The Baby

New York City. It was the coldest day of the year. The streets were covered with freshly fallen snow and ice hung from the rooftops. In a penthouse apartment facing on Central Park a young woman was worrying. She was pregnant and unmarried. She was getting bigger every week and she felt sure she could not hide her condition much longer.  Under other circumstances she might have welcomed the baby she was carrying, but because she was not married she felt ashamed.

That very morning she had walked down Fifth Avenue to St. Patrick's Cathedral to ask God for help and for forgiveness and absolution for her sins. She had found solace in reading the New Testament and praying the twenty-third psalm. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." She had felt better in church beating her breast and confessing her sinfulness before God. "We are born in sin. We live in sin. We die in sin." This was her religion. 
We live in sin. But there is hope through the bountiful mercy of God accessible particularly through the intercession and supplications of Our Blessed Lady. 

As she prayed in the cathedral she watched the bishop officiate at the mass. If she had been a man, she might have been a priest too. If she had a son she would want him to be a priest. What better role in life could there be? Only one other--and she was that--to be an artist. She had taken up art as a career in defiance of her family and the world of high society from which she came. This was an unusual step for a society girl in those days. But she could not stand society anyway. She had always been a rebel.

She recalled Mother Demming, the mother superior at the convent of the Dames of the Sacred Heart where she had been incarcerated for ten years. Mother Deming knew what was important for a young lady about to enter  society. One must always be chaste and never entertain lascivious thoughts. Why had she not listened to Mother Deming? If she had, she would not be in the plight she was in now. 

She knew she had been playing with fire when she allowed a man to enter her sanctuary. But she was already thirty-five years old. “How long must I wait,” she had asked herself feeling frustrated. “Must I never know a man?”

That man, her first lover, named Miguel, had seduced her and then betrayed her, She caught him stealing money from her purse after he left her lying on her bed. Embarassed, he tried to excuse himself, saying that he needed the money to buy food for his starving wife and children! Marguerite felt sorry for him, but told him to leave and never return. Soon after that her holiday period in Mexico City was over, and she returned alone to her home in Los Angeles.

Feeling nostalgia for Mexico and Mexican music and culture, she often spent her afternoons wandering around the stalls of the Mexican vendors on Olivera Street. There one day she met a closet gay Anglo named George Polkinghorn.

He invited her to attend a party of upper class Anglos and Mexicans taking place in Los Angeles that night.

Marguerite didn't want to go, because she felt too depressed, still morning the lolls of her first lover, but George insisted and told her that he would be at the mansion with his chauffeur to pick her up at six thirty and drive her to the party, so she agreed to go.  

It was at this party that she met Carlos,a handsome young musician and part-time law student. She found him very attractive, dashing, tall and handsome and with an aristocratic demeanor bred into him by his noble Spanish Mexican family. They danced divinely together and soon began to see each other frequently after that first encounter.

Before long they began to make adventurous trips across the border into Mexico.                One night Carlos came upstairs with her up the mansion central stairway right into her bedroom. She wanted to tell him to leave, but her erotic desire was too strong to resist him, and what she later referred to as "the inevitable" just happened. In the end she later reported she had actually  lost her ladylike demeanor and thrown herself into his arms passionate embrace. What was a well-bred girl to do in a situation like that? Who knows? Anyway, Marguerite just let go and relaxed into it enjoying the whole thing fully,and having no idea then that Carlos   had left a little momento of their passionate embrace in her womb.

Margureite had gone to Catholic school side kindergarten through college, guided there by the nuns of the order of the Sacred Heart.  She had been expected to remain a virgin till death, saving her virtue for the Divine Bridegroom. She was to be a "Bride of Christ" and to serve as the unattached companion of her aging father.   

Her relationship with Papa was complicated.  He loved her, and yet, he would not allow her the freedom she craved and felt entitled to as an adult.She wanted love from him but she felt he seemed to be unable to give her the love she wanted and needed. Instead of love, realizing his limitations, he gave her money. But she felt that with that money came parental control, what she often referred to as his "golden leash" and her "golden cage."

Well now she had a surprise for him. He would be furious. She felt a mixture of fear and excitement as she thought about it. Why should she feel pleased about disappointing him?  Strangely, she found herself enjoying the thought of seeing him squirm. She enjoyed the feeling of getting even, of showing him that she could do  something on her own.    "Papa, forgive me for having such wicked thoughts towards you. But I really resent the way you control everybody, and especially the way you treat Mother," she had said to him not long ago.

"But what about Mother? What will she think? She may have another breakdown and go into another sanitarium. I must hide my secret from her. She's suspicious and already and suspects that something untoward is going on."   


To  hide her pregnancy before it began to show, Marguerite enrolled in some art history classes in New York and then took the Super Chief with her mother as her traveling companion to New York where they rented a big penthouse apartment for her looking out on Central Park, and she began to attend her art history lectures at the Met.


Before she began to show, she convinced her mother to return to LA believing that Marguerite was fine there alone, on her own. 

     Pretty soon the baby began to kick in her womb and she began to feel embarrassed and to want to have the baby "delivered" i.e. "removed" soon.

"I wonder if Dr. Hickey can do anything to help me now," Marguerite asked. Perhaps he could induce the labor, and bring the baby sooner, she thought. She had not even considered an abortion, of course. That would be a mortal sin. 

