MARVIN'S CHRISTMAS CHILD
 By Patrick Mulcahey

Marvin was a fifteen-year-old black drag queen and one of the most important influences in my life, one of my true teachers.  Annemarie was a sad-eyed Italian girl with long, long hair in a ponytail, so black it was almost navy blue.  I have no idea where Marvin and Annemarie are now, but over thirty years ago I was with them almost every hour of the day, for -- well, I was there eighteen months.  Annemarie was discharged after only six, and Marvin escaped just before I was transferred to the place where the head doctor favored electroshock treatments.

When I was still in my teens, I was committed to a mental hospital because I was gay.  That is a story I need not tell.  Back then it happened all the time. Now problem teenagers run away from home or get sent to Outward Bound, but in those days parents who didn't know what to do with their wild or troubled kids had them committed for a year or two.  This was when psychiatric services still existed, and health insurance picked up the tab.  Or sometimes the county did, when Juvenile Hall didn't do the trick.  And hospitals had no difficulty coming up with a diagnosis for any wayward kid when someone was willing to foot the bill.

Everybody on my ward was under 21.  All most of us needed was someone to tell us, "Nobody else will say so, but you're fine, you're normal, go home."  I think the doctors and nurses knew it, or should have, but they needed their jobs and their residencies and convinced themselves they did us some good. About a third of us were gay or lesbian, another third were gloomy or rebellious, then there were the anorexic girls being force-fed and a very few others with bona fide problems.  (Later I had my private revenge.  Every soap opera I ever wrote for had an evil stupid psychiatrist named Dr Berv, the name of my first shrink, holding one of the leading characters prisoner on a psych ward for the flimsiest reasons.  I liked to picture my Dr Berv at home in front of the TV:  "Not again!"  I don't expect he actually watched my shows, but millions of housewives and truck drivers wanted him dead, and that was good enough for me.)

Annemarie was one of the few who really belonged in a hospital.  She had just had a baby and was suffering from severe post-partum depression.  After the birth she would have nothing to do with her husband, a fresh-faced Italian country kid who looked like a farmer, or with her baby.  In fact she would have nothing to do with anyone.  For five months she never spoke even one word, never answered or asked one question.  They kept her so over-medicated (a favorite approach in those days) on megadoses of Thorazine that she was stiff as a board.  She would sit bent over the newspaper for hours, staring at the same headlines, until one of us would come along and turn the page for her.

The awful grief in her face marked her as different, damaged.  We all saw it and felt protective of her.  When the nurses would ask Annemarie morning questions like whether she'd brushed her teeth, we would make up answers and then argue with each other till the nurses gave up and left her alone.  Now, Annemarie was not quite oblivious.  She would make her bed at seven a.m. like the rest of us, and when it was time for lunch or medications, she would get up when we did and follow, though sometimes we had to remind her.  She was just compliant enough with the routine of the place to avoid being scolded or spoken to. On visiting days her whole family would come.  The farmer husband, and Annemarie's grandmother, a shriveled little crone all in black, like an Italian grandmother in the movies, and Annemarie's glamorous mother, Renata, who always wore a fur coat.  The whole family had come from Italy a few years before.

Renata spoke only a little English, the grandmother none at all.  Annemarie spoke not a word of anything to any of them.  Renata would bring some fabulous home-baked confection that her daughter wouldn't touch, so the rest of us devoured it while they stood around Annemarie, looking off pained into empty air, as if posing for a tragic family picture.  Renata's mastery of the baking arts drove the anorexic girls to despair.  They complained they were getting big as houses, and it's true we were all getting fat, since there was nothing to do but sit and eat.  If you were well-behaved enough, once a week three nurses would take a small group out to play volleyball for ninety minutes, which was amusing in a diabolical sort of way.  You haven't lived till you've watched ten teenagers drugged-out as zombies let a volleyball bounce off their faces for an hour and a half.  On one of these excursions I ran away and had to be brought back by the police, which put an end to my volleyball days.

