by Alice Munro
Jill’s headache dulls. Groggily she washes out my diapers and shirts and gowns and sheets. Scrubs them and rinses them and even boils the diapers to defeat the diaper rash to which I am prone. She wrings them all out by hand. She hangs them up indoors because the next day is Sunday, and Ailsa, when she returns, will not want to see anything hanging outdoors on Sunday. Jill would just as soon not have to appear outside, anyway, especially now with evening thickening and people sitting out, taking advantage of the cool. She dreads being seen by the neighbors—even being greeted by the friendly Shantzes—after what they must have listened to today.
And such a long time it takes for today to be over. For the long reach of sunlight and stretched shadows to give out and the monumental heat to stir a little, opening sweet cool cracks. Then all of a sudden the stars are out in clusters and the trees are enlarging themselves like clouds, shaking down peace. But not for long and not for Jill. Well before midnight comes a thin cry—you could not call it tentative, but thin at least, experimental, as if in spite of the day’s practice I have lost the knack. Or as if I actually wonder if it’s worth it. A little rest then, a false respite or giving up. But after that a thoroughgoing, an anguished, unforgiving resumption. Just when Jill had started to make more coffee, to deal with the remnants of her headache. Thinking that this time she might sit by the table and drink it.
Now she turns the burner off.
It’s almost time for the last bottle of the day. If the feeding before had not been delayed, I’d be ready now. Perhaps I am ready? While it’s warming, Jill thinks she’ll dose herself with a couple more 222’s. Then she thinks maybe that won’t do; she needs something stronger. In the bathroom cupboard she finds only Pepto-Bismol, laxatives, foot powder, prescriptions she wouldn’t touch. But she knows that Ailsa takes something strong for her menstrual cramps, and she goes into Ailsa’s room and looks through her bureau drawers until she finds a bottle of pain pills lying, logically, on top of a pile of sanitary pads. These are prescriptions pills, too, but the label says clearly what they’re for. She removes two of them and goes back to the kitchen and finds the water in the pan around the milk boiling, the milk too hot.
She holds the bottle under the tap to cool it—my cries coming down at her like the clamor of birds of prey over a gurgling river—and she looks at the pills waiting on the counter and she thinks, Yes. She gets out a knife and shaves a few grains off one of the pills, takes the nipple off the bottle, picks up the shaved grains on the blade of the knife, and sprinkles them—just a sprinkle of white dust—over the milk. Then she swallows one and seven-eighths or maybe one and eleven-twelfths or even one and fifteen-sixteenths of a pill herself, and takes the bottle upstairs. She lifts up my immediately rigid body and gets the nipple into my accusing mouth. The milk is still a little too warm for my liking and at first I spit it back at her. Then in a while I decide that it will do, and I swallow it all down.
IONA is screaming. Jill wakes up to a house full of hurtful sunlight and Iona’s screaming.
The plan was that Ailsa and Iona and their mother would visit with their relatives in Guelph until the late afternoon, avoiding driving during the hot part of the day. But after breakfast Iona began to make a fuss. She wanted to get home to the baby, she said she had hardly slept all night for worrying. It was embarrassing to keep on arguing with her in front of the relatives, so Ailsa gave in and they arrived home late in the morning and opened the door of the still house.
Ailsa said, “Phew. Is this what it always smells like in here, only we’re so used to it we don’t notice?”
Iona ducked past her and ran up the stairs.
Now she’s screaming.
Dead. Dead. Murderer.
She knows nothing about the pills. So why does she scream “Murderer”? It’s the blanket. She sees the blanket pulled up right over my head. Suffocation. Not poison. It has not taken her any time, not half a second, to get from “dead” to “murderer.” It’s an immediate flying leap. She grabs me from the crib, with the death blanket twisted round me, and holding the blanketed bundle squeezed against her body she runs screaming out of the room and into Jill’s room.
Jill is struggling up, dopily, after twelve or thirteen hours of sleep.
“You’ve killed my baby,” Iona is screaming at her.
