The Inner Circle (48 page)

She turned her face to me, a blue sheen of neon caught in her hair. “I'm a nurse,” she said.

“Oh, really? Well, that's—that's terrific. It really is. A nurse, huh? That must be—interesting.”

“You'd be surprised,” she said, looking out over the room before her eyes came back to mine. “But you know what?”

“What?”

“You know what I really like? After a good meal?” She leaned in close, so that her forehead was nearly touching mine and I could smell the gin and her perfume and the meat on her lips.

“No,” I said, “what?”

“You can't guess?”

Iris went into labor on June the twentieth, just after dinner. She'd experienced mild contractions the day before, and there had been blood in her vaginal secretions that morning, followed by a discharge of bloody mucus, normal precursors to the rupturing of the amniotic sac and the imminent birth of the child. Though I'd been unconscionably ignorant of the whole process (witness my question about the kicking of the baby, which even the most untutored or oblivious should know doesn't occur until the sixteenth week), Prok had encouraged me to educate myself, not only for “my own benefit in apprehending the life process,” as he put it, but in improving my ability to relate to our female subjects as well. And he was right: now I knew what they went through, what they were afraid of, how the pleasure of the act was followed by the pain of disclosure, abortion, the throes of birth. Though he'd never been busier or more harassed, Prok took the time to quiz me each week on Iris's condition—the swelling of her breasts, the appearance of the linea nigra drawn like a dark chalk mark over the hump of her abdomen, the dropping of the fetus, the widening of the cervix—and made a little lecture of it every step of the way. Terms like “blastocyst” and “human chorionic gonadotrophin,” “endometrium” and “progesterone,” which I'd probably copied into a notebook somewhere in Intro to Biology and promptly forgotten, became as familiar to me as the baseball scores in the morning paper.

We were lucky, really. We had not only the benefit of the literature on the subject (including an excellent and very thorough new book by Benjamin Spock, a Columbia University M.D.) and the experience of
Dr. Bergstrom, but the advice of Iris's mother as whispered through the long-distance lines and all the support Prok and Mac could give us, Mac especially, who spent hours at the house, knitting, baking and just chatting away with Iris in her soft glutinous tones as if Iris were one of her daughters and the baby out of her own bloodline. My own enthusiasm, as I've said, tended to vary day to day, but there was something of the inevitable in the process and I found myself submitting to the pull of it. And I was informed. At least there was that.

As the due date approached, I made sure that the car—with its rebuilt transmission—was in good running order and the gas tank topped off, ready for the dash to the hospital. The twentieth fell on a Friday, and I hadn't wanted to leave Iris to go into work, but she had assured me she'd be fine—I should stick close to the phone, that was all. As it was, I was hardly able to concentrate through the long, tediously unmomentous morning and into the crux of the slow-grinding afternoon, and I left work early—How was she? No change—to make us a light dinner of macaroni salad and canned fruit, and then we'd sat in the living room listening to the radio and waiting. She'd gotten up to rinse her cup in the sink when I noticed that her dressing gown was stuck wet to her legs. I looked at her in alarm. “Iris,” I said, “you're wet, do you know that?”

She'd put a hand out to steady herself against the sink, and there was dripping now, and I was up off the couch and taking hold of her under the arms as if she were on the edge of a dark yawning gulf and in danger of slipping away from me. The terminology rang in my head—
amniotic sac, cervical dilation, oxytocin
—but I felt helpless all the same. She gave me a weak smile, dead weight in my arms, and murmured, “Yes, I think it's time.”

There was the usual rush to the hospital, the wife's face drawn and bloodless, the prospective father's hand trembling on the gearshift, a litany of all the things that could go wrong jamming the airwaves in his head—Catherine Barkley dead in the rain and the infant too, the forceps child down the block with the pinched features like an unfinished painting, the crippled, the retarded, the hopeless, the stillborn—and then there was the wheelchair waiting at the emergency entrance and the two of them sitting in Admissions answering inane questions and filling out forms till the prospective father wanted to get the nurse in a stranglehold and force her to reveal the whereabouts of Dr. Bergstrom, the obstetrician, and where was he? Didn't he realize what was going on here?

