T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

As the due date approached, I made sure that the car — with its rebuilt transmission — was in good running order and the gas tank topped off, ready for the dash to the hospital. The twentieth fell on a Friday, and I hadn’t wanted to leave Iris to go into work, but she had assured me she’d be fine — I should stick close to the phone, that was all. As it was, I was hardly able to concentrate through the long, tediously unmomentous morning and into the crux of the slow-grinding afternoon, and I left work early — How was she? No change — to make us a light dinner of macaroni salad and canned fruit, and then we’d sat in the living room listening to the radio and waiting. She’d gotten up to rinse her cup in the sink when I noticed that her dressing gown was stuck wet to her legs. I looked at her in alarm. “Iris,” I said, “you’re wet, do you know that?”

She’d put a hand out to steady herself against the sink, and there was dripping now, and I was up off the couch and taking hold of her under the arms as if she were on the edge of a dark yawning gulf and in danger of slipping away from me. The terminology rang in my head— amniotic sac, cervical dilation, oxytocin —but I felt helpless all the same. She gave me a weak smile, dead weight in my arms, and murmured, “Yes, I think it’s time.”

There was the usual rush to the hospital, the wife’s face drawn and bloodless, the prospective father’s hand trembling on the gearshift, a litany of all the things that could go wrong jamming the airwaves in his head — Catherine Barkley dead in the rain and the infant too, the forceps child down the block with the pinched features like an unfinished painting, the crippled, the retarded, the hopeless, the stillborn — and then there was the wheelchair waiting at the emergency entrance and the two of them sitting in Admissions answering inane questions and filling out forms till the prospective father wanted to get the nurse in a stranglehold and force her to reveal the whereabouts of Dr. Bergstrom, the obstetrician, and where was he? Didn’t he realize what was going on here?

I didn’t say anything, though. Didn’t make a move. Just sat there in the crucible of the chair and held Iris’s hand while the nurse nattered on and the ink made its way from the pen to the printed forms and the world went maddeningly on as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary. Iris looked bilious, bleached to the roots of her hair, her eyebrows painted stroke by stroke over the void of her eyes. She was sunk down in the chair, slumped under the terrible weight of the ball she was carrying around with her, teeth clenched, limbs dangling. The hands of the wall clock crept round as expected. Clouds bobbed in the sky beyond the window. All at once, Iris let out a sharply aspirated cry and the nurse smiled. Then they finally came for her, two orderlies with a gurney, and took her up to Obstetrics, and nothing happened, absolutely nothing.

After an hour or so they let me in to sit with her, pulling the curtain around the bed to give us some privacy. Her eyelids were closed, her hands prone beside her. There was no color to her, none, and she might have been dead already, laid out on a slab in the funeral parlor. I took her hand then — out of passion and fear and because I felt so reduced and helpless in that moment — and her eyes snapped open. “John?” she said.

“It’s me,” I said. “I’m right here.” It was movie dialogue, and I kept seeing Helen Hayes’s face superimposed over hers, and where was the “Liebestod” to carry us away? “What are the contractions like? Coming faster now? Did he say how long it’s going to be?”

They’d given her something for the pain and her voice was drowsy with it. “It’s going to be a while, John,” she murmured. “It’s just one of those things, you know? Sometimes, with your first—”

An unseen woman cried out from across the room then — or no, she shrieked, actually, as if a torturer were at work on her with his hot pliers and his electrodes. There was a silence, and then she shrieked again. I felt chastened, helpless, full of remorse and tenderness. The only thing I could think to do was squeeze my wife’s hand. “Should I find Bergstrom? Talk to him, I mean?”

Her voice dropped away. “Only if you want to. But don’t”—the woman shrieked again, stone on glass—“get yourself in a lather. I’m okay. I am. Everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see.”

In the end, of course, she was right — everything was fine, and John Jr., at seven pounds six ounces and twenty-one inches in length, was the result. But Iris’s was a protracted labor, and Friday night became Saturday morning, the progress of the clock as tedious as anything I’d ever endured, Sunday sermons, a visit to the dentist, Prok in the sixth hour of a Buick-bound lecture, and then the sun was up and Bergstrom back on the job advising me to go home and shower and catch some sleep because she was barely dilated and it would be a while yet. I didn’t take his advice. I slumped in the chair at Iris’s bedside, listened to the furtive comings and goings of the ward, might even have heard the odd wail of a newborn from the delivery room across the hall. Coffee fueled me, and something greasy from the cafeteria — chili con carne, fried chicken and dumplings — till my stomach was a vat of acid. When Saturday afternoon melded into Saturday evening, and still nothing had happened, I turned to my flask for solace.

Sunday morning came, the small hours revisited, and I went out to the car and slept, and when I woke the sun was high overhead and making a furnace of the Dodge, the windows of which I’d rolled up in order to defeat the mosquitoes. I’d sweated through to my underwear, and I’m afraid that I must have been a walking wall of unpleasant odors and secretions. My mouth was dry, but I took the precaution of refilling the flask before I shuffled back through the hospital, looked in on Iris — still nothing — and made my way into the men’s room to throw some water on my face and pat down my underarms with hand soap and paper towels. It was past noon by the time I had a sandwich in the cafeteria, and then I sat through the long afternoon and into the evening with my wife, and it was as if we’d never been anyplace else in the world but here, behind the white curtains, while expectant mothers climbed into the beds on either side of us, cried out their pain, and were wheeled into the delivery room to gratify their husbands and their doctors. I was reading to her from the paper when the sun went down for the third time.

Then it was night, ten o’clock, ten-thirty, eleven, and yet still nothing, though the contractions were coming faster now and Dr. Bergstrom was on the case, poking his head between the curtains every few minutes, inspecting Iris’s cervix for dilation and making encouraging noises. I should say, incidentally, that I’d been given permission to be with my wife throughout the process and to witness the birth itself, something Prok had encouraged me to do. He’d been present for the delivery of all three of his children, and he spoke very passionately both to me and Dr. Bergstrom about the significance of the experience from a scientific point of view, and I think he himself would have liked to be there with us if it wouldn’t have looked odd in the eyes of the community. Odd enough that the husband should be present, let alone another male, no matter how closely connected and how purely objective he might have been. And of course Iris would have refused him in any case. This was her show. Absolutely.

And then it occurred to me, as eleven o’clock slipped by and my stomach broiled and the bourbon lit me from within and all of my fears came rising to the surface like the corpses of the drowned, that there was actually something serendipitous in the delay, that something extraordinary was occurring here — if Iris held out another forty-five minutes by my watch, John Jr. would share a birthday with Prok. I told myself that everything was happening for a reason, that was all it was, and I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. Or auspicious. John Jr. and Prok. I saw a succession of birthday parties stretching on over the years, balloons, flowers, the cutting of the cake, Prok lifting my son to his shoulders and parading round the room with him, uncle, godfather, mentor.