The News of the World (17 page)

At six weeks, Eddie's also developing a strange growl that he uses primarily when we try to burp him; it is as if he's trying to fake one so as to get back to the bottle. And at night sometimes, as the fanbelt slips into the power steering wail, he'll throw in a little growl as counterpoint, just to show us he's beginning to do things on purpose.

He also has a four-note nasal coo, which is the sweetest noise ever created. He coos whenever the bottle is plugged in his mouth, and sometimes he coos for a moment or two after he's eaten, as his eyes roll sleepily back in his lids.

We know his every peep, every soft snort (he has two), and we listen to him and study these noises because like any parents, we take them as signs of life. We go to the crib at all hours and listen for the feather breath, the muted sigh, some small sound. But we are also keen because Nancy is looking for a sign of love. She hangs on his every glance, tic, start; he's smiled a couple of times now and when he has, Nancy has called me into the room where she stands with his little head in her hands, while she sobs and sobs. “He smiled,” she says. “He smiled at me.” She has fallen in love with Eddie so profoundly that our house seems a new place, and she needs some small sign of love in return.

I know she's going to get one, but she is not so sure. Eddie came to our house in the arms of my lawyer's wife, Bonnie, when he was two days old. Bonnie, who has four children of her own, was weeping, and repeating again and again: “He's so beautiful, so perfect.” It was the moment of transfer that changed Nancy, utterly. She had been cool. She had been hopeful, surely, but also steady and reasonable, and then when Bonnie put Eddie in Nancy's arms, it was as if the infant carried 50,000 volts of some special electricity. Nancy sat down with her eyes on his little face, and her mouth became a scared line. I stood there wishing she would just cry instead of looking like she was about to start crying.

And it's been that way for six weeks. A solemnity has crept into our lives as my wife, the dearest soul I know, waits to see if this adopted child will love her. Hey, I've talked to her, and obviously, logic has no place in the deal. So my wife listens to the baby and watches his face the way astronomers stare into the deepest heavens for the first sign of a new star.

TONIGHT,
when Sam came over, in fact, was the first time Nancy has relaxed enough to drink a beer, and I think by the time he left after midnight, she'd had four. Sam loves kids and just the way he held Eddie and how obviously happy he is for us to have a baby put Nancy at ease.

I brought a chair in from the dining room and we sat in the kitchen and Sam tried to remember when Robbie and Juney were babies. He told a funny story about how Rob wouldn't stop crying at night and the doctor had told them just to let him cry. But a neighbor, suspecting child abuse, had called the police. It had happened twice. Now Robbie is fifteen and works for me weekends, mowing the lawn and washing the cars. He lives with his mother.

After his ten o'clock bottle, Eddie went to bed, bunching himself on his arms and knees like a bug. When I returned to the kitchen, Nancy had opened another beer and had her feet up under herself on the chair. Sam had opened the window and pulled out his cigarettes. Something was up.

Well, with our old friend Sam, it's always Vicky. They've been divorced over three years, but he feels that she still conducts her life around a massive and undiminished hatred for him. “It's no Sun Valley this summer,” he said, blowing smoke like a strong secret out the window. He smokes differently since we've gotten the baby. “It's her option, as always, and she says that she and Jeff are taking the kids to San Diego for five weeks after the Fourth. She's known since Thanksgiving about my time off and my plans to let Juney learn to ride, but all of a sudden, she's got this craving to take the kids on her honeymoon. Rob and Juney are acting funny, like it was my fault, like if I'm really their father why don't I just make it happen.”

Sam lifted an empty beer can and deposited his cigarette, tilting the can to extinguish the butt. I remember Vicky smirking when he did that; she always called him a “bo-ho,” her joke for
bohemian.

“Rob sure is getting to be a handsome young man,” Nancy said.

“Now that is undisguised flattery,” I said to Sam. “He looks just like you.” And Rob does. What is most affecting, however, is that Rob
walks
just like Sam, and when we play one on one in the driveway, Rob has the same fake-left-go-right move that Sam uses. I haven't told him about it yet, because with my age, I need the little advantage.

