Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [147]
“Modern times!” Bobbeen marveled. “When Rita was born I had to stay a week, and they didn’t let Vic in the delivery room, either. You-all are lucky.”
It was on Rita’s account that he’d asked Bobbeen to wait till morning; he assumed she would be exhausted. But when he went to her room he found her sitting upright, looking ready to spring out of bed. Her hair was combed and she wore her flannel pajamas in place of the hospital gown. “Eight pounds, four and a half ounces,” she said. She must be talking about the baby, who wasn’t there yet. They kept them in the nursery for the first few hours. “He’s got your mouth: those little turns at the corners. And my dad’s Italian hair. Oh, I wish they’d bring him in.”
“Ah, well, you’ll have him for the next eighteen years,” Ian said.
Eighteen years; merciful heavens.
He sat with her awhile, listening to her rattle on, and then he kissed her good night. When he left, she was dialing her mother on the phone.
At home, a single lamp lit the front hall. His father must have gone to bed. It was after ten o’clock, Ian was amazed to see. He trudged up the stairs to his room.
Already Rita’s pregnancy seemed so long ago. The pillow laid vertically to ease her backache, the opened copy of Nine Months Made Easy, and Doug’s pocket watch, borrowed for its second hand—they struck him as faintly pathetic, like souvenirs of some old infatuation.
He sat on the bed to take off his shoes. Then he realized he would never manage to sleep. He was tired, all right, but keyed up. Padding softly in his socks, he went back downstairs to the kitchen and switched on the light. He poured milk into a saucepan and lit a burner, and while he waited for the milk to heat he dialed Reverend Emmett.
“Hello,” Reverend Emmett said, sounding wide awake.
“Reverend Emmett, this is Ian. I hope you weren’t in bed.”
“Goodness, no. What’s the news?”
“Well, we have a boy. Joshua. Eight pounds and some.”
“Congratulations! How’s Sister Rita?”
“She’s fine,” Ian told him. “It was a very easy birth, she says. To me it didn’t look easy, but—”
“Shall I go visit her tomorrow?”
“They’re sending her home in the afternoon. Maybe you’d like to come see her here.”
“Gladly,” Reverend Emmett said. “Why, we haven’t had a new baby at church since Sister Myra’s granddaughter! I may have forgotten how to hold one.”
“You’re welcome to brush up on your skills with us,” Ian told him.
“God bless you for thinking to call me, Brother Ian,” Reverend Emmett said. “I know absolutely that you’ll be a good father. Go get some rest now.”
“I believe I will,” Ian said.
In fact, all at once he felt so sleepy that after he hung up, he turned off the stove and went straight to bed.
He stepped out of his shirt and his jeans and lay down in his underwear, not even bothering to pull the covers over him. He closed his eyes and saw Rita’s glowing face and the baby’s expression of outrage. He saw Reverend Emmett attempting to hold an infant. That would be a sight. It intrigued him to imagine the incongruity—to try and picture Reverend Emmett in this new context, the way he used to try picturing his seventh-grade teacher doing something so mundane as cooking breakfast for her husband.
Apparently, he thought, there were people in this world who simply never came clear. Reverend Emmett, Mr. Brant, the overlapping shifts of foreigners … In the end you had to accept that the day would never arrive when you finally understood what they were all about.
For some reason, this made him supremely happy. He pulled the covers around him and said a prayer of thanksgiving and fell headlong into sleep.
“This is proper gift,” the foreigner named Buck told Ian. Or Ian thought he told him; then a moment later he realized it must have been a question. “This is proper gift?”
He meant the white