The person who kept us all from going authentically nuts was Marvin.  He was so completely unimpressed by all of it -- the big-name hospital, the serious doctors and nurses, the terribly important group meetings and therapy sessions -- that just by being himself, he showed us how idiotic it all was.  At the age of fifteen he'd run away from home about a million times, had lived on the street, shacked up with older men, and been arrested for solicitation, which he felt was an outrage, since whatever service he'd been offering had been offered for free.  The doctors pretended to be broad-minded and would tell Marvin his cross-dressing wasn't the problem, in their view, which was absolutely a lie, anybody could see it made their skin crawl.  But no, they would say, they were only concerned by the dangers to any fifteen-year-old boy who went around dressed as a woman.  Some intolerant type could hurt him!  Marvin wasn't worried.  "Honey, when I dress up, I look older.  Plus I got a knife, how dumb do you think I am?"  No answer could be more logical, but the doctors just shook their heads.  Marvin tried to get everyone to call him Sheree, his drag name of choice, but the doctors made out that would be unhealthy, delusional, since Sheree was not on his birth certificate.  Marvin tried to outwit them by proposing the compromise "Marvina," which sort of was his name, but they wouldn't go for that either.

Marvin schooled us in inventive ways to pass the time.  Every month we had mandatory psych testing, three-hour sessions three days in a row, those miserable standardized tests where you fill in a column with a number two pencil, careful to make no stray marks.  It was boring beyond belief, until Marvin showed us how the answer sheets with their hundreds of columns could be filled out to make patterns, or faces, or spell out obscene messages.  We had an "art therapist" who learned quickly that giving us paints was a bad idea, so she had the brainstorm of bringing in a Polaroid camera.  She proposed we create a big photo collage, assembled with glue, but since we weren't allowed to take pictures of anyone's face -- confidentiality, I guess -- the project didn't seem promising.  Until Marvin went off in a corner and came back with a snapshot that developed in front of our eyes to be an image of his genitals.  It seemed like such a good idea that we all took the camera off to that same corner.  We never saw the art therapist again.  She was replaced by a dance therapist, whose sessions were almost as pathetic as our volleyball games, until Marvin took over and taught us line-dancing, which was very new then, unheard-of really.

Of course, Marvin couldn't dress up on the ward.  But he discovered where the linens were stored and took to wearing a hospital gown over his clothes, the closest thing he could find to a dress, and a little surgical cap for a hat. The linen room had no lock, so it was no use taking the gown away from him, he would just go get another, and after a while the nurses stopped trying.  He'd swish around in his hospital gown and cap feeling like an empress but looking like someone about to have a kidney removed.  We thought it was hilarious, but the doctors tried to reason him out of it, again from the fear-of-violence angle:  What if one of the other kids beat him up?  "Just let them try," said Marvin.

But here the doctors seemed possibly to have a point.  We all knew the kid they were talking about was Rusty.  Rusty was the toughest, meanest case on the ward, another runaway and street kid.  He was little but wiry, sullen and given to throwing things and exploding in four-letter words.  He was macho beyond macho, with hands that were always fists, and hardly ever talked except about people he'd beaten up or planned to beat up.  He always wore a leather jacket, which made him look even more forbidding.  Still, maybe the shared fondness of Marvin and Rusty for clothing-as-symbol should have predicted, better than the doctors' warnings, what was to come.

Among the daily rituals of the place was a fiendish one called Little Leaderless group.  This consisted of locking up in a room together for two hours all the patients belonging to a single doctor -- there were six or seven psychiatrists all told -- for "therapy."  It was actually therapy for the nurses, who would go and smoke and have coffee.  Marvin and Annemarie and I belonged to Dr Berv, along with a pothead named Glenn and a slinky young lesbian named Forrest, who used her jeans as an ashtray in a way I have never seen anyone else do, insisting the ashes were good for the denim.  So every afternoon the five of us would be locked up together, ostensibly to talk about our problems.  But since our main problem was being locked up, Glenn would sleep, Forrest would smoke, and Marvin would dance and tell me about his adventures.  Annemarie sat still as a stone the whole time.  Marvin had brought two records to the hospital with him.  The one he played over and over, I still hear it in my sleep, was "Who's That Lady?" by the Isley Brothers.  (This was the 60s version; later, when their 70s remake hit the charts, it felt like Marvin was haunting me.)  Marvin would stand in the middle of the room and sway.  Who's that lady?  Sexy lady!  Real fine lady!  And plainly the answer in his head was:  Marvina!  That's who.

