CHAPTER TWO

FEBRUARY

“Dr. Zauber? She’s ready.”

Diehl’s words in Ben’s ear were meaningless at first. He had come awake as soon as the phone began its imperious ringing, but he had no memory of Diehl’s previous call. “Who?” he shot out. “Who’s ready?”

“Mrs. Kinney. She’s eight centimeters.”

“Why the hell didn’t you call me earlier?” he said. “Goddamn it, why’d you wait until the last minute?”

“I did call.” Diehl was indignant. “You said to get back to you when she was really ready.”

Slowly, their previous conversation drifted back into Ben’s mind. “Oh, Christ,” he sighed. “Yeah. That’s right. I did say that.”

“I could deliver her,” Diehl offered eagerly.

“No. She’d never forgive me.” He was wide awake now. “I’ve known her for seven years. Delivered both her other kids.” Standing, he began groping for his shoes. “Just snow her for a few moments. I’ll be there faster than you can wheel her into the delivery room.”

“Snow her?”

“Delay her. Give her a shot. And have the nurse tell her not to push.”

“You sure you don’t want me to deliver her?”

But Ben was already hanging up and within seconds he was into his shoes and coat and out the door. Rushing along the windy street that separated his apartment from the hospital, his coat flapping behind him, he was racing as in his dream.

Annette Kinney was in the delivery room wide awake, and Angela Rogers, one of the nurses, was holding her legs together and telling her in her soft Southern drawl not to bear down, not yet. Annette’s face was contorted, but when she saw Ben she managed a smile. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispered and then her body heaved.

“Have I ever let you down?” Angela checked the fetal heart while another nurse dried his arms. Water was still running down to his wrists from his double-quick scrubbing. Then he heard Angela say, “Heart rate’s gone down to 115” and suddenly he was intensely at work, ordering oxygen for Annette in order to keep the baby’s own supply mighty and telling her now to push, push hard, as hard as she could.

He could see the top of the baby’s head, its matted hair a mound of black twisted seaweed. But it had stopped its voyage through her vagina. He ordered forceps and began pulling down on the head, directing Diehl to cut the episiotomy while he braced himself against the baby’s stubbornness. Then suddenly he had a firm hold on the baby and he maneuvered its head half out, working now with his hands alone. The head was slippery but he held it and at last eased out a shoulder. There was a torrent of fluid and a second later he was grasping the baby by its heels, sucking mucus from its sticky face, and hitting it hard, waiting for the belligerent world-hating cry and the bellicose red color to come. But the baby merely whimpered, made no warrior cry, and although when the cord was clamped his small penis swelled, his color didn’t come.

Troubled, but trusting that the infant would soon enough perk up, he handed it to Diehl and directed him to start the required measurements of heart, muscle tone, and breathing. In the meantime, he concentrated on the afterbirth.

It was coming rapidly. He helped Annette deliver it, pushing on her stomach, then quickly checked to see if it had all come out. When he heard Angela at his elbow saying something to him, he asked her to wait a second, and completed his careful examination of the placenta. Then he heard Angela whisper loudly, “It’s Apgar three,” and knew that Annette’s baby had not turned red.

When he had finished with Annette and she was being sponged and dressed, he went over to take a look at the infant. A pediatric resident had been called and the baby placed in an isolette. It was breathing oxygen, its small stomach rising and flattening laboriously. “It’s hypoxic,” the pediatrician said. “We’ll have to hold it here for a while.” He sighed and looked uneasy. “Do you want to tell the mother?”

Annette Kinney was lying flat when he got down to her room, but she was already whispering animatedly with a woman in the bed next to hers. Tired but triumphant, she reminded him of a schoolgirl still awake at dawn after a New Year’s Eve date. He wished she didn’t look quite so joyous. Pulling the curtain around her bed so they could have privacy, he began, “Where’s Frank?”

“Home. We thought it would be best for the kids if he stayed with them.”

“Have you called him yet?”

“No. I was just about to.”

Ben bit on the inside of his cheek. “We’re going to have to keep the baby on oxygen for a day or so.”

He hadn’t expected her to take his report calmly, but he was unprepared for the way her forehead suddenly gashed into great, deep wrinkles. “He’ll be fine. You’ll see,” he went on, trying not to let her see his own anxiety. “He just needs a day or two of special care. He’s a little hypoxic, but he’ll flourish rapidly on oxygen.”

