was afraid to look, and rightly so. He lay there, transparently red, white and blue, all chest, insect limbs, black blinkers, head moving rhythmically to unheard music, making circles on its tiny neck. Tubes criss-crossed his chest, arms, feet. Oxygen pumped in and out his box, his little heartbeat, weakly, irregularly, registering on a screen.
I thought he must be dying.
“Do you want to hold him?” the nurse said, muffled behind her masque.
Should I have said no?
Through the holes on the side of his see-through box, she made sure the patches holding the tubes and needles were in place, then slowly lifted him up. He trembled, but did not fall apart.
He fit with room to spare in my two hands, reaching in. I could have held him in one. He felt as light and tremulous as a frightened bird. His blood beat visibly through the wax of his skull, lungs fluttering irregularly, heart likewise.
The nurse’s dark eyes slanted, frowning above her masque. The Doctor. We put him down.
She rushed me out of the room. I wasn’t supposed to have been there. Good-bye, I said, looking over my shoulder at the glass box. Good-bye.
I went back and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark with the sleeping women and infants. The nurse had disappeared. No point in staying to the bitter end.
Surely, you must agree I’d been through enough by then?
I put on my socks, the jeans they had laundered for me that I was still able to just button even before the birth, my T-shirt and sweater.
I put these things on, quietly, slowly, haltingly. I took my little bag from the locker, with my Saturday night’s tips, which miraculously had not been stolen, two bus slips, and the key to Pam’s flat.
I walked past the sleeping women, past the empty nurses’ station, past two student doctors who seemed unperturbed by the sight of me, went right down the elevator and out the front door.
I walked quickly away, all the way back to Pam’s flat, through nearly silent, snow-muted streets. I let myself in, got my things together, called a taxi and eighteen hours later landed in New York.
I know what you’re thinking. What about the poor dog? Pam’s dog I was enlisted to look after. What happened to him when I was in hospital?
Well, you can’t get everything right.
That’s how I wrote it for the shrink. Do you think she felt sorry for me?
Do you think she thought I was justified? Do you? Well, do you?
The year Fritz came along, it suddenly became OK to kill babies. To me this reversal came out of the blue. One day it was the most heinous crime in the world, the next, something my older sister’s best friend mentioned in passing, like a bad acid trip, or shoplifting at Woolworth’s.
Once there was this murderous safety net, you lost the right to say no. Even if worst came to worst, the guy reasoned, you could get an abortion at Planned Parenthood, just down the road, or through the college clinic.
In London, riding the big escalators deep into the earth, amongst posters for multicolored tights and Silk Cut cigarettes and purple suede boots reaching way up the thigh, a poster said PREGNANT? In bold block white letters on black background. A number to call for terminations, as they called them.
But when push came to shove, I couldn’t.
Now I sit on a bench at the bottom of Manhattan, at the end of summer, the end of the world. Haze blurs the Wall Street skyscape. Mist rises, a film over the water, overhead through branches still lush, still green, still going on, all of it. Germans fall into line for the boat to the Statue of Liberty, a Jamaican plays his carnival tune amid a cluster of tourists. A faint ripe smell fills the air, and spiked, acorn-like things have begun falling on the path. I crush one underfoot.
Fall is coming. And in the fall, in October, I will rise above the clouds in a silver jet. The noise of the engines, my little tray shifting and shaking from the thundering blast.
In the fall I am going back to see my son, for the first time since he was born.
I’d rather not join up the past with the present. I am committed to staying here, continuing my life. Such as it is. Yet this vision of myself calmly looking out the window of the jet, of myself slowly walking down the path of another park, in another city, walking, then stopping in my tracks as I see him swinging off the monkey gym and running, small, sturdy, slightly pigeon-toed in baggy trousers like his father’s, running towards me across the grass – this vision overwhelms me.
I did not think they’d be amenable, the people who are raising him. I thought that now I am someone who can afford a transatlantic fare, they’d find me formidable. But the people who deserve to call themselves parents -- they know I am not formidable, know I forfeited all right to him long ago.
They sought me out, sent a simple note to my parents’ old address, a plain thin envelope that drifted here and there, and finally to me here in New York.