When she had called Dr. Hickey, her gynecologist,  the first time she had made her motives clear: "I don't want to harm the baby," she'd said, "I just want  to get it out of me as soon as possible; so I won't be so conspicuous.  If you can just get it out of my body alive, then I can give it away and be done with it and nobody need ever know. Then I'll be free."

Free. Free. How she longed to be free again. She felt so big as she looked out the window of her penthouse from which she studied the New York skyline. She saw a large hawk circling above the trees in Central Park. She wanted to be free of her burden now, like this hawk. 

Walter, her younger brother, had tried to get her to come home, but she had refused. He had been full of all kinds of paranoid nonsense, trying to convince her that it was dangerous for her to stay. He didn't know she was pregnant, and she didn't dare tell him.  He was such a blabbermouth, such an idiot, she thought. 

  "Why should I run away now?" she asked herself rhetorically. “It will be over soon. Then I can go home. Unburdened. Free.” She was confident that she could  face the ordeal of birth by herself. She was strong. And she had faith in the Lord, who would protect her and deliver her and her baby safely.

That was what she felt this morning. But often in the huge metropolis of New York, she  felt  completely alone...and afraid. Just like the Blessed Virgin who waited for her time to come two thousand years ago, she was patiently waiting  for her baby to come, too. 

"What will my baby look like, she wondered? Will he be a little dark Mexican boy like his daddy? Will he look like Papa?" That would be too bad, she thought for Papa was a small man, hardly five feet tall,  with a big Jewish nose, which she had inherited.   

"What if it's a girl?" she wondered. "No, it can't be a girl; it musn't be a girl; I hate girls!" she said to herself.  "It must be a boy."

  Ever since her childhood she simply  couldn't stand girls    or excessively girlish or even feminine women, either.  Marguerite always preferred males, even among her pet animals. "Females are too emotional and unreliable." she asserted coldly. "They tend to have female problems,  and then too they  get pregnant--as happened to me. Men have it so much easier. They can just take their pleasure and leave their pregnant women to deal with the consequences"

Suddenly the penthouse doorbell rang. It was Dr. Hickey,  as she expected. He had come for his daily visit. 

"Can't you do something," she blurted out impatiently as he examined her. 

"It's not yet your time; my dear you're hardly seven months pregnant, Marguerite. I can't perform  miracles! All I can do is put my  hands on your belly and we can pray together. If God wills it , and the baby is ready to come, it will come." 

        They did this for what seemed to her to be an eternity, but it was of no avail, and Dr.  Hickey left assuring her that he would return the next day to comfort her and to try again.

But that night the pains began to come, and she soon realized that the baby was on its way into the birth canal at last. She called a taxi and rushed to Manhatten General Hospital, afraid her waterbag would break before she arrived. 

The birth process went quickly and by the early hours of the morning  a little dark skinned hairy baby boy emerged from her womb. Baby Raphael, for that was what she named him, was very small, and was put into an incubator, as his future seemed precarious. He soon took hold of life, however, and  within a week he was out of danger and was withdrawn from the incubator. 

When the nurse  brought the infant to Marguerite to feed with a bottle and hold as her own, she held him gingerly, like a dirty diaper. She felt embarassed that she did not have an instinct about what to do with this little creature. Being the yongest in her large New Orleans family she had had no experience of caring for a baby before. 

"How glorious it is to be a mother!" she exclaimed after the nurses took the baby back to the baby room. "What a unique realization it is to be a mother! Nothing in life can capture this feeling. No words can express the wonder of it,  when mother and child are floating in the bliss of their own world. This is the stuff that dreams are made of," she later wrote in a letter to her mother, to whom she was closer than to anyone else in the world. 

This was, she felt, without a doubt the peak experience, the highest moment in her life thus far. She  had discovered a new identity and a new mission in life: Motherhood. Henceforth she would have two creative destinies, she decided, being an artist and being a mother. This was creativity in its essence, she felt. No sculptures she had created had ever been more alive, she thought to herself,  nor had they been so remarkably beautiful. Among all her works she always considered her small statue called "the baby" her  masterpiece.  In fact, she felt so inspired by her creation that as soon as she was strong enough she carved a model of the baby's head in stone. 

But now that she had brought this newborn baby into the world, she faced a new creative challenge: what to with it. She had intended to put it up for adoption, but in the end, feeling such love for it, she decided to keep it. Money can perform miracles, and for Marguerite money was no problem. So she made a deal with Dr. Hickey and his mistress/nurse to accompany her  and the baby on the long train trip back to California, with the understanding that upon arriving in Los Angeles, they were to carry the baby off the train as if it was their own.  

The plan worked beautifully. As the train pulled into Los Angeles Central Station, "Mrs. Hickey,"  accompanied by her "husband," carried the baby safely through the crowded station while Marguerite was met by her mother and Oscar, the family chauffeur. 

        Marguerite gloated that they were quite unaware of the newest family member who  was being carried right under their noses to a prearranged house manned by a twenty-four hour nurse located only a few blocks from the family mansion. 

From the station, Marguerite rushed directly to the hospital to see her father, who was recovering from a prostate operation. He  was just waking up from the anesthetic when she arrived. His piercing blue eyes looked through her as she kissed him. 


"Bonjour, Madame-Madmoiselle," he said, and that was all. He thereby let her know that he knew her secret!   

How? A circumcision bill from the New York hospital had somehow slipped into his hands. They smiled at each other in full understanding. He was obviously proud and  pleased with, Marguerite, his favorite daughter who had heroically and secretly carried through the birth process on her own far away from the family, and borne him a grandson.