Only Son (2 page)

June 7, 1977—Portland, Oregon

The overweight, copper-haired nurse waddled into the waiting room. “Mr. McMurray?” she asked.

Paul McMurray tossed aside the copy of
Sports Illustrated
and hopped off the light green vinyl couch. He was twenty-seven years old, with straight flaxen hair and a tan. His athletic good looks were just starting to slide, and his Trailblazers T-shirt didn't quite camouflage a slight beer belly.

In fact, he hadn't been in the waiting room very long before he'd left and returned, smuggling in a six-pack of Budweiser and some cigars. He'd slyly pulled a beer from the grocery bag and offered it to another expectant father, who had shown up just a few minutes after him. The guy said, “No, thanks,” and that was it. Didn't say another word the whole time—and they'd been in the waiting room for over two hours.

But now the man was standing up along with Paul McMurray. The nurse looked confused for a moment, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. “Mr. McMurray?”

“Yeah,” Paul said anxiously. “I'm McMurray. That's me.”

The nurse broke into a smile. “Congratulations. You're the father of a healthy, eight-pound-two-ounce baby boy.”

“ALL RIGHT!” he yelled, shoving a fist in the air.

“You can see him in the newborn room in just a few minutes. And the mother's doing fine. She's resting, but you can see her in a little while.”

Paul McMurray had another beer, then went to the window outside the newborn room. He waited, his nose fogging the glass. In his hand he clutched the cigars. He gave one to the man standing beside him, the other expectant dad. He was a tall, well-built man with light brown hair. He looked like the country club type, handsome and well dressed. He had on a green sport shirt with some designer logo on the breast pocket.

“Congratulate me,” Paul grinned. “I'm a daddy. Got myself a little boy. How about that, huh?”

The stranger gave him a limp smile. “Congratulations,” he murmured, tucking the cigar in the breast pocket of his sport shirt. “Thanks for the smoke.” He turned back toward the window, a sad look on his face.

“This is my first kid,” Paul said. “My name's Paul McMurray.”

“Jack Spalding,” the man said, shaking his hand. But he still didn't smile. He glanced back at the infants.

Paul wondered if the guy's trip to the hospital had started much earlier today. He looked so goddamn gloomy. Maybe there were complications with the birth. Maybe his kid had already been born—perhaps born dead or deformed. “Is—ah—your baby in there?” he asked.

But before the man answered, Paul saw the nurse on the other side of the glass, holding something in a white blanket. She came up to the window. Paul pointed to himself and mouthed his last name. She nodded. He blinked at the purple, no-eyed thing—the face all squashed and its head lumpy. And it was so dark.

He mouthed his name for the nurse again, and she nodded emphatically. She showed him the baby's hands so he could count the fingers. The nurse was talking to the baby, pointing at Paul. He could read her lips: “There's your
daddy
,” she said.

Paul let out a surprised laugh. “That's my boy!” he cried. “That's my little Eddie. Hi, slugger.”

The nurse gently rested the infant in a bassinet, then pinned a tag at the foot of the little bed: “
McMurray
.”

Paul glanced at the man, who also seemed mesmerized by little Eddie. “That's my little boy,” he said.

“He's beautiful,” the man whispered. There were tears in his eyes.

“Um, which one is yours?”

The man pointed to an infant three cribs over from Eddie.

“A boy?” Paul asked.

He nodded.

“Uh, he's a handsome little tyke, too,” Paul said, trying to be polite.

“Not as handsome as yours,” the man said.

Paul McMurray gazed at his son and smiled. But then it struck him as pretty damn strange. What a weird thing for a new father to say about his own little boy: “
Not as handsome as yours
.” Was the guy's kid really that ugly? He glanced over at the other baby. He wasn't deformed or hideous-looking. The tag on his crib read:
Copeland
.

Paul McMurray scratched his head. “Hey, what did you say your name was?”

He turned, but the man wasn't there anymore.

 

At a stoplight on his way home, Carl Jorgenson was about to toss the cigar out the car window. But then he changed his mind and tucked it back inside the pocket of his sport shirt.