Annette sank down onto the pillow, her gaiety gone. “Really just a day or two?” she asked doubtfully.

“Really. I’m sure of it. I’ve seen these things often. Have I ever lied to you?”

“No, never,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “But there’s always a first time.”

“Trust me,” he said. “And relax. And after you call Frank, try to get some rest. Who knows? You might even get the baby by afternoon.”

He felt a power in his voice, saw how she relaxed her forehead, hypnotized by his drawl, and he left right afterward, promising to see her later on in the day. It seemed to satisfy her.

But he himself was beyond consolation. He had been asleep and oblivious and to cover up that first unfortunate error, he had had Annette’s labor slowed down. It should have gone all right even so; most of the time a little slowdown produced only a negligible effect on labor. But Annette’s baby had responded by getting altogether sluggish. It had tarried in her vagina and been poisoned by inadequate air. He felt monstrous, ashamed.

On his way out of the hospital, he stopped in front of the darkened gift shop, and, peering into the display window, wished the shop were open so that he could buy something for Annette. A plant. A bottle of perfume. A book. Anything. Then he pushed past the window, abashed, recognizing the irrationality of his urge to buy Annette a gift. It was audacious to imagine that there was anything he or anyone else could give her to make up for what would, most likely, soon be taken from her.

He made his way out into the street and, too angry with himself to permit himself the solace of sleep once again, went over to his office where he read until dawn and called the pediatric intensive care unit several times to check on the Kinney baby’s progress. But each time he called, the resident on duty informed him that there had been no improvement yet.

Cora was the first person to arrive in the morning. She saw his light on, tapped on the door, took one look at him and said, “What’s the matter? You look terrible.”

“It’s nothing,” he answered, not wanting to talk about the Kinney baby. “When’s Sidney expected?” Above all, he wanted to avoid Sidney just now. Seeing Sidney, who had never compromised a birth, would just make him feel worse. If he could feel worse.

“Not till late,” Cora said. “He’s in Washington.”

“Oh. Right! I forgot!” Relieved, he washed and shaved in the office bathroom and prepared himself to start seeing his patients. He was sure that once he was busy he would forget about Annette Kinney for a while. But he couldn’t forget about her. As each new patient arrived, he kept seeing Annette’s disappointment anew, kept seeing disdain in each woman’s face and himself for the failure he had become.

All morning he was regretful and disgusted with himself for having indulged in the extra pills just because Claudia and Sidney had made him feel so left out. If only he could relive last night. If only such second chances were possible. If they were, he thought once, he could have called Naomi instead of taking the extra pills.

When the office emptied out a little he took his lunch break. Cora brought him a hamburger and a milkshake and before unwrapping them he called Pediatric Intensive Care again. But the resident’s voice was flat and thin as he said, “Still no change.”

“Well, let’s give it twenty-four hours,” Ben said. “It’s still too soon to be sure the oxygen won’t make a difference.”

“Sure,” the resident agreed. But when Ben hung up the phone he couldn’t bring himself to eat.

Cora, returning to clear away his lunch, insisted on his having the milkshake at least. Her face was wind-reddened and she looked angry and disapproving as she fussed over him, ripping open the paper bag and forcing a straw into the thick, dark liquid. “You need to get out more,” she muttered. “To think about other things besides work.”

She came in again when he had seen his last patient. He was sitting at his desk, his head in his hands. Cora reminded him that he had promised her the day after Lincoln’s Birthday off because she was going skiing and told him that she had found a good replacement for herself while she was on holiday. But when he simply nodded and seemed uninterested in who it was, she began to grow fiercely maternal. “You should take days off sometimes too,” she said. “All work and no play—”

“I know,” he said.

“Dull boy,” she finished.

When she was gone he put his head and his arms down on the desk, not expecting to sleep but intending merely to rest. He was too upset to sleep, he thought. In a few minutes he would go over to the hospital again, check with his own eyes on the progress of the baby and pay his promised visit to Annette Kinney. But fatigue overwhelmed him. Without any exertion of will, his eyes started to shut, and his ears ceased to register Cora’s footsteps in the hallway. Instead, in his mind, he kept hearing the voice of his mother, Sara. She was talking to somebody he couldn’t recognize and she was crying and saying, “He’s dull. Let’s face it. Let’s just face up to it.”

