Many thanks again. Advice noted.
Novel Treatments / The Eagle & The Dodo Chpt 1 (1/3) Revised
Truth may seem, but cannot be:
Beauty brag, but ‘tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
William Shakespeare `The Phoenix and the Turtle’
* Eaglet*
I
.
“Isn’t she beautiful! George, oh isn’t she beautiful!”
He smiled and met Helen’s eyes, which began to sparkle and then, as if wire-guided, returned to her providence. His wife’s lips, stripped of lipstick, were dull and bloodless, yet the remainder of her face radiated her achievement. In her arms, peeking out of the light swaddling was the burning face of the emergent.
“Yes darling, she’s beautiful,” he heard himself say, sounding distant and muffled, as if he were still on the other side of the delivery room door. “How are you feeling?”
“I hurt, I’m sore, but so happy George, I’m so happy. She’s so beautiful.” Helen lifted her head from the pillows and craned her neck over the covers for a better look at the face of her child. “Is she all right?”
“She’s perfect.” He leant over and put his arm around Helen’s shoulder feeling a dynastic satisfaction. He ran a finger across the soft underside of the baby’s jaw. It was hot and soft, so tender it whitened under his lightest touch.
“But what did the doctor say?”
“How do you think I know?” He sounded tense, “That’s what he said,” he added more moderately.
“Oh I’m so relieved. She’s perfect . . . I was afraid that there might be something wrong . . . never mind.” She was a mother at last, and fulfilled that part of her destiny. In her arms was her baby. She wouldn’t have been satisfied with her life otherwise. “Look at her George. Isn’t she just the most beautiful little thing you’ve ever seen? Look at her little hands, oh she’s so beautiful.”
He wanted very much to think she was beautiful. But he didn’t, and he lied. It was easy enough. She was wonderful, marvelous, but beautiful . . . All new born babies looked like grisly, red-faced monkeys to him, and this one, his own daughter, was no exception. His perception of reality stood in the way of his falling headlong and giddy like his wife into the beauty behind his daughter’s present chryslitic appearance. When the wings of this crumpled butterfly filled he hoped with all his heart that he would feel differently. Feel more. He was sure he would, but for the moment he felt numb, in shock. He was still trying to come to grips with her actual physical existence.
Life was renewed.
And the torment was now over. Thank God. Just as she must have felt the pressure deflate about her abdomen, so too he could now feel the tension flow out of his muscles and nerves. He let out his breath as if he had been holding it in the last nine months. Relieved – it was good to see a smile on Helen’s face again and he became aware that his own cheeks were aching. He realised suddenly that he was happy too; for the delivery of a healthy child; that made them a true family. The pregnancy was over at last. It was a long time, he now reflected, to put up with an irritable, moody, whingeing woman. Loving his wife, he had borne the load graciously, yet he could not help but marvel at the way everyone always talked about, wrote about, described minutely, what the woman was going through; the compulsions, the anxiety, the pain, all the strange and wonderful symptoms brought about by the metamorphosis their bodies were experiencing, without reference to the other person; the whipping post who had to suffer the sting of side effects to the whole damn misery.
About the sixth month of pregnancy he remembered thinking that it was unfortunate, that it was not he who was having the baby.
Somehow he imagined himself being more in control of the situation; less demonstrative, less demanding, less occupied with the process. What he couldn’t grasp was; that since Eve women had been having babies, and his wife was no less than those before her; it was what their beautiful ‘inconvenient’ bodies were designed for, it was a natural function for them, so why the hell was it such an ordeal? Modern medicine was just that; too modern, and advances in childbirth delivery too recent to be linked to any evolutionary physiological change. They hadn’t been spoiled that much had they; by epidurals, by confinement, by what? No it all must be just a lack of understanding on his part. Or was it God, or the declining infant mortality rate and more than the fittest surviving.
He appreciated the discomfort that growing a huge belly, and supporting another life within might cause. He could not be close enough to it, that was all. It wasn’t him having a baby. But it was over now and he was glad. He preferred anything, even the prospect of wiping dirty bottoms, to the considerate, pandering fool he had become. It wasn’t a role he could have prepared for and not one he was used to. He accused himself of selfishness, then wondered if in the grand scheme of things he was the only one.
Being a man was supposed to be simple, and he wished he had ten bob for every woman he had heard wish they were men, but they hardly appreciated the difficulties. But he would never say that. He had to be strong, represent and enact authority, and be the provider; the leader and the hunter, basic substantial roles for survival. Mary was lucky to be a girl, a svelte creature of whimsy, delicacy and grace.
