A doctor with a barrel chest and unimaginably soft small hands, held curled in front of the pouch of his smock, comes into the anteroom uncertainly. He asks Harry, “Mr. Angstrom?” This would be Dr. Crowe. Harry has never met him. Janice used to go off and visit him once a month, bringing home tales of how gentle be was, how delicate.
“Yes.”
“Congratulations. You have a beautiful little daughter.”
He offers his hand so hastily Harry has only time to half-rise, and so absorbs the news in a crouching position. The scrubbed pink of the doctor’s face—his sterile mask is unknotted and hangs from one ear, exposing pallid beefy lips—becomes enmeshed in the process of trying to give shape and tint to the unexpected word “daughter.”
“I do? It’s O.K.?”
“Seven pounds ten ounces. Your wife was conscious throughout and held the baby for a minute after delivery.”
“Really? She held it? Was it—did she have a hard time?”
“No-o. It was normal. In the beginning she seemed tense, but it was normal.”
“That’s wonderful. Thank you. Good grief, thank you.”
Crowe stands there smiling uneasily. Coming up from the pit of creation, he stammers in the open air. Strange: here he has been for the last hours closer to Janice than Harry ever was, has been grubbing right in her roots, yet he has brought back no secret, no wisdom to confide; just a bland sterile blessing. Harry dreads that the doctor’s eyes will release with thunder the horror they have seen; but Crowe’s gaze contains no wrath. Not even a reprimand. He seems to see Harry as just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he spends his life trying to reap.
Harry asks, “Can I see her?”
“Who?”
Who? That “her” is a forked word now startles him. The world is thickening. “My my wife.”
“Of course, surely.” Crowe seems in his soft way puzzled that Harry asks for permission. He must know the facts, yet seems oblivious of the gap of guilt between Harry and humanity. “I thought you might mean the baby. I’d rather you waited until visiting hours tomorrow for that; there’s not a nurse to show her right now. But your wife is conscious, as I say. We’ve given her some Equanil. That’s just a tranquillizer. Meprobamate. Tell me”—he moves closer gently, pink skin and clean cloth—“is it all right if her mother sees her for a moment? She’s been on our necks all night.” He’s asking him, him, the runner, the fornicator, the monster. He must be blind. Or maybe just being a father makes everyone forgive you.
“Sure. She can go in.”
“Before or after you?”
Harry hesitates, and remembers the way Mrs. Springer came and visited him on his empty planet. “She can go in before.”
“Thank you. Good. Then she can go home. Well get her out in a minute. It’ll be about ten minutes all told. Your wife is being prepared by the nurses.”
“Swell” He sits down to show how docile he is and rises again. “Say, thanks by the way. Thank you very much. I don’t see how you doctors do it.”
Crowe shrugs. “She was a good girl.”
“When we had the other kid I was scared silly. It took ages.”
“Where did she have it?”
“At the other hospital. Homeopathic.”
“Nn-huh.” And the doctor, who had gone into the pit and brought back no thunder, emits a spark of spite at the thought of the rival hospital, and utters his grunt of disapproval with a sharp wag of his scrubbed head and, still wagging it, walks away.
Eccles comes into the room grinning like a schoolboy and Rabbit can’t keep his attention on his silly face. He suggests thanksgiving and Rabbit bows his head blankly into his friend’s silence. Each heartbeat seems to flatten against a wide white wall. When he looks up, objects seem infinitely solid and somehow tip, seem so full they are about to leap. His real happiness is a ladder from whose top rung he keeps trying to jump still higher, because he knows he should.
Crowe’s phrase about nurses “preparing” Janice has a weird May Queen sound. When they lead him to her room he expects to find her with ribbons in her hair and paper flowers twined into the bedposts. But it’s just old Janice, lying between two smooth sheets on a high metal bed. She turns her face and says, “Well look who it isn’t.”
“Hey,” he says, and goes over to kiss her; he intends it so gently. Her mouth swims in the sweet