The Stork Club (19 page)

The friends were understanding and kind. They offered sympathy for the loss of hope of ever having a baby. The sisters looked funereal, which was obviously
the way they felt. Even the flowers they brought, white lilies, looked like the kind people brought when someone died. And they sat on the bed and spoke in solemn whispers.

When her strength came back, Lainie began a regimen of chemotherapy twice a week. Mitch would drive her to the hospital and wait, drive her home and sit outside the bathroom door while she was sick, then help her gently into bed where she would nap, while he went back to work at Panache. Her hair was falling out in large chunks, her skin was sallow, and she had no appetite at all. She still went to the store as often as she could. She had enough energy to do some work, but she felt sensitive about her appearance when she saw the pitying expressions on people's faces when they looked at her.

One day she stopped at Sherman Oaks Park, sat in her car in the parking lot near the playground, and watched the toddlers in the sandbox and the bigger children on the play equipment and wished she were dead. When the months of chemotherapy ended, the doctors scheduled a surgery during which they planned to take a tissue sample from each organ to determine if the cancer was gone.

"Mitch," Lainie said the night before the second surgery. She was naked against his naked back. "If they find any more cancer, I'm not going to go for chemo again. I'm going to elect to die."

The surgery found nothing. Mitch sent her a giant basket of flowers. He also sent a dozen helium balloons which floated to the ceiling in her hospital room, and he held her too tight, and she laughed when he climbed into the hospital bed next to her and said, "God couldn't take you away from me so soon. I'm too nice a guy."

The business was running like a top and Lainie's strength was returning, her hair was growing back, and
her everyday life was normal again. Slowly and gently Mitch brought their sex life back to normal too. Loving her, it seemed, with a greater tenderness than ever.

On Mitch's thirty-fifth birthday, Lainie threw a party for him right in the store, with valet parking, a dance floor, a disc jockey, and a caterer. She invited Mitch's sisters and their husbands, all the employees of Panache and their spouses, a whole group of her friends from school, and the guys Mitch grew up with in the Valley. There was Dave Andrews, who owned a mattress company, and Frankie De Lio, who owned a chain of liquor stores, and Larry Weber, who was a successful lawyer.

When the disc jockey played Kenny Rogers singing "Lady," Mitch took Lainie onto the dance floor as if they were a couple of teenagers at a school dance, and some of the girls from the store let out a cheer when he pulled her close to him and they danced.

"You have come into my life and made me whole . . .," Kenny Rogers sang.

"Larry Weber told me he has a client whose sixteen-year-old-daughter is very pregnant," she thought she heard him say into her hair, and she wondered why he was telling her that. "I mean as in so pregnant she's giving birth any minute."

Lainie looked into his face now to try to see where this was leading. "So?" she asked.

"So she's a kid and her parents didn't want her to have an abortion, and for a while the girl's mother was going to keep the baby and raise it as if it was hers, only now they decided that wouldn't be good for the girl, so they need to find a home for it fast."

"Look at that cute couple," Carin said as she and her boyfriend danced past Lainie and Mitch. For a few minutes Lainie didn't know what to say as they moved to the music, pressed tightly together, then she stopped
dancing and stood in the middle of the dimly lit room and looked at him.

"You mean just like that. In a couple of days? Somebody drops off a baby?"

"I know. It sounds nuts, doesn't it? But maybe it's fate. Larry being here and asking me casually why we don't have kids, and me telling him all the stuff we've been through . . . "

Lainie looked away. A peal of laughter erupted from Mitch's sisters who were standing in a cluster with their husbands.

"I mean, maybe we're the ones who are destined to take the baby from this poor little girl."

Lainie had always thought Mitch was against adoption because an adopted baby wouldn't have the De Nardo genes. But here he was asking to take in some stranger's baby within hours. He was getting desperate.

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. I mean, it's so fast. We don't even have anything for it."

"What does it need? It could sleep in our bed. I can go to any drugstore and get diapers and formula now if I have to." He looked and sounded like a kid begging for a puppy. Next he would probably swear he'd be responsible for feeding it and changing it.

"I'll help with it. Hell, we can afford to get a full-time nurse."

