Dark Carnival (13 page)

    The sound of moist, small, 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 try to be a brave girl, no need to worry. She'd take care of baby. Oh, yes, she'd take care of
him
, all right. This last she said with a peculiar emphasis, which David Leiber ignored.

    The airplane went east with Leiber. There was a lot of sky, a lot of sun and clouds and then Chicago came running over the horizon. Leiber was dropped into the rush of ordering, planning, banqueting, making the rounds, telephoning, arguing in conference, downing coffee in scalding gulps betweentimes. But he wrote letters each day and sent telegrams that said brief, nice, direct things to Alice and 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 airplane went west and California came up, and out of the twisting circular metal of propellers came a vibratingly sudden materialization of Alice lying in bed, Dr. Jeffers standing in the sunlight at a window, and the reality of Leiber feeling his feet walking slowly, becoming more real and more real, until, when he reached her bed, everything was whole, intact, a reality.

    Nobody spoke. Alice smiled, faintly. Jeffers talked, but only a little of it got through to David.

    'Your wife's too good a mother, son. She worried more about your baby than about herself. . .'

    A muscle in Alice's cheek flattened out, taut, then.

    Alice began to talk. She talked like a mother should, now. Or did she —  Wasn't there a trace of anger, fear, repulsion in her voice? Dr. Jeffers didn't notice it, but
he
wasn't looking for it.

    'The baby wouldn't sleep,' said Alice. 'I thought he was sick. He just lay in his crib, staring. Late at night, he'd cry. Loud. He cried all night and all night. I couldn't quiet him. I couldn't sleep.'

    Dr. Jeffers nodded. 'Tired herself right into pneumonia. But she's full of sulfa drug now, and she's on the safe side.'

    Leiber felt ill. 'The baby, what about
him?
'

    'Chipper as ever; healthy as a cock.'

    'Thanks, doctor.'

    The doctor took leave, walked down the stairs, opened the front door faintly, and was gone. Leiber listened to him go.

    'David!'

    He turned to her whisper.

    'It was the baby, again,' she said. 'I try to lie to myself — convince myself I'm a fool. But the baby knew I was weak from the hospital. So he cried all night. And when he wasn't crying he'd be
too quiet
. If I switched the light on he'd be there, staring at me.'

    Leiber jerked inside. He remembered seeing the baby, awake in the dark, himself. Awake very late at night when babies should sleep. He pushed it aside. It was crazy.

    Alice went on. 'I was going to kill the baby. Yes, I was. When you'd been gone only an hour on your trip I went to his room and put my hands about his neck, and I stood there, for a long time, thinking, afraid. Then I put the covers up over his face and turned him over on his face and pressed him down and left him that way and ran out of the room.'

    He tried to stop her.

    'No, let me finish,' she said, hoarsely, looking at the wall. 'When I left his room I thought, it's simple. Babies die every day of smothering. No one'll ever know. But when I came back to see him dead, David, he was alive! Yes, alive, turned over on his back, alive and smiling and breathing. And I couldn't touch him again after that. I left him there and I didn't come back, not to feed him or look at him or do anything. Perhaps the cook tended to him. I don't know. All I know is that his crying kept me awake and I thought all through the night, and walked around the rooms and now I'm sick.' She was almost finished now. 'The baby lies there and thinks of ways to kill me. Simple ways. Because he knows that I know so much about him. I have no love for him, there is no protection between us, there never will be again.'

    She was through. She collapsed inwards on herself and finally slept. David Leiber stood for a long while over her, not able to move. His brain was frozen in his head, not a cell of it stirred.

    The next morning there was only one thing to do. He did it. He walked into Dr. Jeffers's office and told him the whole thing, and listened to Jeffers's tolerant replies:

    '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 hate admitting hatred for loved ones.'

    'So Alice hates her baby.'

    'The best way to put it is that 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. If 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 a while, 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 and I'll recommend a good psychiatrist. Go on along now, and take that look off your face.'

    When summer came, things seemed to settle and become easy. Leiber worked, immersed himself in office detail, but never forgot to be thoughtful of his wife. She, in turn, took long walks, gained strength, played an occasional light game of badminton. She rarely burst out emotionally 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 scared 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 fifty. The crying continued.

    Finally, carefully disengaging Alice's grip, he slipped from bed, put on his slippers, robe, and tiptoed out of the room.

    He'd go downstairs, he thought tiredly, and 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 and stopped. 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 cumbersome, patchwork doll he had bought as a joke, for —  

   
For the baby
.

    Alice drove him to work the next day.

    She slowed the car half way down-town; 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, got an appointment arranged with a reliable neuropsychiatrist. That was
that
.

    The day's work went uneasily. Things seemed to tangle and he kept seeing Alice all the time, mixed into everything he looked at. So much of her fear had come over into him. She actually had
him
convinced that the child was somewhat unnatural.

    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 all exhaustion, and nothing else. His head throbbed. He was very willing to go home.

    On the way down in the elevator he wondered, what if I told Alice about that toy — that patchwork doll — I stumbled over on the stairs last night? Lord, wouldn't
that
send her off into hysterics! No, I won't ever tell her about that. After all, it was just one of those accidents.

    Daylight lingered in the sky as he drove home in a taxi. In front of his Brentwood place 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 to the house looked unnaturally silent and uninhabited, and then, quietly, he remembered that this was Thursday, and the few hired help they were able to obtain from time to time were all gone for the day. It was cook's day off, too, and he and Alice would have to scriven for themselves or eat on the Strip somewhere.

    He took a deep breath of air. A bird sang behind the house. Traffic moved on the boulevard a block away. He turned 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 at the top of the house. Where the sunlight landed it took on the bright colour of the patchwork doll sprawled in a grotesque angle at the bottom of the stairs.

    But he paid no attention to the patchwork doll.

    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. She was lying at the bottom of the stairs, like a crumpled doll who 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 continuous for a long time until Dr. Jeffers walked in out of the night-time and slapped him again and again across his cheeks.

    'Snap out of it! Pull yourself together, son!'

    'She fell down the stairs, doctor. She tripped on a patchwork doll and fell. I almost slipped on it the other night, myself. And now — '