Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (23 page)

Fern dialed Edgar again and again he did not answer. She finally called her doctor and he could hear in her voice that she was very far along. “Why didn’t you call earlier? I’m coming over.”

“You are?” she asked. “Don’t I have hours to go?” Only poor people and hippies had babies at home. Fern wanted the hospital. She wanted the drugs.

“I don’t think we have time to move you.”

While Fern rocked on her hands and knees, sat back up and rocked again, the Swedes drank coffee and found and ate cans of tuna fish to which they added a smear of butter. Fern, in a lucid moment, said, “Is that customary? Is it always done that way?”

“Never,” said one. “It has never been done that way.”

It was so hot in the house. Fern said, “I have to push now,” as much to herself as the Swedes. The dog paced.

“We understand,” said the yellow-toothed man. “You must lie down. Don’t worry, we understand what to do.”

The doctor would arrive just after the two boys had been safely delivered into the hands of the yellow-toothed man, wrapped in blankets by the other Swede and placed on Fern’s chest on their sides so their lungs could drain. The Swedes had waited until the cords stopped pulsing and then cut them with kitchen shears. One man had given Fern ice chips to suck on. The doctor said, “Oh, hello.” He had not expected this particular kind of company. The towels the Swedes had put under Fern were soaked with blood and fluid. “Thank you,” he said. They had done exactly what they were supposed to do. The babies, two boys, were scrunched but beautiful, one slightly larger than the other, and Fern was fine. Everyone was absolutely fine.

While the doctor put fresh towels under Fern and tended to her and Fern tried to figure out how to hold both babies at the same time, the Swedes began to cinch up the laces on their boots. They smoothed their shirts.

“We have to go back now,” they said.

Fern told them to make themselves a bag with the rest of the tuna fish and some bread and a thermos of coffee. They stood at the doorway, looking east towards the hills, towards the train, towards the many miles. “You are all right?” they asked.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to do that.”

“It was a luck,” yellow tooth said.

“Miracle of life,” the other told her. She had forgotten the desk completely. In the sunlight the Swedes had such tender, pink skin.

—

When Edgar came home he found that his family had nearly doubled. The doctor was there and Fern was lying on the bed covered by a blanket. “You gave birth,” Edgar said. “I missed it again.”

“Two boys,” Fern said, her whole body still flushed. “Come closer.”

“Are they all right?” he asked.

“They’re perfectly healthy,” the doctor said.

Edgar felt the weight of the locket against his leg. It made him feel stupid, this small, purchased beauty, when Fern had brought forth two lives in the space of an afternoon.

She grabbed his hands and pulled him onto the bed. “When Cricket comes home from school, we’ll be complete. This is our family.” Fern wanted to freeze them on this first day as a whole family before time got to work on them. The babies were tinier than tiny. They wanted to be pressed together, like two halves of a circle. Fern recognized this because she had felt it twice—first with Ben and then with Edgar. It was as if the idea of a single body did not exist—only in joining did either of them come true.

—

As if the family had tipped over the edge of a waterfall, time sped up. The twins were healthy and happy and neither of them was overquiet or odd. They were regular babies and then regular kids. Everywhere they went people said to Fern, “I guess triplets would be harder,” and “You certainly have your hands full,” and Fern smiled and nodded. The twins learned to crawl, to walk, to beg. She put them to sleep in their own beds but by morning one had always migrated over to be close to the other. Cricket learned to put on her own shoes, to pour a glass of milk. She learned to read. She
learned to scold, to congratulate and to console. Time doubled, tripled. Edgar went to his study and read and wrote. Some days the story unwound and some days it tangled. Some days he came home feeling like a writer and some days he wanted nothing more than to give it up. Edgar felt the magnetic pull of misery less strongly than he ever had before. He was too busy trying to articulate the complicated fact of his own privilege to hate it the way he always had.

