They did not go to Italy that summer. It was the first time since 1949 that Pat had spent a whole summer in England. They let the Florentine house through an agency. They had wanted to go, despite everything, but Pat had to acknowledge that she just wasn’t well enough. She spent most of June hardly moving from bed, doing nothing but caring for the baby. They called her Flossie, or the Little Tyrant, and joked that she had been born knowing only the imperative mood.
They worried about fallout. Milk from hill regions was condemned after checking for radioactivity. “At least they’re checking,” Bee said. “Some of my friends are buying home Geiger counters, but I think that’s paranoid. But maybe we could think about getting a cow. It would be nice to be self-sufficient. In case.”
Pat fed Flossie herself. Her breasts, which she had always felt were embarrassingly small, were still smaller than Bee’s even when swollen, but she had no shortage of milk. Pictures of evacuated children from the Ukraine were on television—both women wept when they saw them. “Damn hormones,” Bee said, wiping her eyes. “I’d have been upset, but I’d never have cried, before.”
“Me too,” Pat agreed, and they laughed at themselves.
“Mind you, I hated being evacuated,” Bee said.
“I just went with the school. It wasn’t too bad,” Pat said. “But we didn’t have to go to new countries. Those poor kids, going away to East Germany and Hungary and Russia.”
Bee’s baby was born in September. She was a girl. Pat could not be with her for the birth, and she waited at home with baby Flossie. They had already discussed names.
“If it’s a girl, Marie Patricia,” Bee said. “After Marie Curie, of course.”
“And if it’s a boy?” Pat asked. She was lying in bed, with Flossie sucking hard at her breast and clenching and unclenching her fists as she did it, which always made both her mothers smile.
“I don’t know. Patrick sounds so Irish.”
“Not Patrick,” Pat agreed. “If Floss had been a boy I was thinking of Marsilio.”
“Marsilio!” Bee hesitated. “It would do in Italy, and of course Ficino, but in England? Maybe as his second name?”
“It’s up to you,” Pat said.
“Philip Marsilio?” Bee tried. “Philip Marsilio Dickinson. What do you think?”
“Lovely,” Pat said. “Why Philip?”
“After Dr. Harrington,” Bee said. “He got me that fellowship and took a chance on me, and not just me. He believes women should be in science. And he loves plants. And he has arranged the calendar so that I get the sabbatical to write the plant disease book this autumn, without ever saying a word about why.”
“I thought you said plant people took no notice of mammalian biology?” Pat teased, moving Flossie to the other nipple.
“That’s his way of taking no notice in a quietly supportive way,” Bee said.
So Pat was expecting Marie, and was astonished when Bee told her instead that the baby, nine pounds two ounces, was Jennifer Patricia. “What happened to Marie Curie?” she asked.
“Jennifer, after the midwife,” Bee said. “She was amazing. She held my hand while I was pushing. If only you could have been there to hold my other hand! Jennifer is a good name, look at her. Doesn’t she look like a Jenny to you?”
“Of course she does,” Pat said, again overwhelmed with tenderness and love.
Bee and Jenny came home from the hospital. Pat drove and Bee sat in the passenger seat, with both babies in carry cots wedged into the back seat. “We may need a bigger car,” Pat said when they got home and levered the carry cots out. Her incision barely hurt now, though at first she had been almost incapacitated by it.
It was hard having two babies on different schedules. They both fed both babies indiscriminately—their plan to each feed their own didn’t outlast Jenny’s first day at home when Pat automatically put her to her breast while Bee was sleeping exhaustedly. Neither of them ever had enough sleep. “We should have scheduled this better,” Bee said, getting out of bed in the middle of the night as one crying baby woke the other.
“It’s terrible,” Pat agreed. “But it’s also wonderful.”
Bee laughed and padded off, coming back with a baby under each arm. “Flossie’s getting heavy,” she said.
“And Jenny always was heavy,” Pat agreed.