An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [50]
Then the heartbeat stopped.
Then my heart broke.
And then — look, we’re at 7:36 again — there was suddenly a toasty warm, hollering, wet baby on my chest, and Edward and I were laughing, and laughing, and laughing. He was actual! An actual baby, pulled from the dream of my body into the shocking wakefulness of earthly life. Maybe he thought the same of us: all that warmth, those dim voices, the love taps, the questions — I thought I’d made you up.
“It’s a little boy!” said Edward.
“Did you see?” said Dr. Knoeller.
“A little boy!” Edward told her.
He was small and skinny, six pounds and change, twenty inches long.
When Dr. Knoeller left she kissed us, and hugged us, and said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m up for doing this again.”
Even so, we didn’t name him Lance.
In the hospital room, we tried out names. We hadn’t seriously played at this game since before Pudding was born. He looked absolutely unlike a Moses. He looked, in fact, like Edward, fair-haired and big-eyed and worried. “Isn’t he just like his father!” the nurses kept saying admiringly, as though this was a great trick the three of us had pulled off. Oh, he was beautiful, entirely himself.
We discussed Barnaby, Felix, Thomas, and Arthur. “The boy who wasn’t Mabel,” Lib said, when Edward called. We understood that Oscar was out: we were pretty sure that’s what Pudding’s name would have been, had he lived. This baby deserved a name of his own. But what would suit him?
“Barnaby Harvey,” I kept saying, and Edward shook his head.
“I’ve always loved the name Thomas,” he kept saying, and I shook my head.
“August,” he said, reading from the book of baby names I’d bought fifteen years before for fictional characters. “We could call him Augie, or Gus. Gus, I think.”
“Sidney,” I said.
“Maybe. Sidney. Sid. It’s a no-nonsense, tough name, Sid. Your mate down at the pub.”
The Sid I knew best was the husband of the president of my grandmother’s temple sisterhood, a sweet uxorious pharmacist. “Maybe not,” I said.
“Gus, then,” said Edward. “I think Gus.”
That night, when Edward went home to get some sleep, I tried it out. The baby was in his plastic hospital bassinet, swaddled into a neat and uncanny little package. I could see only his head in its mint green cap. “Hello, Gus,” I said. “Hello, Gussie. Hello, Gusling. Hello, Gosling.”
Sometime around 2:00 a.m., it had settled in my mind, and so I told the baby the story of his older brother. I really did: this isn’t literary fancifulness. He was a little, little baby, and I told him the story out loud, not knowing when we might tell him again: I wanted him to know how glad we were to see him, and how sad we were that he’d never know his older brother.
“I think your name is Gus,” I told him, and of course now I can’t imagine why we thought his name could ever be anything else.
Later that week, after we’d come home from the hospital, the baby clothes arrived from England. We’d thrown away anything really difficult, or burned it behind Savary. Still, for a while I just stood and looked at open boxes. Then I took out a piece of clothing, a pair of blue striped pull-on pants, and without thinking I brought them to my face and breathed in.
Of course they wouldn’t smell like him. He died in Bordeaux. What sentimental perfume did I think I’d find on them anyhow, what essence of Puddingness?
And yet they did smell of him. That is, they smelled of the sweet milky French baby soap we’d bought in Duras. Savary had a washing machine but not a dryer, and we’d washed everything and then hung it to dry on the lines on the south side of the terrace. Those lines were way over my head — I had to stand on tiptoe and grab them down — and the clothes were very small and sweet as they dried. So the pants and everything in the box did smell like Pudding,