THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  Three days she remained in the small bright room, grateful for the unofficial quarantine she’d been placed in and for the medications that allowed her to avert whatever horrible truth was waiting to be announced the moment she seemed sufficiently alert. Perhaps in the meantime it would die and she’d be spared ever having to know what the doctors and Ben knew, to see what they’d seen that had made them unable to answer her unasked questions. Then on the morning of the fourth day, when she awoke without even a wisp of tranquilizer on her mental horizon and when the nurse brought her no medication before breakfast, she knew they had decided to put it off no longer.

  It was the doctor, not Ben, who performed the grim duty, beginning with a little scientific lecture on the subject of genetics, the drift of which seemed to be to reassure her that it was not her fault, nor Ben’s fault either, but simply a very unfortunate “roll of the dice.” A recessive gene could be passed on for a hundred years or more without anyone the wiser, and the rarer the gene, the more unlikely that a man who bore it would have a child by a woman who also bore it. The odds in their case had been on the order of one in twenty-five million. Impossible, therefore, either to have predicted or prevented such a contingency.

  Even then the lecture continued, as though there might be something worse to know. Then she realized that in fact the doctor was offering her the only hope left to offer, though it was couched in pieties about the need to accept the likelihood that the child would not live long, that even with the best care the hospital could provide it, it would probably be dead before the New Year. In that case, she asked, did she have to see it? Yes, he said, he had discussed it with her husband, and they thought it would be best. The hospital bills in these cases could quickly mount up to an extraordinary sum. Even with their hospitalization the intensive care that such a child required could be ruinously expensive, and since, in the long run, there was little to be hoped for from such treatment…

  Sondra understood: the child would be likelier to die at home than if they left it in the hospital. She agreed to see it, and a nurse brought it to the room, wheeling it in a little crib, as though she could not bring herself to make any closer physical contact. The corner of the sheet that formed a kind of hood over its face was folded back to reveal features so grossly misshapen, so literally horrible, that even braced by the doctor’s warnings she could not repress a cry of revulsion, as though it had to be put on the record at once and incontestibly that she recognized no claim of motherhood or of humanity.

  Every facial feature had in some way or other been skewed or twisted awry: the squinting eyes wide-spaced and slanting, the nose a bony beak, the ears misshapen and misplaced, but worst of all the harelipped and cleft-palated mouth with the white funguslike growths where lips should be—the mouth that at the very moment of her own cry of revulsion and denial opened to scream in seeming sympathy, or else to demand that which she would rather have died than to allow, to be given suckle at her breast.

  “Take it away,” she told the nurse in a whisper, and then, to the doctor, “Leave me alone.” The squalling of the thing in the crib seemed to continue long after it had been wheeled out of the room, and indeed it never really was stilled from that moment on, but, like some horrible advertising jingle that replays itself even in our dreams, it went on hour after hour, day after day. In the middle of being fed its formula it would pull away from the nipple that had momentarily gagged its misshapen mouth to scream with renewed energy, flailing its warped, polydactylous hands at the bottle, as though protesting being forced to drink the artificial milk, forced to be alive and in pain.

  For that must have been the reason it cried—it must be in constant pain. It was not only its face and limbs that were abnormal. Beneath the rough, red, flaky skin its body was a nest of anomalies—the heart congenitally diseased, the kidneys and other organs pitted with lesions. The doctors professed to be amazed that it was still alive a week after it had been taken home. And Sondra, who had been able to endure the horror of its presence only because of the doctor’s unspoken promise that it would not live much longer, began to doubt that promise. She found that no matter how long it went on screaming, no matter how many hours since it had last been fed, she could not make herself go into her own bedroom, where it was kept (and into which neither Judith nor William was ever admitted). A nurse had to be hired. Mrs. Ruddle, an elderly, dwarfish, terribly cheerful practical nurse who seemed to develop an actual affection for the child. Soon Sondra felt a horror of Mrs. Ruddle almost equal to that which she felt for the thing in the crib, but Mrs. Ruddle could not so easily be avoided. Meals had to be made for her. Her questions had to be answered, and it was necessary from time to time to pretend to take an interest in the condition and behavior of Mrs. Ruddle’s charge.

