Son of the Morning Page 6

  After the second pregnancy, for some reason it became difficult for Opal to conceive a child. They tried—they tried relentlessly, desperately, with a kind of sardonic good humor. The house was so large, they loved each other so completely, surely they were meant to have many children?—at least four or five? Opal went through a spell, fortunately short-lived, of praying for a baby; she went not merely to morning services on Sunday, as everyone did (even, for a while, Dr. Vickery himself, when he believed his position in Marsena not yet solid enough to withstand charges of “atheism”), but to the Sunday-evening service, and the prayer meetings on Wednesday and Friday evenings. After some years she did manage to become pregnant—and then lost the baby, after a bout of influenza; then again, at the age of thirty-one, she became pregnant with the child Elsa, their last-born. And it struck her often as ironic that she, who had had to work so industriously at the business of becoming pregnant, should have a daughter, poor wretched Elsa, who should manage to conceive so very readily at the age of fifteen . . .

  “The odds against it are astronomical,” Thaddeus declared.

  Opal nodded and said nothing, and as he went on to argue that an abortion was not only justified under the circumstances but the only correct, moral thing to do, the only sane thing to do, she sat very still across from him (they were sharing a nightcap at the old table in the kitchen one midnight in November) and appeared to be listening respectfully enough; but when he was finished she said softly, “Yes—except the baby will be half Vickery. What of that?”

  NEVERTHELESS THADDEUS TRIED to talk his colleagues at the Derby General Hospital into approving an operation “to terminate pregnancy” for his daughter; he was convinced the abortion must take place and that no intelligent person, certainly no professional colleague of his, would wish to oppose it. But the Chief of Surgery refused to consider the case. He refused even to submit it to a committee. “It’s illegal in the state and too many people know about your daughter,” he told Thaddeus. “I’m sorry: but what can I do? The operation is illegal.”

  “I don’t understand,” Thaddeus said blankly. “What do you—what do you mean?”

  “Abortion is illegal. You know that as well as I do.”

  “But the girl was raped—”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. Abortion is illegal, we’d be vulnerable to arrest, the fetus is a living creature and—”

  “It isn’t living,” Thaddeus said. “It isn’t human.”

  “It’s living and it’s human. You’re tired: you’d better go home.”

  “Of course, of course it’s living, I meant only that—that—It isn’t human—It isn’t a human embryo,” Thaddeus said excitedly. “Not if we stop it in time. Don’t you see? It has no eyes yet, it’s mouthless, sexless, it’s hardly more than a worm, a slug, and if we stop it in time—”

  “You’d better go home. You don’t look well.”

  He drove to Port Oriskany, where he argued with the Chief of Surgery at the hospital there, a man who had interned with him and whom he had always liked. From there he went to talk with another former classmate, in private practice in Rosewood, an affluent suburb west of the city . . . and from there to a clinic in Port Oriskany where one of the physicians on the staff was, according to rumor, available for abortions if one could afford them. But he had no luck, he had no luck at all.

  “The problem is that everyone knows about her by now,” he told his wife angrily. “The entire county! They sympathize with me, they’re sorry as hell about Elsa, but they won’t do anything: they’re terrified of being arrested.”

  Opal nodded slowly. “You don’t blame them, do you?”

  “Yes, I blame them! For Christ’s sake,” Thaddeus said. “They might consider me . . . they might consider the hell I’ve been going through. Even if I could locate someone in another part of the state, or in another state, people here know about her and they would wonder . . . they would talk . . . Could I be arrested after the fact? Could Elsa? But there wouldn’t be any proof. Would there? Oh Christ,” he said, running both hands through his hair, half-sobbing, “if only she’d miscarry . . . You lost that baby, after all; it happens all the time; there was the Wreszin girl just the other week, lost it in the fifth month . . . The poor girl, how she bled! Like a pig she bled. Oh God. If Elsa . . . If only . . . If only everyone didn’t know about it we could act in secret, we could all go away for a week or two, and . . . Even if I couldn’t locate someone to do it I could do it myself, maybe . . . if I could bring myself to . . .”

  Opal stared at him. “That’s ridiculous,” she said sharply.

  “If we got desperate enough . . .”

  “There’s no we, it’s only you,” she said. “You’re desperate. I never heard of anything so barbaric—you, her own father!”

