University of Northern Iowa

The Virgin BirthAuthor(s): Kevin SteinSource: The North American Review, Vol. 274, No. 3 (Sep., 1989), p. 41Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25125094 .

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MELISSA BANK ?_

she'd written anything about Henry. Instead, it said how

lovely the summer had been, the sailing and beach, and

getting to know us.

Henry came down the shore alone the last weekend of the

summer, right after he'd left Druid, and before he was to start at Columbia. He acted the way he had before Alice.

At dinner he told us funny stories about New York. That week he'd gone out with a dancer from the Midwest. He said that when the dancer first arrived in New York, the

dope dealers around Times Square said, "Loose joints, loose joints," and she said, "Thank you." I watched my parents laugh, and I could tell they were glad to see he

was himself again. After dinner Henry and my father

stayed out on the porch and talked about what courses he was going to take, and which credits would transfer from the other colleges. I heard Henry say, "I'm going to

graduate from Columbia," and my father answer,

"Right." My mother smiled when she heard them. She was caught up in our being together, the celebration of the last weekend of summer. When she said to me, "What's wrong?" it was, in part, a reprimand.

Later, lying in the dark with all those empty beds, I tried to make myself feel better about Henry. But I couldn't. My whole family seemed different to me. I had asked my father about his cadaver in medical school, and in his careful, gentle way he told me that the world was

different now. It reminded me of how my mother looks

up at an overcast sky, and says, "It's sure to clear up."

I couldn't fall asleep. I got out of bed, and tiptoed down the hall. Henry's light was on, but he'd hardly looked at me during dinner. I went through the living room outside to the dock. I unsnapped part of the boat's

cover, and stepped down into the boat. The seats were

damp, and the air cool. I found my father's balled-up windbreaker, and put it on.

I went through Henry's story of the party again, and tried to figure out if there was anything to the anti-semitic

part. I heard my grandmother's voice trying to teach me

about Us and Them. I didn't know what to believe. My parents had never taught me about a Them, only about an

Us, our family. And I thought of the way my mother hung the flag, and how my father sometimes argued with my uncle from Israel?Uncle Ben said, "You are a Jew who

happens to live in America," and my father, steamed-up, said, "I am an American Jew." Whoever was right, we

lived happily and well. My mother was always saying how

lucky we were. But as I thought about it, my family

appeared to me vulnerable and alone, a tiny boat,

unseaworthy. All I really knew was that Henry had failed out there,

and that here we were, here I was, welcoming him home,

saying everything was all right. But it wasn't. It was scarey to think that my brother had failed at loving someone. I

had no idea myself how to do it. I could see the white

boats all along the lagoon, rocking even though there wasn't any wind. Only one house on the lagoon had any

lights on. It was way down at the end, and the light was

the glow of a television set. Sitting in the boat, I reached

my hand down into the water. It felt warm, warmer than it

was, because of the night air. D

THE VIRGIN BIRTH Kevin Stein

Not that I ever believed it, or questioned it, or really thought about what it

asked me to believe: how someone became

without becoming, how all at once He was,

of a sudden and the flutter of angel's wings, without the touch of flesh to flesh, without sweat, without pleasure or the swell

of pleasure that sweat confirms, without

the slightest matting of her unbraided hair

that day when nothing happened to happen as if something had, as it did for me this morning,

when I whistled through chapped lips and got nothing?not even the tiniest tune?

but still the dog came at a trot, each footfall

raising a child of dust which disappeared into our galaxy, an ordinary spiral twirling about a black hole among another 100 billion

some alien might call nebulae if she reads Latin, or home if she's no fool. Why aren't I giddy with the news that every atom of iron in our blood

and calcium in our bones is the gift of a star?

Let me say I'm suspicious, let me say

I have my fears, even though my doubt

is not my father's doubt, bouncing his leg to Basie's base line at the Paramount Theatre

in 1939, when the knees of the girl he danced with

held the civilized world in place, sturdy and predictable as the way she'd surely

clamp them shut. Four years later, hunkered down, frozen to the frozen tundra of Attu, he saw those legs kick open as Andromeda apologized, invited him in

to the sky of perfect pleasure. It was hard

to believe in anything, let alone

that something could come of nothing, a god made man to salvage him but not

his Japanese prisoners, their shaved heads

bowed and contemplative, here and there

a wound cherry red and blooming with what my father never called "star-stuff,"

though to one he handed his white handerchief, and got it back later, decorated,

Mt. Fuji sketched lightly in blood.

September 1989 41

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