Don waited for him at the Columbus Avenue corner of their block but his father came up from the Amsterdam Avenue corner and was home an hour before Don gave up his wait. “We’ve a little baby,” Don said on the phone. “Well, of course, little. Well, not of course ‘little.’ It could’ve been a big baby—big for a newborn baby. In other words—ah, I’m too excited to talk. Just that you’re a grandmother again and of a girl. Now I have to phone Lucy’s folks.” It rained heavily the night his wife left. He said when she was at the door and the taxi was honking downstairs “This is a lot like a lot of the novels I used to read in my twenties and some of those movies too and which now turn up on TV. When the wife or husband leaves or the lover or newborn baby dies, it often poured and the hero would walk out of the hospital that night into the driving rain.” His wife said “Sometimes life is like that, sometimes it isn’t. I suppose in those books and movies the rain was supposed to add drama, but here it’s just anticlimactic.”
