his home offended his sense of interior design.
“Do you have to have it today?” he finally said.
“I would prefer to have had it yesterday,” I replied.
He looked at his watch and telegraphed a whole story with that one small movement. A story he didn’t need to tell me again. He had a meeting, and couldn’t figure out when he could get to the store. He could build a skyscraper, but he couldn’t engineer a simple errand.
When I asked my mother about how she managed the swelling and pain, she, always decorous, claimed she didn’t recall. She had a faraway look in her eyes when I asked, as if she was searching the atmosphere for an answer, and not her memory. I couldn’t help thinking: I bet my father would remember. Not because he was more sensitive, but because he was more aware. When I was a child he seemed to know I was going to cry before I did. Once, when I tripped leaving our gazebo and fell against the rocks circling the hydrangeas, one of his hands reached for me, and the other, I swear, went into his pocket for his handkerchief. The hankie arrived, gently daubing at the corner of my eye, at the precise moment the first tear fell. Years later, he waited for more tears, ready to dry them, to hold me, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Of course, it’s not my mother’s fault that bad memories elude her. I don’t blame her for blanking out the pain; for wanting to remember only the good things, the early things. She can’t remember what the nursing home staff brought her for breakfast most days, but she remembers Christmas in Vienna with Aunt Caro and Aunt Lillian, and riding in a horsedrawn carriage with a Santa who couldn’t speak English. She kept trying to tell him what she wanted for Christmas, and he nodded over and over again until she started to think he was mechanized. She’s told me this story five or six times, and I find myself nodding the same way. The Viennese nod—useful in so many situations. She can’t remember where she put her reading glasses, but she remembers the first time she went to the Louvre wearing a miniature black beret. She can’t remember why my father left her, but she remembers she was wearing a red dress and red lipstick when she met him.
Even if she could remember, how bad could postpartum be when you had a personal maid and a nanny in your household, people who slept down the hall? I’m sure Bertha and Louise brought her hot compresses, poached eggs, chamomile tea. I’ve taken to writing down what I have for breakfast and when I bathe, to try to keep track of those elusive necessities. My neighbor Betsy says that should be my only goal for the day: to have a bath and eat breakfast. That way, she theorized, you won’t be as annoyed when the rest of the day unravels, when the children and their needs take over. I wish Theo and I could have a nanny like dear old Louise. She fed me and changed me, no doubt, while my mother slept in her Lanz nightgown. Soundly, the way Theo sleeps. Neither of them prepared for this life of constantly waking up. But was I? Who was, when you’re descended from people who had staff to care for the children and clean the house? The money for such things doesn’t exist in our families anymore, but does the taste for them, the craving in the dark recesses of your DNA, ever go away?
Theo left the house early, before seven, complaining he couldn’t sleep. You’re not supposed to sleep, I told him.
“Babies’ cries,” I yawned, “are designed to wake up their parents. To ensure the continuation of the species.”
“Is it my imagination,” he sighed, “or does he cry more than I remember?”
“It’s just a different timbre from Emma’s,” I said, pulling the pillow over my head. I could still hear the baby through the heavy layers of goose down. In some ways, muffled cries sound worse, the music of being smothered.
I couldn’t see Theo’s eyes, those bright eyes that had been my undoing, but I could feel them on me, the way I often did when I used an unusual word. “Timbre.” Staring at me, as if he was turning me into whatever I’d said. My wife is an exotic curiosity. I must stare at her and decide if