In this plain envelope they enclosed two earth-shattering pieces of information. One was of the existence of the child I thought died at birth. The other was that the child’s father, their son, had been killed. I’d thought it the other way round; that the baby died, and the father lived.
They enclosed an obituary: Lance Corporal Michael James Patrick Rafferty, aged 28. Died not in Belfast or Afghanistan, but in a motorbike crash, two blocks from home.
I’d assumed they’d dispersed from the address I knew years ago, but they were there the entire time. They found me out going through his things. He still carried my high school picture, address and phone number on the back. All those years, shifting from wallet to wallet, and he never got in touch. Not that I blame him.
Now I sit limply on the bench in the balmy September shade, and think about what I will wear. The parents -- it will be of no concern to them what I look like, so long as I sign the papers.
But the boy. I see him in the park where his father and I once whiled away the time, to get out of the house, escape the storm we created. Hours in the little park café, our companions shabby old men surreptitiously feeding scraps to dogs -- which amused us -- and haggard young mothers, overweight, overwrought -- who did not.
Ten years ago, another park, another autumn mist, a different damp rotting smell, other acorn-things crunching underfoot. I wore a much over-sized tweed blazer bought for a pound at Oxfam, to hide what was not even beginning to show, baggy jeans, an old red pullover, poorly cut hair, dyed in aubergine shades of youth, worn-out shoes, inadequate for city pavements. My feet hurt a lot then; it was the season of hurting feet. We walked all over town looking for work -- to pubs, restaurants, across bridges, to where the trains didn’t go.
When I took my shoes off in his small, slope-roofed bedroom, he knelt down and kissed my instep.
“I’ll buy you a new pair,” he said. How could I, for even one minute, have believed we stood a chance?
That night after supper he went down the street for cigarettes. Want anything? I knew he’d bring me back a candy bar. He always did. It was a quiet night. His father drove a limousine evenings.
He slammed gaily out the front door, went down the street, and never came back.
This week, in one of the discount houses off lower Fifth Avenue, I bought a raincoat. A lush, draped, eggshell-colored raincoat over which my hair falls, now its natural chestnut brown, fluffy, long, well-cut. The blue crepe suit underneath looks expensive, though I got it at a discount shop on Fulton Street. It hangs well. No one, looking at my figure today, would ever guess.
Sheer black stockings, shin to instep, and on my feet, although I will be obliged to walk some ways across the park (as I, from a distance, solemn, torn, bleeding, frozen, see my son running towards me across the grass) on my feet, I think, the new Kenneth Coles. Black leather, high-heeled, long pointed toes. A bit tarty, but I would rather he remember me that way. He must never guess the poverty of his origins.
He calls his paternal grandparents Mum and Dad. She was thirty-six when he was born, he forty. But they’ll tell him someday, or someone will, when he’s twelve, fifteen, twenty. They’ll tell him the lady you met, x-many years ago in the park, the lady in the eggshell raincoat, the blue suit, with the cherry lipstick and pale blue eye shadow, was not your dead brother’s old girlfriend, but your mother. And your dead brother who you used to see only on holidays home from the army? Who played with you, who took you to the park? He wasn’t your brother, but your Dad.
After Mick gaily slammed out the door I hung on for a day or two. His parents did not take it as calamitously as mine would have. He’d told his father first, man to man. By the time I arrived, up from the summer country job where we’d met, his Dad had calmed to grim monosyllables and abrupt departures. The mother better. She sat at the kitchen table, young-looking, even in her distress, chain-smoking, blue eyeliner circling blue eyes, dark hair prettily curled down to her shoulders, managing, even in the fray to pay attention to her other, younger son, eight-year-old Frankie, who ran around the kitchen, throwing a ball, knocking things about, possessed of excess energy, a sieve for the household stress.
The mother (her name was Kath) tipped cigarette ash into a ceramic circle that said Whitbred Ale. “What about your parents, would they be sympathetic?”
I shook my head, tears welling. It would be utter disaster. They have so many problems as it is. (Though what were they, in the light of everything now, what were they really?) My father will kill my mother, I said, He’ll blame her.
Kath pursed pink lips and dropped mascara-thick lashes. Not refuting my version, merely indicating, What do you think this is doing to my family?