Poor Sara, Ben mused, and sat with his head buried in his arms. Whenever he thought of his mother, he felt sorry for her. Drowsy, he remembered how she had told him that when she was young, she had always dreamed of marrying a prince. An immigrant, she had learned English late in childhood, read fairy tales well into her teens, and fantasized overlong about princes charming, bewitched and benighted.

The man she had married, Samuel Zauber, Ben and Sidney’s father, had clearly been no prince. An accountant for the Mid-Hudson Dairy, he spoke with an accent, smoked cigars whose odor Sara detested and left his socks strewn about the living room floor. After his death, Sara complained about him incessantly. But while he was alive, Ben imagined, she must have kept her complaints to herself, for she had made an alteration in her fantasies and Samuel was necessary to that alteration. She had decided that although she had not married royally, she might, instead, produce a prince for herself.

Sara tried, from the first month of her married life. In bed with Samuel she smelled his feet, was aware of the odor even when he had bathed them in the porcelain tub. She herself felt hot, sweaty, sunstruck. He would ride her, straddling her and galloping, a courier who did not know the errand he was on, the reason why she lay so willingly beneath him though he rode and rode her to exhaustion. And she never told Samuel how she felt. Feelings as a matter of display between husbands and wives were invented later, when Sara was already an older woman. In their midnight rides across the bed, physical presence was all.

Then at last Sara became pregnant and rejoiced, never once doubting that the weight within her was a son, a prince. But after six bloodless months she awoke screaming and bleeding in the night and Samuel called their doctor, the only Jewish physician in Poughkeepsie, and he came and took Sara in his black Ford to the hospital and she was assured, when she was sent home several days later, that there was no cause for the miscarriage, that there was nothing wrong with her, that it had just been an idiopathic event. She was urged to try again.

And she did try, and did try, and for the next eight years she was pregnant seven times and seven times Samuel telephoned in the night for the doctor and Sara was taken to the hospital and then returned home to try again. She began to believe that God had forsaken her, and grew depressed and stayed at home, friendless. And then, on her ninth effort God decided in her favor and let her have Sidney. Or so it seemed to her. That he was God-given she never questioned, and, even more than most Jewish women of her age and background, treated her first son as a being at whose feet both she and her husband should worship.

She knitted and embroidered and sewed and fed him, first with her breasts and then with an ornate spoon, a large never a small one. She kissed and bathed and caressed him and put him to sleep, once he reached the age of nightmares, in her own fluffy bed, urging Samuel to settle down on the couch. She taught him to read and recited her fairy tales to him and told him he must be a doctor when he grew up, and help God help poor women like herself, and she sat him on her knees for piano lessons before he was three years old. He was everything she had ever wanted in life.

In a way the second baby, Ben, was superfluous. She had had all her prayers answered by Sidney. Ben was an afterthought, God’s postscript.

Still, she had done her best to love them equally. She was indefatigable and exquisitely fair. It was not her fault that Ben was a much more lethargic baby than Sidney, undemanding, absorbed in his own fingers and toes and unimpressed by rattles and colored wooden beads. Not her fault that Sidney, at two, had memorized his picture books, whereas Ben, stubby-fingered, could barely manage to turn pages one at a time. Not her fault that Sidney, at three, could print his name in great wobbly, giant strokes, whereas Ben clutched a pencil in his chubby palm and tried to make the eraser write. Worst of all, Ben did not speak until he was three or at least spoke only nonsense words, meaningless to the entire family. Sara lost interest in Ben.

Not so Samuel. Ben could still remember how his father had spent hours tutoring him, trying to teach him to speak, holding him on his lap and saying over and over, “Mommy. Dadda. Sidney.” It was his last memory of his father. Samuel had died when Ben was three and Sidney six, and Ben had learned to speak only after his father’s death and only as Sidney’s pupil. His mother still told the story of how it had happened with wonder and adoration in her eyes.

She had awakened early one morning shortly after Samuel’s death and heard loud sounds from the boys’ room. Ben was shouting, “Maddern gail,” and Sidney was shouting back, “Sailboat, moron! Say, ‘Gimme the sailboat!’”

