She cried in the dark for a long time. Ve
ry late she relaxed, shakingly, against him. Her breathing came soft, warm, regular, her body twitched its worn reflexes and she slept.
He drowsed.
And just before his eyes lidded wearily down, sinking him into deeper and yet deeper tides, he heard a strange little sound of awareness and awakeness in the room.
The sound of small, moist, pinkly elastic lips.
The baby.
And then—sleep.
* * *
In the morning, the sun blazed. Alice smiled.
David Leiber dangled his watch over the crib. “See, baby? Something bright. Something pretty. Sure. Sure. Something bright. Something pretty.”
Alice smiled. She told him to go ahead, fly to Chicago, she’d be very brave, no need to worry. She’d take care of baby. Oh, yes, she’d take care of him, all right.
The airplane went east. There was a lot of sky, a lot of sun and clouds and Chicago running over the horizon. Dave was dropped into the rush of ordering, planning, banqueting, telephoning, arguing in conference. But he wrote letters each day and sent telegrams to Alice and the baby.
On the evening of his sixth day away from home he received the long-distance phone call. Los Angeles.
“Alice?”
“No, Dave. This is Jeffers speaking.”
“Doctor!”
“Hold on to yourself, son. Alice is sick. You’d better get the next plane home. It’s pneumonia. I’ll do everything I can, boy. If only it wasn’t so soon after the baby. She needs strength.”
Leiber dropped the phone into its cradle. He got up, with no feet under him, and no hands and no body. The hotel room blurred and fell apart.
“Alice,” he said, blindly, starting for the door.
* * *
The propellers spun about, whirled, fluttered, stopped; time and space were put behind. Under his hand, David felt the doorknob turn; under his feet the floor assumed reality, around him flowed the walls of a bedroom, and in the late-afternoon sunlight Dr. Jeffers stood, turning from a window, as Alice lay waiting in her bed, something carved from a fall of winter snow. Then Dr. Jeffers was talking, talking continuously, gently, the sound rising and falling through the lamplight, a soft flutter, a white murmur of voice.
“Your wife’s too good a mother, Dave. She worried more about the baby than herself.…”
Somewhere in the paleness of Alice’s face, there was a sudden constriction which smoothed itself out before it was realized. Then, slowly, half-smiling, she began to talk and she talked as a mother should about this, that, and the other thing, the telling detail, the minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour report of a mother concerned with a dollhouse world and the miniature life of that world. But she could not stop; the spring was wound tight, and her voice rushed on to anger, fear and the faintest touch of revulsion, which did not change Dr. Jeffers’ expression, but caused Dave’s heart to match the rhythm of this talk that quickened and could not stop:
“The baby wouldn’t sleep. I thought he was sick. He just lay, staring, in his crib, and late at night he’d cry. So loud, he’d cry, and he’d cry all night and all night. I couldn’t quiet him, and I couldn’t rest.”
Dr. Jeffers’ head nodded slowly, slowly. “Tired herself right into pneumonia. But she’s full of sulfa now and on the safe side of the whole damn thing.”
Dave felt ill. “The baby, what about the baby?”
“Fit as a fiddle; cock of the walk!”
“Thanks, Doctor.”
The doctor walked off away and down the stairs, opened the front door faintly, and was gone.
“David!”