Ten Thousand Saints

Twenty-One





When Eliza opened her eyes, she saw their faces from left to right. Even in her state of disorientation, her brain processed the people sitting at her bedside in its trained latitudinal sequence. Jude, with a black eye, in a hospital gown. Beside him, with a suntan, Les. On the other side of the bed, holding a paper cup of tea stained with her fuchsia lipstick, her mother.

“Is the baby okay?”

Les tossed his crossword onto Eliza’s blanketed legs. “The patient speaks.”

Eliza’s voice was groggy, her limbs heavy. An IV was taped to the back of her hand, a plastic clip attached to her finger. And there was something strapped to her belly, a belt. She let her eyelids flutter closed. She remembered all the commotion in the park, a fight, screaming for the boys to get off of Jude. She didn’t remember anything after that. When she opened her eyes, Jude averted his. She remembered kissing him in her bed.

“Right as rain, darling.” Di picked up Eliza’s hand and stamped her knuckles with her lipstick. “The heart rate was up for a while, but now it’s stable. They gave you something to sleep.”

Yes, she had slept. She’d slept better than she had in months.

“In fact, you’ve been asleep for seven years,” Les said. “This is actually your fourth child.”

“Les, what are you doing here?”

“You were hit in the head last night, darling,” said her mother. “By a police officer. You have a concussion.”

“You were concussed,” Les added, miming the swing of the nightstick.

Jude said, “You passed out in the ambulance.”

“Ambulance?”

“Tell her,” Jude said.

“Tell me what?”

“Tell you nothing. She’s awake now, gentlemen. You can go.”

“I think she’s going to find out,” Les said.

Jude rubbed his scalp. “They shaved your head.”

“Just part of it, darling, for the stitches.”

Eliza lifted her hand to her head. It was wrapped in a bandage.

“Thank you very much, Jude, you can take your father to the waiting room now.”

Jude and Les rose to their feet. Les said, “You look great, sweetheart.”

“Honestly, it’s not much,” said her mother after they left the room. “It’s just a patch over your ear. You remember Randall, the one who did the stage makeup before Angie. His lover is a wigmaker. He’s got this fabulous shop in SoHo with nothing but beautiful wigs made from human hair. We’ll find you something beautiful.”

Eliza traced the bandage. Her head didn’t hurt; she couldn’t feel a thing.

“We won’t waste our time worrying about hair. Hair grows back. You’re safe, and the baby’s safe. We should be glad all we have to worry about is a little hair.”

“I don’t care about my hair, Mom.”

It had been more than three months since she’d seen her mother. Her makeup was carefully applied, her hair pulled back tightly in its braid. The only thing that was different was the faint glaze of dark hair above her lip, dusty with powder. She’d waxed her mustache for years. Without Les to kiss good night—or without Eliza—she’d stopped.

“I moved back home,” Eliza said. “We were trying to reach you.”

“I know, my darling. I know everything.”

Eliza scooted up in the bed. “Jude told you? You didn’t give him a hard time, did you?”

“I certainly did.”

Di was pleased to fill in the details. She knew, after weeks of false leads, that they had been in Vermont. She knew, after a weeks-long wild-goose chase to Chicago, where Jude had called her at her hotel, that they had not been in Chicago. She knew a bad private investigator. She didn’t know who was a bigger piece of work: Les or his ex-wife. She knew that, apart from her first trip to the ER and her present one, Eliza had not seen a doctor. She knew about the six weeks of cocaine and the marijuana and now the doctor and nurse did, too. She knew about Johnny’s indiscretion. She knew what had happened in the park, and if Eliza thought she wasn’t going to bring the fattest lawsuit the City of New York had ever seen, she’d better think again.

She took a long sip of tea.

She knew that Eliza had decided to give up the baby. Was that right?

Eliza, petting the tape on the back of her hand, nodded.

Her mother petted the back of Eliza’s hand, too. She thought that was a wise and brave choice. She knew that Eliza had missed her and that Eliza knew she’d missed her, too. She knew that Eliza was sorry and that Eliza knew she was sorry, too.

The nurse came in then. “Someone’s awake!” She padded around in her sneakers, checking monitors, the IV. They wanted to keep her here one more night, she said, to make sure her brain didn’t swell. While the nurse adjusted the strap on her belly, Eliza looked at the ceiling, staring at the white lights until tears burned in her eyes. The nurse held up the banner of paper spilling out of one of the machines. “You see these dips and peaks?” she asked, tracing them with her finger. Eliza squinted at the graph. “This is your baby’s heartbeat. It’s following a nice pattern now.”

Eliza cleared her throat. “The drugs I did—did they hurt the baby?”