Women were designed to be beautiful and train themselves to be sexy. a natural reflection of men’s desires – everything a woman needed to be. They were smooth and rounded, soft and lovely, didn’t have organs which hung out in remarkable contrast to the other parts of the body. A woman=s crucial actions and behaviour were directed towards what happened today: a safe childbirth. This required a stable, clean, healthy environment for nine months of gestation, and the early years of her young=s life. The vibrations from this function were felt in all corners of women’s lives, they craved stability, and the men they sought to marry needed to have at least the appearance of that. If the man didn’t have muscles, he had to have money, and if he did not have that, then he had to express a potential shelter with the charisma of his confidence. A man had to have a recipe for success, or have the stuff that could be moulded into the shape of it by their own gentle hands. They could dampen the wild spirit in the hearts of men by their need to be safe. The need to accept an element of risk in order to survive and progress was the counter element evident in men.
It had sometimes seemed to him that women could do without sex indefinitely, and were rarely inspired sexually by the male body; weren’t sexually voracious and wouldn’t be involved if the idea of conceiving a child weren’t present. Everyone, man and woman chained to a biological role, and its enhancements, and effects and repercussions, of just being in the bodies of men and women.
The large white door with an aluminium push plate and a small wired glass window to his left swung open and a new concentrated burst of antiseptic followed the over-scrubbed doctor into the room. His skin shined beneath the pinkness.
“How’s our little mother now?”
“Oh fine doctor, thank you. Thank you for everything. Isn’t she beautiful?”
“She certainly is, a nice healthy six pounds, seven ounces. You should be pleased.” The doctor as if just noticing his presence nodded to him.
“Oh I am. I am. I can’t wait to get her home.”
“In a day or so. Let you rest a bit,” said the doctor glancing at him like he were some type of domestic Simon Legree. “Have you a name for her?”
“Mary,” announced Helen proudly, “it was my mother’s name.”
“I think the traditional names are best. I can’t remember what it means . . . ” The doctor pondered a moment as if searching the chronicles of his pediatric career then shook his head. “Never mind it has a very pretty sound, as pretty as the girl it belongs too.” The doctor’s hand cupped the curve of his daughter’s head like he owned it.
It hadn’t been his choice of name. Helen thought it sounded cheerful. He had looked it up to see what it meant. It meant ‘bitter tears’ and it was too ordinary and Catholic by half for him. He also didn’t warm to the doctor’s off-hand manner with him. In fact, he found himself not liking Doctor Klinsky very much at all. He was resentful of this third element that had entered so closely on their lives. He was grateful, pleased for the knowledge, the expertise the doctor provided, but a jealousy had formed about thoughts of the man who they, or rather his wife, had become reliant upon. His very words, in his wife’s interpretation, were law – his idlest suggestions had controlled their lives. And he shuddered when he remembered that Klinsky had explored areas of Helen’s body previously set aside as sacred to him alone. During these past months he had been made to feel almost like the incumbent fool who had, accidentally, started the whole episode; the poor clod who shoved it in once too often. It was the doctor who got all the `thank you’s’ as if he had been the sole perpetrator of the event from insemination to birth. It was silly to think this way he knew, but he’d felt so stupid, so useless, at a distance which the doctor was not.
“Can I hold her?”
“I’ll see you later,” said the doctor and disappeared through the swing doors.
He felt the terror of her fragile, non-existent weight in his arms. He looked at the child again; saw the dark gloss of her wet eyebrows.
“She looks like you George.”
He was part of her. That was the miracle; the immediate fascination of resurgent life, it was all there before him in an incredible red-faced gremlin. His little girl: Mary. As he looked into her face, smoothed her hair for the first time, a whole host of thoughts charged in on him. He asked himself what a baby was? The beginning of a love affair. The continuation of hope, of line. Baby; raw lump of nerves to be shaped by experience. The birth of being, of life, of consciousness, of entity. And yet now, so vulnerable, who didn’t know whether toes are fingers or fingers toes. Womblife, he said to himself softly, mentally addressing her, daylife is here. Try to be happy in this cold world. Grab at happiness every chance you get. A small eye tinted golden by the afternoon light seemed to take him in for a moment, looking straight through him, knowing the truth of him, but not caring. In the immediate distance he heard the insistent running of scales up and down a toy xylophone – it was time to go.
