Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (3 page)

 
          
“Let’s
take this thing slowly, son. It’s quite natural for mothers to hate their
children, sometimes. We have a label for it—ambivalence.
The
ability to hate, while loving.
Lovers hate each other, frequently.
Children detest their mothers—”

 
          
Leiber
interrupted. “I never hated my mother.”

 
          
“You
won’t admit it, naturally. People don’t enjoy admitting hatred for their loved
ones.”

 
          
“So
Alice
hates her baby.”

 
          
“Better
say she has an obsession. She’s gone a step further than plain, ordinary
ambivalence. A Caesarian operation brought the child into the world and almost
took
Alice
out of it. She blames the child for her
near-death and her pneumonia. She’s projecting her troubles, blaming them on
the handiest object she can use as a source of blame. We
all
do it. We stumble into a chair and curse the furniture, not our
own clumsiness. We miss a golf-stroke and damn the turf or our club, or the
make of ball. I f our business fails we blame the gods, the weather, our luck.
All I can tell you is what I told you before. Love her.
Finest
medicine in the world.
Find little ways of showing your affection, give
her security. Find ways of showing her how harmless and innocent the child is.
Make her feel that the baby was worth the risk. After awhile, she’ll settle
down, forget about death, and begin to love the child. If she doesn’t come
around in the next month or so, ask me. I’ll recommend a good psychiatrist. Go
on along now, and take that look off your face.”

 
          
When
summer came, things seemed to settle, become easier. Dave worked, immersed
himself in office detail, but found much time for his wife. She, in turn, took
long walks, gained strength, played an occasional light game of badminton. She
rarely burst out any more. She seemed to have rid herself of her fears.

 
          
Except
on one certain
midnight
when a sudden summer wind swept around the house, warm and swift, shaking the
trees like so many shining tambourines.
Alice
wakened, trembling, and slid over into her
husband’s arms, and let him console her, and ask her what was wrong.

 
          
She
said, “Something’s here in the room, watching us.”

 
          
He
switched on the light. “Dreaming again,” he said. ‘You’re better, though.
Haven’t been troubled for a long time.”

 
          
She
sighed as he clicked off the light again, and suddenly she slept. He held her,
considering what a sweet, weird creature she was, for about half an hour.

 
          
He
heard the bedroom door sway open a few inches.

 
          
There
was nobody at the door. No reason for it to come open. The wind had died.

 
          
He
waited. It seemed like an hour he lay silently, in the dark.

 
          
Then,
far away, wailing like some small meteor dying in the vast inky gulf of space,
the baby began to cry in his nursery.

 
          
It
was a small, lonely sound in the middle of the stars and the dark and the
breathing of this woman in his arms and the wind beginning to sweep through the
trees again.

 
          
Leiber
counted to one hundred, slowly. The crying
continued.

 
          
Carefully
disengaging
Alice
’s arm he slipped from bed, put on his
slippers, robe, and moved quietly from the room.

 
          
He’d
go downstairs, he thought, fix some warm milk, bring it up, and—

 
          
The
blackness dropped out from under him. His foot slipped and plunged.
Slipped on something soft.
Plunged into
nothingness.

 
          
He
thrust his hands out, caught frantically at the railing. His body stopped
falling. He held. He cursed.

 
          
The
“something soft” that had caused his feet to slip, rustled and thumped down a
few steps. His head rang. His heart hammered at the base of his throat, thick
and shot with pain.

 
          
Why
do careless people leave things strewn about a house? He groped carefully with
his fingers for the object that had almost spilled him headlong down the
stairs.

 
          
His
hand froze, startled. His breath went in. His heart held one or two beats.

 
          
The
thing he held in his hand was a toy. A large cumber-some, patchwork doll he had
bought as a joke, for

 
          
For the baby.

 
          
Alice
drove him to work the next day.

 
          
She
slowed the car halfway downtown; pulled to the curb and stopped it. Then she
turned on the seat and looked at her husband.

 
          
“I
want to go away on a vacation. I don’t know if you can make it now, darling,
but if not, please let me go alone. We can get someone to take care of the
baby, I’m sure. But I just have to get away. I thought I was growing out of
this—this
feeling.
But I haven’t. I
can’t stand being in the room with him. He looks up at me as if he hates me,
too. I can’t put my finger on it; all I know
is
I want
to get away before something happens.”

