Bitter Sweet (60 page)
Her husband didn’t love her. She knew that as certainly as she knew whom he did love.
Maggie awoke at
on November 8 with a strong, knong contraction that opened her eyes like a slamming door. She cupped her stomach and lay absolutely still, wishing it away, realizing it was two weeks early. Don’t let anything happen to the baby. When the pain ebbed she closed her eyes, absorbing the prayer which had imposed Jr’self without her conscious will. When had she begun wanting this child?
She turned on the light and checked the minute hand on her watch, then lay waiting, remembering her first birth, how different it had been with Phillip beside her. It had been a slow labour, thirteen hours total. At home they had walked, then danced, laughing between contractions at her ungainliness. He had carried her suitcase to the car and had driven with one hand on her thigh. When a hard pain snapped her straight as a switchblade, he’d rolled down the car windows and run a red light. His was the last face she’d seen before being rolled into the delivery room, and the first upon waking in the recovery room. How reassuringly traditional it had been.
How daunting, this time, to face it husbandless.
Another pain built. Eight minutes.., pant.., pant...
Call Dad... call the doctor...
Dr Macklin said, ‘Get to the hospital.’
Roy
said, ‘I’m on my way.’
Vera told
Roy
, ‘Don’t expect me to show my face around that hospital!
Reaching for his shirt and shoes, he replied, ‘No, Vera, I won’t. I’ve learned not to expect anything from you at the times that count.’
She sat up, her hairnet like a web over her forehead, her face pinched beneath it. ‘See what this has done! It’s driven a wedge between us. That girl has disgraced us, Roy, and I can’t for the life of me see how you can -’
He slammed the door, leaving her braced up on one hand, still haranguing him from the bed they’d shared for over forty years.
‘Hello, honey,’ he said cheerfully when he got to Maggie’s. ‘What do you say we get this little person .into the world?’
Maggie had not thought she could love her father more, but the next two hours proved differently. A father and daughter could not go through so intimate an experience without learning each other’s true mettle and being bound by new, even stronger tethers.
Roy
was magnificent. He was all the things that Vera wasn’t: gentle, infinitely loving, strong when she needed strength, humorous when she needed reprieve. She had worried about certain moments- when he’d have to witness her pain, when her body was probed in one way or another, and above all, that of baring herself before him for the first rime. He proved dauntless. He took her nudity in his stridea surprise - talking her through the first minutes with a recollection while rubbing her abdomen, naked, for the first time.
“When you were little, oh, about five, six maybe, you delivered your first baby. Do you remember that?’
She wagged her head on the pillow.
‘You don’t?’ He smiled. ‘Well, I do.’ His hand made soothing circles. ‘That was back when we used to make home deliveries from the store. If somebody was sick, or if an old lady didn’t have a car or a driver’s licence, we’d deliver her groceries for her. So one day the doorbell rang and I went to answer it, and there you stood, with your dolly in a brown paper sack. “I gots a delibery from the hostible,” you said, and handed it to me.’
‘Oh, Daddy, you’re making this up.’ Maggie couldn’t help smiling.
‘No, I’m not. I swear upon this very grandchild, I’m not.’
He patted her big, stretch-marked stomach. ‘You must have overheard things about deliveries and hospitals and that’s how you figured it was done, straight to the door in a brown paper sack like I delivered groceries.’
At that moment a contraction began, closing her eyes, forcing a breathiness into her voice. ‘I wish .. it were.., that easy.’
‘Don’t push yet,’ he coached ‘Breathe short. Hold those lower muscles tight . . . just for a while yet. That’s it, honey.’ When the contraction stopped he wiped her brow with a cool, damp cloth. ‘There. That was a dandy. Things are coming along real good, I think.’
‘Daddy,’ she said, looking up at him, ‘I wish you didn’t have to see me in pain.’
‘I know, but I’ll be strong if you’ll be. Besides, this is pretty exciting for an old man. When you were born I didn’t get a chance to watch ‘cause in those days they threw the fathers out in a smoky waiting room.”
She reached for his hand. His was there to grip hers tightly. For either of them to say ‘I love you’ would have been superfluous at that moment.
On the delivery table, when she called out, then growled with the effort of pushing the child from her body, he proved even more stalwart.
‘That’s the way, honey. Give ‘em hell,’ he encouraged.
When the baby’s head appeared, Maggie opened her eyes between pains and saw
Roy
’s eyes rapt on the mirror, a smile of excitement on his face.
He wiped her brow and said, ‘One more, honey.”
With the next push they shared the moment in eternity toward which all of life strives. One generation.., to the next.., to the next.
The baby sfithered into the world and it was Roy who rejoiced, ‘It’s a girl!’ then added reverently, ‘... oh, my... oh, my,’ in the kind of hushed tone often prompted by perfect roses and some sunsets. ‘Look at her, look at that gorgeous little granddaughter of mine.’
The baby squalled.
Roy
dried his eyes on the shoulder of his green scrubs, Maggie felt with her hands the wet, naked bundle on her belly, touching her daughter the first time before the umbilical cord was severed.
Even before she was bathed they held her, together, the three generations linked by
Roy
’s rough meat-cutter’s hand which lay on the baby’s tiny stomach, and Maggie’s much more delicate one upon the infant’s bloody, blonde-capped head.