"I'm so lost in your love . . .," Kenny Rogers sang.

The next few days were about visits to the lawyer and signing papers in Larry Weber's Valley office, then running to the Juvenile shop to look at baby furniture. They bought a changing table, a crib, and a musical swing.

"Can't you just order them," Margaret Dunn asked, "and not have them delivered until after the baby is born?"

Mitch laughed at his mother-in-law's superstitions, and told the Juvenile shop to deliver everything that night. It would give him time to run home and get the third bedroom cleaned up and ready for the arrival of the baby.

The next morning Larry Weber called just as they unlocked the front door to open the store for the day to tell them that the girl was in labor.

"We're ready for her," Mitch said, smiling.

"It's a boy," Larry Weber said just before they went home for the day, and Mitch grabbed Lainie and twirled her around. "We're talking Joey De Nardo. We're going to have a boy." That night Lainie brought a picnic dinner into the baby's room, spread out a blanket, and they ate sitting on the floor, talking about how it would feel to have a little one in that very room any day now. They drank a lot of Santa Margharetta Pino Grigio with dinner, and when the phone rang at eleven o'clock they were in bed, both a little drunk, making love.

"We should have done it in the crib," Mitch said, "just to bless it," as the phone rang again.

Lainie turned over on her stomach and slithered to the phone to pick it up. It was Larry Weber.

"Hi, Larry," she said, feeling happy and playful and glad she'd gone along with this plan. In a few days they were going to go and pick up their baby, Joey De Nardo, and she would hold him and kiss him and raise him as if he were from her own body.

"The baby has something wrong with it, " Larry Weber told her. "A heart defect. They don't think he's going to make it." Lainie closed her eyes. Mitch was nuzzling her back and moving his hands under her to her breasts. A baby. Forty-eight hours ago she was okay about never having one, then suddenly she was about to have one, and now she felt as if she'd been kicked in the teeth.

For some dumb reason the crib and changing table were all she could think about. Why did we ever get the crib and the changing table? That's why something bad happened and now we'll have to send back the crib and the changing table. She felt her whole body racked with a terrible wrenching misery. Stop, she thought. You can't fall apart over this. This was a baby you've never even seen. But she couldn't speak, so she handed the phone to Mitch.

"Hello?" he said into it. "Yeah? Yeah? Ahhh, that's too bad, Larry. Is the little girl okay? Uh-huh. Well at least she's okay. Yeah. Thanks." Mitch put the phone down and took Lainie in his arms. Naked against his nakedness, she could feel his chest heaving as he tried to hold in the sadness.

For months after that, Lainie's dreams were filled with babies. Babies that talked like grown-ups, faceless babies; one dream that recurred was about the sound of a crying baby. In the dream she would walk through some unidentifiable empty house, trying to find the baby, whose cries became more urgent as Lainie became more frantic. Maybe, she thought, I should go to a psychiatrist.

But how would she find the right psychiatric help? It was something she could never discuss with her mother, who didn't believe in talking about her feelings with people she knew, let alone some stranger. Yet she had to do something about these feelings of anguish and loss and fear. A fear that she would lose Mitch, a fear that her barrenness was making her ugly to Mitch. And that any day now he would leave her for somebody else, and the somebody else would become pregnant within weeks.

She would think about those things and work herself up into an anxious state, and then anything Mitch said
felt like a dismissal to her. If he hung up the phone too quickly with her when she called him at the store, or if he was too critical of the way she handled a customer, she felt afraid that any minute he would turn to her and say, "That's it. I'm leaving you."

One night, after they were both warm with the satisfaction of their lovemaking, Mitch moved himself up on one elbow and looked at his wife's face.

"Lainie," he said, "I've got something serious I want to talk about. Do you think you can handle it?"

Lainie felt a flutter Of fear. This was it, the moment she'd been dreading. What else, after all they'd been through, could he mean by something serious? He was going to tell her he was leaving her.

"Sure I can," she said, her brow furrowed.