The nurse hung her clipboard at the end of Eliza’s bed. Di gazed into her tea. “There’s no way to know yet, honey. You quit the hard stuff in the first trimester—that’s what counts.”

After the nurse left the room, Di took up Eliza’s hand and began gently, absently pushing back each of her cuticles. Always file your nails in one direction, so they don’t tear. If you tap your nails on a table, they’ll grow faster. Eliza closed her eyes. Maybe it was the sleeping pill. She felt light, as though she were floating in her hospital bed on a slow-moving river.

“Mom? I don’t think you quite know everything.”

Her mother stopped massaging.

Eliza said, “Johnny’s not the father.”

Her mother sat up straight in her chair, spilling her tea in her lap.

I knew it. I knew that kid was acting.” Les punched the button with the side of his fist, and a can of Coke clunked down through the vending machine. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, champ. Why cover it up?” He extracted the can, opened it, and took a long sip.

“It’s not me,” Jude said. “Why do you always think it’s me?”

“No? Come on. I’ve heard the way you talk about her. You’re telling me you two haven’t . . . ?”

“We haven’t, we haven’t.” Did everyone think they had? Why was Jude the last one to assume the two of them were a possibility?

Les leaned against the vending machine. They were in an alcove of the waiting room. No one could hear them. “Who’s the daddy, then?”

Jude told him.

Les chewed over the name, sliding it around on his tongue, trying to recall who Teddy was exactly, how he might fit in. “Teddy. Yes. That makes sense, now that you mention it. When she went to visit you, right?” He shook his head: what a shame.

“We thought if we said Johnny was the father, Di would let her keep the baby. They could raise it together.” The opposite now seemed just as likely. Would Di have insisted Eliza give up a dead boy’s baby?

“You know, Lady Di was pregnant more than once. She had some . . . procedures.” Les slurped his Coke, his eyes distant. “One of them was Daniel’s. Her husband. It was before they were married. They were young, they weren’t ready.” He was speaking with some bitterness, but Jude didn’t think it was the abortion he was bitter about. “I know she regretted it, after he died. Wanted a son. I bet she wished she could bring her husband back to life.”

They strolled into the waiting room and took two seats in front of the TV. The news. Jerry Falwell endorsing Vice President Bush. “Dipshits,” Les muttered, crossing his legs, ankle to knee. He’d arrived on the red-eye from San Francisco that morning, after Harriet had called him, worried about Jude. Eliza’s hospitalization was a surprise, and Les was happy to take advantage of the coincidence. Concerned parent, times two. Jude was inclined to resent him for this posture, as he had the last time they were stuck in a hospital waiting room together. But his dad had flown across the country. He’d come to his rescue again.

But who did Jude need rescuing from? Not himself this time. He was not on drugs. Not Tory or Hippie, who were hundreds of miles away. Not the cops who had bruised a few of his ribs but had saved the bulk of their bruising for Eliza. Not Di anymore. Eliza had made her decision, and he doubted there was anything anyone could do to change it. Jude saw himself now for what he was: inessential. He was the tissue that bound the essential members together—Teddy, Johnny, Eliza, those who were joined by blood or by sex. Jude was joined to no one by neither. He was beyond rescue.

Now the news was showing footage of Tompkins. The cops had yielded around six this morning, leaving the park to the remaining protestors. Dozens arrested, dozens injured. A skirmish, a melee. In the daylight, the park looked no more ruined than usual; for the first time Jude could remember, people were pushing brooms through the street. Jude knew he was supposed to be angry at the pigs, but Jude was the one who’d started the fight. Jude was the one who’d put Eliza in the hospital. But if Johnny had been a good husband, they wouldn’t have been in the park in the first place. If Johnny had been a good husband, Eliza wouldn’t be giving up the baby.

They’d allowed only one person in the ambulance with her, and Johnny had pulled the family card. Jude had run through the dark streets to Beth Israel—just let her be okay, just let the baby be okay, and he’d give her up, he’d give up the baby—only distantly aware of the ache in his ribs. The nurse had insisted on getting him cleaned up and into a bed. When she applied some antiseptic to his busted lip—“This’ll sting a second, baby”—he did a poor job of hiding the erection under his gown. He lay in the bed, behind a curtain in the hallway, for an hour and a half, tasting the iodine and Eliza’s mouth, before someone would tell him she was okay. He said he was her stepbrother.

Jude twisted the hospital bracelet around his wrist. He was barefoot, nothing on his body but his boxers and the gown.

“Dad, you know any fags?”

The waiting room was full, but his voice was low, one of many. A baby was wailing.

“Don’t call them that, champ. Say fairies or queers.”

