James was mischievous. He climbed up the Christmas tree, pulling it over and smashing all the glass. He hid under beds and bit his own hand to keep from giving himself away with giggles. Dick insisted on disciplining him—he didn’t share the liberal theories about child-rearing that Polly hewed to. This only meant that James kept an eye on Dick and saved his pranks for Polly. That was genius, wasn’t it?
The second time she got pregnant it was under the same circumstances, on a night when once again they made love after a long party and were nearly asleep, and she was completely relaxed. Again she felt the small explosion in her abdomen, and this time, Dick believed her—or said he did.
At the birth she insisted on only the smallest drop of knockout drugs. She’d never said so aloud, but she wanted a girl, very badly, and she wanted to be conscious when her daughter entered the world. But she had another disappointment in that regard, whom they named Knox. He was a pretty baby but colicky and miserable a lot of the time. He couldn’t settle for a nap and screamed when he was dressed, especially when she pulled socks onto his unblemished and unused feet. By age two he was more at ease, in no small part because James wanted a companion and taught Knox how to play. Polly was grateful for that, and a bit jealous. Her fervent domesticity also yearned for companionship. Daily she attended to her plants, watering, fertilizing, stroking, and talking to them; she poked a needle through a needlepoint canvas, taking on a years-long project of making chair seats for both her dining rooms; she made birthday cards, Christmas cards, Christmas ornaments far beyond ho-hum orange and clove sachets and popcorn strings; and she decorated carefully, with much thought going into proportion and color. The boys swirled around her whatever her pursuit, happy to be in her orbit but without any interest whatsoever in helping her, or learning. She taught them the names of every bird that came to both houses, and all the flowers both wild and cultivated, but they only learned robin, blue jay, hawk, eagle, daffodil, hydrangea, hawkweed. If she had a daughter, it would be different. A daughter would stitch her into a long line of women who had quietly made the world beautiful, stretching back to Eve. A daughter would make fresh stitches.
Pregnant again! She cast spells for a girl, but the pregnancy felt no different than the other two before it, and she prepared herself to be a good sport in the delivery room. She was in Philadelphia when the baby made it known it was time. She had the normal pains in the normal way and didn’t think anything of it and went to the hospital when her water broke and liquid rushed down her legs. She waited to be told when to push, but many faces peered and poked at her, and when she asked what was going on, no one told her. Instead voices barked overhead and she was wheeled swiftly into a light-flooded room where metal chimed and rattled and her doctor introduced another doctor and a black saddle plunged to her face and she slipped from consciousness.
When she woke, she understood nothing. Frantically she scrabbled back through recent memory to figure out where she was, but she couldn’t find her name. She lay in limbo for eons. Dinosaurs were born and their species extinguished. Leaves became coal. Magnificent civilzations sank under the ground. Then a woman in white handed her a small creature—b-a-b-y, she spelled out in her mind—and asked her what she’d name him. Him. A man came in and handed her flowers. They gave her a glass cylinder and showed her how to plug it into the baby’s mouth. Bottle! The word announced itself and she spoke it aloud. Yes, the baby’s bottle, the milk warmed up. How did she feel?
She tried to sit up, and they pushed her back against the pillow. You had a caesarian section, Polly. You couldn’t get the baby out yourself.
She reached down and discovered a big bandage across her lower abdomen. Everyone told her that all that mattered was that she had a healthy baby boy. But what about her? She’d failed miserably and had been horribly violated. The slicing of her uterus gave her nightmares. Ten days after they released her, five days after the baby was “born,” she was back in the hospital with a high fever. Her belly had puffed up into a bready dome. You have a puerperal infection. Childbed fever. Women died of it in the past, but we can treat it now, so you’re lucky. Who knows how you got it, it didn’t happen here, the hospital is sterile. Maybe you did something at home? Do you always wash your hands after using the bathroom?
And she’d believed her doctor was a good man.
Her parents and Dick and other friends came to see her, but she was too depressed to speak. Then Agnes came, and Polly wanted to talk.
“You have to get better, that’s all,” Agnes said.
“I feel as though I’m being punished for wanting a girl so much.”
“You could have died. Your blood was poisoned and it could have gone all through your whole body.”
“Why can’t I have a girl? Everyone I know has a girl.”
“I don’t,” Agnes said.
“You know what I mean. I have so much knowledge, and who am I going to share it with? How to arrange flowers, how to divide hosta, how to set a table for every occasion. Boys don’t want to know any of that.”
“Polly, you sound spoiled, and you’re not spoiled. So what you don’t have a girl? You have a new child, a healthy child, and you are sick. Focus on those two things. You have plenty of time to feel sorry for yourself, though don’t do it around me.”
“You’re right,” Polly said. “You’re right. Thank you, my friend.”
“Call me anytime. Even in the middle of the night, when I’m out flying on my broom,” Agnes said.
Polly giggled.
When Dick came in later, he sat down by the bed and took her hand.
“Polly, I’ve made a decision. There will be no more children,” he said. “I’m not risking this again. This boy is the last.”
He was just upset, worried about her. “I want to call him Theodore,” she said. “After my brother. But we’ll call him Theo rather than Teddy.”
“Fine by me. From now on we’ll be a lot more careful.”
“Even after parties?” She grinned at him.
He looked at her quizzically, and then kissed her on the forehead. “You just rest, my dear. We’ll talk when you’re well.”
An unexpected feeling developed as Polly got to know the tiny infant. She adored him in a way she’d never adored anything before. Here was her own child, her true love. She felt no guilt about this deep affinity. She loved James and Knox unconditionally. It was just that Theo and she knew each other, so well that their intimacy embodied a paradox—they constantly surprised each other. She never had the confounded feeling with him that she often got with Dick and James and Knox of not being able to make sense of their actions. She had to adapt to them, but not Theo. From his first days on earth they moved forward in tandem. Bailey sized up the situation quickly, and attended to Polly more than to the baby, hovering around the two of them, protecting them from the rest of the world. Polly now felt she had more than a purpose, she had a destiny. It went beyond being a mother, into the realm of souls.
What was a soul mate? She had dreams, strange dreams of music she’d never before heard that required instruments that didn’t even exist. In one dream a filament connected each person on earth to a speck in the universe. In another dream, she was plunged into the barrenness that preceded existence. It was impossible to put it into words, but she was determined to do so, not just leave it to tumble around inside of her, amounting to nothing. But not the same nothing that she was trying to describe. Her nothingness was something. Even the word nothing was something! She decided to figure out how to talk about it.