The Day's Heat Page 19

  Would she spend the rest of the summer pregnant? Fulfill the horror stories of Claire’s bridge friends, who swore they’d had ten-, eleven-month pregnancies, and then cesareans “to get it out”—their words?

  How did Cassie’s and Lill’s births start? Lee tried to remember. Would her body remember? Remember to release that minuscule droplet of hormone that pushed a baby out? It seemed impossible. The pain and expense of the delivery meant nothing now: any torment, any amount of money, she was ready to pay, she’d borrow from Ray.

  The first cramps came as a vague pulling sensation in her back, from sleeping on the couch, Lee thought at first. But by late afternoon, after she’d vacuumed the house, changed bed linen, and polished the three living-room windows, the cramps had become rhythmic, drawing-down pains, each a little more genuine.

  Out of some instinct came a great desire to phone her mother. “Mama,” the word slipped out as she worked. Instead, she dialed her mother-in-law’s number. Willie Mae answered, saying Claire had driven over to Albany to play in a bridge tournament. “Done gone for the afternoon and evening, Miss Lee. You’se done started?”

  “Yes. I’ll have someone pick you up, Willie.” There was no way to reach Charles since the Bettlemain men were working over in Nashville, and so she called David Palmer. “Come get me, David, please. I’m in labor.’ She gave him instructions to the elder Bettlemains’ house, told him Willie Mae would be waiting on the porch.

  Lee had only talked to David twice since Sister Ellen died. In those short conversations on the telephone, he’d asked how she felt, told her he cared, and assured her that everything would work out. In the meantime, Lee waited, not knowing what to think, flinching at every phone call, every knock at the door.

  Now, after telling an uninterested Lill that the baby was coming, Lee waited outside on the carport with her overnight case, packed weeks earlier, beside her.

  She hurried out to the car as David Palmer pulled into the driveway. He stayed at the wheel, racing the motor as though afraid the car’s engine would die. Willie Mae got out to help with the suitcase, hugging Lee, asking, “How far apart you hurting, baby?” The pains were coming every five minutes, rolling across her abdomen, causing Lee to stop and bend forward, resisting an impulse to squat down. “Take her on quick, Father. Don’t worry ’bout nothing, Miss Lee, baby.”

  In the car she breathed the deep relaxing breaths described in The Dick Reed Natural Childbirth Book. She had practiced them, though not nearly enough, and now she tried to pretend that David Palmer driving her to the hospital was truly because there was no one else available. It was similar to the time he’d driven her home after she fell at St. Jerome’s. He kept both hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead at the street.

  Would it be this way from now on? she wondered. Seeing him only at Mass, skipping months between calls, him thinking the baby was his, but at a distance, without any inconvenience. Like Charles, she thought, that’s what he wants, too. Whatever I do, whatever lies I told, it serves them both right.

  In between breaths and the thickening pain, she did not see the startled wince in the priest’s shoulders each time she moaned and leaned forward on the seat.

  In the hospital, Lee lay on the crisp white hospital sheet, trying to read a battered magazine. In her hurry to get into the Emergency Room, she’d left a library book and David Palmer in the car, him trying to find a close parking spot. She told the attendant to roll the wheelchair on in, that the priest would take care of the paperwork.

  But there had been no need to rush. After she was upstairs in the labor room, the next half hour was easy, the pains faint, allowing Lee to go through the cleaning-up and getting-ready procedures without too much discomfort. Then the cramps returned in full force, each one gathering in her back and sweeping to the front in increasing seconds of torture. Strangely though, in between, the pains subsided as though they’d never existed. The Dick Reed book said there was a natural relaxation that set in with labor, and it was true, if you knew about it. Within the hour, Lee had dropped the magazine and looked out at the bare antiseptic room from under lowered eyelashes, a film starting to come down somewhere in her mind, not obscuring the pain completely but putting it off at a distance, but, of course, not nearly far enough away. She was glad that at the end, when the baby was being delivered, Dr. Yuller would give her a shot and gas.