“I wonder if Eddie will look like us,” Nancy said, hugging her knees in her chair.

“He already does,” Sam said. “The poor little guy has that problem already.” He reached for his cigarettes, showed them to us. “How we doing with the smoke?”

“You're all right, Sam. None's blowing in here,” Nancy said.

“I look more like my father than my brother Tim does,” Sam said, lighting up and shaking the match in front of the window opening. “Tim's even six inches shorter than both of us.” He laughed. “I think it pisses him off.”

“It sure forced him to become an outside shooter,” I said. I reached behind Nancy into the fridge. “Beer?”

“One more, then I gotta go,” Sam said. “Last hearing on the rate hike tomorrow; the public defender better be sharp.”

“Tim's not adopted,” Nancy said, taking the beer from me. “Is he?”

“No. He and Irene came along after Mom and Dad had adopted me and Carrie.”

I took a chance. “Nancy's a little worried, Sam.” I said. “How …”

“How do you feel about
your
parents?” Nancy said.

Sam looked up, his face confused, and then he looked over at Nancy, huddled on her chair. His face rose into a large grin. “You're kidding,” he said. “Nan, you're worried? Come on. She's kidding, right?” Sam leaned on his elbows toward Nancy. “Well, don't worry. He's your little boy and he'll always be your boy. Look at me. I love my parents and I love my kids; it's my wife I can't abide.” Sam laughed and stuck the cigarette back in his mouth. “She's the one who grew up to hate me.”

Sam stood up. “I gotta go. Thanks for the beer. I'll call you late tomorrow and give you the play by play of the hearing.”

“What will you do if you can't take the kids to Sun Valley?”

“Plan two. Stay around here. Drink beer with you guys. Teach Eddie about women and how to ride a bike.”

“Go on,” Nancy said. “You're not finished. What's the punch-line?”

Sam shrugged and opened the door. “Once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget.”

After Sam left I asked Nancy if she felt better.

“Sam's a good guy,” she said. “And I should probably drink more beer; this is the first time my back has let go since the baby got here.”

“What about this. You go to bed and I'll listen for the baby,” I said, clearing the counter.

“My son,” she smiled briefly hugging me, her head against my chest. “Please listen for my son.”

IT
was twelve minutes after two when the fanbelt began to squeal, just a short touch and then another, then the real sound of a fanbelt slipping. I mean, it is so close I could tape it and convince people of car trouble. Nancy was out so cold with the worry and fatigue of six weeks that in the half light we have from the hall she could have been the definitive photograph of sleep deprivation.

You see a kid that small in his crib and it looks like someone sleeping on a jailhouse floor and you don't wonder about
any
sound he may make. I slipped my hand under Eddie's head just as the fanbelt was rising into power steering trouble and we ducked quickly into the kitchen. He quieted for the ride into the new room, and the quick flash from the fridge door turned his head in curiosity for the moment that allowed me to retrieve the bottle and stick it in the warmer. Since we'd had the baby, I'd become used to standing naked in the kitchen at night with Eddie in my arms.

The standing-zombie fatigue was worst the third week and now in the sixth it had settled to just my eyes and knees, a low burning. My head rocked slightly and I kept my eyes closed, drifting through the routine.

While Eddie was still too amazed at being whisked around to cry, I changed him, and when I pulled the heavy wet diaper away from under him, he swam happily in the air for a moment, punching softly into the dark. By the time I had him powdered and diapered, he was squealing again, each breath a wonderful, powerful compression, focused and building.

In the kitchen, the bottle was ready. I found it without reaching twice, unplugging the warmer as an afterthought, the kind of motion that in ten years I would forget I had committed a thousand times. With a quick flip I had milk on my wrist, and then of all the easy connections and coincidences in the universe, the baby's mouth found the nipple easiest of all. And as I walked around my own house naked as they say Adam was, holding my son, I heard cooing, edged by a kind of purring slurp, and one or two real, honest deep breaths.