“Do you—”

“Look, champ, if you’re trying to tell me you bat for the other team—”

“No, Dad.”

“I’d accept you. Your mother would accept you. You’re a good kid, despite the hell you’ve put us through this year, but look, I deserve it. Maybe if I’d been there to provide some masculine influence—”

“Dad, I’m not a queer!” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I like girls.”

“You sure?”

“I like Eliza. She’s a girl.”

“So you have—”

“We haven’t—done anything. We made out. Yesterday. That’s it.”

“Jude Keffy-Horn, you little shit.”

“Is that weird? Since you used to go out with her mom and all?”

Les rocked his head back and forth, thinking. “It’s a little weird.”

Jude’s heart lumbered forward. It was exhilarating, saying it out loud. “I don’t know if she likes me, though. I mean, I think she’s pissed at me.”

“Why is she pissed at you?”

He replayed the scene in his head. Kissing her had been like playing a song, or eating a meal at one of the nice restaurants Di had taken him to. The kiss had steps, phases—a bridge, a chorus, an appetizer, something to cleanse the palate. It had a shape, a momentum—and then it had stopped. Jude had stopped it.

“I liked it. It was great and everything.” He left out the part about the breast milk. “I guess I just got a little weirded out. I’m supposed to be straight edge.”

“True.”

“And she’s pregnant. With Teddy’s kid.”

His father placed his soda on the table beside them. “It’s a little weird,” he said, not unkindly. “But soon she won’t be pregnant.”

Jude leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and sank his forehead in his hands. Away from Eliza, in the noise of the waiting room, her pregnancy now seemed a small matter to overcome, a curable condition. It would be as if the baby—and Teddy—had never been born. It was the worst possible outcome. They had let Teddy down. They had held this miracle in their hands, nurtured it, fought for it, and then, together, they’d dropped it.

He felt it fall: a baby over a ledge. He felt it fall many, many stories, never landing, just diving through thin air.

But what then to do with this immense relief, this joy rolling out like a carpet before him, the surprise gift of their youth returned to their hands?

He wondered if his own birth mother, unburdened by him, went on to live her life and kiss boys.

“Will they let you outside in that getup?” Les stood up, stretched, and crushed his soda can. “I need a smoke.”

First Avenue was sleepy with Sunday-evening traffic. A school of taxis swam together from light to light. Cigarette butts littered the sidewalk around Jude’s bare feet, and the air was warm with restaurant grease and petrol, the uriney stink of trash. Still, it felt good to be outside. The air wasn’t as pure as Vermont air, but it was just as rich, just as distinctively laced. He inhaled.

“You know what I think, St. Jude?” Les lit his cigarette. “I think it’s time we were roommates again. I’ve missed New York. Now that Lady Di isn’t a crazy woman anymore, I’m going to talk to Davis about getting my old place back. What do you say?”

“I don’t know,” Jude said. “I guess I’d have to think about it.”

“Don’t worry about your mother,” Les said. “Now that she’s got a man friend, she’s not so alone. Isn’t this groovy, all this love in the air? Your mom found someone, you found someone. Now I just have to—”

“A man friend? Wait, who did she find?”

“She didn’t tell you?” Les exhaled out of the corner of his mouth. “She’s got a man friend. A P.I., of all things.”

“A P.I.?” Jude could only picture Tom Selleck.

“Di hired some New York investigator to track you guys down. He found me first. I tried to keep him off your trail, but eventually he caught up with your mom. By that time, though, you guys were on the move again. He kept visiting your mom to buy pipes and fell for her. Ended up helping her scatter some bread crumbs to Chicago to keep Di busy.”

Jude’s head was spinning. “Wait. You and Mom both tried to keep us from Di?”

“And now he wants to move to Vermont, live the country life. Romantic, huh?”

“Mom has a man friend? Who’s a private investigator?”

So he hadn’t imagined the voice in the background. His mom hadn’t dated anyone since his dad.

“Any a*shole can be a P.I.” Les told Jude about his friend’s brother who took a class at John Jay, had some business cards printed up, and now charged top dollar to take pictures of husbands f*cking around on their wives. Les tapped his cigarette at his side. The bitterness edged his voice again. “But she deserves to be happy. She’s a special lady, your mom.”

“What about Di?”

Les shook his head. The suntan on his face gave him a ragged, inflamed look. His fingers released his cigarette; it dropped to the ground. “I’m done with pining for old flames. She wouldn’t take me back, anyway.”

