Only Begotten Daughter (6 page)

“The kid down the street. She’s just the kid down the street.”

“But you really think … God?”

“Sorry, Mur. She’s a deity. She’s here to shake things up.”

Bong, bong, bong,
came the glassy cadence from the laundry room, like a crystalline clock tolling the hour. They were dining by candlelight, all the electricity between Brigantine and Margate having succumbed to a thunderstorm. Georgina looked up from her plate and smiled, a noose of spaghetti dangling from her mouth. “Something is on the wing,” she said. The storm was blowing out to sea; the world seemed scrubbed, the air squeaky clean. “Wing of angel.” Georgina the neo-Catholic. “Wing of phoenix.” Georgina the pagan priestess.

Tree branches ticked against the kitchen window. Murray retrieved the Coleman lantern from the pantry and ignited the two testicle-shaped mantles. Georgina’s swollen belly, so tense and electric beneath her artsy tie-dye smock, bumped against him as together they marched to the laundry room.

And there she was, caught in the Coleman’s roaring glow, an aborning baby, battering the glass with her tight little fist. Her sac had ripped, filling the jar to belly depth with amniotic fluid. Hard-edged shadows played across her resolute face. Condensed breath drifted through the machine, so that Julie’s efforts to enter the earth suggested the mute gyrations of a creature in a dream. A fissure appeared, then a fretwork of cracks.

“Julie, no!” Murray lurched forward. The jar exploded like a teapot under a hammer, glass fragments hailing against the washer, the amniotic fluid gushing onto the mattress. “Julie!”

On her forehead, blood.

He lifted his wet, squalling baby from the broken womb, and, sliding her over the teething rail, held her to his breast, her cut leaking onto his white wool sweater. The more blood he saw, the happier he felt. His child had a heart. A real heart, like any other baby’s, not a ghostly spark, not a supernatural vibration, but a pumping lump of flesh. She was a child, an incipient person, somebody you could take to an ice-cream parlor or a Nets game.

The umbilical cord, he saw, still joined her navel to the placenta. She was not entirely born. But now here came Georgina, Swiss Army knife in hand, cutting the funiculus and tying it off with the dexterity of a boatswain.

“We did it, Mur. A natural childbirth.” She yanked a pillow case from the drying rack and pressed a corner against Julie’s snake-shaped gash. “Nice Julie, sweet Julie.” The baby’s squalling subsided into a series of hiccuplike pouts. “It’s just a scratch, Julie, honey.”

Murray felt embarrassed to be crying this much, but there he was, awash in the arrival of his firstborn. Hefting the dense wriggling bundle, he realized mass was an art form, it could approach perfection: Julie’s every gram was correct.

“Hello,” he rasped, as if she’d just called him up on the telephone. His hugs should have fractured a bone or two, but love, he sensed, had a high tensile strength; the harder he squeezed, the calmer the creature became. “Hello, hello.”

“You’ll need a pediatrician,” said Georgina. “I’ll tell Dr. Spalos to expect your call.”

“A woman, no doubt.”

“Uh-huh. You should also send for a birth certificate.”

“Birth certificate?”

“So she can get a driver’s license and stuff. Don’t worry, I’ve been through all this with my midwife. In the absence of an attending physician, there’s a form you fill out. Mail it to Trenton, Office of Vital Records, along with the filing fee. Three bucks.”

He looked at Julie. Her wound had stopped flowing; the blood on her cheeks was dry. When he pressed his face toward hers, the air rushing from her lungs pushed her mouth into a facsimile of joy.

Three bucks? Was that all? Only three?

Georgina’s marine biologist arrived exactly thirty days after Murray’s alleged deity—a female marine biologist, her skin the color of espresso beans, a wiry and spirited little bastard who, Murray argued, looked exactly like Montgomery Clift. Together the new parents went to the registrar in the Great Egg Township Department of Health and obtained the necessary filing forms.

“I have to put her name down,” said Georgina. “Nothing sounds right.”

“How about Monty?” Murray suggested.

“We need something cosmic here.”

“Moondust?”

“What’s your opinion of Phoebe?”

“Sure.”

“You really like it? Phoebe was a Titaness.”

“Perfect. She’s entirely Phoebe.”

Phoebe,
Georgina wrote.