“Nights in White Satin” came over the car radio. He cranked up the volume. “Suicide Music,” Carl called it. This song and Brook Benton's “A Rainy Night in Georgia” were his favorite I'm-depressed-and-want-to-wallow-in-it tunes. The music certainly fit his mood now. He almost wished it would rain. The night was too beautiful, with a gentle, early summer breeze and the clear, starlit sky. He never felt so lonely in all his life.

When the light turned green, Carl suddenly realized he was headed in the wrong direction. “You don't live there anymore, stupid,” he whispered to himself. He made a U-turn. His new apartment was on Weidler, another part of town. He wasn't crazy about the place. But it beat the Best Western, where he'd stayed for two nights after walking out on Eve. Two nights of limbo. He'd longed for a sense of permanency, and wanted his things out of the house. He also wanted Eve to know he wasn't coming back. So he signed a lease on the first apartment he'd seen.

Carl parked in front of the building, a homely four-story brick structure built in the Eisenhower era. Maybe he'd taken the apartment because he felt sorry for the landlady. Old Mrs. Gunther didn't look long for this world. She had short, curly hair, and cat-eye, rhinestone-studded glasses. While she'd shown Carl the apartment, she'd clutched to her bosom a mangy old poodle she had introduced as Sparkle. Sparkle had a crooked jaw and yellowish grey hair the same shade as her owner's. In fact, the two could have passed as sisters—if you put rhinestone-studded glasses on the dog.

“It's a warm, friendly building,” Mrs. Gunther had explained, stroking Sparkle's head. “You'll like it here…”

But Carl found the other tenants a cold assortment of forgettable faces. He didn't recognize the man now following him up the walk to the front door. Carl guessed he was around his own age, thirty-nine—maybe older. The dark-haired man wore tennis clothes, and ate an ice-cream cone. A few paces behind him straggled a little boy, also working on an ice-cream cone. Carl glanced back at them, thinking the father ought to walk beside his son so he could keep an eye on him and make sure he was safe.

Carl unlocked the door, then held it open for them. Without a look at him, the man strolled by and called back to his little boy, “Come on, quit dawdling.”

Carl felt like the invisible doorman. “You're welcome a helluva lot,” he said, loud enough to be heard.

But the man ignored him. He grabbed his son's hand and moved toward the elevator.

Carl let the door swing shut. “Hey, don't thank me, buddy,” he growled. “I love holding doors open for ingrates like you…”

The man stepped inside the elevator, let go of his son's hand, then turned around and flipped him the bird. “Fuck you very much,” he said. The elevator doors shut.

“Oh, nice!” Carl yelled after him in vain. “And in front of your kid, no less. You got a lot of class!” He stomped toward the elevator and jabbed at the button.
Creeps like that shouldn't even be allowed to have children
, he thought;
damn, it was so unfair…

As the elevator took him up to the fourth floor, Carl wanted to hit something—someone. He'd come very close to belting Eve that night, the week before, when she'd told him what she'd done. It had taken every drop of restraint to keep from knocking her across the living room. But he'd left her unharmed; both of them angry, in tears. Now, he was glad he'd held back. A blow to the side of that pretty raven-haired head would have smacked some of the guilt out of Eve, and she deserved to feel one hundred percent terrible for her actions.

Carl stepped inside his new living room, dark and cluttered with half-unpacked boxes. The hide-a-bed sofa he'd ordered from Meier & Frank had arrived. It was still shrouded with plastic. Mrs. Gunther and Sparkle must have let the delivery people in. At least he wouldn't have to use the sleeping bag tonight.

Switching on the kitchenette overhead, he dug a frozen pizza and a beer out of the refrigerator. The telephone rang. He stared at it a moment, fancying that it might ring off the daisy-patterned kitchenette wall. Maybe Eve, calling to make amends? He hated himself for hoping it was. Finally, he shoved the pizza in the oven and went to the phone. “Hello?”

“Carl?”

It was his lawyer. “Hi, Jerry,” he said, opening the beer. “How are you?”

“I've been trying to get you all day. Where have you been?”

Carl sipped his beer. “The old neighborhood pool, the movies, here, there. What's up, Jerry?”

