Private Practices (37 page)

“Yes, of course,” Ben said, putting away his handkerchief. “My girlfriend will. I've asked her to come over.” They were both relieved when just then the telephone began ringing. “You want to get that?” the detective asked. Ben stood up slowly, his shoulders stooped. “I guess I should.” As he walked out of the living room he saw one of the uniformed policemen summon the detective into the kitchen. He tried not to think about the tool closet.

He took the call in his bedroom. It was his answering service. The brusque night operator said, “A Mrs. Emily Harper is trying to reach you. Says she's started having labor pains. I told her I wasn't sure you were back in town yet.” Copying down the number the operator proffered, he kept listening to hear whether there were sounds of cupboards being opened and closed in the kitchen. But he could hear nothing. Impatient, he dialed Emily.

The husband answered. “Dr. Zauber? How good of you to call right back. My wife's begun having pains. We've been timing them.”

“How close are they?”

“They're coming every nine or ten minutes.”

“Regularly?”

“Yes. For the past hour.”

“Okay,” Ben grunted. “Take her over to the hospital.” He started to hang up but the husband begged, “Hold on a moment. She wants to talk to you.”

He held on, but the wait seemed interminable and he began to feel more and more uneasy. He didn't like leaving the detective out of his sight for so long. As soon as Emily got on the phone, he shot out, “Go over to the hospital. I'll join you there as soon as I can. I can't talk to you now.” And then he started anxiously back toward the living room.

Before he was halfway down the corridor, the detective reappeared. “Who'd you call?” he asked, his tongue popping into his cheek.

“One of my patients. She's in labor.” Did he have to ask the detective's permission to leave? Was he under suspicion? He couldn't tell.

“You going to deliver the baby? You up to it?”

He heard the detective with joy. Certainly if he'd been more distrustful of him, he would have detained him longer. “I thought it might help,” he said hesitantly. “Take my mind off things.”

“Yeah. I suppose you could use that.” The detective drew his notebook from his pocket once again. “Well, go ahead. We might ask you to come down to the homicide zone office tomorrow. After we see the ME's report. And after we've spoken to …” he flipped pages with his broad fingers, “… the deceased's wife, Dr. Alithorn, Dr. Hess. Once we've looked into things. But it looks pretty routine to me. Unless there's anything you've left out.”

“Nothing. Nothing important.”

“Yeah, well if there's anything else we need to ask you, we'll be in touch.” The detective snapped his notebook shut and put it away. “By the way, your girlfriend's here. I've been talking to her.”

“Where?” Ben peered toward the front hall door and then looked abruptly away. Two men were carrying Sidney's draped body from the bathroom.

“In the kitchen,” the detective murmured. “She's been here awhile. Hope you didn't mind my not telling you sooner.”

Ben made an uncomplaining gesture with his hand.

“Nice woman,” the detective went on. “I was chatting with her while you were on the phone. Says you were supposed to get married except she couldn't take the way you were always spending so much time looking after your brother.”

Ben bit his lip. “She was jealous, I guess.”

The detective said, “They're always jealous about something. If it isn't your family, it's your work.” He shrugged and asked, “You want to go see her?”

When Ben hurried into the kitchen, Naomi raced toward him. Her dark eyes were full of pain for him and she held him tightly, her arms binding him like hoops. How long would he have to go on seeing her before he could break up with her again? Not until Claudia too had been questioned about his devotion to Sidney. Not until Alithorn had described Sidney's irrational behavior in his office, and the doctor in St. Louis had reported Ben's concerned avuncular interview with him. Not until the ME had filed his report and the police had checked the St. Louis flights. But eventually, after a while, he would find some excuse to quarrel with her. Kissing her upturned face, he buried his lips in her raucous curls. No matter. Claudia would be in mourning for quite some time, her idealization of Sidney rekindled now that he was dead. It would be a while before she would be emotionally available, and even then, it would be a while before he could be sure that he was the type of man who could interest her. Though he had the imagination. He could see that clearly. And a prodigious, an imperial intellect.

