Chapter Thirteen #3
Somewhere along the way, Felix had told his parents that Margaret was pregnant, which made him obliged to call them again to tell them they had a grandson.
Within a month, the Salts—who hadn’t had any interest in coming to Bonhomie to see their son when he got back from almost dying in the Pacific—called to say they were coming to stay the night.
The start of a little getaway, they said; from there, they were off to Detroit for a boat show.
Russ Salt was exactly as Margaret remembered him: a shorter, older, less charming version of Felix.
He was impeccably dressed, had a darkly veined nose, and drank martinis as fast as Felix could make them.
He was standing with his glass when Margaret walked into the living room and he took her arm and encouraged her to turn in a circle.
“Would you look at the figure on that girl?” he asked his wife.
Lillian Salt had thinning blond hair and a face that knew disdain better than any other expression. Drinking French white wine Felix had bought for her, she glanced at Margaret and said, “Don’t be rude, Russ. She just had a child.”
Lillian thought Felix was too thin. She thought Margaret wasn’t feeding him enough.
She wanted to hold the baby, but never for very long, would ask Margaret to put Tom on her lap and then, a minute later, ask Margaret to come get him.
She didn’t understand why Margaret wasn’t breastfeeding.
She didn’t understand why a pacifier was necessary.
In the morning, Margaret was so eager for them to be gone that she asked if they needed help packing. As Lillian put the finishing touches on her hair, Russ carried their bags out to their car. Margaret accompanied him, Tom in her arms. She said, “It’s been lovely having you here.”
“We’re delighted,” Russ said, sounding more relieved than delighted. He lowered the trunk lid.
The last thing Lillian said, peering obtrusively at Tom’s face before she got in the car, was that Margaret might have won the hair and the eyes, but the baby’s nose belonged to Felix.
—
Margaret wondered. She didn’t want to wonder, because there was absolutely nothing to be gained from it.
But it was impossible not to. Felix walked around shaking his head after his parents left, collecting their glasses and apologizing to Margaret.
He crawled back into bed. Margaret sat with the baby next to her in his bassinet, catching her breath from the visit and paging through the latest issue of Photoplay.
Gary Cooper looked handsomer than ever, she thought, and he shared some of Felix’s features.
Those slightly sad eyes. That air of calm guardedness.
On Gary Cooper it looked like calm guardedness; on Felix it once had, too, but now it looked like sedation.
Cal was more Guy Madison, she thought, turning the page.
Madison, with a little Jimmy Stewart thrown in (except for the height).
She set the magazine down, picked the baby up and held him in front of her, her hands around his tiny chest, her fingertips almost meeting at the middle of his back.
She turned him this way and that, and while he giggled and gurgled, she tried to read lineage into his nose, his ears, his mouth.
If you pushed on his nose or tugged on his ears, you could tell he was still pliable, still forming—like a lump of dough that needed time to rise.
“Which is it?” she asked him. “Cooper? Or Madison-Stewart?”
But babies have nothing to gain from showing their hands. For all she knew, this one was going to be the spitting image of her father. All Tom was revealing, at the moment, was that he had bright red hair and beautiful green eyes. As if Margaret had made him with no help from anyone else.
—
The sound of the baby crying in the middle of the night was a dreaded thing.
It wormed into her dreams, scratched at the insides of her eyeballs.
She’d been dreaming of a waltz in a grand ballroom with gold brocade curtains and a light-blue ceiling painted with clouds.
All the women in gowns and all the men in long-tailed tuxedos.
Belle of the ball, watched by everyone, she danced with Felix, then switched to Cal, then to Bernard, then to the sheet music salesman, then to the English teacher obsessed with Tibet, then back to Felix.
How they all laughed! How they all loved her!
Then, with one cry from Tom, how they all vanished—even Felix, because, once again, his side of the bed was empty.
He rarely slept through the night anymore.
He always conked out promptly but often got up later, unable to stay under.
Then he’d either be up for the rest of the night, or conk out again somewhere else; she’d find him on the couch, or in the recliner in his study.
Since Tom had come into their lives, she sometimes found Felix awake in the nursery.
Holding the baby and pacing the room, or sitting in the green felt rocker, feeding him.
At Felix’s request, Margaret had shown him how to warm the formula and test the temperature on the inside of his wrist.
That night, with her dream fading in her head, she walked bleary-eyed down the hall, and when she neared the nursery she heard Felix speaking softly over the baby’s fuss.
“Come on, buddy,” he was saying.
She peeked into the room. He was in the rocker, the baby on his lap.
“We can figure this out, can’t we?” he said. “You and me?”
Parenting, he meant. Or life. He stuck the end of the bottle into Tom’s mouth and wiggled it.
She came in and asked if she could take a look, then showed him that the nipple cap wasn’t on all the way; the baby was only getting air.
“Doesn’t he need air?” Felix said. Trying for a little middle-of-the-night humor, but it only confirmed what Margaret feared deep down: that they had no business raising a child, neither one of them having known a loving bond with a parent.
“You’ll be surprised what just comes to you naturally,” Ruth, now on her third, had told Margaret.
What came naturally to Margaret was wanting to sleep for more than three hours at a time.
