The Child

THE CHILD had not been wanted. He said they couldn’t afford it yet; she said they hadn’t done all the things they had planned to do. They thought, during the second month, of giving up the child, but decided against it. They agreed that she would continue to teach until the seventh month, and they told each other that they would love the child anyway, that somehow things would work out.

As the months went by and the child began to grow inside her, Helen changed; not only did she begin to forget about the many things they had hoped to do while still not “burdened” with children, but she found that she was beginning to look forward to becoming a mother. “Maybe it was best this way, honey,” Gary would say at night when they lay in bed together. “Maybe we were only kidding ourselves, maybe we would have just let the years slip by, inventing excuses, if this hadn’t happened to us.” After spending an evening with their friends they would take pleasure, almost secretly, it seemed, from comparing themselves to those married couples who were still without children, from noting how the child was drawing them closer to one another.

She wrote to her family and to his, and they received long letters of congratulations and sizable checks from both sets of parents. They were amazed, they told each other, at how easily they could accept the gifts, without feelings of guilt, of obligation. Helen delighted in her third-grade children as she had never done before, and he became more optimistic about their financial situation. Several times a week he would sit down on the living-room couch with her and he would go over the figures—showing her, with pencil and paper, that even if she didn’t return to teaching for three years, everything would be all right. She praised him for his ability to arrange things, to foresee possibilities she would never have thought of.

What pleased them most, though, was feeling the baby, listening to it. He would lie with his ear pressed gently to her stomach, and every time he heard a sound they would experience a thrill which seemed magical. “I think I’m falling in love with you all over again,” she said to him. “It’s so strange.”

She had never seemed more beautiful to him, and he had never loved her more. They had never, he felt, been this close. Still, as the months went by, he became increasingly uneasy. In particular, he was afraid of what would happen to her were something to go wrong. He called her doctor and the doctor told him not to worry. He did, anyway. Helen didn’t, he saw, and this worried him even more. While she was making supper one evening he leafed through a copy of Life magazine and found an article about Thalidomide babies who were being rehabilitated through the use of artificial limbs. Had Helen seen the article? If, as he hoped, she had not seen it, what was he to do? If he threw the magazine away without telling her, and if she found out, she would think that he was treating her like a child, overprotecting her. “Have you finished with all the magazines in the rack?” he called to her. “It’s getting stuffed.” “I’m finished with them,” she called back.

At the office, his friends told him that she would begin feeling ugly and neglected, that her eyes would turn inward, that she would begin neglecting him—he waited, but none of these things happened. Still, he was afraid for her, for the baby. He went to see their doctor, and the doctor smiled at his fears. Gary considered, and then told the doctor about the time, before they were married, when Helen had been ill. The doctor nodded; Helen had told him all about it. There was nothing to worry about. If anything, giving birth to a healthy child would, he said, serve to close the door even more securely on that period of her life. What if the child wasn’t healthy, he asked. The doctor replied that something could always go wrong, of course—there were never guarantees; as things stood, though, Helen was coming along beautifully and he didn’t see any cause for worry: there was more chance of a safe falling on Gary while he walked in the street, he laughed, than of something being wrong with the child.

Without telling Helen, Gary telephoned her mother and urged her to come and stay with them, but Helen’s mother said that she wasn’t needed yet. She thought she would come to New York after the baby was born, when she could be more helpful. Gary said all right. When it came time to give up their own pleasures, he became wary again, he waited for something to happen, but she neither neglected him nor felt neglected; if anything, she became more affectionate than she had been before, and at night her only concern was that he might go to sleep unsatisfied.

One evening he tested her by opening the middle drawer of the living-room secretary and taking out the European travel folders they had collected. She smiled. “We’ll go some day,” he said. “You’ll see.” “We’ll go some day,” she agreed, her hand touching his cheek. The radiance in her own cheeks disturbed him. On weekends they saw their friends, and when he would mention her “strangeness,” nobody seemed to understand him. Everybody said that she was beautiful in pregnancy and would make a beautiful mother. His friends teased him about being “put off,” and afterwards she would console him, more soft, more kind than ever.

Then he seized on something definitely amiss: she had not sensed his worry. There it was, he told himself. She was too placid, too understanding, much too free of all anxiety. He telephoned the doctor again and explained; wasn’t it unnatural for her to have no worries whatsoever and not to sense the fact that he was worried? The doctor laughed. “Do me a favor, Gary,” he said. “Tell her what you’ve told me and see what happens.”

He did. “Oh, you’re sweet,” she said, cuddling to him in bed. “Of course I know you’ve been worried. You’ve been so dear—”

“You knew?”

“Of course.” She laughed again. “Everybody knows. You’re not very good at hiding things. But don’t be glum, dear one. I like you this way. Somebody has to do the worrying for the three of us.”

Three weeks before she was due, she told him that she had invited Mrs. Hart to have dinner with them. Mrs. Hart had been their landlady before they were married. “Won’t she be surprised!” she exclaimed. He didn’t answer. She snuggled up to him. “I just thought she would get a kick out of seeing us together—you know, as a married couple. Remember the way she used to wink at me whenever she’d see us going in and out of your apartment?” He remembered. They had not seen Mrs. Hart for over two years. She giggled: “I liked living in sin with you. Do you know that?” He tried to smile. “You don’t mind if she comes, do you? When I told her I was Mrs. FogeL she said, ‘Gary’s mother?’ Then I said, ‘No, I’m Helen Fogel, Mrs. Hart,’ and she congratulated me and said that she’d seen the announcement in the Times. Do you mind if she comes?”

