Seventh Avenue (18 page)

“You’re a good boss,” Helen replied. “The best one I ever worked for, a decent man. How could any of us have done less? So we’re just showing our appreciation.”

“I better get moving.”

“Give Rhoda and the baby our love,” several voices called after him.

He got back in his car, took a pull from the bottle of rye that Eva insisted that he take with him, as her mother might wonder about it. He shoved the key in the ignition and began to blubber, uncontrollably. It seemed impossible to reconcile his new feeling for Eva with the experience of fatherhood; the two jarred each other in his mind. If only he could be on his way to the hospital to see Eva . . . if only she had had his baby.

He had regained his control when he walked down the corridor of the hospital, but inside him there was a sense of relentless anxiety. He stopped by a desk and gave his name to a tall Swedish nurse who was built like a weight lifter.

“Just a see, Dr. Rosen wants to see you,” she said glumly, and he froze.

“What about?”

“I really wouldn’t know.” She glared at him impatiently.

“Is the baby okay?” he asked.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss the matter with you.”

She picked up a telephone, whispered something into the receiver, and he heard Dr. Rosen paged over the public-address system. A thin wispy man with a mustache as long as a licorice stick, a loping gait, and bushy eyebrows that lived a life all their own, came up to the desk. He turned his stethoscope round his finger with the confident air of a snake charmer.

“Yes, nurse?”

“Mr. Blackmail” - she pointed a gnarled twig of an index finger at Jay, who stood looking out of the window at the airshaft.

Dr. Rosen loped over to him.

“We met, I think, once, when you brought your wife in for an examination.”

“Uh-huh. How’s the baby?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh, no, he’s all right, isn’t he?”

“Satisfactory. He’s a normal baby - good size - but I don’t want you to be alarmed when you see him.” Jay’s face lost its color, and he began to sweat. “He’s bad a bit of trouble breathing. But there’s nothing to worry about.”

“How long will he have this trouble?”

“It’s difficult to say. The resident pediatrician examined him and diagnosed it as a pulmonary infection. Has your wife had any shocks that you recall?”

“I’m not really sure.”

Dr. Rosen shifted his weight from his right foot to his left, pressed his palm against the wall and said skeptically, “She had a fall of some kind last night, didn’t she?”

Jay’s attitude altered from concern to “search me.” The doctor did not press the point. He realized that Jay was lying.

“My wife mention anything?” he asked innocently.

“No. But she had a laceration on her scalp. Your mother brought her in. I suppose you do a lot of traveling in your business. She said you were in Philadelphia.”

“I move about,” Jay agreed.

“Well, the baby was premature because of her fall.”

“But he’s all right?”

“He is.”

“Can I see him now?”

Dr. Rosen sneered ever so slightly and led Jay to the nursery. Through the glass window, Jay saw him, flat on his back, in a translucent tent that covered most of his body but revealed the face.

“Your wife’s in room 238,” The doctor turned sharply and walked away.

“Thanks a million for everything.”

A nurse wearing a mask gave him a thumbs-up sign from behind the window, and tilted the small basket towards him. After a minute, she lowered it, and he reluctantly started in the direction indicated by an arrow on the wall. He rapped softly on the door of Rhoda’s room and waited. There was no reply from inside, and he pushed the door open and saw that she was sleeping. Five bouquets of flowers with cards attached were in vases around the room. He had forgotten to buy flowers and was just about to rush out to a florist to get some when Rhoda awoke. He was trapped. She had a drugged smile on her face, her eyes had deep brown rings under them, and her skin had a sallow shiny glaze.

“I forgot to bring the flowers. They’re in the back of the car.”

“That’s okay. Did you see him?”

He wondered if he ought to say anything about the oxygen tent and she sensed his anxiety.

“He’ll be okay. He just needs love.”

Jay approached the bed and sat down in a straight-backed wooden chair with an uneven leg that made it wobble.

“I’m sorry about last night.”

She touched his hand lightly with the tips of her fingers.

“You’re a man . . . you mustn’t lose your self-control. I guess I just got on your nerves. Things’ll be much better now. Your mother’s been wonderful to me. The superintendent called her, and she came over in a taxi. She’s told me all about the trouble with your father, and I think I understand you much better than I did before.”

