Read Online It Will Come to Me by Emily Fox Gordon - Free Book Online Page A

was always hungry. But for the four days that he and Ruth were kept in the hospital because of Isaac's mild jaundice, Ruth had the distinction of being the mother of the biggest baby in the nursery. “What a big guy,” murmured one of the other mothers, sidling up to her as she stood over Isaac's bassinet. “How was the delivery?” “A little rough,” said Ruth, “but we got through it.” “Well, bless your heart,” said the woman. “Here's your big big boy,” cooed the nurse who carried him into her room to be fed. “Feel how solid he is!” The candy striper who distributed the daily menu form giggled at his noisy nursing, the grunts and growls and smacking noises he made at the breast. On her second day in the hospital a young black man came to Ruth's bedside to draw her blood. Isaac was deep into a feeding—once he'd attached himself to the nipple there was no tearing him away. “I'm a man,” crooned the technician, smiling down on Isaac as he wrapped a rubber strap around Ruth's upper arm. “I spell M-A-N.”
    She'd had the room to herself for the first two days, but on the third she awoke to find that the curtain around the other bed had been pulled shut. She never spoke to her roommate, never even saw her except for a glance at her inadequately covered backside as she limped into their shared bathroom. She did get a look at the baby when the nurses brought it in and noted that it was a very small girl in a pink preemie cap. Apparently the mother's milkhadn't come in fully—from behind the curtain Ruth could hear a steady low hum of concerned consultation and an occasional faint ululation from the baby.
    After a lunchtime feeding, when Isaac was milk-drunk and ready to drape himself compliantly across her shoulder, Ruth heaved herself out of bed and hobbled down the corridor to take them both for a turn around the solarium. She needed to get out of the room to allow herself to enjoy the surge of triumpha-list joy that had been gathering in her. For his first two days of life she'd viewed Isaac as an evil Golem, intent on making her nipples bleed. She flinched when the nurse brought him to her; it wasn't easy to form an attachment to a hideous frog-legged thing that seemed to want to eat her. But on the third day her feelings changed. Suddenly she was proud of him, proud of his size and voraciousness and his very ugliness, which she now understood to be a source of a repellent protective power, like the grotesque masks and amulets prized by primitive peoples. It was a power in which she shared. She was the mother of a big, big boy, a battered, heroic survivor of the birth canal, and unlikely as it seemed, that made her the reigning queen of the
Totem and Taboo
land that the delivery floor had turned out to be. Maybe Freud was right, she thought. Maybe it was true that the only truly unambivalent human connection was the relationship between mother and son.
    Here was Isaac at eleven months, in his high chair. He'd mastered the pinching motion necessary to pick up a Cheerio between thumb and forefinger and he was offering one to Ruth, who was leaning into the frame in profile, her face lit with an adoring smile. Was she even capable of that smile now? And here he was at three, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the children's room at the library with Ben, working on one of the advanced puzzles thelibrarian kept aside for him. He was as pretty as a little boy as he'd been ugly as a baby, with curly dark hair and girlish eyelashes. By the time he was two he was no longer particularly large—only a little over the sixtieth percentile. People smiled down at him when Ben and Ruth took him on stroller outings. He was an altogether appealing and promising child, solemn, conscientious, confiding. He put away his toys methodically. He sang on key in a high sweet voice. He listened to stories with intense concentration and retained long passages in his memory. Was it possible he'd be an early reader? As it