Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“I’m fine,” she said. Her lips were so dry they looked gathered. The nurse had instructed him to feed her chips of ice from a plastic bowl on the nightstand, but when he offered her one she turned her head away fretfully.

She used to seem so invulnerable. That may have been why he had married her. He had seen her as someone who couldn’t be harmed, once upon a time.

It was dark before they wheeled her to the delivery room. The windowpanes flashed black as Ian walked down the hall beside her stretcher. The delivery room was a chamber of horrors — glaring white light and gleaming tongs and monstrous chrome machines. “You stand by her head, daddy,” the doctor told him. “Hold onto mommy’s hand.” Somehow Rita found it in her to snicker at this, but Ian obeyed grimly, too frightened even to smile. Her hand was damp, and she squeezed his fingers until he felt his bones realigning.

“Any moment now,” the doctor announced. Any moment what? Ian kept forgetting their purpose here. He was strained tight, like guitar strings, and all his stomach muscles ached from urging Rita to push. Couldn’t women die of this? Yes, certainly they could die. It happened every day. He didn’t see what prevented her from simply splitting apart.

“A fine boy,” the doctor said, and he held up a slippery, angry, squalling creature trailing coils of telephone cord.

Ian released the breath that must have been trapped in his chest for whole minutes. “It’s over, sweetheart,” he told Rita. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the racket.

The doctor laid the baby in Rita’s outstretched arms and she hugged it to her, cupping its wet black head in one hand. “Hello, Joshua,” she said. She seemed to be smiling and weeping both. The baby went on wailing miserably. “So, do you like him?” she said, looking up at Ian.

“Of course,” he told her.

It wrenched him that she’d felt the need to ask.

Eventually the baby was carted off somewhere, and Rita sent Ian to make phone calls. In the waiting room he shook quarters from the envelope she had prepared weeks earlier. He called each of the numbers she’d written across the front — first Bobbeen, and then his father, and then Daphne, Thomas, and Stuart (Agatha was still at work), and Rita’s two best friends. They all sounded thrilled and amazed, as if they hadn’t understood till now that an actual baby would come of this. Bobbeen wanted to drive right over. Ian persuaded her to wait, though. “You can visit her tomorrow,” he said. “But stop by early. They’re letting her go home right after lunch.”

“Modern times!” Bobbeen marveled. “When Rita was born I had to stay a week, and they didn’t let Vic in the delivery room, either. You-all are lucky.”

It was on Rita’s account that he’d asked Bobbeen to wait till morning; he assumed she would be exhausted. But when he went to her room he found her sitting upright, looking ready to spring out of bed. Her hair was combed and she wore her flannel pajamas in place of the hospital gown. “Eight pounds, four and a half ounces,” she said. She must be talking about the baby, who wasn’t there yet. They kept them in the nursery for the first few hours. “He’s got your mouth: those little turns at the corners. And my dad’s Italian hair. Oh, I wish they’d bring him in.”

“Ah, well, you’ll have him for the next eighteen years,” Ian said.

Eighteen years; merciful heavens.

He sat with her awhile, listening to her rattle on, and then he kissed her good night. When he left, she was dialing her mother on the phone.

At home, a single lamp lit the front hall. His father must have gone to bed. It was after ten o’clock, Ian was amazed to see. He trudged up the stairs to his room.

Already Rita’s pregnancy seemed so long ago. The pillow laid vertically to ease her backache, the opened copy of Nine Months Made Easy , and Doug’s pocket watch, borrowed for its second hand — they struck him as faintly pathetic, like souvenirs of some old infatuation.

He sat on the bed to take off his shoes. Then he realized he would never manage to sleep. He was tired, all right, but keyed up. Padding softly in his socks, he went back downstairs to the kitchen and switched on the light. He poured milk into a saucepan and lit a burner, and while he waited for the milk to heat he dialed Reverend Emmett.

“Hello,” Reverend Emmett said, sounding wide awake.

“Reverend Emmett, this is Ian. I hope you weren’t in bed.”

“Goodness, no. What’s the news?”

“Well, we have a boy. Joshua. Eight pounds and some.”

“Congratulations! How’s Sister Rita?”

“She’s fine,” Ian told him. “It was a very easy birth, she says. To me it didn’t look easy, but—”

“Shall I go visit her tomorrow?”

“They’re sending her home in the afternoon. Maybe you’d like to come see her here.”

“Gladly,” Reverend Emmett said. “Why, we haven’t had a new baby at church since Sister Myra’s granddaughter! I may have forgotten how to hold one.”

“You’re welcome to brush up on your skills with us,” Ian told him.

“God bless you for thinking to call me, Brother Ian,” Reverend Emmett said. “I know absolutely that you’ll be a good father. Go get some rest now.”

“I believe I will,” Ian said.

In fact, all at once he felt so sleepy that after he hung up, he turned off the stove and went straight to bed.

He stepped out of his shirt and his jeans and lay down in his underwear, not even bothering to pull the covers over him. He closed his eyes and saw Rita’s glowing face and the baby’s expression of outrage. He saw Reverend Emmett attempting to hold an infant. That would be a sight. It intrigued him to imagine the incongruity — to try and picture Reverend Emmett in this new context, the way he used to try picturing his seventh-grade teacher doing something so mundane as cooking breakfast for her husband.

Apparently, he thought, there were people in this world who simply never came clear. Reverend Emmett, Mr. Brant, the overlapping shifts of foreigners … In the end you had to accept that the day would never arrive when you finally understood what they were all about.

For some reason, this made him supremely happy. He pulled the covers around him and said a prayer of thanksgiving and fell headlong into sleep.

“This is proper gift,” the foreigner named Buck told Ian. Or Ian thought he told him; then a moment later he realized it must have been a question. “This is proper gift?”

He meant the white plastic potty-chair resembling a real toilet, a pink ribbon tied in a bow across the seat like one of those hygienic paper bands in hotel bathrooms. Buck and Manny held it balanced between them on the top porch step. If Ian answered, “No,” they seemed ready to spin around and take it home with them. He said, “Of course it’s proper. Thank you very much.”

“In America, every what you do is proper,” Manny said to Buck. They appeared to be resuming some previous argument. “Why you are always so affrighted?”

“Wrong,” Buck said. “They tell you is proper. Then catch your mistake. Ha!” he cried, startling Ian. “Pink ribbon. For boys should be blue.”

“We already have been discussing this,” Manny told him severely. “It is no problem.” He turned to Ian. “Pink or blue: is all the same to you. Correct?”

“Correct,” Ian assured him. “Come on inside.”

He stood back, holding open the door, and they carried the potty through the front hall and into the living room. Rita sat in the rocker with a large pillow beneath her. Daphne and Reverend Emmett shared the couch. “This is proper gift,” Buck told them. He and Manny set the potty on the floor.