The Laments Read Free Page B

“after you’re finished we’ll pay him a visit.”
    THIS WAS MARY’S SECOND VIEWING of her son, and she was disheartened. The neonate was dwarfed by his incubator; hair ran up his tiny spine; he resembled a little bush baby with his enormous eyes and minuscule hands. Like the membrane of an onion, his skin was transparent, exposing the desperate tangle of blood vessels that kept him alive. To her dispirited eye, he was more hatchling than human.
    “All premature infants look this way,” the doctor assured her. “But in just a few weeks he’ll be a bouncing baby. This fellow, Mary, will look just like little . . .
Jack
.” He opened one of the circular holes on the side of the incubator. “Go ahead, give him a stroke.”
    “A stroke? Like a dog?”
    Dr. Underberg looked at her in disbelief.
    “He
needs
your touch, Mary. He needs a reason to live, and your warmth will give him that.”
    Mary patted the tiny creature with her index finger. She noticed its fragile rib cage rise and fall, and winced that her body had produced a mite so ill equipped for life.
    MARY BOYD’S ESTRANGED HUSBAND , Walter Boyd, was listening to the BBC’s shortwave broadcast of cricket. Australia was about to beat England. Walter could recite the test match scores for the past fifteen years. Though he could never remember the players, he found numbers comforting—phone numbers, account numbers, his last six electric bills: he recited them to calm himself. When the phone rang suddenly, he counted five rings before answering.
    “Thought you might want to know that I’ve just had your baby,” said a familiar voice on the other end.
    Startled, Walter dropped the weather statistics from his edition of the
Sunday Mail
. He buckled forward, clutching the phone—using the stern voice he reserved for strangers.
    “Who is this?”
    “Mary. I’m in Salisbury.”
    “Mary?”
    “Yes. Mary. Your wife.”
    The phone line went dead, but Walter kept it to his ear, expecting somehow to get a full explanation from the telephone company. When none came, he counted the stripes on the cuff of his shirt while the cricket match turned to white noise and the conversation replayed in his brain.
    I’ve just had your baby.
    “ HOW LONG ARE YOU STAYING IN THE HOSPITAL? ” asked Julia’s mother, Rose D’Usseau, formerly Rose Clare, formerly Rose Frank, formerly Rose Willoughby. It wasn’t that she was hard to live with—she just grew bored with her husbands easily. An elegant, delicate woman with a proud manner, she made a wonderful first impression; men fell for her left and right. Once married, she dressed them, changed their haircuts, reformed their habits, enrolled them in the right clubs, redirected their careers. Her work done, she mentally dusted off her hands and looked for a new challenge.
    “Till the morning,” replied Julia.
    “Thank heaven,” sighed Rose, regarding the drab hospital room with disapproval. If she didn’t renovate men, she might have set her talents to historic buildings.
    “And the poor thing still has no name?” she continued, eyeing the sleeping bundle in Julia’s lap.
    “He’s not a
thing,
Mother,” replied Julia. “He’s a boy.”
    “He’s a thing until he has the
dignity
of a name,” said Rose. “And who is this doctor? He needs a new suit, a haircut, and a
proper
pair of shoes!”
    Julia turned to Howard for support; deflecting her mother’s verbal assaults required more energy than she could muster.
    “Dr. Underberg is the head of obstetrics, Rose,” explained Howard. “He has quite a few things to teach the medical establishment in this country.”
    “Really, Howard? How marvelous.” Rose brightened. Howard always had this effect on her. Julia found her mother’s awe of Howard disquieting—and rather predatory.
    There was a squeak at the doorway as Nurse Pritchard, the matron of the ward, prepared to announce the end of visiting hours. But the striking resemblance between Rose and Julia gave