He went over to the sink in the corner and puked. Tears came into his eyes, and he washed his face with cold water.

“Have you been drinking?”

“A bit . . .”

“Have something light to eat . . . some boiled eggs. Your mother expects you for dinner tonight, so don’t disappoint her, okay, darling?”

“Do you want to sleep?”

She thought for a minute and realized that he wanted to leave.

“I guess you have to get back to the store. They’ll be very busy and with both of us not there . . .”

He gave her a light peck on the forehead and made for the door. She waved at him, and he strode morosely into the corridor. He passed the nursery and paused to catch another look at his son, but he could not see much even on tiptoe. The child was too far away. He walked about for a few minutes in the hope of finding a nurse who could go inside and hold the child up or push it closer to the window. The nurse at the desk was not there. The long corridor was poorly lighted and stretched to infinity. A vague, nagging worry crept up on him: could the baby really breathe in there? What would happen if something went wrong with the apparatus? Why weren’t there any nurses about? He trotted down the corridor, turned a corner and came up against a blank wall. Retracing his steps to the desk and still finding it unattended he ran back to the nursery. He shimmied up a small two-inch wooden platform that jutted out from the window, but he could not keep his balance. In a panic, he raced around the side, opened the door and tore in. His entrance disturbed some of the infants. Several whines created a chain reaction, and then all of them began an exacerbated caterwauling screech. All, except his. He bolted out of the room and shrieked for help, then went back inside. In desperation, he rocked the child’s crib. Through the glass, he saw Dr. Rosen and a nurse. The doctor came in, his face red, and his eyeballs popping out of his head.

“You get the hell out of here,” he shouted.

“What kind of hospital you running?”

“I’ll have you arrested if you don’t get out.”

“My kid! Something’s wrong with my kid.”

The doctor pointed to the door and Jay walked out. The doctor examined two dials attached to oxygen tanks, peered through the plastic hood, then closed it.

“Is he okay?” Jay demanded, grabbing the doctor’s sleeve.

“Yes. As if you give a damn!”

“Just who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I’m not a charity case. You people are guilty of criminal negligence.”

“Are we now?” Dr. Rosen measured him as though for a coffin. “Did you know we gave your wife ether?”

“So, get to the point.”

“People talk under ether - when they’re going under, and when they’re coming out of it. Your wife had quite a bit to say.” Jay’s face lost its color, and his mouth twitched. “In front of witnesses she talked: the anaesthetist, a nurse, and me. She kept saying: ‘Jay, don’t hit me . . . I’m pregnant. Jay I can’t get myself off the floor, help me. I’ve hit my head. Jay don’t leave me. Help me.’ Let me tell you something, tough guy, if anything had happened either to your wife or the baby, I would have reported the matter to the police. At the very least, you’re guilty of first-degree assault, but your wife has to make a complaint for the police to take action. In short, Mr. Blackman, I think you’re the worst shit I’ve come across in my life, and I’ve met a few unpleasant people in my day. And if I catch you around here, except during official visiting hours, I’ll report you to the hospital authorities and provide them with a complete report.”

Jay stumbled out of the hospital. He didn’t know where he walked, but after a few hours of aimless wandering he discovered he was in a bar on Second Avenue. He sat crouched in a booth by the men’s toilet. He was feeling no pain, and he stared at some money in front of him. He counted the money: six dollars in bills and some silver. He lurched to his feet and drifted over to the bar.

“You got the time?”

The bartender, a short beer barrel of a man with axle grease on his hair, held his watch to the light by the register.

“Seven o’clock.”

“How long’ve I been here?”

“Look, buddy, I’m not the official timekeeper counting for the knockdowns, I just sell booze.”

