“Wentworth Hale.” He nodded and offered a hand to Julia for the second time, doffing an imaginary cap to Pamela. Behind one ear he’d tucked a hand-rolled cigarette, and a small white badge pinned to the breast of his leather waistcoat read STAMP OUT REALITY. His gray ponytail was held back with a thick blue elastic band that looked as if it had once held together a bunch of asparagus.
“Wentworth is fighting the good fight with us, he’s on our board at the clinic and he’s done fantastic advocacy work for us, I’ve never known anyone make better use of their retirement, I can’t even tell you. He campaigned and wrote letters for us when it looked like our local admissions privileges were under threat—he’ll tell you all about it and I’ll make some drinks. Gwen,” Pamela called, “would you like a G&T?”
“I’m sixteen,” Gwen replied rather frostily, and then seeing a way to avoid Nathan at the buffet table added with marginally more warmth, “I’ll make them though, if you want.”
“Thank you, lovely girl, that would be marvelous. Limes in the Minton.”
? ? ?
THOUGH PAMELA HAD not grown up with Thanksgiving, as a hostess she had nonetheless managed to capture its essence: a day on which hardworking Americans are required to spend upward of five hours on a freeway (one way) in order to eat turkey, very late, in the twilit company of family members avoided the rest of the year. With no nearby relatives of her own, Pamela ensured a little friction by populating her parties with ill-assorted friends, colleagues, and acquaintances from yoga who had in common only that each could think of nowhere better to go. Julia and James’s journey from the hotel had been nothing compared to those of a recently divorced speech and language therapist who had driven from Amherst past three accidents and a two-mile lane closure, and a professor of pediatric oncology who’d been on an unsuccessful date with Pamela several months earlier, who had been on I-95 since eight a.m. and now, slightly sickened by a large Dunkin’ Donuts pumpkin latte and a bag of powdered donut holes, was mutely nursing a Calvados and wishing he’d stayed at home. The most cheerful guests were twin toddlers currently chasing one another with peacock feathers, overdue for a collapse into sticky, corn syrup tears.
Julia did as expected. She ate dry, lukewarm slices of turkey breast—cruelty-free, Pamela assured her. She tasted sweet potatoes topped with blackened marshmallows, as cloying as imagined, and far more delicious. She compared gelatinous tinned cranberry sauce to Pamela’s glossy homemade rendering and dutifully admired the latter (the recipe handed down through James’s family). She sipped lukewarm too-sweet apple cider in which sharp shards of cinnamon bark bobbed, and in which there was regrettably no alcohol. She met midwives and doulas, a hypnobirthing expert and a drunken, florid acupuncturist. She listened while Pamela described to a widening circle of listeners the day that James, as a young resident, had stitched up a new mother with such assiduity that he had closed off her urethra and had then had to call her back into the operating room to confess and remove three stitches. Julia saw that this anecdote was intended to make James look foolish and that it succeeded, noting its effect upon James himself: a rigid tension in his jaw. “Who really needs to pee, right?” He shrugged, as if telling a deprecating story himself, but it was clear he was not happy.
Though this visit had been his own initiative, James had seemed frantic to leave almost as soon as they arrived. Julia now understood that he and Pamela were friends only on the telephone or by text message, and in the reassuring narrative he told himself about the end of his marriage. They were amicable when the Atlantic lay hugely between them, but in person were irritable and competitive. James evidently found his ex-wife aggravating, but was too much a gentleman to say it. What he did say, coming up behind Julia, slipping his hands around her waist and speaking low and urgently was, “I need to leave ten minutes ago.” She squeezed his forearm and promised to find Gwen. The visit had been instructive, and Julia was now glad they’d come.
She was scanning the room when she felt her phone vibrating and glanced down to see that it was Philip. It was, Julia calculated, quarter past one in the morning in London. Philip had never called her after half past nine.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, maidele, please don’t worry, I’m fine. Have you got a minute, though?”
“Of course.” She went up the winding staircase and closed herself in a spare bedroom, next door to Pamela’s own boudoir where earlier, among gauzy scarves and crumpled piles of silky garments, she had been forced into Pamela’s socks. Here hung the guests’ damp coats on a cloakroom rail, and behind it various items necessary for attending home births. Three cylinders of oxygen were aligned against one wall, and beside these was a tower of loose plastic packets of absorbent pads. A stack of bedpans stood on the bedside table. The large bed was made up with a crocheted blanket in shades of sage and umber and orange. Julia sat down, only to roll sideways. A waterbed, she realized, righting herself and feeling a liquid, undulating wave lift and fall beneath her. She stood up again feeling tricked, and slightly foolish.
“There’s nothing for you to worry about, but I just wanted to let you know that Mole hasn’t been very well, he’s with the vet now and they’re taking good care of him.”
“Now? It’s late, how did you get him there? What happened?”
“I took him in a little while ago but I wanted to stay and see what they said. He’s dehydrated, primarily, so they’ve put him on fluids and they’ll see what’s what overnight.”
“Poor Mole. Poor you, I’m sorry.”
“By the time I left him just now he was wagging his tail; dehydration does make one miserable. He looked better in half an hour. I wouldn’t have bothered you, only I thought you might have spoken to Iris and worried.”
“Thank you. I’m so sorry it’s kept you up. Are you okay? You must be exhausted.”
“Right as rain. How is it?”
Julia stepped out into the hallway and peered over the banister to judge, swiftly, whether anyone could hear. Closed in the spare room once again she said, “Pamela is quite a big personality, shall we say. I don’t really think she’s your cup of tea; she’s written a book about orgasm in childbirth.”
“God help us,” said Philip, with a chuckle that turned, almost instantly, into a cough. “As if birthing mothers don’t have enough to worry about.”
“She’s signed a copy for you.”
“I look forward to it. How’s my granddaughter?”