Manhattan Lullaby (25 page)

“No,” replied Maxine. “I'm divorced from him.” She nodded at Harry.

“Then what is your relationship to
him
?” persisted Crumm as she pointed at Vincent.

“None. I just met him at the condom counter in the drugstore. You know, the one at 49th and Lexington. So naturally I invited him home for coffee,” replied Maxine, giving her best wide-eyed, doesn't-everybody-do-this? expression.

“
Harrump
!” replied Crumm and wrote it down. It was obvious to her that these people were not the kind of people who should be looking after
one
baby, never mind two-and-a-half babies.

When she looked up again she directed her attention to Luba, who was sitting demurely in the chair that Bradley had retrieved from his bedroom.

“You say you are the mother of the baby named Rogue?”

“That's right,” answered Luba, trying hard to be helpful because Paulie had told her about the visit from Dear Maxine and her son and she was very impressed to think her child was the grandchild of a woman who knew all the answers.

“Are you and the father,” she indicated Bradley, “married or do you live together?”

“No, we've never met before,” replied Luba with a bright smile.

“You've never
met
before?” Crumm repeated her answer in case she might have misheard it the first time.

Luba shook her head, bright golden curls dancing like bubbles on top of her shoulders.

“So you've never been married or lived together or—?”

“Nope. I live with Paulie,” she said, hoping to make it easier for this odd-looking brown woman to understand the situation.

Crumm's jaw tensed visibly. She scrutinized the assembled to refresh her memory. There was no Paulie among them. “And who is Paulie?”

“Don't ask,” warned Maxine.

But Crumm persisted. “Who,” and she looked threateningly at them all, “or
what
, is Paulie?”

“Paulie is my girlfriend.”

“I see. And in what sense of the word do you mean
friend
?” Crumm felt she was getting down to the nitty gritty now, and it was very gritty indeed.

Now it was Harry's turn to interrupt. This woman was really beginning to piss him off and he intended to give her a piece of his mind. The only problem was the Scotch had twisted his tongue a little. “For Christ's sake,” he cried, thumping his free hand on the arm of the couch, “don't you get it? She's a thespian!”

“A thespian!” the rest of them chorused, swiveling their heads to look at Harry.

Luba looked confused. She bit her bottom lip. “That's not what we call it.”

“Well, what do
you
call it?” Crumm was gritting her teeth and sitting on the edge of her chair now, pen poised like a dagger over the page.

“Paulie's a lesbian,” said Luba.

“I told you not to ask,” said Maxine with a certain amount of satisfaction.

“And you're not a lesbian?” inquired the social worker, who wanted to make sure she had the facts, ma'am, just the facts.

“Oh, no,” giggled Luba with a high-pitched little trill. “I go both ways.”

“I need a drink,” muttered Bradley, and he stumbled out into the kitchen.

“I could use a refill,” called Harry, waving his glass in the direction of the doorway.

Bradley returned a moment later carrying the bottle of Scotch, slopped some into his father's proffered glass and then raised the bottle to his lips.

Luba, unabashed about the content of her testimony, leaned over toward Joyce, who happened to be sitting nearest to her chair. “Who is that woman?” she whispered, cocking her head at Emmiline Crumm, who was now making deep gouges in her notepad with the tip of her pen.

“Child Welfare,” whispered Joyce, raising her eyebrows for emphasis.

“Oh,” Luba nodded understandingly and then added, “I didn't know babies could get welfare.”

Joyce's groan was barely audible.

Vincent was taking it all in. All he had wanted was a cup of coffee and a nice chat with an interesting and attractive woman. As it was, it looked like he had the makings of an interesting paper to present before the APA at their next meeting. If only they gave Nobel Prizes for psychology he would be a definite contender if he wrote up what he was now observing. He could almost see the title: “The Coping Mechanisms of the Urban Family in a Multi-Dimensional Extended Unit, Under Intervention.”

Getting bored with all the writing and drinking and no longer being the center of attention, Luba leaned sideways again and said, “You're pregnant.”

