The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,68
had been born in England, and had been tightly swaddled when he first saw her – a compact package with a round red face. She was the first baby he had ever held; he had thought it would be a precarious experience, shot through with fear of dropping something so precious and fragile, but no, in even the smallest infant there was an adhesive force, a something that actively fit your arms and hands, banishing the fear. The hot wobbly head, the wandering eyes like opaque drops of celestial liquid, the squinting little face choleric and muscular with the will to live. We’re in this together, Dad, the baby’s body had assured him, and we’ll both get through it.
And they had, through diapers and midnight feedings, colic and measles, adolescent tears and fits of silliness, flute lessons and ski lessons, grade school and high school, until at last, ceremoniously attending an entertainment by the graduating seniors, Richard had been startled by how his daughter, one of a leggy troupe of leotarded dancers, had in synchrony with the others struck a conclusive pose and stared unsmiling out at the audience. All their eyebrows were raised inquisitively. They were asking, What are we? And the answer, from the silently stunned audience, had become: Women. Richard had never before quite so distinctly seen his daughter as a body out in the world, competing, detached from his own. And now her body was splitting, giving birth to another, and he’d be damned if he’d let Joan be there having their grandbaby all to herself.
Driving down Route 86 into the blinding splinters of a sunset, he heard the disc jockey crow, ‘Get your long johns out of the mothballs, Nutmeg Staters, we’re going to flirt with zero tonight!’ It had been a dry January so far, but what little snow had fallen had not melted, because of the cold; tonight was to be a record-setter. The station played country music. Hartford had always struck him as a pleasantly hick city, a small forest of green-glass skyscrapers on the winding road to New York; when you descended out of the spaghetti of overpasses, there was a touching emptiness, of deserted after-hours streets and of a state capital’s grandiose vacancies. It was a city with nobody in it, just a few flitting shadows, and some heaps of plowed snow. The hospital complex included a parking garage, but he circled the inner-city blocks until he found a free meter. Not yet six o’clock, it was quite dark. Richard hurried through the iron air to the bright lights of the warm hospital spaces. He was the last of this particular extended family to arrive, and the least. A receptionist and her computer directed him to the correct floor, and after he had sat in the waiting room long enough to skim the cream from two issues of Sports Illustrated, Joan hurried out to him from some deeper, more intimate chamber of the maternity wing like a harried hostess determined to make every guest, however inconsequential, feel welcome.
She had put on weight with her contentment as Mrs Vanderhaven – Andy evidently didn’t impose the slimming stress of her first marriage – and wore a beltless yellow dress, with small flowers, that seemed old-fashioned, a back-to-nature dress from the Sixties. Her face, broader than he remembered it, was rosy with the event overtaking her – she was becoming a grandmother – and the tropical warmth of the hospital air. ‘We didn’t know if you’d be coming or not,’ she explained.
‘I said I would,’ Richard protested, mildly.
‘We didn’t know if Ruth would let you.’
‘How would she stop me? She thought it was a terrific idea. “Give them all my love,” she said.’
Joan shot him a quick, blue-eyed glance, uncertain, as she often had been, of how ironical he was being. She seemed in the years since they were married to have lost her eyelashes, and her hair had turned gray above her wide brow. Factually she said, ‘They broke the waters an hour ago, and now we’re just sitting around waiting for the contractions to take hold. Judy is in good spirits, though a little apprehensive.’ This last description seemed to fit Joan as well; she was shy with him. Their telephone conversations, which on the excuse of the children had persisted long into their second marriages, had dwindled these last years; months of silence between them went by now, and he did not know when he had last been as alone