irritation. Before I could trace it to its roots I said, “Practical, unless you count having a baby with a man you hardly know.” That sounded meaner than I meant it to. I backpedaled. “I mean, not that knowing the man you have your baby with makes any difference. Actually, maybe knowing the father is worse. Then you don’t have any excuse for perpetuating his genes.” I was starting to go off. I laughed too loud, startling Stella.
Mary Rose retrieved her backpack from where it hung on the hall-closet doorknob, then fished around inside. “Look at this.”
It was a handout given her by Dr. Vertamini, her OB/GYN. A list of symptoms that signal impending miscarriage: pain or burning on urination; vaginal spotting or bleeding; leaking or gushing fluid from vagina; uterine contractions; severe nausea; severe vomiting; abdominal pain; dizziness or light-headedness; severe headache; swelling of face, eyes, fingers, or toes; blurred eyesight; reduced fetal movement; absence of fetal movement for twenty-four hours (from the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy on).
“What do you think it means by pain, exactly?” asked Mary Rose.
“Are you experiencing any pain?”
“No. I figured it has to do with malpractice laws or something. Dr. Vertamini probably gives one of these to everyone, don’t you think? She just didn’t print it up for me.”
“Oh, no, I think she printed it up just for you.”
“So I shouldn’t worry, is what you’re saying.” Mary Rose manufactured a smile. Her teeth looked like bathroom tile installed by a perfectionist.
“Get used to worrying is more like it. You’ll get past the first trimester, then there’s the second, then the third, then the birth. No sooner is the baby born then you start worrying about can she hear all right? Is she retarded? And this new thing I read in the paper. Children who don’t go to day care have a higher rate of leukemia. Children who do go to day care wind up sociopaths. It’s a prison sentence of worry. No parole.”
Mary Rose dropped the handout on the table, dragged a slice of pizza from the box, pinching off swags of cheese with her long, nail-bitten fingers. I got the feeling she didn’t like my answer. Or maybe just my sermonizing. I do have a tendency to go on a bit. But she knows this about me, so why did she bother asking?
“What was all that business at Thanksgiving with Dicky?” she asked abruptly. “I asked Ward, and he just rolled his eyes.”
“Poor old Dicky. It would kill him that you didn’t know all about it.”
I was happy to get off the subject of motherhood and told Mary Rose probably more than she wanted to know about poor Jennifer Allen, whom Dicky had fallen in love with when he was at U.S.C. They became acquainted because they were both from our city, had gone to rival private high schools. She had a head of sunny curls that compensated for all of her shortcomings. Jennifer and Dicky loved each other in the dedicated, impractical way of the well-off. He bought her a yellow Vespa for her birthday. She convinced her parents to allow Dicky to accompany them on their annual two-week Christmas pilgrimage to St. Croix.
After two terms at school, Jennifer got sick. Or it was presumed she was sick. She began falling asleep in class. She was pale as a mushroom. It was all those weekend ski trips to Mammoth, those late nights with Dicky, the midterms, beer bongs, glee clubs. It was the anemia typical of the earnest, nutritionally ignorant vegan whose idea of saving the planet involves subsisting on a diet of Coke Classic and Cool Ranch Doritos. All Jennifer Allen really needed was a vacation from being a nineteen-year-old college student with no worries, but because all this collegiate carrying-on is presumed to be a normal upper-middle-class child’s birthright, nobody thought anything of it.
When Jennifer came home for the summer, her mother took her to one of our city’s most well-respected specialists, where she was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer: leukemic reticuloendotheliosis, also known as hairy cell leukemia. It had already invaded her marrow, spleen, and blood.
The shock felt by Dicky Baron and Jennifer Allen almost stopped their young hearts there and then. Who had ever heard of such a thing? Hairy cell leukemia. How could something so ridiculous-sounding be fatal? If she chose to accept treatment, there would be useless operations, followed by a round of expensive, nausea-producing chemotherapy that would not, in the end, postpone a death both painful and tedious. In the meantime, it would spell the end of the sunny curls. It would mean a life of valiant hat wearing.
Jennifer wept. There was not much hope. There was, however, the romance of dying while you were still young and pretty, featuring the interesting delusion that you can somehow experience the benefits of death without actually ceasing to exist. One day, while Dicky and Jennifer were alone in the house, Dicky found Big Hank’s .45 semi-automatic while he was going through Father’s bedside table, looking for something interesting to pinch. Dicky and Jennifer believed it was fate.
Dicky gave the gun to Jennifer, clicking off the safety and turning his back, as if she were a stranger about to get undressed.
Dicky’s comment, when he was arraigned on charges of manslaughter, was, “I thought there would be more noise and less blood.” The detective in charge of the investigation wore rubbers over his tasseled loafers and was glad of it. Even the ceiling needed to be repainted.
In Romeo’s Dagger, the first of the three movies I’ve managed to get off the ground, I insisted that Jennifer shoot herself off screen. We have all seen enough, I said. We have proved to ourselves and the world that the American people are unflinching. All has been told; all has been shown. I made an impassioned plea to the studio for the power of restraint. When that didn’t work, I cited the shower sequence in the original Psycho. I got my way. Now that I have Stella, I am relieved on behalf of Jennifer Allen’s mother.
Dicky maintained throughout the trial that if he and Jennifer had done anything wrong, it was in telling her parents. If Jennifer had been less conscientious, she never would have complained to her mother, and no doctors would have been involved. No medical clerks would have been involved, medical clerks who make clerical errors.
For Jennifer Allen, his Jennifer Allen, did not have hairy cell leukemia. Her chart had been confused with that of another Jennifer Allen by Corrine Clingenpeel, a medical receptionist trying to hold down two jobs, raise her young son, and get through nursing school. It was a single-mother mistake, as the papers were fond of reporting, the mistake of a woman overwhelmed. For this Jennifer Allen, Dicky’s Jennifer Allen, was the healthiest person on which an autopsy had ever been performed in the state, according to our city’s chief coroner.
It made the national news, and the nation was duly outraged. An investigation into hospital filing systems was opened up. Briefly, the blame was laid at the smelly feet of a cadre of sixteen-year-old computer hackers. For several weeks the nightly news ran stories about people who had gone in for knee surgery and had their gall bladders removed instead. Dicky (“looking not unlike the young Nick Nolte”—Associated Press) wept on all three networks, plus CNN. He was tried, acquitted, and signed by William Morris.
I’d been rattling around the film industry for six years when Audra brought me the rights to Dicky’s side of the story. In Hollywood there are always several sides for sale. I was in the art department on a feature at the time. For twelve hours a day I moved furniture on, off, and around the set. The movie was set in Victorian times and all the highboys, chiffonniers, and sideboards were made of solid oak and cherry. I wore a kidney belt and a look of perpetual self-pity. I liked movies. If I liked moving furniture I would have gotten a job with Bekins. At this time Dicky’s case came to trial, and an article about Jennifer Allen’s death appeared as a Newsweek cover story.
When
