In His Father's Footsteps Read online

  She was out of breath and could hardly make the six flights of stairs to reach their apartment when they got home. She had been doing it every day, but it was getting harder and harder, and Jakob was surprised that the stairs and her job hadn’t brought on early labor. He rubbed her feet and ankles when she lay down on their bed, before lighting the candles again for the second night of Chanukah. She needed to rest for a minute first. They chanted the prayers together again. And after that, he told her to sit while he made dinner. He wanted her to take it easy.

  The baby was still high, which the doctor said was normal for a first baby, and it wouldn’t come down until she was actually in labor, so the fact that it wasn’t lower down didn’t mean it would be a long time before she delivered. It could happen any day. They had said that a two-week span before or after her due date was considered normal, so it could still be two weeks away. Jakob hoped not for her sake. She looked exhausted and was grateful to sit while he made dinner. Afterward she helped him do the dishes, and then he insisted she relax, take a bath, and go to bed. It was bitter cold out, and he thought they should stay home as much as possible and had stayed home over the weekend. He didn’t want her slipping and sliding on the ice and snow, or going up and down six flights of stairs more than she had to, to go to work.

  “If you haven’t had the baby by then, we’re going to have a nice cozy weekend,” he told her, “and you are going to stay in bed, while I wait on you hand and foot. Your wish is my command.” She smiled as he said it, and fluffed up the pillow behind her. “Do you want me to run your bath?” They knew they were lucky, since many apartments like theirs had no bathrooms of their own, and shared a common one with other apartments on the same floor. She was grateful they had one for themselves.

  She got up eventually, and soaked in a warm tub for a while, which felt heavenly, while Jakob read one of the books Izzie had given him about diamonds. He had learned a lot about the business in the last five months and was eager to know more. When she came to bed in a pink flannel nightgown she had made with lace at the collar, he smiled. She looked like an enormous pink balloon with graceful arms and legs and her pretty face above it all. It was hard to believe she was having a baby, she looked so young. He took a shower after her bath, with a hand-held shower he’d installed himself, and he was wearing pajamas she had made for him out of the best Egyptian cotton, like the ones he used to wear.

  He had just gotten into bed and turned to her to say something when he saw a strange expression on her face, like a grimace of pain, and then it was gone.

  “What was that?” he asked her, concerned.

  “I don’t know. I think the baby just made a knot or something, or put a foot in the wrong place. Maybe it’s just trying to make room, but there’s none left.” He nodded and kissed her and picked up his book again, and as he did, he saw her wince again, harder this time, and instinctively she grabbed his arm. Her eyes were worried when she met his. “That really hurt. Maybe something’s wrong.”

  “I think you’re having a baby one of these days. Maybe the baby is fed up and wants to come out.” They had told her what to expect in labor, and it didn’t seem like that. According to what the nurse had told her it was all very predictable and regular, contractions which started slow at first, and got stronger much later, that one could time and were regular intervals apart. What she’d just had was a massive pain that took her breath away, and a feeling of pressure that made it even worse, as though everything inside her was being squeezed in a vise.

  “Should we call a doctor?” he asked her.

  “It’s probably something I ate.”

  “A watermelon perhaps,” he said, looking at her, and they both laughed. But it was her due date, so he didn’t want to ignore it entirely, and he kept an eye on her between chapters as he read, and after a few minutes she fell asleep, and he tucked the covers around her with a tender look, and kissed the top of her head with the silky long blond hair that had grown back. It was fanned out across the pillow. He finished reading, and was about to turn off the light, when she gave an awful moan, which he recognized as one of her nightmares, but when he glanced at her she was awake. “Are you okay?”

  She shook her head and fought to catch her breath. It was almost a full minute before she could speak. “I’m having some kind of awful pain. It’s really bad, Jakob. It feels like the baby is trying to come out sideways and breaking everything on the way.” She was panicked, tried to sit up and couldn’t. It hurt too much, and when she pushed back the covers she saw blood on the sheets. She had nothing to compare it to, no mother or aunts or grandmother or sister to talk to, and this was nothing like the predictable, genteel process she’d been told to expect. This was violent and so agonizing she couldn’t even stand up. She looked at Jakob in terror as the vise squeezed everything inside her again.

