The Accident Of Birth

The Accident Of Birth

            When his small head shot out bloody and scummed white beneath, like a fresh skinned knee, the midwife cradled him through. She took him from between sweaty thighs and regarded him whole and she knew. Even before she cut and tied the cord and did the slow look over to see what she’d helped bring into the world, she knew. 

            Usually, this was when she rubbed the white protective gunk off the baby, checked for a cleft palate, clubbed feet, an angel’s kiss, anything odd for which she might need to prepare the mother – an obvious deformity or just a tiny third nipple.  But this child – ten fingers, ten toes, and eyes as shiny and dark blue as pebbles you might hope to find one day in a stream – was physically perfect. She turned the baby with her long fingers and read him the way a blind man’s hand passes over a coin and knows at once its face and its value. She knew that this was a child who would never be tethered to the womb that grew him, nor the house he fell into, nor to the hard packed earth that would soon be under his small feet. One of those accident-of-birth children. Might not be a bad thing to be. The year was 1929.

            She swaddled him tightly and gave him to the 16-year old girl on the bed. “I’ll call him Eno,” the girl said. “That was his father’s father’s name,” she said curling the newborn in and taking a first look. “You’ll be the one and only Eno,” she said trying a smile. “I’m tempted to name you after my daddy,” she kissed his soft head.  “If yours doesn’t get home soon from selling stuff all over the county almost no one wants,” she touched his nose with her finger tip, “that’s what I’ll do.”

            The girl looked up at the knotted pine ceiling. She had thought herself clever, at first, landing the salesman, the out-of-towner, the man who arrived with small gifts wrapped in brown paper and knotted with string. It was only later that the girl understood she hadn’t been any different from his customers; she was like a lady who is persuaded to purchase a mechanical butter churn and then discovers after the first payment she doesn’t want or need it. The girl had bought the salesman hook, line, and sinker. He once told her that when a person signs for the goods or service, that’s called “the closing.” She supposed her “closing” was when she first opened her legs. Oh, he was experienced. She’d been as hot as a June bride on a feather bed. But now this. 

            “Don’t forget to look down at what you’ve got in your arms,” the midwife said. She showed the girl how to put Eno to her breast, and thought that maybe this girl and this Eno could make a good team, thread themselves through the lean years, if they stuck together. 

            The father kept away, trying to sell crap nobody wanted or nobody could afford, even if they did want fly swatters or stainless steel sieves or important books of knowledge edged with fake gold paint.

            Eno’s mom, she was young and pretty, charming enough not to care too much if her husband ever came back.  What woman needed a tired travelling salesman who never sold anything, when eight men in town would find you firewood on a cold night, when your mother held your baby like her own, when two grade school pals, in the bitterest winter, pulled you fish out of a frozen lake?

            And Eno? He kept his name. He grew up as you might expect of an Accident of Birth. Furious and desperate at his surroundings, dismissive of his mother, he composed eloquent and precise post-cards to the stars of the silver screen, begging to be adopted.

 Dear Claudette Colbert,

 I have long been an admirer of yours. I am a young man of 11 with some talent and much enthusiasm. You radiate goodness on the screen and, even with the prodigious acting talent that you surely possess, I know that goodness must be inside you too. Please, tell me there is a place for me in Hollywood with you? I would work hard and not be a nuisance. Did the great Shakespeare not say, “Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful?” Take a chance on me. I await your reply.

Chaleureusement, Eno of Ohio

            “My one and only,” Eno’s mother said, by way of a morning greeting.  She’d hold up a finger, kiss it, and press it to her son’s forehead and Eno would scowl and pull down one of the salesman’s books from the swayed shelf, or go loiter by the news rack in the general store. He befriended the lonely schoolteacher and pinched paperbacks from her meager library. He went to the pictures, sat in the dark, and plotted his escape.  

            Occasionally, his mother would chance upon a card that had slipped from Eno’s pocket.