‘It’s like having you all over again,’
Roy
said.
Maggie lifted her eyes and, as they filled with tears,
Roy
kissed her forehead. She found, at that moment, the blessing within the burden brought about by this unwanted pregnancy. It was he, this kind, loving father, his benevolence and goodness, the lessons he would teach her yet both her and this child - about love and its many guises.
‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘thank you for being here, and for being you.’
‘Thank you for asking me, sweetheart.’
Mike called on November 9 and told Eric, ‘Barb’s cousin Janice called this morning when she got to the hospital. Maggie had a girl last night.’
Eric sat down as if poleaxed.
‘Eric, you there?’
Silence.
‘Eric?’
‘Yeah, I’m... Jesus, a girl . . .’
‘Six pounds even. A little small, but everything’s okay.’ A girl, a girl. I have a baby girl? ‘Is Maggie okay?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘Did Janice see her? Or the baby?’
‘I don’t know. She works on a different floor,’
‘Oh, sure.., well . . .’
‘Listen, I hope it’s okay to say congratulations. I mean, hell, I don’t know what else to say.’
Eric drew an unsteady breath. ‘Thanks, Mike.’
‘Sure. Listen, you gonna be okay? You want me to come out or anything? Have a beer? Go for a ride?’ I’ll be all right.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah... I... hell...’ His voice broke. ‘Listen, Mike, I have to go.’
After hanging up he walked around feeling bereft, glancing out window after window, staring at objects without seeing them. What was her name? What colour was her hair? Was she lying in one of those glass cribs that looked like a big Pyrex bread pan? Was she crying? Being changed?
Was she in Maggie’s room being fed? What would they look like together, Maggie and their daughter?
His mind formed a picture of a dark head bent over a blonde one, the infant nursing from a baby bottle.., or a breast. He felt as he’d felt within the hour after his father had died. Helpless. Cheated. Like crying.
Nancy
came in from the grocery shopping and he forced himself to act normal.
‘Hi, anybody call?’ she said.
‘Mike.’
‘They’re still coming tonight, aren’t they?’
“Yes, but he asked me to come out and help him move Ma’s old furl oil barrel this afternoon. We’re going to haul it out to the dump.’ They’d finally talked Ma into a new furnace. It had been installed the previous week. It was a logical lie.
‘Oh, that’s all?’
‘Yeah. ‘
He moved like a plane on automatic pilot, as if all will had been taken from him - upstairs to reshave, change clothes, recomb his hair and pat after-shave on his cheeks, thinking all the while, you’re crazy, man! You keep your ass away from that hospital!
But he continued preparing, unable to resist, realizing this would be his only chance to see her. Once Maggie took her home it might be months, years before .she was old enough to walk and he happened to run into them uptown.
One look, one glimpse of his daughter and he’d hightail it out of there.
In the bedroom before
Nancy
’s lighted mirror, he checked his appearance one more time, wishing he could have worn dress trousers and a sports jacket. To haul Ma’s oil burner to the dump? His white shirt was tucked tightly into his blue jeans, but he smoothed the front another time, then pressed a hand to his trembling stomach. What are you scared of? He blew out a big breath, turned from his reflection and went downstairs to find his jacket.
Shrugging into it, avoiding
Nancy
’s eyes, he inquired, ‘You need any help with supper?’
‘You’re great with Caesar dressing. I thought I’d let you make it and toss the salad.’
‘Right. I’ll be home in plenty of time.’
He hurried out before she could kiss him good-bye.
He’d got a new Ford pickup. No advertising on its doors, nothing to disclose who owned it. Driving it through the drear November afternoon towards.
Strangers? Or had Maggie kept it as her own? And was there a cradle in one corner? Or a crib against one wall? A rocking chair in one corner?
Lord, all he’d miss. All the sweet ordinary paternal milestones he’d miss.
The hospital was on
At the nurse’s station a plump fortyish woman with a dime-sized mole on her left cheek looked up as he passed, watching him through thick glass that magnified her eyes and tinted them pink. He knew the procedure - anyone wanting to view babies asked at the nurses’ station for them to be brought to the observation window, but Eric had no intention of asking. Luck would either be with him or it wouldn’t. He nodded to the woman and proceeded around the corner toward the nursery window without speaking a word. Passing open doors he glanced inside wondering which was Maggie’s, telling himself, should he happen to catch a glimpse of her, he would not pause. But he felt an almost sick longing at the realization of how near she was. Within yards, behind one of these walls, she lay upon a high, hard bed, her body mending, her heart - what of her heart? Was it, too, mending? Or did it still ache at the thought of him, as his did at the thought of her? If he asked her room number and stopped in her doorway, what might her reaction be?
He reached the nursery window without encountering anyone, and looked inside. White walls trimmed with colourful rabbits and bears. A window on the opposite wall.
A clock with a blue frame. Three occupied glass cribs. One with a blue nametag, two with pink. From this distance he could not read the names. He stood terrified, sweating, feeling an overload of blood rush to his chest and a shortage of breath as if he’d been tackled and gone down hard.
The baby beneath the pink card on the left lay on her back, crying, her arms up and quivering like newly sprouted shoots in a stiff breeze. He stepped closer to the window and withdrew his glasses from his jacket pocket.