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
