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His was the only vote against Denton and Rudolph pla
There was a knock on the door and Dorlacker said, “Come in.”
His secretary entered. “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” she said to Dorlacker, “but there’s a call for Mr. Jordache. I said that he was in a meeting, but …”
Rudolph was out of his chair and walking toward the secretary’s phone in the anteroom.
“Rudy,” Jean said. “I think you’d better come here. Quick. The pains are starting.” She sounded happy and unworried.
“I’ll be right there,” he said. “Make my excuses to President Dorlacker and the members of the board, please,” he said to the secretary. “I have to take my wife to the hospital. And will you please call the hospital and tell them to get in touch with Dr. Levine and say that Mrs. Jordache will be there in about a half hour.”
He ran out of the office and all the way to where his car was parked. He fumbled with the lock, cursing whoever had stolen the radio in New York City, and for a wild moment looked in the car parked next to his to see if by chance the keys were in the ignition. They weren’t. He went back to his own car. This time the locked turned and he jumped in and sped through the campus and down the quiet streets toward home.
Waiting all through the long day, holding Jean’s hand, Rudolph didn’t know how she could stand it. Dr. Levine was calm. It was normal, he said, for a first birth. Dr. Levine’s calmness made Rudolph nervy. Dr. Levine just dropped in casually from time to time during the day, as though it were just a routine social call. When he suggested that Rudolph go down to the hospital cafeteria to have some di
Dr. Levine had laughed. “Fathers have been known to eat, also, he had said. “They have to keep their strength up.”
Materialistic, casual bastard. If ever they were crazy enough to have another baby, they’d hire somebody who wasn’t a machine.
The child was born just before midnight. A girl. When Dr. Levine came out of the delivery room for a minute to tell Rudolph the news that mother and child were fine, Rudolph wanted to tell Dr. Levine that he loved him.
He walked beside the rolling bed on which Jean was being taken back to her room. She looked flushed and small and exhausted and when she tried to smile up at him the effort was too much for her.
“She’s going to sleep now,” Dr. Levine said. “You might as well go home.”
But before he went out of the room, she said, in a surprisingly strong voice, “Bring my Leica tomorrow, Rudy, please. I want to have a record of her first day.”
Dr. Levine took him to the nursery to see his daughter, asleep with five other infants, behind glass. Dr. Levine pointed her out. “There she is.”
All six infants looked alike. Six in one day. The endless flood. Obstetricians must be the most cynical men in the world.
The night was cold outside the hospital. It had been warm that morni
He knew he was too excited to sleep and he would have liked to call someone and have a drink in celebration of fatherhood, but it was past one o’clock now and he couldn’t awaken anybody.
He turned the heater on in the car and was warm by the time he stopped the car in his driveway. Martha had left the lights on to guide him home. He was crossing the front lawn when he saw the figure move in the shadow of the porch.
“Who’s there?” he called sharply.
The figure came slowly into the light. It was Virginia Calderwood, a scarf over her head, in a fur-trimmed gray coat.
“Oh, Christ, Virginia,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“I know all about it.” She came up and stood close to him, staring at him, her eyes large and dark in her pale, thin, pretty face. “I kept calling the hospital for news. I said I was your sister. I know everything. She’s had the child. My child.”
“Virginia, you’d better go home.” Rudolph stepped back a little, so that she couldn’t touch him. “If your father finds out that you’ve been hanging around here like this, he’ll …”
“I don’t care what anyone finds out,” Virginia said. “I’m not ashamed.”
“Let me drive you home,” Rudolph said. Let her own family cope with her madness, not him. And not on a night like this. “What you need is a good night’s sleep and you’ll …”
“I have no home,” Virginia said. “I belong in your arms. My father doesn’t even know I’m in town. I’m here, with you, where I belong.”
“You don’t belong here, Virginia,” Rudolph said despairingly. Devoted to sanity himself, he was helpless in the face of aberration. “I live here with my wife.”
“She lured you away from me,” Virginia said. “She came between one true love and another. I prayed for her to die in the hospital today.”
“Virginia!” He had not been really shocked by anything she had said or done before. He had been a
“Don’t try to treat me like a child,” she said. “I’m no child. And I have my own car parked down the block. I don’t need anyone to drive me anyplace.”
“Virginia,” he said, “I’m awfully tired and I really have to get some sleep. If there’s anything you really have to talk to me about, call me in the morning.”
“I want you to make love to me,” she said, standing there, staring at him, her hands sunk in the pockets of her coat, looking normal, everyday, neatly dressed. “I want you to make love to me tonight. I know you want to do it. I’ve seen it in your eyes from the begi
But by this time, he had opened the door and slammed and locked it behind him, leaving her raving there on the porch and beating with her fists on the door. He went to all the doors of the house and the windows on the ground floor and made sure they were locked. When he came back to the front door the hammering of small, mad, feminine fists had stopped. Luckily, Martha had slept through it all. He turned the light out on the porch, from inside. After he had called the hospital, he climbed wearily to the bedroom he shared with Jean.
Happy birthday, daughter, in this quiet, respectable town, he thought, just before he fell asleep.
It was Saturday afternoon in the country club bar, but early, and the bar was empty because most of the members were still out on the golf course and on the te
The clubhouse was a low, nondescript, rambling clapboard structure. The club was always on the point of going into bankruptcy and accepted anyone who paid the low initiation fees and had summer memberships for the people who came up only for the season. The bar was adorned with the faded photographs of people in long, fla