  “But if no one else is willing—”

  “Her own father! You’re crazy even to think of it!”

  “But Opal—”

  “Stop it. Shut up. Don’t say another word,” she cried. “Elsa can live with it and I can live with it. Don’t say another word.”

  “Live with—?”

  “You and Ashton are the ones—you’re the ones. Elsa can live with it. Don’t you say another word about doing it yourself! Doing it yourself,” she said mockingly. “As if I’d let you touch her.”

  Thaddeus stared at his wife. This fat, sallow woman with the frizzy hair and the bleary, slightly mad eyes—what had she to do with him, how did she dare oppose him? She was wearing what might have been a housedress or a dressing gown or a smock of some kind, shapeless and faded with many washings, and over this she wore one of his oldest, shabbiest coat sweaters; her cotton stockings were baggy at the knees; her shoes were unlaced. She gave off an odor of fury and desperation, an animal’s odor. He felt for an instant the dizzying conviction that he did not know her at all, that she was a creature who had come to life only in the past few weeks.

  “She isn’t going to have that baby,” Thaddeus said quietly. “She’s only a child. She knows nothing of life, she isn’t very bright—a sweet, warm, lovely girl—a mere child—”

  “Both my sisters were married when they were seventeen,” Opal said.

  “—an innocent child with her life all before her. Suppose she has the baby and puts it out for adoption—what about the rest of her life? She’ll never forget it. She’ll never be the same again. It would be a terrible, tragic mistake to let her have it. I know, I’ve seen this sort of thing happen many times—and in most cases the girl at least loves the father of the child, at least knows the father—”

  Opal was shaking her head from side to side. Her face was closed and ugly. “It’s too late,” she said. “It’s out of our hands.”

  “It isn’t too late, for Christ’s sake! It can’t be much more than the third week. There are many possibilities . . . but we must agree, Opal, we must agree that it’s . . . it’s . . . That we don’t want the poor girl to have that bastard child . . .”

  “It’s too late,” Opal said hollowly.

  And so they argued, and fell silent; and Thaddeus drove out again, seeking aid; but he had no luck. All things must be fulfilled according to Your law and so he had no luck, though he wept and stormed and threatened and cajoled and offered to pay large sums of money, until even those colleagues of his who sympathized with him and pitied him and wished to help him lost patience and refused to see him, saying the situation was a tragic one but could not be helped: such was the law of the nation, such was the law of the Lord.

  If he had succeeded . . . ?

  But the thought is impossible. Nathanael Vickery never born!

  Impossible.

  HE WAS NOT to deliver the baby either, because both his wife and his daughter forbade it. (Just as Elsa had forbidden him even to examine her that terrible night—staggering into the kitchen with blood glistening on her legs, her finger sprained, her heartbeat accelerated and erratic. No, don’t touch me! No. Not you.—Hysterical, unreasonable. She had allowed O
pal to take care of her, while he shouted instructions through the closed bedroom door. And afterward at the hospital, in the emergency ward of Derby General, she had not wanted him in the room with the doctor on duty. She had not wanted her father anywhere near.) A midwife from a nearby farm, a coarse, ignorant woman in her late fifties, was Elsa’s and her mother’s choice, and so Thaddeus sat out the interminable labor in his office, playing solitaire and sipping bourbon and leafing idly through old medical journals and newspapers (war was imminent but unreal as a fairy tale: what did Hitler and Belgium and Luxembourg and the Netherlands have to do with him?) and the slim, stained volumes of philosophy he had studied long ago, in another lifetime, when he had been moved by the melancholy glamour of Stoicism while having no awareness whatsoever of its truth.

  Elsa’s labor began shortly after noon and continued for the rest of the day and well into the night; it was to last some seventeen hours altogether. Thaddeus sipped bourbon, sitting unshaven at his cluttered desk, reading Epicurus, waiting. At the back of his mind arguments continued: she must have an abortion, she must be rid of the child. The disaster must be averted. But it was too late. It was June now, the very last day of June. The baby would be born at 5:30 A.M., undersized, not breathing, the umbilical cord twisted about its neck, a dead thing—evidently dead—until the midwife gave it a panicked shake and it came to life and began to gasp and choke and squawl. Downstairs its grandfather sat hunched in his pajamas and wrinkled bathrobe, reading by an inadequate lamp of the grim measured truths of the “hedonist” Epicurus, who declared that there is nothing nobler than to apply oneself to philosophy, and there is no greater goal for mankind than the attainment of ataraxia—tranquillity, equanimity, the repose of one’s soul. Dare one hope for joy?—for the feverish activity of joy? No. Better the vanquishment of all desire and all strife. The cessation of instinct itself.

