March 1964
I
The snow started to fall several hours before her labor began. A few
flakes
first, in the dull gray late-afternoon sky, and then wind-driven swirls
and
eddies around the edges of their wide front ****ch. He stood by her side at
the window, watching sharp gusts of snow billow, then swirl and drift to
the
ground. All around the neighborhood, lights came on, and the ****d
branches
of the trees turned white.
After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the weather for wood he
had
piled against the garage the previous autumn. The air was bright and cold
against his face, and the snow in the driveway was already halfway to his
knees. He gathered logs, shaking off their soft white caps and carrying
them
inside. The kindling in the iron grate caught fire immediately, and he sat
for a time on the hearth, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the
flames
leap, blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly
through the darkness, as bright and thick as static in the cones of light
cast by the streetlights. By the time he rose and looked out the window,
their car had become a soft white hill on the edge of the street. Already
his footprints in the driveway had filled and disappeared.
He brushed ashes from his hands and sat on the sofa beside his wife, her
feet propped on pillows, her swollen ankles crossed, a copy of Dr. Spock
balanced on her belly. Absorbed, she licked her index finger absently each
time she turned a page. Her hands were slender, her fingers short and
sturdy, and she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read.
Watching
her, he felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife, that their
baby, due in just three weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, this
would be. They had been married just a year.
She looked up, smiling, when he tucked the blanket around her legs.
"You know, I've been wondering what it's like," she said. "Before we're
born, I mean. It's too bad we can't remember." She opened her robe and
pulled up the sweater she wore underneath, revealing a belly as round and
hard as a melon. She ran her hand across its smooth surface, firelight
playing across her skin, casting reddish gold onto her hair. "Do you
suppose
it's like being inside a great lantern? The book says light permeates my
skin, that the baby can already see."
"I don't know," he said.
She laughed. "Why not?" she asked. "You're the doctor."
"I'm just an orthopedic surgeon," he reminded her. "I could tell you the
ossification pattern for fetal bones, but that's about it." He lifted her
foot, both delicate and swollen inside the light blue sock, and began to
massage it gently: the powerful tarsal bone of her heel, the metatarsals
and
the phalanges, hidden beneath skin and densely layered muscles like a fan
about to open. Her breathing filled the quiet room, her foot warmed his
hands, and he imagined the perfect, secret, symmetry of bones. In
pregnancy
she seemed to him beautiful but fragile, fine blue veins faintly visible
through her pale white skin.
It had been an excellent pregnancy, without medical restrictions. Even so,
he had not been able to make love to her for several months. He found
himself wanting to protect her instead, to carry her up flights of stairs,
to wrap her in blankets, to bring her cups of custard. "I'm not an
invalid,"
she protested each time, laughing. "I'm not some fledgling you discovered
on
the lawn." Still, she was pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and
watched her as she slept: the flutter of her eyelids, the slow even
movement
of her chest, her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it
completely with his own.
She was eleven years younger than he was. He had first seen her not much
more than a year ago, as she rode up an escalator in a department store
downtown, one gray November Saturday while he was buying ties. He was
thirty-three years old and new to Lexington, Kentucky, and she had risen
out
of the crowd like some kind of vision, her blond hair swept back in an
elegant chignon, pearls glimmering at her throat and on her ears. She was
wearing a coat of dark green wool, and her skin was clear and pale. He
stepped onto the escalator, pu****ng his way upward through the crowd,
struggling to keep her in sight. She went to the fourth floor, lingerie
and
hosiery. When he tried to follow her through aisles dense with racks of
slips and brassieres and panties, all glimmering softly, a sales clerk in
a
navy blue dress with a white collar stopped him, smiling, to ask if she
could help. A robe, he said, scanning the aisles until he caught sight of
her hair, a dark green shoulder, her bent head revealing the elegant pale
curve of her neck. A robe for my sister who lives in New Orleans. He had
no
sister, of course, or any living family that he acknowledged.
The clerk disappeared and came back a moment later with three robes in
sturdy terry cloth. He chose blindly, hardly glancing down, taking the one
on top. Three sizes, the clerk was saying, and a better selection of
colors
next month, but he was already in the aisle, a coral-colored robe draped
over his arm, his shoes squeaking on the tiles as he moved impatiently
between the other shoppers to where she stood.
She was shuffling through the stacks of expensive stockings, sheer colors
****ning through slick cellophane windows: taupe, navy, a maroon as dark as
pig's blood. The sleeve of her green coat brushed his and he smelled her
perfume, something delicate and yet pervasive, something like the dense
pale
petals of lilacs outside the window of the student rooms he'd once
occupied
in Pittsburgh. The squat windows of his basement apartment were always
grimy, opaque with steel-factory soot and ash, but in the spring there
were
lilacs blooming, sprays of white and lavender pressing against the glass,
their scent drifting in like light.
He cleared his throat -- he could hardly breathe -- and held up the terry
cloth robe, but the clerk behind the counter was laughing, telling a joke,
and she did not notice him. When he cleared his throat again she glanced
at
him, annoyed, then nodded at her customer, now holding three thin packages
of stockings like giant playing cards in her hand.
