A Personal Matter (6 page)

Bird agreed. “I’ll go right over to the college and explain what’s happened,” he was saying, when he heard the hard click of the connection being broken arbitrarily at the other end of the line. So his own voice had filled the listener with disgust, too. Bird put the receiver back and picked up the baby’s basket. The one-eyed doctor was already in the ambulance. Bird, instead of climbing in after him, set the basket on the canvas stretcher.

“Thanks for everything. I think I’ll go alone.”

“You’re going home alone?” the doctor said.

“Yes,” Bird replied, meaning “I’m going
out
alone.” He had to report the circumstances of the birth to his father-in-law, but after that he would have some free time. And a visit to the professor, compared to returning to his wife and mother-in-law, held a promise of pure therapy.

The doctor closed the door from the inside and the ambulance moved away silently, observing the speed limit, like
a former
monster now powerless and deprived of voice. Through the same window from which, an hour earlier, weeping, he had gazed at pedestrians in the street, Bird saw the doctor and one of the firemen lurch forward toward the driver. He knew they were going to gossip about him and his baby, and it didn’t bother him. From the telephone conversation with the old woman had come an unexpected furlough, time to himself to be spent alone and as he liked—the thought pumped strong, fresh blood into his head.

Bird started across the hospital square, wide and long as a soccer field. Halfway, he turned around and looked up at the building where he had just abandoned his first child, a baby on the brink of death. A gigantic building, with an overbearing presence, like a fort. Glistening in the sunlight of early summer, it made the baby who was faintly screaming in one of its obscure corners seem meaner than a grain of sand.

What if I
do
come back tomorrow, I might get lost in the labyrinth of this modern fort and wander in bewilderment; I might never find my dying or maybe already dead baby. The notion carried Bird one step
away from his misfortune. He strode through the front gate and hurried down the street.

Forenoon: the most exhilarating hour of an early summer day. And a breeze that recalled elementary school excursions quickened the worms of tingling pleasure on Bird’s cheeks and earlobes, flushed from lack of sleep. The nerve cells in his skin, the farther they were from conscious restraint, the more thirstily they drank the sweetness of the season and the hour. Soon a sense of liberation rose to the surface of his consciousness.

Before I go to see my father-in-law, I’ll wash up and get a shave! Bird marched into the first barbershop he found. And the middle-aged barber led him to a chair as though he were an ordinary customer. The barber had not discerned any indications of misfortune. Bird, by transforming himself into the person the barber perceived, was able to escape his sadness and his apprehension. He closed his eyes. A hot, heavy towel that smelled of disinfectant steamed his cheeks and jaw. Years ago, he had seen a comic skit about a barbershop: the barber’s young apprentice has a hellishly hot towel, too hot to cool in his hands or even hold, so he slaps it down as it is on the customer’s face. Ever since, Bird laughed whenever his face was covered with a towel. He could feel himself smiling even now. That was going too far! Bird shuddered, shattering the smile, and began thinking about the baby. In the smile on his face, he had discovered proof of his own guilt.

The death of a vegetable baby—Bird examined his son’s calamity from the angle that stabbed deepest. The death of a vegetable baby with only vegetable functions was not accompanied by suffering. Fine, but what did death mean to a baby like that? Or, for that matter, life? The bud of an existence appeared on a plain of nothingness that stretched for zillions of years and there it grew for nine months. Of course, there was no consciousness in a fetus, it simply curled in a ball and existed, filling utterly a warm, dark, mucous world. Then, perilously, into the external world. It was cold there, and hard, scratchy, dry and fiercely bright. The outside world was not so confined that the baby could fill it by himself: he must live with countless strangers. But, for a baby like a vegetable, that stay in the external world would be nothing more than a few hours of occult suffering he couldn’t account for. Then the suffocating instant, and once again, on that plain of nothingness zillions of years long, the fine sand of nothingness itself. What if there
was
a
last judgment! Under what category of the Dead could you subpoena, prosecute, and sentence a baby with only vegetable functions who died no sooner than he was born? Only a few hours on this earth, and spent in crying, tongue fluttering in his stretched, pearly-red mouth, wouldn’t any judge consider that insufficient evidence? Insufficient fucking evidence! Bird gasped in fear that had deepened until now it was profound. I might be called as a witness and I wouldn’t be able to identify my own son unless I got a clue from the lump on his head. Bird felt a sharp pain in his upper lip.

