“It is a terrible world,” I said, “but he’ll be fine.”
I meant that he would stick by her. Dorothy didn’t appear to doubt this either. She was twenty-eight already.
“He’ll teach the baby how to fish,” I said. “You’ll have the only infant who knows how to surf-cast.”
I didn’t say it, but I was ever so slightly sorry for Forster, who’d been outmaneuvered, caught off guard. Nature’s dupe. He really did only want a few simple things — a life with lots of empty space in it — and now he was getting more than he’d bargained for.
But you always did, in a couple. That was what I thought when I lay next to Joe in the tiny bedroom at the end of the hall. Joe was talking on about how fishermen never had to punch a time clock, no wonder Forster liked it. That was how come Vanzetti had no proof he was at work the night of the Braintree robbery, he was out selling fish. Could he get a lobster to testify he never fired a shot? An eel to swear for him?
It was okay. I might’ve had a husband who talked about things I cared far less about. “It’s so quiet here at night,” Joe said. “At home our streets are teeming, aren’t they?”
“Most streets,” I said.
“And heartless. We’re as bad as India,” Joe said. “Only they have more people.”
“We could have just as many, before very long,” I said. “In about a minute, we could. Margaret Sanger’s mother lived through eighteen pregnancies and eleven births, did you know that? Nobody cares whether poor people have birth control.”
We were practitioners of birth control ourselves. I hated nothing more than having to buy feminine hygiene products like jellies and foaming tablets — I’d wait till a woman clerk was on duty in the drugstore and whisper the words. They were too graphic, those products, like artificial versions of private natural processes. I was sure it was wrong that such items should be made for profit and sold in stores for cash.
I was thinking about the capitalist system having this intimate contact with my own tissues, as I took the tube out of our suitcase and padded down the hall to the bathroom to slip the manufactured gel inside me. I tried to be fast, so Joe didn’t wait too long, but a kind of modesty always kept me from doing this in his sight.
“It’s ridiculous we have to do things with chemicals just to make love freely,” I said to Joe, when I was getting back into bed. “It makes me hate nature.”
“Don’t tell nature you said that,” Joe said.
“I hate it that procreation has anything to do with sex,” I said. “Who thought that up? What sense does that make?”
“Our opinions were not consulted,” Joe said.
“There are too many babies,” I said, “born every day and they don’t get cared for and nobody does anything about it.”
“I wouldn’t say nobody,” he said.
“You haven’t been to India,” I said. “You haven’t seen all the babies in India.”
I hadn’t seen all the babies in India either, as Joe well knew. I did have a memory of a row of mothers and little children (littler than I was) sleeping along a narrow street, curled on blankets in a settled way, as if they were camping at a relative’s. My father shuttled us past them very swiftly.
And why was I going on about this now? Dorothy had been so radiantly emphatic about how happy she was, and here I was having a fit about excess infants. I was in a house with a garden full of nasturtiums and green squash, the clean smell of salt all around, the frogs and crickets thrumming out the window, and I was mad at nature.
“Manhattan in August is every bit as hot as India,” I said, a fact I made up, but I reached for Joe just then, so he didn’t need to answer.
The next day we all took a walk along the beach with Forster. He pointed to a horseshoe crab, which looked like an iron helmet with a bayonet attached. “They’re living fossils,” he said. “Haven’t changed for three hundred million years.”
I thought the thing was dead, but Dorothy’s brother John poked it with a piece of driftwood and it moved very slightly in the sand.
“Will it bite?” I said.
“Oh, no, never,” Dorothy said.
“Its mouth is in the middle of its underside,” Forster said, “so it can’t bite you unless you pick it up.”
“It doesn’t seem like an animal,” Joe said. “More like a moving ashtray.”
“Forster said they can live to be thirty,” John said. “But they don’t have babies till they’re eleven.”
“He knows a lot, that Forster,” I said.
“I see hundreds of things on the shore much more clearly,” Dorothy said, “because of Forster.”
“He’s the man to have by the sea, I can tell,” I said.
Forster looked away. “He is,” Dorothy said.
“Dorothy has extremely good eyes,” Forster said. It was the fondest thing I’d heard him say.
“How did you learn it all?” I said. “It’s kind of amazing.”
Forster shrugged.
“He went to shell college,” Joe said. “They give you a wet mackerel for a diploma. Leaves a lasting impression.”
When we were back home again in New York, Joe would sometimes imitate Forster picking up a crab or piece of kelp. “It’s very, very antique,” he would say. “Its smell is older than mankind.”
Throughout that autumn I was aware of the months passing for Dorothy. I knew she believed that she was moving into a larger truth, growing herself into a fuller vessel. And the child would have the sweet, slightly neglected freedom the offspring of some of our friends had. If you did your best not to get in nature’s way, would nature reward you? Our most theoretical friends liked to say the institution of the state was unnatural, as if no insult could be more utter.
Forster went out to Staten Island every weekend, even as the weather got colder. Betsy said Dorothy was looking wonderful. But Richard reported that Forster and Dorothy were having fights, because she’d started walking to town to go to Mass in the mornings. She mostly did this when he wasn’t there, but he was horrified anyway.
“She isn’t even a Catholic!” Betsy said. “If I were her, I’d maybe just not bother to tell him about this little secret church habit. I’d keep my mouth shut, if I were her. At a time like this. Where is her brain?”
“He’ll never agree with her,” Richard said. “Forster of all people. She knows that.”
Dorothy had no cagey feminine practicality. She was more like a prophet, helpless to resist telling what she saw. My father, when he was a young man, had wanted to preach in India because (my mother told us) he couldn’t bear not explaining what he knew. We all thought Dorothy was moving backward, and yet it was a poetic motion. “She’s becoming medieval,” Norman said.
Dorothy’s religious eccentricity had an interesting effect on me, it pushed me into a different stubbornness. I stuck closer to my husband, very close indeed (where would I be without such a husband? how would I live?), and this meant going to more meetings. They had their bits of beauty, those meetings, especially the ones for Sacco and Vanzetti, where the rhetoric was already a wail of grief, though the two men, in prison, waiting, were certainly still alive.
In December Dorothy moved back to the city with Forster, and with her younger sister, Della. I liked Della, who was staunch like Dorothy but milder and girlier. It was Della who later went with Dorothy to Bellevue Hospital, when the labor pains came. Where was Forster? No one seemed to think he had planned to go anywhere near the yowl and blood of delivery. But everyone said he was entirely enchanted once the baby — a healthy girl — was actually born. Well, who didn’t like babies?
When Joe and I visited Dorothy at her apartment, Della was holding the baby — a creature so tiny she could rest along Della’s forearm — and walking her around the living room. Dorothy was lying on a couch and Forster hovered in a doorway. It was a small room, with all of us in it. “Who thought I’d have such a pretty baby?” Dorothy said. “I thought I’d have some gnarled little thing only I could love. You don’t think she’s too pretty, do you?”