  The nights were the hardest to bear. Then Mrs. Ruddle wasn’t there, and Sondra had to lie alone in her room, listening to the rasping irregular breath of the thing in the crib. She did not have the concentration to read, and she could not sleep, so she would watch movies on TV, using earphones to keep the thing from waking up and howling. It did anyhow, of course, at least twice a night, and then she would have to go over to the crib and roll it back and forth till the howling abated. She would not, could not bring herself to take it from its cocoon of blankets and hold it in her arms, and if its diaper was wet, it stayed wet until Mrs. Ruddle appeared at 7:00 A.M.

  She slept in the daytime, when the kids were away at school and Ben was at the office. When they were home, she made a conscientious effort to maintain a business-as-usual attitude, cooking favorite recipes and during dinner asking one preemptive question after another about their lives, their problems, and whether because Ben had coached them in how to deal with her, or from their own sense of tact, both William and Judith respected the unstated ground rule of all these dinnertime conversations, that they were never to refer to the thing in the crib or anything associated with its presence in the house, including the unfortunate Mrs. Ruddle.

  Christmas approached and was allowed to go by with the most minimal festive observance: an artificial tree assembled, by William and Judith, on Christmas Eve and disassembled on New Year’s Day; a modest exchange of presents that developed inadvertently into a comedy, as it turned out that almost everyone had got almost everyone else a sweater (there were no presents, of course, for the thing in the crib); and for dinner, in defiance of all tradition, a roast beef. The one major breach of decorum had come on Christmas morning itself when only Judith got dressed to go to Mass, and then had begun to urge her family to go with her. Finally, more angry than distraught, Sondra had had to explain to her stepdaughter what ought to have been too obvious to need underlining, that she did not intend to sit in a packed church and listen to a priest go on about the wonder and glory of the “Nativity.” The idea seemed an obscene joke. Judith went to Mass alone.

  Through it all Ben paid her the compliment of not interfering or offering “advice.” What advice could be given? Obviously, she was cracking under the strain; they both were. But what could be done but to wait for the thing to die, as the doctors had assured them it would? In a way it helped that it looked so utterly inhuman: it was impossible to feel love for it, and so she would be spared the pain of mourning. Though perhaps when it did finally die and had been cremated, she might feel differently. But guilt seemed more likely than grief. Already she could feel that guilt, like another fetus inside of her, not low in her stomach but higher, near her lungs, clawing at her rib cage as though trying to escape, to be expressed by some visible action. She began to be able to understand stories of penitents who had torn out their hair or whipped themselves with thorns.

  In lieu of such certifiable excesses she took to going for long walks along the ice-slicked Willowville streets. The sidewalks were rarely shoveled out here, except the walks connecting front doors to the driveways. You had to walk in the street itself alongside the mounds built up in the gutters by the snowplows. The traffic was light in the daytime, and it w
as seldom necessary to step aside for a car to go by. The wind was wonderful, cold and brutal, a thief determined to snatch her fur coat away from her. It forced tears from her eyes she would not otherwise allow herself to shed. It numbed her feet and penetrated the thin leather of her gloves so that, by the time she returned home, an hour, two hours later, her hands would be stiff and red. She would go into the kitchen then and plunge her hands beneath a stream of hot water and gasp with the splendor of the pain. But she never came down with a cold or the flu, nor did the little monster, though at night she placed its crib directly in the path of the steady draft from the partly open bedroom window.