She said, gently, Have you considered a clinic?
Too far gone, I said.
Well, she rose, brushing her hands on the front of her neat wrap-around skirt, reaching down for Frankie’s small hand, You two didn’t waste any time, did you?
During the two days I stayed on after Mickey left, I helped Kath with the washing up, took Frankie to the playground. I was glad for the company, grasping at straws, trying to belong. Without him I felt I was missing an arm.
He’ll come back, I said aloud in the café, watching Frankie outside, running rings around nothing.
“Nasty little buggers, aren’t they,” commiserated a bloated young mother, whose lithe, blonde daughter on roller-skates screeched ceaselessly in circles.
He’ll come back, Kath said.
He may not, said the father, and I suspected collusion.
I saw what they saw. A nice girl, a mixed-up girl, a girl with her own parents, a big house, going to college in America. It was not for them to take me on.
After two days a mate of Mick’s came with the news that he’d joined the forces.
I told Kath I’d leave next morning. Could I call home, collect?
Is it your period, my mother said melodramatically, across the transatlantic wire. Though I was, at twenty, marginally too old for this to be scandalous. How much money do you need, she said, a woman who never missed Sunday mass, who was a saint, a martyr in her own life, who’d never consider aborting any of her own five, no matter how bad the timing.
Five hundred, I told her. We made arrangements for it to be wired to a bank near St. Paul’s. I told her about Mickey, and she said, I know honey, I know. But she did not say, We love you, come home, don’t worry, you can have it here. We have four bedrooms and three baths, what’s one little baby, more or less?
I told them all I was booking an appointment at the clinic. Dangerous, but not illegal. Don’t worry, I said, I have a girlfriend to stay with after.
I did have a friend in Finsbury Park. Pam, from my summer job, was leaving with her boyfriend for Jamaica, where he was shooting a film. They wanted me to dog-sit till Christmas. I crossed the river to wave the happy couple off.
Pam stood in pink quilted coat, arm in arm with the fiance to whom she had been vigorously unfaithful all summer. When I’m twenty-four, I wondered, will I inspire men to loyalty, protection, continued admiration, love?
Pam had an ex, an Australian who ran an American-style hamburger joint in Mayfair. I ordered the uniform a size large. I was slender, my stomach muscles strong. Only when all my clothes were off might one have guessed.
With the money my mother sent I bought a new pair of shoes. Got my hair cut at Vidal Sassoon for a pound. Served lager and burgers to Americans, to Germans, Australians. Painted my face white and lips red and men left phone numbers on cocktail napkins. Walked home unmolested, magically immune from harassment, on dark city streets. Looked at home lights burning in flats, thought of the previous man, Adrian. The memory of his gentle brush-off in the spring a nostalgic indulgence now. All his fault in a way. If he hadn’t gone back to the girl he’d lived with before, I wouldn’t have had to move out, wouldn’t have gone to work in that awful place, met that awful man, had that bad night that sent me running out to the country, then tripping into the vat of sweet, syrupy sentiment that was Mickey.
I got in touch with a Catholic charity, walked Pam’s dog in Hyde Park where leaves feel like rain. I’d read about unwed mothers, knew what to feel. But the girls in these books were appalled that their lives, their chances, were ruined. But my life, once such a hopeful, shining thing, had altered months before, changed the night of that terrible man.
In the movies the smell of popcorn made me ill. I stretched out the waist-band of my baggy jeans, piled on sweaters, hid in the oversized Oxfam jacket. Wandered through rush hour in the City, passed pin-striped blond men with closed faces who might have been my earlier man, Adrian, but were not. I looked at my own bewildered, fattening face in a reflective metal strip.
One rainy November morning I walked south of the river, back to Mick’s neighborhood. I passed bristle-haired young men with Rottweilers who looked at me and looked away, past a middle-aged man hosing down a Mercedes, who returned my glance sharply, past an Irish lace-curtained ground-level window, behind which a white-haired lady lifted a green plastic bowl for inspection.
Mick’s house a small, functional, faded yellow row house. Not a light, not a curtain fluttered. That was when I knew they’d fled, to get away from me.
