“Definitely overdone,” Joe said. “See if you can feed her something to make her homelier.”
Della put her in my arms, as a great favor, but I was less eager to hold her than they thought. She was chubby and damp, sweet as my own baby brother had been, but I didn’t want her curling too close to me. I knew perfectly well how babies were made, but I seemed to be afraid they were contagious. Joe said, “Look how she settles in.”
“Hello, hello, hello, Tamar Teresa, hello, my fatso girlie girl,” Della said.
I asked Forster how they’d decided on the names and he looked surprised. “Dorothy’s work,” he said.
Joe said, “How calm the baby is.”
The baby took that as her cue to begin fussing, and Dorothy got up to take her out of my arms. “You little fat thing, you want more to eat,” she said.
Dorothy swiveled and turned her back to us when she bared herself to nurse the child. Dorothy a mother! Forster led us into the kitchen and poured us shots of brandy. Joe said, “To the future that’s just arrived,” and we drank the stuff down.
Joe said, when we were out the door, “I think he really looks very happy.”
“In his way,” I said.
“He likes seeing Dorothy so glad.”
“Richard thinks love is making a fool of him,” I said.
We were all upset when we heard that Dorothy had made friends with a nun on Staten Island and had the baby baptized at a church there. Neighbors came to the beach house afterward for a celebratory lunch of boiled lobsters and salad, but Forster, who had caught the lobsters, left before people got there.
“He didn’t have to rain on her parade,” Betsy said. “What does it matter to him if she likes Jesus?”
“She’s the one who won’t stop talking about it,” I said. “And it’s his baby.”
“He left on principle,” Richard said. “I don’t blame him.”
Joe and I stood with a group in Union Square, trying to get people to sign petitions to the governor of Massachusetts, begging him to stop the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. In a light summer rain Joe and I took turns holding an umbrella over us. Some people signed and were friendly. Some boys threw clods of mud at us, which we tried (to everyone’s amusement) to block with the umbrella. Joe believed in acting jolly about it.
I looked at our flyer with its portraits of Sacco and Vanzetti, the two of them cuffed together, staring ahead, deep-eyed, men fond of gardening and known to nurse sick kittens, men neighbors said were too gentle to have shot two other workers for payroll money. Probably. Plenty of people I knew were sure the most dearly held principles had to yield to larger principles, that sacrifice was necessary for any radical change, even the sacrifice of mercy to violence.
I was against ever giving up mercy, and I thought the old kind of anarchism was done for. The point about Sacco and Vanzetti — anyway — was the government’s unrelenting malice. I got wet and dreary and discouraged, standing out with our petitions. No wonder people like Forster never volunteered for this.
Really, as I saw it, Forster might just as well have stuck around to eat a lobster or two for the baptism lunch. Melted butter, hot rolls, crisp lettuce from the cottage garden. I thought he meant to stay for the meal but then he couldn’t do it: he had no polite lying in him, not even for love.
Dorothy would have to be married in the Church, if she was really going to join the Church. No more cozy common-law in the beach shack. Betsy said Dorothy was painting herself into a corner, tying herself into an obedience she didn’t even believe in. I barely knew any Catholics, not as close friends, and I didn’t think Dorothy did either.
Sometimes I prayed when I was alone, a fact Joe didn’t know. Not to any deity — I was done with kowtowing to whatever ran the universe — but sometimes I pled for help or for mercy. And in moments of great sweetness I would think, Thank You for this. After Joe and I were married, when we were alone, after the reception, in a hotel room with a ceiling of looping plaster garlands, I thought that.
We hadn’t even meant to be married, had we? But then we’d made our concession, we’d given way on a point we decided didn’t matter. It turned out we were that kind of people. Sometimes.
Forster kept leaving Dorothy and coming back. This went on for months and months. What did I want him to do? Terrible for a woman with an infant to have to put up with that. Didn’t I want Dorothy to have him? But hard too for him to put up with Jesus all the time. Did I want him to find solace with me? Even in my dreams I couldn’t bring myself to think of leaving Joe. In my fantasies I had a torrid affair with Forster, our dazzled bodies falling into one audacious discovery after another. But my mind got stuck on where we would go to act out these exquisite inventions: Didn’t he still share the apartment with Della, when Dorothy wasn’t there? Or had they all given that up? Could he be living alone, on his crummy earnings? I could foresee so easily every step in our falling into bed together, the hesitations and overtures and bursts of truth. But I puzzled over what bed we would use. The practicality of my nature worried the problem.
I had no special reason to think Forster was drawn to me. I had sometimes had glimmers, but I didn’t think I was worldly enough to gauge them. The deepest question — which was not even a question but a blot over thought — was what it would mean to deceive a person like Joe. Even if he never knew.
But still I might do it. It might not be beyond me to do such a thing. Who knows until the tests are given? My mother used to say that India had tested her faith. The place was hot and terrifying but Jesus still lived. Once I told Joe that India had given me my own faith. I meant the leper. I was in a horse cart on the street with our maid when one came up to us, with his parched skin mottled light and dark, hobbling against a cane because one foot was missing. I knew about lepers from the Bible. His begging bowl was on a cord around his neck, but the maid had the cart go faster, to get away. At home I wanted my mother to find him and give him all our coins. My poor mother, I had a crying fit when she wouldn’t. Joe said Emma Goldman told people she became an anarchist after she saw a peasant beaten with the knout, when she was a girl in Russia. Horror eats you, if you don’t have an idea: that was what I thought.
Joe believed in using city libraries, and we were on our way to the Ottendorfer branch one Saturday when we ran into Forster on the street. It was October by this time and he looked all right — thin, but he was always thin — and he said, “This is the best season in New York, isn’t it?” I thought it was a cheerful thing to say, and the sky was indeed a rare deep blue.
“It must be still beautiful out at the beach,” Joe said.
“It would be, if we could be simple again, but we can’t be,” Forster said. “When I go out to fish, Dorothy has the nun come to visit her. The woman runs off if she happens to come when I’m there.”
“The sister comes to teach Dorothy?” I said.
“Oh, yes, she does,” he said. “Often.”
“How’s the baby?” Joe said. “She’s all right?”
“Tamar is excellent,” he said. “She’s taught herself to crow at the gulls.”
“The gulls probably know what she’s saying,” Joe said.
“I bet you can talk to the gulls,” I said to Forster. “You of all people.”
“Who’d want to?” Joe said. “Bunch of complainers, those gulls.”