That a Spirit of Absolute Being or a World Mother or a Primal Hermaphrodite may have influenced Julie’s conception did not stop Murray from worrying about his parenting abilities. Her runny nose, for example. Dr. Spalos kept saying she’d outgrow it. But when? Then there was the milk question. The two dozen parenting books Murray had exhumed at garage sales and flea markets were unanimous in censuring mothers who didn’t breastfeed. Every time Murray mixed up a new batch of Similac he read the label, wishing the ingredients sounded more like food and less like the formula for Tupperware.

On clear nights, he and Georgina always fed their infants on the lighthouse walkway.

“Up here, Julie’s closer to her mother,” Georgina noted.

“I’m her mother. Mother and father—both.”

“Not a chance of it, Mur.” Georgina transferred Phoebe from one nipple to the other. “Julie was sent. The age of cosmic harmony and synergistic convergence is just around the corner.”

“You’re guessing.” Murray started Julie on a second bottle. What an earnest little sucker she was. Her slurpy rhythms synchronized with the incoming tide. “Nobody knows where that egg came from.”

“
I
do. She break any natural laws yet?”

“No.”

“Only a matter of time.”

Whenever Georgina dreamed up some bizarre new project for fattening Phoebe’s brain cells—a carnival, a street fair, a Bicentennial parade—Murray and Julie went along. “They’re putting up a casino on Arkansas Avenue,” Georgina would say. “I think the girls should see what girders and jackhammers and all that shit look like, don’t you?” And so they were off to the Boardwalk, watching a great iron ball swoop through the sky like a BB from heaven and bash down the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in preparation for Caesar’s Palace. Or: “Trains, Mur! Noise, smells, movement, adventures starting—trains have it all!” And so they drove to Murray’s hometown of Newark and toured the terminal, letting their infants soak up the presumably enriching chaos.

The Primal Hermaphrodite—whoever—did not spare Murray the dark side of parenthood. Julie’s dirty diapers were no more appealing than any other baby’s, her ear infections no less frequent, her cries in the night no less piercing and unfair. Often he felt as if his life had been stolen from him.
Hermeneutics of the Ordinary
was a lost cause, not one sentence added since Julie’s birth. Day-care helped, saved Murray’s sanity in fact—Farmer Brown’s Garden, the best in the business, according to Georgina, who sent Phoebe there three afternoons a week—though the women who ran the place made him uneasy. They were all swooners and gushers, and of course the Katz child, so cute and precocious, gave them plenty to swoon and gush about.

Precocious. Murray couldn’t deny it. Only five days after her birth, Julie had rolled over in her crib. By Yom Kippur she was tooling around the cottage on hands and knees. She uttered her first word,
Pop,
at a mere twenty weeks. By eight months she could walk upright, spine straight, left arm swinging back as the right leg went forward, an achievement that proved particularly disturbing to Murray when in the middle of her second year he noticed that among the several media on which she walked—sand, eel grass, the cottage floor—was the Atlantic Ocean.

It was really happening. They’d come for their evening swim, and now, damn, there she was, skipping across Absecon Inlet.

“Julie, no!” He ran to the shore and waded into the shallows. A show-off he could handle, even a prodigy. “Don’t
do
that.” But not this crap.

She stopped. The water sparkled in the fading sunlight. Murray squinted across the bay. What a marvelous little package she was, standing there with the retreating tide lapping at her shins.

She asked, “What’s wrong?”

“We
swim
here, Julie, we don’t
walk.
”

“Why not?” she demanded in an indignant whine.

“It’s not nice! Swim, Julie! Swim!”

She dove off the bay’s surface and into its depths. Within seconds she reached the shallows, toddling toward him on the weedy bottom. A bit on the chunky side, he realized. Julie was a fast girl with a cookie.

Perhaps he’d imagined it all. Perhaps the aberration lay not in Julie but in the water—an extra infusion of salt, causing super-buoyancy. Still, considering the stakes, considering the baby bank aborters and the Mount of Skulls, even the suggestion of water-walking was intolerable.

“Don’t
ever
do that again!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling softly. “I’ll be good, Pop,” his daughter promised.

At dinner that night he told Georgina about the episode.

“I believe there was a lot of salt in the bay this morning,” he hastened to add.

“Don’t kid yourself, Mur. We’re experiencing a major incarnation here. Water-walking? Really? Sensational!” Georgina sucked a pasta strand through the O of her lips. “Let’s do the Philly Zoo tomorrow.”

