Читать книгу An Affair of State - Pat Frank - Страница 4

The way Jeff Baker got his name was like this.

His father, a State Department clerk, was called to George Washington Hospital at the lunch hour. He remained at the hospital all the rest of the day, and all that night, in the late September of 1919. Mabel Baker was thirty-seven, this was their first child, and it was a difficult labor. Through the whole night Nicholas Baker kept his miserable watch on the bench in the corridor, his hands locked across his sharp knees, and his unsubstantial frame braced against the muffled cries that issued from the delivery room, and rolled down upon him in ever-quickening rhythm like storm waves. Yet so unobtrusive was Nicholas Baker that when the baby was born neither the doctor nor the nurse remembered he was waiting. At eight in the morning he ventured into the hospital office and asked whether there was any news, and the startled telephone girl said the baby had been born an hour before, and it was a boy, and weighed five-and-a-half pounds, and where had Mr. Baker been all this time.

Mabel Baker was in a semi-private room, which was as much as they could afford. There were three other women in the room, and their unreserved inquisitiveness and rude staring made Nicholas Baker self-conscious as he took his wife's hand and bent to kiss her cheek. Her face was gray and showed all its lines. "Was it bad?" he whispered. "Was it bad, dear?"

"Not too bad," she said. "It's hard to remember. It was like a nightmare you didn't think would ever end, and now it has ended."

"It's wonderful--a boy."

"He's very small, the doctor said."

"He'll grow bigger. He'll grow big enough for the Foreign Service."

"He'll grow up to be Ambassador to London," Mabel said, because that was the grandest thing she could imagine.

"Won't he have to make a million first?" Nicholas laughed. Mabel was positive, but had never convinced her husband, that only his lack of money prevented him from crossing the invisible line separating the career diplomats from the clerks, the gentlemen from the shabbily respectable, in the Department. He knew, although he never mentioned it, that there were barriers more inflexible than penury. There was family, and school, and the clothes he wore and the way he wore them, and the people he knew, and the wife he had married.

They talked of the things to be done--the telegram to her family, the announcement cards, the eight dollars a week to the colored maid to clean the house and cook breakfast and dinner while she was in the hospital, and finally a name for the boy. "We'll name him Nicholas, junior," Mabel said, "and we'll give him Rowley for a middle name. That'll please my dad."

"All right," Nicholas agreed. It was certainly the conventional, the expected name. He took his watch from his trousers pocket.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"Eight-forty."

"Then you'd better get down to the Department," she suggested, accurately reading his thought. Nicholas had not been late to work in fourteen years. It was something of a record in the European Division. It was his only distinction, and it would distress him to see it shattered.

"You're sure you'll be all right? I'll stay if you want me to."

"Of course I'm all right. Anyway, the doctor is coming to look at me again at ten, and then you can come back at noon."

A nurse, gauze mask swinging below her chin, entered the semi-private room. "You want to see the baby, don't you, Mr. Baker?" she said.

"Oh, yes, of course I want to see the baby." He was surprised that he hadn't thought of this himself. One of the first things he should have done, he was sure, was to ask to see the baby. He hoped that Mabel hadn't noticed his lapse in protocol.

The baby was one of twelve babies, displayed like packaged dolls in a department store window, in a room shielded from the corridor by plate glass. "This is a new idea," the nurse explained. "Protects them from the flu germs." She pointed to one of the baskets. "That's yours."

Nicholas Baker saw a red face, wrinkled like a dried apple, but afterwards he was never absolutely certain he had looked at the right one. He wondered what custom required him to say, and how many minutes he should look at this wrinkled, red face. "Ah, fine, fine!" he said. After he was gone the nurse thought he behaved not at all like the father of a first-born son. It might have been his sixth, he seemed in such a hurry to get out of the hospital.