Escape the Night Read Free

too young and too old for this sort of thing. ‘I’ll wait until they produce something,’ I think were his exact words.”
    â€œEver the family man.” Charles glanced at the Times , saw WEST BERLIN BORDER HOMES SEALED BY EAST GERMAN POLICE without interest or comprehension. “I wonder how much emotion he expended on our mother.”
    â€œHe outlived her.” Phillip shrugged. He inspected the waiting room with distaste. “Don’t let you do this with much grace, do they?”
    Charles looked up with a glimmer of amusement. Phillip had grown a clipped mustache to go with his tailored clothes and pearl cufflinks. His natural movements were willowy: Charles could see the military strut of Black Jack Carey in the way he held them in, discerned a tension running parallel to his own. “Childbirth is the great leveler,” Charles answered. “Another Bolshevik plot for your friend Englehardt from HUAC: ‘I have here a list of five hundred babies …’”
    â€œWe’ll never agree on that, will we?”
    â€œPolitics, or babies?”
    â€œEither one, I expect.” Phillip carefully placed his hat on the table and sat across from Charles. “How’s Allie taking to her new role? She’s not generally noted for supporting parts.”
    Charles paled slightly: by now anger changed only the color of his face, not its expression. Knowing that Phillip used his conceit of Allie as actress because it touched a nerve, he remained silent: to respond would be to acknowledge the unspoken war which now embraced even childbirth, but which only John Carey could end, by dying. Instead, finishing the cigarette, Charles watched the sinuous twist of smoke as it vanished, thinking of Allie’s almost sensual relation to poetry, and how her moods—bright or melancholy—vibrated with the music she had heard. Pregnancy had cracked her like a glass.
    Slowly, Schoenberg sliced her open: her hips were narrow and a Caesarean section too risky. But there was more blood than usual, and it took him a moment to see the head.
    He opened his forceps, slid them through the incision, and clamped. His forehead glistened. Slowly, he pulled the baby from its mother. Its hair was matted with blood and its skin was blue from drugs and lack of air. The nurse cleaned mucus from its nose and mouth with quick jabs of a bulb syringe. Schoenberg spanked it.
    Its head lolled. Schoenberg slapped it again. The baby neither cried nor moved nor breathed. Quickly Schoenberg cut its cord and rushed it to the baby warmer, clapping an oxygen mask on its- face. “Damned Nembutal,” he muttered.
    The baby’s leg moved. Slowly, its skin grew flushed. It squalled, then curled on its side, scarcely more conscious than its mother.
    When Allie awoke several hours later she lay rigid, refusing to hold the baby or look into its face. They took it to the nursery.
    Staring through the glass, Charles saw Allie Fairvoort in the blondness of its hair.
    He glanced up, caught Phillip Carey’s reflection as he looked down at the baby. For an instant, Charles read fear and vulnerability, felt their father pass between them like a feather in a vacuum, leaving no trace. Blindly, the baby reached toward its uncle with a tiny fist: Phillip’s face softened.
    â€œAh,” he said quietly. “The son and heir.”
    A nurse appeared, riffling a sheaf of forms. “Is one of you the father?”
    Charles nodded. “I am.”
    â€œThe mother won’t give us a name.”
    Charles turned, hands in his pockets, watching his son as if wondering what its life might hold. Then he turned back again, facing his brother for a long, cool moment before he looked at the nurse. “John Peter Carey,” he told her softly. “The second.”

CHAPTER 2
    Peter Carey looked nothing like his grandfather.
    By the time he was four, it was clear that Peter would always be fair, that he