"Laine, all these years when we thought we'd never have kids, I was okay about it. But when the adoption question came up, the reason I grabbed it was because I figured maybe it was God's way of telling us we needed a kid, and then when the poor little baby died, I didn't know what to think. Now something's in my head, and I want you to know that if what I'm going to tell you isn't okay with you, then I'll drop it. Forever. I swear. Because you're everything to me, you know that? Right?" Lainie touched his arm lightly and nodded, relieved at hearing all the affirmations of his love, and ashamed of herself for doubting him because of her own feelings of inadequacy.

"You have done so much for me, Laine. When I met you I was just some hotshot with a new business, floundering around with no personal life at all, but you, with your sweetness and the full-out way you love me so completely, gave my life meaning, and I'll never stop being grateful to you for that.

"A big reason our store is such a success is because of your devotion to it. I probably would have thrown
the whole thing in the garbage fifty times, like after the flood when we didn't have insurance and all the clothes were ruined. You found that little cleaner downtown who specialized in suede, and stood over him till he made those jackets look like new, and then we sold them all. We made it because no matter what happened, you were always there with your patience saying, We'll work it out. I think you're a miracle. And that's why now I want it to be my turn. Now,
I
want to do something that I can do for us. I want to call a lawyer and have him help us hire a woman to have a baby for us."

Lainie's throat tightened as if someone were choking her.

"It will mean that instead of adopting a baby that was the product of two strangers, like we almost did, at least this way we'll know that half of this baby is a De Nardo. Part of us. I'm not asking this on a whim, Laine. Since your surgery I've been trying to figure out what I could do, and this seemed to me to be something that I can offer to us. Bring to the partnership. Because God knows, we've been good enough together all these years for you to believe what I believe. I mean that you and I are one. Remember we saw that old woman on television who said that marriage is two horses pulling in one yoke? Well, let this part, the part about making a biological child for us, be my part of the yoke."

"Mitch," she said, hoping she could get through this without crying, "it's a bad idea. You know what's happened historically in cases like this. This isn't as if we're putting part of me and part of you into some woman to carry for us. Whoever we hire is going to be having a baby that's yours and hers. And when the time comes for her to part with it, she's going to be giving up her own child. What if she changes her mind? Are you going to let her keep that baby? And never see it? Or share custody? Or are you just going to say, 'Oh
well,' knowing that out there somewhere is your son or your daughter and you gave it up because the surrogate decided she couldn't handle it?"

She could tell by the look of surprise on Mitch's face this was not the response he'd anticipated. She was surprised herself at the power of her outburst. "Believe me, Mitch, I'm desperate to have a baby, but I won't do it that way."

"Lainie, don't decide now. This is a knee-jerk reaction and you ought to take time to think about it. What happened in the cases you're talking about was because those women weren't properly tested or adequately screened. We could sidestep that by making sure she took a battery of every kind of test, we could meet the kids she already has and see how healthy
they
are. Hell, we can afford to have ten different psychiatrists check her out. In fact, my sister Betsy knows about a place—"

"Betsy! I knew this had something to do with one of your meddling sisters: What did she do? See it on 'Oprah'? No, this sounds more like 'Geraldo.' 'Women Whose Husbands Impregnate Strangers.' " Lainie heard herself shout at her husband for the first time in their years together. Heard her voice shrieking and sounding like some shrew. Like Elizabeth Taylor in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
? But she wasn't sorry. She was pulsing with anger. "Betsy and those other two witches can mind their own business and get their noses out of my life."

"You're being a selfish little brat."

"
I'm
being selfish? If you want a baby so much and you're
not
being selfish, why can't we try to adopt again? We'll adopt a son and
he'll
carry on the precious De Nardo name. What in the hell do you think is so great about your genes that the world can't live without them?"

"Lainie, don't provoke me, goddammit. I'm getting
really angry at your attitude about this. This idea makes sense for us." She heard the hot anger rising in his voice, and she knew her temper was no match for his, but this was too much. She was not going to back down and give in to this insane request. "I want to have my genetic child," Mitch said, fuming. "And it
can
be done. People are still doing it all the time, and without problems. I've made calls to find out. I've talked to the best lawyers and the best psychologists, and they all assured me we can cover every possible loophole."