At Columbia, where she’d studied for her master’s all those years ago, there’d been a professor who’d once remarked that the prime requisite of a speech pathologist was patience. He had written the word on the blackboard in huge block letters: P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E. She thought about him on the drive back to Rutledge. It was going to take somewhere between two and three years to successfully conclude treatment with her three eight-year-olds. She wasn’t there to treat symptoms, no, there were too many therapists who successfully treated a stuttering problem only to discover that the client had “voluntarily-involuntarily” replaced the earlier symptom with a far more serious physical symptom like hysterical aphonia — the loss of speech entirely. One therapist (not a pathologist like Connie; in the speech rehab game, a therapist qualified for certification with a B.A., a pathologist with an M.A.) had come to her in total astonishment when one of her clients lost his stutter only to become hysterically blind. Symptom migration was a common result of impatience. Patience, Connie remembered. P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E.
It would take two years at best with these kids. She sometimes felt only despair, the end result of immediate gratification constantly postponed. With Jamie’s work, it was different. He took a picture, he developed it and printed it, he realized his goal within days, sometimes within—
She stepped on the thought before it ballooned into the anger it normally triggered. It had been too many years. You couldn’t get angry over something that had happened — or failed to happen — all those years ago. Not if you wanted to preserve whatever it was you already possessed. What do I already possess? she wondered.
They were married in February of 1951. Jamie was almost twenty-five, Connie was not yet twenty. She was still a virgin on their wedding night, and she wept the first time they made love. Jamie held her in his arms and comforted her, and told her he would love her till the day he died. Connie wept into his shoulder, the sexy white silk nightgown she’d bought expressly for their honeymoon bunched above her waist and stained with blood.
She was still only nineteen when she got pregnant in March, a month after their wedding. Jamie had by then taken a job with a commercial photographer in Peekskill, some eighty miles from Poughkeepsie and a long commute back and forth every weekday, but the plan was for Connie to finish her sophomore year at Vassar before they moved into the city. She could not understand how she’d become pregnant. She had used the diaphragm religiously and according to the instructions given her at the Margaret Sanger Clinic in New York, and she simply could not understand how it had failed her. In April 1951, when she learned definitely that she was going to have a baby, abortions were illegal in the United States; moreover, they were dangerous and expensive. In the small garden apartment they were renting near the school, they discussed their plans.
It had been understood between them that they would have no children until they were both established in their separate careers. Connie wanted to be an actress; she had, in fact, already applied to both the Actors Studio and the Vodorin Workshop for possible enrollment in the fall. That was before she got pregnant.
“You can still finish out the term,” Jamie said.
“You don’t think I’ll be showing?”
“No, no, this is what? April, right? You’re still only a month pregnant...”
“Pregnant, Jesus,” she said, and shook her head.
“So June’ll be three months, that’s all. You won’t be showing at all.”
“I hope not. Because I’d feel like an idiot, you know.”
“I know.”
“In class, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Doing Voice of the Turtle or whatever, and having this big belly sticking out.”
“You won’t be showing yet, hon.”
“So I’ll finish the term, and then what?”
“Well... I don’t think you’d be able to start anyplace else in the fall, do you?”
“No.”
“I mean...”
“No, it wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“The baby’s coming...”
“December.”
“Yeah, so.”
“Yeah, I’d be in my sixth month by the time classes started, I don’t think Igor Vodorin would particularly appreciate...”
“But, you know, once the baby’s born...”
“Yeah, then what?”
“You could, you know...”
“Yeah, what?”
“Well...”
“I think I can kiss it goodbye, Jamie.”
“No, not necess—”
“Yeah, I think so. I don’t think they mix, Jamie. Acting and babies.”
“You know, by then I may be earning good money as a photographer, we could get someone in to take care of him — or her — and you could...”
“I find it difficult to believe there’ll really be a him or a her, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, there’s a baby growing inside me, Jamie, do you realize that?” she said, and suddenly clutched her belly with both hands. “But I... you know... I really don’t feel anything about it, or for it, or... I just feel annoyed, I guess. It’s just an annoyance, Jamie. I don’t want a fucking baby, do you want a baby?”
“No, but... honey, this doesn’t... it doesn’t have to mean the end of all our plans, you know. You can still go to acting school once the baby’s old enough to...”
“Sure.”
“A year or so, I guess would...”
“Sure, leave an infant with a stranger.”
“Lots of women...”
“Sure.”
“Honey, I’m sorry. I wish I...”
“Aw, shit,” she said, “it’s not your fault.”
But it was. In bed that night, she wept. She turned her back to him and wept silently into her pillow. She was only nineteen years old and about to have a baby. In December, she thought, I’ll be a mother. It was April already, and there were crocuses blooming on the patchy lawn outside the apartment complex. But the wind was still strong, and it rattled the windowpanes, and she thought of all those movies where a train was roaring through the night, and the wheels were going clickety-click-clack and the lights were flashing by the window and a girl was looking outside and remembering the past, the past all came back to the girl. The windows in their tiny bedroom rattled with the wind, and Connie lay beside her husband weeping quietly, but no past came back to her, she was almost too young to have had a significant past. A baby coming in December. To Connie, it seemed as if a baby would be the end of her life.
They moved to the city in June, several weeks after Connie had taken her final exams for the semester. Lissie was born six months later, on the nineteenth of December. She weighed seven pounds, twelve ounces. Jamie watched while Connie breast-fed her for the first time. She held the baby in her arms, cradling baby and breast, looking down at the infant’s head.
“What does that feel like?” he asked.
“The baby, do you mean? Here?”
“Yes.”
“Just a... I don’t know... a little tugging feeling.”
“Is it exciting?”
“A little. I don’t know. It’s not sexual, it’s... I don’t know. It’s just very strange.”
“I wonder if she likes it.”
“My milk?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure she does.”
“Can I taste it?”