  Upstairs the girl suffered her brainless sweaty agony, downstairs her father wiped at his eyes, muttering to himself. They had not allowed him to . . . They had not allowed him . . . He might have changed the inevitable course of events; he might have triumphed. Yet somehow it had not happened. The third week became the fourth, and then the fifth . . . And then it was the third month . . . And then the fourth, and the fifth, and . . . Deeply into winter; emerging from winter and into spring; a cruel tantalizing blizzardy spring; then heavy cold rains. Now it was the very end of June and summer had not yet begun. Unfair, it was unfair. They had not allowed him to scrape her womb clean. They had not allowed him near her, though she was his daughter and lived in his house, under his authority.

  In Lucretius he read with great interest that there is no hell (except earth itself), and there are no gods, no intrusion from another sphere into the lives of men. What is heaven? What is hell? Chimeras. Wisps of fancy. There is no spiritual world, only a materialist world in which soul and mind are evolved with the body, grow with the body, ail with the body, and finally die with the body’s death. There is nothing permanent: the universe consists of atoms: the law of laws is that of evolution and dissolution everywhere. Wiping at his eyes, Thaddeus Vickery discovered in these ancient, placid words a kind of beauty, a grave and noble simplicity he had not hoped to encounter in his lifetime. The infant Nathanael Vickery was born from between his mother’s bloody chafed thighs, as she pushed and pushed to free him from her, groaning aloud, wailing, and Thaddeus Vickery underscored with a shaky pencil a verse paraphrase of Lucretius he could recognize, even in his exhausted state, as mawkish, yet beautiful nevertheless, a wisdom he would never surrender:

  Globed from the atoms, falling slow or swift

  I see the suns, I see the systems lift

  Their forms; and even the systems and their suns

  Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

  IV

  In the beginning there was not the Word, nor words; only the bliss of Your presence. He knew it as light: liquid light. So radiant that it was black; blinding; a blackness ten times black; but light nonetheless, Your radiance.

  The infant Nathanael saw through his closed eyelids such realms of light!—and breathed with his tiny lungs the rich warm liquid radiance. It was dearer than blood to him, more precious by far than any physical substance. (Once born, in fact, he could not maintain himself easily in the coarseness of air; nor could he manage to take nourishment at his mother’s full, generous breast, though his lips made sucking motions and his distraught mother tried to force him to suck.) He never forgot that radiance, that bliss, and forever afterward in the depths of his soul he sang praises to You. Even in his darkest times he sang praises to You.

  He sings praises still.

  Like David in the wilderness of Judah: O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee . . . Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name.

  IN THIS NEW landscape how could he make his way? Yours was a realm of such intense light that there was no need to see; his eyes moved in a continual ecstasy, blinded, blind. He saw nothing, neither did he hear. Yet he knew. He knew all there was to be known. Your Kingdom: an infinity of Being. Souls unborn, yet-to-be-born, souls transparent and light-riddled as his own. Souls shifting and flowing through one another, light as the seed of dandelions . . . graceful as tiny rainbow-hued fish . . . fragile as butterflies . . . He was a witness to their agility as they passed through one another and wound about one another, causing small ripples of pleasure, small vibrations of pleasure, almost too intense to be borne. He was a witness to Your love, Your perfection, which was his own. Faceless, eyeless, he had no need to see, nor did You contemplate him—nor did You judge him, so long as he was Your own creature. The lifebeat, the jolting of the womb, the terrible constrictions of the womb’s wall, the struggle of his spirit as it was fashioned into flesh: the lightning flash of pain as the eyelids were pierced forever: the filling of the lungs, which seemed too small to contain all that they must contain: screams and yells and kicks and squawls and now a ruthless impatience to be born: so You breathed mightily into him and he gasped and choked and quickened with life, and fell headlong into an ecstasy of pain.

