rocking.
“I see no way to deliver her,” the man said, “except by cutting.” He did not like the word, you could see; but he had to use it. “I might save the child.”
“Save her,” Francois said.
“If I do nothing, they’ll both die.”
“You can kill it, but save her.”
Eulalie clenched her fist on the cradle, and Augustin cried at the jolt. Lucky Augustin, already born.
They were arguing now—the surgeon impatient at the layman’s slow comprehension. “Then I might as well fetch the butcher,” Francois shouted.
Aunt Eulalie stood up, and the book slipped out of her fingers, slithered down her skirt, fell and opened itself on the floor. She ran up the stairs: “For Jesus’ sake. Your voices. The children.”
The pages fanned over—the fox and the cat, the tortoise and the hare, wise crow with his glinting eye, the honey bear under the tree. Maximilien picked it up and straightened the bent corners of the pages. He put his sister’s fat hands on the cradle. “Like this,” he said, rocking.
She raised her face, with its slack infant mouth. “Why?”
Aunt Eulalie passed him without seeing him, perspiration broken out along her upper lip. His feet pattered on the stairs. His father was folded into a chair, crying, his arm thrown over his eyes. The surgeon was looking in his bag. “My forceps,” he said. “I shall make the attempt, at least. The technique is sometimes efficacious.”
The child pushed the door just a little, making a gap to slip in. The windows were closed against the early summer, against the buzzing fragrance from gardens and fields. There was a good fire, and logs lay ready in a basket. The heat was close and visible. His mother’s body was shrouded in white, her back propped against cushions, her hair scraped from her forehead into a band. She turned to him just her eyes, not her head, and the threadbare remnants of a smile. The skin around her mouth was gray.
Soon, it seemed to say, you and I shall part.
When he had seen this he turned away. At the door he raised a hand to her, a feeble adult gesture of solidarity. Outside the door the surgeon had taken off his topcoat and stood with it over his arm, waiting for someone to take it away from him and hang it up. “If you had called me a few hours ago …” the surgeon remarked, to no one in particular. Francois’s chair was empty. It seemed he had left the house.
The priest arrived. “If the head would emerge,” he said, “I should baptize it.”
“If the head would emerge our troubles would be over,” the surgeon said.
“Or any limb,” the priest said hopefully. “The Church countenances it.”
Eulalie passed back into the room. The heat billowed out as she opened the door. “Can it be good for her? There is no air.”
“Chills are disastrous,” the surgeon said. “Though anyway—”
“Extreme Unction, then,” the priest suggested. “I hope there is a convenient table.”
He took out of his bag a white altar cloth, and delved in again for his candles. The grace of God, portable, brought to your hearth and home.
The surgeon’s eyes roamed around the stairhead. “Get that child away,” he said.
Eulalie gathered him into her arms: the love child. As she carried him downstairs the fabric of her dress chafed his cheek, made a tiny sound of rasping.
Eulalie lined them up by the front door. “Your gloves,” she said. “Your hats.”
“It’s warm,” he said. “We don’t really need our gloves.”
“Nevertheless,” she insisted. Her face seemed to quiver.
The wet nurse pushed past them, the baby Augustin tossed against her shoulder, held with one hand as if he were a sack. “Five in six years,” she said to Eulalie, “what can you expect? Her luck’s run out, that’s all.”
They went to Grandfather Carraut’s. Later that day Aunt Eulalie came, and said that they must pray for their baby brother. Grandmother Carraut mouthed, “Christened?” Aunt Eulalie shook her head. She cast an eye down at the children, a can’t-say-too-much look. She mouthed back at Grandmother: “Born dead.”
He shuddered. Aunt Eulalie bent down to kiss him. “When can I go home?” he said.
Eulalie said, “You’ll be all right with Grandmother for a few days, till your mother’s feeling better.”
But he remembered the gray flesh around her mouth. He understood what her mouth had said to him: soon I shall be in my coffin and soon I shall be buried.
He wondered why they told lies in this way.
He counted the days. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette went to and fro. They said, aren’t you going to ask us how your mother is today? Aunt Henriette said to Grandmother, “Maximilien doesn’t ask how his mother is.”
Grandmother replied, “He’s a chilly little article.”
He counted the days until they decided to tell the truth. Nine days passed. It was breakfast time. When they were having their bread and milk, Grandmother came in.
“You must be very brave,” she said. “Your mother has gone to live with Jesus.”
Baby Jesus, he thought. He said, “I know.”
When this happened, he was six. A white curtain fluttered in the breeze from the open window, sparrows fussed on the sill; God the Father, trailing clouds of glory, looked down from a picture on the wall.
