Authors: Allan Gurganus
Chloe’s prize Pekingese, Mikado, snorted under card tables as through a tunnel ridged with nyloned columns. He edged, grimly interested, toward this new arrival’s scent. An ancient wheezy male animal, Mikado took the liberty en route of sniffing up as high on women’s limbs as he could reach, of rubbing languidly against the swishy silk and hazy shins of every woman there. Chloe had tied a yellow bow around his topknot; he tolerated this on bridge days, a fair trade for the cozy sense of being underneath a long playhouse of gaming tables, cards fatly snapping overhead. His path lay strewn with kicked-off shoes. Dainty aromatic feet to nudge. Mikado, the Blankenships’ cranky one time ribbon winner, is only mentioned here because he suspected—before any other living creature in this murmurous house—that something was about to give.
He sauntered to a halt, stood under her table, stared—proprietary and enraptured—up at the area (dare I go through with this grisly sequence and its raunchy aftermath, my life?) between the young Helen’s barely opened knees.
Mikado’s flat face was mostly nose, very wet, chill as the jellyish aspic now gleaming on a kitchen counter. Cataracts had silvered over both his popping goldfish eyes. Smell, swollen to exciting new dimensions, remained the one great jolt and consolation left him. He nuzzled near enough and quite almost against the silk to get a better sample scent of something rich and decidedly awry here. The placing of his wide cool snout upon her shinbone made Helen, who’d just spread her cards, shudder with a little flinch. The subtlest sort of pelvic twist, then a serene smile of recognition: “Oh, Mikado,” she whispered to her geisha fan of cards. For this was a society where ladies knew the names of other ladies’ gardeners and maids and lapdogs.
Next … into this party cubicle of china shop small talk and play-it-safe decor, Nature lunged fairly bullishly. Intent on clobbering mere taste, it went right for a trigger spot and let loose one deep-seated wallop. It happened Now.
The Peke got hit by falling waters, about a bucket’s worth. He yelped and scrambled down the hallway through a grove of table legs and female feet, skidding to safety under a favorite sideboard’s shadow. Once there, Mikado collapsed and was panting when Helen, mouth a perfect O, bellowed forth in some voice totally unladylike and three full octaves deeper then her usual musical lilt, “Oh my Gawd, I’ve stawrted!”
Cards scattered atop the table, some teetered onto her steep lap, fell to dampened Persians. Her three tablemates stood, overturned the Samsonite. With it went a coaster full of lipsticked butts. Table to table, downstairs then up, news darted at the speed of sound. Three women moved to help Helen stand but she’d stretched out all her limbs. She was less seated on the chair than propped against it, semi-rigid as a starfish, muttering some Latin from her convent days.
First they dragged her toward the velvet chair. But Chloe, who’d just spent a fortune having that piece reupholstered, dissuaded them by backing, beckoning, through the kitchen’s swinging portholed door. The cluster veered in there and, for want of a better spot, laid
Helen on the central counter, under a panel of humming fluorescent tubes. Her shoulder bumped a wooden salad bowl filled with party mix (pretzel sticks, nuts, crackers, sprinkled salts, and Worcestershire sauce) and sent this shooting across linoleum’s fake brick. Other dishes toppled, too. Pink and green mints rattled everywhere, the silver compote clanged toward a corner. One red aspic fell, splitting to sheeny smithereens before the Spicer twins took charge and set the other party foods along shelves or on the floor around the waist-high counter where Helen lay, distended.
Friends bustled to hold her hands, trying to dry her skirt with paper toweling. Pat Smiley quickly phoned the hospital for advice, forgetting to request an ambulance. Others listened in on two upstairs extensions, scolding her when she hung up. Then someone just as flustered dialed the fire department. Irma, my godmother, the movie reviewer, a short sensible woman who’d seen more films more times than practically anyone, now did what they would do in movies at such moments, on sea voyages, at Western waystations: she put water on to boil and fetched some string plus a bottle of Jack Daniel’s (still in last year’s Christmas gift box). She spread what seemed to be a sheet under my poor mother, rocking her from side to side. Helen, chewing knuckles, apologized to Chloe. “Really ruined your party. If I’d only guessed … Richard will be absolutely livid. Oh, this is so
unlike
me.”
“Hush,” Chloe said. “You couldn’t know. It’s Nature’s doing, darling. Keep calm. Help’s coming. We all love you.”
