She crossed the street toward a maple sapling that still had a few of its leaves, red as lipstick. “See?” she told the baby. “Red! Isn’t it pretty?” She turned him slightly so that he was facing the sapling. He blinked and let his gaze travel across it, his head bobbling slightly with the effort of concentration. He no longer had that squinchy newborn look; he was wide-eyed and alert. His cheek, when she set hers against it, was so silky that she almost couldn’t feel it.
They had so far had the street to themselves — they’d had the whole world to themselves — but now a bus loomed out of the fog and stopped beside them. The doors opened with a wheeze, letting off two dark-eyed young women, one of them obviously pregnant. They were followed by a tall young man in glasses, and the three of them stood at the bus stop a moment laughing and interrupting each other, riding over each other’s words, talking about a party they had been to the night before. Then they moved off down the street, and as their voices faded, Rebecca noticed the quiet surrounding her and the baby. It was that cottony, thick, enclosing quiet that often descends with a fog, and it made her long, all at once, for the clamor of her family.
Anyhow, Abdul must be getting hungry. He was nosing hopefully into the crook of her neck. She turned and started home.
The mist was settling on her hair. She could see the glints in the strands that fell over her eyes. The hem of her skirt was growing heavy with moisture. The baby’s mouth against her skin felt like a cool little guppy mouth.
Had it ever crossed her mind that Joe had married her for her usefulness? Yes, it had crossed her mind. And never more so than after he died; just up and willfully died and left her to cope on her own.
Now, though, she saw what he had rescued her from: that ingrown, muted, stagnant, engaged-to-be-engaged routine that had started to chafe her so. Oh, he had been just as useful to her; no doubt about it. What she’d told NoNo was true.
And while she had once believed that she’d been useful only in practical matters (tending the little girls, waiting on Mother Davitch), now she saw that her most valuable contribution had been her joyousness — a quality the Davitches sorely lacked. Not that she herself was joyous to begin with. No, she had had to labor at it. She had struggled to acquire it.
Timidly, she experimented with a sneaking sense of achievement. Pride, even. Why not? It didn’t seem all that misplaced.
She carried the baby home jauntily, striding straight through the puddles, wearing jewels of mist in her hair and holding her head high.
Eleven
As luck would have it, Poppy’s party fell on a day when two paying events could have been scheduled instead. One was just a small luncheon, but the other was a Christmas party for a brokerage firm, and Rebecca was very sorry to have to turn it down. A promise was a promise, though. She had told Poppy they would celebrate on his actual birth date. Enough of these second-best, orphan compromises — major milestones observed midweek or shoved into the next month so as not to interfere with more important people’s arrangements.
So: December 11th, a Saturday. The plan was to begin at two in the afternoon, for the little ones’ sake, and extend into early evening. Presents were not discouraged. (Poppy had been firm about that.) Food would be served from the very beginning; none of this waiting around for the toasts. Lots of desserts, but no savories, no hors d’oeuvres or crudités, certainly no main dishes. And the centerpiece would be a towering cake, really more of a wedding cake, prepared by Toot Sweet in Fells Point. Poppy had done the research: Toot Sweet was the winner. Fortunately, Biddy didn’t take offense. “Fine with me,” she said. “I have enough on my hands with all those pastries he wants.”
The guest list — saved these past six months in the pocket of Rebecca’s calico skirt, where it had gone through the laundry twice and emerged as soft as blotting paper but still comparatively readable — consisted mostly of family, plus two of Poppy’s old friends, plus some incidental acquaintances like his physical therapist and Alice Farmer. (It was ironic, Rebecca often reflected, that by definition those family parties that were largest and most demanding were the ones to which Alice Farmer had to be invited as a guest.) There had been more people on the list, but many of them were dead. A few others were too frail to attend, and a few had simply dropped out of sight at some unnoticed point in the past.
Rebecca’s mother and Aunt Ida had accepted, much to Rebecca’s surprise, with the understanding that they would leave the party early on account of the long drive home. Also they would arrive early, they announced, in order to help out. Privately, Rebecca began thinking up tasks that would keep them harmlessly occupied. Sorting through the napkins, inspecting the stemware for water spots…
Because it was December, the decorating scheme would be Christmassy. Already a slender tree stood in the front-parlor window, diminutive white lights twinkling tastefully from each branch. Now Rebecca set up another tree in the dining room, chunkier and messier, smothered in decades’ worth of construction-paper chains and Polaroid photos of the children pasted on paper-doily snowflakes. Some of the photos were faded past recognition. Many were interchangeable, since Davitch babies tended to look fairly much alike below a certain age. (All those little clock faces, wisps of dark hair, squinty mistrustful eyes.) On top she put a gold foil star with seven different-sized, unevenly spaced points, brought home from kindergarten long ago by one or another of the girls; no one knew which anymore. She draped a huge banner across the rear-parlor mantel reading HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY POOPY—a mistake she hadn’t noticed until she got it home — and she lugged the TV and the VCR down from the family room and plugged them into an outlet in the front parlor, because Hakim (in love with Western technology, like every immigrant Rebecca had ever known) was bringing as his present a professionally produced videotape assembled from the family’s home movies. This was supposed to be a secret, although Poppy had to have suspected something. On the morning of the party, when he went in to watch cartoons, all he found was a rectangle of dust on the TV stand. He didn’t say a word about it, though; just grunted and laid out a game of solitaire instead.
The day was bright and unusually cold, which meant Rebecca could wear her Bedouin costume. Although of course she didn’t put it on first thing. No, first she put on baggy pants and one of Joe’s old flannel shirts, and she raced around the house picking up and vacuuming and cooking Poppy a special breakfast. Nothing but sweets — waffles and cocoa. (The man would contract diabetes before the end of the day.) A little blue birthday candle flickered on the topmost waffle. “Happy birthday to you…” she sang, all by herself, standing over the table with her hands clasped together in front of her.
Poppy said, “Why, thank you, Beck,” and calmly blew out the candle. It amused and touched and exasperated her, all at the same time, how he accepted this fuss and bother as only his due.
“Just think,” she told him. “One hundred years ago today, you were just the tiniest bundle nestled in a cradle. Or maybe in your mother’s bed. Were you born at home? Did your mother have a doctor?”
“She had a midwife,” he said, cutting into his waffles. “Mrs. Bentham: she came to the house. We lived on North Avenue then. She was just starting out in her practice, and we were her first set of twins.”