The weekly ritual that started us off every Monday was Big Group.  This was everyone on the ward, plus all the doctors and nurses and social workers.  We sat in a gigantic circle in the biggest room in the place.  It was the patients' job to set up the chairs.  We had to start like an hour early: picture 30 teenagers medicated just short of unconsciousness trying to put 50 chairs in a circle.  Half the kids were only there because their parents were worried they might be smoking dope, to which the professionals' solution was to put them on hard drugs until the insurance ran out.  Truly, the whole system was so stupid it doesn't bear thinking about.  Anyway, Big Group was when it was announced who was doing well, who was not, who was leaving, who was being granted privileges (volleyball), who was being denied them, and I don't remember what else, except that it lasted all morning.  The favorite topics were Annemarie's silence -- but that could not go on too long, since Annemarie never responded -- and Marvin's misbehavior.  We "as a community" were supposed to chime in and say how much Marvin bothered us, how we wished he would shape up, and once in a while when he'd pissed somebody off the subject took on a little life.  But basically we thought Marvin and his gowns and his dancing were a hoot and refused to help dress him down, with the result that Marvin was usually sentenced to "social isolation" for a couple of days.  This meant that during free time he had to sit in a chair in the hall and nobody was supposed to talk to him.  Whoever designed this punishment, however, did not have the likes of Marvin in mind.  He could not be made to shut up, and we could not be made not to answer him, so it was mostly a punishment for the nurses trying to enforce it.

One Monday at Big Group, Marvin made a startling proposal.  This meeting is too boring, he said, the same thing every week.  He had an announcement and a suggestion that would make Big Group more fun for everyone next time.  The doctors were probably bored too, and while I'm sure changing the program was out of the question, they pretended to entertain the idea.  What did Marvin want to do instead?, they asked.  Marvin said that next Monday we should set up the chairs in rows, like a church.  He and Rusty wanted to be married, and why not at Big Group, when we could all be their witnesses?

Every jaw in the room dropped and every eye went to Rusty.  We thought he would probably go for Marvin's throat, or at least throw a chair at him.  But Rusty just sat there, slouching, arms folded over his leather jacket.  "What?" he said finally.  "Don't think you can get a priest in this hole?"

We were all struck mute as Annemarie.  Rusty and Marvin!  We slept four to a room, and it's true Rusty and Marvin were rooming together, but never had we suspected anything like this.  If their two other roommates knew, they hadn't let on.  Dr Hale, Rusty's doctor, piped up, breaking the silence.  "We can discuss this in private session," he said in Rusty's general direction, and bang, Big Group ended early.  Rusty was moved out of Marvin's room that evening into the room I was in.  Glenn and I stared at him as he got his stuff settled. "Is it true you want to marry Marvin?"  Rusty stared back.  "So what if I do?"

Marvin brought up his wedding idea again the following Monday, as everyone knew he would, but this time the doctors had had a week to prepare.  What Marvin was suggesting was impossible, they said.  But since they did not like to object on the grounds of distaste, or to say no one was allowed to turn Big Group into a transvestite wedding bash, they tried to cite other, more neutral obstacles.  A marriage between a man and a man can have no validity, they said, for instance.

Marvin did not argue the premise, just that it didn't apply:  "If you think I'm a man, it's because you're diluted, not me."  That was Marvin-speak for "deluded," but fitting in its own way.  Certainly there was nothing diluted about Marvin; he was as full-strength as they come.

For weeks Marvin pressed for his public wedding, which he had to know he would never get, but he did succeed in making a fool of everyone who opposed him. You and I might think of many reasons Marvin and Rusty should not marry in the nuthouse, but the doctors were at such pains to seem non-judgmental that they could only come up with the most ridiculous ones.  Rusty and Marvin were much too young, they said once.  Marvin said Jesus's mother had been only twelve, not citing a source for the statistic, but the shrinks didn't know enough to dispute it.  Finally Marvin pushed them almost into lunacy.  They would be an interracial couple, Dr Hale pointed out, trying to sound like the voice of reason.  Society being what it is, life would be hard.  Or hadn't Rusty noticed Marvin was black?, Dr Hale quipped.  "Yeah," said Rusty, "and so is his butt."

At last Marvin came up with an argument no one could answer.  He hadn't wanted to bring it up before, he said, but if the hospital wouldn't let him and Rusty get married, it would make their baby a bastard.  That's right, Marvin declared:  he was pregnant with Rusty's child.  We all looked to see what the doctors would say to this bombshell, but in a flash they put their cautious faces on.  "Look, I'm starting to show!" Marvin said, and he pulled up his hospital gown so we could see.  As I say, the inactivity was making us all fat, but Marvin was getting fatter than anyone.  His stomach almost did look like more than just a stomach.