 
          
He
got out on his side of the car, came around, motioned to her to move over, got
in. “The only thing you’re going to do is see a good psychiatrist. And if he
suggests a vacation, well, okay. But this can’t go on; my stomach’s in knots
all the time.” He started the car. “I’ll drive the rest of the way.”

 
          
Her
head was down; she was trying to keep back tears. She looked up when they
reached his office building.
“All right.
Make the
appointment. I’ll go talk to anyone you want, David.”

 
          
He
kissed her. “Now, you’re talking sense, lady. Think you can drive home okay?”

 
          
“Of course, silly.”

 
          
“See
you at supper, then. Drive carefully.”

 
          
“Don’t
I always? ‘Bye.”

 
          
He
stood on the curb, watching her drive off, the wind taking hold of her long,
dark, shining hair. Upstairs, a minute later, he phoned Jeffers and arranged an
appointment with a reliable
neuropsychiatrist
.

 
          
The
day’s work went uneasily. Things fogged over; and in the fog he kept seeing
Alice
lost and calling his name. So much of her
fear had come over to him. She actually had him convinced that the child was in
some ways not quite natural.

 
          
He
dictated long, uninspired letters. He checked some shipments downstairs.
Assistants had to be questioned, and kept going. At the end of the day he was
exhausted, his head throbbed, and he was very glad to go home.

 
          
On
the way down in the elevator he wondered, What if I told
Alice
about the toy—that patchwork doll—I slipped
on
on
the stairs last night? Lord, wouldn’t
that
back her off? No, I won’t ever tell
her. Accidents are, after all, accidents.

 
          
Daylight
lingered in the sky as he drove home in a taxi. In front of the house he paid
the driver and walked slowly up the cement walk, enjoying the light that was
still in the sky and the trees. The white colonial front of the house looked
unnaturally silent and uninhabited, and then, quietly, he remembered this was
Thursday, and the hired help they were able to obtain from time to time were
all gone for the day.

 
          
He
took a deep breath of air. A bird sang behind the house. Traffic moved on the
boulevard a block away. He twisted the key in the door. The knob turned under
his fingers, oiled, silent.

 
          
The
door opened. He stepped in, put his hat on the chair with his briefcase,
started
to shrug out of his coat, when he looked up.

 
          
Late
sunlight streamed down the stairwell from the window near the top of the hall.
Where the sunlight touched it took on the bright color of the patchwork doll
sprawled at the bottom of the stairs.

 
          
But
he paid no attention to the toy.

 
          
He
could only look, and not move, and look again at
Alice
.

 
          
Alice
lay in a broken, grotesque, pallid
gesturing and angling of her thin body, at the bottom of the stairs, like a
crumpled doll that doesn’t want to play any more, ever.

 
          
Alice
was dead.

 
          
The
house remained quiet, except for the sound of his heart.

 
          
She
was dead.

 
          
He
held her head in his hands, he felt her fingers. He held her body. But she
wouldn’t live. She wouldn’t even try to live. He said her name, out loud, many
times, and he tried, once again, by holding her to him, to give her back some
of the warmth she had lost, but that didn’t help.

 
          
He
stood up. He must have made a phone call. He didn’t remember. He found himself,
suddenly, upstairs. He opened the nursery door and walked inside and stared
blankly at the crib. His stomach was sick. He couldn’t see very well.

 
          
The
baby’s eyes were closed, but his face was red, moist with perspiration, as if
he’d been crying long and hard.

 
          
“She’s
dead,” said
Leiber
to the baby. “She’s dead.”

 
          
Then
he started laughing low and soft and continuously for a long time until Dr.
Jeffers walked in out of the night and slapped him again and again across his
face.

 
          
“Snap
out of it! Pull yourself together!”

 
          
“She
fell down the stairs, doctor. She tripped on a patch-work doll and fell. I almost
slipped on it the other night, myself. And now “

 
          
The
doctor shook him.

 
          
“Doc,
Doc, Doc,” said Dave, hazily.
“Funny thing.
Funny.
I—I finally thought of a name for the baby.

 
          
The
doctor said nothing.

 
          
Leiber
put his head back in his trembling hands and spoke
the words. “I’m going to have him christened next Sunday. Know what name I’m
giving him? I’m going to call him Lucifer.”

 
          
It
was eleven at night. A lot of strange people had come and gone through the
house, taking the essential flame with them—
Alice
.

 
          
David
Leiber
sat across from the doctor in the library.