Rough Crossing

continued

authoritative ways. John's priority was finding a job to pay the upcoming doctor's bills, and I was incapable of thinking so much as an hour ahead. It was days before the ground stopped rising and falling beneath me. No wonder my seasick mother had groaned at the sight of an active toddler!

As promised, Daddy had secured an appointment with a leading obstetrician. Leaving John in the waiting room of Dr. Locke MacKenzie, I was passed from nurse to nurse, disrobed, gowned, and introduced to a dignified man with gray-streaked hair who performed a swift examination. A few minutes later in his consulting room, Dr. MacKenzie gave a nine-syllable name to the anatomical problem that had brought us back to the States.

"Nothing to be alarmed about. No reason why you won't have a perfectly healthy baby" He handed back the letter I'd brought from the Paris doctor. "Frenchmen tend to be hysterical. Your father says he'd like to take you to Florida. That's fine. I'll need to see you in a month."

Dr. MacKenzie had risen and was holding out his hand. I suppose I shook it, but since the words "healthy baby" I'd wanted only to rush to the waiting room with the news. John and I walked down Park Avenue two feet above the sidewalk. We were going to be parents! With the Paris doctor's bleak prognosis, we hadn't allowed ourselves to think past the pregnancy.

"Early October," John repeated the due date. "We should probably wait a month or two after that, don't you think, before heading back overseas?"

I agreed. I knew nothing about babies, but it made sense to wait a few weeks before traveling with one. That an infant would in any way alter our lifestyle did not occur to us. How much room could someone that small take up? Maybe back in Paris we'd want to find accommodations with a bathroom on the same floor, John acknowledged. And maybe not so high up in the building, I added, thinking of six steep flights carrying... whatever it was babies needed. Bassinets, diaper pails, bottles -- we were innocent of such things. To us a baby was a miniature person with correspondingly miniature needs.