In the dark living room, I sat in the corner of the old couch, holding Eddie and listened until he snorted two or three times and then gasped, a sharp little gasp, and I knew that two ounces were down, and we could try for a little air. I stood him against my chest and patted his back while he squirmed and growled, his head bobbing in search of the bottle. Then he grew quiet, which always is a good sign. He stood, head away from my body, as if he was listening for something, and then it came: a belch, a good two-stage belch, which he delivered partially in my ear and which sounded exactly like a lawn mower coming around the corner of a house. After that, his head bobbed some more, poking me about the face, and he was ready for more dinner.

I had already fallen asleep twice during the feeding, but sometime during the second burping, Eddie really woke me up with his head. He was bumping against my face softly, working his mouth like a little fish, whining a little bit, when I felt him swing back into space. I had a good hold of him, so I wasn't too worried, when
wham
! his forehead hammered my nose. I saw a quick flash and my eyes filled with tears that burned and burned. I must have started or moved somehow, because I felt Eddie wet me right through the diaper leg, which—out of a kind of misguided concern—I always leave a little loose.

Eddie was fussing and I stood and walked him around the room for a minute, too tired to change him, too tired to go to bed. My head felt strange, kind of empty. And finally I gave up in the middle of our second lap and sat back on the couch. Leaning there I burned with fatigue, wet and warm, and headed toward three o'clock.

Once or twice I thought about getting up, drying us off, and going back to bed, but my head was light and I was tired to the bone. Eddie began to sleep there on my chest, evenly against me, each breath a bird wing in the night sky. I pulled the T.V. quilt over us and leaned back into warm sleep myself.

It's funny about love, about how you think you're in love or how you may think you know your capacity for love, and suddenly somebody like Eddie comes along and shows you whole new rooms in your heart. I never thought Nancy would be nervous about making this baby belong to us; and when I saw that she was, that she wanted fiercely for him to be ours in every way, I started getting nervous, because I didn't know how to help her.

When I woke there was crying. This was no gentle revving of the small engines of crying. This was roaring, and then I opened my eyes and it was Nancy. She had a hand on my forehead and all I could see in her face was her open mouth in a gasp so full of horror and fear as to seem counterfeit. Her eyes were wide, crystalline, unblinking. In the late dawn light, she looked as though she had bad news for me.

Then I looked down. Eddie lay on my chest in a thick mess which included the blanket, both my hands, my side, and a good portion of the couch cushion. It was blood. I reached up and felt the crust of blood on my neck and chin. My head ached slowly, a low-grade ice-cream headache, and I felt my swollen nose with my fingers. All the time, I realized, my other hand had been feeling Eddie sleep.

“It's okay, Nan,” I said in a thick voice. “I had a bloody nose.” She sat on her heels next to me, her hands now clasped in her lap, her lower lip clipped fast in her teeth. “Eddie's okay. He's still sleeping, see?” I tried to lift Eddie up just a little to show his breathing face to her, and when I tried that, I realized we were stuck. My nose had bled over everything, blood that would be on the couch for generations, and now a thin layer of blood had glued Eddie to my belly and chest.

When you lie naked in an empty bathtub with your son attached to your abdomen by the stickiness of your very blood, and your wife gingerly sponges you apart with lukewarm water, there is a good chance you too will wake the baby. Eddie opened his eyes in the warm wash of water and lifted his head, as he's learning to do. His eyes tracked the strange space, while Nancy squeezed water between us, and then he saw his mother and made the most extraordinary gesture of tilting his head in recognition, his mouth pursing comically as if to say,
Please, Mom, spare me this indignity.

And she did. With a noise of her own, something between a sigh and a cough, Nancy reached down for her child. His body awash with blood and water, Eddie hopped into his laughing mother's arms. There was no question about it this time: he put his arms around her laughing neck and, in a happy, bucking hug, he grabbed her hair.

MAX
is a crotch dog. He has powerful instinct and insistent snout, and he can ruin a cocktail party faster than running out of ice. This urge of his runs deeper than any training can reach. He can sit, heel, fetch; he'll even fetch a thrown snowball from a snowfield, bringing a fragment of it back to you delicately in his mouth. And then he'll poke your crotch, and be warned: it is no gentle nuzzling.