Authors: Stanley Elkin
It ain’t all been dainties and plum puddings, has it, Eddy, our crusade? Passing the hat, doing our buskers’ shuffle up and down the kingdom’s avenues? For press and for public passing the hat, passing the hankie, touching it to the collective eye, the collective nose. God, Eddy, how we Hyde Park-cornered them with our despair, with our need and our noise. Our cause! Cause and affect! Anyway, our hats in our hands, our hearts on our sleeves, and our knees on the ground. Beggars!
Beggars, Ed!
Always for Liam, of course, never ourselves, of
if
for ourselves, then for the abstract motherhood and fatherhood in us, or if for Liam, then for some soiled and abstract childhood in him, some sentimental fiction of good order, natural birthright, the ought-to-be.
“Well of course,” you’ll be saying, “Well of course, you silly git, of
course
we’d a right to expect better than we got, of
course
Liam did. Of
course
it’s good order, birthright, and proper dispensation for kids to grow up! Nothing sentimental there. No fiction about it. Childhood diseases are one thing—mumps and measles, chicken pox, croup. Maybe a broken bone or a tooth to be pulled. Rashes in summer from lessons botched in leaf identification. The coughs and sniffles and low-grade fevers. All the rocking-chair temps. The mustard plaster and the asafetida. Oils of clove and the hanging garlics. All the cuddle comforts—Epsom salts, vaporizers, and the Vicks reliefs. Your only
scaled
suffering, what the traffic can bear.
“But car crash and brain damage,” you’ll be saying, “paralysis? Your tumors and cancers and drowning accidents in surf?”
Don’t get me wrong, Eddy. I think so too. I was his mother, I was his mum. And lived nine months longer than ever you did with superstition and fear, the 4 a.m. credulities, all the toxic heterodoxies of lying-in, all pregnancy’s benighted, illiterate dread. Guilty for fried foods I’d eaten years before, the shadow of sugar incriminating me, of butter and egg yolk and marble in meat, all that candy, all those fish ’n’ chips.
Even signs of life startling. “My God,” I thought when he kicked, “he’s got only one leg!” And “Christ!”—when I puked—“I’m upchucking bits and pieces of my kid!”
Doing bargains with God, you see: “If he’s missing a finger, take it from his left hand, Lord,” “Make him deaf rather than blind, blind rather than simple.” “If he has to be ugly, don’t give him bad teeth.”
Jesus, the stuff I thought! “I’d rather he be homosexual than nearsighted.” “If he’s fat I hope he’s tall.” “I prefer he be bad at games than not have a sense of humor; I’d rather he didn’t get the point of jokes than be stingy.” “It would be better if he were a poor Tory than a wealthy Red.”
That’s not the half of it, of course. The half of it was another bargain, the half of it was this: “Let him have one leg, Lord. Take the fingers from his right hand and make him this deaf, blind, simple, rich, fat, Red. Rot his teeth, God, and let him be short, this clumsy, mean and ugly, humorless, nearsighted fag. Just let him be born alive!”
Not just let him live, Eddy. Let him be born alive. Because if he was born alive I took it for granted he’d live. It never occurred to me it could be otherwise. What did I know about vicissitude who could strike such bargains? Who assumed you paid the price of admission up front and were never bothered again; who suspected, perhaps even expected that at the outside there might even be trouble, hard times, say, but to whom it just never occurred that she’d still be alive herself and have to witness out-and-out tragedy?
But he was perfect, our Liam. From the beginning one of those rare, good-looking babies, alert and cheerful, sturdy, well. So even-tempered that if you didn’t know better you might believe him actually thoughtful, actually circumspect. And wasn’t his
gaze
clear? And wasn’t his
grip
strong? As if he was trying to chin on the world with those perfect, tiny hands? Pull himself up, have a look round?
I was his mother, Eddy. I was his mum. And counted his limbs and totaled his toes, his fingers and features, doing the sums of my baby son like some holy arithmetic, as if I were a religious telling her beads, say, or as if I were counting my blessings.
But nervous…no, stunned, in the presence of such glory. The postpartum depression you hear about—I was his mother, I was his mum—is only a sort of stress, only a kind of strain, just the ordinary and decent apprehension of responsibility. His soft spot, for example, his fontanel, that dangerously malleable skullcap of infant membrane which I couldn’t help but think of as a kind of quicksand, some treacherous maelstrom of the vulnerable it half scared me to death to clean, to go near with water, a washcloth and soap.