Others, timing her contractions by the kitchen’s sunburst wall clock, mumbled Yes, they did. They patted her wrist, pressed cool terry cloth scented with wintergreen across her dead-white forehead. Irma said, “Forgive me, dear. I hate to, but—” and boldly flapped back Helen’s dress, took a look, mumbled, “Uh-oh. Somebody did call someone, an ambulance or something, right?” Others gathered behind Irma, stooped, shook heads sideways, held onto one another. Mavis DeWitt gave an empathetic moan, recalling her twins’ forty-nine-hour delivery. She whispered, “I think I’m going home. I feel … I feel … Good-bye.”
A
T THE CORNER
of Elm Avenue and Country Club Drive, the ambulance, ignoring a stoplight, overcome by the power of its siren and right of way, bisected the route of a northbound fire truck headed to the same address, and each vehicle, similarly entranced and headstrong with mission-of-mercy noise, mistook the other for its potent echo. They collided. Nobody was hurt but the vehicles got pretty well smashed up. A medic shunted about applying first aid to firemen all in black rubber raincoats and seated on someone’s lawn. The assistant fire chief lifted the ambulance’s hood and sniffed for smoldering.
Women fought to peek through the kitchen door’s porthole. Helen was thrashing now and Irma, a squat level-headed person, ordered all potential fainters to the living room. Then Pat Smiley barged in with news that sirens had been heard from an upstairs window and, grinning at her own alertness, saw my mother laid upon the work counter, legs apart, surrounded by floored platters of party foods set like offerings around some sacrificial altar—my demure mother spread-eagled where the light refreshments should be, now writhing, gasping rhythmically, some heady severance already evident—and Pat, usually so stalwart, tottered toward the sink, blacking out en route, grabbing a hanging split-leaf philodendron, taking this down and falling in a ripe blur of store-bought dirt and looping greenery. Irma promptly shooed the others out, all but the hostess and the reliable Spicer twins, who, for twenty-nine years, had locally team-taught Home Ec. These lanky sisters hoisted Pat from either end and crunched toward the living room, shuffling through broken crockery, vines, aspic scattered here and there like wobbly carnage. They’d revived her when Mikado waddled in, having licked himself clean of perfectly respectable waters. He sniffed at the damp towels blotting Chloe’s rug. A beast, wet to the size of a rat, white in the eyes, still licking his dark chops, sent poor Pat Smiley out again with one sleepy shriek. The Spicer’s simply lifted her legs back onto the furniture.
“Where
are
those ambulances?” Chloe got out ice tongs, any tool
that looked silvery and surgical. “Sirens have been at it for ten darn minutes.” Mother’s wails now filled the house. Thirty acquaintances took up handbags, met at the front door, faces wary as if Helen’s fate had befallen each and all of them. They told one another in lowered voices, “We’ll only be underfoot,” and, once assured of their basic good sense, fled.
Young Helen pleaded, between quickening seizures, to be gagged for decency’s sake. She kept screeching personal charges against her husband, saying this mess was all his fault, his fault, his fault. Irma cradled Mother’s head, lifted a water tumbler of Jack Daniel’s, tried to tip some between the victim’s lips. But Helen kept choking. So instead they doubled over a tulip-shaped potholder and simply stuffed this between chattery teeth. “Bite down,” Irma told her. “It’s risky to move you, dear. We hear them, hold on tight.”
At the phone, Chloe was barking orders to the manager of the country club two blocks away. “Preston, listen and listen good: you get into a cart right now. You ride out and grab any doctor on the course. A dentist, a vet, anybody. But, Preston? Hurry. The poor little thing’s head is out already.”
A fringe-topped golf cart wobbled into the driveway. Two young doctors, one podiatrist plus everybody’s dermatologist, wearing three-toned golf shoes and flashy shirts, barged in without knocking, found a fainted woman sprawled on the living-room chaise, hurried over, peeled back her skirt, yanked down panties. Elvyra Spicer, unmarried and long aware of men’s baser drives, flew enraged across the room, slapped Dr. Kenilworth’s head and sports cap, shrilling, “Not her. Not her, you. In there!”
The kitchen was an epic mess. Cereal, pretzels, soils, shards of aspic, stepped-on mints both pink and green—all this litter split and crackled under their spiked shoes, which sent Chloe swooping through the kitchen door to check on her inherited Orientals. But the kitchen did smell wonderful: good bourbon. Someone with nothing better to do perked coffee.