We waited for the doctors to say that what Marvin asserted was physically impossible, but strangely enough, they never did.  They must have thought they had therapeutic reasons, e.g. that Marvin was harboring an insane fantasy that he needed to realize for himself was insane, but it was very disconcerting for the rest of us.  "Marvin couldn't be pregnant, Doctor -- could he?" we would ask, but the question was never answered. "You'd have to ask Marvin," they'd say, or "Do *you* think he is?"  After a few weeks their no-comment position had us all half-persuaded of it as a remote possibility, one that if it could happen at all, could happen to Marvin.  Was Marvin persuaded?  He was not educated in the usual sense, Biology Chemistry Algebra II, but he was no fool.  He at least pretended to know his way around the human body, and when pressed would offer pseudo-physiological explanations for his alleged condition.  I don't know to this day whether he believed them himself, or desperately wanted to, or wanted Rusty to, or just got a kick out of messing with everyone's head. What seems most probable is that like any faith its hold on him varied from day to day.

That was the state of affairs as Christmas approached.  Some of us would be going home for the holiday on two- or four-day passes.  Some of us did not care where we were as long as it wasn't home.  The days leading up to Christmas are a hectic time for most people, but on a mental ward, where no one's expected to shop for gifts or send cards, it's pleasantly low-key.

It was time for Little Leaderless, and the nurse locked Marvin and Glenn and me in with Dr Berv's female crosses to bear, silent Annemarie and chain-smoking Forrest and "Who's That Lady?"  Glenn stretched out on his bed for a nap -- this was the same room that at night became our bedroom -- and we expected Marvin to go for the turntable, as usual.  But no.  He sat in a chair with his legs crossed and looked at Annemarie, then re-crossed his legs and looked at her some more.  There was a tacit understanding among us that Annemarie should not be annoyed, she got enough of that from the doctors and nurses, and now it looked like Marvin planned to annoy her.  Annemarie sat hunched and silent. Her eyes were never vacant, I should tell you that.  She always seemed to be looking on a vision of something unspeakable, like the only person to escape a massacre, alive but unable to stop living it.

"Annemarie," Marvin said finally, "you have such pretty hair.  Won't you let me do something to it?"  Annemarie did not have pretty hair.  It was matted and dull and dirty.  Getting her to take a shower was such a chore that the nurses skipped over her turn whenever they could, until finally one of them would take her in hand and bathe her.  Then she would come out with stringy wet hair that dried however it dried, and somebody would put it back in a ponytail for her.

Marvin moved behind her and slipped the rubber band out of her hair.  Glenn looked at me, wide-awake, and Forrest forgot her cigarette.  Touching Annemarie was not done.  A pat on the arm to remind her it was time for meds or lunch, maybe, but anything this intimate was out of bounds.  "I would kill for hair like this!  You know how much straightener it would take me?" said Marvin, spreading her hair across her shoulders, still kinked where the rubber band had been.  Annemarie did not resist him.  "Don't you want to look nice when Peaches comes?" Marvin coaxed.  Peaches was what he called Annemarie's husband, because his cheeks were so round and pink and his foreign name was unpronounceable. Annemarie seemed not to hear Marvin or not to know who Peaches was if she did. Marvin sat back down and put on a little pout.  "Some people don't know how lucky they are to have husbands," he said.

After a minute he got up and put on "Who's That Lady?," a sign that things could return to normal.  Forrest remembered the ash on her cigarette and rubbed it into her pants.  Glenn covered his head with a pillow, to keep the recurring nightmare music out.  Suddenly Annemarie stood up.  I thought she would head for a bed, maybe even for the locked door, wanting away from Marvin and all of us.  But instead she started toward the bathroom, then stopped, just standing. The john here had only a toilet and sink; the showers were down the hall.

Forrest was the first to understand:  Annemarie was waiting.  "Who's got shampoo?" said Forrest.  Glenn scrambled around under his bed and produced some.  "Come on, Annemarie," said Forrest, "I'll wash your hair and then Marvin can fix it up."  The girls went off.  We heard the water running in the sink.

Well, this was a surprise -- Annemarie agreeing to be interfered with.  For once, we would have something to report from Little Leaderless.  Marvin and Glenn and I rummaged the room.  Glenn had a hairbrush and Marvin selected one of Rusty's many combs.  My parents had sent me a Christmas present, a blow-dryer.  I had long unkempt hippie-hair myself at the time.  The blow-dryer was intended to kill two birds with one stone:  serve as a peace offering, and get me to take some interest in my hair.  I hadn't even opened the box.  Marvin did, and found inside with the dryer a little bottle labeled "detangler."  I could picture my mother tucking it into the box, my father wanting to know what the hell is that for?

