the music had had to travel above miles of railroad tracks and deserted superhighways, past coal yards and auto dumps, oil derricks and factory smokestacks and electrical transformers. She switched off the radio and pulled Peter’s sleeping bag up around his shoulders. She checked on the baby in her crib. Then she returned to bed, shivering slightly, and huddled against Joe’s hulking back for warmth.
“Mack the Knife,” Sam used to sing, and “Greenfields”—yes, that had been around. She remembered how operatic he’d get, rolling his eyes, pounding his chest, trying to make her laugh. (She’d been an earnest young medical student, in those days.) Then she remembered the tender, aching line that the examining table had pressed across the mound of the baby, when Jenny was an intern bending over a patient. Six months pregnant, seven months … By her eighth month the marriage was finished, and Jenny was walking around in a daze. She saw that she had always been doomed to fail, had been unlovable, had lacked some singular quality that would keep a husband. She had never known this consciously, before, but the pain she felt was eerily familiar — like a suspicion, long held, at last confirmed.
She wore uniforms designed for male physicians with forty-inch waists; there were no maternity lab coats. On rounds, professors would give her doubtful glances and ask if she were sure she was up to this. Sympathetic nurses brought her so many cups of coffee that she thought she would float away. One of those nurses stayed with her through most of her labor. Other women had their husbands, but Jenny had Rosa Perez, who let her squeeze her fingers as hard as needed and never said a word of complaint.
And what was the name of that neighbor who used to watch the baby? Mary something — Mary Lee, Mary Lou — some fellow intern’s wife, as poor as Jenny and the mother of two children under two. She baby-sat for a pittance, but even that was more than Jenny could afford. And the schedule! Months of nights on duty, thirty-six hours on call and twelve off, emergency room, obstetrics, trauma surgery … and her residency was not much better. Meanwhile, Becky changed from an infant to a little girl, an outsider really, a lively child with Sam Wiley’s snapping black eyes, unrelated to Jenny. Though it was a shock, sometimes, to see her give that level, considering stare so typical of the Tulls. Was it possible, after all, that this small stranger might constitute a family? She learned to walk; she learned to talk. “No!” she would say, in her firm, spunky voice; and Jenny, trying to stay awake at three in the morning or three in the afternoon, whatever bit of time they had together, dropped her head in her hands. “No!” said Becky, and Jenny hauled off and slapped her hard across the mouth, then shook her till her head lolled, then flung her aside and ran out of the apartment to … where? (A movie, perhaps?) In those days, objects wobbled and grew extra edges. She was so exhausted that the sight of her patients’ white pillows could mesmerize her. Sounds were thick, as if underwater. Words on a chart were meaningless — so many k’s and g’s, such a choppy language English was, short syllables, clumps of consonants, she’d never noticed; like Icelandic, maybe, or Eskimo. She slammed Becky’s face into her Peter Rabbit dinner plate and gave her a bloody nose. She yanked a handful of her hair. All of her childhood returned to her: her mother’s blows and slaps and curses, her mother’s pointed fingernails digging into Jenny’s arm, her mother shrieking, “Guttersnipe! Ugly little rodent!” and some scrap of memory — she couldn’t quite place it — Cody catching hold of Pearl’s wrist and fending her off while Jenny shrank against the wall.
Was this what it came to — that you never could escape? That certain things were doomed to continue, generation after generation? She failed to see a curb and sprained her ankle, hobbled to work in agony. She misdiagnosed a case of viral pneumonia. She let a greenstick fracture slip right past her. She brought Becky a drink of water in the middle of the night and then suddenly, without the slightest intention, screamed, “Take it! Take it!” and threw the cup into Becky’s face. Becky shivered and caught her breath for hours afterward, even in her sleep, though Jenny held her tightly on her lap.
Then her mother called from Baltimore and said, “Jenny? Don’t you write your family any more?”
“Well, I’ve been so busy,” Jenny meant to say. Or: “Leave me alone, I remember all about you. It’s all come back. Write? Why should I write? You’ve damaged me; you’ve injured me. Why would I want to write?”