A moment later Sara heard a loud, thunderous crack and a rain of whimpers and Ben sobbing, “Maddern gail thina rihm!” and she had hurried to the door of the boys’ room just in time to see Sidney stomping the wooden sailboat she had just given Ben for his birthday. He was in tears. On his knees. Clutching at slivers of wood. His groping hands were dangerously close to Sidney’s still-stomping shoes. Sara had started to rush for her youngest son when, his voice in a howl, his fingers pinioned, he had shrieked, “Gimme sailboat, moron.”

Suddenly both Sara and Sidney stood still, and then Sidney lifted his foot arid freed Ben’s fingers and Ben grabbed and cradled the mangled boat and Sara ran across the room. Scooping up Sidney, she hugged him. “You made him talk!” she cried. “You make him talk!” Ben was howling “Gimme sailboat, moron,” and at last Sara hugged him too and kissed his throbbing fingers.

Shortly afterwards Sara felt able to move with the two small boys to Brooklyn, where her husband’s brothers owned a mirror business and had offered her a job. She had delayed the move, ashamed of Ben, but now she was no longer ashamed. Little by little he had begun to make sense and by the time they moved and he met his uncles, Sidney had taught him to shake hands and say, “Gimourning.”

Soon after they moved, Sidney started school. Ben stayed at home with a housekeeper and waited impatiently all day for three o’clock when he and the woman could go to the schoolyard to pick up Sidney. He would hold the housekeeper’s hand tightly until he saw Sidney’s class come into the yard in size place order and then he would run with flailing arms and tripping feet to greet his brother, shouting “Gimourning! Gimourning!” But Sidney, fourteenth in line, with knickered boys in front and in back of him, would say loudly, “Jerk” and “Shithead” and “Gedoudahere,” and after a while Ben knew those words too, and by the time he was ready for kindergarten he spoke quite well, albeit at first with a bothersome, rattling stutter.

Still, it didn’t prevent him from tagging behind after Sidney and his friends in the empty lots and alleys in which they played stickball and ring-a-levio, although it sometimes prevented him from explaining to Sara at night his frequent torn pants and cut knees and bruised arms. Or something did. He feared the loss of Sidney’s company more than he feared scrapes and cuts and punches and the stinging flesh-reddening searing that Sidney called an Indian burn.

But Sidney was not always cruel to him. His cruelty was chiefly a public display, name-calling and tricks and physical abuse whenever Ben followed behind in the pack of boys.

When they were alone, Sidney was different. When they were alone, he would let Ben listen to his radio or play with the doctor kit Sara bought him on his eighth birthday, or the chemistry set he was given at nine. Ben would be Sidney’s patient, forever getting his temperature taken and his heart listened to and his back thumped hard and his mouth stuffed to overflowing with delicious candy pills. And Ben would be Sidney’s taster, sniffing, then gulping, the foul drinks Sidney concocted. Holding his nose, Ben would bravely swear the marvelous oaths by which Sidney bound him, the secret curses prompted by scatology and the movies. “I’ll be fucked to shit if I ever fail you,” “I’ll be your faithful servant forevermore.”

Later there were rituals inspired by Sidney’s extensive reading: the hand in the gas flame, the hairs pulled out close to the temples, the bloody signatures on folded scraps of paper. Ben never tired of time spent with Sidney, even when Sidney abused him. Sara said Sidney was a genius and that genius had its own ways. And Ben was inclined to agree with her, although he didn’t know what genius was. Still, he knew that Sidney was endowed with a unique gift.

He called it imagination, a quality he found grievously lacking in himself. He felt uninventive, dull, shallow. Sidney was exciting, unpredictable, full of undercurrents. What was a kick in the shins compared to experiencing the world through Sidney’s eyes?

Ben submerged himself in Sidney’s depths and felt, drowning, that he had landed somewhere.

He had slept. When he drifted to consciousness, he saw that it was after six. The office was silent. Cora and the other two nurses had undoubtedly gone home long ago. He sat up, astonished, startled that he had fallen asleep at his desk without any preparation for sleep. He had taken no pills since the night before. Still sleepy, he felt inordinately pleased with himself. Then he remembered Annette Kinney and her baby and dissatisfaction replaced his contentment. Quickly he stood up and drew on his overcoat. He had yet to take his promised second look at the mother and child.

Annette was tearful when he saw her. “You said I’d have the baby by afternoon,” she said accusingly.

“I said maybe by afternoon,” he reminded her gently. She turned her head away and began to sob.

