Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [141]
He could see she felt hurt. She said, “Oh.”
“I just want to … concentrate on this. All right?” he asked.
“I could concentrate too,” she said.
But Curt touched her sleeve and said, “Come on, Daph. I’m sure he’ll call as soon as he has anything to tell you.”
When he led her away, Ian felt overwhelmingly grateful. He felt he might even love the boy.
Rita lay on a stretcher in an enclosure formed by white curtains. No one had come to examine her yet, she said, but they’d phoned her doctor. She wore a withered blue hospital gown, and a white sheet covered her legs and rose gently over the mound of her stomach. Ian settled on a stool beside the stretcher. He picked up her hand, which felt warmer now and slightly moist. She curled her fingers tightly around his.
“Remember our wedding night?” she asked him.
“Yes, of course.”
“Remember in the hotel? I came out of the bathroom in my nightgown and you were sitting on the edge of the bed, touching two fingers to your forehead. I thought you were nervous about making love.”
“Well, I was,” he said.
“You were praying.”
“Well, that too.”
“You were shy about saying your bedtime prayers in front of me and so you pretended you were just sort of thinking.”
“I was worried I would look like one of those show-off Christians,” he said. “But still I wanted to, um, I felt I ought to—”
“Could you pray now?” she asked him.
“Now?”
“Could you pray for the baby?”
“Honey, I’ve been praying ever since we left the bar,” he said.
Really his prayers had been for Rita. He had fixed her firmly, fiercely to this planet and held her there with all his strength. But he had prayed not only for her health but for her happiness, and so in a sense he supposed you could say that he’d prayed for the baby as well.
She spent one night in the hospital but was released the following morning, still pregnant, with orders to lie flat until her due date. At first this seemed easy. She would do anything, she said, anything at all. She would stand on her head for two months, if it helped her hang onto this baby. But she had always been the athletic, go-getter type, and books didn’t interest her and TV made her restless. So every evening when Ian came home from work he found the radio blaring, and Rita on the telephone, and the kitchen bustling with women fixing tidbits to tempt her appetite as if she were a delicate invalid. Which, of course, she wasn’t. “I don’t care if it takes major surgery!” she’d be shouting into the phone. “You get those moldy old magazines away from her!” (She was talking to Dennis or Lionel—one of her poor frazzled assistants.) Her hair flared rebelliously out of its braid and her shirtsleeves hiked up on her arms; nothing could induce her to spend the day in her bathrobe. And constantly she leapt to her feet on one pretext or another, while everybody cried, “Stop! Wait!” holding out their hands as if to catch the infant they imagined she would let drop.
Ian’s father, who kept mostly to the basement these days, told Ian this was all a result of a misstep in evolution. “Human beings should never have risen upright,” he said. “Now every pregnant woman has gravity working against her. Remember Claudia? Same thing happened to Claudia, back when she was expecting Franny.”
“That’s true, it did,” Ian said. He had forgotten. All at once he saw Lucy in her red bandanna with her hair hanging down her back. “Just, you know, a little bleeding …” she informed him in her quaint croak. Lucy had been pregnant herself at the time. She had been pregnant at her wedding, most likely, and only now did Ian stop to think how she must have felt going through those early weeks alone, hiding her symptoms from everyone, trying to figure out some way to manage.
“It won’t be real fancy,” she said.
And, “Twenty twenty-seven! Great God Almighty!”
She said, “Do you think Danny will mind?”
That evening while he and Rita were playing Scrabble, he rose and wandered over to Lucy’s framed photo above the piano. Daphne had hung it there some time ago,