Waiting for Lily
Doyle, Brian
THE NIGHT WATCH WAITING FOR LILY BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON I am sitting in my childbirth class carefully not watching a film. My wife is watching. I hear her gasp in horror as a...
...Once I sat wrapped in the dark and waited for you...
...The Frenchwoman, thanks to the magic of cinema, has had the same baby a thousand times since the film was made in 1971.1 take a quick peek between my fingers at the sole moment in the thirty-three-minute film when I do not hear light screaming from the Frenchwoman...
...The doctor pulls gently, with a practiced touch, and holds the baby up to the camera...
...The mother grinned, the doctor beamed, the nurses preened, the baby was proffered like a trophy, but the father stood there in a daze, mechanically brushing away strands of hair...
...In her belly our child was restless, and I watched the undulating skin, the tiny mobile mountains of my child's elbows and feet...
...I love your mother more than I can tell you...
...The world is so sad and so hauntingly beautiful...
...There are many gods and they all have one name, which is Nameless...
...Your hands wrote runes on her skin...
...Touch as many things with your gentle fingers as you can and remember them all because they will pass and they are all holy...
...I think it is a girl, because so many women tell us it is a boy...
...There are many nights, just now before Lily arrives, when I help my wife into bed and then sit in the dark watching mother and daughter...
...In some sense, all things pray by being themselves...
...I waited for who you would be...
...Many things are prayers: floating hawks, unfurled flags, river music, the flash of wrens in a thicket...
...I tell you this so you will know...
...She may be working, pregnant, a mother, broken-hearted, stood up, left alone, beautiful, arrogant, gentle, in love, confused, brilliant, or dead...
...Lily, I want to say, Lily, I have so many things to tell you I don't know where to start...
...She may be finishing college...
...If it is a girl we may name her Lily, for beauty...
...I think of her feet...
...I helped my wife into bed that night, lowering her gently into place, constructing a tower of pillows around her...
...We are only people, poor and fragile...
...It courses from east to west and stops...
...I hear her gasp in horror as a French baby splashes out of a Frenchwoman...
...His soul remains in her heart...
...My wife, who has grown accustomed to her restless tenant, sleeps on...
...I am having trouble sleeping, and sitting in the dark relaxes me...
...Your mother and I met late in life and your birth made me cry...
...BRIAN DOYLE Brian Doyle is editor of Portland Magazine, published by the University of Portland...
...Once there was a moon and you danced in water and I sat in the dark and thought my heart would burst...
...I held you close when you first entered the world...
...And he is indeed the father of a girl named Lily...
...I like to tell stories...
...Humor is mercy...
...Once my mother found my brother dead...
...As I do so the baby pops out with a wet sound...
...Lily rolls over, her foot rippling back from west to east...
...There was a moon caught in huge trees...
...She fell asleep with unusual speed...
...evil things are empty...
...He forgot to smile at the camera when his daughter was born, I noticed...
...I watch Lily's right foot move across my wife's stomach...
...Once there was a carpenter who was dragged to the edge of a dusty town and killed...
...But within us are worlds without end...
...On the way home I think about girls...
...Now they are the size of my thumbs...
...Sometimes I sit there for a couple of hours...
...If it is a boy, we might name him Joseph, an honest name, a name carved from wood...
...Chances are that she has a lover, maybe a husband...
...I waited my whole life to tell you what I cannot put in words...
...You were rolling in her belly...
...People are savage and holy, Lily, and nothing will hurt you as much as your lovers and heaven is here in the love of your friends and family...
...in twenty years they will be in high heels...
...The moon wrote silver words on the wall...
...We are only people, Lily, poor and fragile people, and we play with evil as with a toy...
...Puberty arrived years ago...
...Wisdom is in the heart and the heart is cruel...
...he might actually have been a god...
...It's a girl, and we stare at each other for a moment before I cover my eyes again and she blindly gropes for her first meal...
...In ten years they will be shod by sneakers...
...I think of her father, who stood dazedly by his wife, holding her hand, brushing away wet strands of hair from her forehead...
...One of your grandfathers built a house with his hands and died within the walls he loved so...
...I stood there dazed, brushing the wet hair from your mother's face...
...Stories are small prayers...
...Remember me...
...I will be fifty-five years old then...
...The French girl in the film is now over twenty, I realize, and has certainly had a little chat with her parents about her early appearance in a skin flick...
...It was in the autumn, under a lovely silver moon...
...Your mother slept, her face open and innocent, her hair 6: 18 December 1992 cascading across her forehead...
...The moon slants through the fir trees in my yard and spangles against the wall...
Vol. 119 • December 1992 • No. 22