“I don’t blame you for being angry with me,” he offered, then wished he hadn’t. But it was all right. She wasn’t listening to him, but was crying loudly now.

“Please stop,” he cajoled. “The more you cry, the worse you’ll feel.” He made himself smile briskly and add in a stern voice, “If you go on crying, we’ll have to give you tranquilizers and that won’t be good for your milk.”

Her tears subsided and he went on. “I think you’d better begin using a breast pump. Just to keep yourself ready. I’m going to tell the nurses to get you started.”

“You are? You really think the baby’s going to be all right?”

“Of course I do. I’m sure of it.”

He had almost convinced himself until he stopped in the nursery and saw the baby’s pale grayish color. Diehl was there too, agitated and ashen faced himself. “I’m sorry,” Ben said to him.

The obstetrical resident didn’t reply.

“Any improvement?” Ben asked.

“Not yet,” Diehl finally muttered.

Ben looked down at the baby in its glass nest.

“I called you in time,” the younger man said then, speaking up.

“Sure you did.”

“I thought you were going to say I called you late,” Diehl went on nervously. “It’s been known to happen. I have a friend who got kicked out of Midstate because an attending lied about when my friend called him.”

“You don’t have much confidence in me, do you?” Ben frowned.

“It isn’t you. It’s this place. The buck-passing.” Behind Diehl’s bravado, Ben could hear how worried he was.

“You don’t need to worry,” Ben said. “I’m not like that.”

The resident looked up, suddenly grateful. “I’m sorry,” he said, and Ben realized how young he was. No more than twenty-seven, he thought. “You should get some sleep,” he advised him paternally.

“I can’t. Who can sleep around here? I’d give my right arm for two full nights of sleep.”

Ben lingered a while, feeling close to Diehl, understanding the depths of his exhaustion and anxiety. But there was nothing else he could think of saying to the younger man and, finally, taking a last look at the baby, he excused himself and hurried out of the nursery. Sidney would be back from Washington by now and would be coming to the hospital to do his rounds. He didn’t want to run into Sidney. Not now. Not yet. Tomorrow, when the baby pulled through, then he could talk to Sidney about it.

He raced for the back elevator but to his dismay when it stopped for him he saw Sidney, looking elegant in a new blue cashmere coat and carrying a bulging briefcase, pushing out from behind a crowd of strangers. And immediately after Sidney emerged, so too did Thomas Alithorn, the chief of ob-gyn. Ben backtracked, turning toward the direction from which he had come, but Sidney saw him and called out, “Hey, Ben. Wait up a minute.”

Ben walked reluctantly back. Sidney and Alithorn were deep in conversation. “Fascinating,” Alithorn was saying. “Absolutely fascinating.” Alithorn’s aging face was well tanned, the result of daily tennis. When he saw Ben, he nodded, but his eyes seemed to stare right through him. Looking at Sidney again he said, “Come on over to my office and let’s talk about it further.”

Ben was used to being ignored by Alithorn. A political man, Alithorn picked his friends carefully, concentrating on the powerful old-timers or the up-and-coming stars. Still, he ran the department efficiently and was well thought of by the administration because he brought in a lot of money in the form of bequests and endowments. “I’ll need to hear more,” he was saying to Sidney, “But sure, it sounds possible. We’d like to help out.”

Sidney set his briefcase down between his legs and pulled out a reprint, handing it to Alithorn. “I’m afraid I’m going to be tied up for a while. But here. Read this, and maybe we can talk about it Saturday.”

“Fine. See you Saturday at eight.” Alithorn, taking the reprint, hurried down the corridor.

As soon as he was gone, Ben said, “I’ve got to go, too,” and pressed the elevator button again, but Sidney asked, “What’s your hurry?”

“I thought you were in a hurry,” Ben said nervously, still not wanting to talk with Sidney.

“Why? Oh, you mean what I said to Alithorn?” Sidney glanced at the chief’s retreating back. “That was just politicking. Never seem eager when someone wants to do you a favor.” He gave Ben a paternal smile. Then he bent down and closed his briefcase. “Alithorn may let me take over some more lab space. And use some of the residents. A couple of them are very keen to do research. Matthews, Diehl. Diehl called me this morning and asked to work with me.”

“Diehl?” Ben said edgily.

