And then he laughed. He paused in the tiny hallway, put his elbow to Mr. Persichetti’s strong arm. “My wife always knows exactly,” he said. There was a bit of tobacco on his wet lip. “But that’s probably because she only lets me do it twice a year, Valentine’s and my birthday, so it’s not hard to figure.” He stepped out the door and then turned to say, “I got two kids born in November, two in June. No kidding.”
The children gathered along the driveway briefly looked away from the ambulance as the man went down the steps, shouting back to Mr. Persichetti. “This guy,” he said, pointing at the house, “is a lucky man, if she don’t know if it’s been nine months or seven.” Mr. Persichetti raised a hand, agreeing, nodding and laughing, but also saying under his breath, Get going, get going. He would not rest easily until he was sure she was in a doctor’s care. Then he noticed her boys. They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a comforting arm around each.
Carefully, dipping carefully-the broad backside in the good wool skirt-Pauline reached into the car and took the infant from Mary Keane’s arms. There was the pink receiving blanket, the long white shawl, the lace bib of her homecoming dress. Pauline stepped back, onto the grass that lined the driveway, the baby in her arms.
Mary said, “Where’s her bonnet?” and then searched the floor, looking for it. Her husband was coming around the car to help her get out. Pauline held the baby in her arms, dipped her large, powdered face closer to its own, her eyes taking in, there on the grass at the side of the driveway, the cashmere shawl (her own gift, from Saks), the receiving blanket, the tiny body, the little face. Slowly, Pauline raised her left hand and cupped it over the child’s skull to keep her warm. The sun was high but there was a clean chill in the air. The smell of autumn, and of the sawdust left behind from the fallen tree. She held the baby against her chest and raised her elbow to bring the small sleeping face nearer her own.
“Here it is,” Mary said, lifting the bonnet from the floor.
Inside, the children were waiting around the dining-room table with their homemade cards and the frosted birthday cake their father had brought from the bakery this morning. Inside, Pauline’s overnight bag was packed and waiting in the vestibule. As Mary, carrying the new baby, preceded her into the house, Pauline slipped her jacket from the hall closet and lifted the bag, even as the three children gathered around their mother. She simply walked out again, through the front door. She went down the steps. She raised her hand without turning when they called after her. She raised her hand without turning as John Keane followed her down the steps to say, “At least let me give you a lift to the bus stop.”
“Go back to your new family,” she said without turning. “This is a precious moment. There shouldn’t be any strangers at this homecoming.” Meaning it, every word of it, but not turning to see how thoroughly her sudden departure had disrupted the homecoming anyway, how the children had looked away from their mother and the new baby to stare after her, how John Keane had looked back to his wife, their new daughter in her arms, to shrug, to show her his annoyance. The woman drove him crazy.
Without turning, Pauline walked with her bag the three blocks to the bus stop, then changed at Jamaica for the bus home.
At her building, she struggled with the six days of mail shoved every which way into her box (she’d had no time, when the call came, to leave her mailbox key with her neighbor), bills and advertising circulars and bank statements and a mailman who would probably keep pushing mail into her box even if she was gone for six months, dead for a year-only one of the phalanx of indifferent strangers she faced every day.
Upstairs in her apartment she unpacked her bag-two house-dresses in polished cotton and a floral housecoat, another good skirt and sweater and the underwear, girdle, and stockings she’d have to wash out in the sink this evening. In the bottom of the bag, beneath her makeup case and her slippers, the card Jacob had drawn for her-a vase with six spindly flowers: a purple tulip, what seemed to be a red rose, and four simple daisies (she guessed that the success with the tulip had inspired the rose and the failure of the rose had led to the safer daisies). Inside the folded piece of blue construction paper he had written only, in careful cursive, From Jacob.
Although she preferred Michael, whose distrust of anything placid echoed her own, she put the card on her dresser.
Moving into her small kitchen, Pauline went through the refrigerator, tossing out the milk and the sliced ham she had not had time to dispose of last week, when the call came that the baby had arrived early and they were on their way to the hospital. A minute later and they would have missed her, she told John Keane, when the call came. She had just powdered her nose and put on her hat.
She rode the elevator down again to shop briefly-it was Sunday and the stores closed early-for what she needed: milk and eggs and bread and margarine. She told the lady at the deli where she ordered her ham that it had not been a vacation by any means: three children to look after and a much neglected house to clean. The lady at the counter-Maria, in housecoat and worn slippers and swollen ankles-called her some good friend to do all that and Pauline said, “Oh, but the baby is beautiful,” a kind of reprimand, as if it had been Maria herself who had complained so ungenerously about the dirty house.
The grocery bag was light enough but still her back ached and her legs were tired. She had slept fitfully all week in little Annie’s bedroom, wall to wall with stuffed animals that the child never played with and that Pauline would have donated to an orphanage, had the choice been hers. And the little girl had cried herself to sleep in her brother’s bedroom every night, lonesome for her mother. And that little Italian man in the side yard two days in a row, with his chain saw and his hatchet, clearing the fallen tree. Standing too close to her, Pauline felt certain, when he came into the kitchen for a glass of water.
The sparse trees along her block were showing signs of red and gold but there was also the smell of dog droppings and bus fumes and sun-warmed garbage in the air, which you didn’t have out on Long Island. And the Empire State Building across the river was useless, a painted backdrop at this hour on a Sunday, its offices empty, its very reason for being temporarily drained. Her company’s own building, her empty office within, not three blocks away. Home again, she changed into another housecoat, the red velvet one she had made for herself last Christmas, the covered buttons she’d found at A amp;S a satisfying perfect match. She boiled an egg for dinner. Mixed a Manhattan to sip with Walter Cronkite. She answered the phone only the second time it rang, Mary calling to say I wish you hadn’t run off (but not meaning it) and that the house has never been so clean (no kidding) and what did you put in your mashed potatoes that made the kids love them so (a little sugar and a little garlic salt, but Pauline wouldn’t tell).
Darkness had come down on the city by then, the lights in all the buildings had come up. With the phone still to her ear, Pauline dipped her head to notice through her own blinds that the couple across the street was having takeout Chinese again, in their kitchen. They were most likely newlyweds, only in the apartment for a few months. Pauline knew it did not bode well that the young bride never cooked.
“And you cleaned up that slipcover so beautifully,” Mary Keane said.