Authors: Hortense Calisher
T
HE CLICK—IF THEY
had not been up and awake, hungry from lovemaking, prowling to the icebox for the party they owed themselves, they might not have heard it, a noise no more than a…click—as if the child, rolling over with one of those long, angelic breaths children exhale in sleep, had shifted a toy against the crib-railing—but the child was never put to bed with a hard toy. In the mother-pouch of her mind, so small a part then, so soon to swell, this fact was at once alerted. The dog’s nails on the bare floor made almost such a sound. Although the dog was just yawning awake, still in its padded bed, they half thought it this. Sooner or later, they would have looked in on the crib in passing. They paused drowsily at its side.
A child in a crib has a certain shape—rounded. This shape was no longer there. She saw that before he did. The thing that lay there, belly arched, was not hers—a long, stringy puppet, its legs still working in terrible ricochet from the kick that had flung it there. As she screamed, the clamped chin tilted; in the head, scooped up by her to an inner mutter that it was round, still round, the eyes had retreated but were there, pupil-less, white.
Later, they could not have said which of them bent to pick it up, which cried “Let it stay!”, which said to get Sonsie, answered yes get her. The mother had guessed what it was—from an old tale. That she knew. The father, already outside, knew that he was the one who had gone. No, Sonsie said on the stairs, her old gown flying behind her, no. I never saw one, none of my kids ever.
By the time Sonsie stood over the crib, the stopped breath had begun again, the pupils were slowly returning to the eyes. The parents dared to raise theirs. Sonsie leaned across the crib, her mouth a wry, Greek gape; when the lips of that mask folded in, and two drops appeared on its cheekbones, the girl beside her made one retching, pulled sound and dropped toward the crib on her knees, her arms outflung. I thought it was dead then—she said later, over and over—then I thought it was dead.
“No,” said Sonsie. “—Ah!” and then, in the softest yearn, but not a moan, “Ah, ahhh.” By some grace, they understood her. No, it’s alive. Ah—it breathes. They could hear the rasping. And for the last—gently cupping its head, she held it barely lifted. It was a child again, the mouth softening to human, the eyes dull as if from a journey but wide; it was May. Sonsie’s forefinger touched the mouth and came away. She held the fingertip out to them. “Bit its tongue,” she said. “Bit her tongue.”
It was David who went to the phone, went through the pad for the number kept there by Elizabeth.
“Way up there on Park?” said Sonsie. “You want to try mine, Dr. Boda? He’s nearer, he’s in the development.”
They tried him. Yes, she was breathing regularly now. Not hot to the touch. Cool.
If they wanted to bring her over to his office, he would meet them there. If they wanted to get her to a hospital, he could send an ambulance—“You feel safer, you want to.”
Everyone was so careful to ask what they wanted, to put to them what was theirs.
“I think you could bring her over,” he said. “Meet you there in ten minutes. Sure, bring her over.”
They brought her over.
But first—when Sonsie bent to pick up the child, its mother came alive then, warmed out of her crouch of shock—and took May from her.
Ahhh
, this was what she wanted, said deeper in her throat than any of them, forcibly keeping herself from squeezing the body until it was one with her own again—if she could but have it once more inside her! Only the feel of that body could help her body’s need to suffer in its stead—and could not allay it. The night when a child is sick is a simple agony, once learned. This was its lesson. What suffers in the center of such a night cannot be suffered for by the most willing substitute—is now a thing apart. Yet each time, with the same gesture, she tried.
On this first night, hurrying through the dark byways, she had time to think of her own childhood, safe on lighted avenues, family ones. Whenever any of them had been sick, particularly when she was, they had had the doctor. He came. Often, he might have come when it wasn’t necessary, when—(never dreamt of)—they might have brought her over. But when it was needed, when her father roused them to his last attack, he had been there. It had been he, old and retired now, who had sent her to the joint office on Park Avenue, first to the obstetrician with whom she was as briefly and falsely chummy as a show-dog to its hired handler, who after their joint success had passed her on to his colleague in pediatrics, Dr. Dowlin: a healthy baby, scales, formula, scales, new formula, one rash, one allergy—just give her this in place of the cod-liver oil, a healthy baby, no wind of such a night ever, just give her this in drops. Dowlin might live on Park or in some suburb fifty misty miles away for all she knew; if met on the street she would not know his every-other-month face. No matter. House calls were no longer the practice anywhere.
