Saint Maybe (42 page)

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

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

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

“Jogs?”

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

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

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

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

“Pardon?”

“ ‘Like a Prayer.’ ”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The
song
, Ian.”

“Oh.”

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

“At work,” she said.

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

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

“An inventor.”

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

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

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

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

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

Although he was nowhere near as confident as he sounded.

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

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

He swallowed.

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

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

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

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

“How much?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m staying,” Daphne told him.

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

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

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

“I could concentrate too,” she said.

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

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

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

“Remember our wedding night?” she asked him.

“Yes, of course.”

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

“Well, I was,” he said.

“You were praying.”

“Well, that too.”

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

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

“Could you pray now?” she asked him.

“Now?”

“Could you pray for the baby?”

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

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

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

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

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

“It won’t be real fancy,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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