  “Let’s call the doctor,” he said, trying to appear calm, and terrified by the agony etched on her face. She thought it had happened too quickly to be normal labor, and like her, he had no idea what to expect. He fumbled for the number she had written down for him weeks before, and called. He got the answering service, and the operator told him to hold. It was eleven o’clock at night by then, and the doctor came on the line quickly. Jakob identified himself and described what Emmanuelle was experiencing, and said she was in too much pain to talk or even stand up.

  “You need to get your wife to the hospital. I’m already there with another patient. I’ll be waiting for you. You need to leave home right now.” He wanted to ask if the doctor thought something was wrong, but he didn’t want to frighten Emmanuelle even more.

  “He said we need to come to the hospital now,” Jakob said gently, and she frantically shook her head.

  “I can’t get up. It hurts too much,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “You have to,” he said firmly, wondering if he should call an ambulance, but it would cost a fortune. He didn’t think her life was at risk, she was just in terrible pain. “I’ll carry you. Don’t move.” He leapt out of bed and put his clothes on as fast as he could, with his coat on over them, laced his shoes and wrapped her in a blanket and picked her up as she screamed at him not to move her or touch her. He felt like a monster as he ignored her pleas, turned off the light with her in his arms, and walked out of the apartment. Even nine months pregnant, Emmanuelle was light as a feather, and she was crying as he hurried down the stairs with her in his arms, trying to reassure her.

  “You’ll be fine,” he kept saying over and over. He just wanted to get her to the hospital, so they could do something about the pain. He could tell that she was having the agonizing pains every couple of minutes, and when he reached the street, carrying her, he held her tightly and hailed a cab that was passing by. He settled her on the seat, and got in on the other side, told the driver to take them to Beth Israel hospital, and turned to look at Emmanuelle, her eyes were closed and she was grimacing through another pain.

  “Is she all right?” the driver asked, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

  “She’s having a baby,” Jakob said, holding tightly to her hand as she looked at him with tears running down her cheeks, convinced that everything was going wrong. The baby had to be dying to be giving her so much pain, but she couldn’t even speak to tell Jakob how it felt.

  “I’ve delivered two in my cab,” the driver said, racing through the snow, and going through two red lights. “They named one of them after me.” He smiled and Jakob nodded as he kept an eye on Emmanuelle, who was getting worse by the minute. It took fifteen minutes to get to the hospital at full speed, and her condition had degenerated dramatically by then. He paid the driver quickly, scooped Emmanuelle up in the blanket and walked into the emergency room with an air of desperation, and a nurse spotted him immediately. He looked like a madman, with his hair askew and Emmanuelle sobbing in his arms. The nurse grabbed a gurney, signaled for two attendants
to help them, and they got Emmanuelle onto it and wheeled her into an examining room, as Jakob gave them the name of her doctor, and they said they’d find him right away. He followed them into the examining room, not sure if he should be there, but he wanted to know what had gone wrong. None of this was what they had been told to expect. Birth was a normal, natural process, and not the violent agony that he was witnessing Emmanuelle going through.

  They ignored him standing in a corner of the room, still in his coat, unwrapped the blanket, took off her blood-stained nightgown, and slipped on a hospital gown, as she started to scream and wave frantically for Jakob to approach. He did hesitantly, not wanting to interfere, as the nurse encouraged her and kept telling her that everything was fine. Another nurse had gone to have the doctor paged, and the first nurse did an internal exam as blood gushed from Emmanuelle and tears rolled down Jakob’s cheeks as he watched, terrified to lose her. What if she was dying? How would he live without her? She was all he had left, and the nurse smiled as she finished the exam.