“Shall I take her?” David said. His face was white, abject. She refused him.
They entered the development, its sweat-colored halls. If one lived here perhaps, and there was a doctor in the building?
They found the door with 1C on it ajar, as was the practice anywhere. Just before they went in, the thought came, and guilt with it. Maybe house calls were still made, in some places—perhaps on Riverside Drive. Then the door opened for them into a small entry tight with chairs; Dowlin-Boda-AnyFace nodded at her, and she held out to them her child.
On that first night, they learned that convulsions were not uncommon in very young, otherwise healthy children. He examined very carefully. All was now almost normal, temperature lowered. He was not surprised. For this, not even seeing him, they loved him blindly. To check, they must bring her round at eleven the next morning. After sitting over the quiet crib almost until dawn, they were awakened at ten by a May vigorously shaking her railings. In the happy sunlight, they saw that Dr. Boda was young, wore a brown suit too old for him, and had a mild face—to which Elizabeth, though she hoped never to see it again, held up proudly, almost with scorn, this baby so round with health, this daytime child.
Until the second night, neither of them remembered the click. It was recalled to them precisely six weeks later, again on a Sunday but much earlier, around nine in the evening. On this occasion, Dr. Boda came to them. Met by David at the bottom of the stairs, he strode up after him, looking neither left nor right, as if he had been in a hundred such places, and went directly to the child, tossing back the blankets in which they had cuddled it, its spasm over. “No, don’t bundle it—let it have air!” In the absence of other—conditions, a convulsion
could
be the body’s own device against high fever. Humbly they submitted their own virtue—in having noted a snuffle, felt a forehead, kept it all this brilliant day at home. He listened, unresponsive, leaning his body over the child’s like a thick, dependable log across which they could surely tread into sun again, bending to draw down its eyelid, absently holding its hand, almost as they might, to admire the small, perfect nails. After a while—he stayed for an hour—he gave medication, one of the antibiotics which they were to repeat every four hours round the clock. They saw he had a way with children. “Dis make me
fee
better,” May even repeated after him. It made them feel—but once again, she was May. When they thanked him for staying so long, he glanced at his watch and said, “Just happened to be my poker night, I’ll still get there. Right on my way.” From the underground of that fourth-hourly tunnel they were to come to know so well, they gazed up at him in wonder—this denizen of the norm.
After the third occurrence, it was confirmed by Dowlin that, in the absence of
other
(had he been the one to say pathology?), yes, such explosions could be—she already knew how common among the young high respiratory fevers were? Yes, she knew. “No—you keep on with your young man down there,” said Dowlin. “Way down there. Well run double harness. I’ll talk to him, in case anything else comes up.” He flipped a registry. “N.Y.U. Medical. Flower Hospital. Good enough. Quite young, I see.”
“Yes,” she said without thinking. “He always wears the same brown suit.”
“Ah, I won’t tell him!” said Dowlin, with his jolly, terminating laugh. In the same way that she had noticed Boda’s suit, without noting she had, she observed dully that Dowlin too admired, even to scrutiny, May’s small, formally extended hand.
Nothing else came up. Nothing but that, but nothing else—nothing but that, that—at intervals of anywhere from a month to six weeks. That. Though Boda didn’t come to them again, they grew to be old phone correspondents. She came to hate the mild sight of him in his suit, the flat voice now the symbol of the opening phase of that delirium which, once begun, evolved in exact sequence, like a theorem or recurrent dream, with the obsessiveness of both. Dowlin was the man she loved; ah Dowlin, large, pink and euphoric, was her man. For May never saw him except in the intervals—Dowlin at the Cove was not to be imagined—and in the intervals, May bloomed. One could almost believe she bloomed for him, that others, in anticipation of his kingly touch, did also, his very success being that once in his sight, no child was an ill one. What had he ever said of this one any more alarming than that these strep-type germs had patterns of dormancy and recurrence—and
amazing
resistance—or that May, if later found to be an allergenic—such a comfortable threat—was young to be tested, and might meanwhile outgrow the business altogether! For in his office the child was always May; there she was always a healthy Dowlin child.
