November 1957
Bill
paced around the small, green and white room.
Back and forth, up and down.
Clair
glanced up from the Popular Mechanics magazine in which his nose had been
buried. “Bill, you’re going to wear a hole in the
carpeting.”
Bill
stopped in his tracks and looked up. His
gazed into the distance like a man in a trance. His interlaced fingers whitened
as he tightened his hands’
grip on each other. “What could be taking so long?”
“It’s a boy,” a white-clad nurse
announced from the door of the waiting room.
Bill
turned so fast he nearly lost his balance. The worry lines around his eyes
relaxed as they widened and his mouth opened into an O, then stretched into a
big smile. “A boy?”
He whirled around to all the people
stuffed into the room. His and Lois’s immediate families, and Mark and Anna,
all jumped up and stood shoulder-to-shoulder, all grinning like a pack of
fools.
“It’s a boy!” Bill yelled. Everybody
surged forward and started talking at once. They pounded on his back and
shoulders from every direction. He
laughed and nudged his way through the pack. “Thank you. Clair, pass out the cigars, would you.” His
eyes moistened and his smile beamed like the sun. “I’m going to go meet my
boy.” To the
nurse, he said, “How’s
my wife?”
“She’s just fine Mr. Schoppe.” The
nurse spoke without turning. “Her labor was hard, but she came through like a
real trouper. She’s a tough young woman.”
Relieved,
Bill laughed. “You
don’t even know the half of it.” He stopped and turned.
A
cheer went up. Grinning, he turned back. The nurse was gone.
Poking
his head out the doorway, he looked to his left and then to his right. He spotted
a white cap over a short bob of brown curls bouncing down the hallway. “There
she is,” he muttered, hurrying to catch up.
He
followed her through a set of double doors and stopped in front of a wall, the
top half of which was glass. Behind the glass two rows of bassinets. Bill’s eyes glistened as he looked at the
rows of babies. “Which one is mine?” he said, without turning.
The
nurse said, “just one moment.”
She walked down the hall and went in through a door. A few agonizing minutes later she reappeared
on the other side of the glass, masked, gloved and wrapped in a surgical gown. She picked her way
between the bassinets and stopped at one right in front of where Bill stood with
his nose centimeters away from the glass. She caught his eye and hers crinkled
above the mask.
Bill
pointed. “Is that him?”
She
nodded and picked up the squirming bundle. She held him out like a doll on
display.
“Wow,” Bill said. His eyes watered and
he dabbed at them with the rolled-up cuff of his denim shirt.
