she must be dead. Darkness swooned at the edges of his vision, but before he passed out, he saw that his beloved Maddy was breathing. He clutched the edge of her bed until his vision brightened.
Gray-faced, drenched with sweat, she looked not like the vibrant woman he knew, but instead appeared to be frail and vulnerable.
Blood on the sheets suggested that she’d delivered their child, but no squalling infant was present.
Elsewhere, Beezo shouted, “Where are you bastards?”
Reluctant to leave my mother, Dad nonetheless went in search of the conflict to see what help he could provide—as (he has always insisted) any baker would have done.
In the second delivery room, he found Natalie Beezo upon another birthing bed. The slender aerialist had so recently died from the complications of childbirth that her tears of suffering had not yet dried upon her cheeks.
According to Dad, even after her agony and even in death, she was ethereally beautiful. A flawless olive complexion. Raven hair. Her eyes were open, luminous green, like windows to a field in Heaven.
For Konrad Beezo, who didn’t appear to be handsome under the greasepaint and who was not a man of substantial property and whose personality would surely be at least somewhat off-putting even under ordinary circumstances, this woman was a prize beyond all reasonable expectation. You could understand—though not excuse—his violent reaction to the loss of her.
Stepping out of the delivery room, Dad came face to face with the homicidal clown. Simultaneously Beezo flung open the door from the crèche and charged into the hall, a blanketed infant cradled in the crook of his left arm.
At this close range, the pistol in his right hand appeared to be twice the size that it had been in the waiting room, as if they were in Alice’s Wonderland, where objects grew or shrank with no regard for reason or for the laws of physics.
Dad might have seized Beezo’s wrist and, with his strong baker’s hands, fought for possession of the gun, but he dared not act in any way that would have put the baby at risk.
With its pinched red face and furrowed brow, the infant appeared indignant, offended. Its mouth stretched open wide, as though it were trying to scream but had been shocked silent by the realization that its father was a mad clown.
Thank God for the baby, Dad has often said. Otherwise I would have gotten myself killed. You’d have grown up fatherless, and you’d never have learned how to make a first-rate crème brûlée.
So cradling the baby and brandishing the pistol, Beezo demanded of my father, “Where are they, Rudy Tock?”
“Where are who?” Dad asked.
The red-eyed clown appeared to be both wrung by grief and ripped by anger. Tears streaked his makeup. His lips trembled as if he might sob uncontrollably, then skinned back from his teeth in an expression of such ferocity that a chill wound through Dad’s bowels.
“Don’t play dumb,” Beezo warned. “There had to be other nurses, maybe another doctor. I want the bastards dead, all of them who failed her.”
“They ran,” my father said, certain that it would be safer to lie about having seen the medical staff escape than to insist that he had encountered no one. “They slipped out behind your back, the way you came, through the waiting room. They’re long gone.”
Feeding on his rage, Konrad Beezo appeared to swell larger, as if anger were the food of giants. No Barnum & Bailey buffoonery brightened his face, and the poisonous hatred in his eyes was as potent as cobra venom.
Lest he become a stand-in for the medical staff no longer within Beezo’s reach, Dad quickly added, with no trace of threat, as if only being helpful, “Police are on the way. They’ll want to take the baby from you.”
“My son is mine,” Beezo declared with such passion that the stink of stale cigarette smoke rising from his clothes might almost have been mistaken for the consequence of his fiery emotion. “I will do anything to keep him from being raised by the aerialists.”
Walking a thin line between clever manipulation and obvious fawning in the interest of self-preservation, my father said, “Your boy will be the greatest of his kind—clown, jester, harlequin, jackmuffin.”
“Jackpudding,” the killer corrected, but without animosity. “Yes, he’ll be the greatest. He will. I won’t let anyone deny my son his destiny.”
With baby and pistol, Beezo pushed past my dad and hurried along the shorter hall, where he stepped over the dead nurse with no more concern for her than he’d have shown for a janitor’s mop and bucket.
Feverishly trying to think of something that he could do to bring down this brute without harming the infant, Dad could only watch in frustration. When Beezo reached the door to the expectant-fathers’ lounge, he hesitated, glanced back. “I’ll never forget you, Rudy Tock. Never.”
My father could not decide whether that declaration might be an expression of misguided sentimental affection—or a threat.
Beezo pushed through the door and disappeared.
At once, Dad hurried back to the first delivery room because his primary concern understandably remained with my mother and me.
Still unattended, my mother lay on the birthing bed where Dad had moments ago discovered her. Though still gray-faced and soaked with sweat, she had regained consciousness.
She groaned with pain, blinked in confusion.
Whether she was merely disoriented or delirious is a matter of contention between my parents, but my father insists that he feared for her when she said, “If you want Reuben sandwiches for dinner, we’ll have to go to the market for cheese.”
Mom insists that she actually said, “After this, don’t think you’re ever going to touch me again, you son of a bitch.”
Their love is deeper than desire, than affection, than respect, so deep that its wellspring is humor. Humor is a petal on the flower of hope, and hope blossoms on the vine of faith. They have faith in each other and faith that life has meaning, and from this faith comes their indefatigable good humor, which is their greatest gift to each other—and to me.
I grew up in a home filled with laughter. Regardless of what happens to me in the days ahead, I will have had the laughter. And wonderful pastries.
In this account of my life, I will resort at every turn to amusement, for laughter is the perfect medicine for the tortured heart, the balm for misery, but I will not beguile you. I will not use laughter as a curtain to spare you the sight of horror and despair. We will laugh together, but sometimes the laughter will hurt.
So …
Whether my mother was delirious or sound of mind, whether she blamed my father for the pain of labor or discussed the need for cheese, they are in relative agreement about what happened next. My father found a wall-mounted phone near the door and called for help.
Because this device was more an intercom than a phone, it did not have a standard keypad, just four keys, each clearly labeled: STAFFING, PHARMACY, MAINTENANCE, SECURITY.
Dad pressed SECURITY and informed
