A Toast to My Son Grady, on the Occasion of his Birth

My son Grady will be 36 tomorrow, Sunday, Jan. 4 at 7:28 pm. I was there when he was born, in the upstairs bedroom of an exceedingly drafty old house deep in Buffalo New York's working-class West Side. We didn't have a midwife to make our home birth possible. Couldn't find one. What we had was a doctor, a very brave one.

Home births were essentially illegal in the early '70s in New York State. But you could say my wife Patty and I had a taste for illegality back then. We'd both been active in what was then known as the Catholic Radical Left. We burned or stole or otherwise destroyed draft files. I'd dropped out of college to do such things. Legal? We weren't even married at the time.

In the spring of 1972, when Patty found herself pregnant and I'd gotten a suspended sentence for my draft board action, she went looking for a midwife. She knew she wanted to have the baby at home. Midwives were scarce and doctors were worse. The ones she called said she was wrong to even think such thoughts. They called her names -- including the old standby, "Communist" -- and all but threatened her with arrest. Such, such were the glory days of politically polarized America.

A friend in the movement was a nurse. She thought she knew a young doctor, a resident, who might actually be willing to deliver the baby at home. The doctor she had in mind was named Louie Hevizy.

Louie was Hungarian. A Hungarian prince, he told us. A Hungarian prince who had been strung up by the neck to a Budapest lamppost during the 1956 uprising. A Hungarian prince who had been cut down from that lamppost at the last minute by anti-Communist partisans who then spirited him to the underground from where he was eventually allowed to emigrate to the States "with the help of the Rockefeller family," as he always explained.

I liked Louie from the start. He was the only man I'd ever met who was skinnier than I was. He spoke with a deightful accent and loved to brag about his various flirtations and love affairs, the women he lured to the bachelor pad where his giant bed awaited, its vastness outfitted with black silk sheets.

Years later, when I first heard and saw Roman Polanski interviewed, I thought of Louie. They were both great lovers and talkers and braggarts and irresistibly funny.

I never asked to see the burn marks on his neck that would have confirmed Louie's story about his being hanged. Never asked him to explain his family history. He was the least political political refugee I've ever met. He hardly even seemed a doctor -- he seemed more intent on having a good time doing whatever he wanted.

When he looked at us, he couldn't have seen a payday. We were indigent and proud of it. But where every other doctor saw only a pair of hippies or Communists or flakes, Louie saw people. When he looked at Patty, he saw a determined young woman in need. Perhaps he saw a challenge. He never explained why he agreed to risk his career -- because that's what it would have meant -- to respond to our request, to act like a real doctor.
Beverly, our friend the nurse, quietly collected the stuff we'd need and stashed it in the bright orange-and-yellow delivery room we'd made of our bedroom. I remember especially a number of hot water bottles she'd lifted from her hospital with which she lined the baby's garishly red-painted basinette.

It was Louie who, when summoned on that snowy Buffalo day, arrived at our door with his doctor's bag, half a dozen bottles of Asti Spumante and a camera. And it was Louie who delivered Grady Kane-Horrigan 36 years ago today and who took the photos and toasted us with his Asti and hung around downstairs with two dozen friends and family members who'd gathered belowdecks for the great occasion. He even circumcized the poor kid, while allowing me the honor of cutting the cord.

It seems, as I look back on it, a great adventure, a perfect reflection of the times, with its authoritarian despots, idealistic rebels, its naivete and its happy ending. Or beginning. For Grady was our beginning.

I lost track of Louie after he delivered our daughter Annie three years later. Times had changed. We had to go to the hospital. The people there tried their best to shut me out. Annie was born in a surgery whose main features were cold steel gurneys and chains hanging from the ceiling. Though something had been lost, Annie made it easy to forget our disappointment.

We moved from Buffalo a few years after that. Among the many people I lost track of was Louie. What I know of his life after our departure I'm not comfortable relating. I wish I could re-write his story to fit the happy ending he deserved but didn't get.

But today I'll raise a glass to Louie Hevisy, the doctor who broke the rules and went against the odds and brought my son into the world. He was a doctor, a Lothario, a crazy Hungarian and maybe sometimes a bullshit artist. But more than anything else, Louie Hevizy was a prince.