“Aren't you keeping that baby waiting?” the detective was asking. He was watching Ben caress Naomi with a glint of vicarious enjoyment in his blue eyes.

“Right,” Ben said, and drew his body away from hers. She was crying. “Poor Ben. Poor Sidney. Oh, what a fucking waste.”

His feeling of success was overwhelming. He forced himself to stay stooped, to maintain his usual hesitant slouch as he left the room. But once he was on the way to the hospital he straightened up, his long legs striding free.

Emily had been shaved, given an enema, and put to bed in a tiny private labor room. A white-haired delivery nurse slathered her belly with a plastic gel and hooked her up to the fetal-heart monitor and the resident on duty, a young black woman, examined her. Later, Philip read aloud to her from a crumpled copy of the
Daily News
he had found on her night table. But after a while, Emily couldn't concentrate.

She asked Philip to stop reading and in between contractions she held his hand and watched the contractions and the baby's heartbeat translated into wriggly hills and small, bumpy plains on the monitor. When the contractions came, she ceased caring about the machine, and pulled her hand out of Philip's, her fingernails digging into her palms. Then as soon as the immediate stress was over, she reported that the contractions had been more interesting than painful, and went back to holding Philip's hand and studying the geography of her ordeal.

It was Philip who began to look blanched. Twice he called her “Champ,” and repeated the old saw about how if men had to give birth, there would be an end to babies.

“It's nothing,” Emily assured him, “nothing at all,” and resolved that for Philip's sake she would leave her hand in his when the next contraction came. But she couldn't do it. The bite of her nails into the soft flesh of her palms somehow alleviated the sensation of being pulled and pushed apart deep inside herself, in a place she had never before known existed.

“I wish Zauber would get here,” Philip complained.

“He will. He'll be here soon.”

She loved Philip utterly at that moment, loved the worried pallor of his face, and the way he stroked her hand with his thumb whenever he was clasping her, as if trying to add to mere comforting pressure a hint of remembered sensuality. He was stroking her that way when she felt a great spurting of fluid between her legs, a sensation she had feared would dismay and embarrass her, but which instead made her feel deliciously free and exultant. On the fetal-heart monitor she saw right afterward a tall, jagged peak and she felt she was somewhere else, somewhere high in hot, wondrous mountains that sparkled with lakes and pools and rushing waterfalls. She closed her eyes and dozed for a few minutes.

When she awakened, Zauber was there. He was standing at the foot of the bed, conferring with Philip, the resident and the nurse. He was all in white. Starched.

He looked like a god, she thought. Like a savior. Like the way Cortez must have looked to the Indians. And everyone in the room, except herself who was distant and dreamy and uninvolved, was watching him deferentially as he studied her chart and the tracings of the monitor. When he had finished his perusal of her records, the resident and the delivery nurse left the room discreetly and Zauber came to the head of the bed. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“Fine,” she tried to smile. But there was another contraction on its way. She turned away from him, concentrating on the breathing exercises she had learned in her childbirth classes. When the contractions came, their urgency shattered her usual concern with sociability and propriety. And indeed she quite enjoyed the way they freed her of obligation and restraint. She was alone with her baby. They were in the mountains. They were climbing. She was out of breath. She was panting.

“She seems to be having quite a bit of pain,” she heard Philip say to Zauber as she slid slowly down the slope she had been climbing.

“Well, what did you expect?” Zauber sounded so white and wintry that Emily half-sat to stare at him.

“Lie back down,” he admonished her. “I'm going to examine you. Check up on that resident.” Philip laughed ingratiatingly and she wondered what had struck him as funny.

“Can you hold off for just a second?” she asked. “I feel—I think there's another—” Zauber didn't wait for her to finish her sentence. He was at the foot of the bed, forcing her thighs apart, so that when the contraction came she felt unable to ascend. She thrashed her legs, unable to climb free.

“Can't you stay still?” Zauber commented. His voice was icy.

“It hurts,” she said, panting.