"I'm afraid Miss Asher was here first," the clerk said, cool and haughty.
Their eyes met then, and he was startled to see they were the same dark
green as her coat. She was taking him in -- the solid tweed overcoat, his
face clean-shaven and flushed with cold, his trim fingernails. She smiled,
amused and faintly dismissive, gesturing to the robe on his arm.
"For your wife?" she asked. She spoke with what he recognized as a genteel
Kentucky accent, in this city of old money where such distinctions
mattered.
After just six months in town, he already knew this. "It's all right,
Jean,"
she went on, turning back to the clerk. "Go on and take him first. This
poor
man must feel lost and awkward, in here with all the lace."
"It's for my sister," he told her, desperate to reverse the bad impression
he was making. It had happened to him often here; he was too forward or
direct and gave offense. The robe slipped to the floor and he bent to pick
it up, his face flu****ng as he rose. Her gloves were lying on the glass,
her
bare hands folded lightly next to them. His discomfort seemed to soften
her,
for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.
He tried again. "I'm sorry. I don't seem to know what I'm doing. And I'm
in
a hurry. I'm a doctor. I'm late to the hospital."
Her smiled changed then, grew serious.
"I see," she said, turning back to the clerk. "Really, Jean, do take him
first."
She agreed to see him again, writing her name and phone number in the
perfect script she'd been taught in third grade, her teacher an ex-nun who
had engraved the rules of penman****p in her small charges. Each letter has
a
shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your
responsibility to make it perfect. Eight years old, pale and skinny, the
woman in the green coat who would become his wife had clenched her small
fingers around the pen and practiced cursive writing alone in her room,
hour
after hour, until she wrote with the exquisite fluidity of running water.
Later, listening to that story, he would imagine her head bent beneath the
lamplight, her fingers in a painful cluster around the pen, and he would
wonder at her tenacity, her belief in beauty and in the authoritative
voice
of the ex-nun. But on that day he did not know any of this. On that day he
carried the slip of paper in the pocket of his white coat through one
sickroom after another, remembering her letters flowing one into another
to
form the perfect shape of her name. He phoned her that same evening and
took
her to dinner the next night, and three months later they were married.
Now, in these last months of her pregnancy, the soft coral robe fit her
perfectly. She had found it packed away and had held it up to show him.
But
your sister died so long ago, she exclaimed, suddenly puzzled, and for an
instant he had frozen, smiling, the lie from a year before darting like a
dark bird through the room. Then he shrugged, sheepish. I had to say
something, he told her. I had to find a way to get your name. She smiled
then, and crossed the room and embraced him.
The snow fell. For the next few hours, they read and talked. Sometimes she
caught his hand and put it on her belly to feel the baby move. From time
to
time he got up to feed the fire, glancing out the window to see three
inches
on the ground, then five or six. The streets were softened and quiet, and
there were few cars.
At eleven she rose and went to bed. He stayed downstairs, reading the
latest
issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. He was known to be a very
good doctor, with a talent for diagnosis and a reputation for skillful
work.
He had graduated first in his class. Still, he was young enough and --
though he hid it very carefully -- unsure enough about his skills that he
studied in every spare moment, collecting each success he accomplished as
one more piece of evidence in his own favor. He felt himself to be an
aberration, born with a love for learning in a family absorbed in simply
scrambling to get by, day to day. They had seen education as an
unnecessary
luxury, a means to no certain end. Poor, when they went to the doctor at
all
it was to the clinic in Morgantown, fifty miles away. His memories of
those
rare trips were vivid, bouncing in the back of the borrowed pickup truck,
dust flying in their wake. The dancing road, his sister had called it,
from
her place in the cab with their parents. In Morgantown the rooms were dim,
the murky green or turquoise of pond water, and the doctors had been
hurried, brisk with them, distracted.
All these years later, he still had moments when he sensed the gaze of
those
doctors and felt himself to be an imposter, about to be unmasked by a
single
mistake. He knew his choice of specialties reflected this. Not for him the
random excitement of general medicine or the delicate risky plumbing of
the
heart. He dealt mostly with broken limbs, sculpting casts and viewing
X-rays, watching breaks slowly yet miraculously knit themselves back
together. He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white
heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith
in
something so solid and predictable.
He read well past midnight, until the words ****mmered senselessly on the
bright white pages, and then he tossed the journal on the coffee table and
got up to tend to the fire. He tamped the charred fire-laced logs into
embers, opened the damper fully, and closed the brass fireplace screen.
When
he turned off the lights, shards of fire glowed softly through layers of
ash
as delicate and white as the snow piled so high now on the ****ch railings
and the rhododendron bushes.
The stairs creaked with his weight. He paused by the nursery door,
studying
the shadowy shapes of the crib and the changing table, the stuffed animals
arranged on shelves. The walls were painted a pale sea green. His wife had
made the Mother Goose quilt that hung on the far wall, sewing with tiny
stitches, tearing out entire panels if she noted the slightest
imperfection.
