The Four Temperaments by Yona Zeldis McDonough Page A

carrying a girl. He had seen Penelope's little lists scattered about the apartment, along with her editorializing comments:
    Grace—Right idea, but too Christian
Amber—Golden, but overdone these days
Jade—Does this mean a loose woman?
Allegra—Lovely, but now an allergy medicine. Think mucus & sneezing
    All at once, she snapped the book shut and dropped it on the floor.
    â€œIs something wrong?” Gabriel asked.
    â€œUseless! That book is useless,” she said. “I don't want her to have an ordinary name.” Penelope said “ordinary” as if she were saying “loathsome” or “disgusting.” “I want her name to be special.”
    â€œWe'll find something you like,” he soothed, preparing to go back to an article that he had been meaning to finish for days. Two people at work had asked what he thought of it; he wanted to be able to tell them.
    â€œBut I'll have the final say, right?” There was an edge to her voice that made Gabriel put down the magazine.
    â€œYou already have the name, don't you?” She nodded. “But you're worried I won't like it?”
    â€œYou have to let me pick it!” she said, sounding more shrill than she had since she became pregnant.
    â€œWhy don't you start by telling me what it is?”
    â€œIsis.” There was a long pause, while Gabriel tried to absorb the idea of raising a little girl in San Francisco, a little girl with Penelope's white skin and dark hair and eyes who when asked would say, on the playground, at nursery school, in day camp, that her name was Isis. Gabriel didn't think he could stand this, so he closed his eyes, and thought instead of what he could say that wouldn't make his wife burst into tears.
    â€œIt's different,” he said finally.
    â€œYou hate it, don't you?”
    â€œIt's very different,” he said.
    â€œI know. That's part of what I love about it. No one else will have her name. And of course I love all the associations.”
    â€œAssociations?”
    â€œTo the goddess,” she said. “And all the things she stands for: water, the bounty of the earth. Life. I want her to be all that. Have all that.” As if a name, that name or any other, would insure anything, thought Gabriel, but he did not say it. Instead, he put the magazine on the nightstand and retrieved the book of baby names from the floor.
    â€œCan I look at this with you?” he asked. “I'm kind of curious.”
    Several months
later, Penelope gave birth to a six-pound, six-ounce baby girl. Gabriel was there during the delivery—“Not like the old days, with the men pacing in the waiting room,” Ruth had commented. Of course, Oscar didn't pace, not any of the three times. When Gabriel was being born, he sat up at the nurses' station, raptly listening to the Brahms string sextet that happened to be on the radio; the other two times he was home tending their other child, or children, while the baby was making its way into the world. Not that Ruth minded; there was, after all, something superfluous about husbands during a birth anyway.
    But Gabriel was there, with all Penelope's instructions neatly written out in a series of lists that he kept in different pockets. There was the list of breathing patterns, another of baby names, still a third list of people to call as soon as the baby was born. There was also the cool washcloth, the bag of lollipops, the cup of chipped ice on which she could suck, the snapshot of her childhood cocker spaniel, Candy, that was meant to soothe and focus her throughout the birthing process. Gabriel was so worried about Penelope—what she was going through—that the birth of the child was almost an afterthought. It is only when they handed him the swaddled bundle—the baby felt as warm and reassuring as a loaf of just-baked bread in his arms—that the point of all this strenuous exertion became real. He looked down into her