Forrest brought Annemarie out of the bathroom, her head turbaned in a towel. Marvin sat Annemarie down and sniffed her neck.  "Sweet," he said.  He undid the towel and her hair flopped down her back like a black mat of seaweed.  He pumped most of the bottle of detangler into it, then proceeded to brush it out. Annemarie did not wince, but it looked like tough going.  "This is nothing compared to my nappy head," assured Marvin.  He did seem to know what he was doing.  His own hair had been cut short -- his mother's fault, he would fume --- but I suppose he had practiced on enough wigs.  Annemarie let him turn her head right or left or tilt her chin up and down as needed.  "Who's that lady?

“Beautiful lady.  Lovely lady," the Isley Brothers sang, until the record quit.

The silence was welcome.  It all seemed to be going quite nicely.  Annemarie was starting to look, well, not pretty, but different.  Who's that lady? "Annemarie," said Marvin, as if he really needed to know, "why you don't want your baby?"

Forrest and I froze.  Glenn sat up on his bed.  Even the doctors and nurses had never dared ask such a thing.  "Marvina," said Forrest, meaning:  What are you doing?

"What?" said Marvin, brushing.  "Where would Baby Jesus be without his Momma on

Christmas?  Something could've come along and ate him."

He was probing Annemarie's wound, deliberately.  It wasn't like him to be cruel and that shocked us as much as the subject.  We all felt it was indecent, so why didn't we stop him?  Maybe we thought an argument would only make things worse.  Or maybe we were interested in spite of ourselves.  Nobody ever mentioned Annemarie's baby to her.  In her hearing it was the Forbidden Subject.

Nothing like an expression disturbed Annemarie's face, but her stillness now seemed different.  Like when you're in a room with someone asleep who stops breathing too long:  you know something's changed before you know what it is. Marvin put down the brush and took up the comb.

"Rusty and me are naming our baby Linda," said Marvin.  "It has to be a girl, or I'll drown it."  Marvin hoped the baby wouldn't come out too white.  With Rusty's looks and Marvin's skin, he said, she ought to look like Diana Ross.  "Rusty's uncle has a place in Virginia that Rusty says we can stay at, Virginia Bay.  I can take Linda out on the beach all the time.  Honey, I look good with a tan, you should see me."  I think he meant Virginia Beach.  Marvin had never been out of Bridgeport, Connecticut, except to go to New York and be bad.  "Linda," he said.  "That's Puerto Rican for gorgeous.  Most people don't know that."

We couldn't think of stopping him now.  We would no more have told Marvin his baby could never exist than we would have grilled Annemarie about hers.  "I want to dress her up in nice things, you know?  Black people look ugly in pink. Yellow will be her color."  Rusty knew everything there was to know about cars, Marvin said, and all those rich people driving down to Virginia Bay would get flat tires and need spark plugs.  Rusty should do okay.  "We don't know if we want her going to those cracker schools, though.  If one of those teachers raised a hand to her!  I do not believe in hitting a child.  Or leaving her all day with her auntie."

We watched, but Annemarie seemed safe, in no need of our protection.  Her withdrawal from the world was so complete that maybe we were all like people you see in your sleep, whose speech does not signify, however alarming.  Marvin and the detangler had made her hair shine with little blue lights.  There were even a few promising waves. Annemarie would never be what is called pretty, but there was a dignity in her square peasant face, those great brown eyes, that might be beautiful in someone who laughed and was at ease with the world.

Marvin stopped combing and sat by her, suddenly looking concerned.  "Does it hurt, Annemarie?" he asked, serious.

"I think she likes it," said Forrest.

But Marvin did not have combs or grooming in mind.  He put his face too close to Annemarie's.  "Did it hurt when you had the baby, is my question.  Did it hurt like you thought you were like to die?"

Annemarie looked through him.  Maybe her lip moved, maybe not.  It was unbearable, it was torture, what he was doing.  "Marvin," I said sharply. "Yes, Hilda," said Marvin, dismissive, not taking his eyes off Annemarie.  This thing of boys calling each other girls' names was new and repugnant to me.  I would not call him Marvina, so Hilda was his revenge.  Sometimes it was Patrice.

"Leave her alone now," I said.

"How else am I supposed to know?" Marvin complained.

"You don't need to know," I said, feeling dangerous myself.

He ignored me, confiding to Annemarie as if nobody else was there, his dark proud face guileless and beseeching.  "I love my baby now.  Rusty and me tell her all kind of things," Marvin said.  "We want her to have a good life.  But could I ever hate her for hurting me so much?"

Glenn was holding his pillow up to his face.  "Put the music back on," he said from behind it.

