The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [124]
You used to be such good fun, Jin. Now you’re degenerating into just a mother, like all the rest.’
‘I am a mother,’ Virginia said, and it still sounded odd to say it. ‘How can I help worrying? If she just wouldn’t cry so much, it wouldn’t be so bad.’
‘You’re telling me,’ Joe said bitterly. The baby’s crying was increasingly on his nerves. Sometimes when he was in the bar, he would listen to the piteous, penetrating sound from above for as long as he could stand, and then he would run up the stairs and shout angrily at Virginia: ‘For God’s sake, can’t you keep that child quiet? You’ll drive everybody out of here before you’re done with it!’
People in the bar would make jokes about the child’s crying, which could plainly be heard when there was not a noisy crowd. ‘Safety-pin trouble?’ they would ask, raising their eyes to the ceiling, or: ‘Why don’t you go up and slap the poor little brute on the back?’ – manufacturing a belch.
‘The kid’s all right,’ Joe would say curtly. Although these were the same people to whom he had boasted when Jenny was born, he now resented their domestic allusions, which seemed to minimize him into the figure of a henpecked father, pacing the floor in the small hours with a yelling baby.
Before the baby was born, Virginia was always waiting quietly for him to come upstairs after the bar closed. Now she nearly always seemed to be busy with the baby. Sometimes when he was upstairs after closing-time, he would grow so irritated by the sight of Virginia anxiously trying to make the baby feed at her breast, that he would fling off downstairs and go out to a club, or spend the rest of the evening drinking by himself in the bar.
Weighing the baby to see how much she had taken, mixing the bottle to supplement the unsuccessful breast-feeding, Virginia would try to puzzle out why Joe felt like that. She had always understood that a man liked to see his wife feeding his baby. Joe hated to see it. He thought that Virginia would spoil her figure. He wanted her body to be all for him, not shared even with their baby. Although the conception of Jenny had satisfied his creative pride, he had never really wanted her. Virginia knew that. Now that Jenny was here, he was jealous of her because she had turned Virginia into part wife, part mother, instead of all wife and lover.
Understanding this, Virginia tried to be extra loving to Joe, so that he should not feel left out of this mysterious, unimagined intimacy between herself and Jenny. She had never known anything like the tenderness she felt towards the restless, difficult child, with the fuzz of black hair and the speck of nose and the mouth that folded so sweetly in slumber, and protested so violently much of the time she was awake. When Virginia held her in her arms, and the tiny, groping hands clutched at her, it seemed almost as though, by the very fact of her beloved existence, the baby were protecting her, instead of she protecting the baby.
Since she could not discuss the baby’s ups and downs with Joe, Virginia discussed them with Lennie, who was always ready to listen. If Joe went out during the day, Lennie would often stump up the stairs to hang over the crib and gaze with wonder at the tiny child. He bought impossible presents for her, and would nearly break his heart trying to make the feeble hand grasp a tin trumpet or a golliwog. When Virginia let him pick Jenny up, he would sit motionless on the low chair, his feet carefully planted, his short leg trembling a little, his pointed, freckled face absorbed, holding his breath in tenderness and wonder at the feeling it gave him to have the baby in his arms.
Joe came home one afternoon and found him holding the baby like this while Virginia was downstairs in the kitchen. Jenny had been quiet, staring at Lennie with calmly unfocused eyes. When Virginia heard her cry, she ran upstairs to find that Joe had snatched her away, and was holding her awkwardly, while