Olivia, our daughter was called, after me, obviously. Ponderous name for a baby, but she would have grown into it, given time. It was a great shock when she arrived: I had wanted a boy, and hadn’t even considered the possibility of a girl. A hard birth it was, too — Gloria did well to survive it. The child didn’t, not really. She seemed healthy at first, then not. Game little thing, all the same. Lived three years, seven months, two weeks and four days, give or take. And that’s how it was: she was given and, shortly thereafter, taken.
I didn’t know she was dying. That’s to say, I knew she was going to die, but I didn’t know it would be that night. She went quickly, in the end, surprising us all, giving us all the slip. How did they find me? Through Buster, probably: it would have amused him to tell them where I was and what I was up to. It was the middle of the night, and I was asleep in Anneliese’s bed with one of Anneliese’s amazingly heavy legs, as heavy as a log, thrown across my lap. The telephone had to ring a dozen times before she woke up, groaning, and answered it. I can still see her, sitting on the side of the bed in the lamp-light with the receiver in her hand, pushing away a strand of hair that had caught in something sticky at the corner of her mouth. She was a thick-set girl, with a nice roll of puppy-fat around the waist. Her shoulders gleamed. Let me linger there in that last moment before the fall. I can count, if I wish, each delicate knob of leaning Anneliese’s spine, from top to bottom, one, and, two, and, three, and—
Every few yards along the seemingly endless corridors of the hospital there were nightlights set into the ceiling, and as I flitted from pool to pool of dim radiance I felt as if I were myself a faulty light-bulb, flickering and flickering and about to go out. The children’s wing was overcrowded — a measles epidemic was in full swing — and they had put our little girl in an adult ward, in an adult-sized bed, off in a corner. It was dim there, too, and as I hurried through the room I confusedly imagined that the patients reposing on either side of me were in fact corpses. A lamp had been rigged up where the child was, and Gloria and a person in a white coat were leaning over the bed, while other vague figures, nurses, I suppose, and more doctors, stood back in the shadows, so that the whole thing looked like nothing so much as a nativity scene, lacking only an ox and an ass. The child had died a minute or two before my arrival, had, as Gloria told me afterwards, just drifted away with a long, ragged sigh. Which meant, we both were determined to believe, that she had not suffered, at the end. I stumbled to my knees at the bedside — I wasn’t entirely sober, there’s that to confess to as well — and touched the moist brow, the slightly parted lips, the cheeks on which the bloom of death was already settling. Never knew flesh so composed and unresponsive, never before or since. Gloria stood beside me with her hand resting on the top of my head, as if she were conferring a blessing, though I suppose she was just holding me steady, for I’m sure I was listing badly. Neither of us wept, not then. Tears would have seemed, I don’t know, trivial, let’s say, or excessive, in bad taste, somehow. I felt so odd; it was like suddenly being an adolescent again, awkward and clumsy and cripplingly at a loss. I got to my feet and Gloria and I put our arms around each other, but it was no more than a perfunctory gesture, a grapple rather than an embrace, and brought us no comfort. I looked down at the child in that big bed; with only her head on show, she might have been a tiny perished traveller sunk to the neck in a snowdrift. From now on, all would be aftermath.
Gloria asked where I had been all night, not to accuse or complain, but absently, almost. I can’t remember what lie I told her. Maybe I told her the truth. It would hardly have mattered, if I had, and probably she wouldn’t have heard me, anyway.
What I want to know, and can’t know, is this: Was she aware that she was dying, our daughter? The question haunts me. I tell myself she couldn’t have known — surely at that age a child has no clear idea of what it is to die. Yet sometimes she had a look, distant, preoccupied, gently dismissive of all around her, the look that people have when they are about to set off on a long and arduous journey, their minds already off in that distant elsewhere. She had certain absences, too, certain intermittences, when she would become very still and seem to be trying to listen to something, to make out something immensely far-off and faint. When she was like that there was no talking to her: her face would go slack and vacant, or she would turn aside brusquely, impatient of us and our noisiness, our fake cheerfulness, our soft, useless hectoring. Am I making too much of all this? Am I giving it a spuriously portentous weight? I hope I am. I would wish she had gone blithely unaware into that darkness.
I could have told Marcus, there in the awful place that used to be Maggie Mallon’s, could have told him about the child, about the night she died. I could have told him about Anneliese, too. It would have been some sort of confession, and the idea of me in bed with a girl might have jogged him enough to make him see the immediate thing he wasn’t seeing, the real thing that I should have been confessing to. I would have been relieved, I think, had he guessed what I was keeping from him, though only in the sense of being relieved of an awkward and chafing burden — I mean, it wouldn’t have made me feel better, only less loaded down. I certainly wouldn’t have expected catharsis, much less exoneration. Catharsis, indeed. Anyway, I said nothing. When we left the Fisher King my unconsoled friend muttered a quick goodbye and walked off with his hands plunged in his pockets and his shoulders sloped, the very picture of dejection. I stood a minute and watched him go, then I too turned away. The weather had changed yet again, and the day was clear and sharp now with a quicksilver wind blowing. Season of fall, season of memory. I didn’t know where to go. Home was out of the question — how could I look Gloria in the eye, after all that had passed between Marcus and me? One of the things I’ve learned about illicit love is that it never feels so real, so serious and so gravely precious as at those moments of breathless peril when it seems about to be discovered. If Marcus were to tell Gloria what he had told me, and Gloria were to put two and two together — or one and one, more accurately — and come to a conclusion and confront me with it, I would break down on the spot and confess all. I could lie to Gloria only by omission.
There was something in my pocket, I took it out and looked at it. I had pinched a salt cellar from the restaurant table, without noticing. Without even noticing! That will show you the state I was in.
I set off for the studio, having nowhere else to go. The wind was shivering the puddles, turning them to discs of pitted steel.
Someone, Marcus had said, someone: so I was safe, so far, in my anonymity. I felt as if I had fallen under a train and by the simple expedient of lying motionless in the middle of the track had been able to get up, when the last carriage had hurtled past, and clamber back on to the platform with nothing more to show from the misadventure than a smudge on my forehead and a persistent ringing in my ears.