He said he didn’t mind; he couldn’t help but feel, though, that something stupid—something terrible—would happen if Mrs. Hart came. He thought, he waited. Then the day before Mrs. Hart was supposed to come, he telephoned their doctor and told him everything. The important thing was Helen and the baby, he told himself. He had been foolish to wait this long. The doctor didn’t see anything particularly wrong, or antic, in what Helen was doing, but he suggested that Gary see a psychiatrist if Gary thought that would help. “I’ll go,” Gary said. The psychiatrist listened to Gary and agreed with him that it was natural for an expectant father to worry, but he didn’t seem to find anything fearful in what had happened. Still, until the baby was born, Gary could come for sessions twice a week if he liked. Gary felt uncomfortable, silly, and said that he supposed he was just a typical nervous father-to-be; he left before the time was up.

That night Helen told him that she had telephoned Mrs. Hart and canceled the dinner arrangements. “It would have made you uncomfortable, wouldn’t it?” she said. “Anyway, it was a silly idea in the first place.”

Two and a half weeks later, three days ahead of schedule, she went to the hospital. She called him at his office, and by the time he arrived she was in the delivery room. When he was allowed into her room afterward, she was sleepy, but happier than ever. “I saw the whole thing,” she said. “It was beautiful.”

She came home from the hospital three days later, and her mother flew in from Cleveland and stayed with them for two weeks. The girl had weighed seven pounds four ounces at birth, and everyone agreed that she looked just like Helen. Gary’s parents drove in from Boston, stayed for a week, and then left. As the doctor had predicted, his anxiety was gone as suddenly as it had come. The two of them spent endless, timeless hours watching their child; the hands and feet—the fingernails, the soft wrinkles at the knuckles, the tines across the palm, under the toes—they fascinated him most: so delicate, so perfect, so miniature. Proudly, he told all their friends that whenever the baby started crying, all he had to do was lift it and she would stop. Once in a while, out of habit, he supposed, he would find himself observing Helen, noting her behavior, but she gave him no cause for worry now, and he was pleased. He had been a bit concerned at first that she had experienced no pain whatever during labor, but the doctor assured him that her experience was not abnormal. “It happens,” he said.

At night they took the baby into their bed with them and watched her, talked to her. Then they would return her to the crib and talk for hours about how glad they were that they had not given her up. “I’ve never loved you so much,” he said. “Soon,” she said. “Soon.” He studied their finances, showed her the results of his calculations, and they agreed that they would have to be careful. They checked with their doctor after the first month and then put up a calendar next to their bed with the probable “evil days” circled in red.

Two days later the baby broke out in a rash that covered her arms and neck. They went to the doctor, and he told them not to be alarmed. He prescribed a skin cream and said that the rash would probably disappear in a week or less. “It’s summer, though,” he said, “and the heat will tend to aggravate it. But don’t worry. It’s nothing.” They asked him the other question, and he smiled and said that it was all right. Hadn’t he told them so the other day? They went home, happy, relieved. The baby started crying in the car, stopped, then started again when they were in the apartment. “Poor little thing,” Helen said as she smoothed the cream onto her daughter. Gary watched and felt helpless. The baby stopped, then started again a half hour later. They stayed in the bedroom, and he held her. When he offered her to Helen, she said to let her cry. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “You heard the doctor.” “But the rash is worse than before,” he said. “It’s spreading to her chest.” “There’s nothing to worry about,” she repeated. “Come to bed.” He rocked the baby gently against his shoulder, and she howled even more. “Come to bed,” Helen said, undressing. He put the baby in its crib, and she cried in a way that terrified him; she seemed to be gagging. “Please look at her,” he said. Helen got up, trailing her underclothes, letting them drop to the floor; she looked at the baby and the baby stopped crying. “See?” she said, touching his arm with her forefinger. “Now come to bed.” He went with her. “I’m so tired,” he said when she’d put the light out. They touched each other gently, saying that the baby would be all right in a few days, and then he kissed her and told her to get a good night’s sleep. “I hope the baby sleeps until morning,” he said, but just as he spoke the baby started crying again. He turned on the night lamp and got out of bed. There were large red splotches on her face. “Shouldn’t we call the doctor?” he asked. “Come to bed,” she said. The baby kept crying. He held his child for a while and tried to soothe her by rubbing more salve on the red spots. The baby’s skin seemed red-hot to him. Gradually, the crying stopped. When he put her back in the crib, she whimpered.

A quarter of an hour later he asked Helen to get up. “Guess we’d better get the new safety valve out,” he said, nodding toward the calendar. “You never know.” She clung to him, her arms locked around his shoulders. “Do you want me to get it for you?” he asked. She moaned. “Do you?” he asked again. When she didn’t answer, he stroked her hair and said that he would get it for her. But she wouldn’t let him go. “Please,” he said. “We have to, honey. I don’t want to, either, but we have to.” “No,” she said, clutching him. “No.” “But it’s an ’evil day,’” he said, laughing. “I don’t care,” she said fiercely. Their child began wailing again, and he tried, gently this time, to get away from Helen so that he could tend to the child. She was choking on something now, wailing, sputtering. “I don’t care,” Helen said again. The baby’s screaming stopped for a while. When it started the next time—louder, more painful than before—he tried to get away, but by then he knew that he could do nothing but agree with what she repeated endlessly in his ear, that there was nothing to worry about.