Instead, she started … not crying, exactly, but something worse. She was torn by dry, ragged sobs; she ran out of air; there was a grating sound in her chest. Her mother said, calmly, “Jenny, hang up. You know that couch in your living room? Go lie down on it. I’ll be there just as soon as Ezra can drive me.”
Pearl stayed two weeks, using all of her vacation time. The first thing she did was call Jenny’s hospital and arrange for sick leave. Then she set about putting the world in order again. She smoothed clean sheets on Jenny’s bed, brought her tea and bracing broths, shampooed her hair, placed flowers on her bureau. Becky, who had hardly seen her grandmother till now, fell in love with her. Pearl called Becky “Rebecca” and treated her formally, respectfully, as if she were not quite sure how much she was allowed. Every morning she walked Becky to the playground and swung her on the swings. In the afternoon they went shopping together. She bought Becky an old- fashioned dress that made her look solemn and reasonable. She bought picture books — nursery rhymes and fairy tales and
Sundays, when his restaurant closed, Ezra drove up from Baltimore. He was not, in spite of his innocent face, an open sort of person, and rather than speak outright of Jenny’s new breakability he kept smiling serenely at some point just beyond her. She took comfort from this. There was already too much openness in the world, she felt — everyone raging and weeping and rejoicing. She imagined that Ezra was not subject to the ups and downs that jolted other people. She liked to have him read the papers to her (trouble in Honduras, trouble in Saigon, natural disasters in Haiti and Cuba and Italy) while she listened from a nest of deep blue blankets and a nightgown still warm from her mother’s iron.
On the second weekend, Cody blew in from wherever he’d vanished to most recently. He traveled on a breeze of energy and money; Jenny was impressed. He used her telephone for two hours like the wheeler-dealer he always was and arranged to pay for a full-time sitter, a slim young woman named Delilah Greening who turned out to be better help than Jenny would ever have again. Then he slung his suit coat over one shoulder, gave her a little salute, and was gone.
She slept, sometimes, for twelve and fourteen hours straight. She woke dislocated, frightened by the sunlit, tickling silence of the apartment. She mixed up dreams and real life. “How did it happen—?” she might ask her mother, before she remembered that it hadn’t happened (the Shriners’ parade through her bedroom, the elderly gentleman hanging by his heels from her curtain rod like a piece of fruit). Sometimes at night, voices came vividly out of the dark. “Dr. Tull. Dr. Tull,” they’d say, urgently, officially. Or, “Six hundred fifty milligrams of quinine sulfate …” Her own pulse thudded in her eardrums. She held her hand toward the light from the streetlamp and marveled at how white and bloodless she had become.
When her mother left and Delilah arrived, Jenny got up and returned to work. For a while, she carried herself as gently as a cup of liquid. She kept level and steady, careful not to spill over. But she was fine, she saw; she really was fine. Weekends, her mother and Ezra paid brief visits, or Jenny took Becky down to Baltimore on the train. They both dressed up for these trips and sat very still so as not to muss their clothes. Jenny felt purified, like someone who had been drained by a dangerous fever.
And the following summer, when she could have accepted more lucrative offers in Philadelphia or Newark, she chose Baltimore instead. She joined two older pediatricians, entered Becky in nursery school, and shortly thereafter purchased her Bolton Hill row house. She continued to feel fragile, though. She went on guarding a trembly, fluid center. Sometimes, loud noises made her heart race — her mother speaking her name without warning, or the telephone jangling late at night. Then she would take herself in hand. She would remind herself to draw back, to loosen hold. It seemed to her that the people she admired (one of her partners, who was a wry, funny man named Dan Charles; and her brother Ezra; and her neighbor Leah Hume) had this in common: they gazed at the world from a distance. There was something sheeted about them — some obliqueness that made them difficult to grasp. Dan, for instance, kept up such a steady, easy banter that you never could ask him about his wife, who was forever in and out of mental institutions. And Leah: she could laugh off the repeated failures of her crazy business ventures like so many pratfalls. How untouched she looked, and how untouchable, chuckling to herself and covering her mouth with a shapely, badly kept hand! Jenny studied her; you could almost say she took notes. She was learning how to make it through life on a slant. She was trying to lose her intensity.
“You’ve changed,” her mother said (all intensity herself). “You’ve grown so different, Jenny. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong, but