I didn't say anything, though. Didn't make a move. Just sat there in the crucible of the chair and held Iris's hand while the nurse nattered on and the ink made its way from the pen to the printed forms and the world went maddeningly on as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary. Iris looked bilious, bleached to the roots of her hair, her eyebrows painted stroke by stroke over the void of her eyes. She was sunk down in the chair, slumped under the terrible weight of the ball she was carrying around with her, teeth clenched, limbs dangling. The hands of the wall clock crept round as expected. Clouds bobbed in the sky beyond the window. All at once, Iris let out a sharply aspirated cry and the nurse smiled. Then they finally came for her, two orderlies with a gurney, and took her up to Obstetrics, and nothing happened, absolutely nothing.

After an hour or so they let me in to sit with her, pulling the curtain around the bed to give us some privacy. Her eyelids were closed, her hands prone beside her. There was no color to her, none, and she might
have been dead already, laid out on a slab in the funeral parlor. I took her hand then—out of passion and fear and because I felt so reduced and helpless in that moment—and her eyes snapped open. “John?” she said.

“It's me,” I said. “I'm right here.” It was movie dialogue, and I kept seeing Helen Hayes's face superimposed over hers, and where was the “Liebestod” to carry us away? “What are the contractions like? Coming faster now? Did he say how long it's going to be?”

They'd given her something for the pain and her voice was drowsy with it. “It's going to be a while, John,” she murmured. “It's just one of those things, you know? Sometimes, with your first—”

An unseen woman cried out from across the room then—or no, she shrieked, actually, as if a torturer were at work on her with his hot pliers and his electrodes. There was a silence, and then she shrieked again. I felt chastened, helpless, full of remorse and tenderness. The only thing I could think to do was squeeze my wife's hand. “Should I find Bergstrom? Talk to him, I mean?”

Her voice dropped away. “Only if you want to. But don't”—the woman shrieked again, stone on glass—“get yourself in a lather. I'm okay. I am. Everything's going to be fine, you'll see.”

In the end, of course, she was right—everything was fine, and John Jr., at seven pounds six ounces and twenty-one inches in length, was the result. But Iris's was a protracted labor, and Friday night became Saturday morning, the progress of the clock as tedious as anything I'd ever endured, Sunday sermons, a visit to the dentist, Prok in the sixth hour of a Buick-bound lecture, and then the sun was up and Bergstrom back on the job advising me to go home and shower and catch some sleep because she was barely dilated and it would be a while yet. I didn't take his advice. I slumped in the chair at Iris's bedside, listened to the furtive comings and goings of the ward, might even have heard the odd wail of a newborn from the delivery room across the hall. Coffee fueled me, and something greasy from the cafeteria—chili con carne, fried chicken and dumplings—till my stomach was a vat of acid. When Saturday afternoon melded into Saturday evening, and still nothing had happened, I turned to my flask for solace.

Sunday morning came, the small hours revisited, and I went out to the car and slept, and when I woke the sun was high overhead and making a furnace of the Dodge, the windows of which I'd rolled up in order to defeat the mosquitoes. I'd sweated through to my underwear, and I'm afraid that I must have been a walking wall of unpleasant odors and secretions. My mouth was dry, but I took the precaution of refilling the flask before I shuffled back through the hospital, looked in on Iris—still nothing—and made my way into the men's room to throw some water on my face and pat down my underarms with hand soap and paper towels. It was past noon by the time I had a sandwich in the cafeteria, and then I sat through the long afternoon and into the evening with my wife, and it was as if we'd never been anyplace else in the world but here, behind the white curtains, while expectant mothers climbed into the beds on either side of us, cried out their pain, and were wheeled into the delivery room to gratify their husbands and their doctors. I was reading to her from the paper when the sun went down for the third time.