The weeks passed, very slowly, very quickly. Editorials warned of American aggression: “Europe Must Speak or Perish!” In the wee hours after my long shift, my ears pricked for the sound of the missile that would do its harm in the unclaimed hours before dawn, when no one was looking and anything might happen. No one would stop it, like no one stopped what happened in that dark locked room.
I worked. The weight I’d put on could have been for other reasons. I tried not to binge, steered clear of beer, but couldn’t quite give up smoking. I’d have saved four hundred pounds, on top of the money my mother sent, by Christmas. Then I’d stop work, get in touch with the Catholic charity.
Only Tony, the restaurant manager, guessed.
“You’ve put on weight,” he said one evening. “A lot of weight.”
“I know,” I said, and went off with my tray of four plates and six drinks.
I cleaned out the popcorn machine, the last waitress to finish, carrying two full buckets of water to mop the floor around the salad bar.
“Put that down,” Tony commanded. “You shouldn’t be carrying things like that.”
He had the sun-aged skin of all Australians, the receding blond hair, the moustache.
We had a pint, even though I knew I shouldn’t, and talked. Tony said not to worry. At 3:30 we locked up and he drove me all the way home. He asked to come in. What difference would it make? He didn’t mind about me. He had a four-year old daughter from a previous liaison. Everything would be all right.
He sprang off the bed when he felt blood gushing.
Ring an ambulance, he said. Only there was no phone.
He drove me to hospital. I put two towels on the seat, they soaked right through. He dropped me off, saying he’d check in next day. It will be over, I thought. Death didn’t scare me. I’d spent a lot of time with death the night of that locked room.
What’s your blood type, what’s your National Health number, people shouted at me. Doctors spoke to me in Spanish, German, Russian. I wasn’t telling. I’d come without I.D. No one was going to find out.
I woke up and it was dark and I couldn’t move. This seemed right, as I was dead. At least not in hell. Limbo perhaps? Then why was I breathing? My eyes adjusted, saw shades of grey, light bouncing off metal tubing, below, a curtain. Sound of heavy rain outside, or a fan. People muttering. I was strapped down, but loosely. I extricated one arm, then another, and with a pinch pulled out my IV drip. I leaned on an elbow. My stomach was nearly flat. I reached over and pulled back the curtain. Next to my bed, not two feet away, a cot. With a small baby. Streetlight coming from the window gave enough illumination for me to tell it’s skin was dusky. I didn’t reach for it; I was afraid I’d strangle it. I pulled the curtain shut, lay down and closed my eyes.
When I woke it was bright. My curtain still shut, but outside noise, footsteps, babies wailing. I felt lucid and strong, but dirty, sticky, and sore. I had to go to the bathroom, but had wet myself apparently.
Outside the curtain at least twelve beds, most filled with women. The little cot next to me, and the bed beyond, empty. Rising I felt light-headed, stunned, but really, fine. No shower in the lav, but when I returned, an Arabic woman nursing the dark-skinned baby I’d encountered in the middle of the night occupied the bed next door. I sat down on the edge of my bed and tears of relief welled. Now I could go find Mick.
The woman was Iranian, spoke English well. She talked in a high, piercing, sing-song voice about her baby, a daughter, about its father, a twenty-year old African musician who wanted nothing to do with either of them. But she didn’t care, because she now qualified for her own council flat. She said not to worry about the crying. She had cried at first. Sometimes, she said, looking down at her child, Sometimes I feel like hitting her.
“What about yours?”
“Mine?” I said.
“Your son.”
Then a nurse and doctor bore down on us, barged into my cubicle, and pulled the curtain firmly shut. They came armed with forms. They were impatient, condescending, but not unkind. Surprised I spoke English. They asked me if I knew who the father was and I said yes, although there was in fact, some doubt. It concerned the baby. Yes, the baby. In addition to many other problems, which they would shortly fill me in on, the baby was having trouble changing over his blood from my type to the father’s.
So no miscarriage, but a real, live, premature, nearly three pound baby. Six months, I told them. That was what they doctor had surmised.