Edgar’s parents sent gifts, Fern’s parents sent short letters detailing the repairs that had been required on the house, the sculptures that had sold, the number of headache-free days Paul had had each month. Fern replied with news of the children, news of the summerhouse they had purchased on the island, the sailboat to go with it. She had to give her parents something because she was their daughter, but she wanted their reach to be shallow, surface-level, since everything they had touched before had been left aching.

Fern bought furniture and clothes and art and then spent time taking care of those objects. Edgar teased her for the purchases and then forgot about them. When the twins were two years old, she enrolled in one class—Archaeology—and imagined digging up bones of ancient people on the banks of the Nile, in the deserts of Syria, the mountains of Central Asia. At dinner she explained the methods to Edgar and the children: the way the area of a dig must be marked off in squares with flags and pegs. “The earth is like a layer cake,” she explained. “The deeper you go, the older the soil. It’s your first information about how old your find is.” Fern promised that they could conduct a dig at their summerhouse. She imagined wearing a bandana and sitting on the ground, brushing away the dirt from an Indian femur with a toothbrush. The children imagined bigger beasts: mammoths, pterodactyls.

Fern liked taking the class but she was afraid of a full schedule and afraid of failing again and afraid of being told just how small
she was. “I have three children to raise,” she said when Edgar pressed her. “My mother had two nannies to help her. One of the kids is always waking up in the middle of the night. Everyone is always hungry. I’m doing all I can.” She kept picturing that professor and his nose hair and the humiliation that had bloomed in her. Learning to be a mother of three was hard enough and she had not slept a full night in all these years and no one gave grades for it and there was no end-of-the-year party or vacation and school sounded lonely and surrounded with teenagers and tests she did not have time to study for, old professors looking at her like she was already overripe.

“When they’re bigger,” she said, trying to smile. Edgar let it be. He did not want to tell his wife that he thought she could amount to more, though he did, because he loved her and because she was smart and because he was blind to so much of the work she did in their home, the invisible structure she built to support five lives.

—

Six cats were adopted and six cats were hit by cars or eaten by wild animals. Flower did not come home one night and Cricket quit eating for two days. The dog was replaced by a beagle, which could not be housebroken and was soon given away and replaced by a golden retriever whose blind enthusiasm even Cricket did not have the strength to match. Later there was a turtle, a rat and a series of fish. Maggie appeared on the doorstep and the children immediately made her family.

The house was all noise and then quiet, noise and quiet. Edgar’s parents came to visit with ever-larger gifts. In Chicago, the world’s tallest skyscraper was built using Edgar’s father’s steel. Fern’s parents sent a letter saying that the First Lady had purchased one of Evelyn’s sculptures to put in the White House garden and
she had gone to see it settled, reported a long conversation at dinner with the wife of the Spanish Ambassador about the difference between American aphids and European ones. Fern replied with basic facts about the children—Cricket was growing a garden and could cook her own eggs and was reading books about fragile young British women, the twins were obsessed with building great block towers and crashing them down. In every conversation with her parents, Ben was a dark maw that would not close. Fern knew blame had no purpose but she hoarded it all the same.

The children always needed Fern to be a different kind of mother than she had been the week before. They exhausted her and she longed for a break and then she missed them acutely the moment they were out of sight—that was the truth of motherhood. Birthdays accumulated under everyone. Each year Edgar said, “Would you consider finishing your degree?” and each year she said, “Later.”

The rest of the world came into Fern and Edgar’s house on television: the Ohio National Guard shot unarmed students at Kent State, the Weather Underground bombed the US capital, abortion became legal. The first American space station was launched into orbit, people all across the country lined up in their cars to fill up during a gas shortage. The President resigned in scandal. The daughter of a rich newspaperman was kidnapped. North Vietnamese troops encircled Saigon. The last American soldiers were lifted by helicopter to an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. Nearby, the Cambodian dictator forcibly emptied his capital city and began killing thousands of people, but the world was war-weary and it would be a long time before anyone intervened.

A serial killer began and completed a spree. The economy was slow, inflation was high, people were stabbed and robbed in the subways in New York. There were gays in the streets and
performance artists and cocaine; the music changed again and men grew long sideburns and everyone young was always taking their clothes off.

