Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“I can’t believe you didn’t see it,” he said. “It was a fucking hearse.”

For the first time she caught or allowed herself to notice the jagged, broken note in his voice, the undercurrent of anger that had always been there but from which her layers of self-absorption, of cell production, of sheer happy bulk, had so far insulated her.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said.

“Still,” he said, shaking his head. He was crying.

“Richard,” she said. “Are you … what’s the matter?”

The light turned to green. The car in front of them sat for an eighth of a second without moving. Richard slammed the horn with the heel of his hand.

“Nothing,” he said, his tone once again helpful and light. “Of course I’ll drive you anywhere you need to go.”

Midwives’ experience of fathers is incidental but proficient, like a farmer’s knowledge of bird migration or the behavior of clouds. Dorothy Pendleton had caught over two thousand babies in her career, and of these perhaps a thousand of the fathers had joined the mothers for at least one visit to her office, with a few hundred more showing up to do their mysterious duty at the birth. In the latter setting, in particular, men often revealed their characters, swiftly and without art. Dorothy had seen angry husbands before, trapped, taciturn, sarcastic, hot-tempered, frozen over, jittery, impassive, unemployed, workaholic, carrying the weight of all the generations of angry fathers before them, spoiled by the unfathomable action of bad luck on their ignorance of their own hearts. When she called Cara Glanzman and Richard Case in from the waiting room, Dorothy was alert at once to the dark crackling effluvium around Richard’s head. He was sitting by himself on a love seat, slouched, curled into himself, slapping at the pages of a copy of Yoga Journal. Without stirring he watched Cara get up and shake Dorothy’s hand. When Dorothy turned to him, the lower half of his face produced a brief, thoughtless smile. His eyes, shadowed and hostile, sidled quickly away from her own.

“You aren’t joining us?” Dorothy said in her gravelly voice. She was a small, broad woman, dressed in jeans and a man’s pin-striped oxford shirt whose tails were festooned with old laundry tags and spattered with blue paint. She looked dense, immovable, constructed of heavy materials and with a low center of gravity. Her big plastic eyeglasses, indeterminately pink and of a curvy elaborate style that had not been fashionable since the early 1980s, dangled from her neck on a length of knotty brown twine. Years of straddling the threshold of blessing and catastrophe had rendered her sensitive to all the fine shadings of family emotion, but unfit to handle them with anything other than tactless accuracy. She turned to Cara. “Is there a problem?”

“I don’t know,” said Cara. “Richie?”

“You don’t know?” said Richard. He looked genuinely shocked. Still he didn’t stir from his seat. “Jesus. Yes, Dorothy, there is a little problem.”

Dorothy nodded, glancing from one to the other of them, awaiting some further explanation that was not forthcoming.

“Cara,” she said finally, “were you expecting Richard to join you for your appointment?”

“Not — well, no. I was supposed to drive myself.” She shrugged. “Maybe I was hoping … But I know it isn’t fair.”

“Richard,” said Dorothy, as gently as she could manage, “I’m sure you want to help Cara have this baby.”

Richard nodded, and kept on nodding. He took a deep breath, threw down the magazine, and stood up.

“I’m sure I must,” he said.

They went into the examination room and Dorothy closed the door. She and another midwife shared three small rooms on the third floor of an old brick building on a vague block of Melrose Avenue, to the west of the Paramount lot. The other midwife had New Age leanings, which Dorothy without sharing found congenial enough. The room was decorated with photographs of naked pregnant women and with artwork depicting labor and birth drawn from countries and cultures, many of them in the Third World, where the long traditions of midwifery had never been broken. Because Dorothy’s mother and grandmother had both been midwives, in a small town outside of Texarkana, her own sense of tradition was unconscious and distinctly unmillenarian. She knew a good deal about herbs and the emotions of mothers, but she did not believe, especially, in crystals, meditation, creative visualization, or the inherent wisdom of preindustrial societies. Twenty years of life on the West Coast had not rid her attitude toward pregnancy and labor of a callous East Texas air of husbandry and hard work. She pointed Richard to a battered fifth-hand armchair covered in gold Herculon, under a poster of the goddess Cybele with the milky whorl of the cosmos in her belly. She helped Cara up onto the examination table.

“I probably should have said something before,” Cara said. “This baby. It isn’t Richie’s.”

Richard’s hands had settled on his knees. He stared at the stretched and distorted yellow daisies printed on the fabric of Cara’s leggings, his shoulders hunched, a shadow on his jaw.

“I see,” said Dorothy. She regretted her earlier brusqueness with him, though there was nothing to be done about it now and she certainly could not guarantee that she would never be brusque with him again. Her sympathy for husbands was necessarily circumscribed by the simple need to conserve her energies for the principals in the business at hand. “That’s hard.”

“It’s extra hard,” Cara said. “Because, see … I was raped. By the, uh, by the Reservoir Rapist, you remember him.” She lowered her voice. “Derrick James Cooper.”

“Oh, dear God,” Dorothy said. It was not the first time these circumstances had presented themselves in her office, but they were rare enough. It took a particular kind of woman, one at either of the absolute extremes of the spectrum of hope and despair, to carry a baby through from that kind of beginning. She had no idea what kind of a husband it took. “I’m sorry for both of you. Cara.” She opened her arms and stepped toward the mother, and Cara’s head fell against her shoulder. “Richard.” Dorothy turned, not expecting Richard to accept a hug from her but obliged by her heart and sense of the proprieties to offer him one.

He looked up at her, chewing on his lower lip, and the fury that she saw in his eyes made her take a step closer to Cara, to the baby in her belly, which he so obviously hated with a passion he could not, as a decent man, permit himself to acknowledge.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“I don’t see how you could be,” Dorothy said. “That baby in there is the child of a monster who raped your wife. How can you possibly be all right with that? I wouldn’t be.”

She felt Cara stiffen. The hum of the air-conditioning filled the room.

“I still think I’m going to skip the hug,” Richard said.

The examination proceeded. Cara displayed the pale hemisphere of her belly to Dorothy. She lay back and spread her legs, and Dorothy, a glove snapped over her hand, reached up into her and investigated the condition of her cervix. Dorothy took Cara’s blood pressure and checked her pulse and then helped her onto the scale.

“You are perfect,” Dorothy announced as Cara dressed herself. “You just keep on doing all the things you tell me you’ve been doing. Your baby is going to be perfect, too.”

“What do you think it is?” Richard said, speaking for the first time since the examination had begun.

“Is? You mean the sex?”

“They couldn’t tell on the ultrasound. I mean, I know there’s no way to really know for sure, but I figured you’re a midwife, maybe you have some kind of mystical secret way of knowing.”