  A woman down the hall, who apparently had never heard of the Dick Reed relaxation method, called, “Oooooh” and “Ahhhhh” and “Pleeeease,” dragging the sounds out, making anyone who was listening feel her suffering. In counterpoint, underneath the extended howls, Lee could hear a nurse’s low controlled voice, saying, “Don’t be such a baby. You’ve already had your shot.”

  Lee turned, pulled the pillow around her ears, determined to stop the faint sounds she found herself making, determined not to ask for a shot until she absolutely had to. Dick Reed encouraged his mothers to do without drugs unless absolutely necessary. I’ll ask after the next pain, she thought, and for the next three, gauged their intensity. “That was pretty bad,” she said, after the first one. “That was unendurable,” she said, after the second. “And that one was hellacious, god-damned awful,” she said, after the last longer, harder spasm. And in the in-between reprieves from pain, the total relief, she giggled at her evaluations.

  “Are you ready for your shot, Mrs. Bettlemain?” the nurse of the controlling voice asked from the doorway.

  Willing herself not to give this woman any satisfaction, not to clench her jaw and talk through her teeth, Lee said, “No, not just yet. Why not give it to that poor woman down the hall? She seems to need it.”

  White starch crackle and a stockinged hiss advanced on Lee’s bed. “Why… why, we can’t give your shots to just anybody.” The nurse held out a tray, a hypodermic needle on it, an alcohol cotton at the tip. “But you should be ready for yours.”

  Lee was ready, more than ready, but the woman down the hall’s pleading had changed to “Nurrrrrse, nurrrse,” a high whining, worse than the squeezing vise that was tightening around Lee’s middle.

  “She really seems to need it, nurse.”

  “She’s spoiled! Girls are so spoiled these days, can’t take nothing.” The nurse motioned with the tray. “But you should be ready. Dr. Yuller said you can have this.”

  “Give it to her!” Lee jerked her head back toward the sounds of “Pleeease, nurrrrse,” that were now higher and shriller, truly pitiful.

  “I can’t! I’ve got it ready for you.”

  “Well, put it on the table, there, until I’m ready,” Lee said in her most level voice, looking from the hypodermic up to the nurse’s worried eyes. “We don’t want to give shots to just anybody, now, do we? Even if they need it.”

  Then Lee turned on her side, partly to send the nurse away and partly to hide the deep groan that was working its way up and out of her throat. When she turned back, the woman was gone, and the tray with the syringe was on the night table, the cotton seeping alcohol.

  “Oh God, please let Dr. Yuller come quick and give me that shot,” Lee whispered to the tiles of the white ceiling, and with the next pain she asked for the shot from the white wall, and then begged it from the white curtain that hung around her bed, and finally from the edge of the white sheet that she chewed to keep from calling “Nurrrrrse” too, pressing her face into the pillow.

  Later, Dr. Yuller bellowed, “Why in the hell wasn’t Mrs. Bettlemain given this injection?” And still later, in the delivery room, he whooped, “It’s a boy, Lee! Your old man can quit trying!”

  All the while, in behind the pain and the talk, the clatter of metal on metal, the snips of scissors and gurgle of water, in behind the sounds, that the drugs made into a changeable elastic band that ran round a spindle in Lee’s mind, was a voice down the hall calling, “Pleeese, nurrrrse, pleeese.”

  Then the pleading turned into a dream with Lee begging, “Pleeese,” only to find herself in another room with a d
ifferent nurse, who was kneading Lee’s abdomen and saying, “It’s all over Mrs. Bettlemain. You have a beautiful son.”

  “I was expecting another girl,” Charles said that evening, the yeasty smell of beer flowing from him as he bent to give Lee’s cheek a brush of his lips. “I took a shower. Didn’t figure you’d be done so quick.” He dragged the one padded chair in the room to the side of the bed and sat, propping his boots on the metal slats underneath.

  “What does he look like?” Lee asked.

  In the delivery room, she’d had only a perception of wet black hair and incredibly loud crying that was somehow confused with the woman’s calls and the dream she had later. A dream in which she was a nurse, holding a tray with a hypodermic needle, walking down a long hall to give the crying woman a shot.

