When he and Gaby had learned that the instructorship was his, they had felt momentarily rich. One of the girls she knew at school was giving up a first-floor apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, much nicer by any standard than the basement apartment on Phillips Street, larger and in a converted town house with a venerable magnolia behind the tiny iron fence. But they had decided against taking it. Eventually they would move; they agreed it would be nice for a child to know grass and more open space than the city provided. But they had the beach place in Truro whenever they could get away to it, and for now they wanted to preserve what they shared on Beacon Hill. Gaby determined thriftily that each month she would lay aside the additional money they would have spent on the Commonwealth Avenue apartment (“Is that why they call it a layette?”) and by the time the baby things were needed they would be paid for.

For his part, he found the excuse he had needed to give up smoking. Instead of hoarding guilt because he was a physician who used tobacco, at reasonable intervals he dropped the price of a pack of cigarettes into a cardboard container designed for pathology specimens, saving toward the purchase of an English baby coach like one he and Gaby had admired on walks in the Public Garden. The financial aspects of the confinement were taken care of. Gaby was under the personal care of Dr. Irving Gerstein, chief of the hospital’s Ob-Gyn Service, who was not only the best obstetrician Adam knew but was extremely good with expectant fathers. One day Adam sat with him in the hospital cafeteria discussing Gaby’s narrow pelvis and drinking coffee while Gerstein ate watermelon. Taking a slick black seed between his thumb and forefinger, Gerstein had pinched and the ovule had squirted out. “That is how easily your baby will be born,” he had said.

Now, as Adam re-entered the apartment, he was content and enormously hungry. He ate the grapefruit, eggs and crisp bacon she gave him and heaped lavish praise on her supermarket brown-and-serve rolls, but she was curiously reticent.

“Is there anything wrong?” he asked as he started his second cup of tea.

“I didn’t want to spoil your breakfast, darling.”

Miscarriage, he thought numbly.

“It’s your father, Adam,” she said.