  “You’re doing beautifully, Mrs. Stein,” she told her. “You can start pushing in a few minutes, and we’re going to have a baby in your arms before you know it.” Emmanuelle was waving frantically, and screamed with another pain as the doctor walked in and the nurse reported her findings to him. “She’s almost at ten, she may be there by now. They just got here,” she told him calmly, and the doctor turned to smile at Jakob.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t have the baby at home. You cut it very close.”

  “She just started having pains less than an hour ago.” And then Jakob lowered his voice, so Emmanuelle wouldn’t hear him. “Is something wrong?”

  “Not at all.” The doctor smiled pleasantly as he washed his hands in the sink. “Why don’t you wait in the fathers’ waiting room. We’re going to get to work. We’ll take her up to the delivery room now. She can start pushing soon. We’ll come and find you as soon as the baby is born. Everything is going fine.” Emmanuelle let out a horrific scream as he said it, and Jakob looked as though he didn’t know whether to go to her and refuse to leave, or do what they told him. She sounded as though she was being torn in half, and the doctor pointed to the door, as the nurses got Emmanuelle onto the gurney under protest, and the doctor gave her a shot for the pain. They all looked busy and Jakob knew he had to leave, and he felt as though he had betrayed and abandoned her when he did.

  The fathers’ waiting room was down the hall, and he could hear Emmanuelle screaming as they rolled her away. He felt sick as he listened to her, it reminded him of the camp, and women who’d undergone ghoulish experiments. What was happening to her couldn’t be normal, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. But he had never known a woman who’d had a baby before, and no one had ever discussed it with him. He was sure that Emmanuelle hadn’t expected this either. She would have warned him if she’d known there would be this much pain. And he wondered if the doctor had been lying to him and something was wrong, but they had all looked very calm in the room, except his wife, writhing in agony and screaming his name. He had never felt so helpless in his life, and he felt like a murderer for having done it to her, and caused her so much grief.

  There were three other men waiting in the room when he walked in. One was reading a newspaper, the other had a book with him, and the third was asleep slumped in his chair. The one with the book looked up and smiled at him, and saw instantly Jakob’s panic and despair.

  “First baby?” he asked Jakob, and he nodded.

  “This is our third. First babies take a long time. You’ve got plenty of time to go to the cafeteria and get something to eat.” There was a pot of coffee in the room, and the thought of food after what he’d just seen made him feel sick. And even worse that it might take a long time. How would she stand that if it did? She would never forgive him for it, he was sure.

  The man with the newspaper lowered it and smiled at them both. “This is our fifth. We already have four girls. We came in early this time, my wife had the last one at home. I delivered it.” Jakob felt weak at the realization that he was in a room full of pros, and tried to relax as he perched uneasily on a chair, hoping they’d come to give him good news in a few minutes, that it was all over, and both mother and baby were fine. But half an hour later, no one had come. A nurse had come in to refresh the coffeepot, and the sleeping father had gone out to get something to eat. They told him he had plenty of time. And when Jakob asked, the nurse said there was no news of his wife, but they would tell him right away when his baby was born, and he could see it through the nursery window and visit his wife. He felt completely out of control and wondered how she was and if the shot for the pain had helped.

  The man with four daughters was the first to get news an hour later. The head nurse said he had twin girls, which was unexpected and he groaned and then laughed.

  “Six girls,” he said with a shocked expression, and left the room shaking his head and wished Jakob and the other father good luck.

  “I don’t care what we have as long as my wife and the baby are all right,” Jakob said anxiously to the other man, who looked at him sympathetically.

  “They’ll be fine.” Jakob didn’t want to tell him how awful it had looked when they took her away, and how unprepared she had been for what she had to face. It had never occurred to him that it would be as bad as that.

  He had been there for two hours, and was ready to crawl out of his skin when the man expecting his third child was told he had a son, and mother and child were doing fine. He left the room beaming, and wished Jakob luck. And then he was alone in the room, and dropped his head into his hands, praying for her. After everything she’d been through, she didn’t deserve an agony like this. His eyes were closed, and he was thinking about her when he heard someone walk into the room and looked up. A nurse was smiling at him.

