Alison Lurie: The War Between the Tates: A Novel

Brian did not speak. The bomb had exploded; depression, thick and dirty and full of stones, rained down on him. A vision of his vain and foolish vigilance in the past made him laugh gratingly, then break off as he thought of what was to come in the future. Only two weeks ago a liberal abortion bill had been passed in the state, but by the time it took effect it would be too late for Wendy; it was too late even now.

He would have to marry Wendy. Also, he would have to do this right away, as soon as it became legally possible—before her pregnancy became so obvious as to make them a public joke. But if she had been as free with her confidences as last time, it was already a public joke. He would have to stand up with her in the county courthouse, while the witnesses sniggered behind their smiles. Then he would have to take her home, and live with her for the rest of his life. The depression rained on steadily; Brian could feel himself bruised, knocked down, choking in the heavy, muddy future.

Meanwhile Wendy, perhaps encouraged by his silence, went on chattering with increasing confidence. “It’s a real freaky trip, you know, having somebody growing inside you—carrying them around everywhere you go. And knowing that everything you do affects them. Like if I smoke a joint or have a couple of beers, the baby gets high, did you know that? I mean, that’s a big responsibility.”

The responsibility was large not only generically but specifically, Wendy explained, because this child was destined for greatness. “It’ll have the Sun conjunct Uranus, a powerful magnetic personality, very original; maybe a genius, Zed says,” she confided, conveying to Brian the unwelcome news that her pregnancy was already known to that fool at the Krishna Bookshop. Indeed, as he soon discovered, it was an old story to most of her friends—who, in keeping the secret, had all also been deceiving him.

Though enthusiastic about the baby, Wendy received Brian’s proposal of marriage with a composure which verged on lassitude. She also accepted his other proposals for their future (legal, economic, medical) without any great vivacity or gratitude. Brian assumed it was because all her attention was turned inward, upon her womb and its contents, that she took so little interest in planning when and how they would marry, or where they would live (Alpine Towers being forbidden to infants). Yet when he recalled the nest-building fervor that had overtaken Erica under similar circumstances, he felt puzzled.

He was furious, too, that additional responsibilities should be forced upon him now, when term papers were coming in and his phone, both at home and at the university, rang constantly about the Peace March. He had no time to call doctors or inspect apartments. Wendy, who did, apparently could not summon the energy. But when he complained of this one evening at supper, he received another severe, almost fatal shock.

“You don’t hafta call up that real estate dude if you don’t want to,” Wendy told him, setting her elbows one on each side of a plate of overcooked chili (expectant motherhood had blurred her sense of time, never very acute). “You don’t hafta do anything you don’t want. I mean, shit.” Her voice trembled. “You don’t hafta marry me.”

Controlling his own voice, Brian replied that she did not mean that.

“I do too,” Wendy asserted. “I don’t care if I’m an unwed mother. I mean, so what? I mean if people don’t like it, screw them.”

Brian gave a sigh of exasperation at these counterculture histrionics. Wendy had managed to conceal her condition so far by wearing loose clothing, notably the garment she had on then: a huge, heavy, tentlike Indian poncho made out of an old red blanket with orange and black zigzag designs. But she was growing larger, and the weather warmer, every week. Soon she would have to take off her wigwam, and the coming papoose would be visible to everyone. And when it came to that, he explained to Wendy, she would care. She would suffer from embarrassment and from social censure, including that of her own family of origin.

Wendy denied this. “I can hack it,” she insisted. “I may be a little uptight about what Ma will say, but I can hack it with her too, and the whole family if I hafta. I’m not freaked out over what your neighbors and the department will think.”

“You say that now.” Brian smiled, trying to lower the temperature of the discussion. “But even if it were true, it’s not the only consideration. We can’t be concerned only with you. Or me.” He smiled even harder. “We have to think of the baby, of what it will mean for him or her to be illegitimate.”

“Lots of kids in this country are bastards, and they don’t always—I read this article—”

“No doubt,” he said impatiently. “Lots of kids are also undernourished, and neglected, and un-educated. I wish them all well. But I have no intention of placing that sort of handicap on any child of mine.”

“Yeh, but—” Wendy had given up all pretense of eating; she shoved her plate aside and leaned over the table. “I mean, isn’t that just going along with everything that’s fucked up in this society? If you just do it because you’re afraid of prejudice,” isn’t that sort of helping to perpetuate it?”

Brian groaned silently, and rebuked himself for having provoked a theoretical argument with someone who was constitutionally (in both senses, now) incapable of logical thought.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “why should it be so important that it’s your child? I mean, like Zed says: it’s a karmic hangup to think of kids as mine or yours, as if they were private property. All children belong to God, really, and we’re just appointed their guardians, the way it’s written in The Prophet.

“Lo, your children are not your children, but the sons and daughters of God”

she recited in a trembly, emotional voice. “That’s a really beautiful saying. And it’s true, too.”

Third-rate poetry, Brian thought to himself; mystical crap. Then another interpretation of Wendy’s babbling, far-fetched but even less agreeable, occurred to him. “It is mine, though, I assume, this baby?” he said in a tone he tried to make pleasant. “Technically speaking, that is.”

Wendy’s reaction to this question—the mug-shot slump of her shoulders, the red, slapped expression on her face—should have been answer enough. But Brian, determined to know the worst, forced first an admission and then the sordid details out of her.

She wasn’t really, absolutely sure, Wendy finally admitted. Because, you see, at the end of last year, when Brian was at those meetings in New York, and she came back to college early to finish a paper, “there was this guy Ahmed that Linda knows, this grad student in Engineering. He’s really a nice dude, sort of shy and sensitive, you know? He writes prose poems.” Ahmed was spending the holidays alone in his dormitory. “He couldn’t go home for vacation because he’s from Pakistan, and he had all this dumb work to make up, these crappy engineering problems. He was feeling really lonely and down, thinking how he was stupid and had no friends and would be a disgrace to his country and he might as well jump down the gorge ...So I like gave myself to him for Christmas.”

The night that followed this revelation was the worst Brian has ever had. Hour after hour he tossed and twitched, while Wendy, worn out by sobbing and self-justification, lay sleeping heavily beside him.

He could see no way out: it was like a multiple-choice test in which none of the answers were right. Marry Wendy? Abandon her? The odds were in favor of the child’s being his, and certainly the moral responsibility, for he had lain with her a hundred times to the Pakistani’s one. There was no chance of that character’s assuming the burden, according to Wendy. (“Oh, Ahmed can’t marry me; he’s been betrothed to a girl back home since he was fourteen. He hasta marry a virgin anyhow, because of his religion.”)