A wet Pekingese sat on hind legs in the pantry doorway, panting, a soggy yellow ribbon draped across its head. The doctors’ caddy, a handsome black kid of fourteen, now jangled in from the cart,
heaving forward two golf bags. In his excitement, he stood braced, as if expecting players to choose a proper putter for this situation.
Young doctors studied the event with an old amazement, some wonder missing from their hospital routine. They studied the committee of busy improvising women, studied a red rabbit-sized and wholly uninvited little wriggler aim out toward fluorescent light, looped to a pink cord that spiraled downward. Irma Stythe (God bless her sane and civil heart) guided the creature, eased it—still trailing slick residues and varnishes—up into general view. Just now, Irma, recognizing the doctors, grinned wanly over at them, said, “You want to slap it?” proferring the ankles.
“No.” Kenilworth shook his head, took his cap off, modest at the sight of women in such complete control. “No. Please. You—” and he lifted one hand as if offering the option of a waltz.
So Irma hauled off and smacked it smartly. She did this again. And once more, until It squalled into Me. They all smiled to hear a new human voice in the room. As recognition, the caddy clapped. Applause, but just a smattering.
The ambulance driver, nose bloodied, rushed in to explain the delay, chatted with a doctor who dabbed at the guy’s upper lip. Pattie Smiley, coming to, hearing the cries, insisted on getting up. The door swung open just long enough for the company to see her grin, glimpse the coral-colored cord, blanch of human coloration and drop backward to the carpet as the door fell closed. They wrapped the baby in monogrammed towels and laid him in his mother’s arms. Helen’s face was puffed, glossy with tears. Her bun had come undone some time ago, brown hair a wooly pagan mess. She gazed down at the purplish child, still bawling, his fists already pounding air in spastic if determined blows, the infant’s flop-eared ugliness a final indignity in a series of such. Helen really sobbed now. Concerned, Elmira Spicer tugged the potholder from the sudden mother’s mouth but she groaned, “You put that back.”
A new siren, then the fire chief lumbered in, wearing full regalia. Helen and the infant, both wailing in different registers, were carried past the card tables, borne over the prone Pattie Smiley and her
attendant, Elvyra, who bent across her, pressing down the hem, sure the men had come back for a second try.
Irma phoned Richard’s insurance office to make sure he knew. Somehow, no one had thought to call him. His best business voice: “Yes Irma? Actually I’m in the middle of a group life conference. But what can I do for you?”
She gave one croupy giggle, then leaned against the wall, fatigued. Irma, midwife, clamped a hand over the receiver as if to smother, told Chloe, “Richard’s asking what
he
can do for
me.”
Chloe was wandering around, palms pressed to her cheeks, surveying the remains of her model kitchen.
“You heard right. Go to her, Richard, take flowers. She was so brave. The baby has real lung power. No, have your
secretary
send the flowers. You get moving.”
Chloe stumbled into the front room and collapsed on the beleaguered chaise. Irma followed, stood looking down at today’s hostess, Grand Master Chloe, rubbing her neck and shoulders, eyes mashed shut.
The twins had dragged Pat Smiley home a few doors down. Abandoned handbags lay scattered under chairs. Cards and party favors, a set of keys, one ashtray smoldering,
“Irma.” Chloe lifted her head. “You’re still standing? Could I ask you for one more thing? That damask tablecloth on the counter, the one that was under her? Would you just maybe toss it into the washer? Put in about a pound of Oxydol. I can clean up the rest later. I’ll just call Fatima and her sister and their whole neighborhood to come over here and work for a solid week. But I don’t think I can quite abide the sight of that cloth just yet.”
“You mean the sheet?”
“Yes, it was a tablecloth, actually. Damask. You couldn’t have known, Irma. It was Grandmother Halsey’s, 1870 or so. Not to fret, darling.”
Irma Stythe leaned back into the kitchen. Cloth’s pattern of wheat sheaves, bounty, harvest home, was now spread with urgent gloss and gore. Mikado trotted after her toward the laundry room. Upstaged
all afternoon, antsy for attention, he now rolled over, played dead dog, sat on his haunches, then—tentatively—pranced.
Irma held a tumbler full of bourbon above the chaise. Chloe sniffed, opened one eye. The big house was oddly silent now. A few yards away, some lawn mower hissed and yammered, reassuring. Chloe sat up, took the glass in both hands as a child might, and tossed back three adult swallows. Mikado circled the heaped towels, smelling them. “No,” Chloe called, halfhearted, “bad dog.” But the animal climbed onto the pile, gave a huffy sigh and, head resting on crossed paws, closed his eyes.