“And when will you know if there’s gonna be a kid?” Hannah had asked Ruth.
“When I get pregnant, or when I don’t,” Ruth had replied.
“But are you trying ?” Hannah had asked.
“We’re going to start trying after the New Year.”
“So soon!” Hannah said. “You’re not wasting any time.”
“I’m thirty-six, Hannah. I’ve wasted enough time.”
The fax machine in the Vermont house rang throughout her wedding day, and Ruth kept leaving her dinner party to check the messages. (Congratulations from her foreign publishers, for the most part.) There was a sweet message from Maarten and Sylvia in Amsterdam. (WIM WILL BE BROKENHEARTED! Sylvia had written.)
Ruth had asked Maarten to keep her informed of any developments in the case of the murdered prostitute. Maarten had told Ruth that there was no news about the prostitute’s murder. The police weren’t talking about it.
“Did she have any children?” Ruth had earlier faxed Maarten. “I wonder if that poor prostitute had any children.” But there had been nothing in the news about the prostitute’s daughter, either.
Ruth had got on an airplane, she’d crossed an ocean, and what had happened in Amsterdam had all but vanished. Only in the dark, when she lay awake, did she feel the touch of a dress on a hanger or smell the leather of the halter top that had hung in Rooie’s closet.
“You’re gonna tell me when you’re pregnant, aren’t you?” Hannah asked Ruth, when they were doing the dishes. “You’re not gonna try to keep that a secret, too, are you?”
“I have no secrets, Hannah,” Ruth lied.
“You’re the biggest secret I know,” Hannah told her. “The only way I know what’s going on with you is the only way everyone else knows it. I just have to wait and read your next book.”
“But I don’t write about myself, Hannah,” Ruth reminded her.
“So you say,” Hannah said.
“Of course I’ll tell you when I’m pregnant,” Ruth said, changing the subject. “You’ll be the first to know, after Allan.”
When she went to bed with Allan that night, Ruth felt only half at peace with herself; she also felt exhausted.
“Are you okay?” Allan asked her.
“I’m okay,” Ruth told him.
“You seem tired,” Allan said.
“I am tired,” Ruth admitted.
“You seem different, somehow,” Allan told her.
“Well. I’m married to you, Allan,” Ruth replied. “ That’s different, isn’t it?”
By the end of the first week of January 1991, Ruth would be pregnant, which would be different, too.
“Boy, that was fast!” Hannah would remark. “Tell Allan not every guy his age is still shooting live ammunition.”
Graham Cole Albright—seven pounds, ten ounces—was born in Rutland, Vermont, on October 3, 1991. The boy’s birthday coincided with the first anniversary of German reunification. Although she hated to drive, Hannah drove Ruth to the hospital. She’d been staying with Ruth for the final week of Ruth’s pregnancy, because Allan was working in New York; he drove to Vermont on the weekends.
It was two in the morning when Hannah left Ruth’s house for the hospital in Rutland, which was about a forty-five-minute drive. Hannah had called Allan as they were leaving for the hospital. The baby wasn’t born until after ten in the morning. Allan arrived in plenty of time for the actual delivery.
As for the baby’s namesake, Graham Greene, Allan remarked that he hoped his little Graham would never share the novelist’s reputed habit of frequenting brothels. Ruth, who for more than a year had been bogged down near the end of volume one of The Life of Graham Greene, felt a far greater anxiety about one of Greene’s other habits: his inclination to travel to the world’s trouble spots in search of firsthand experience. This was nothing Ruth would wish upon her little Graham, nor would she ever again seek such experiences for herself. After all, she’d seen a prostitute murdered by her customer, and it appeared that the murderer had got away with it.
Ruth’s novel-in-progress would suffer a yearlong hiatus. She moved with her baby boy back to Sagaponack, which meant that Conchita Gomez could be Graham’s nanny. This also made the weekends easier for Allan. He could take the jitney or the train from New York to Bridgehampton in half the time it took him to drive from the city to Vermont; he could also work on the train.
In Sagaponack, Allan used Ted’s former workroom for an office. Ruth claimed that the room still smelled of squid ink, or of a decomposing star-nosed mole—or of the Polaroid print coater. The photographs were gone now, although Ruth said she could still smell them, too.