“Eve called me this morning, asking for your new phone number. She wants to talk with you—”

“Well, I don't want to talk with her. Another thing, Jerry, please tell her to stop calling me at work.”

“Carl, she thinks the two of you ought to see a marriage counselor and try to work things out.”

“There's nothing to work out,” Carl sighed, setting his beer on the yellow Formica counter. “All the counseling money can buy won't change things. Now, have you filed the petition for divorce or whatever it is you do to get the ball rolling?”

“Not yet, Carl. I thought maybe—”

“Jerry, please, get off the pot and do it.”

“I just want you to be practical about this. Now—”

“She can have the house, the second car, everything she can get her bloodstained hands on. I don't care.”

 

“Carl, you're not acting rationally…”

“For God's sakes, how do you expect me to act?” he said. “That was my baby, goddamn it! I wanted that child more than anything.”

“I know that,” Jerry said. “And I understand—”

“Then you understand why I can't have anything to do with her right now. So—please, please file that petition. Okay?” Carl didn't want to give him time for any more arguments, and he quickly said: “Listen, I have a pizza burning up in the oven here, so I've got to go. Just file the sucker. Thanks for calling, Jerry. G'night.” He hung up. Friend or no friend, if Jerry didn't file on Monday, he'd find a new lawyer.

Screw dinner
. Carl switched off the oven. He needed a shower. He hadn't taken one after swimming his laps that afternoon, and hated the idea of dried community pool water covering his body. He'd been in such a hurry, throwing on his clothes over the damp swim trunks and running to his car to follow that young couple home.

Two weeks before, elated that at last he would become a father, Carl had first spotted them at the neighborhood pool. The guy looked like an ex-jock, a bit out of shape. The wife was cute with brown hair and dimples, but no stunner like Eve, whose
haute couture
looks always turned heads. He wouldn't have given the girl a second glance if not for the beautifully swollen belly that stretched the fibers of her lavender swimsuit.
That's Eve in just a few months
, he'd thought, a satisfied grin on his suntanned face. How radiant the girl had seemed, carrying new life inside her.

Seeing them again today, he'd felt as if they had something that used to be his. He noticed them after finishing his laps, and he moved his blanket over to the grass, near where they sat in lawn chairs. The guy had brought the newspaper and a cooler with him. He opened a beer and stuck the can in one of those Styrofoam receptacles to keep it cold. The girl was wearing her lavender swimsuit again, and she looked overdue for the delivery room by several days. “Promise me, honey,” the girl said as she rubbed suntan lotion on her husband's shoulders. “Don't let me get one of those ugly postnatal haircuts like my sister got. She looked so frumpy in her pictures with the baby.”

The husband was deep into the sports section.

Some kids were screaming “Marco Polo!” in the shallow end of the pool, and Carl couldn't hear the young couple for a minute.

“—might as well be talking to myself half the time,” the girl was complaining. She applied lotion to her legs, barely able to reach them past her inflated midriff.

Carl watched as a skinny, wet kid in baggy trunks raced past the husband, a little too close. Apparently, the kid had shed some water on his sports page. The husband looked very annoyed, and grumbled something to his wife.

“Oh, relax!” Carl heard her say. She tipped her head back.

Carl saw something that the guy hadn't noticed yet. Down by his feet, his precious beer had spilled over on its side. If the skinny, wet kid had done it, Carl hoped the boy was long gone. One of the worst beatings Carl had ever gotten in his life was from knocking over his father's beer; and he imagined that this guy was a lot like his old man.

“MARCO POLO! MARCO POLO! MARCO POLO!”

In between shrieks, Carl heard the husband say, “Somebody should get them to shut the fuck up.”

Oh, bub, you'll be great for those 2:00 a.m. feedings
, Carl thought, sitting at the edge of his towel.

The wife muttered something to the guy, and he laughed. He reached down for his beer. Carl waited for him to make the discovery. But just then, the skinny kid ran by once more, giggling and flailing his arms. Again, he must have doused the guy with a little water. The husband threw down his paper and almost leapt up from the lawn chair to chase him, but then he sat back down.

Carl watched the boy gleefully threading around people, chairs, and towels.