Now here was Madeline, dead, and Tillie fine except for a small ugly scar on her left breast. Dora did not feel equipped to understand any of it. What of all those boys she’d held who’d been killed in the Pacific, at Omaha Beach, at sea? What of the other men she’d loved, dead now too, both of them? Bill’s partner had died right at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in front of a Winslow Homer painting, of a massive heart attack. If that hadn’t happened, it was possible that she would have run off with him.
Standing, Dora heard the low hum of a voice downstairs. She followed it, carefully holding the banister as she walked. There in the kitchen, hanging up the telephone, was Peter. He looked at her, weary.
“It could be any day now,” he said. “She’s dilated two centimeters. Her back hurts.”
Dora allowed herself to ask the question that had been on her lips since Melinda had first called back in the spring.
“Why the hell didn’t she get an abortion?” Dora said.
“She’s Baptist. You know. Super religious. She thinks she’ll go to hell for something like that.”
“That’s plain stupid,” Dora said. She sat across from Peter. “What kind of nincompoop is this girl?”
He laughed. For the first time it did not sound like a harsh bark. Dora laughed too.
SHE TOOK HIM to lunch at the Rue de L’Espoir. “You can’t sit waiting by the phone,” she told him as she hustled him into the car. “Having a baby can take a very long time. I was in labor twenty-eight hours with your father.”
Dora ordered her martini with her lunch. She always enjoyed a good martini.
“May I ask,” she said to her grandson, “how all this came to pass?”
“Come on, Gran,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “You know how girls get pregnant.”
“I’m not sure I know how teenage girls get pregnant by boys who don’t even love them,” she said. The martini was perfect, dry and cold.
“Love,” he said, practically spitting out the word. “What good is loving someone? Then they die, or leave, or don’t love you back. Big deal.”
“Well,” Dora said, “everyone is going to die. Even you. That’s one of humankind’s most foolish ideas, that everyone will die except you.”
“You know what my mother says about you?” Peter said, narrowing his eyes again. “She says you’re a tough old bird. Cold hearted too.”
Dora rolled her eyes. “How would Melinda know anything about me at all? As far as I can tell she was in a drug-induced haze until my son died. Then she got scared enough to straighten herself out, go to law school, and join the real world.” She leaned across her sandwich and added, “Am I cold hearted because I call things as I see them?”
Peter smiled. She was almost starting to like the boy. “Not at all.” He sighed. “I guess maybe I do love Rebecca a little. I mean, I love being with her and everything. Touching her and stuff.”
“Yes, well, that’s obvious,” Dora said, blushing a little. “You know, Tillie, your Aunt Tillie, I mean, got herself in similar trouble. Of course, she was older, in college, and she came home for Christmas with the news. I said, Tillie, you are far too young and immature to have a baby. I’ll arrange an abortion for you and that was that. Of course, Tillie agreed.”
Peter said, his mouth full of hamburger, “I thought she was . . . you know . . .”
“A lesbian. Yes. Apparently that wasn’t always the case.”
Peter swallowed and then looked at Dora, all seriousness. “Boy, you’ve had a sad life, haven’t you?”
Dora finished her martini. “Not at all. If you asked anyone about their life when they were seventy-eight years old it would be full of the same sorts of stories. I guarantee you. This baby of yours that’s getting born is just one of many blips in your lifetime.”
“But it breaks my heart,” Peter said.
“What does?” Dora asked him, surprised.
“That I’ll never even lay eyes on it. That I’ll grow old with a child in the world that I don’t even know. That I’m losing something important.”
Without warning, Dora felt tears spring to her eyes. Hastily, she closed them and pressed her fingers to her eyelids, hoping her grandson did not see her do it.
“I THOUGHT YOU said it took forever!” Peter shouted.
Dora was surprised to see his cheeks wet with tears, surprised that he would cry so freely.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and her own voice sounded weak and feeble.
Peter stood in the middle of the kitchen, still rumpled from sleep. His thin cotton striped pajamas and the way his cowlick stood straight up like a miniature bale of hay made him seem like a child rather than a young man who had just become a father.
“Sorry? That’s all you can say?”
His hands were placed on his hips, his jaw jutted out. Dora thought of Dan, how he would stand in this very spot in this very way and challenge her. The thought made her dizzy enough to drop, sighing, into a chair and hold her head in her hands.
“Her mother said she had it yesterday afternoon,” Peter was saying, his voice bordering on shrill. “The kid’s already like a day old practically.”
Dora shook her head. He would never see this child of his anyway. Hadn’t he told her that the girl wasn’t even going to hold it? That the adopting parents would be right there, waiting, ready to take the baby away with them?
“What can it possibly matter,” Dora said evenly, “that you got the news twelve hours after the fact?”