“I hit her,” Verna said at my side. I sensed her skin inches from mine, through our clothes. “All day, everything I told her to do, she did the opposite. When I said, Put your toys in the basket, she dumped those that were in out. After I put her shoes on to go outside, she took them off and threw them behind the bed. When I fed her supper, she let the food go in little repulsive dribbles down her face and laughed at me.” Verna’s list of accusations felt prepared, for some court where her guilt would be decided. “Then she wouldn’t go to sleep, and wouldn’t and wouldn’t.…” Her reedy voice became croaky and broke.
Of Paula’s little honey-colored limbs, her two arms were held limp at her sides on the bare mattress of the cot and one leg was bent like that of a comedian about to take a sideways sliding step.
“The little bitch,” Verna went on, in this room whose walls were leaking small noises. There came a gush of unmistakably televised laughter, that canned product there is no mistaking for any real thing. “I had read her a story, a Little Golden Book about that gingerbread man, I used to hate it when Mom read it to me, about how little pieces of him keep getting eaten off, now they’ve cleaned it up so he just runs and that’s boring, too, anyways”—she sighed greatly, so I felt at her side her lung capacity, her Amazonian solidity and power—“I had put her down finally and thought she was asleep, and was taking this bath ever so quietly, and she was standing up in her crib and had thrown her cuddly bear and her Pilly and Blanky and everything out, Nunc—she’d even pulled up the rubber sheet, and that takes strength! So I tapped her,” Verna confessed, “and then she set up such a howl and made me feel so fucking guilty I lifted her out and carried her into the other room and tried holding her till she calmed down, me still wet from the bath and without a stitch on.”
Even in her misery she went out of her narrative’s way to tease me with that.
“Why were you taking a bath?” I asked.
“Can’t a person just take a bath because they feel like it?”
“They can,” I said, “but I was wondering if you were planning to sneak out once Paula was asleep, which is why you were so impatient with her not falling asleep. You wanted her to fall asleep so you could go out. I suspect you do that quite a bit.”
The child under our eyes was holding uncannily still, staring, like a person with a Walkman singing in her ears.
“I wasn’t impatient, Nunc. You should have seen me, I was fucking Mother of the Year. But she wouldn’t shut up, she wouldn’t settle down, and it was getting later and later—”
“You had a date,” I told her.
“O.K., Smartass, I did. Big deal. What are you anyways, some kind of chastity belt or something?”
I sighed, weary, really, of this half-formed child, of the something half-formed and clumsy about all this abortive to-do we call life. “Why did you hang up?” I asked.
“When?”
“When you were talking to me. You called the house and I said wait a minute and when I came back you had hung up.”
“I didn’t like your going off to consult with that stuck-up wife you have and talking about my case. I knew what you were doing, you two.”
I sighed again, and under my eyes Paula stirred. Her good leg moved. She was expecting me to do something to shut off her inner music. I ducked back through the curtain into the other room and Verna followed, squinting against the light. “So when did Paula become unable to walk?” I asked.
She straightened; her chest puffed out, in the loose neck of the terrycloth robe. “After I dumped her out of my lap and knocked her into the little bookcase I got when you and that dumb Dale were goosing me along to get a fucking worthless high-school certificate.” She gestured at it; she had fastened on the bookcase as the problem, the culprit. “Here I was,” she said, beginning to cry with self-pity, the tears flowing readily from their warmed-up ducts, “being so good and patient, I don’t care what you say, and the little cunt, who’d been really such a cunt all day, squirms in my arms and reaches out and knocks my drink all over this watercolor I had nearly finished and had let sit on the table to dry!”
“I can’t quite picture this,” I said. “You were drinking?”
“Yeah and I finished up an old joint in the bathtub, maybe that’s why I was so mellow at first, trying to be this picture-book mommy like you and all the other creeps want.”
“I’m not sure that’s what we all want. We want you to be your best self.”
“Tell me about it.”
“And then was that when she couldn’t walk?”
Verna nodded, her tears as quickly dried as they had appeared.
