Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [2]
“No car?”
The doctor looked around him, as if wondering how all their equipment had arrived—the bulky stage, the heap of little costumes, the liquor carton in the corner with a different puppet’s head poking out in each cardboard compartment.
“Mr. Kenny brought us,” said the boy, “in his panel truck. He’s chairman of the Fund-Raising Committee.”
“You’d better come with me, then,” the doctor said. “I’ll drive you over.” He seemed fairly cheerful about it. He said, “What about the puppets? Shall we take them along?”
“No,” said the boy. “What do I care about the puppets? Let’s just get her to the hospital.”
“Suit yourself,” the doctor told him, but he cast another glance around, as if regretting a lost opportunity, before he bent to help the boy raise the girl to her feet. “What are they made of?” he asked.
“Huh?” said the boy. “Oh, just … things.” He handed the girl her purse. “Emily makes them,” he added.
“Emily?”
“This is Emily, my wife. I’m Leon Meredith.”
“How do you do?” the doctor said.
“They’re made of rubber balls,” said Emily.
Standing, she turned out to be even slighter than she’d first appeared. She walked gracefully, leading the men out through the front of the tent, smiling at the few stray children who remained. Her draggled black skirt hung unevenly around her shins. Her thin white cardigan, dotted with specks of black lint, didn’t begin to close over the bulge of her stomach.
“I take an ordinary, dimestore rubber ball,” she said, “and cut a neck hole with my knife. Then I cover the ball with a nylon stocking, and I sew on eyes and a nose, paint a mouth, make hair of some kind …”
Her voice grew strained. The doctor glanced over at her, sharply.
“The cheapest kind of stockings are the best,” she said. “They’re pinker. From a distance, they look more like skin.”
“Is this going to be a long walk?” Leon asked.
“No, no,” said the doctor. “My car’s in the main parking lot.”
“Maybe we should call an ambulance.”
“Really, that won’t be necessary,” the doctor said.
“But what if the baby comes before we get to the hospital?”
“Believe me,” said the doctor, “if I thought there was the faintest chance of that, I wouldn’t be doing this. I have no desire whatever to deliver a baby in a Pontiac.”
“Lord, no,” Leon said, and he cast a sideways look at the doctor’s hands, which didn’t seem quite clean. “But Emily claims it’s arriving any minute.”
“It is,” Emily said calmly. She was walking along between them now, climbing the slope to the parking lot unassisted. She supported the weight of her baby as if it were already separate from her. Her battered leather pocketbook swung from her shoulder. In the sunlight her hair, which was bound on her head in two silvery braids, sprang up in little corkscrewed wisps like metal filings flying toward a magnet, and her skin looked chilled and thin and pale. But her eyes remained level. She didn’t appear to be frightened. She met the doctor’s gaze squarely. “I can feel it,” she told him.
“Is this your first?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, then,” he said, “you see, it can’t possibly come so soon. It’ll be late tonight at the earliest—maybe even tomorrow. Why, you haven’t been in labor more than an hour!”
“Maybe, and maybe not,” said Emily.
Then she gave a sudden, surprising toss of her head; she threw the doctor a tilted look. “After all,” she said, “I’ve had a backache since two o’clock this morning. Maybe I just didn’t know it was labor.”
Leon turned to the doctor, who seemed to hesitate a moment. “Doctor?” Leon said.
“All my patients say their babies are coming immediately,” the doctor told him. “It never happens.”
They had reached the flinty white gravel of the parking lot. Various people passed—some just arriving, holding down their coats against the wind; others leaving with balloons and crying children and cardboard flats of shivering tomato seedlings.
“Are you warm enough?” Leon asked Emily. “Do you want my jacket?”
“I’m fine,” Emily said, although beneath her cardigan she wore only a skimpy black T-shirt, and her legs were bare and her shoes were ballet slippers,