Passersby do not pause, but they do stare a bit.
• • •
I’d like to say that she emerged because she knew I was coming—that, prompted by a premonitory pang, she sought help for us both, in the fast-approaching hour of our mutual extremity.
But this she did not.
No. It was rather that she happened to spy, out the window, a figure, tall, dark, slightly stooped, passing along the brow of Bridge Street; and this figure she wished to pursue, in spite of, or perhaps because of, her bulging belly.
In the time it has taken her to edge us down the stairs, though, the object of my mother’s desires has disappeared, up the brow of Bridge Street and into the town. Whether turning to right or to left: unknown.
My mother is not perturbed.
She begins—not to run, that is impossible for us now—but to trot, very swiftly, with a sort of rolling motion, a sideways motion, none too smooth, her vast prominence balanced carefully in her palms, hair loose, frock flapping. Thus we make our way together, she and I, on one of our final excursions of the sort, to the corner of Bridge Street and Grape Lane, where my mother, sensing or, perhaps, even scenting her man, with that uncannily acute perception her pregnancy has granted her, correctly chooses the right-hand turning.
We arrive just in time to see a tall, stooped figure hovering at the entrance of the Custom House tavern.
Tom! Tom! my mother calls. There is an urgency in her tone, so much so that Himmelfarb the old-clothes man looks up sharply from beneath his many hats, the acrobats tumbling on their carpet under the Custom House awning pause in their tumbling, Punch misaims his whack at Judy, and Thomas Argument (if indeed it is he), apparently failing to hear, recedes all the more quickly through the tavern door.
Tom! cries my mother. Tom!
Angrily this time. There’s an edge to her now.
She would willingly follow him in—she has already begun trotting again, gaining momentum, palms beneath belly, the entire street crew of onlookers urging her forward—That’s the way! You tell him, missus!—except that now comes the sudden, warm, wet gush between her legs. All at once, abruptly, like a folding chair collapsing, my mother sits down in the street. Under her breath she mutters, so softly that only I can hear it: Beast!
And then:
Quick, she says, from her apparently helpless position, somebody fetch Mrs. Marwook!
It is a credit to my mother that even in this, her most abject moment—big bellied, tear streaked, her frock soaked in amniotic juices, ignored by her lover, down on her nates in the middle of Grape Street—mercilessly kicked, in short, both from within and without—she is still beautiful—more than that—she is compelling. Nor has she lost her presence of mind. Mrs. Marwook! she cries, on the double! And the butcher’s boy, feeling himself commanded by beauty of irresistible aspect, immediately drops his tray of steaks and dashes off to fetch the deft-fingered crone who will, very soon, usher me into the world.
• • •
I will not dwell on the details of the birth—the extended battle between me and my mother, lasting the better part of eighteen hours, fought in the big bed in the small pentagonal bedroom on the third floor of the Birdcage—nor mention how it galled her, in the thick of it, to feel beneath her thigh, through the scrawny mattress, the hard jabbing edge of the traveling trunk she never got to finish packing. I think that even then, even as I was making my struggling, strangling, stumbling way down the birth canal, my mother was mentally packing that trunk—six dresses, two corsets, three petticoats, five pair of stockings, gloves, evening gloves, blue hat with an egret feather, black hat with a maroon lace, cambric hankies, dress boots, waterproof boots . . . No surprise that there developed, during certain moments in the struggle, a controversy as to whether she was trying to keep me in, or thrust me out—Push, missus! Ye’re distracted!—which Mrs. Marwook, prodding sharply with words and hands, urged her to resolve as quickly as possible, and in the right direction.