The doctor, who was young, dark, and somber, with receding hair, began to tell me, quite grimly, all that was wrong, described all they had done to try to preserve his life, and the remarkable success, the remarkable luck they’d had in being able to do this, considering they’d had no medical information, no history, nothing to go on at all.
There was a problem with the lungs, he said, which would get worse as he grew. The heart was touch and go, problems also likely to develop there; surgery likely. He was being fed intravenously, warmed, the blood-changing accelerated by ultra-violet light.
Other risks: nerve damage, mental retardation, blindness.
I knew I ought to be crying.
The doctor looked at me expectantly, accusingly.
“So you think he’s not going to be all right, then?”
He sighed and asked how old I was, if I was in touch with the father, if my parents knew. Was I planning on keeping the baby?
I was going to give it up, I said, Now I don’t know.
He handed me the stack of forms and left.
I sat up in bed and put down the name of a girl from California I’d roomed with freshman year, a fanciful phone number. My correct medical history. I put down Mickey’s name, address and phone number, but explained in parenthesis that this was his parents’ home, and added, dramatically, Whereabouts Unknown.
The other doctor came, pulled the curtain around and examined me. (It hurt.) I asked the nurse after if I could take a shower and wash my hair, and that I’d wet the bed, and where were my things? She gave me shampoo and even some fresh underwear and sanitary towels.
When I was clean I felt much better, had lunch and then slept.
It was a busy hospital. When the doctor came around again he said he didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to see the baby, especially if I was planning on giving it up if it survived.
I watched the T.V. and felt strangely safe. The news reports from America all far and away in the dark outer world, and no one knew anything about what I’d done, here in this warm bright place.
That night I fell asleep quickly, while the visiting hours were still on, clean and fresh on my hard high hospital bed hidden behind my curtain.
But in the middle of the night, a commotion, footsteps down the hall, and a Jamaican nurse shook me awake.
“Your son,” she said. “You must see your son.”
I followed her, wrapping my blanket around for cover. The row of beds filled with mothers, cots filled with babies, past a window showcasing two mildly premature babies in their incubators, down another hall, into a large room. The nurse gave me masque, gown and rubber gloves, attired herself in the same. She opened the door to a smaller room. I was afraid to look, and rightly so. He lay there, transparently red, white and blue, all chest, insect limbs, black blinkers, head moving rhythmically to unheard music, making circles on its tiny neck. Tubes criss-crossed his chest, arms, feet. Oxygen pumped in and out his box, his little heartbeat, weakly, irregularly, registering on a screen.
I thought he must be dying.
“Do you want to hold him?” the nurse said, muffled behind her masque.
Should I have said no?
Through the holes on the side of his see-through box, she made sure the patches holding the tubes and needles were in place, then slowly lifted him up. He trembled, but did not fall apart.
He fit with room to spare in my two hands, reaching in. I could have held him in one. He felt as light and tremulous as a frightened bird. His blood beat visibly through the wax of his skull, lungs fluttering irregularly, heart likewise.
The nurse’s dark eyes slanted, frowning above her masque. The Doctor. We put him down.
She rushed me out of the room. I wasn’t supposed to have been there. Good-bye, I said, looking over my shoulder at the glass box. Good-bye.
I went back and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark with the sleeping women and infants. The nurse had disappeared. No point in staying to the bitter end.
Surely, you must agree I’d been through enough by then?
I put on my socks, the jeans they had laundered for me that I was still able to just button even before the birth, my T-shirt and sweater.
I put these things on, quietly, slowly, haltingly. I took my little bag from the locker, with my Saturday night’s tips, which miraculously had not been stolen, two bus slips, and the key to Pam’s flat.
I walked past the sleeping women, past the empty nurses’ station, past two student doctors who seemed unperturbed by the sight of me, went right down the elevator and out the front door.
I walked quickly away, all the way back to Pam’s flat, through nearly silent, snow-muted streets. I let myself in, got my things together, called a taxi and eighteen hours later landed in New York.
I know what you’re thinking. What about the poor dog? Pam’s dog I was enlisted to look after. What happened to him when I was in hospital?
Well, you can’t get everything right.
That’s how I wrote it for the shrink. Do you think she felt sorry for me?
Do you think she thought I was justified? Do you? Well, do you?