Which old flames his father was referring to he didn’t know. Surely there were many in the vast bank of his past, before his mother, during, after. Husbands f*cked around on their wives, and private investigators took pictures of them. People f*cked, f*cked up; they married, had babies, divorced. His father was as guilty as any of them, and for years Jude had despised him for it. Now, watching his tattered Birkenstock stamp out the cigarette on the sidewalk, it occurred to Jude that his father, for reasons of his own, might be as heartbroken as he was.

“You know, your mom used to get pretty upset about abortion.” Jude wondered if he was thinking about Di again, or about Ingrid Donahoe, the woman who had aborted his child to save her marriage. “It wasn’t fashionable, in the Roe v. Wade days, for a modern gal like your mom to oppose abortion. But, you know, she wanted a baby more than anything.” He shrugged, as though he was still not sure this was a wise idea. “Anyway,” he said, turning to go inside, “Teddy’s kid is going to make some mother very happy.”

His father pressed his hand lightly to Jude’s spine, where the hospital gown opened to his bare back. Then, the glass doors sliding open before them, he followed his son to the entrance.

They stayed at the apartment on St. Mark’s, Davis in the loft, Jude and Les sharing the futon. Davis made breakfast for dinner—grits and Kentucky scramble and buttermilk biscuits. Jude had toast. He called his mother. He’d be coming home soon. Late into the night, Les told stories of his travels, cannabis by cannabis—Mauwie Wauwie, Swiss Miss, Holland’s Hope.

Uptown, Eliza and her mother watched Santa Barbara. Eliza napped on the divan. For dinner Neena made them saag paneer and fresh chapati bread, Eliza’s favorite, and they ate on the balcony, watching the joggers in Riverside Park, their sweatbands glowing like distant planets in the settling dark. The boys were gone. On the dining room table, under a ring of spare keys, Kram and Delph had left a note—Thank you for your hospitality—and eight dollar bills to cover the bottle of wine they’d made use of, a 1981 port. The only things left were Jude’s.

The following morning, Di paid a visit to her lawyer, a colleague of her late husband’s, to discuss a lawsuit against the City of New York and an annulment, on the grounds of nonconsummation, of her daughter’s marriage to John McNicholas. Neena went to the grocery to restock the kitchen. Eliza stayed home. She painted her toenails. She called Nadia and talked to Nadia’s father. Nadia was at her mom’s place in the Catskills. She had a new horse: Rome. Did Eliza want the number?

No, thank you, she didn’t.

She was playing one-handed scales on the piano, a Yoo-hoo in her other hand, when there was a knock at the door. Jude stood on the other side of it, wearing one of Les’s Hawaiian shirts. His eye socket had faded from a deep purple to a jaundiced brown. His lip was cut, too.

“I still have my key, but I didn’t want to bust in. I just want to pick up my stuff.”

She held the door open, and he stepped inside. Hitching up his shorts—those were Les’s, too—he looked around the apartment as though he hadn’t been there before.

“What were you playing? It sounded pretty good.”

“Nothing. Just scales.”

Jude looked across the room for a place to sit, then shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the wall.

“Anyone home?”

Eliza shook her head.

“How you feeling? I like your head wrap thing.”

“Thank you. Neena gave it to me.” She reached up and touched the top of her head, stroking the silk scarf. “They gave me a list of things I could take for pain, but I don’t want to take anything.” She put her hands in her lap. “What about you?”

Jude shrugged dismissively. “You got it worse than I did. I wish it was my head that got split open.”

Eliza took a sip of her Yoo-hoo. Then she slipped off her scarf. “You can make it up to me.” She found the end of the bandage and unwound it, undressing her head, and released the ribbon of white gauze. Across her left temple, nine stitches held together a naked patch of scalp. “Do you have your clippers?”

He shaved her head in the living room, Eliza sitting on the piano bench, Neena’s purple scarf now wrapped around her shoulders. He circled her body, the clippers humming, her dark hair feathering to the floor. She didn’t open her eyes until the sound stopped. In her mother’s bathroom, her back turned to the sink, she angled Di’s hand mirror in front of her face.

“Now you’re really punk rock.”

“We’re twins,” Eliza said, putting down the mirror on the sink. She swept the scarf from her shoulders and dropped it over his head.

“Do I look punk rock?”

Eliza said, “You look like Little Red Riding Hood.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said, taking off the scarf. Scattered across the marble vanity were the various toiletries he’d left behind. Noxzema, shaving cream. Like the skeletons of some spiny-backed mollusc, his retainers.

“You’re not going to ask me to marry you, are you?”

“Do you want me to?” Jude asked. The scarf around his shoulders looked like the shawl Johnny had worn on their wedding day, the shawl she had tied to her own.

“Not anymore,” she said. “Sometimes I wished we were the ones who were married, though.”

“You did?”