Edgar had a chapter of his novel published. Then on a winter Saturday, he sat at the kitchen table and held a thick stack of typed pages in his hands. They were heavy and felt warm. Almost like a living thing. Edgar looked at the title page:
LUCKY by Edgar Keating
. He found a large envelope, sealed the manuscript inside, wrote the name and address of an agent, and kissed the flap. Fern and the children were outside stomping snow into paths and chasing each other. Edgar was too nervous to say where he was going. “I’m taking the dog out,” he said. His whole body felt electrified. It would have been easy to talk himself out of mailing the package: the potential embarrassment, the concern that he had wasted his time, that he would have to find something else to do with his life. The day was deeply grey. A snowplow had created dirty piles on the sidewalk. It was not as bitter as it had been and Edgar was without gloves for the first time in weeks. On a busy corner he saw a thin man his own age wearing pressed plaid pants and jacket, a nice wool coat and sneakers. It took him a minute, but then Edgar knew. “Runner?” he said to the man.

“Holy shit, brother!” the man said. He had huge sideburns and curly hair that resisted the side-part it had been forced into. Edgar did not feel as grown up as Runner looked. Runner, whose wild and unapologetic life Edgar had sometimes wished for, a shadow of which formed the story in his novel.

The summary: he was there to close out his mother’s estate. He still lived in Alaska and was still married to the librarian but they had moved off the commune. “All we wanted was a real fucking toilet,” Runner said, “and we ended up with a big house, a couple of trucks, three kids and two law degrees.”

“You’re an attorney?” Edgar asked.

“I know. But I’m on the right side.” He told Edgar how he and his wife were working for the American Indian Movement. “There’s so much fucked-up shit in the past that it’s hard to know where to start,” he said. “Broken treaties, stolen objects, stolen land, stolen children, forced boarding schools, systematic rape. Mass murder. I could go on.” He looked Edgar up and down. “You seem happy,” he said.

Edgar squeezed the package in his hand. “Thanks. I am.”

Runner wrote down his address. He offered the guest room. He said, “We see the northern lights in winter and there’s almost no night in summertime. Come find me when you get tired of the city. I’ll take you salmon fishing. Bring the family.”

Runner, true to his name, held his briefcase up to his chest and jogged off. Edgar watched him until he turned the corner. For the first time, Edgar did not feel like he was living the worse life. Even the hippies were buying houses and having babies. They had all grown up.

Two weeks later the agent called with the news that Edgar’s novel would be published.

A few weeks after that Fern’s parents died.

Spring came, the roses bloomed, Fern dreamed about Ben. She talked to him in her head. Edgar waited impatiently for notes from his editor. Fern once again did not register for classes for the fall.

Fern thought of a hundred things she might have said to her parents about Ben, about herself, about being a woman, a mother, about love. She might have told her father that she didn’t blame him. She might have told her mother that she understood that it had not been fair for her either. Mostly though, their death was a quietness in Fern instead of an explosion. That her parents were no longer behind her on the path did not feel like an event; she
had been walking away from them for a long time. Summer came again and the family packed for the island. They sailed, they swam. They plotted out a square of the cliff to dig up and followed the protocol Fern had learned in school—the grid, the logbook, the careful use of tools. Cricket discovered an arrowhead and toothbrushed it out of the soil and they found dozens of quahog shells with dark purple lips.

One afternoon Fern watched Will and James, the side-by-side of them, at work on a puzzle. She brought lemonade over and said, “You are so lucky to have each other. I hope you know that.” They did not even look up. They were years away from the treachery of adolescence, from the time they would turn to look for love elsewhere. She wanted them to always have each other, to never outgrow this perfect pairing. She imagined a corresponding set of girls for wives and a house big enough for everyone and one next door for Cricket—Cricket who did not have the luck to be a twin but also did not stand to lose her match.

The whole family went fishing and cooked chowder and sang sea songs on the lawn in the evening, slapping mosquitos under a sky that flashed with a coming lightning storm.