Jill doesn’t correct her—she doesn’t say, Mine. Iona holds me out accusingly to show me to Jill, but before Jill can get any kind of a look at me I have been snatched back. Iona groans and doubles up as if she’s been shot in the stomach. Still holding on to me she stumbles down the stairs, bumping into Ailsa who is on her way up. Ailsa is almost knocked off her feet; she hangs on to the banister and Iona takes no notice; she seems to be trying to squeeze the bundle of me into a new terrifying hole in the middle of her body. Words come out of her between fresh groans of recognition.
Baby. Love my. Darling. Ooh. Oh. Get the. Suffocated. Blanket. Baby. Police.
Jill has slept with no covers over her and without changing into a nightdress. She is still in yesterday’s shorts and halter, and she’s not sure if she’s waking from a night’s sleep or a nap. She isn’t sure where she is or what day it is. And what did Iona say? Groping her way up out of a vat of warm wool, Jill sees rather than hears Iona’s cries, and they’re like red flashes, hot veins in the inside of her eyelids. She clings to the luxury of not having to understand, but then she knows she has understood. She knows it’s about me.
But Jill thinks that Iona has made a mistake. Iona has got into the wrong part of the dream. That part is all over.
The baby is all right. Jill took care of the baby. She went out and found the baby and covered it up. All right.
In the downstairs hall, Iona makes an effort and shouts some words all together. “She pulled the blanket all the way over its head, she smothered it.”
Ailsa comes downstairs hanging on to the banister.
“Put it down,” she says. “Put it down.”
Iona squeezes me and groans. Then she holds me out to Ailsa and says, “Look. Look.”
Ailsa whips her head aside. “I won’t,” she says. “I won’t look.” Iona comes close to push me into her face—I am still all wrapped up in my blanket, but Ailsa doesn’t know that and Iona doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
Now it’s Ailsa screaming. She runs to the other side of the dining-room table screaming, “Put it down. Put it down. I’m not going to look at a corpse.”
Mrs. Kirkham comes in from the kitchen, saying, “Girls. Oh, girls. What’s the trouble between you? I can’t have this, you know.”
“Look,” says Iona, forgetting Ailsa and coming around the table to show me to her mother.
Ailsa gets to the hall phone and gives the operator Dr. Shantz’s number.
“Oh, a baby,” says Mrs. Kirkham, twitching the blanket aside.
“She smothered it,” Iona says.
“Oh, no,” says Mrs. Kirkham.
Ailsa is talking to Dr. Shantz on the phone, telling him in a shaky voice to get over here at once. She turns from the phone and looks at Iona, gulps to steady herself, and says, “Now you. You pipe down.”
Iona gives a high-pitched defiant yelp and runs away from her, across the hall into the living room. She is still hanging on to me.
Jill has come to the top of the stairs. Ailsa spots her.
She says, “Come on down here.”
She has no idea what she’s going to do to Jill, or say to her, once she gets her down. She looks as if she wants to slap her. “It’s no good now getting hysterical,” she says.
Jill’s halter is twisted partway round so that most of one breast has got loose.
“Fix yourself up,” says Ailsa. “Did you sleep in your clothes? You look drunk.”
Jill seems to herself to be walking still in the snowy light of her dream. But the dream has been invaded by these frantic people.
Ailsa is able to think now about some things that have to be done. Whatever has happened, there has got to
be no question of such a thing as a murder. Babies do die, for no reason, in their sleep. She has heard of that. No question of the police. No autopsy—a sad quiet little funeral. The obstacle to this is Iona. Dr. Shantz can give Iona a needle now; the needle will put her to sleep. But he can’t go on giving her a needle every day.
The thing is to get Iona into Morrisville. This is the Hospital for the Insane, which used to be called the Asylum and in the future will be called the Psychiatric Hospital, then the Mental Health Unit. But most people just call it Morrisville, after the village nearby.
Going to Morrisville, they say. They took her off to Morrisville. Carry on like that and you’re going to end up in Morrisville.