“Yeah. By the way, he said you’d had a bad baby last night.” Pulling off a paisley silk scarf, Sidney asked, “Still bad?”

“Yeah,” Ben nodded disconsolately.

“Well, don’t worry about it. You win some, you lose some. Anyway, Kinney’s not exactly what you could call unlucky. Doesn’t she have two kids already?”

“The baby’s not lost yet,” Ben said, disheartened by Sidney’s casualness. “It may pull through.”

“Yes, but if it does, it’ll probably be a vegetable.” Sidney shrugged again. He prided himself on always taking a realistic approach to problems and saw pessimism as realism.

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, I hope you’re right, old buddy. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.” Sidney picked up his briefcase, stooping a little from the weight. Then suddenly he set it down again and said, “What went wrong with the delivery?”

“I was late. I had the baby delayed.”

Sidney leaned closer to Ben. “Sleeping?”

“Yeah.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t tell anyone about that.” Sidney had lowered his voice. “Let them think Diehl called you late.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not? Don’t be a schmuck.” Sidney rubbed a still-gloved hand across his forehead. “There’s liable to be a malpractice suit,” he whispered. “There’ll be one for sure if the baby dies. But even if it lives, if it’s retarded, there could be one. And how do you think that’ll look for our practice?”

“I’m sorry,” Ben said. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“Damn right you weren’t.” Sidney was struggling to keep his voice low. “Well, forget it. Just let me take care of it. Diehl’s very anxious to get into research.”

“I can’t let him take the blame.

“I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”

“But I already told Diehl it was my fault and that I’d stick by him.”

“Well, you’re not going to.” Suddenly Sidney pulled off his gloves and stretched out a hand toward Ben’s jacket. “For Diehl, it’ll all blow over in a while,” he said. “It wouldn’t for you.” Sidney’s fingers groped, then closed around the plastic container in Ben’s pocket. “You have too much to hide,” Sidney whispered. “So don’t act like a damn fool.”

A moment later, Sidney was gone and Ben was standing alone in the corridor, ashamed. He hated Sidney’s advice and himself for having provoked it. He wanted to kick something. Anything.

Alone, he left the hospital and began to wander, first to the icy river, then across town and into the park, a snowy polar terrain. There was nothing new in Sidney’s urging him to compromise himself, he thought as he walked, feeling like a lonely arctic explorer left behind by hardier comrades.

It had happened so many times before. He remembered the time he had written on limnology for his high school biology course. Visiting the Museum of Natural History, he had become fascinated by the museum’s replicas and diagrams of freshwater ponds, the mysterious balance between the big fish and the small, the way the waters teemed with life. And so he had decided to write his term report on the subject, the very decision giving him a sense of purpose and accomplishment. And the research went so well that gradually he began to change his mind about science. He had disliked it at the start of high school, and had done mediocre work in chemistry. But he felt enthusiastic about biology.

Sidney was off at Cornell taking pre-med, and one day Ben wrote to him and told him that perhaps he too would, after all, plan on a career in science, perhaps become a biologist or even a doctor. Sidney had written back, “Fantastic! Who knows? If you become a doctor, maybe we could share a practice someday.”

But he had warned Ben that he’d better get a top grade in biology. “You got a B in chemistry. You’ll have to pull an A in biology or else you won’t get into a college with a good science program. And if you don’t do that, you won’t stand a chance of getting into a good med school.”

Ben increased his efforts on the term paper and when Sidney was home at Easter vacation, showed it to him. But Sidney hated it. “Why’d you choose limnology?” he had asked. “You should have picked the cell. Or the circulatory system. Something important.” Ben had explained limply, “I liked it.” Sidney had shrugged and said, “Tell you what. I’ll write a paper for you while I’m home.” Ben demurred, but Sidney was insistent. “You picked the wrong topic, old buddy,” he said. “You’ll never get as good a grade with this as you’d get if you did the cell.” Ben had finally acquiesced, and he got an A in biology, although he was never quite certain what grade he would have gotten if he had used his own paper.

In college—unlike Sidney he went to City and lived at home to save Sara money—he and Sidney had similar altercations. To Sidney, anything short of glowing success was failure, and he was always predicting failure for Ben and trying to get him to forestall it through deceit, urging him to cheat on exams, hire a fellow student to go over his papers for him, even to subscribe to a thesis-writing service he had read about somewhere.