                  To the esteemed Barbara Stanwyck,

            I saw Meet John Doe, and You Belong To Me this year as many times as I could. You are the most beautiful, the most entertaining, and, by far the cleverest, woman in pictures. Even fellows like Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper look like chumps in a room with you. My name is Eno. I am 11 years old and live in a very small town in the middle of nowhere. I would like to move to Hollywood. You were an orphan child once and taken in by strangers. I read that. Maybe you would do the same for me? I should say, I’m not an orphan, but my mother wouldn’t mind much, seeing as it would be such a magnificent opportunity. How much I would love to belong to you. Please write me back.

            Your great admirer, and would be ever grateful adopted son,

            Eno

            She delighted in his high-toned vocabulary even when she didn’t know what all the words meant, but she would’ve liked to have scrawled in the corner, I would mind my son leaving. I’d let him go, Miss, but I’d mind. 

            No matter.

            Dear Mr. Barrymore, Miss Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Jane Wyman, Mr. Stewart, Miss Lamour….

            The studios replied with a photograph every now and then, which Eno ignored and drawered, but no one wrote back, ever. 

            Meanwhile, Eno’s father circled back, though at longer and longer intervals, like a comet making a wider and wider orbit, and returned more bent and empty-handed with each journey. Eno imagined him setting off one day in a straight line and never returning. That might be better than the shame of having the dusty, folded man appear at the door every couple of months.  Eno’s mother was an embarrassment of a different kind.  So ripe, she drew stares.  A body like that was almost an affront to the times. Eno hated the march through town or to church.      Holding her hand like some kind of chaperone, he shielded her from the leers and invitations of men whose own wives had gone worn, dry and sagging like the decade.

            Time passed.  No one starved. The boy grew, and he grew refined and cultured, as if he did his growing elsewhere, in different soil, but there he was, right next to his mother. 

            Once he painted very advanced pictures of fruit and people all over her wooden dresser, the only thing she truly had that was real and old and hers from her family, and he just painted on it without asking. He was twelve years old. But it was good, very good. It was like something you’d see in a catalogue so she didn’t get angry.  

            At fourteen, he implored Oxford University to accept him.  Oxford University was the top place to study, he’d learned from some book in a tumbled set his father had left because he couldn’t sell it.  Eno remembered laying out the onionskin stationary, a pen, and the airmail envelope with its red, white, and blue chevrons around the edges.  He started writing, careful not to press too hard and make a tear, able to swallow his engine of want and make it into the soft stroke of his pen. Oxford, miraculously, wrote back.  He was too young to apply and the war was making cross-continental travel most difficult, but the letter politely suggested that he finish high-school with good grades and keep in touch. That was enough.  Like a fish tugging at a line, he knew somehow, soon, he’d be reeled in and yanked out of this place once and for all.

            Good timing, post-WW2. Eno finished high-school, went into the armed forces and, on the GI bill, went straight to Dartmouth, a little older, but it was Ivy. Then he met and married a very rich girl for the times – way too rich to marry an Eno except she was a little old for her parents to be too picky. 

            He’d waited his whole life for this, a grandeur befitting all those desperate, cramped desires. It didn’t feel criminal. It didn’t feel like love, but he wasn’t so mean as not to pretend. It felt good. He told himself he wasn’t going to waste it.

            On a rare visit to Ohio, Eno told his mother that he knew from the very first of knowing that he didn’t belong in that town, in that house, on that dirt floor. “Oh, I knew that too,” she said,  “even before you had a thought in your own head.  The midwife warned me.  She told me you weren’t mine. I said, ‘That’s impossible. He came from my body.  I grew him.’ But she said it happens like that sometimes.” His mother was cheerful when she said this, matter-of-fact. Eno looked at her and could still make out the girl of her, the girl who had made him do little more for her than hold her hand. She held up her finger, crooked now, and he knew what she would do.  He felt something stir in him. A chick’s soft feathers from the inside, like he’d been cradling an egg in his chest his whole life, and it had just hatched. He reached out to her with both hands.

First published in the East Jasmine Review