Iona has been there before and she can go there again. Dr. Shantz can get her in and keep her in until it’s judged she’s ready to come out. Affected by the baby’s death. Delusions. Once that is established she won’t pose a threat. Nobody will pay any attention to what she says. She will have had a breakdown. In fact it looks as if that may be the truth—it looks as if she might be halfway to a breakdown already, with that yelping and running around. It might be permanent. But probably not. There’s all kinds of treatment nowadays. Drugs to calm her down, and shock if it’s better to blot out some memories, and an operation they do, if they have to, on people who are obstinately confused and miserable. They don’t do that at Morrisville—they have to send you to the city.
For all this—which has gone through her mind in an instant—Ailsa will have to count on Dr. Shantz. Some obliging lack of curiosity on his part and a willingness to see things her way. But that should not be hard for anybody who knows what she has been through. The investment she has made in this family’s respectability and the blows she’s had to take, from her father’s shabby career and her mother’s mixed-up wits to Iona’s collapse at nursing school and George’s going off to get killed. Does Ailsa deserve a public scandal on top of this—a story in the papers, a trial, maybe even a sister-in-law in jail?
Dr. Shantz would not think so. And not just because he can tote up these reasons from what he has observed as a friendly neighbor. Not just because he can appreciate that people who have to do without respectability must sooner or later feel the cold.
The reasons he has for helping Ailsa are all in his voice as he comes running in the back door now, through the kitchen, calling her name.
Jill at the bottom of the stairs has just said, “The baby’s all right.”
And Ailsa has said, “You keep quiet until I tell you what to say.”
Mrs. Kirkham stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, square in Dr. Shantz’s path.
“Oh, I’m glad to see you,” she says. “Ailsa and Iona are all upset with each other. Iona found a baby at the door and now she says it’s dead.”
Dr. Shantz picks Mrs. Kirkham up and puts her aside. He says again, “Ailsa?” and reaches out his arms, but ends up just setting his hands down hard on her shoulders.
Iona comes out of the living room empty-handed.
Jill says, “What did you do with the baby?”
“Hid it,” Iona says saucily, and makes a face at her—the kind of face a terminally frightened person can make, pretending to be vicious.
“Dr. Shantz is going to give you a needle,” Ailsa says. “That’ll put paid to you.”
Now there is an absurd scene of Iona running around, throwing herself at the front door—Ailsa jumps to block her—and then at the stairs, which is where Dr. Shantz gets hold of her and straddles her, pinning her arms and saying, “Now, now, now, Iona. Take it easy. You’ll be okay in a little while.” And Iona yells and whimpers and subsides. The noises she makes, and her darting about, her efforts at escape, all seem like playacting. As if—in spite of being quite literally at her wit’s end—she finds the effort of standing up to Ailsa and Dr. Shantz so nearly impossible that she can only try to manage it by this sort of parody. Which makes it clear—and maybe this is what she really intends—that she is not standing up to them at all but falling apart. Falling apart as embarrassingly and inconveniently as possible with Ailsa shouting at her, “You ought to be disgusted with yourself.”
Administering the needle, Dr. Shantz says, “That-a-girl Iona. There now.”
Over his shoulder he says to Ailsa, “Look after your mother. Get her to sit down.”
Mrs. Kirkham is wiping tears with her fingers. “I’m all right dear,” she says to Ailsa. “I just wish you girls wouldn’t fight. You should have told me Iona had a baby. You should have let her keep it.”
Mrs. Shantz, wearing a Japanese kimono over her summer pajamas, comes into the house by the kitchen door.
“Is everybody all right?” she calls.
She sees the knife lying on the kitchen counter and thinks it prudent to pick it up and put it in a drawer. When people are making a scene the last thing you want is a knife ready to hand.
In the midst of this Jill thinks she has heard a faint cry. She has climbed clumsily over the banister to get around Iona and Dr. Shantz—she ran partway up the stairs again when Iona came running in that direction—and has lowered herself to the floor. She goes through the double doors into the living room where at first she sees no sign of me. But the faint cry comes again and she follows the sound to the sofa and looks underneath it.
That’s where I am, pushed in beside the violin.
