“Dipe?” Marguerite was still on the line.
“Hm?”
“You there?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I went blank there for a minute.”
“I was saying, do you want me to go ahead with it?”
Of course he wanted her to go ahead with it. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Except for a son. His son. Due today. “Yeah, sure,” he said, glancing at his watch. Fifteen minutes. Maybe Joanna had been trying to get through, maybe he’d missed her, maybe—“Listen, Marguerite, you take care of it. Got to go. ’Bye.”
And then he was dialing home.
The rain had stopped. The roads were clear. Depeyster Van Wart, twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor and the imminent acquirer of fifty pristine ancestral acres marred only by a single flimsy ramshackle structure the wind might have blown down on a good day, paced the worn gray carpet of the Peterskill Community Hospital’s maternity ward. Joanna was somewhere inside, beyond the big double swinging doors, strapped down and sedated. There was a problem with the delivery, that much he knew, that much Flo Dietz — Nurse Dietz — had told him as she flew through the door on one of her hundred errands to god knew where. The baby — his baby, his son — was in the wrong position. His head wasn’t where it was supposed to be and they couldn’t seem to turn him around. They were going to have to do a C-section.
Depeyster sat. He stood. He looked out the window. He rubbed dirt on his gums. Every time the double doors swung open he looked up. He saw corridors, gurneys, nurses in scrub suits and masks, and he heard sobs and shrieks that would have made a torturer wince. There was no sign of Joanna. Or of Dr. Brillinger. He tried to occupy his mind with other things, tried to think about the property and the satisfaction he’d have in leveling that tumbledown shack and how he’d ride with his son in the first light of morning, before breakfast, when the world was still and their breath hung on the air, but it didn’t work. The intercom would crackle, the doors would fly open, and he was undeniably, interminably and irrevocably there, in the hospital, watching the second hand trace its way around the great ugly institutional clock and staring at the pale green walls as if at the interior of a prison cell. He ducked his head. He felt as if he were going to throw up.
Later, much later, so much later he was sure Joanna had died on the operating table, sure his son was a fantasy, already dead and pickled in a jar as a curiosity for some half-baked obstetrical surgeon who’d got his training in Puerto Rico and barely knew which end the baby was supposed to come out of, Flo Deitz slipped up behind him in her noiseless, thick-soled nurse’s shoes and tapped him on the shoulder. He jerked around, startled. Flo was standing beside Dr. Brillinger and a man he didn’t recognize. The man he didn’t recognize was wearing a scrub gown and rubber gloves and he was so spattered with blood he might have been butchering hogs. But he was smiling. Dr. Brillinger was smiling. Flo was smiling. “Dr. Perlmutter,” Dr. Brillinger said, indicating the bloody man with a nod of his head.
“Congratulations,” Dr. Perlmutter said in a voice too small to be hearty, “you’re the father of a healthy boy.”
“Nine pounds, six ounces,” Flo Deitz said, as if it mattered.
Dr. Perlmutter snapped the glove from his right hand and held the bare hand out for Depeyster to shake. “Joanna’s fine,” Dr. Brillinger said in a fruity whisper. Numb, Depeyster shook. Relieved, Depeyster shook. All around. He even shook Flo’s hand.
“This way,” Flo was saying, already whispering off in her silent shoes.
Depeyster nodded at Drs. Brillinger and Perlmutter and followed her down a corridor to his right. She walked briskly — amazingly so for a pigeon-toed, middle-aged woman who couldn’t have stood more than five feet tall — and he had to hurry to keep up. The corridor ended abruptly at a door that read NO ADMITTANCE, but Flo was already gliding down another corridor perpendicular to it, her brisk short legs as quick and purposeful as a long-distance runner’s. When Depeyster caught up to her, she was standing before a window, or rather a panel of glass that gave onto the room beyond. “The nursery,” she said. “There he is.”
It had been what — twenty, twenty-one years? How old was Mardi? — and he could barely contain himself. His heart was pounding as if he’d just sprinted up ten flights of stairs and the hair at his temples was damp with sweat. He pressed his face to the window.
Babies. They all looked alike. There were four of them, hunched like little red-faced monkeys in their baskets, hand-lettered name tags identifying their parentage: Cappolupo, O’Reilly, Nelson, Van Wart. “Where?” he said.
Flo Deitz gave him an odd look. “There,” she said, “right there in front. Van Wart.”
He looked, but he didn’t see. This? he thought, something like panic, like denial, rising in his throat. There it was — there he was — his son, swaddled in white linen like the others, but big, too big, and with a brushstroke of tarry black hair on his head. And there was something wrong with his skin too — he was dark, coppery almost, as if he’d been sunburned or something. “Is there anything … wrong with him?” he stammered. “I mean, his skin—?”
Flo was smiling at him, beaming at him.
“Is that some kind of, of afterbirth or something?”
“He’s darling,” she said.
He looked again. And at that moment, as if already there were some psychic link between them, the baby waved its arms and snapped open its eyes. It was a revelation. A shock. Depeyster’s eyes were gray, as were his father’s before him, and Joanna’s the purest, regal shade of violet. The baby’s eyes were as green as a cat’s.
For a long while, Depeyster stood there in the hallway. He stood there long after Nurse Deitz had left him and gone home to her supper, long after the other proud fathers had come and gone, so long in fact that the janitor had to mop around him. He watched the baby sleep, studied its hair, the flutter of its eyelids and the clenching of its tiny fists as it drifted from one unfathomable dream to another. All sorts of things passed through Depeyster’s mind, things that unsettled him, made him hurt in the pit of his stomach and feel as empty as he’d ever felt.
He was a strong man, single-minded and tough, a man who dwelt in history and felt the pulse of generations beating in his blood. He had those thoughts, those unsettling thoughts, just once, just then, and he dismissed them, never to have them again. When at long last he turned away from the window, there was a smile on his lips. And he held that smile as he strode down the corridor, across the lobby and through the heavy front door. He was outside, on the steps, the cool sweet air in his face and the stars spread out overhead like a benediction, when it came to him. Rombout, he thought, caught up in the sudden whelming grip of inspiration, he would call him Rombout. …
After his father.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following people for their assistance in gathering material for this book: Alan and Seymour Arkawy, Mitchell Burgess, Richard Chambers, Chuck Fadel, Ken Fortgang, Rick Miles, Jack and Jerry Miller and the crew of the Clearwater.
Footnote
1Shortened from Mohewoneck, or raccoon skin coat, a reference to the only garment he was seen to wear, winter or summer. Apart, of course, from his breechclout.
2 Leaf-eye.
3 Literally “sitting in the pickle.”