“You're kidding,” said Joyce, shifting her weight to get a little more comfortable.

“Did you get yours from him too?” Luba waved her long white fingers at Bradley, who, oblivious to the consequences, was just taking another swig from the Scotch bottle.

Joyce rolled her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. “No. Same family, different vintage.”

“Oh,” replied Luba, crinkling up her forehead. She had had no idea that sperm was dated the same way as wine.

Janie, meanwhile, was busy having a good long look at the mother of Bradley's child, an act that women are wont to do with possible rivals. After a few minutes and sexual proclivities aside, she decided she had nothing to worry about. Whatever the woman might have had going for her in the looks department, she lacked in the brains department.

Just then, Rogue stirred in her arms. He stretched one pink fist out from beneath the blanket, kicked his legs and let out the deep, deep sigh of an awakening infant. Now that he was awake, no longer simply a warm weight in her arms, she could not resist the urge to take a look at him. She folded the corner of the blanket back and held the tiny body slightly away from her so she could get a better look at Bradley's son. And as she did so she experienced the unmistakable feeling that the gears that guide the revolutions of the planet were grinding abruptly to a halt. In a mere millisecond, the earth, as they say, stood still.

“Oh my God!” The first time she formed her lips around the words no sound came out. The second time it did. “
Oh my God
!”

Emmiline Crumm stopped writing. Maxine came rushing in with a half-warmed bottle of formula. Vincent stopped tilting Amanda's bottle and she started to choke. Harry, who was just about to take a sip of his Scotch, swallowed the whole thing instead. And Bradley, who had been hanging around in the background trying to decipher the truth so he could confess his circumstances to the Child Welfare Lady, the City of New York, the State of New York and Morley Safer, if he cared to listen, stopped doing all of the above and rushed over to Janie.

“What is it? What happened? What's the matter with my baby?”

Janie, who had had a few seconds of realization to get the wheels of her world turning once again, looked up and said to Bradley, “Nothing's wrong. But he's not your baby.”

Part Three

Is You Is, Or Is You Ain't, My Baby?

Chapter Eighteen

Immediately after Janie's explosive observation about Rogue's right to bear the name of Kraft, all hell broke loose.

Emmiline Crumm, whose tightly wound coil of a personality suddenly slipped its spring, leaped to her feet, hurling both her notepad and her pen to the floor, and shouted hysterically, “I knew it! I knew it! You're running a baby mill out of this apartment. And you”—she pointed a trembling, vengeful finger at a shocked Vincent Taylor—“must be the doctor in charge.”

“Me?—I—” stammered Vincent, who confessed later, when he could look back and laugh at all this, that he had no idea that a chance meeting in a drugstore was going to lead to his indictment for running a baby mill.

Fueling herself with her own fury, Emmiline Crumm then began hopping around the room flinging accusations and vilifications of this nature and that at everyone present and complaining about degenerates, men exploiting women, wombs for rent, and the price of theater tickets.

“Definitely anal retentive,” sighed Vincent Taylor, realizing that as the only psychologist present, it was up to him to take charge of any situation relating to crazy behavior. He handed Amanda, who had begun to whimper at all the noise, to Maxine and stood up. Keeping a safe distance between himself and the raving Crumm, he circumvented the room and went over to Bradley, who was standing next to Janie repeating over and over again, “What do you mean, he isn't
my
baby?”

Janie, who had but a few moments before been unable to stop herself from blurting out her earth-shattering observation, was suddenly at a loss for words. She had spent the past few weeks getting used to the idea that Bradley was a father and that as such her own life would be forced to take on a new direction. Now, suddenly, she was confronted with the possibility that that may not be the case after all and the sign up ahead read not Detour but possibly only Dangerous Curve.

“Excuse me, son,” said Vincent, gently prying the bottle of Scotch from Bradley's tightly clenched fingers, “but could I borrow this for just a minute?” And he took the bottle into the kitchen, poured a good measure of the contents into a water glass and returned to the living room, where he tried to get the gibbering Ms. Crumm to swallow some.