She saw him look up and give her an annoyed, even contemptuous glance, but then once again the baby began to push at her. Too soon. She hadn't rested yet. Zauber was probing inside her. “Wait. Wait,” she cried out loud to the baby.

Zauber said, “I haven't got all night.”

Philip had returned to the chair and was sitting on the edge of it, shaking his head. “The pain is really something,” he said. “All the preparation doesn't really prepare you.”

Zauber said, “Maybe you ought to go out for a while.” He looked down at Emily's chart and spoke without lifting his eyes. “You know, maybe it would be better if you weren't here. I think she's playing up to you.”

She heard him with anger. “You promised Philip could stay the whole time!”

“Give the poor man a rest,” Zauber sighed. “Let him get a cup of coffee.” It had begun to snow all around him and she couldn't quite make out his features. “Now be quiet and let me finish up.” He pushed her legs apart again.

His fingers felt frigid. She shivered and saw him through the snow. Perhaps she could melt him a little. Melt him and make him warmer toward her. Perhaps he was still worried about that woman she had heard him talking about the day she had first noticed his cold streak.

She wanted to ask him but suddenly another contraction distracted her. She started to perspire, exuding moisture from every pore in her body. The baby was tearing at her. It was marching. Parading through her. Trampling her flesh. It was her enemy. In its quest for life, it would stop at nothing. It would rend her asunder.

She shrieked. The sound thrilled her. She was still alive. She had thought the creature in her belly had killed her but no, the sound that hurtled from her throat reassured her that she was unhurt. She began to relax, her palms, opening onto the bedsheets.

“If you can't control yourself, Mrs. Harper, I'll have to send your husband away,” Zauber said. “It isn't fair for him to have to listen to you carrying on like this.”

“He doesn't mind,” Emily said as soon as she could speak.

“I don't mind,” Philip echoed loyally. He reached for a piece of gauze and began wiping her forehead. But then Zauber whispered something to him.

“If you think so,” Philip answered. His voice betrayed relief.

“I really do. Go ahead. You take a break.” Zauber clapped Philip around the shoulders and Philip stood and eagerly left the room.

Emily began to shiver again.

“Mrs. Harper,” Zauber said, sitting down in the chair Philip had vacated. “I have a theory about birth. About labor that is.”

For a moment he reminded her of his old self. He seemed to want to explore cultural phenomena with her, as he sometimes used to do in his office. She remembered how flattered she had always felt when he chatted with her. But she wasn't in the mood for intellectual conversation now. It was the wrong time. The wrong place.

“Excuse me,” she murmured. “I can't concentrate.” Her teeth were chattering and already her stomach was starting to cramp.

“My theory is that all pain can be suffered in silence if the sufferer wills it,” he said, ignoring her plea.

She shook her head. She didn't agree. She had liked the primitive reassuring screams that had begun to issue from her throat. But she couldn't explain her point of view. She had to start panting again.

“I'm convinced of it.” He crossed his legs and sat back. “I've become a great believer in will power.”

She wished he would stop speaking. His words were squalling through her ears and his eyes were shiny and hard as icicles. She couldn't bear the way they pierced. But she couldn't say words at the moment. All she could do was groan. The baby was beating against her spine. She arched, her back surging with pain. It was splintering, she thought. Her spine was breaking into a thousand shreds and shards. “Oh God,” she yelled. “Oh God. Oh help me.”

Zauber was watching her, his features composed. “Mrs. Harper, I'm disappointed in you.”

She shivered and pulled the blanket up around her neck.

“Actually all the literature indicates that much of the pain of childbirth—the expression of pain, that is, the screaming and shouting and carrying on that are so distracting for the people who have to work with women in labor—is mere hysteria. It's culturally determined. Not all women scream and carry on. Eskimo women don't do it much. Whereas Puerto Rican women are notorious for making unnecessary noise. Studies have shown—”

“Please,” she managed at last. “Please don't talk to me now. I'm in pain. I didn't know it was going to hurt like this.”