“It’s stupid.”

Jude tried to hide his smile by playing with his lip. “Well, sometimes I wished the same thing.”

She was rubbing her shaved head, and now she took another look at it in the mirror. “What were you going to ask, then?” she asked his reflection.

“If you’re sure,” he said, rubbing his own head reflexively. “About the baby.”

“I’m sure,” she said. Her other hand was on her belly, and, reflexively, she began to rub it, too. He copied her. They rubbed their bellies and their heads.

“Is it pat your belly, rub your head?” he asked.

“No, it’s rub your belly, pat your head.”

They attempted this for a minute, watching each other in the mirror. He kept messing up and patting his belly. “It’s not that hard!” Eliza said, laughing. He gave up and reached for the handful of charms hanging from her neck. He fingered the subway token. Teddy used to hold it up to his glasses and peer through the hole at Jude.

“What’s in this locket, anyway?”

Gently, she took it back from him. “It’s a secret.”

Empty-handed now, he dropped his hands to her belly. She closed her eyes. He held his hand over her T-shirt and he rubbed. It was a Green Mountain Boys T-shirt, extra large. Clockwise, he polished her belly. He leaned in to kiss her and closed his own eyes, and no one but the mirror was there to witness their image, their profiles locked at belly and mouth.

They remained in this position until, at the distant door of the apartment, there was another knock.

“Maybe Neena forgot her key,” she said.

It was Johnny. Linen jacket, tie. The bridge of his nose was bruised, and beneath his left eye was a jagged cord of skin, not yet a scar. Beside him, smaller than Johnny, also in jacket and tie, was an Indian man with a briefcase.

“Oh my God,” Johnny said to Eliza. “Did they do that at the hospital?”

“Jude did it.”

“She had hair before,” Johnny said to the man. To Eliza, he said, “The doorman let me up. But I thought I should knock.”

“Thoughtful,” said Eliza. Over her shoulder, Johnny caught Jude’s eye, then abruptly dropped it. He was not here to return any punches, Jude saw. He had some more formal method of retaliation in mind.

“He might as well hear this, too. Can I come in?”

The visitors did not sit down. Jude stood by the piano, arms crossed, the foliage of Eliza’s hair scattered at his feet.

“Who’s this?” Eliza asked, nodding to the man with the briefcase. Whoever he was, Jude was grateful for his presence, for the excuse not to get into another confrontation with Johnny. He wore a precise mustache, a pair of metal-framed glasses, and too much of an expensive cologne. Where had Jude seen him before? The temple? He recognized some feature, the narrow span of his shoulders, the controlled way he moved his body, as though he hoped he would appear not to be moving at all.

“This is Ravi Milan,” said Johnny. “He’s a lawyer. He’s Teddy’s dad.”

Eliza and Jude didn’t move from where they stood. Ravi did not extend his hand but nodded politely at each of them. “I have great respect for the life you’re carrying,” he said to Eliza.

“That’s his friend Jude,” said Johnny.

“That’s not his dad,” Jude said. “Teddy’s dad’s dead.” But the eyes, the small, fragile hands . . .

“I’m sure you have many questions,” said Ravi. “I’m happy to answer them—”

“But we have business first,” Johnny finished.

Ravi stepped over to the piano bench, set down his briefcase, and opened it. Out of it he produced a handful of printed pages, bound with a black plastic clip, which he handed to Eliza. Over her shoulder, Jude squinted to read the letters: PETITION FOR ADOPTION.

“What is this?” she asked Johnny. “You put on a tie and you think you can adopt my kid?”

“That’s not what it says,” said Johnny.

“Did he tell you we didn’t sleep together?” Eliza asked Ravi. “That we’re husband and wife, but he’s been sleeping with someone else? Should you tell the judge that? Did he tell you he doesn’t have a job, an apartment, a f*cking phone—”

“Miss, if you’ll read the form—”

“This is what you’ve wanted the whole time. Why didn’t you just say so from the beginning!”

Ravi, looking over her shoulder while remaining as far from her as possible, pointed to the typewritten entries on the bottom of the first page:

PETITIONER(S): Ravi and Arpita Milan.



RELATIONSHIP TO ADOPTEE: Grandfather, stepgrandmother.



Ravi said, “My wife and I would like to adopt your child.”

Neither Jude nor Eliza heard much after that. Intermediary parties, open adoptions, hearings, consents. Eliza was screaming, a blue vein pulsing under her stitches. Amidst her protests, Neena arrived from the grocery and spilled a plastic bag of canned spinach across the floor. Ravi bent to help pick up the cans. First uncertainly, then like old friends, he and Neena chattered on in a language that no one else understood.