“Sit still, please! I nicked you,” the barber hissed, resting his razor on the bridge of Bird’s nose and peering into his face. Bird touched his upper lip with the tip of his finger. He stared at the blood, and he felt a pang of nausea. Bird’s blood was type A and so was his wife’s. The quart of blood circulating in the body of his dying baby was probably type A, too. Bird put his hand back under the linen and closed his eyes again. The barber slowly, hesitatingly shaved around the cut on his upper lip, then scythed his cheeks and jaw with rough haste, as if to retrieve lost time.

“You’ll want a shampoo?”

“No, that’s all right.”

“There’s lots of dirt and grass in your hair,” the barber objected.

“I know, I fell down last night.” Stepping out of the barber chair, Bird glanced at his face in a mirror that glistened like a noon beach. His hair was definitely matted, crackly as dry straw, but his face from his high cheekbones to his jaw was as bright and as fresh a pink as the belly of a rainbow trout. If only a strong light were shining in those glue-colored eyes, if the taut eyelids were relaxed and the thin lips weren’t twitching, this would be a conspicuously younger and livelier Bird than the portrait reflected in the store window last night.

Stopping at a barbershop had been a good idea: Bird was satisfied. If nothing else, he had introduced one positive element to a psychological balance which had been tipped to negative since dawn. A glance at the blood that had dried under his nose like a triangular mole, and Bird left the barbershop. By the time he got to the college, the glow the razor had left on his cheeks would probably have faded. But he would have scraped away with his nail the mole of dried blood by then: no danger of impressing his father-in-law as a sad and ludicrous hangdog. Searching
the street for a bus stop, Bird remembered the extra money he was carrying in his pocket and hailed a passing cab.

Bird stepped out of the cab into a crowd of students swarming through the main gate on their way to lunch: five minutes past twelve. On the campus, he stopped a big fellow and asked directions to the English department. Surprisingly, the student beamed a smile and singsonged, nostalgically, “It’s certainly been a long time, sensei!” Bird was horrified. “I was in your class at the cram-school. None of the government schools worked out, so I had my old man donate some money here and got in, you know, through the back door.”

“So you’re a student here now,” Bird said with relief, remembering who the student was. Though not unhandsome, the boy had saucer eyes and a bulbous nose that recalled the illustrations of German peasants in
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

“It sounds as if cram-school wasn’t much help to you,” Bird said.

“Not at all, sensei! Study is never a waste. You may not remember a single thing but, you know, study is study!”

Bird suspected he was being ridiculed and he glowered at the boy. But the student was trying with his whole large body to demonstrate his good will. Even in a class of one hundred, Bird vividly recalled, this one had been a conspicuous dullard. And precisely for that reason he was able to report simply and jovially to Bird that he had entered a second-rate private college through the back door, and to express gratitude for classes that had availed him nothing. Any of the ninety-nine other students would have tried to avoid their cram-school instructor.

“With our tuition as high as it is, it’s a relief to hear you say that.”

“Oh, it was worth every penny. Will you be teaching here from now on?”

Bird shook his head.

“Oh. …” The student tactfully expanded the conversation: “Let me take you to the English department; it’s this way. But seriously, sensei, the studying I did at cram-school didn’t go to waste. It’s all in my head someplace, taking root sort of; and someday it will come in handy. It’s just a matter of waiting for the time to come—isn’t that pretty much what studying is in the final analysis, sensei?”

Bird, following this optimistic and somehow didactic former student, cut across a walk bordered by trees in full blossom and came to the front
of a red-ochre brick building. “The English department is on the third floor at the back. I was so happy to get in here, I explored the campus until I know it like the palm of my hand,” the boy said proudly, and flashed a grin so eloquently self-derisive that Bird doubted his own eyes.