  “You have a beautiful eight-pound, fourteen-ounce son, Mr. Stein, and your wife and baby are doing fine. They’re in the recovery room now, and we’ll bring her down to a room in about an hour. She’s a little groggy right now. They’ll bring the baby down in a few minutes and you can see him at the nursery window. Congratulations,” she said and left the room, as Jakob sank deeper into his chair with shaking legs. He was overwhelmed with relief. All he could think about was Emmanuelle. He wished he could go to her, even if she was asleep, and then they came to tell him that his son was ready to meet his dad, and he walked down the hall to the nursery on legs that felt like rubber.

  When he got to the window, they were holding up a beautiful baby boy, all pink and perfect, in a blue nightgown, tightly swaddled in a blue blanket, wearing a little blue knit cap. He was sound asleep and looked just like Emmanuelle. Jakob had never seen such a beautiful sight in his life, and he stood staring at him until the nurse put him in a bassinet with blue bows on it and rolled him away, and Jakob walked back to the waiting room, thinking about his son, wishing he could tell his parents, who would have been so proud. They had no one to share this with except each other.

  It was another hour before they told him that Emmanuelle was in a room and he could see her for a few minutes. She was dozing when he tiptoed in, her eyes opened when he bent to kiss her, and she smiled. Everything he felt for her, and all the worry of the past few hours was in his eyes.

  “He’s beautiful. Are you all right? Was it terrible?” She hesitated and then shook her head. Instinctively, she knew it was one of those secrets one was supposed to keep from men.

  “It was fine…he was very big, and he was sideways for a while…that’s what I felt when we were at home, but then he came down normally when they helped him.” They had used forceps, which she didn’t tell Jakob either, he didn’t need to know.

  “He looks just like you,” he said and kissed her again. He had never loved her more, and he could sense that it had been much harder than she was telling him. He had wanted it to be easy for her, and it had been anythin
g but that. “What are we going to call him?”

  “Max,” she said, after Jakob’s father, and Julien for hers. It was Jewish tradition to name children after family members who had been lost, and Jakob’s more recently than hers.

  “He looks like a Max, and you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Thank you for our son, and everything you went through tonight.” No one had warned her, and he thought she had been very brave.

  “It was worth it,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed. Maybe that was why no one told the truth about it, because in the end, the pain didn’t matter. The baby was worth it all. “I love you,” she said and drifted off to sleep as Jakob watched her. Then he left her, and went back to the nursery window to see his son. He was sound asleep too. They had told him that he could see them both at nine o’clock the next morning. He left the hospital and walked all the way home in the snow. It was four o’clock in the morning, and he was thinking of the people they had lost, his parents and grandparents, her mother, their sisters, and now they were a family of their own. He had a son, and he knew how proud they would have been of him and happy for them. He and Emmanuelle and Max were a family. He was smiling as he walked home. It was the best night of his life.

  Chapter 4

  Emmanuelle and the baby stayed at the hospital for five days, which was a standard maternity stay. Jakob had hoped that having Max would make her more confident about the good things in life and bring her peace. She was ecstatically happy with their son, but at the same time motherhood heightened her anxieties about the bad things that could happen. What if he got sick or was kidnapped, or became handicapped or injured when he got older? What if he died or a war came, and another Holocaust? What if Jews were singled out again for persecution and deported?

  She still firmly believed it could all happen again, no matter what Jakob said to reassure her. He worried about it himself at times, but not to the degree she did. He was more concerned about their financial situation, about providing for them, and making life secure for his wife and son. She worried less about money than about her son winding up in a concentration camp, as they had, for the same reasons of discrimination. And nothing convinced her otherwise. She was deeply marked by her years at the camp and all she had lost there. So was Jakob, but it manifested itself differently. He was always worried about money and providing for them. He had never had to worry about money as a young man, and now he did, constantly.