“What?” she asked dumbly.
Beneath that great brush of a mustache, Dr. Cohen’s mouth turned upward into a grin. “All your symptoms point to a pregnancy. You should make an appointment with your gynecologist.”
“No, it can’t be,” Rose said. “Can’t you check? I don’t want to see another doctor. It cannot be.” She was shivering audibly. “I’m forty.”
He sighed. “Mrs. Downes, you have to follow up. It absolutely can be,” he added without any gaiety or adornment. And it was his serious tone that made her believe him.
She told Thomas that she had to go back, Dr. Cohen wanted to run some tests. “Tests for what?” Thomas asked, looking concerned.
“Nothing,” she said, “it’s nothing.”
She went to her gynecologist. Four days later, after she returned home from school—Thomas still at work, Harry, who knows where—the nurse called. “Congratulations!” she exclaimed. Rose was nearly three months’ pregnant.
“All right, then,” she said, though she had no idea why. It was certainly not all right. Pregnant, after all this time? What in the world was she going to do?
She filched a cigarette from Harry’s room. Out on their tiny balcony, she perched on the edge of a plastic chair grimy with dirt and lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply. The nicotine enveloped her. Even with the smoke, Rose could still make out the odor of chlorine drifting up from the courtyard. The pool water was a murky grayish green, a scrim of leaves laced the edges. They had taken the apartment in part for the pool, but even when it had been in good condition, they had rarely gone swimming.
She could get rid of it. She knew enough to know that it wasn’t the way it used to be. She was friendly with a math teacher at school; Joan was an Isadora Duncan devotee at least fifteen years Rose’s junior who was teaching herself German and lived on a diet of nuts and honey. Rose felt certain that Joan would know where to take care of it. Thomas wouldn’t need to know.
But how could she not tell him? They almost never spoke of it anymore—his desire for children, her desire not to have them. She had thought and thought about it. She had believed herself to be right. For years she had told herself: not everyone was made to be a mother. It was easier to believe that than reckon with the more pointed question that often came to her at night: How could she be a mother? What did she know about taking care?
Whenever she thought about it, Rose felt like a child herself. She was back in the flat in Vienna, watching Mutti, dressed in silk, give her nose a final dusting of powder. The Mutti in the letters that Rose treasured was warmer and chattier than the elegant, distant mother she recalled from her early years. When she considered being a mother, all Rose could think about was the pain of separation, of being left behind.
Rose liked to think that not having children was not a tension in her marriage, but what had begun as a question between them had morphed into a sadness, a particular sadness for both of them, with a presence all its own.
And now? Now she was at sea with no idea of which way to turn. She hadn’t wanted this. They hadn’t been careful of late, but they had been careful for so long. How could it have happened?
That wasn’t the point anymore. What if for all these years, she had been trying to protect herself against something that could not be protected? The growth inside of her felt violent, a disturbance, disrupting everything that she had insisted upon. Nothing was the same. Her body was telling her so. And, perhaps, Rose tried to tell herself with a calm that she did not feel, it was time for her to quiet and listen.
That night, in their tiny windowless bathroom with the turquoise tiles that Rose had thought about replacing for a decade now, Thomas brushed his teeth methodically, keeping an eye on his watch as he always did, timing himself.
“I have to tell you something,” Rose said, looking at her husband’s reflection in the mirror.
He held up several fingers—three more seconds—and spit into the sink. “Mmm?”
She had a hand on the edge of the wet sink, leaned on it for support. Just say the words, she told herself. “I’m pregnant,” she finally said.
He stared, his thin lips whitened by toothpaste, his cheeks drained of color. She would never forget how in that moment he was a stranger. “What?” He said it so sharply that Rose could only hear disappointment.
She swallowed. She wasn’t sure she could work up the courage to speak again. “I’m—”
“I heard you,” he said. “My God, did I hear you?” He clapped a hand over his mouth. “You’re pregnant?”
She nodded, grabbed his wet hands with her own. A sob ripped through her.
“Are you sure?” He was crying now, but also—she was sure of it—laughing. “You’re certain?”
She nodded again. “You’re happy?”
“I’m delirious.” He pulled back, scrutinizing her. “And you? What about you?”
“I’m scared,” she said, and she was crying now too.
“Do you—do you want this?”
She gripped him hard—she was that frightened. But she made herself say the words. “I think I do. I do. But, Thomas, we will be so old; people will think we’re the child’s grandparents.”
He kissed her damp cheeks, one after the other, laughing all the while. “I do not care,” he said. “Do you hear me? I do not care at all.”
The next day while Rose was teaching fourth period, a junior came to her classroom. “There’s a call for you, Mrs. Downes,” she said. Rose hurried to the office. What was wrong? Thomas only called if it was urgent.
But it was her nephew on the line. “I got a callback!” Harry said joyously. “For the doctor role.”
“Oh, Harry,” she said, irritation mingling with relief. “I was in the middle of teaching. You worried me.”
“So sorry, Aunt Rose,” he said, not sounding sorry at all, “but I got a callback! They want to see me again. This afternoon.” His voice dropped. “But I’m not at all prepared.”
“But you are,” she told him.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. You are only scared because you care so much.” She believed this, didn’t she?
On Saturday, Rose returned to the Soutine exhibit, Thomas and Harry in tow. This time, she felt prepared, happy even, her nausea abated, glad to have her men by her side. Today the gallery rooms were crowded, and Rose elbowed her way to show Harry the Page Boy at Maxim’s, the portrait in the show that had reminded her of The Bellhop.
Harry, attentive, eager, was taken with the still lifes. He kept bounding between them and Rose and Thomas—“that bloody side of beef,” he said. “It’s unseemly and awful and fantastic.” A few minutes later, he came back. “I just read an amazing story in the catalog; did you know that Soutine hauled an actual side of beef up to his studio, and kept buckets of cow’s blood by its side and doused it whenever it started to turn gray?”