On the evening of his sixth day away from home he received the longdistance 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!’
He turned to her frightened whisper.
‘It was the baby again.’ She clutched his hand. ‘I try to lie to myself and say that I’m a fool, but the baby knew I was weak from the hospital, so he cried all night every night, and when he wasn’t crying he’d be much too quiet. I knew if I switched on the light he’d be there, staring up at me.’
David felt his body close in on itself like a fist. He remembered seeing the baby, feeling the baby, awake in the dark, awake very late at night when babies should be asleep. Awake and lying there, silent as thought, not crying, but watching from its crib. He thrust the thought aside. It was insane.
Alice went on. ‘I was going to kill the baby. Yes, I was. When you’d been gone only a day 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 smother every day. 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 I know so much about him. I have no love for him; there is no protection between us: there never will be.’
She was through. She collapsed inward on herself and finally slept. David Leiber stood for a long time over her, not able to move. His blood was frozen in his body, not a cell stirred anywhere, anywhere at all.
The next morning there was only one thing to do. He did it. He walked into Dr Jeffers’ office and told him the whole thing, and listened to Jeffers’ 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 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 neardeath 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. 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 sof
t’ that 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 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 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 neuro-psychiatrist.
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 the face.
‘Snap out of it! Pull yourself together!’
‘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—’
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.
‘Alice wasn’t crazy,’ he said, slowly. ‘She had good reason to fear the baby.’
Jeffers exhaled. ‘Don’t follow after her! She blamed the child for her sickness, now you blame it for her death. She stumbled on a toy, remember that. You can’t blame the child.’
‘You mean Lucifer?’
‘Stop calling him that!’
Leiber shook his head. ‘Alice heard things at night, moving in the halls. You want to know what made those noises, Doctor? They were made by the baby. Four months old, moving in the dark, listening to us talk. Listening to every word!’ He held to the sides of the chair. ‘And if I turned the lights on, a baby is so small. It can hide behind furniture, a door, against a wall—below eye-level.’
‘I want you to stop this!’ said Jeffers.
‘Let me say what I think or I’ll go crazy. When I went to Chicago, who was it kept Alice awake, tiring her into pneumonia? The baby! And when Alice didn’t die, then he tried killing me. It was simple; leave a toy on the stairs, cry in the night until your father goes downstairs to fetch your milk, and stumbles. A crude trick, but effective. It didn’t get me. But it killed Alice dead.’
David Leiber stopped long enough to light a cigarette. ‘I should have caught on. I’d turn on the lights in the middle of the night, many nights, and the baby’d be lying there, eyes wide. Most babies sleep all the time. Not this one. He stayed awake, thinking.’
‘Babies don’t think.’
‘He stayed awake doing whatever he could do with his brain, then. What in hell do we know about a baby’s mind? He had every reason to hate Alice; she suspected him for what he was—certainly not a normal child. Something—different. What do you know of babies, Doctor? The general run, yes. You know, of course, how babies kill their mothers at birth. Why? Could it be resentment at being forced into a lousy world like this one?’
Leiber leaned toward the doctor, tiredly. ‘It all ties up. Suppose that a few babies out of all the millions born are instantaneously able to move, see, hear, think, like many animals and insects can. Insects are born selfsufficient. In a few weeks most mammals and birds adjust. But children take years to speak and learn to stumble around on their weak legs.’
‘But suppose one child in a billion is—strange? Born perfectly aware, able to think, inst
inctively. Wouldn’t it be a perfect setup, a perfect blind for anything the baby might want to do? He could pretend to be ordinary, weak, crying, ignorant. With just a little expenditure of energy he could crawl about a darkened house, listening. And how easy to place obstacles at the top of stairs. How easy to cry all night and tire a mother into pneumonia. How easy, right at birth, to be so close to the mother that a few deft maneuvers might cause peritonitis!’
‘For God’s sake!’ Jeffers was on his feet. ‘That’s a repulsive thing to say!’
‘It’s a repulsive thing I’m speaking of. How many mothers have died at the birth of their children? How many have suckled strange little improbabilities who cause death one way or another? Strange, red little creatures with brains that work in a bloody darkness we can’t even guess at. Elemental little brains, warm with racial memory, hatred, and raw cruelty, with no more thought than self-preservation. And self-preservation in this case consisted of eliminating a mother who realized what a horror she had birthed. I ask you, Doctor, what is there in the world more selfish than a baby? Nothing!’
Jeffers scowled and shook his head, helplessly.
Leiber dropped his cigarette down. ‘I’m not claiming any great strength for the child. Just enough to crawl around a little, a few months ahead of schedule. Just enough to listen all the time. Just enough to cry late at night. That’s enough, more than enough.’
Jeffers tried ridicule. ‘Call it murder, then. But murder must be motivated. What motive had the child?’
Leiber was ready with the answer. ‘What is more at peace, more dreamfully content, at ease, at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered, than an unborn child? Nothing. It floats in a sleepy, timeless wonder of nourishment and silence. Then, suddenly, it is asked to give up its berth, is forced to vacate, rushed out into a noisy, uncaring, selfish world where it is asked to shift for itself, to hunt, to feed from the hunting, to seek after a vanishing love that once was its unquestionable right, to meet confusion instead of inner silence and conservative slumber! And the child resents it! Resents the cold air, the huge spaces, the sudden departure from familiar things. And in the tiny filament of brain the only thing the child knows is selfishness and hatred because the spell has been rudely shattered. Who is responsible for this disenchantment, this rude breaking of the spell? The mother. So here the new child has someone to hate with all its unreasoning mind. The mother has cast it out, rejected it. And the father is no better, kill him, too! He’s responsible in his way!’