“Is she—?” Isaac asked, not knowing how to finish the question.
“She’s fine. We’re watching her closely and it looks like the bleeding has stopped.”
“And the baby?”
“He’s very small,” said the doctor. “It’s unlikely he’ll make it through the night.”
“He?”
“Yes, a boy.”
“A boy,” Isaac repeated, numbly.
The doctor looked at him with apologetic eyes.
“May I see him?” Isaac asked.
“We don’t recommend it.”
“Yes, but I think I’d like to, if it’s all the same.”
The doctor led Isaac upstairs to the nursery, where a nurse gestured to a chair in the middle of the room. The room was lined with bassinets,but Isaac avoided looking inside them, terrified to catch a glimpse of his son before he had fully prepared himself for the encounter. The nurse walked over to a bassinet and reached for a bundle of blankets that didn’t look much different from any of the others. She held the bundle close to her chest and hesitated as she neared Isaac.
When she handed the bundle over to Isaac, he was surprised at how heavy and warm it felt in his arms.
“He’s hot?” he asked, alarmed.
“That’s just the hot-water bottle,” she explained. “We’re trying to keep his temperature up.”
He lifted a corner of the blanket to reveal the red, wizened face of a tiny, old man—all forehead, no hair, eyes closed tight. His head couldn’t have been bigger than a billiard ball. Indeed, he was resting against a hot-water bottle, which had been wrapped in a towel.
The child was horrifying to look at, and somehow also vaguely beautiful. It was impossible, studying him, to pick out Fannie’s sharp brown eyes or Isaac’s hairline but it must have been the promise of those features, and others like them, eventually developing, that helped him see past his son’s strangeness.
“I convinced Fannie to ride the Dodgem cars yesterday. At Steeplechase Pier,” Isaac said as he stared down at his fragile son. He could feel his breath beginning to catch in his throat. A tear rolled down his cheek and landed on the baby’s forehead. He wiped it away with his thumb, which seemed huge when held up against his son’s miniature features. “Is this my fault?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not familiar with them,” said Dr. Rosenthal.
“You just bump into each other. I hit her once, maybe twice. Hard, I think. I mean, not really. It’s just an amusement.” He knew he was talking too much and tried to make himself stop. “She was laughing.”
“I wish we knew but sometimes these things aren’t so easy to pinpoint,” said the doctor in the same tepid tone in which he’d said everything else.
The nurse was kinder. “It’s possible she had high blood pressure, or some other condition. Sometimes these things just happen.”
It was hard for Isaac to comprehend that this child, who had to weigh less than two pounds, was the same baby Fannie had dreamed of for so many years. Why hadn’t Isaac given him to her sooner?
Isaac’s eyes settled on a card, which had been tucked into the baby’s bassinet. It read,Feldman, Baby Boy.
“We’re naming him Hyram,” Isaac said.
The doctor gave the nurse a look, and she retrieved the card from the bassinet. She pulled a pen from her pocket and scratched through the wordsBaby Boy. Above the strike-through, she wroteHYRAMin big, block letters. Isaac liked the way the name looked when it was all spelled out.
“May I see Fannie?” Isaac asked.
“She needs to rest,” the doctor warned. “Perhaps tomorrow.”
Isaac knew what he wanted to say but it was hard to get the words out. “I think she might want to see him, before he—”
“That’s not advisable.”