"I know how a child can be hated," said Marvin, and he looked like he did. "It's better for that child not to be born."

Forrest smiled faintly.  "My parents hate me, so what?"

"So you drank Drano," said Marvin.

Annemarie moved, just her head.  It was not that unconscious working of the jaws, from Thorazine dry-mouth.  It looked like a terrible effort.  A communication, unprecedented, from the distant place where she lived.  It could have meant almost anything but Yes -- No, Don't Touch Me, Go Away, I'm Tired. For a moment the order of things was inverted:  we sat very still, the only motion in the room Annemarie's, until that stopped too.

"Do you want us to call someone, Annemarie?" said Forrest.  We were like careless hikers on a two-hour outing who'd tumbled down a ravine.  It might take a professional to get us out.

"She's fine," said Marvin, decided.  "I am not going to hate my Linda, is what she's saying."  He took Annemarie's hand and kissed it.  "That's all I wanted to know."  It really did seem as if that had been the point of the whole petrifying discussion, for him.  "Hilda, gimme that thang," he said, meaning the blow-dryer.

I plugged it in and he turned it on full blast.  In the quiet room it sounded like a pack of racecars.  Glenn was worried the nurses would hear, but they were off in their break room and not likely to budge for a hurricane. Annemarie's hair flew around her head like a sea creature with a thousand arms roused to defend itself.  Marvin applied the brush with great concentration, but even Marvin could never have encountered a head of hair like this.

Annemarie's face disappeared.  Before our eyes the long black strings expanded to ten times their size, till her hair was billowing like a throng of genies released from captivity.  Forrest began to shriek:  "Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off!"

Marvin yanked the plug out of the wall.  Forrest pushed Annemarie's hair back. Her eyes were closed.  Tears ran soundlessly down her face to her chin and dropped into her lap.  "You hurt her," said Glenn.  "You freaked her," said Forrest.  And then Annemarie said something none of us could hear.

It was halfway between a groan and a whisper.  "What?" we said.  Her voice was strange from disuse.  Her lips were chapped and spittle caked the corners of her mouth.  "What, Annemarie?"  We leaned in close and finally we heard her, the parched words crackling along our skin like an electric charge:  "I want my baby."

Marvin hurled himself at the door, kicking and banging.  The four of us pounded against the safety glass, screaming our heads off.  Finally somebody came and unlocked it.  "Call Renata and Peaches!" we yelled.  "Annemarie wants her baby!"  The nurses gaped at the transfigured Annemarie, looking half-demon, half-madonna under that thundercloud of hair, then ran for the nurses' station phone.  Annemarie was our patient now and we were giving the orders.

The doctors assembled one by one, making us tell them over and over what happened.  Dr Berv tried to quiz Annemarie, but she paid no more attention to him than ever.  They scowled to think their important work of probing zonked captive minds had been interrupted for nothing.  Marvin put his hands on his hips and said, "Annemarie, did you or didn't you tell us you want your baby?"

"I want my baby," croaked Annemarie.

Marvin and Forrest and Glenn and I were waiting at the doubled locked doors when we heard the buzzer and saw Renata's fur coat through the window.  The little grandmother entered first, holding the door for frightened Renata, who only half-understood the nurse's call.  She was carrying the baby, wrapped in a voluminous white blanket.  Behind them was Peaches, Annemarie's husband, weighed down with the most astonishing Christmas cake I have ever seen.  Renata must have spent a week on it.  It was the size of a small table top, ornamented with rosebuds at the corners, and atop it was mounted a full Nativity scene: the manger, the Virgin, the shepherds, the cows, the wise men, the works.

Some of the figures were candy, some were plastic.  The roof and walls of the barn were made of cookie dough and iced to resemble timber. Renata put the baby in Annemarie's arms, afraid to let go.  We held our breath, but Annemarie did not drop it.  She did not rock it either.  She only looked down, moveless, exactly the way she had always stared at the newspaper, at her feet, the floor.  But without being told we now all understood she had never needed those pages turned, that what she'd been seeing was the little white burden now in her arms.  Her husband set the cake down on a table and moved to her side.  He did not dare to touch or kiss her.  He could not know, after such a long agony, if his loving her had been forgiven.  Instead he parted the white blanket so his beautiful wife could see her beautiful child's face and arms. Everyone stood around crying, except for the doctors, who I think had gone off to make notes.  The baby reached up and took hold of Annemarie's tumbled-down hair.

Marvin asked if the baby Jesus on the cake was edible, and Renata said no.  But I think he had divinity enough in him that day.