Sidney never practiced deceit to advance his own career. He didn’t have to. But when it came to Ben’s career, he believed it was essential.

It wasn’t that Ben was doing badly in college. He was as smart as the next fellow, if not as brilliant as Sidney. But, knowing Ben’s early slowness, Sidney never quite trusted his advances during adolescence and young manhood. It was as if the past had greater reality than the present. When Ben found the work in medical school extremely difficult, Sidney said, “There’s only one way a guy like you can make it through. You’re going to have to start studying all night.”

Ben promised to try. But he couldn’t do it. To help him, Sidney, already an intern, produced amphetamines to keep him awake for hours on end, and barbiturates to permit him brief restorative naps. “No harm in these,” Sidney said. “No harm in anything but failure.”

Following Sidney’s advice, Ben had made it through medical school, and later through a grueling internship and residency, and at last he had become, like Sidney himself, a specialist in obstetrics and gynecology. Yet he always felt himself to be an inferior doctor. Years later, thoroughly disillusioned with himself, he returned to the barbiturates he had first come to enjoy during medical school. He monitored his habit, tried to keep it from overwhelming his life. But he never tried to give it up. It made failure tolerable.

Wandering through the park, his legs finally grew so weary that he felt grateful. He would be able to sleep now. Able to sleep even without the pills. He didn’t want to have to take them. Not tonight, when at any minute the Kinney baby might die and he would have to break the news to Annette. Stamping through the snow onto an unfamiliar windy corner, he hailed a cab and rode to his apartment.

But he couldn’t sleep. Lying exhausted on the living room couch, he kept thinking that if the Kinney baby died, he would blame himself fiercely for its brief labored life. And even if it lived, if it was in any way damaged, he would still blame himself, no matter whom Sidney blamed officially. And he would blame himself for whatever happened to Diehl, would have Diehl on his conscience too.

But he had no choice. As Sidney had said, he had too much to hide to risk a malpractice suit. Such a suit might dredge up his addiction and possibly result in suspension from the hospital. As long as he was taking his pills, he’d have to do what Sidney advised. And he couldn’t give them up. They were the jewels with which he courted his beloved sleep.

Lying on his back, he withdrew the container from his pocket and spread a few yellow capsules on his palm. Golden and shiny in their clear jell covers, they seemed to him jewels indeed, and he held them gently and then at last got up and went into the kitchen to fill a glass of water. There was no point in fooling himself; he needed the pills.

Far below, outside the kitchen window, was a wide landscaped courtyard and, as he ran the water in the sink, he could hear sounds carried upward through the yard, music, a child crying, a door slamming, other people’s lives being lived. He lifted the pills toward his mouth but suddenly his eyes narrowed and his fist tightened around them. Holding them hidden, he thought of the story Sara still told about her childhood in Russia, about how on a moonlit snowy night she had tossed a necklace of pearly white beads out of the window, expecting, or so she told it, that when the spring sun shone and melted the snow, the beads too would disintegrate into pale gray rivulets. Instead, she had found the necklace in the spring, the chain on which the beads were strung rusted and green, but the beads themselves still a pearly vivid white against the new grass.

Raising the courtyard window, he abruptly scattered his fistful of pills out into the snow. Then he dug in his pocket, took out the container, unscrewed it and shook out the rest of the smooth, golden capsules, watching them scatter into the wind.

That morning at seven-thirty the pediatric resident called him from the hospital. “You know the Kinney baby?” Ben held his breath. “It’s off the oxygen. And it looks as if there’s nothing else wrong. For now, at least.”

“Does Mrs. Kinney know?” His misery of the night before was evaporating.

“Not yet. We thought you’d want to know before we told her.”

“Great,” Ben said. “Good work. I’m coming over right now. Don’t tell her. I’d like to tell her myself.”

He felt, as he walked swiftly to the hospital, that once again he was in his flying dream, his body weightless and perfect. He felt it still when he swirled open the curtains around Annette Kinney’s bed.

She was sitting up, using the breast pump, and he was glad that he had thought of that distraction for her. But she was drawn-faced and there were tear streaks on her cheeks. “Now why are you crying?” he asked, scarcely able to contain his excitement. “Didn’t I tell you not to let yourself get all upset?”

“I’m just so terribly worried,” Annette said. “So scared.” She set down the little rubber pump and covered herself with the rough sheet, wiping her eyes with a corner of it.