“I sound pretty simple, don’t I!”

“Not at all; not so simple.”

“It’s awfully nice of you to say so. Well then, I’ll be seeing you around, sensei. And take care of yourself: you’re looking a little pale!”

Climbing the stairs, Bird thought: That guy will manage his adult life with a thousand times more cunning than I manage mine; at least he won’t go around having babies die on him with brain hernias. But what an oddly unique moralist he had had in his class!

Bird peered around the door into the English department office and located his father-in-law. On a small balcony that extended from a far corner of the room, the professor was slumped in an oak rocking chair, gazing at the partly open skylight. The office had the feeling of a conference room, far larger and brighter than the English offices at the university from which Bird had graduated. Bird’s father-in-law often said (he told the story wryly, like a favorite joke on himself) that the treatment he received at this private college, including facilities such as the rocking chair, was incomparably better than what he had been used to at the National University: Bird could see there was more to the story than a joke. If the sun got any stronger, though, the rocking chair would have to be moved back or the balcony shaded with an awning, one or the other.

At a large table near the door, three young teaching assistants, oil gleaming on their ruddy faces, were having a cup of coffee, apparently after lunch. All three of them Bird knew by sight: honor students who had been a class ahead of him at college. But for the incident with the whisky and Bird’s withdrawal from graduate school, he certainly would have found himself in pursuit of their careers.

Bird knocked at the open door, stepped into the room, and greeted his three seniors. Then he crossed the room to the balcony; his father-in-law twisted around to watch him as he approached, his head thrown back, balancing himself on the rocking chair. The assistants watched too, with identical smiles of no special significance. It was true that they considered Bird a phenomenon of some rarity, but at the same time he
was an outsider and therefore not an object of serious concern. That funny, peculiar character who went on a long binge for no reason in the world and finally dropped out of graduate school—something like that.

“Professor!” Bird said out of habit established before he had married the old man’s daughter. His father-in-law swung himself and the chair around to face him, the wooden rockers squeaking on the floor, and waved Bird into a swivel chair with long arm rests.

“Was the baby born?” he asked.

“Yes, the baby was born—” Bird winced to hear his voice shrivel into a timid peep, and he closed his mouth. Then, compelling himself to say it all in one breath: “The baby has a brain hernia and the doctor says he’ll die sometime tomorrow or the day after, the mother is fine!”

The taffy-colored skin of the professor’s large, leonine face quietly turned vermilion. Even the sagging bags on his lower eyelids colored brightly, as though blood were seeping through. Bird felt the color rising to his own face. He realized all over again how alone and helpless he had been since dawn.

“Brain hernia. Did you see the baby?”

Bird detected a hidden intimation of his wife’s voice even in the professor’s thin hoarseness, and, if anything, it made him miss her.

“Yes, I did. His head was in bandages, like Apollinaire.”

“Like Apollinaire … his head in bandages.” The professor tried the words on his own tongue as if he were pondering the punch line of a little joke. When he spoke, it was not so much to Bird as to the three assistants: “In this age of ours it’s hard to say with certainty that having lived was better than not having been born in the first place.” The three young men laughed with restraint, but audibly: Bird turned and stared at them. They stared back, and the composure in their eyes meant they were not the least surprised that a queer fellow like Bird had met with a freak accident. Resentful, Bird looked down at his muddy shoes. “I’ll call you when it’s all over,” he said.

The professor, rocking his chair almost imperceptibly, said nothing. It occurred to Bird that his father-in-law might be feeling a little disgusted with the satisfaction the rocking chair gave him ordinarily.

Bird was silent, too. He felt he had said everything he had to say. Would he be able to conclude on such a clear and simple note when it came time to let his wife in on the secret? Not a chance. There would be tears, questions by the truckload, a sense of the futility of fast talk, an
aching throat, and a flushed head: finally a rope of screaming nerves would fetter Mr. and Mrs. Bird.

“I’d better be getting back; there are still papers to be signed at the hospital,” Bird said at last.