Vac (15 page)

I moved sullenly about the next morning. I would have to face it. It was done—sealed, confirmed and irrevocable—from the moment my seed spirted into your soft tunnel of life. From the union of a code with a code had sprung new consciousness. Looked Jewish? All right he looked Jewish. So what? Who didn’t? Anyway we all wore the flat, flayed face of a foetal ape. We all looked weird, upright caterpillars,
nodding
at the stars. I would sear from my consciousness every taint of literary glamour and I would—oh God!—love my son as myself.

My mother and aunt returned from the maternity home. Glumly I listened to them burbling about:

They were blind anyway! Or so eccentric in their capacity for admiration as to be worthless as critics. Anything small, anything human and small, was to them intrinsically lovely and it was inconceivable that a new bud of the family would seem to them other than regal.

In the full blaze of day I strode up the hill. It was done, sealed and confirmed. Oaks from acorns and the voluptuous
convulsion exacts a lifetime of concern. It was done and must be faced.

You smiled and asked:

I walked out of the ward into the corridor. A nurse tied a gauze mask round my face. Why wasn’t I strong and adult? She led me into a tiny room containing a sink, medical stores and two glass-topped boxes. Anyway, here I was. For a while, the night before, I’d wondered if I’d have the strength to look at him again. The nurse pointed to one of the boxes and I trudged to it and gazed in.

After a while, I asked her:

I fancied her eyes smiled above her own gauze mask. She nodded.

I bent down and picked him up and looked at him closely. Then I carried him over to the other incubator and gazed into that. No, there was no mistake. That ruddy, broad-cheeked child had never issued from you. I looked at the babe in my own arms again. No, there was definitely no mistake. Now I could perceive, faint but unmistakable, traces of me and of you. I didn’t actually weep. I had done my stint of that. And if I had done, it would have been neither from sorrow nor joy but literally from amazement.

He was so tiny—and so beautiful!

I gazed and gazed. I searched for some echo of what I had seen the day before, and found none. Perhaps I was quite off my rocker. Perhaps I was really in some asylum, hallucinating experience. I gazed at my little son. His nose snuffled and wrinkled in the air and his lips moved rapidly in vain suction. Wait—babies get squashed being propelled down the vaginal canal. Had it been the random crumpling of his tiny countenance
that had produced the devastating effect? Had he now popped back into shape like a rubber toy? The metamorphosis, in one day, was unbelievable! I had thought his face long and thin and it was round and incredibly beguiling and his nose was perfectly proportioned and his hair was brown and silky—

I replaced him in the incubator.

It was no good. I had no right to enjoy him. I had
forfeited
my claim to proud paternity by my sordid weakness of the previous day. But he was so beautiful! So little and frail and—

I sat down on your bed.

But I couldn’t tell you! You still thought I was semi-divine. I couldn’t expose to you the gross crusts of clay that were my feet.

I couldn’t stay away from him.

Now when I visited you. I fidgeted beside your bed for a few minutes, then rushed off to the incubator room to gaze at our exquisite product. He was tiny. The full-term babies swaddled beside their mothers seemed enormous, huge,
prodigal
mounds of coarse flesh, compared to our blue-veined, delicate boy. But he was vital enough, crying and clawing eagerly at your breast when they brought him to you for
feeding
and soon sucking you sore. I had no right to love him
because
I had failed the test—I hadn’t been able to love him when I thought he was ugly. But he was so appealing and so lovable, I couldn’t resist. My unworthy love cascaded about him.

You were whole again. You wrote me a letter. It ended:

I knew what you meant. It stabbed me. Your simple, fragrant words always did. You meant we must love him,
must
love him, not just because of your long pain in growing him, not just because he was our first, and was likely to remain our only, child, not just because he was tiny and pretty and lovable but—because of all the different things, because of all that had passed between us in words and looks and deeds of love, because of—all the different things!

And now we don’t live together.