“She fell kind of funny, sort of wedged against it at an angle for a second, and then lay there yowling in this new kind of way, sort of startled and, you know, like she really meant it now. So I picked her up and held her and she didn’t like that so I tried to put her back on her feet and she just kept going limp and falling back down on the floor, so I—”
“So you what, Verna?”
“Slugged her again. I had been so mellow, Nunc, so sweet and reasonable, all naked, holding her and sort of singing, you know; that’s what the dinge do—you get all mellow and then they take advantage, they pop their pricks out or knock your drink over or something to let you know you’re just dumb white dirt. I’d been working so hard on that watercolor, and getting really pleased, you know, and then her ruining it showed how pathetic and useless it all was, not just then but all along. And you want to know something else?” Her voice was growing smaller, into a whisper.
“What else?” My heart was racing as if I had just climbed the stairs, and I wondered if it had ever slowed, since the moment the phone had startled me in the midst of Tillich.
“It felt great. The best. Whacking her that last time, when she was down. This poor little colored girl, not even two years old, as hard as I could. Isn’t that something?”
“That’s something,” I agreed, unable to decide whether her theatrically drugged-sounding voice was an ironical act, seeking a reaction from me, or the best she could do, locked as she was behind that flat amber gaze, which seemed focused on a point beyond my head, where the recent past was being rerun. I asked, “How did she get back into the crib?”
“I dumped her in.”
“Did she cry out when you lifted her?”
“Like I say, she was yowling pretty much all the time. I was getting all this pounding on the ceiling, and shouts through the walls. One lady across the hall yelled she was calling the police. She always yells that. She’s a wino.”
“I mean, did Paula act as if something were ruptured, or sensitive?”
Her gaze altered and slowly alighted on me. “Oh my God. You think I really hurt her.”
“Don’t you?”
In the other room, Paula, hearing us talk, cried naggingly, halfheartedly, like the grinding of a non-starting engine that has drained its battery. We went in to her. I touched her, gently palpating. That miraculous silken texture of a young child’s skin. My touch hypnotized her into silence until I came to her left leg. Her little scream was equally of pain and of protest, her inky round eyes indignant and astonished from deep within. These eyes no longer seemed at all blue. Her father’s genes were also taking firm possession of the child’s flared nostrils, her everted upper lip, her squarish ears so nicely close to the skull.
“A hairline fracture,” I guessed. “Or maybe just a sprain. There’s no visible dislocation.”
“Oh my God,” Verna moaned again.
I told her, “Better that than an internal injury. A ruptured spleen and she could be bleeding to death. But she isn’t guarding her abdomen. We must get her to a hospital. Get me a blanket—two blankets, that one of hers on the floor and one of yours from your bed.” My mind had that curious clarity that fatigue with its tunnel vision brings.
Verna moved away but it was not to follow my order; she went into the bathroom. I shouted after her, “And while you’re in there, wash your face! You look
like a circus clown!” I heard her retching, as I swaddled Paula myself. Women throw up so quietly, I have noticed: as if this function, too, is less unnatural to them. “Paula,” I explained, “I know this hurts, but I’m being as gentle as I can. We’re going to go ridey-ridey in the car-car.” A phrase that came back to me from the days when Richie was small.
She stared up at me solemnly from within the blankets. “Go home,” she said distinctly. It was a command.
“As soon as I can,” I promised. I wondered now if I should have checked her diaper. It had not seemed wet on the outside, but then these new paper-and-plastic ones are deceiving.
Verna came back to us; her face was clean and less luminous, less white. “Yukky,” she said. “But I think I got my head back on a little better. God, Nunc, I’m a mess. I should be put away.”
“Get dressed,” I told her. “And please check if Paula’s diaper should be changed.” I went into the other room and tidied up somewhat and gazed out at the city lights. Paula whimpered. Verna sang to her croakily: “Aaaall through the night …” They at last appeared, the child blanket-wrapped and wearing a Sherpa-style hat with earflaps, Verna in a gypsy blouse and wide plaid skirt and her serape. I thought the outfit a bit impudent for the occasion, but held my tongue.