  “He’s right dark-skinned—nothing like Cassie and Lill. Like you, I reckon.”

  “They won’t bring him down until after visiting hours, Charles. Tell me again exactly, what he looks like, everything.”

  “He’s the onliest one down there. Just a baby, not like the girls at all.”

  “He’s a boy. What you wanted. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Yeah, great.” Charles shifted his feet on the metal rails, crossed his arms, and looked around the room, his gaze stopping on the small television set that hung in the corner.

  “Does that work?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s don’t watch TV, Charles.”

  “Just the scores, babe, okay?”

  “May I speak to you, son?” Claire, flushed and twitching, holding on to the heavy hospital door, motioned for Charles to come out into the hallway.

  Lee didn’t wonder at her mother-in-law’s nervous summoning. Claire was always having little private conferences with her sons, on something as small as the repair of a chair leg, and now there was going to be the hospital bill, so she’d have to make something out of it. Lee turned the sound of the television off, took another chocolate out of the box Claire had brought, and lay back on the pillows, her eyes closed.

  Now, I’ll be able to say “my son,” too, she thought; although now it didn’t seem all that important. It was more important to eat chocolates to make her milk come in, rich and nourishing, more important to stay in this balloon of peace she seemed to have earned.

  Five minutes passed and Charles came back. Angry, putting his feet down much too hard as he crossed in front of Lee’s bed, setting the television volume up again.

  “Where’s Claire?” Lee asked, above the noise, but not really caring.

  “Out there. She’s had a turn. The nurses are giving her some water.”

  “What happened?”

  In a voice he usually saved for dragging Furlough out of the house, Charles said, “They had Charles Jr. in the god-damned colored nursery!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Seems like that priest what brought you up here is a nigger priest. Takes care of the nigger church. They say he brings colored gals up here all the time. They thought you was just one of them high yellers.”

  “But Dr. Yuller? And you? Didn’t you fill out the papers?”

  “Sure. But the nurse didn’t look, said they all say they have husbands who are coming up later. And they said you didn’t need no shot, not like no ordinary white woman neither.” He thrust his feet against the metal frame of the bed, moving it a foot across the floor.

  Lee couldn’t find a word, but could feel her scalp move, a pinching at the roots of her hair.

  The hospital door opened and Claire, her face glossy and pale, edged past the bed, her hand out in front of her, shaking a small white paper cup so that the water sloshed over the side. “I knew it was the colored nursery right away. Willie Mae’s girl had her baby up here two weeks ago. I told them it was a mistake,” Claire said. “I told them there was never any colored blood on our side of the family.”

  Lee gasped and then spoke slowly, distinctly, as she had seen her drunken mother do so often: “Are you saying, dear Claire, dear daughter of the Confederacy, that there are no niggers in your woodpile?” The word “niggers” hurt coming out of her mouth. It stirred up a buried memory of one summer at the beach when three boys in a passing truck yelled “nigger” at a darkly tanned Lee, who never tried for a tan again. “I’ll have you know, Claire, that all my relatives are in Atlanta, all three generations, and are all known by their first and last names. We’ve never owned any slaves, and … and there are no niggers in Lebanon!” She wasn’t sure of this last assertion, but it was her mother’s contention.

  Claire’s thick pale eyelids blinked. “What I was trying to explain to those nurses out there was—was that you’re foreign, and even though the baby is dark that there’s no colored blood.” This time she omitted on our side. The last of the water, squeezed too hard, gushed out of the paper cup, streaking down Claire’s dress front.

  Lee felt her anger spew out like the water. The child was Charles’s, the exact same genes as Cassie’s and Lill’s. She’d pretended so long that the baby was David’s that now she had to remind herself of the truth. She wanted to ask, What does it matter? A drop of colored blood, a gene? Why should that be so important? The child was hers, whole and perfect. And then she had to ask herself, So why are you taking such pains to prove the drop didn’t come from your side? Africa is pretty damn close to Lebanon, Miss Smarty Pants, just across the Mediterranean Sea.