Walking out the front doors of the hospital thoughts were going through his mind concerning the prepared nursery. It was full of soft warm blankets, fluffy nappies and plastic liners, pink bears, yellow and chocolate coloured ducks. The new cage was there for the new arrival; pine, strong, neat, non-toxic paint and oh so sanitary. Prepared weren’t they – nothing forgotten. The crunch of the gravel broke up his well-run itinerary of thinking. It was ground he’d covered at least twenty times before. What was wrong with him? What had happened, what was it? How to explain it? Sure, the basic facts were there, overwhelming in themselves. Childbirth, that said it all in one word, but what words, thoughts made sense of it, life. A single shot begins it and then nine hidden months later out pops a six and a half pound bundle of flesh and bone vaguely resembling something human. The flesh takes life under its own control; it eats, it grows. Under the effect of a bluish watery milk it fills the skin, stretches it so it is smooth. The hand unfolds and the threads of use grow across the palm. Raw dry knees come off the ground and the top heavy little body toddles about in frightful glee. The hair, mere filaments once, grow to a length so beautiful no pair of scissors can be tempted to cut a single lock while innocence persists. The mind beneath more than alive from the very beginning; feeling, looking, searching, questioning, rationalizing the world away. Every word, sound, object, sight, taste, feel a new bright surprising key to another door of riddles.
Each new phase of development having its own unique beauty. The limbs stretch to become proportionate to the size of the head. Before he knew it, puberty like some new inch would be reached and the pubic hairs stir memories of origins. The chest would deepen too; breast buds become sore and bloom. She plays netball for the school team, proves good, and represents the local suburb. Thighs thicken and calf muscles wrap themselves about the shins like smooth brown snakes. The nails grow to be painted bright colours, the lashes curl and other allures arrive to play the game once more. The fruit is ripe, is overripe, is spoiled.
(What will she want to do with her life? What will she be, to her, to me?)
He could see the boys coming sniffing around like hounds after a bitch in heat. Just as he had done when he was younger. (Like me.) Sex imperative they enter and sit down tidily on his couch waiting to steal a touch, a pet, and the promise of a favour. Their young fluffy cheeks belie an unseen maturity. He was anxious for his virgin Mary, his alone, inviolate still smelling of baby soap. Her nubile body is deflowered without his knowing it, or who, or when. Then in her that uncorrupted part of him would be gone. That cheek, for her mother’s lips and his, blushed no longer for the rest of them. How to stand it? How to sit through nights waiting for her to come home? Reading until eyes are red, the room heavy with cigarette smoke and aches in the head like lightning illuminating a terrible landscape covered in a dull fog of apprehension.
(I will be responsible.)
There will be her own character, underneath it an uneasy trust, but secure enough to make living possible. Several of the boys, likeable enough fellows by most standards, will come and go midst tears and laughter, but one will remain. Someone unlikely, he supposed, was expected. She would love him, and his heart would ache again, but eventually retire to the promise of a new and equally magical arrival, removed one generation to soften the blow.
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Helmling reviewed Version 1 -
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Very interesting.
I can’t put my finger on why, but the dialogue feels a little stiff or artificial to me. For one thing, Helen doesn’t talk to Mary. From my recollections, women always talk to their newborns when they’re in their arms. Also, the doctor’s dialogue didn’t seem clinical enough, but then every doctor’s different.
I love the psychology of the father you explore. I wonder, did you ever consider a first person point of view?
“removed one generation to soften the blow,” incredible.
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Sloper reviewed Version 1 -
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Brian—
I see that you have done a revision based on the reviews that were posted for your earlier version. This version is good, and it reads very smoothly. I wanted to give you a warning not to worry too much about some of the advice that you had been given. First, I would warn against “Americanizing” your style. You do not have to write so that every audience understands your work effortlessly. Also, despite the reviewers assertion, there are many many readers who are accustomed to British syntax. English is a world language, after all.
For ease of reading, the shorter paragraphs are an improvement. But don’t sacrifice style for accessibility. I think that you have done well here, not losing the spirit of the character while changing the breaks in line. I am simply leary of style “rules”. Sometimes wordy narration (or on the other hand, sentence fragments) are justified, especially in first-person narrative, where the style is a part of your character.
And the rambling? Well, this is a novel, not a SS. This gives you more time to plumb the depths of your character.
This new version is excellent, but don’t get trapped into making alterations simply to please.
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