Or any crankiness that couldn’t be accounted for within the limited infant parameters of shit or hunger or sleep, the explosive, inexplicable tantrum cholerics of incommunicado grief like a sort of willful madness, which was…well, maddening, mysterious to me because it seemed so arbitrary and implacable, like…oh, a cow howling, or the panic neighing of a horse, or any other inarticulate anguish of the beasts. “What? What is it, Liam?” I’d lean over his crib and ask. “What, child,
what?”
Or pick him up, rock him, spoil him, try to bribe his anger with my comfort, my still swollen maternals, the boneless, angleless fillets of my soft shoulders, my tender breasts, my featherbed lap, my mother-meat. Crooning, cooing, ah-ah-ahhing a promised protection I had no more faith in than he did, the distraught, crazed, wailing Liam.
Because that’s what I thought, Eddy, that he’d actually gone mad, as out of control as a demon. Dry, rested, fed (spitting my tit out like an orthodox offered interdicted fruit) and outraged. No longer even bothering to reason with him through reason (my new mum’s version of it anyway—love, a hug, a kiss, a squeeze), but cutting through all that and going directly to the recognized, time-honored lingua franca of all infants everywhere: that universal, gold-standard, pound-sterling, cosmic greenback, the comprehensive baby currency of distracting bauble. Shaking keys at him, offering my change purse, setting a ticking watch at his ear (which he wouldn’t have heard anyway above that racket he made), giving him a shiny spoon to look at, a rattle to bang, textures to feel: crumpled paper, a penny, a string of beads, an orange peel, grapes, bread, the flesh of an apple. Concerned, Eddy—well, I was his mother, I was his mum—that there might be something intractable and unyielding and malicious at the core.
Which there was, wasn’t there, Ed, only not what we expected, or anyway expected back in those days when we were both new to the game and didn’t know the score.
Because you learn. Sooner or later you do. I did. Because standing over their cribs to see if they’re still breathing doesn’t keep them alive. Hard work does.
Though I’ll spare you this part lest you take it into your head I’m complaining, which I’m not. Because things even out, they really do, and there’s a certain clean democracy about everything. I’m thinking of those nine months of ungovernable dread, the seven I knew I was pregnant plus the two retroactive ones when I feared I might have done Baby some thoughtless injury just because I didn’t know he existed yet. Because if those nine months were unbearable to me, and if it’s true that you can never really share them, never really catch up, I ought to tell you that you can’t share or catch up either with the times of greatest joy, those seven or eight or nine months when I knew he was out of the woods, or I was, that I was past my postpartum funk, that his soft spot wasn’t going to sink in on itself and the crankiness was no cry of madness or doom but only some inexplicable inner teething, say, maybe just ordinary run-of-the- mill boredom, and we lay, infant Liam and I, gurgle to gurgle and coo to coo and skin to skin.
I was his mother, Eddy, I was his mum. I saw him raise his head, turn over, crawl, pull himself up, stand without holding on, take a step, walk. I heard him say “biscuit,” I heard him say “mum.” I pushed him in his pram. I was with him on the pleasure-ground, on the commons, on the heath. I took him to the Bingo, I took him to the high street. I took him to the kiosk, I took him to the caff. Oh, Eddy, we went everywhere, everywhere, Liam and his mum. We went to the tinsmith, to the coster and chandler. We rode in estate cars that the salesman would drive. I showed him the fishmonger, the chapman and publican, the chemist and cutler, the cooper and smith. We browsed at the stationer’s. Estate agents opened houses for us. We had the builders in. And took the air at the poulterer’s. Haberdashers and milliners set out their wares for our inspection. Everyone did, showing their goods, pitching their hope at us in the lively open market that’s the world.
All for Liam’s baby benefit, Ed, to train his urge and craving to their cheer. So that we went everywhere and did it all not just with whomsoever but with whatsoever the greengrocer and tradesmen equivalencies are for arcade and for bourse. Ever so much better than playing House it was, our sprightly little game of playing Planet, playing Life.
He wasn’t a baby now. He was a little boy. And had seen enough, I think, of what was only merchandise.