Boda was the dark one, consulted only at evening, from their underground. Children’s fevers rise at evening, ordinary children. May was still ordinary. In this she was only like any other child. Even Boda would acknowledge this. How the mother hated him for her dependence on him! It was he, she was now sure, who had dropped the word “pathology,” making her surmise brain tumors and epilepsies of which, in Dowlin’s bright land, she was ashamed even to inquire. And it was he who had remarked casually that convulsions, though a scare, often had little further significance in children-under-three, often ceased thereafter. But May was now almost three. What if after three? What significance then?
And what about the father?—for these days they scarcely any longer seemed “David and Liz” to each other, and were almost surprised, the few times when, leaving all in Sonsie’s care, they were persuaded to venture out together, to hear themselves so called. He too grew weary of the name Boda, but differently; he grew tired of hearing it on the mother’s lips. Between her and the doctor and child, he was made to feel alternately smaller and larger, now swollen to giant responsibility, now shrunk to helplessness; until now he had never been a man to dwell on his size. It had been he, too, who had noted that the child’s tolerance of fever apparently teed off—to the other…trouble—at a temperature of almost precisely 103.6. At that point, she almost always abruptly—dropped. For this observation he was praised—and never quite forgiven.
For now they knew what the click was. Now they had seen. It was the click of the teeth, as the underjaw snapped closed. Another small sound, like a snuffle, confused it to the ear. This was the cut-off breath. From the first dread rise of the thermometer, they sat up in turns now, hers in a concentration so dense that he sometimes wondered—never to be said—if all unconsciously, she were willing it to rise. For when it came, it was almost a relief, now. Now it had come, and if it were she sitting beside the crib watching that hot, sleeping face, she knew what to do now. She even knew the small twitchings that preceded it, hoping these were ordinary, knowing they would not be—though children in ordinary fevers often twitched.
But sometimes she could not sit there—it was the waiting. Then she stood yards from the crib, paralyzed by her need to suffer for what was in it—and watched him. Then he took over, and she was blessedly only his handmaiden. At these times, with her following after him, her hands knitted, her head stunned from side to side, he was truly the father-God. For he was not hysterical.
But this too could chill—in retrospect. For even in sleep, when she was fathoms under, if a blind tapped, the dog sighed, she found herself at the cribside not even knowing how she got there, as if blown there by a cloud. And he was such a heavy sleeper the click never woke him; though he sprang on the instant, he knew this to be a lack. Less learned than she on all the vulture hazards, he deplored her womanly habit of superstitiously trying to ward these off by prenumbering them. He loved May no less—but then, a father’s love! That was what it came out to. Of what she most resented, though he felt it, he could never be justifiably accused. A time might come when she was alone with…that. For he was the one who had to be away from home.
Meanwhile, there was more than enough to be performed in unison. She found a way to write the grandparents of May’s “little ups and downs” without alarming Mr. Pagani—and to keep from Margot what she could not bear to have her mother know, that her own child had a flaw. When Margot, less watchful than she might have been otherwise, said that Jacques’s illness was giving concern, she managed to mislay the page without being sure that David had seen it. David learned to efface any anxiety in his letters to his father, finding this harder to do than in the old days when his father had been its subject, learning that when the subject was young—there was no equivalent. When May broke then-hearts by saying hesitantly, as an innocent chocolate was handed her, “Dis make me fee
better
?” the anecdote was not reported. If an old image of an Eden as innocent often recurred, it was not mentioned between them. Of all that they had learned, that night’s lesson had been the easiest.
And when the time
came
, with the telegram calling him to Jacques’s deathbed, neither bothered to comment on the unforeseen terms of it—that it should be Jacques’s and not his father’s—they were so deep now in that unison. She was now to be alone with it. It seemed to both the natural progression of the dream.