Wanting to have long pockets of quiet without the sound of crying.
Wanting to feel like her existence consisted of something more than just taking care of two people, one entirely helpless and the other nearly so.
She longed for Tom to start sleeping through the night, and she longed for Felix to get back on a regular sleep schedule and take better care of himself.
She hated to agree with anything his mother had said, but he was too thin.
A year after his return from the war, he was two sizes down in his shirts.
Several nights later, alone again, she awoke to the baby’s crying.
Felix wasn’t in the nursery when she looked in, and he wasn’t downstairs.
She heated the formula, fed Tom, put him back in his crib, and stepped over to the window that looked down onto the backyard.
There was Felix, sitting in the middle of the yard in one of the Adirondack chairs, smoking.
It was late August. She left her robe, walked out in her nightgown.
Usually, she didn’t bother him to come back to bed because he would just toss and turn when he got there, but she didn’t want to leave him outside like this.
She could just see him falling asleep and waking up in the morning, chilly with dew.
She came up from the side so as not to startle him. Laid a hand on his shoulder.
—
In November, she was walking through the Sherwood Garden Shop, looking for decorative pots for the front porch, when, rounding the end of an aisle, she knocked Tom’s stroller into the legs of a man holding the hand of a little boy.
Bumped from behind, the man buckled a bit, said, “Whoa,” then turned around.
It was Cal. A beige porkpie hat resting on his head, his brow raised and his mouth just slightly open as he took her in.
She was looking far from her best, she thought.
Her hair was pulled back because it needed to be washed, and she was dressed for housework. By chance, she’d thrown on an overcoat.
They remained in suspension for a moment.
Then she apologized for bumping into him, and with renewed surprise they said hello, and how funny it was that they hadn’t encountered or at least glimpsed each other before now.
(They had. She’d crossed the street to avoid him on a few different occasions.
He’d sat in his car in the post office parking lot for five minutes once, waiting for her to come out and leave before he went in.
And they’d both driven past each other’s houses several times.)
“You look wonderful,” he said.
“I don’t, but thank you.” She could tell he meant it, though. She had the crazy desire to lean into the look he was giving her, to see if his breath smelled like Necco Wafers.
His eyes moved down to the stroller. “Who’s this little redhead?”
“Tom.” She could see the thought surface behind his eyes, the secret she’d told him: I don’t want children. But here they were. Among the many things she wasn’t going to explain to him, her failure to honor that declaration was near the top of the list. “Tell me your son’s name again?”
“Cal, Jr., officially.”
He said the boy’s nickname, but it went right through her head. She asked how old he was.
“Two and a half,” Cal said. “What about this guy?”
“Seven months.”
She’d forgotten how twitchy he could be when he was nervous, how boyish, despite that little V of worry over the bridge of his nose.
She warmed from within at the sight of him and had to remind herself: she’d only ever known him as a lover.
He glanced into the stroller again and the V deepened. He was doing the math.
She’d already decided that no one—including her—had anything to gain by bringing Cal into this. She didn’t want to be the wrecking ball for two marriages. “I got pregnant at the very end of July,” she said, and let that sink in. Then, just to be sure, she added, “Right after Felix got back.”
Cal’s voice softened. “Is that so?”
Look at you, way over there, she thought. “It might even have happened that first night he got home. That’s what we think, anyway.”
He nodded, and she knew he understood what she was saying: she’d made a choice. She’d had to make a choice. There was longing in his eyes—for their little wedge of shared past? for a different outcome?—but right behind it was relief, and that made her want to cry. It made her wish they’d never met.
Then he began to talk. As the boy tugged at his hand and said, with no particular urgency, “Dad, Dad, Dad,” Cal told her about the trellises he was going to put up in his backyard, and what kind of creeping vine he was going to plant, and shade versus sunlight.
She remembered tracing his teeth with her tongue.
How he would say, “Oh—oh, here I go,” just before he came.
She remembered she was there to buy decorative pots.
“I might splurge on a new garden hose,” Cal said, his eyes moist, ticking back down to the stroller.
All that remained, then, were the pleasantries, uttered with the shared knowledge that whatever words they came up with were intended to close and seal a vault; after that, there would be nothing more to say.
But having nothing more to say didn’t change their circumstances.
It still left them standing in a garden shop, Cal with a two-year-old tugging at his arm, Margaret with her hands gripping a stroller handle, and between them, a baby: sound asleep, and in question.
—
That was just the way it went with women and men, she thought, shoving the stroller down the pots and planters aisle.
Women had the babies, and men, if they felt like it, began to distance themselves the moment they pulled out.
Because they had to go to a wife, or to work, or to a war, or to that secret place of stoic brooding all men were given the key to at birth.
Had any mother ever had the time for stoic brooding?
She was stuck, regardless of who Tom’s father turned out to be.
She resented the very fact of that. Women didn’t have the option of just walking away from their children and leaving it up to the world to figure out who was going to raise them.
Only, they did. Sometimes they left them in baskets.
She felt, all over again, like she’d drawn the short end of the stick in this arrangement. Even as she realized there’d been no sticks, and no drawing.