A border of bears was stenciled just below the ceiling; she had done that
too.
On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pu****ng
aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on
the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that
rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence,
filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all
the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every
past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty
hidden
now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world
subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the
stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days
from
his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went
into
the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the
heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a
few
short hours, transformed.
He stood there for a long time, until he heard her moving quietly. He
found
her sitting on the edge of their bed, her head bent, her hands gripping
the
mattress.
"I think this is labor," she said, looking up. Her hair was loose, a
strand
caught on her lip. He brushed it back behind her ear. She shook her head
as
he sat beside her. "I don't know. I feel strange. This crampy feeling, it
comes and goes."
He helped her lie down on her side and then he lay down too, massaging her
back. "It's probably just false labor," he assured her. "It's three weeks
early, after all, and first babies are usually late."
This was true, he knew, he believed it as he spoke, and he was, in fact,
so
sure of it that after a time he drifted into sleep. He woke to find her
standing over the bed, shaking his shoulder. Her robe, her hair, looked
nearly white in the strange snowy light that filled their room.
"I've been timing them. Five minutes apart. They're strong, and I'm
scared."
He felt an inner surge then; excitement and fear tumbled through him like
foam pushed by a wave. But he had been trained to be calm in emergencies,
to
keep his emotions in check, so he was able to stand without any urgency,
take the watch, and walk with her, slowly and calmly, up and down the
hall.
When the contractions came she squeezed his hand so hard he felt as if the
bones in his fingers might fuse. The contractions were as she had said,
five
minutes apart, then four. He took the suitcase from the closet, feeling
numb
suddenly with the momentousness of these events, long expected but a
surprise all the same. He moved, as she did, but the world slowed to
stillness around them. He was acutely aware of every action, the way
breath
rushed against his tongue, the way her feet slid uncomfortably into the
only
shoes she could still wear, her swollen flesh making a ridge against the
dark gray leather. When he took her arm he felt strangely as if he himself
were suspended in the room, somewhere near the light fixture, watching
them
both from above, noting every nuance and detail: how she trembled with a
contraction, how his fingers closed so firmly and protectively around her
elbow. How outside, still, the snow was drifting down.
He helped her into her green wool coat, which hung unbuttoned, gaping
around
her belly. He found the leather gloves she'd been wearing when he first
saw
her, too. It seemed im****tant that these details be right. They stood
together on the ****ch for a moment, stunned by the soft white world.
"Wait here," he said, and went down the steps, breaking a path through the
drifts. The doors of the old car were frozen, and it took him several
minutes to get one open. A white cloud flew up, glittering, when the door
at
last swung back, and he scrambled on the floor of the backseat for the ice
scraper and brush. When he emerged his wife was leaning against a ****ch
pillar, her forehead on her arms. He understood in that moment both how
much
pain she was in and that the baby was really coming, coming that very
night.
He resisted a powerful urge to go to her and, instead, put all his energy
into freeing the car, warming first one bare hand and then the other
beneath
his armpits when the pain of the cold became too great, warming them but
never pausing, bru****ng snow from the wind****eld and the windows and the
hood, watching it scatter and disappear into the soft sea of white around
his calves.
"You didn't mention it would hurt this much," she said, when he reached
the
****ch. He put his arm around her shoulders and helped her down the steps.
"I
can walk," she insisted. "It's just when the pain comes."
"I know," he said, but he did not let her go.
When they reached the car she touched his arm and gestured to the house,
veiled with snow and glowing like a lantern in the darkness of the street.
"When we come back we'll have our baby with us," she said. "Our world will
never be the same."
The wind****eld wipers were frozen, and snow spilled down the back window
when he pulled into the street. He drove slowly, thinking how beautiful
Lexington was, the trees and bushes so heavy with snow. When he turned
onto
the main street the wheels hit ice and the car slid, briefly, fluidly,
across the intersection, coming to rest by a snowbank.
"We're fine," he announced, his head ru****ng. Fortunately, there wasn't
another car in sight. The steering wheel was as hard and cold as stone
beneath his bare hands. Now and then he wiped at the wind****eld with the
back of his hand, leaning to peer through the hole he'd made. "I called
Bentley before we left," he said, naming his colleague, an obstetrician.
"I
said to meet us at the office. We'll go there. It's closer."
She was silent for a moment, her hand gripping the dashboard as she
breathed
through a contraction. "As long as I don't have my baby in this old car,"
she managed at last, trying to joke. "You know how much I've always hated
it."
He smiled, but he knew her fear was real, and he shared it.
Copyright © 2006 Kim Edwards The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
Published by Penguin Books; May 2006;$14.00US/$18.50CAN; 0-14-303714-5
Author
Kim Edwards is the author of the short story collection The Secrets of the
Fire King, which was an alternate for the 1998 PEN/ Hemingway Award, and
she
has won both the Whiting Award and the Nelson Algren Award. A graduate of
the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she is an assistant professor of English at
the
University of Kentucky.
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