Jay returned to the table, scooped up his money, leaned on a small handrail that led up two steps to the street, and came out into a biting wind that almost blew him back downstairs. He watched a few people chase their hats across the street and hailed a taxi. He gave the driver his mother’s address and promptly fell asleep in the back. When he awoke, the taxi seemed to be rolling around like a light craft in a choppy sea. He paid off the driver on Delancey Street and then bought a bottle of rye at the corner liquor store. His legs were rubbery. He walked down the long crooked street and the wind coming up from the river had a gelid deathly touch in it that cut through him. Climbing the creaking stairs of his mother’s house, past the doors of inquisitive neighbors who when they recognized him smiled the smile accorded one of the locals who had made good, he thought his guts would cave in. He rapped on his mother’s door, and when she answered it, he stood for a moment peering into her doleful eyes, which revealed a degree of suffering he had never before noticed. She seemed frailer, and her arms stretched out towards him like broken twigs. He fell into her arms.

“Momma, what have I done? The baby’s gonna die because of me.”

“He’ll be all right.” She sat him down in his father’s chair. “It’s a good thing she had the phone number from the candy store. The super called me, and I went and got her.”

“Does Poppa know? Did you tell him?”

“No. I just said that I had to go with you to the hospital.” She stood by the window and stared into the street. “Jakie, what’s gonna be with you? She coulda died. Tell me why? You can’t hate her so much.”

“I can’t explain. She brings out the worst in me. I behave like an animal with her. I lose all control.”

“She said you had another woman and that you go out all the time with women. Is it true? Jake, Jake, answer me!” She pushed his slumping head up to the light, but he had passed out, his hand tightly clutching the bottle in the brown paper bag.

Faced with a problem too monstrous to solve, Jay abandoned any hope of a solution. He continued to cross wires in a desperate effort to hide Neal’s birth from Eva. He remembered alluding to Rhoda’s pregnancy when he had met her at Marty’s party, but as she never asked him about it, he kept quiet. Eva, who had a fine and sensitive grasp of character, already knew more about him than she was prepared to accept, but she could not keep away from him, and whenever he came, she was there, waiting, tense and aroused, for him to do as be pleased. She believed she loved him. Three weeks of his violence, his childlike need that drained her energy, had made it clear that her destiny, for what it was worth, had Jay as its focal point. Her relations with her husband had become static before Jay had come into her life, and now if she needed any justification for being a wife in name only, she had it; but as her husband was a man incapable of any kind of defense, a twig floating in a fast-moving mountain stream, he accepted his new position without complaint or comment. Jay had met him three times, giving spurious reasons each time for being with Eva, and Herbie had merely shaken his head, rolled his eyes passively, and looked away. Complications had increased Rhoda’s stay in the hospital to three weeks, and Jay used his liberty like a sailor coming ashore after an eight-month stretch at sea.

At three o’clock one morning, after an evening of heavy drinking and a tour that began at the St. Moritz and ended at the Copacabana, Jay finally brought Eva home. It was a shock to find Herbie sprawled on the sofa wearing a woolly bathrobe with unnaturally large shoulders that made him look like a jellyroll, a pile of
Saturday Evening Posts
by his side.

“You still up?” Eva asked.

“Yeah, a bit late for you, isn’t it?” Jay said.

“Couldn’t sleep.” He sat up and peered at them out of liquid brown eyes. His forehead was decorated with sweat beads, and when he lowered his head, he showed a perfect isthmus of pink scalp.

“How’s tricks, Herbie? Let’s see, you’re pushing off tomorrow to where did you say, Eva?”

“Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s his southern route.”

“You need your sleep, Herbie. That’s a long drive.”

“Where’ve you been?” he said, lighting a cigarette with a shaking hand.

“We had a business conference with Marty. Jay’s opening two more stores next month.”

Herbie nodded his head and blinked, as though the light was too strong.

“Smells like it.”

“Well, we had a few drinks; anything wrong with that?” Jay said defiantly.

“Big businessman.”

“I’m doing all right. Why, you want a job? Maybe I can find something for you.”

Eva giggled drunkenly.

“He could get the coffee and sandwiches for the girls.”

“Hey, that’s a great idea. It’s worth at least a sawbuck a week. What do you say, huh?”

“What’s the matter with you, Eva? I think I’m entitled to an explanation.”

“Here, have a drink, it’ll settle your nerves.” She handed him four fingers of rye.

“I don’t want a drink.”

“Sure, have one, your balls are in an uproar,” Jay said.