Beaches (27 page)

“She’s . . . gone,” Bertie said, and her face must have given it all away. Because Arthur Wechsler knew she didn’t mean that Cee Cee had driven to the drugstore for a pack of cigarettes.

He paled. “To L.A.?” he asked. Bertie nodded. “To be with the guitar player?” he asked, and Bertie nodded. “When did he call?” the doctor asked quietly.

“Tonight,” Bertie said, looking down at her feet because she couldn’t stand to look at his hurt face. There was silence for a long time, and when Bertie did look up at last, she saw tears streaming down the nice gynecologist’s face. Many tears before he finally took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. Bertie realized they were still standing in the open doorway.

“Arthur,” she said, “forgive me for being so rude.

Won’t you come in? Sit down. I’ll make a drink and we’ll talk and-”

“No,” he said, handing her the flowers he’d bought for Cee Cee. Then, for a moment he stood, closing and opening the palms of his hands as if he were exercising his fingers. “No, thanks, Bertie, I think I’ll go.”

He turned, Bertie closed the door and, in a minute, the neighbor’s German shepherd barked as the doctor started his Porsche and drove away.

The next day, Bertie became a member of the Selby Botanical Gardens and volunteered to work in their bookstore three days a week, and after a few months, she met a woman at the Arts and Cultural Center who noticed she was pregnant and invited her to join a prenatal exercise class. At the exercise class, she met two or three women who lunched together once a week after class. At the first lunch, each of the women told her story to Bertie, and when Bertie told them she was having the baby alone, they all oohed and aahed in admiration and offered to help, and took turns calling her and inviting her to their homes for dinner, and when she went, even though their houses were small, and they were hard-working, and their husbands weren’t attractive or interesting to Bertie, she ached with envy of them.

The only time she saw Arthur Wechsler was when she went for her monthly checkups, and from the first time he acted as though nothing had ever happened. Nothing. He checked her, asked her all the routine questions, and dismissed her. The only note of warmth was on the first visit when he put his hand on her arm, promising if she needed him, he would pick her up and take her to the hospital. My God. She hadn’t even thought about that. Never even considered that while she was in labor she wouldn’t be able to drive herself to the hospital. Some women must do that. Or call taxis.

“Thank you, Arthur,” she said. “I guess I’ll have to take you up on that.”

Cee Cee called once every few weeks. She sounded weary when she did, even though she seemed to have lots of exciting things happening in her life. A movie, a great one, Bert, in preproduction, with a really hot new director- she mentioned some name Bertie never heard. He’s great. We really see this thing the same way. How ya feelin’?

“Great,” Bertie told her, and it wasn’t a lie. She was proud of her independence, and although she was a little frightened about the baby, she was excited, too. She’d hired a nurse to stay for the first month, and she’d bought lots of nursery furniture and baby things. Wechsler had told her to do that to cheer herself and it worked. The baby seemed real to her now.

Cee Cee never breathed one word about Arthur Wechsler. Had never, in any of her phone calls, asked how he took the news. Nothing. Occasionally, she’d mention Allan Jackson, but only in passing, as in Allan and I went here or there together, but that was all. Not how the romance was going, and Bertie was too polite to ask. Too polite. That’s exactly what she was. Maybe, she thought, she was even having this baby out of politeness. To whom? Cee Cee, because she’d insisted? Her mother’s memory? Rosie would have loved to have seen this baby. Just one time. To see Bertie pregnant would have thrilled her. Not like this, of course, with no husband around.

That was the last thing Rosie would want for Bertie. For Bertie to have to raise a child the way she had been raised by Rosie. With no father. No sense of family. Always an outcast little twosome. Arriving on Parents’ Night at school with one parent. When they had the Father-Daughter dinner at Girl Scouts, Bertie just stayed home, but once Rosie convinced her to go and to take her Uncle Herbie with her. Herbie left the dinner table six times to make phone calls. He was booking numbers from the Girl Scout dinner.

“Well it could be worse,” Rosie said to her on the rare times that Bertie mentioned how she wished she had a father. “At least he’s dead. We could have been divorced.”

Yes, Bertie remembered thinking divorce would be worse. Death was just pitiful. Divorce would be scandalous. It was good Rosie wasn’t seeing any of this.

By the time the divorce papers arrived in the mail, Bertie hadn’t even found herself a lawyer yet. Michael was more than generous in his support of her. And there, just to prove he believed she wasn’t making it up, were the words “child support,” and again a generous amount.