The city has many hospitals, all of them expanding, commandeering block after block of their surrounding neighborhoods, as if the healing art has itself become a cancer. The hospital I know best (from an appendectomy of Richie’s when he was nine, and a gynecological scare of Esther’s that came to nothing) lies just across the river, a set of clinical skyscrapers among which the original granite temple of medicine with its copper-green dome is hidden like an Easter egg. The emergency entrance is reached by driving up a concrete ramp to a sweeping semicircular new annex named after a local hitech magnate’s first wife, who died young.
Inside, all was brightness. While Paula, amazed into forgetfulness of her injury, sat wriggling against her cocoon of blankets in my lap, Verna dealt with the admissions desk. Her dealings with the welfare system had given her a certain bold sense of her rights. In the silence of the Audi, as we crossed the old ornate bridge, her tears of guilt and fear had begun to flow again, their trails down her cheeks glinting as the lamps in their floriate standards flashed by. These tears should have lubricated the admissions process; but the female bureaucrats on the dead man’s shift at the hospital’s portals saw grief and misfortune on a steady basis and were not moved by it. They had the almost-poor’s prim contempt for the truly poor, for the indigent and useless. Early though the night was, the underclass had already dispatched some delegates to the hospital; the young derelict with his missing teeth and winter tan, the muttering bag lady with her bleeding forehead, the family of Haitians protectively bunched around some nocturnal wound—all these waited their turn in the merciless brightness. Only when I rose and plunked down my credit cards and established myself as Dutch uncle did the portals creak open and the wheels begin to turn; people in white uniforms appeared and lifted Paula’s pain from our hands.
The child was taken out of our blankets, for a first step. But Paula shrieked “Banky!” when they removed her fuzzy infant blanket, with its blue-on-white teddy bears, and she was allowed to keep that one with her. She was laid on a rubber-wheeled gurney and trundled down corridors where interns examined her and X-rays were taken. Throughout these dazzling experiences she clung with her great dark eyes, so brimmingly alive, to her mother’s face; Verna seemed the passive and helpless one of the two, dragged like a balloon after the child, trapped within this tiny child’s field of need. Myself, I clung to the Sherpa hat and to the rejected blanket, whose rough folded mass weighed on my arm with a dreamlike adherence, a physical fragment of Verna’s actual apartment, those sequestered and musty chambers I had so often visited in erotic fantasy.
The young intern who spoke to us was short and blond, with an unconvincing bandit mustache and aviator-style, pink-tinted eyeglasses. He had a way of speaking in three-quarters profile, as if half to himself. “Yes,” he told us, somehow embarrassed. “A fracture. The kind we call a green-stick. That means the break didn’t go clean through. No big deal setting it, but … could you tell me how it happened?”
Verna’s pale slotlike mouth sagged open and the lower lids of her slanted eyes lifted in the effort of answering the question. I realized that she was too panicked to lie and stated, in my most professorial and incontestable voice, “The child fell. On the playground, off a swing.”
He glanced at me, then at Verna. The tinted lenses placed a thin cloud, as of diluted blood, above his eyes. “And the bruise on her face, did that occur in the same fall?”
“Yeah,” Verna answered weakly.
I said, “She let go the chains on the swing and fell forward.”
The young man was the type who, though hesitant and shy and unable to look the world in the face, has a dogged stubbornness, a burrowing will. He said hesitantly, “The break isn’t the type we usually associate with such a fall. You get arm breaks off a swing. And I didn’t notice any grit in the facial contusion, it looks almost like—”
I interrupted: “We washed her face. Obviously. What is this interrogation, anyway? We’ve brought you an injured child and we were made to wait for half an hour at the front desk and now this. Is this a hospital or a court of law?”
“—almost looks like she was struck,” the young man blinkingly continued. “And we noticed some incipient bruises in the posterior area. We’re supposed to report cases that look like child abuse. You see some terrible things—cigarette burns, infants that have had their legs yanked apart and their pelvises snapped.… You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it.” He was half talking to himself. His tone shifted: “Sir, were you present in the playground when Polly had her fall?”