  They really were called monsters in the medical books, though of course they used Greek—terata was the word—to smooth over the fact. There was an entire branch of medicine devoted to the study of monsters, teratology, and Ben had brought home a thick textbook on the subject. In it there was a picture of another infant monster like theirs, though the one in the photograph hadn’t lived an hour beyond its birth. The book said that no infant afflicted by Bradley-Chambers syndrome had ever survived more than ten weeks. It was reassuring information, though she wished Ben had copied only that one page and not shown her the book. The pictures were upsetting, but she couldn’t keep from looking at them. And thinking. As soon as she was well enough, she would demand to have a hysterectomy. She did not want to risk becoming pregnant ever again. If she did, there would be a one in four chance that any child she and Ben had together would also be afflicted by Bradley-Chambers syndrome. That was how it worked with recessive genes. She had learned a lot about heredity since she’d come home from the hospital.

  As the ninth week passed into the tenth and the thing in the crib was showing every sign of setting a new record for survival with Bradley-Chambers syndrome, a visitor called at the house in early afternoon, rousing Sondra from the comforting void of a deep, dreamless sleep. At first, confused, she thought the ringing of the doorbell was the smoke detector in the kitchen. Then Mrs. Ruddle appeared in the archway leading to the gallery, clutching a piece of knitting the same sickly pink as the sweater she was bundled in, as though she were in the process of knitting herself into existence. “Mrs. Winckelmeyer?” the little woman inquired in her piping Munchkinish voice. “Are you awake? Do you want me to get the door?”

  “No, no, Mrs. Ruddle!” Sondra said, alarmed at the thought of a visitor encountering the dwarfish nurse. Mrs. Ruddle, like the thing she tended, was a source of shame to Sondra, a skeleton in the closet, and must be kept a secret as much as possible. “Please, just… go back to the bedroom.”

  Mrs. Ruddle crinkled her thickly lipsticked lips into a smile of compliance and disappeared back along the gallery.

  Sondra adjusted her sleep-mussed hair in front of the foyer mirror and then opened the door to confront, through the hoarfrosted panel of the outer door, the silhouette of a man in black. “Mrs. Winckelmeyer?” he inquired in the soothing tones of a professional sympathizer. A funeral director? she wondered, with a brief unreasoning sense of elation. Then, through the obscuring hoarfrost, she saw the Roman collar.

  “Yes?” she replied, through the still closed door. “What do you want?”

  He tipped his hat. “I’m Father Youngermann,” he said, “from Our Lady of Mercy parish in St. Paul. I’d like to talk with you, if I may.”

  Youngermann, she thought, as she watched him shrug off his topcoat in the foyer. How odd that he should be called that. The first thing she thought, after noticing the Roman collar, was that he seemed too young to be a priest. He might well have been younger than she was. She couldn’t remember ever having encountered a priest younger than herself. It was disconcerting.

  Without being invited, the young priest went into the living room. He looked about, like a guest arriving at a party and hoping not to find himself the earliest. “I don’t suppose that Mr. Winckelmeyer would be home at this hour?”

  “No. He’s not.”

  “I realize that Our Lady of Mercy is no longer your parish, and properly I shouldn’t be trespassing on Father Durling’s territory here in Willowville.”

  Sondra shrugged. “It’s no concern of mine. I wouldn’t really say that I have a parish—since I was divorced.”

  Father Youngmann nodded gravely. “But I understand you have been bringing up your son William in the Church. And that your stepdaughter, likewise, is a practicing Catholic. Even, I’m told, an ardent Catholic.”

  “What is your point, Father?” Father: The word grated. He was not her father, and she resented having to address him as such.

  “Only that I understand, from my work at the hospital, that you’ve had another child.”

  She regarded him levelly, neither agreeing with nor contradicting his statement, simply waiting for him to continue.

  “And there seems to be no record of that child’s baptism. Indeed, the birth certificate says only ‘Male child.’ Has he been baptized?”

  “Who sent you here?”

  “No one at all, Mrs. Winckelmeyer. I came on my own initiative. As I’ve said, this is not a parish matter. I’m here because of my own personal concern.”

  “I’m touched.”

  “I realize, of course, that you must have felt—and must still be feeling—shock and emotional distress. Even when there are no complications, childbirth can be—”

  “Spare me the sympathy card and get to the point.”

