Diane appeared, her coat on, with a sweater for Byron. “The doctor’s still in the office. He’ll see Byron if I take him right now.”
Byron peeped as Peter handed him over. Byron’s fantastic energy, evident only an hour ago, was gone.
He’s dying, Peter thought. The heat from Byron’s body had made a wet circle on his shirt. The hard candle of his life-force was melting.
“Are you coming?” Diane asked, finished with dressing Byron. He thought about that, remembering Diane’s description of taking Byron to the doctor — the wait in a room full of crying children, the pompous posturing of the doctor, the brutal need to restrain Byron for examination.
“Are you coming? I have to hurry.”
Peter shook his head no, scared, ready to give in if she insisted.
“Fine,” she said, and left, carrying Byron, who lay limply in her arms, his eyes almost closed, whimpering pitifully.
Peter sat for a long time after they were gone, not moving, unable really to think of what to do. He should be hungry. He wasn’t. He could use a drink. He considered opening the champagne. Took too much effort.
He felt sorry for Byron.
Peter tried to imagine what it would be like if Byron died.
Diane would mouth for a while. Would she want another?
Peter tried hard to convince himself Diane would not. The pain of one loss might make her shy of a second creation.
But he knew Diane would never accept defeat. She would go right back and do it again, even more determined.
Peter touched his cheek, where the feverish Byron had rested against him, gazing sadly, giving up the struggle, moaning and peeping from the hot ache. The wet of Byron’s sweat had dried; the warmth of his body had cooled. But touching there, Peter felt his son return.
He wanted to cry. The feeling was unfamiliar — a slab of loss; incomprehensible, impossible to chop up into manageable pieces.
Of course, Byron was going to go on living. And growing. And of course, time and time again Peter would fail him, collaborate in his oppression, and have nothing but an apology as an explanation.
He was still in the chair when Diane and Byron returned. Byron was asleep in Diane’s arms, his head lolled back, his lips parted, breathing heavily. She put Byron in his crib and returned to say that the doctor had diagnosed Byron as having an ear infection. Peter was to go out and get a prescription for liquid penicillin filled and she thought they ought to have extra baby Tylenol.
Peter listened, saying nothing. When she finished, he got up. She peered at him for a moment and said, “What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, I think you’d better find out,” she snapped, so angry that she had to turn away and pretend to be interested in something on the rug.
He thought for a while about answering. What could he say? He hated her as a mother, wanted her as a wife? He loved and pitied Byron, but wished Byron didn’t exist at all? That something awful in the corner of his mind had come to life, some shadow had been cast, and now seemed animate — a terrible lurking monster which no night-light could dissipate?
“I think I’d better see a shrink,” he said finally.
“You’d better do something,” she said harshly, but cut herself off, interrupting a longer exposition of criticism. After a moment, she sighed, and spoke quietly. “You acted really weird. He was sick. I have to take his temperature.”
“I’m squeamish,” he said.
Diane squinted, puzzled, trying to bring him into focus. “Squeamish about taking his temperature?”
“Yes.”
Diane shook her head, her eyes wide, her mouth open. She sat down, collapsed by his incredible remark. “You’d better see a shrink,” she said, nodding. “You’re nuts all right.”
Peter swallowed. Her comment, presumably just the residue of her anger, hurt. He believed, suddenly, that if she really knew him, that would be her serious judgment, not a hostile remark, but a final conclusion.
He went to the drugstore. While waiting for the prescription to be filled, he decided to tell Diane that he couldn’t stand what had happened to their life. He didn’t want things to continue this way. They would have to get sleep-in help. She would have to accompany him in the evenings. Her centering on Byron had to be shifted. Either that, or he’d leave.
This decision calmed him. He went home with the medicine, cured of his anxieties.
Diane was on the phone with Betty Winters. Diane sounded happy, laughing, and she called out to Peter while still on the phone: “You’re not going to believe this! We didn’t have to do a rectal—”
Peter blanched at her shouting the word.
“—there’s a thing called a Fever Strip. You just hold it on their”— Diane listened to the phone—“hold it on their forehead for fifteen seconds. Can you believe it?”
Diane sent Peter out again to get this modem miracle. The Fever Strip was nothing more than a few inches of plastic with a color band to read the temperature; the druggist said it was just as good as any other method. When Peter returned, Diane kissed him enthusiastically and then eagerly opened the Fever Strip, testing it on Peter’s forehead and then her own.
Byron woke up, complaining. They cooled his body with washcloths, used the Fever Strip, gave him his dose of penicillin, and he fell back to sleep.
Peter opened the champagne. Diane had a little, he drank most of it. Before Peter got around to his speech, Diane said she was exhausted. He let her go to bed.
Thinking about his earlier upset, Peter thought it was just a case of bad nerves. There’s penicillin to cure the infection; there’s a Fever Strip, a thin plastic device, that makes parenting easy. It would all work out. He had to relax and be patient.
He loved them.
Presumably they loved him.
He would have to wait his turn.
7
DIANE’S VISION moved ahead of her, a camera tracking, divorced from her mind: the sight of the bedroom, the look of the hallway, the closed door of Byron’s room, loomed and then passed, seen through a stranger’s eyes.
But when Diane opened Byron’s door and saw her eleven-month-old baby, standing in his crib, hands on the bars, head cocked curiously, sandy hair in a wave across his brow, she woke up. Woke up with pleasure.
“Ma! Ma!” Byron shouted, crying Hosanna at the appearance of a miracle.
“Hello, baby!”
Byron bent his knees and then jerked up. He opened his mouth and showed the two miniatures of teeth on bottom and a stub of another on top. He grinned and chuckled. He hooted and squealed.
She rushed to get him, to capture his happiness in her. Byron grappled onto Diane, nuzzled his head in her neck, his little but insistent fingers touching, poking, patting, stroking. His delight in her presence was electric in his body.
She changed his soaked diaper, again accompanied by babbling, laughing excitement. Byron tried to roll this way to get the fresh diaper, then that way to grab the tube of ointment. He rolled his bottom up and made his legs accessible to his hands. He grabbed his toe and pulled it to his mouth. He burst into resonant giggles at the cool feel of the wet wipes. His brown eyes glistened at Diane’s, as though only they shared this profound joke: the hilarity of his body functions, the absurdity of cold and cloth, the silliness of feet and diapers.
Diane had her coffee after she put Byron down on the kitchen floor with his bottle. He finished it quickly, and with gusto. He smacked his lips at the last drop, and hurled the vessel contemptuously to the floor. While she mixed formula into the powdered oatmeal, Byron immediately swiveled on his bottom to face the kitchen cabinets. “O!” he shouted to the stainless-steel handles. He flopped forward, palms out. Diane smiled at his adept movements, a baby tank on the move, knees and hands mastering terrain. In a flash he scurried to the cabinets and began his assault. Byron braced himself with one hand and reached for the handle with the other.