A young man cradles a listless infant of about nine months to his shoulder. The child’s head lolls from side to side. The man looks at his young wife, so pretty, but genuine worry puts creases in her brow. She is free diving into the blackest fear. So is he. He is performing the dread calculus of the rest of his days if this infant dies. He does the math. There is no coming back from this. If the boy dies, all of life dies. Days will be simulacra of days. He will never make love to his wife again. He will laugh, but it will be hollow. He holds the boy out in front of him. He looks into the boy’s eyes and detaches. He doesn’t mean to. But he might have to. If the boy dies, life must go on. He can’t follow the boy into death. Shouldn’t. That is not the way.
But wait. This is just the first cold. Maybe they are overreacting. First child, first-time parents, first cold. He looks back into the boy’s eyes and reattaches. Intends to. He inhales. It feels good. But it’s not like before. It’s not like just a couple of minutes before. Something fundamental and heavy has shifted. Something tectonic. The infant senses it, and it makes him weaker, fills his tiny heart with a lifetime of loneliness and a sense of impermanence. The boy looks at his father. Like he’s accusing him. Like he knows his father was momentarily inhabiting a world without him and now, that imagined world, once imagined, will never quite go away, that even if the boy lived, the two worlds will always coexist side by side for both of them—the world with the boy in it and the world without the boy. And they will have to travel between those two worlds forever. There could be no solid ground anymore. Always half the world is lit by sun and half is night. Something like that. But that can’t be, the father thinks. A baby can’t think like that, can’t see, can’t perceive, can’t know. But what was it Wordsworth said? Trailing “clouds of immortality”? Or was it “glory”? “The child is father to the man”?
The baby coughs. There’s something in his chest. A virus. Like a demon or a devil. The father has not wanted to take the boy to the doctor. He doesn’t want to be one of those parents who rush to the doctor every time his son gets a scrape. He doesn’t want his son to be weak and dependent. To start learning so young that it’s okay not to be self-reliant. A world war just ended, millions of men died without complaint. Death still stalks the earth today, probably bored, unemployed, not working full-time anyway, just doing side projects. Like killing babies. This is fruitless imagining. There is only science.
So the father waited a couple of days with the boy like this, demanding that he beat this thing on his own. It’s just a cold, a first cold, it’s got to be nothing. A test. Odds are it’s nothing. The boy coughs. The demon announcing itself proudly. Death being proud. The boy coughs hard, fighting to bring the darkness forth, but the demon only comes halfway up, and then settles back down deep within him, his devil claws like rappelling hooks digging into and holding to the soft feathery insides of the little lungs. In between coughs the boy is motionless now. The baby hasn’t smiled in a couple of days. The father doesn’t know. He hasn’t read books on it. He figured he would just naturally know, and what he didn’t know, his wife would. Fill in gaps for each other. That’s a marriage. She had the mother knowledge. Don’t they all?
The man involuntarily does that calculus again, molds a hypothetical world minus his son. He curses himself and his avoidance of pain, the need for his mind to forecast the worst in order to save itself the future shock. How selfish, he thinks. But maybe natural, maybe human nature. The instinct for survival, self-preservation trumps all. He has read about animals in books, male lions eating their young. Maybe they do it out of love. They swallow their own pain and the child’s pain with the child, no more suffering. The cub is in a better place, a place without worry and pain. Inside the father. Dad will swallow all. Broad-shouldered Dad. Nature is a bastard.
But maybe not. He is not a lion. He is a man. Maybe he’s unnatural and cold. His wife looks at him, into him. Is she seeing his world without the boy? Is she seeing that he has killed his son? Is she seeing that she is not in that world either? That there is now a world where he has killed her, too? Does she see me, he wonders, inside me, and that I have too many worlds to trust? He detaches from her, too. Is the marriage over just like that? Yes and no. He doesn’t know. What does he know? He’s sorry, sure, but goddamn her. He doesn’t need the accusations. He hasn’t done anything, he’s just thinking, doing his best. The boy coughs, weaker this time. Giving up? He can hear the demon exulting. Sadistic. Its claws well dug in. The mother grabs the infant from her new husband. The child is unresponsive. His head lolls on a slack neck. “Please,” she pleads like she’s asked before. “Please let’s get him to the hospital.”
OCTOBER 15, 1946
Pesky also hesitated and the Boston Red Sox lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games.