  He grimaced. “Very well. The point is simply this. I would like to baptize your child, if he’s not already been baptized.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s out of the question.”

  “And I’m sorry, Mrs. Winckelmeyer, but as a representative of Holy Mother Church, I really must insist that some arrangement be made for the child’s baptism, and it really can’t be postponed. Father Durling has tried to reach you on the phone, and I’ve tried. But we get only an answering machine. I respect your wish for privacy at this time, but my understanding is that the child is in daily peril of dying without having received the sacrament of baptism. Your duty as a mother, and as a Catholic—”

  Sondra had been waiting for the priest to have his say before she got rid of him, and the last thing she wanted was a quarrel, but his offering to instruct her in her duty as a mother was one too many. She held her hand up like a traffic cop, signaling him to stop. “I have a proposition for you,” she said. “You want to baptize that thing in there, then you adopt it.”

  The priest gave a little snort of incredulity. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Winckelmeyer, but obviously, as a priest, that’s not a possibility I could even consider. In any case, it’s beside the point. The point is the salvation of your child’s immortal soul.”

  “I’m sure I’ve read in a magazine just recently about a priest adopting a kid. Anyhow, that’s my proposition, take it or leave it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Winckelmeyer, but I don’t understand your unwillingness to have the child baptized. The very sufferings it has gone through here below can add to its glory in heaven—but if it’s denied any hope of salvation through the lack of the sacrament of baptism—”

  “Do you know, until today I never realized what an insane idea that is. A little water on the forehead and a few words and it’ll to go heaven. And without the water and the words, what? Hellfire? Millions of babies must die without getting baptized. All the ones that get aborted. They all go to hell? That’s God’s idea of being fair?”

  “It’s not for us to question the will of God, Mrs. Winckelmeyer. We must accept the Church’s teaching on faith. Without faith we have nothing.”

  “Really? Without faith—without my faith—you’re out of a job, I can see that. Anyhow, I don’t want to get into dumb arguments. God didn’t have anything to do with… I refuse to even say it’s a child. It’s not, it’s a monster. It should never have been born, and it can’t live very much longer, and I don’t want it baptized, I don’t want it even to have a name. It’s like a tumor that I’ve had removed, as far as I’m concerned. A t
umor that screams and shits in diapers. I’m just waiting, that’s all.”

  “Waiting?”

  “For it to die. And for you to leave.”

  The priest took a deep breath. “Can I at least see the child?”

  “I’ve asked you to leave.”

  “Father Youngermann?” It was the piping voice of Mrs. Ruddle, who stood once again in the archway leading to the gallery. “I have the baby here.” She held out the bundle cradled in her arms.

  The priest crossed the living room toward Mrs. Ruddle. Sondra did not object at once. She was curious to watch his reaction when he saw the thing’s face. It was not exaggerated, just a clenching of the jaw and a narrowing of the eyes. Then he reached into his right-hand jacket pocket and took out a strip of colored cloth, which he kissed and draped scarflike about his neck. From the other pocket he produced a small silver flask. It was clear that he meant to go ahead with the baptism despite her having said that he could not.

  Sondra considered trying to wrest Mrs. Ruddle’s bundle from her by main force, but her aversion to physical contact with the thing in the nurse’s arms was greater even than her anger. Instead, without having to take thought, she ran into the kitchen and opened the cupboard below the sink. There beneath the leaking drain that Ben kept saying he would fix and never did was the plastic bucket that caught the leaks. It was three-quarters full of stagnant water. She eased the bucket out from under the U-shaped curve of the pipe, spilling only a little, and hurried back to the living room, where she found Mrs. Ruddle supporting the thing’s misshapen head above the big blue-and-white glass ashtray on the coffee table so that the ashtray would serve as a kind of basin for the baptism. The priest was already beginning to pour the water from the silver flask, and to pronounce the words of the sacrament: “I baptize thee in the name of the Father—”