T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

I watched Marie shrug into her dress, thinking the whole thing was just a lot of superstitious mumbo jumbo and pisantry, when I felt Sister Eleazar’s fingers on my arm; she dipped her head and led me out the front door. The sky was overcast. I could smell rain in the air. “Listen,” the black woman whispered, handing me the can of mustard, “the problem ain’t with her, it’s with you. Must be you ain’t penetratin’ deep enough.” I looked into her eyes, trying to keep my face expressionless. Her voice dropped. “What you do is this: make a plaster of this here mustard and rub it on your parts before you go into her, and it’ll force out that ‘jaculation like a torpedo coming out a submarine — know what I mean?” Then she winked. Marie was at the door. A man with a hoe was digging at his garden in the next yard over. “Oh yeah,” the sister said, holding out her hand, “you want to make a donation to the Brotherhood, that’ll be eleven dollars and fifty cent.”

I never told Marie about the mustard — it was too crazy. All I said was that the sister had told me to give her a mustard plaster on the stomach an hour after we had intercourse — to help the seeds take. It didn’t work, of course. Nothing worked. But the years at Reader’s Digest had made Marie a superstitious woman, and I was willing to go along with just about anything as long as it made her feel better. One night I came to bed and she was perched naked on the edge of the footstool, wound round three times with a string of garlic. “I thought that was for vampires?” I said. She just parted her lips and held out her arms.

In the next few weeks she must have tried every quack remedy in the book. She kept a toad in a clay pot under the bed, ate soup composed of fish eyes and roe, drank goat’s milk and cod-liver oil, and filled the medicine chest with elixirs made from nimble weed and rhinoceros horn. Once I caught her down in the basement, dancing in the nude round a live rooster. I was eating meal three meals a day to keep my strength up. Then one night I came across an article about test-tube babies in Science Digest. I studied the pictures for a long while, especially the one at the end of the article that showed this English couple, him with a bald dome and her fat as a sow, with their little test-tube son. Then I called Marie.

Dr. Ziss took us right away. He sympathized with our plight, he said, and would do all he could to help us. First he would have to run some tests to see just what the problem was and whether it could be corrected surgically. He led us into the examining room and looked into our eyes and ears, tapped our knees, measured our blood pressure. He drew blood, squinted at my sperm under a microscope, took X rays, did a complete pelvic exam on Marie. His nurse was Irene Goddard, lived up the street from us. She was a sour, square-headed woman in her fifties with little vertical lines etched around her lips. She prodded and poked and pricked us and then had us fill out twenty or thirty pages of forms that asked about everything from bowel movements to whether my grandmother had any facial hair. Two weeks later I got a phone call. The doctor wanted to see us.

We’d hardly got our jackets off when Mrs. Goddard, with a look on her face like she was about to pull the switch at Sing Sing, showed us into the doctor’s office. I should tell you that Dr. Ziss is a young man — about my age, I guess — with narrow shoulders, a little clipped mustache, and a woman’s head of hair that he keeps brushing back with his hand. Anyway, he was sitting behind his desk sifting through a pile of charts and lab reports when we walked in. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” Marie went pale, like she did the time the state troopers called about her mother’s accident; her ankles swayed over her high heels and she fell back into the chair as if she’d been shoved. I thought she was going to cry, but the doctor forestalled her. He smiled, showing off all those flossed and fluoridated teeth: “I’ve got some good news too.”

The bad news was that Marie’s ovaries were shot. She was suffering from the Stein-Leventhal syndrome, he said, and was unable to produce viable ova. He put it to us straight: “She’s infertile, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Even if we had the facilities and the know-how, test-tube reproduction would be out of the question.”

Marie was stunned. I stared down at the linoleum for a second and listened to her sniffling, then took her hand.

Dr. Ziss leaned across the desk and pushed back a stray lock of hair. “But there is an alternative.”

We both looked at him.

“Have you considered a surrogate mother? A young woman who’d be willing to impregnate herself artificially with the husband’s semen — for a fee, of course — and then deliver the baby to the wife at the end of the term.” He was smoothing his mustache. “It’s being done all over the country. And if Mrs. Trimpie pads herself during her ‘pregnancy’ and ‘delivers’ in the city, none of your neighbors need ever know that the child isn’t wholly and naturally yours.”

My mind was racing. I was bombarded with selfish, and acquisitive thoughts, seething with scorn for Marie— she was the one, she was defective, not me — bursting to exercise my God-given right to a child and heir. It’s true, it really is — you never want something so much as when somebody tells you you can’t have it. I found myself thinking aloud: “So it would really be half ours, and … and half—”

“That’s right, Mr. Trimpie. And I have already contacted a young woman on your behalf, should you be interested.”

I looked at Marie. Her eyes were watering. She gave me a weak smile and pressed my hand.

“She’s Caucasian, of course, attractive, fit, very bright: a first-year medical student in need of funds to continue her education.”

“Um, uh,” I fumbled for the words, “how much; I mean, if we decide to go along with it, how much would it cost?”

The doctor was ready for this one. “Ten thousand dollars,” he said without hesitation, “plus hospital costs.”

Two days later there was a knock at the door. A girl in peacoat and blue jeans stood there, flanked by a pair of scuffed aquamarine suitcases held shut with masking tape. She looked to be about sixteen, stunted and bony and pale, cheap mother-of-pearl stars for earrings, her red hair short and spiky, as if she were letting a crewcut grow out. I couldn’t help thinking of those World War II movies where they shave the actresses’ heads for consorting with the Germans; I couldn’t help thinking of waifs and wanderers and runaway teen-agers. Dr. Ziss’s gunmetal Mercedes sat at the curb, clouds of exhaust tugging at the tailpipe in the chill morning air; he waved, and then ground away with a crunch of gravel. “Hi,” the girl said, extending her hand, “I’m Wendy.”

It had all been arranged. Dr. Ziss thought it would be a good idea if the mother-to-be came to stay with us two weeks or so before the “procedure,” to give us a chance to get to know one another, and then maybe stay on with us through the first couple of months so we could experience the pregnancy firsthand; when she began to show she’d move into an apartment on the other side of town, so as not to arouse any suspicion among the neighbors. He was delicate about the question of money, figuring a commercial fisherman and a part-time secretary, with no college and driving a beat-up Rambler, might not exactly be rolling in surplus capital. But the money wasn’t a problem really. There was the insurance payoff from Marie’s mother — she’d been blindsided by a semi coming off the ramp on the thruway — and the thirty-five hundred I’d got for delivering spawning stripers to Con Ed so they could hatch fish to replace the ones sucked into the screens at the nuclear plant. It was sitting in the County Trust, collecting five and a quarter percent, against the day some emergency came up. Well, this was it. I closed out the account.