“Paula,” I said sharply, buying some nanoseconds with the correction but unable to come up with a plausible alternative to “No.” I added, “She phoned me as soon as the accident took place.”
“When was this?”
“I didn’t look at the clock.”
“Pretty late, to be out on a playground.”
“That’s none of your fucking business,” Verna told him. “I keep her up late; that way she sleeps later in the morning.” She was trying, I realized, to come to my rescue.
But I had tried to outclass him and he didn’t want to let me off easily. “Funny,” he said to me, as if Verna weren’t there, “that she didn’t bring the child directly to us. Or Saint Stan’s, the hospital two blocks from where she lives, according to this form.” A flimsy blue copy of her admissions particulars had followed us in here.
“She has no car. She’s new to the area.” One answer would have been enough, though both were true.
He turned to Verna, glancing at the form. “Mrs. Ekelof—” he began.
“Miss, thanks,” she said. She was trying to outclass him, too. “I’ll get married when I’m good and ready.”
He looked at us both out of the corners of his tinted glasses and without another word walked out of the room, returning in a minute with an older man, a balding black man with a dancer’s smart carriage and a severe expression upon his face, which was the color of a dark tobacco leaf. He had a stethoscope in the side pocket of his white jacket and was evidently the intern’s superior. They conferred in murmurs at a little distance from us, and then the black man faced me to ask, “Sir, what is your relation to the young lady?”
“Uncle.”
He smiled. “One of those. That’s nice.” He had a voice, lazy and tired but confident, that could have sung the blues to the accompaniment of a twelve-string guitar. “Sir, we appreciate your input, but since the mother was the only one present at the mishap, we’d very much like to hear her account.”
“It’s just like my uncle says,” Verna said. “I always tell her to hang on tight but the—but she disobeyed. She’s been big into disobedience lately; my worker says it’s a phase she’s getting into, t
he terrible twos.”
“My associate and I were asking ourselves, Isn’t the child a bit young to be on a playground swing?” As he softly, courteously spoke, the doctor’s hands, slender with shapely pale nails, touched Paula’s toes where they peeked out from under Blanky. Absent-mindedly he strummed them lightly.
His overworked, rubbed-looking eyes, with yellow, bloodshot whites, came to rest on Verna, and instinct told her that this was her chance to squeeze by. “Maybe so,” she said, in that plaintive little-girl voice of hers, as if pushed through a tube. “I won’t do it ever again. No more swings till she’s big enough to hang on.”
A certain sugar-daddy twinkle had lit up the doctor’s creased features. “Promise?”
An electricity had been set up, and Verna, dishevelled and drained as she was, yearned forward into it, bending back her head so her throat made a white curve and her breasts lifted within the thin cotton of the gypsy blouse. She was near tears again. “I promise.” She unexpectedly sobbed, one syllable.
“Because,” the doctor went on, in a preacher’s musical tone, “a little child like this is a precious gift placed into our hands, and we sure don’t want any harm to come to her, now do we?”
Verna shook her head, once, twice, slowly.
“No matter how much stress and exasperation we feel, now do we?”
Verna repeated the motion as if hypnotized.
The young intern and I had watched this transaction with fascination. Now the black doctor, breaking the spell, abruptly frowned and said, “Let’s get this leg prepped.”
A nurse appeared and gave Paula a sedative injection, even though the child, in sheer exhaustion, had amid the sound of our voices fallen asleep, green-stick fracture and all. Her little lulled body looked pathetically small on the gurney. The needle went in just below the edge of the paper diaper. She didn’t wake. We were allowed to follow into a bright small room where she was transferred from the gurney to an operating table; while the older doctor watched, the intern laid strips of plaster-soaked gauze around the small brown leg, swallowing it in a whiteness that wounded our eyes, beneath the cruel blue lights. Her toes, a row of round digits, seemed a fragment left over from some visual collision or subtraction.