For perhaps a month we’d been going to the parks, Liam rough and tumble with the kids, for when they showed him a toy, at least at first, I think he thought they meant to sell it to him, for him to buy it from them, and so he’d act standoffish, reluctant, disinclined, and ask with almost inattention, nonchalance, just what they thought they wanted for that thing, shaking his head whatever they told him, whatever they said, as I hadn’t even known I’d been teaching him to. “Too dear, too dear,” he’d say, driving his hard bargains like nails in the very air.
“No, darling, no sweetheart,” I had to explain, “they only want to play with you.”
I was his mother, Ed, ever so much longer than you were his dad. No, wait, I was. Because everything has a reasonable explanation, Eddy. No, wait, it does. It has to. Those dreadful nine months he was in my belly like rotten cheese, say, or something you eat that gives you bad dreams. And the four or five months it took his soft spot to heal, the two or three I couldn’t get used to his crankiness, couldn’t get used to him—because motherhood’s not natural, Eddy, it’s
not,
whatever they say; how could anything that dangerous, difficult, and strange be natural? How can spending all that time with something, all right,
someone,
but someone who doesn’t speak your language yet and who doesn’t have enough of his own to tell you his name or say his address, be natural? And how can it be natural to be at the constant beck and call of anything, all right, anyone, anyone who lives within those barbarous parameters of shit and hunger and sleep and all the rest of the time,
all
the rest of the time, on bliss and on grief like a dancer up on point?
Natural?
How can it even be
good
for you? And then our years on the town; then—well, everything, the time I put in on call even when he napped.
You were at business. I had possession, enjoyment, holding in fee simple and fee tail, in freehold and seisin, in dubious privilege and precedence, my mum’s natural seniority, my tenure: all motherhood’s time-serviced squatter’s rights.
Jesus, Eddy, he’d have had to live another dozen years for you to catch up with me.
Which he couldn’t, didn’t. It being hard enough for him to make it through that first dozen. Which he barely could, barely did.
Though you certainly
tried
to catch up, I’ll give you that Seizing, it turned out, on his illness. Making his disease your cause. Like an entertainer on the telethon, almost, so frenzied you were. La! La, luv, it couldn’t have been easy for you—my frame of reference isn’t even his sickness, you know; it’s that pregnancy, those seven lean months when I got so fat, my wary wait-and-see ways afterward—I know. It couldn’t have been easy. Or shouldn’t, shouldn’t have been. Taking poor Liam’s case, your case, over all their heads.
Over the heads of the doctors, of the interns and specialists, over the heads of the experts and scientists and the National Health, over the heads of the odds-makers, over the heads of the nobs and the honorables, of the chairmen of boards, of the media, of the movers and shakers, over the heads of the very public that pitched in with its pounds and its pennies to stretch out his life, at last taking it over the head of God and—what I can’t forget and will never forgive—over the head finally of Liam himself. Who wanted to die.
Then, before he could, you had your idea about all those other poor kids and had already begun your inquiries, and I knew I’d have to leave you once Liam was gone. I can’t live like this, darling. I can’t live like this, Ed.
So. Well. That’s about it.
Anyway, I shall have to stop now. I’ve called the taxi and expect it will be here quite soon. Although it’s funny. To tell you the truth, I haven’t the foggiest what I’m going to tell the driver. I’ve known for years, since Liam was first diagnosed, that we couldn’t live together once he was dead. But I don’t know where to go. I’m out of cigarettes. I shall have to get some. I’ll ask him to stop at the tobacconist on the Upper Richmond Road.
Oh, and don’t you know yet, Eddy, that grown-ups are more interesting than kids?
O
n the strength of all this, Bale left 627 and drifted down to the Fiesta Fun Center, the hotel’s big game room, where Nedra Carp had been joined now by Colin Bible and Mr. Moorhead. The physician had left the Coconino Cove and was, or so it seemed to Bale, a bit unsteady on his feet. Colin, his duties as liaison completed between the Dream Holiday People, as they’d come to be known in the local press, the Orlando undertakers, and the travel agency making the arrangements with the two airlines that would be taking them first to Miami and then back to England, was recounting some of his difficulties. He’d had to pick out the coffin, a rather more ornate and expensive box than necessary, but one which could be paid for out of their contingency fund.
The travel agent, he said, couldn’t have been more helpful. She’d handled nearly everything and been most sympathetic. “Really,” Colin said. “I quite felt sorry for her.”