The lawyer in Sarasota Bertie was using for the divorce had been referred to her by one of the women in the Botanical Garden bookstore. He was young, aggressive, and wanted to fuss over every point in the papers, but Bertie said no, please, let’s dispose of this marriage pronto, in a tone of voice that sounded unlike her own, but oddly familiar.

The baby was due on November ninth. On Hallow-een, Bertie passed out trick-or-treat candy to the neighbors’ children, wondering what her little baby would wear someday to dress up for Halloween. Little Nina. Or would it be a boy? She hadn’t even picked out a name for a boy. After she had passed out chocolate bars to three pirates, one witch, a ballerina, two skeletons, a Spiderman, and a robot, and the doorbell was silent for a while, she went into the baby’s room and stood next to the crib for a long time without turning on the musical duck lamp, stood and talked to the yet unborn child.

“I love you, little person I’ve waited for all my life. And I’m sorry that your grandma won’t be here to see you, or your father, but I promise to supply you with enough love to make up for all the grandmas and daddies in the world, so you won’t even notice. And we’ll have a wonderful life. I swear we will, baby, because-”

The doorbell rang. “Excuse me,” Bertie said as she left the dark room and headed for the front door. She

picked up a few Snickers bars and opened the door. Four trick-or-treaters held out their bags. They were so cute Bertie wanted to grab them and hug them all for lighting up her evening.

“Ooh, Snickers is my favorite,” said the little hobo. “How did you know?”

” ‘Cause they’re my favorite, too,” Bertie said, smiling, and dropped one in the hobo’s bag. The hobo moved out of the way to leave room for the robot.

“Are you pretending to be a pregnant lady for Hal-loween?” the robot asked, showing a mouthful of braces under the silver painted cardboard box, “or are you really a pregnant lady?”

“I really am,” Bertie said, grinning, and tossed another Snickers.

The green thing with a top hat grabbed the Snickers out of her hand and ran, and the tallest one with the bushy fur coat and the Frankenstein mask didn’t have a trick-or-treat bag. It just stood there.

“Do you want a Snickers?” Bertie asked.

“Shit, no,” said Frankenstein. “But I wouldn’t mind a fuckin’ Scotch on the rocks.”

Cee Cee. She pulled off the Frankenstein mask. “Just like Barbara Bain and Martin Landau,” she said. “I take off one weird face and here’s another one underneath.”

Bertie couldn’t believe it. “Where did you get that costume?” she asked.

“What costume? All I got was the mask. This is my regular everyday coat. The real question is where’d you get that belly? I gotta hug you sideways,” she said, hugging Bertie sideways. With the coat Cee Cee was bulkier than her pregnant friend. “Meanwhile, believe it or not, I only brought one small suitcase,” she said, and ran out to the curb where she’d left it. “I had my mask with me and I couldn’t resist being one of the kids. Maybe I ought to put the mask back on and see how I do down the block.”

Bertie laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” Cee Cee hollered. “Some people give cash,” and she was in the living room. Not a word about the fact that she was just popping in unannounced. Just Cee Cee unpacking again, back in the yellow bedroom. Dropping her things here and there. Smoking cigarette after cigarette; opening the refrigerator, looking disgusted, and yelling out the word “Goornisht,” which she explained was the Yiddish word for nothing, meaning how could Bertie, a woman who was carrying a child inside her, have a refrigerator so empty of food?

They sat on the bed for hours, Bertie telling Cee Cee about the people she’d met over the last months, and how she was enjoying Sarasota even though she felt it was retirement- rather than youth-oriented-and Cee Cee telling Bertie about three months of working in a one-woman show, and how rehearsals every day forced her to take off weight, and Bertie told her she looked great even though she was wearing those multicolored striped stockings, and the diaper-wrapped skirt and the purple suede blouse and the gold dangling earrings and her hair in that pompadour, and they laughed, and no one mentioned Arthur Wechsler. Finally, in exhaustion, maybe even because the sun was coming up, Bertie said good night and went to her room.

The first pain woke her at six-fifteen. The second one was at six-nineteen.

“Gee,” she said, knocking at Cee Cee’s door. “I think it’s-” Another pain. “Cee Cee, I think we should hurry,”

Cee Cee was panicked.