“I’m not a zoo person.” Murray shook the Parmesan cheese, the clumps rattling around like pebbles in a maraca.

“Why? You afraid she’ll levitate the elephants?”

“I’m not a zoo person, Georgina.”

But the zoo went perfectly. Murray identified all the animals for Julie, naming them like Adam, and as she repeated each name in her reedy voice he realized he hadn’t known it was possible to love anyone this much, no one had informed him. A regular girl, he told himself. A fast developer, sure. A water-walker, possibly. But at bottom just a regular little girl.

Later, they went to Fairmount Park for a picnic supper of hot dogs and Georgina’s health salad. “Look at us,” said his friend as evening seeped across the grass, bringing fireflies and cricket songs. “The all-American family. Who’d ever know it’s a hermit, a bastard, a dyke, and a deity? Who’d even—?”

Astonishment cut Georgina off. Julie had tuned in the fireflies, organizing them into constellations. “Go over there,” she said, and the insects made a loop-the-loop. “Twist,” and they formed long gossamer strands, braiding themselves into an airborne tapestry.

Murray’s bowels tightened. Phoebe squealed with delight: a two-year-old female Montgomery Clift, laughing merrily.

“Well, would you look at
that
!” Georgina squeezed her roll, launching a hunk of wiener into the air. “Absolutely cosmic! Wow!”

“They’re only lightning bugs.” Murray whimpered like a beaten dog. “I should make her stop.”

Julie taught the insects to synchronize their flashes, then grouped them into letters: A, B, C, D …

“Stop? Why?”

“Exactly the sort of thing her enemies are watching for.”

The organic billboard floated through the night, flashing,
HI, POP, HI, POP.

Georgina scowled. “This reminds me. Er, I don’t want to presume, but …” She grew uncharacteristically shy. “You sure you’re educating Julie properly?”

“Huh?”

“Well, it seems only logical to me that Jesus Christ’s sister should be brought up Catholic.”

“What?”

“Catholic. It served me well enough in my early years. I’ll probably enroll Phoebe in a catechism class.”

Murray snorted. “She’s
not
Jesus’ sister.”

“That remains to be seen. Anyway, Julie would probably do best being brought up Catholic. Either that or Protestant—I’m not prejudiced, though it’s a duller religion. Get her in touch with her roots, know what I mean? Put up a Christmas tree. Hide Easter eggs. Kids need roots.”

“Easter eggs?”

“I’m just trying to be logical. I don’t mean to offend you.”
COKE IS IT
, the fireflies said.

Offended? Yes, he was. And yet, the next day on his lunch hour, he undertook to explore the terra incognita called Jesus, venturing across town to the Truth and Light Bookstore on Ohio Avenue. God’s putative progeny, he felt, he feared, could tell him something about his Julie.

“May I help you?” asked the clerk, a wispy, elderly woman who reminded Murray of pressed flowers. “Are you one of those Jews?”

“One of what Jews?”

“Reverend Milk says that, as the Second Coming gets nearer”—the woman unleashed an iridescent smile—“all you people will start converting to Christianity.”

“That remains to be seen.” Above Murray’s head a painting loomed, a mob of pilgrims swarming over a cross-shaped bridge and sweeping toward a golden, mountainous, fortresslike city captioned
The New Jerusalem.
“Listen, should I buy an entire Bible, or can I purchase the Jesus material separately?”

“The entire Bible is Jesus.”

“Not the Torah, no.”

“Oh, yes.”

Jesus was everywhere. Jesus books, Jesus tracts, Jesus posters, Jesus place mats, coffee mugs, board games, T-shirts, phonograph records, videocassettes. Murray pulled a New Testament from the shelf.

“A King James translation?” The clerk flashed
The Good News for Modern Man.
“You’ll have an easier time with this one.”

King James. Last month, at Herb Melchior’s yard sale, Murray had unearthed a biography of England’s most literary monarch since Alfred the Great. King James I of England was solid ground, a place to get one’s footing before the leap into Jesus. “No, I’ll take James. How much?”

“For someone like yourself, a convert and everything—free.”

“I’m not a convert.”

“To tell you the truth, we’re going out of business. Landlord won’t renew our lease. Know what Resorts International is giving him for this place? Eight hundred thousand dollars. Can you believe it?”

That night Murray plumbed the Gospels. He did not belong here—it felt like going through somebody else’s laundry, like driving somebody else’s car—yet he persisted, turning up one disquieting moment after another.