Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [148]
“In America, every what you do is proper,” Manny said to Buck. They appeared to be resuming some previous argument. “Why you are always so affrighted?”
“Wrong,” Buck said. “They tell you is proper. Then catch your mistake. Ha!” he cried, startling Ian. “Pink ribbon. For boys should be blue.”
“We already have been discussing this,” Manny told him severely. “It is no problem.” He turned to Ian. “Pink or blue: is all the same to you. Correct?”
“Correct,” Ian assured him. “Come on inside.”
He stood back, holding open the door, and they carried the potty through the front hall and into the living room. Rita sat in the rocker with a large pillow beneath her. Daphne and Reverend Emmett shared the couch. “This is proper gift,” Buck told them. He and Manny set the potty on the floor.
“Well, certainly,” Rita said, “and it’s exactly what we wanted. Thank you, Buck and Manny.”
“Is also from Mike. Mike has been arrested.”
“Arrested?”
But before they could get to the bottom of this, Bobbeen called, “Yoo-hoo!” and let herself in. Her heels clattered across the hall and then she appeared in the doorway, wearing an orange pantsuit with a flurry of silk scarf tied artfully at her throat. She held both arms out at her sides; a vinyl purse dangled from one wrist. “Well?” she said. “Where is he? Where’d you put him? Where’s that precious little grandbaby?”
“Hi, Ma,” Rita said. “You remember Buck and Manny here, and Reverend Emmett.”
“Oh! Goodness yes, I do,” Bobbeen said, directing her squinty grimace solely to Reverend Emmett. He was standing now, looking uncomfortable, and Bobbeen stepped forward to grasp his hands in hers. “Wasn’t it Christian of you to take this time from your duties,” she said. Ian always suspected her of harboring a romantic interest in Reverend Emmett, but maybe she was just exceptionally devout. “Hey there, Daphne hon,” she added over her shoulder. She sat in the center of the couch, pulling Reverend Emmett down beside her. “I can’t believe I’m a grandma,” she told him. “Isn’t it a hoot? I sure don’t feel like a grandma.”
She didn’t look like one either, Reverend Emmett was supposed to say, but he just smiled hard and clutched both his kneecaps. Bobbeen studied him a moment. She patted the ends of her hair reflectively and then turned to Rita. “So where’s that little sweetie pie?” she asked.
“Ian was just on his way to bring him down,” Rita told her.
He was?
Before the foreigners arrived, Reverend Emmett and Daphne had been about to follow him upstairs and peek into the cradle. But now there were too many of them, Ian supposed, and so he nodded and left the room. He was a little out of practice, was the trouble. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to support a newborn’s head.
As he started up the stairs he heard Bobbeen say, “Now tell me, Reverend Emmett, do you-all hold with christening? Or just what, exactly?”
“We believe christening to be a superficial convention,” Reverend Emmett said.
“Well, of course it is,” she told him in a soothing tone.
“Not to say there’s anything wrong with it, you understand. It’s just that we don’t consider infants capable of … but if your church favors christening, why, I certainly—”
“Oh, what do I care about christening?” Bobbeen cried recklessly. “I think it’s real holy of you to cast off the superficial, Reverend.”
Ian went into his and Rita’s bedroom, where they were keeping the baby for the first few nights. It lay facedown in one corner of the cradle with its knees drawn up to its stomach and its nose pressed into the sheet. How could it manage to breathe that way? But Ian heard tiny sighing sounds. Long strands of fine black hair wisped past the neckband of the flannel gown. Ian felt a surge of pity for those scrawny,