The months passed; the baby was born. Both of the parents were bitterly disappointed by this sickly, little “ball of tainted suet,” as Alva called it. It had a shrunken left arm and a deformed left foot. The doctor ordered oil massages. There was a chance that the infant’s limbs could be shaped into some semblance of normality. Alva declared that it looked like an idiot. Geraldine had a struggle with herself, trying to keep from smothering it. She couldn’t see why such a monstrosity should live. Perhaps as the years passed it would change. At any rate, she had lost her respect for Alva. There was no denying to her that had she mated with someone else, she might have given birth to a normal child. The pain she had experienced had shaken her. One sight of the baby and continual living with it and Alva in that one, now frowsy and odoriferous room, had completed her disillusionment. For one of the very few times in her life, she felt like doing something drastic.
Alva hardly ever came home. He had quit work once more and started running around as before, only he didn’t tell her about it. He lied to her or else ignored her altogether. The baby now a year old was assuredly an idiot. It neither talked nor walked. Its head had grown out of all proportion to its body, and Geraldine felt that she could have stood its shrivelled arm and deformed foot, had it not been for its insanely large and vacant eyes which seemed never to close, and for the thick grinning lips, which always remained half open and through which came no translatable sounds.
Geraldine’s mother was a pious woman, and, of course, denounced the parents for the condition of the child. Had they not lived in sin, this would not be. Had they married and lived respectably, God would not have punished them in this manner. According to her, the mere possession of a marriage license and an official religious sanction of their mating would have assured them a bouncing, healthy, normal child. She refused to take the infant. Her pastor had advised her not to, saying that the parents should be made to bear the burden they had brought upon themselves.
For once, neither Geraldine nor Alva knew what to do. They couldn’t keep on as they were now. Alva was drinking more and more. He was also becoming less interested in looking well. He didn’t bother about his clothes as much as before, his almond shaped eyes became more narrow, and the gray parchment conquered the yellow in his skin and gave him a deathlike pallor. He hated that silent, staring idiot infant of his, and he had begun to hate its mother. He couldn’t go into the room sober. Yet his drinking provided no escape. And though he was often tempted, he felt that he could not run away and leave Geraldine alone with the baby.
Then he began to need money. Geraldine couldn’t work because someone had to look after the child. Alva wouldn’t work now, and made no effort to come into contact with new “paying off” people. The old ones were not as numerous or as generous as formerly. Those who hadn’t drifted away didn’t care enough about the Alva of today to help support him, his wife and child. Luckily, though, about this time, he “hit” the numbers twice in one month, and both he and Geraldine borrowed some money on their insurance policies. They accrued almost a thousand dollars from these sources, but that wouldn’t last forever, and the problem of what they were going to do with the child still remained unsolved.
Both wanted to kill it, and neither had the courage to mention the word “murder” to the other. Had they been able to discuss this thing frankly with one another, they could have seen to it that the child smothered itself or fell from the crib sometime during the night. No one would have questioned the accidental death of an idiot child. But they did not trust one another, and neither dared to do the deed alone. Then Geraldine became obsessed with the fear that Alva was planning to run away from her. She knew what this would mean and she had no idea of letting him do it. She realized that should she be left alone with the child it would mean that she would be burdened throughout the years it lived, forced to struggle and support herself and her charge. But were she to leave Alva, some more sensible plan would undoubtedly present itself. No one expected a father to tie himself to an infant, and if that infant happened to be ill and an idiot … well, there were any number of social agencies which would care for it. Assuredly, then she must get away first. But where to go?
She was stumped again and forced to linger, fearing all the while that Alva would fail to return home once he left. She tried desperately to reintroduce a note of intimacy into their relationship, tried repeatedly to make herself less repellent to him, and, at the same time, discipline her own self so that she would not communicate her apprehensions to him. She hired the little girl who lived in the