  In this new landscape he floundered, he groped; he was slippery as a fish and could not take hold. Enormous walls of blood-warmed flesh and milk-taut sacs and his mother’s strained, stretched, dead-white belly, skin paler than his own—how could he make his way, how could he take hold? You pulsed along his feathery, downy temples, and stared out sightlessly from his pale eyes, and slipped hot and near-scalding out of his body; You leaned close to him in a balloon-like mass of flesh, You held him to Your jarring heartbeat, his beet-red heated flesh squirming against Yours! And so it came about. And so it was. His lips and his toothless desperate gums closed about Your nipples, but without taking hold, and there was weeping, and sorrow, and discord, but in the end You flowed into him, the pure river of the water of Your spirit flowed into him, and he quickened yet again, and sprang into life.

  And his sacred name was whispered to him, that he should know himself as distinct from You, from even Your heartbeat in the marrow of his bone: Nathanael William Vickery. So it was then and ever shall be. His sacred name was whispered to him, that he should never forget Your gift of life, Your honeysweet nourishment; that he should never forget, in addition, how he was plunged among the others, many of them strangers who knew You not and scorned You, how he was flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood but in spirit Your creature, with the mark of Your blessing upon him: Nathanael William Vickery.

  BUT HE WAS to remember, too, and most vividly and irrefutably, the actual details of his birth. The hurtful air: a sudden chill envelope sticking greedily to his wet hide. The painful pricking of light against his eyes. (Not Your light, which is both glimmering and dark and wonderfully gentle, but the light of the outer jumbled world.) The taste of blood in his mouth. The hammering ringing
pulsating noise of his own anguished cry. (“Listen to him!” someone exclaimed. And the circle of glaring faces drew tighter.) Ah, and the astonishment of his first bath!—for though, afterward, years afterward, he was always to be ignored if he claimed, however hesitantly, that he did remember the hour of his birth, he did remember, with remarkable exactness, the lapping warmth of the water, the surprising cold and hardness of the porcelain basin, the pressure of hands—strangers’ hands—the soft caressing greedy feel of a sponge—for the sponge, larger than a grapefruit, with its queer porous texture, was as real to him, and as living, as the strangers themselves who treated him, from the first, with such startled love, such half-fearful concern, whispering in his presence as if he were incapable of hearing: “Ah, look at him! Look. So small. But so alive . . . He has come to us, hasn’t he? He is ours.”

  IT HAPPENED THAT, one January morning, Nathanael’s young mother was preparing a meal for him in the kitchen of her parents’ house, and a great uneasiness came upon her, for the house was poorly insulated and its walls could barely withstand the wind out of the northeast (sweeping down from the mountains so relentlessly, day after day), and even the kitchen, always the warmest room in the house, seemed drafty and uncomfortable. “It’s cold. Why is it so cold? I hate it here. Why is it so cold?” she said aloud. The baby Nathanael stared up at her; she held him loosely; the giant balloon of her face, the intense glistening eyes, the downturned mouth swayed above him. “Are you cold? Are you hungry? Yes? No? Why don’t you speak? Why don’t you cry? You don’t cry enough, says ugly old Aunt Hannah . . . But I think you do cry enough, I think you cry more than enough. I don’t want you noisier. Or hungrier. I am your Mamma and I know. Are you waking up more? Are you smelling your food? Mashed apricots, mashed peas. Are you hungry? Are you trying to smile—or trying to cry? Yes? No? Why do you stare at me like that? Do you know at last who I am?”

  The baby’s face strained as if something wished to speak through it. His tiny, perfectly formed lips worked soundlessly. And those eyes!—Elsa stared and stared at them. They were beautiful, they were like her own but not quite: like her own but not quite. Pale, pale blue and a bit of hazel, and some hazel-green, and in certain lights flecked with very dark brown. “Looks just like you,” the relatives said, “looks just like you,” smiling their falsehoods, their silly lies, staring at Elsa whom they pitied and hated and would never forgive. “Looks like all of you,” said Mrs. Stickney the other day, meaning Thaddeus and Opal as well as Elsa. Her scrawny homely horse-faced daughter Judith nodded her agreement, but when the girls were alone in Elsa’s room and Elsa wished to show her the lovely white cashmere baby’s shawl one of her aunts had knitted for her, Judith hardly glanced at it; giggled nervously when Elsa asked her about school; clearly wanted to escape. “I don’t like you and I never did,” Elsa whispered. “Go on out of my room! Get.”