During that short trip from the hall to the living room, Jill has remembered everything, and it seems as if her breath stops and horror crowds in at her mouth, then a flash of joy sets her life going again, when just as in the dream she comes upon a live baby, not a little desiccated nutmeg-headed corpse. She holds me. I don’t stiffen or kick or arch my back. I am still pretty sleepy from the sedative in my milk which knocked me out for the night and half a day and which, in a larger quantity—maybe not so much larger, at that—would have really finished me off.
IT wasn’t the blanket at all. Anybody who took a serious look at that blanket could see that it was so light and loosely woven that it could not prevent my getting all the air I needed. You could breathe through it just as easily as through a fishnet.
Exhaustion might have played a part. A whole day’s howling, such a furious feat of self-expression, might have worn me out. That, and the white dust that fell on my milk, had knocked me into a deep and steadfast sleep with breathing so slight that Iona had not been able to detect it. You would think she would notice that I was not cold and you would think that all that moaning and crying out and running around would have brought me up to consciousness in a hurry. I don’t know why that didn’t happen. I think she didn’t notice because of her panic and the state she was in even before she found me, but I don’t know why I didn’t cry sooner. Or maybe I did cry and in the commotion nobody heard me. Or maybe Iona did hear me and took a look at me and stuffed me under the sofa because by that time everything had been spoiled.
Then Jill heard. Jill was the one.
Iona was carried to that same sofa. Ailsa slipped off her shoes to save the brocade, and Mrs. Shantz went upstairs to get a light quilt to put over her.
“I know she doesn’t need it for warmth,” she said. “But I think when she wakes up she’ll feel better to have a quilt over her.”
Before this, of course, everybody had gathered round to take note of my being alive. Ailsa was blaming herself for not having discovered that right away. She hated to admit that she had been afraid to look at a dead baby.
“Iona’s nerves must be contagious,” she said. “I absolutely should have known.”
She looked at Jill as if she was going to tell her to go and put a blouse on over her halter. Then she recalled how roughly she had spoken to her, and for no reason as it turned out, so she didn’t say anything. She did not even try to convince her mother that Iona had not had a baby, though she said in an undertone, to Mrs. Shantz, “Well, that could start the rumor of the century.”
“I’m so glad nothing terrible happened,” Mrs. Kirkham said. “I t
hought for a minute Iona had done away with it. Ailsa, you must try not to blame your sister.”
“No Momma,” said Ailsa. “Let’s go sit down in the kitchen.”
There was one bottle of formula made up that by rights I should have demanded and drunk earlier that morning. Jill put it on to warm, holding me in the crook of her arm all the time.
She had looked at once for the knife, when she came into the kitchen, and seen in wonderment that it wasn’t there. But she could make out the faintest dust on the counter—or she thought she could. She wiped it with her free hand before she turned the tap on to get the water to heat the bottle.
Mrs. Shantz busied herself making coffee. While it was perking she put the sterilizer on the stove and washed out yesterday’s bottles. She was being tactful and competent, just managing to hide the fact that there was something about this whole debacle and disarray of feelings that buoyed her up.
“I guess Iona did have an obsession about the baby,” she said. “Something like this was bound to happen.”
Turning from the stove to address the last of these words to her husband and Ailsa, she saw that Dr. Shantz was pulling Ailsa’s hands down from where she held them, on either side of her head. Too speedily and guiltily he took his own hands away. If he had not done that, it would have looked like ordinary comfort he was administering. As a doctor is certainly entitled to do.
“You know Ailsa, I think your mother ought to lie down too,” said Mrs. Shantz thoughtfully and without a break. “I think I’ll go and persuade her. If she can get to sleep this may all pass right out of her head. Out of Iona’s too, if we’re lucky.”
Mrs. Kirkham had wandered out of the kitchen almost as soon as she got there. Mrs. Shantz found her in the living room looking at Iona, and fiddling with the quilt to make sure she was well covered. Mrs. Kirkham did not really want to lie down. She wanted to have things explained to her—she knew that her own explanations were somehow out of kilter. And she wanted to have people talk to her as they used to do, not in the peculiarly gentle and self-satisfied way they did now. But because of her customary politeness and her knowledge that the power she had in the household was negligible, she allowed Mrs. Shantz to take her upstairs.