“Well, you don’t need to be,” he beamed. “And you’d better pull yourself together right away. You’ve got this happy, healthy baby out there that needs you.”

Annette stared at him, her eyes going wide with disbelief.

“They’ll be bringing the baby to you for the eleven o’clock feeding,” Ben went on. “You haven’t missed a beat.”

Comprehension and relief began to spread across Annette’s face.

“Shall we walk over and see him together? Or do you want to call Frank first and tell him?”

Annette had her feet over the side of the bed already. “After,” she said, stumbling into her slippers.

He gathered up her orlon robe and helped her into it, standing formal and dignified behind her as if he were wrapping her in an evening coat.

“Let’s go see the baby first,” she said, and took his arm.

They promenaded together down the corridor. “I told you it would be just a matter of a day or so,” he said. He loved the almost palpable happiness that seemed to suffuse her, making her skin bright, and refrained from telling her how worried he still was. Only time would reveal whether the baby had received any permanent damage as a result of its oxygen deprivation.

“What do you suppose happened?” Annette asked happily.

“Who knows?” he hedged. “There are so many mysteries about birth. There’s so much we don’t know.”

The baby was in a nurse’s arms, being diapered. Ben hardly recognized it except for its dark thatch of hair. It was red-cheeked and howling and unblemished. Annette dropped Ben’s arm and pressed close to the glass. She had forgotten about Ben.

He couldn’t forget about her. The incident haunted him. Although he had been taking barbiturates regularly for several years now, he had never before slept through a call to the hospital or endangered the health of a patient or a patient’s baby. He had thought himself immune to such possibilities because he had monitored his habit carefully. He had never, until the night he had learned of Claudia’s pregnancy, taken more than the tolerance-producing dose of six hundred milligrams a day. Never allowed himself the street addict’s ignorant climb to ever higher and higher amounts. But despite the educated way he had handled his habit, it had put someone in peril. He made up his mind to stay off the drugs.

It was difficult, more difficult than the abrupt withdrawal itself. That was accomplished after three days of stomach cramps, nausea and weakness. He told Cora he had the flu, had her cancel all his appointments and stayed at home, shivering. In a corner of his bedroom was an overstuffed armchair from which one night, he didn’t remember which or at what hour it had been, he had crazily ripped each cloth-covered button and held them in a sweating palm and at last put a few in his yearning mouth and swallowed, gagging before he vomited them onto the carpet.

But he hadn’t fainted, hadn’t had convulsions. Indeed, he hadn’t experienced any of the more extreme effects that sudden withdrawal could produce in those who took higher doses of the drug. His real difficulties set in later, once the physical dependence was conquered. He was anxious, tremulous, and totally incapable of sleeping. His insomnia was a mutiny against his body, a nightly tossing and twisting of his limbs that left him feeling whipped and beaten toward morning and always, in those silent hours just before dawn, utterly abandoned and alone. He came to long for the very thing he had once most hated, the 4 or 5 A.M. call to hurry to the hospital for a delivery.

But no matter how acute his insomnia and loneliness became, he didn’t let them drive him to writing himself a new barbiturate prescription. Every dawn, awake and brooding, he kept picturing Annette Kinney’s tear-streaked face and hearing Diehl’s agitated voice. He remembered his own residency and didn’t agree with Sidney that no harm would befall the young man if he were blamed for the delay in the baby’s birth. At the very least, his reputation would be stained, so that he would be starting his career with a serious mark against him.

Shouldering the blame himself would also stain a reputation, Ben thought. His own. But his career, such as it was, was already established. He had sufficient patients, and had colleagues who would continue to recommend others to him, no matter whether he won or lost a malpractice suit. As for his addiction, he doubted he could be suspended for it, once it was in the past. And so he lay awake at night, waiting for his insomnia to fade, as he imagined it would in time.

The loneliness was another matter. It was loneliness that had first caused his love affair with sleep. And unless he conquered it now, he would once again be seduced. But he couldn’t look to Sidney for help in this. If anything, Sidney would want to see less of him, not more, once the baby was born. He would have to manage on his own. Would have to develop other distractions. One morning, lying in a tangle of sheets and watching a rainswept dawn that was nearly as dismal and dark as the night that had preceded it, he decided that he was going to marry Naomi.