  Silently, considering the joke—on herself, on all of them—she realized that if the little fellow in the nursery had been fathered by a Martian, if he were permanently purple—the blue-red color he’d been in the delivery room—he would still be hers. She’d want him, she’d keep him. Claire would, too. That’s why she was making such a fuss about the nursery. She’s making him an acceptable child for her son and his family, an acceptable Bettlemain grandchild.

  “Charles, let your mother sit down, before she falls, please.” Lee didn’t try to keep the irritability out of her voice.

  Claire objected, said she could stand. Charles got up out of the chair slowly and leaned against the wall, glancing from his mother to his wife. “It was a mistake, Mama, that’s all. A mistake.” He focused on Lee for a second, a flat, cold look, then turned his face to the game on television, a baseball field, a runner at bat.

  Lee shut her eyes, trying to regain the sealed-off, indifferent strength she’d felt since the baby was born.

  Claire asked, “Who’s playing?” and Charles mumbled something back after she asked a second time.

  Lee kept her eyes closed.

  “Well, you finally got a boy, Charles,” Claire said, getting back some of that cloying good nature she affected in front of her sons and husband. “The girls are so excited about having a baby brother, Lee. I’ve told them to call him Baby Charlie. That’s what we called Charles growing up, until he wouldn’t answer to it no more.”

  Lee pulled the corners of her mouth up, hoping it would pass for a smile. Poor Claire, no one on her side. “Tell Cassie and Lill I’m coming home day after tomorrow, and bringing their brother.”

  At ten the next morning, David Palmer and Father Kennedy came into the hospital room. Lee woke to feel the old priest’s fingers touching her forehead.

  “Oh love, just the blessed sign. No need to wake up.”

  David Palmer stood behind Father Kennedy, raised his shoulders once, explaining. “I stayed until they brought him out. They said they’d clean him up. Is everything all right?”

  Lee pulled the covers higher, up to her chin. In the languor brought by the pain medication, which she knew wouldn’t last, she could look at David Palmer without interest or passion, hardly caring what he said at all. She closed her eyes.

  “Take Communion, love. It will strengthen you.” The old priest whispered the words to the rite so low that Lee couldn’t make the responses. David made them in a muted, cheerless voice.

  As the white wafer dissolved on the roof of her mouth, Father Kennedy said, “Father Palmer insisted on coming, taking s
ome credit for bringing you up here, will you believe it, when it’s my duty to make hospital rounds?” There was something almost pleasant, almost kind, in the old priest’s words toward the younger priest.

  “He has so much black hair, just like you, Lee,” David said.

  Lee put her elbow up over her eyes. “I’m tired.”

  That afternoon, she could feel her milk coming in. Coming down was more like it, for the warmth and heaviness seemed to descend from her armpits. Weren’t breasts just enlarged sweat glands after all, like the scientists said? She drifted between meals and naps, floating between asleep and awake, waiting for the black-headed papoose they brought from the nursery every three hours. He was completely unlike Cassie and Lill in coloring: a violent purple when he cried and dusky rose when he slept, but like his sisters all the same: perfection looking back with immense, unfocused eyes. His arms and legs were thin and stringy, like a frog’s bent next to his body, and the blood-clotted cord of the navel was the same length as his wrinkled larva-like penis. She counted his fingers and toes and changed his diaper every time they brought him to her. The cool air often caused him to pee, sending up a golden arc of urine, once into his very own face.

  “Abraham,” she whispered against the black silky hair that seemed a miniature, incredibly bad toupee atop the bobbing head.

  The third day was dull and overcast, the entire sky a roiling gray tent outside the hospital window. Father Kennedy came in the morning without David Palmer, but Lee didn’t ask where the younger priest was.

  “Just rest, love,” the old priest rasped, trying to whisper, sounding like a wasp in a drain pipe. “My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” Afterwards, the prayers seemed to stay in the room, swirl in the air, filter in as diffuse as the milky light coming through her eyelids.