He dropped his hand and his grin widened. “Now you’re trying to find out something.”
“No, no,” she said quickly. “I only want you to tell her something for me — tell her that I’m ready to do what I said.”
“What did you say?”
She fenced him off. “Now you are trying to find out something.”
“Yes,” he parried. His hand was heavy on her shoulder again. “I got you.”
“No more than I have you,” she said smoothly. “I would tell your father, you know.”
His hand was dead on her shoulder. The grin was stricken from his face. “You wouldn’t!” he whispered.
“No, of course not!” She laughed, sick within herself. “Of course I won’t say a word. You will tell her, won’t you, Sam?”
“Sure, I’ll tell her,” he said. “I’ll tell her — I’ll tell her tonight maybe—”
She went upstairs and took the baby from the cradle and rocked him against her, sick, sick. She must remember that little dark angelic face. What she did was for him — for them all.
She looked at the baby. He was so fair, his eyes blue like her father’s. I’ll call him Paul, after Father, she thought. She had not known what to call him. Once she had asked Bart suddenly, “Do you like the name Roger, Bart?”
“What for?” he had asked stupidly.
“For the baby.”
“I don’t know,” he had answered, pondering. “We had a sorrel horse named Roger. Pop sold him because he wouldn’t go in a team. He’d rear and pitch if he was put with another horse.”
No, she thought, looking at the child’s broad pale forehead and wide blue eyes, Roger didn’t suit him. Roger meant someone else. Paul — she named him Paul.
“Shall we call the baby Paul?” she said brightly at the supper table.
They looked up at her out of the silence. Whenever she spoke they looked at her astonished, unable to comprehend at once what she said, since she did not speak of the things of which they were thinking — the field just sown, a horse to be shod, the pig’s litter. Then Sam spoke. “Paul — it’s all right, isn’t it? Pop will like it.”
“It’s short and handy,” said Bart.
“They can’t nickname it when he goes to school,” said Bart’s mother.
The old man waited, his jaws full of dry bread. He swallowed hard and gulped the skim milk. “It’s a good Gospel name,” he said.
“Then it will be Paul,” said Joan. She smiled. It would have been Paul anyway.
She had often dreamed in the silence of this house of children’s voices, of the chatter and singing, of the shouting and laughter. The house would be full of lovely sound when a child was born. Even a child’s lusty crying would be good to hear.
But Paul was so still. He never cried. Not unless he were hurt and in physical pain would he cry. She waited for the sounds of bubbling laughter, of cries and little angers. Frank, she remembered, searching her memory, had been always bubbling and cooing and roaring with laughter or crying. But Paul was still. She coaxed him with singing and prattle and smiles. But he stared back at her quietly, his face grave, his blue eyes wandering from her face. She held him in her arms and shook him in play and he bore it patiently. The most he ever gave her was one day when she touched his cheek with her finger and moved it about his chubby jaw, his lips. Then for an instant he smiled, as though she had touched some nerve or muscle. But when she cried out in delight, it was over. When she took her finger away, the smile was gone. It was like a ripple when a finger is trailed in water. She could not be sure it was a smile.
She wrote to Rose. “Does David laugh and smile? Does he make sounds?” Rose replied, surprised, “You forget David is nearly a year old. He is trying to talk. He is very delicate and he has been ill so much, too.” She sent a small photograph of a grave little boy, held by a cheerful dark-faced Chinese woman. She studied the small shape. It was a delicate face, a thin body held very straight. The eyes looked out, intense, tragic, and the mouth was pursed into some rebellion. Her heart rushed to him. If I had him I’d build him up, she thought. He needs good food — he ought to get out of that climate. She went and picked Paul up from his crib. He was beautiful. She took pride in his size and health. His body was fat and solid, the dimpled hands chubby, his thighs broad and well-fleshed, his cheeks scarlet and his lips apple-red. But he was so lazy.
“Lazy, lazy!” She laughed at him and nuzzled her face into the fragrant creases of his neck. “Sit up, lazybones! It’s time you were sitting up!”
But when she took her hand away from his back he fell against her, softly, effortlessly, and leaned upon her. “You don’t try,” she scolded him. Then, sick with her love for him, she held him against her. Children were not all the same, she thought, cuddling him. Not all children could be the same. And he was so dear to hold, a lovely baby to hold, leaning in her arms, willing to be held.
“David is so independent,” Rose wrote. “He is so difficult to keep in bed when he is ill. He is a very difficult child to control.”
She kissed Paul’s soft whitish hair under her chin. Against her bosom he lay, his full pink cheek pressed against her breast. He did not cry even to be fed. It was as though he did not know her bosom lay there beneath his cheek. His lips never went seeking. He was like a pretty, plump doll. She held him to her firmly.
“Not all children can be the same,” she said.
And after a while after the winter was passed and spring came again, he began to hold his head up a little and to reach sometimes for the toys she made him — a red dog she sewed, a green rabbit. Perhaps if his toys were bright he would see them better. He would reach for them and hold them and soon they would drop from his hands and he would not miss them. She ran to pick them up for him, to play with them for him, to coax his hands to hold them.
One windy April day she took him outdoors, and above the gusty wind she heard a steady roar. She looked up quickly to see the plane driving through the huge white clouds, flashing across the blue between. “Look, look,” she cried to Paul. She held him up, and with her hand under his chin she forced his gaze upward. And if by any chance Roger Bair was there, so high above her, would he look down and see a woman holding a child up to him? But Paul’s eyes could not catch the swiftly moving shape.
“Look, Mother’s boy! See, darling!” she cried. But his eyes slipped away quickly. She followed them. At what was Paul looking? He seemed not to look seeingly at anything, his gaze as silent as his voice.
But the silence was not as it was before his coming. It was not empty silence, not lonely silence in the house. He was there, growing, eating, sleeping. He was there to be carried in her arms. She carried him in the spring to the woods and made him a bed upon soft old leaves and he lay in the warming sun while she found bloodroot and violets and she carried him into the orchard and saw him seraphic beneath the blossoms, his cheeks pink too, his hair a fluffed gold, his eyes blue. She must have him everywhere. When he was awake, she propped him in pillows near her while she worked. When he slept, she ran to see if he still breathed.
Nothing else was real. Bart was surly with her these days. “I’m still nursing him, Bart,” she said steadily. “I’m not willing — not until I’ve finished nursing him anyway.” Bart glanced at her often from underneath his thick red brows. He tried to catch hold of her awkwardly when she happened to pass him. But she made her body tense and cold against him and he let her go. Once his mother said to her, a faded pink in her cheeks and red staining the folds of her neck, “If you take care, you don’t need to keep Bart waiting till the baby’s done nursing.” Joan was ironing one of Paul’s little dresses and at the words she turned her head quickly back to her work. Bart had complained of her.