But Crumm was having none of it. What was going on here tonight was the scene and substance of her worst nightmares. Fecundity released in all its unbridled force. Women reduced to little more than walking incubation machines, ripening pods, slaves of the enemy sex who wanted to use them only as a means of conveying their gene structure into the next generation. She could think of nothing more disgusting! So when Vincent approached her with the Scotch, intent only on calming her down, she saw it as his way of reducing her to a state of helplessness and then creating another maternity slave.

“Nooooo!” she screamed, pushing his hand away, lather from her leathery lips flying forward like spume from a crashing wave. “Don't you come near me! I know what you want. You're not going to turn me into a baby machine too!” And with her dead eyes almost popping out of her head with fear, she fled down the hall to the bathroom.

“What? What did I say?” said Vincent, looking around at the others. He had no idea what Crumm was carrying on about. Never in his wildest dreams could he imagine her as any kind of a mother, unless you counted the kind that buried their eggs in the sand.

Slamming the door hard enough to make the pictures rattle on the living room walls, Crumm locked herself in the bathroom and remained there until the people from Bellevue showed up a while later to take
her
into protective custody, in one of those table-turning situations which prove that no matter how unpredictable it may be, life is never without irony.

“Wow!” squealed Luba, getting excited by all the pandemonium. “You people really know how to throw a party.”

Harry, who had decided that the only way to cope with whatever was going on was to let the situation overwhelm him and run its course—much the same way as one did with a virus—looked up at Vincent Taylor and said, “If you're not going to drink that …”

And Vincent, glad to be of help to somebody, handed him the water glass. But before Harry could lift it to his lips Joyce took it from him and had a big sip. “Sometimes milk just doesn't cut it, you know what I mean?” she said, handing the glass back to Harry, who nodded his assent. And then she added, “Is this what they mean by the joys of family life?”

Bradley, meanwhile, was taking the news that he had been fired from fatherhood rather badly. “But he
is
mine,” was all he said every time Janie tried to explain to him why she thought he wasn't. And even after she showed him the birth certificate where it listed the father as “donor unknown,” he still wouldn't accept the possibility that she was right.

“But
I
was the donor,” he insisted.

“You were
a
donor. Anybody could be donor unknown,” replied Janie, trying to get him to deal with the facts. “You're not the only one who could have an affair with a plastic cup, you know.”

But Bradley stubbornly shook his head. “He's my baby. His own mother even said so.”

“His own mother has a bra size that's bigger than her IQ,” argued Janie.

Still, Bradley wouldn't listen because he didn't want to listen. His whole life had changed since this baby had entered it and now to find out that it had all been for nothing was more than he could bear. He had lost the woman he loved. He wasn't about to lose the baby he loved as well.

But Janie persisted because deep down she knew she was right and with every minute that passed, with every scrutinizing look she took at the baby, she became more and more convinced that Rogue was not Bradley's son. Finally, in a last-ditch effort to convince him, she pointed out that the baby didn't look like either Luba or him. It had dark hair and a swarthy complexion, whereas they were both light-haired and fair-skinned. He began to listen.

“Maybe it's a recessive gene,” he said, seizing on any possibility to keep his parentage in place.

“Not on my side and not on your father's either,” said Maxine gently to her son. “Nobody in the family looks like that baby. Believe me. Your father and I always thought he must look like his mother—you should excuse the expression—but you can see, she's right here, and there's no real resemblance.”

Luba, who had joined the little coterie at the end of the couch because it seemed like that was where the action was now that the brown woman had been taken away, did a 360-degree turn to prove the point. “I always thought he looked like Paulie,” she said helpfully.

“Isn't it time for MTV?” asked Maxine pointedly.

“Is it?” cried Luba, looking around for the television set.

“But I
love
him,” said Bradley, hugging the baby closer and closer as he realized he was losing the argument.