“Where?” she said, blinking, looking around to figure out where she was. “Time for . . . oh, my God, oh, my God, I don’t know what to do. What do I wear? Do f drive or do you? You’re not going to bleed or anything, are you? I mean … do I have time for a shower? We never even made a plan about this.”

Bertie was in the middle of a labor pain. “No shower,

wear anything, keys to the Cadillac are on the coffee table. Oooh, Gee, let’s hurry up. I’ll call Wechsler.”

A look of panic passed across Cee Cee’s face that looked like she was thinking, Wechsler, my God, I forgot about him, but what she said was, “Even a fast shower?”

Bertie shook her head. She was dialing the phone and looking at her watch. The pains were only three minutes apart now.

“Dr. Wechsler’s service? This is Mrs. Barron. I think I’m in hard labor. My pains are close to-” This one felt like a truck was running over her abdomen. “Going to Memorial Hospital. You’ll contact him? Thank you. Gee? Cee Cee?”

Cee Cee emerged from the guest room. By some miracle she was fully made up and dressed in a darling powder blue pants outfit, much more Sarasota-style than Hollywood.

“Ready?” she asked, grabbing the keys from the coffee table.

Bertie wanted to lie down in the back seat of the Cadillac but she couldn’t, because she had to direct Cee Cee to the hospital. Cee Cee blabbed endlessly, said she felt like Butterfly McQueen in Gone With The Wind because she didn’t know nothin’ about birthin’ no babies, and laughed, and said that maybe someday she’d have a baby herself, so she wanted to observe very carefully how all this maternity ward shit looked, and then she started to cry and told Bertie that Allan Jackson had left her again- but it didn’t matter-that she was dating some very nice new men, and one of them was a successful movie producer and they had a lot in common.

As they drove up to the hospital’s emergency entrance, Bertie saw Arthur Wechsler’s black Porsche pull into a space marked Doctors Only, and when he got out of the car and saw it was Cee Cee helping Bertie out of the Cadillac, Bertie noticed that he opened and closed his

hands in that nervous way of his, and took a deep breath before he walked over to help.

After that, everything was a blur to Bertie. The two hours in the labor room were hazy, Cee Cee’s face, Wechsler’s face, a pink-cheeked nurse, a young black nurse, all of them checking her, talking to her, hovering. Even in her foggy state, though, she noticed that Cee Cee and Wechsler behaved like strangers to one another. It was so odd. Bertie couldn’t help but picture in her mind the nights they’d come home from dates like two teenagers, smooching in her kitchen, giggling lovingly on the phone, and now, a few little months later, they were strangers.

Then it was time to go into the delivery room, and everyone was wearing scrub clothes, even Cee Cee, with the orange hair sticking out, and Bertie had never felt so helpless and hurting. And while she was being wheeled into the delivery room she caught a whiff of Wechsler’s cologne, and Cee Cee, who was beside her must have, too, because she looked after him with misty eyes.

“Push,” Wechsler said to Bertie, and Bertie could see him in the mirror over her head, and the pain was so awful that she was gagging and straining and, “Push,” Bertie looked up at Cee Cee, whose brow and upper lip were covered with sweat.

“Doin’ great, Bert,” Bertie heard her say. And she pushed with all her might. A baby. She was (oh, my God, the pain) having a baby.

“Push harder now, Bertie,” Arthur Wechsler said. Why was he wearing cologne? He never wore cologne to work. Did he know that Cee Cee was coming last night? Did he figure she’d be here for the birth of the baby, which was two weeks early, as if to oblige Auntie Cee Cee’s busy schedule? Push. Aah. Again. Oh, God.

Bertie looked at Gee Cee^ again, who was white as a sheet, and who reached out her arm for anything. Anyone!

One of the nurses saw Cee Cee start to go and grabbed for her just before she hit the floor.

“Is she okay?” Bertie said, and then she realized that her baby was in the doctor’s hands. A girl. It’s a girl. And then they placed the tiny creature on her belly and forgot all about Cee Cee.

“Nina Rose Barron,” Bertie said.

Later in recovery, Bertie slept, and when she opened her eyes Cee Cee was there.

“Sorry I checked out,” Cee Cee said. “But I told you I didn’t know nothin’ about birthin’ no babies. She’s gorgeous, Bert. Looks like you from head to toe. I talked to her through the window of the nursery. Promised if she came to Hollywood to visit me I’d introduce her to Robert Bedford.”