Then it was night, ten o'clock, ten-thirty, eleven, and yet still nothing, though the contractions were coming faster now and Dr. Bergstrom was on the case, poking his head between the curtains every few minutes, inspecting Iris's cervix for dilation and making encouraging noises. I should say, incidentally, that I'd been given permission to be with my wife throughout the process and to witness the birth itself, something Prok had encouraged me to do. He'd been present for the delivery of all three of his children, and he spoke very passionately both to me and Dr. Bergstrom about the significance of the experience from a scientific point of view, and I think he himself would have liked to be there with us if it wouldn't have looked odd in the eyes of the community. Odd enough that the husband should be present, let alone another male, no matter how closely connected and how purely objective he might have been. And of course Iris would have refused him in any case. This was her show. Absolutely.

And then it occurred to me, as eleven o'clock slipped by and my stomach broiled and the bourbon lit me from within and all of my fears came rising to the surface like the corpses of the drowned, that there was actually something serendipitous in the delay, that something extraordinary
was occurring here—if Iris held out another forty-five minutes by my watch, John Jr. would share a birthday with Prok. I told myself that everything was happening for a reason, that was all it was, and I couldn't imagine anything more perfect. Or auspicious.
John Jr. and Prok.
I saw a succession of birthday parties stretching on over the years, balloons, flowers, the cutting of the cake, Prok lifting my son to his shoulders and parading round the room with him, uncle, godfather, mentor.

I took a pull at the flask and glanced down at Iris. She lay there like a stone. They'd given her an epidural for the pain and Dr. Bergstrom had begun to talk about inducing labor or even operating because there was the danger now of an infection setting in, and the nurses had begun to bustle a bit because one way or the other the moment was coming. “Iris,” I said, and I suppose I was half-drunk at the time, the flask doing wonders for my jangled nerves, and I didn't want to think about the delay and the consequences and the fatality that hung over the bed like a palpable nightmare, because I was going to look on the bright side of things, I was going to buck her up as best I could. “Iris, you know what?”

She was exhausted, drained, all her energy and her optimism gone. She barely lifted her eyes.

“Looks like John Jr.—or Madeline—is going to share a famous birthday.”

Nothing.

“With
Prok.
In forty-five minutes it's Prok's birthday, June the twenty-third, did you realize that? Isn't it amazing?”

She let out a sudden gasp, as if a bottle of champagne had been unstoppered, and then, seconds later, another, and then another, and the curtains flew back and the nurse was wheeling the gurney into the delivery room, and as I sat there in surgical mask and scrubs and tried to contain the hammering of my heart, I watched my son come into the world at 11:56 p.m. on June 22, 1947.

I'd like to say that we gave birth to the male volume at the same time—and we should have, according to the schedule Prok had laid out
for himself—but the parturition of the text was a bit more difficult and protracted than any of us could have imagined. As the summer broiled around us and we darted off for abbreviated field trips to this venue or that, Prok worked ever more furiously on the manuscript, writing everywhere—in the car, on the train, at home before work and in the office after the doors had been shut, composing the latter chapters even as the early ones came back to us in galleys from W.B. Saunders. He was putting in eighteen-hour days, sleep a luxury, food nothing more than fuel for the engine, Mac, Mrs. Matthews, Corcoran, Rutledge and I coopted into reading proofs, our offices a blizzard of paper, graphs and spread-eagled texts, always another chart to complete or a fact to check. The absolute final date for completed copy was September 15, and as late as the end of August there were five chapters yet to finish.

I'd never been so busy in my life, nor had Prok ever been so demanding—or short-tempered—and when I wasn't at work there was the nonstop turmoil of the house, diapers in the laundry, boiling away on the stove, strung up like miniature flags of surrender on the line out back, bottles everywhere and the smell of formula hanging over the bedroom and kitchen till I began to think the walls themselves were lactating. There were late-night feedings, John Jr.'s symphony of shrieks, yowls and sputters, the aching quiet of the house at three a.m. and Iris's maternal calm. And her mother, her mother, of course. Her mother was there for the first month, a sponge clamped in each hand, wiping down every horizontal surface till it shone, carting in groceries, sweeping like a robot and forever cooking up vats of lamb stew or succotash or four-inch pans of macaroni and cheese with hunks of sliced frankfurter spread like gun emplacements across the top.