About halfway through the last month of Iris’s pregnancy, the adoptive parents came by to meet her.
Betty did it up as an occasion with fresh flowers on the end tables. Jack checked his watch, shot his cuffs, looked out the window at rapid intervals. Iris had been dressed in high-octane maternity clothes: a conical navy blue dress with a whimsical, polka-dotted, droopy bow tie.
At the very moment of the Anses’ arrival, Jack seemed to panic. He was frozen in the hallway babbling in a low voice. “They can’t find the door. They’re gonna walk into the lake!” He started to call out in a high, tinny voice, projecting crazy merriness. “Back there! Right where you parked! You missed it! You missed … the front door!”
“Iris!” said Betty. “Animate yourself!”
They finally came inside and the introductions were achieved as the judge looked carefully at everyone, settling finally on Iris, whom he examined at length until she said, “Don’t look at me like I was a horse.” But the judge took it well and said this was a happy day in their lives. Judge Anse and his wife, Mona, were a couple in their fifties. Judge Anse seemed unable to leave his judicial air at home and put a considerate pause before each remark, a pause that left one feeling scrutinized. His wife looked very scrutinized. It was easy to think that her desire for a baby was all she had left.
“We had a baby once,” said Mrs. Anse without varying the tone of her voice. “We had it such a short time we didn’t have time to name it. It appeared in the obituary as Baby Anse, comma, girl.”
“Are you familiar with ectopic pregnancy?” asked Betty of no one in particular.
“Is it a problem?” said Judge Anse.
“You can say that again.”
“Nothing she’s got, I hope,” said the judge, jerking his thick head toward Iris.
“No, it’s something I had,” said Betty.
“Oh.”
Judge Anse said he worked hard and there was no estate, no one to leave it all to and we can’t live forever. That seemed to anger him and he used off-color language. He asked the present company to excuse his French. Iris sat blankly in the middle of a discussion of what a difficult age it was for raising children. It was hard to tell whether this was a reference to Iris or to the age in which the baby would live. But it must have been the latter because Jack said conclusively that the country had nowhere to go but up.
Mrs. Anse kept a level gaze throughout this directed upon Iris. Iris felt this gaze and was ready for anything. When Mrs. Anse smiled and asked her question, Iris was ready. “What was the young fellow like?” she inquired.
“A real gorilla.”
“Have we mentioned Iris’s grades?” Betty asked. “Straight A’s.”
“You know,” said Mona Anse in a cracking voice, “the agencies wouldn’t talk to us. They told us we were too old.”
“That’s not exactly true,” said the judge patiently.
“It is for a Caucasian baby. Old. That’s all we heard. We heard it from the state, from the Lutherans, from the Catholics. Old. People suggested every crazy thing you can imagine: midgets, pinheads, boat people. I may be old but I won’t be taken advantage of.” The judge rested his hand on the back of his wife’s.
“Let ’em whine,” said Jack to the empty middle of the room. “They’re getting a bargain.”
Two days later, Iris found out how they met Judge Anse.
“Your father is being sued by a man at the plant who lost something in a machine,” said Betty, blandly.
“Lost something?” said Iris. “What?”
“A limb.”
“What’s that have to do with me?”
“That’s how we got to meet Judge Anse. He’s hearing the case.”
Iris thought for a moment and said, “You sold the baby.” It wasn’t an accusation.
The night the contractions began, the whole thing almost fell apart. Iris bolted and was found two hours later hiding in a boathouse clear on the other side of the lake. By the time they got her back to the house, Betty was behind with the buffet. Somehow, everything went back into place, and by the time Judge and Mrs. Anse and Dr. Dahlstrom arrived, Iris was secured upstairs. Supplies were laid out. Dahlstrom had been playing golf, and Jack had to lend him some carpet slippers to keep him from marking up the floor with his cleats.
“What are you hoping for?” asked Dahlstrom.
“We don’t care as long as it’s got five of everything,” said the judge. Dahlstrom made a Dagwood sandwich. Betty went up and down the stairs at frequent intervals. Jack seemed edgy but remarked that the leading indicators were up.
Dr. Dahlstrom was balancing his sandwich on one palm and building with the other, when Betty came down and said, “Delwyn, now.”
“Hold your horses.”
“I can hold mine but I can’t hold hers.”
“Betty, do me a favor and wait for the pretty part.”
Betty came back downstairs and sat while Dahlstrom ate his sandwich, holding it between bites in front of his admiring gaze like a ship model. When he finished, he said, “And now the good doctor will work his magic. You people pace and wring your hands, whatever blows your hair back.” And he went up the stairs.
There was no way to disguise the waiting. Betty mentioned a Big Band Era retrospective on FM but got no response. Everyone was quiet, but Jack seemed to be smoldering. He slumped down inside his suit coat and stared. After a while, he said, “A good deal was had by all.” This was not lost on Mrs. Anse.
“To whom do you think you are speaking?” she asked, simultaneously with a moan from the second floor.
“Simmer down, Mona,” said Jack. “Simmer down.”
“I don’t want this ruined.”
“Try the salad. Betty used walnut oil.”
“This end is well done,” said Betty pointing at the roast. “You can see the rare from where you are.”
“You’d think I’d feel young tonight. But I don’t. I wonder why?” asked the judge.
“Have you tried Grecian Formula Nine?” asked Jack.
“You’re a crumb,” said the judge. “You’re an insufferable crumb.”
“And why not?” Jack flared. “I’m about to become a grandfather. How do you think that makes me feel? And Betty, my childhood sweetheart, this whole God damned thing is going to make a grandmother out of her. You know what this means, Judge? This means we’re starting to die. That jackass doctor upstairs is shoving us into history.”
“If that’s how you feel,” the judge said.
“That’s how we feel.”
So, by the time Dr. Dahlstrom arrived at the top of the stairs to announce a successful birth, Jack and the judge were at a stalemate. Jack’s moment of vindication lay in his climbing the stairs alone, without looking back, to view the baby lying in its mother’s arms. Whatever was going on around her, Iris was too happy and too far away to notice the arrival of Judge Anse and his wife, or to realize that her baby was a millionaire.
A MAN IN LOUISIANA
That Winter, Ohio Exploration had its meeting at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama. Barry Seitz went along as special assistant to Mike Royce, the tough, relatively young president of Ohio Exploration. Barry knew spot checks could happen any time, and as this was his first job that could go anywhere, he memorized everything. The range of subjects ran from drilling reports in various oil plays in the Southeast to orthodonture opinions concerning Mike Royce’s impossibly ugly daughter. It was Royce’s thought that the girl’s dentist was “getting the teeth straight, all right, but blowing her profile.” Barry was to “mentally note” that Mike Royce wanted to get together some three- and four-year-old snapshots of the girl and arrange a conference with the dentist. Barry didn’t envy the dentist. The girl had inherited her father’s profile and would always be a rich little bulldog.