In the papers he notices her one last rebellion: she is arrested for swimming at night in the pond in Central Park. But the mayor intervenes and from this incident comes New York’s first public swimming pool. She sinks quietly back into her life, coaches a few women swimmers, and has no more children, as far as he can tell. He hopes, from his spacious apartment on the East Side as he watches Compass grow, that she is happy.
ALIETTE WATCHES HIM, TOO. She follows him as he grows famous, and reads every one of his new books. She leaves them strewn conspicuously in her home on nights when she holds soirées; her high-society guests, most of whom have never read a line of poetry, cite him in interviews as their favorite poet. She reads the profiles of him in the papers and watches Compass grow and become his father’s amanuensis, his nurse, his friend. Compass goes to Harvard when his father is offered a lectureship there, and lives with him during his collegiate years. Compass graduates with a degree in English, and holds three school records on the pool’s walls. Later, when the interviewers can induce the boy to speak, he smiles his serious smile, and says, “I can’t imagine a better life than that I live with my father.” Aliette snips this quote and carries it in a locket that hangs from her neck.
One night she turns on the radio and hears L.’s dear voice reciting some of his oldest poems, the ones from Ambivalence. He gasps slightly with his troubled lungs as he reads the lines, “I have dreamed a dream of repentance / I have known the world eternal.” She listens, rapt, and when she switches off the radio, her face is wet.
SHE SEES HIM ONCE, in all this time. They are both old, and he has published his twelfth book of poems. He stands on a stage, behind a lectern. His hair is white, and he is stooped. He reads deliberately and well, stopping between each poem to catch his breath.
He does not notice the plump woman in the gray cloche and chinchilla coat in the back of the auditorium. He doesn’t see how she mouths with him each word he reads, how her face is bright with joy. Later, after he has shaken the hands of his admirers and is alone with Compass in the theater, she is long gone, in bed with a hot-water bottle. But though she is nowhere around, he has felt all evening the change her very presence makes in the air.
He walks on the arm of his handsome son into the cool New York street glistening with rain. Out on the sidewalk, he tells Compass to halt. L. lifts his face to the drizzle and closes his eyes, breathing deeply once, twice. When he brings his face back down, he is grinning.
Then he tells his son, “This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you’d never have again.” He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. “Surfacing,” he says.
Majorette
THE NEW HOUSE, AND ALL ITS NEW FURNISHINGS.
The Sears rugs, the pasteboard sideboard, the pine table made by the groom, who, just then, had his arms full of his bride. She, only sixteen, in an ivory crepe de chine suit, baby-faced, pincurled, a rosebud of a painted mouth. Hershey Queen, 1951.
Also, this: a bundle in the oven, the baby yet invisible but still extremely present.
When the bride was deposited on the floor of the twilit hall, she threw her white roses into the air, smiled her victory smile, gave a little dance in the dining room, and draped her newlywed body over the sofa. The groom smiled glumly, emitting fumes of the whiskey bought all night by the stepdad of the bride, Joe Helmuth, breeder of basset hounds and bearer of a menacing handlebar moustache. The girl’s mother gone these past two years, it had been up to Joe to come into the surveyor’s office one day and stand over the not-yet-groom’s desk. And all he had to do was pick up the compass on the desk, trace a few interlocked circles in the blotter, and the boy gulped and looked up, comprehending. When Joe Helmuth left, tipping his hat at the boss, the compass stood embedded through the cardboard, into the wood, kicking out the pencil leg like a Rockette.
Hence the Saturday festivities in the church with a few frantic sips from the flask, then at the Kiwanis Club with the clucking ice cubes in the tumblers of booze. Now here they were in the splitlevel on the outskirts of Hershey, encumbered with a thirty-year mortgage. Thirty years! the groom thought. He’d be dead by then, what, fifty-five. An old man. He had two years of college — though technical college, true — and had dreams, but his new wife didn’t much fit into them.
Pretty, he’d said to his best man, taking a nip in the nave before the ceremony. But she don’t have a whole lot going on upstairs, see? He’d been angling for a country club wife, the wife of a professional man, the kind that knew how to speak that double-speak that drove all the men mad, but saved the sweet stuff for her husband.
But his best man had said, salacious, Pretty’s the best kind, don’t know much more than they need to. At that, the groom just shrugged.
On her new couch, the bride kicked off her heels and laughed at the spangled asbestos ceiling, sending her cigarette smoke toward it. The wind rose, carrying with it the mysterious sweet scent from the chocolate factory, and she heard her groom go into the kitchen, then heard the refrigerator smooching open. Jingle of a bottlecap hitting the floor, groan of chair legs against the linoleum, soughing of wind in the chokecherry sapling in the yard. When she went in to find her new hubby-hubby, he was in the dark, staring at the bottle in his hands, head in a dark wreath of smoke.
She went to him and stroked the hair back from his handsome forehead. He was stiff, unyielding. She pulled his hand from the bottle with her plump fingers, and he sighed, moved to her, rocked his forehead against the belly where the bean-sized baby was forming. Softly he kissed the belly where the child pulsed and grew, where her little body was building cell by cell, so beautifully.
WHEN THE BABY CAME AT LAST, she came screaming into the hands of the nurse, for the doctor was eating his veal cutlet at the club under the needling glare of his wife. He brushed the crumbs from his chin with his pinkie finger, rolled the wine around his mouth as if it were mouthwash. At last, avuncular, he patted her hand, said: No way it’ll take less than three hours, honey. First-time mother, seventeen years old, tiny little thing. We have time.
Only fifteen minutes after that pronouncement came the crowning, the puckered face, the fishy shoulders slipping out, the fat belly, the kicking legs, the toes in their waxy, bloody patina. A beautiful, healthy baby girl, the nurse said, brushing sweat from her forehead. The baby latched with angry piglet grunts onto the bottle, and the mother, at seventeen years old, felt ancient, a Madonna under the fluorescent hum of the hospital brights.
When the father came in, his knees were wobbly in his work-stained pants. He ran a finger up the tiny arm, holding his breath, and felt a terrible matching tenderness in his own, as if he were feeling what the new child was feeling, as if his callused finger were burning the brand-new skin. For weeks after she was born, he slathered the girl with air kisses, his lips stopping millimeters from the sweet cheeks, blowing smooches at his raw little girl.
Thus petrified with anxiety, vibrating with thrill, the new parents agreed that their new daughter was a good baby. A very good baby, though soon she began sobbing with ferocity. All night long, she seemed to choke herself with sorrow, keeping the parents tossing in their twin bed, clutching their baby-care manual that told them…a terrible mistake to go to the baby when she cries…this will teach her to call for you with screams…Instead, you must steel yourself, go to her only once a night, for feeding and changing if she needs it. They slept with their fingers in their ears; they sat smoking against the headboard in the dark; the father rhythmically pounded his forehead against the kitchen table; and at last, the baby stopped screaming in the nighttime, resigned to lying in her wet and stink until dawn.