by Anne Tyler
She didn’t look like one either, Reverend Emmett was supposed to say, but he just smiled hard and clutched both his kneecaps. Bobbeen studied him a moment. She patted the ends of her hair reflectively and then turned to Rita. “So where’s that little sweetie pie?” she asked.
“Ian was just on his way to bring him down,” Rita told her.
He was?
Before the foreigners arrived, Reverend Emmett and Daphne had been about to follow him upstairs and peek into the cradle. But now there were too many of them, Ian supposed, and so he nodded and left the room. He was a little out of practice, was the trouble. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to support a newborn’s head.
As he started up the stairs he heard Bobbeen say, “Now tell me, Reverend Emmett, do you-all hold with christening? Or just what, exactly?”
“We believe christening to be a superficial convention,” Reverend Emmett said.
“Well, of course it is,” she told him in a soothing tone.
“Not to say there’s anything wrong with it, you understand. It’s just that we don’t consider infants capable of … but if your church favors christening, why, I certainly—”
“Oh, what do I care about christening?” Bobbeen cried recklessly. “I think it’s real holy of you to cast off the superficial, Reverend.”
Ian went into his and Rita’s bedroom, where they were keeping the baby for the first few nights. It lay facedown in one corner of the cradle with its knees drawn up to its stomach and its nose pressed into the sheet. How could it manage to breathe that way? But Ian heard tiny sighing sounds. Long strands of fine black hair wisped past the neckband of the flannel gown. Ian felt a surge of pity for those scrawny, hunched, defenseless little shoulders.
He knelt beside the cradle and turned the baby over, at the same time gingerly scooping it up so that he held a warm, wrinkled bundle against his chest as he rose. This didn’t feel like any eight pounds. It felt like nothing, like thistledown—a burden so light it seemed almost buoyant; or maybe he was misled by the softness of the flannel. The baby stirred and clutched two miniature handfuls of air but went on sleeping. Ian bore his son gently across the upstairs hall.
“In fact I’ve been thinking of joining your congregation,” Bobbeen was telling Reverend Emmett. “Did Rita happen to mention that?”
“Um, no, she didn’t.”
“I just feel you-all might have the answers.”
“Oh, well, answers,” Reverend Emmett said. “Actually, Mrs.—”
“Bobbeen.”
“Actually, Mrs. Bobbeen …”
Ian grinned.
He was halfway down the stairs when he felt a kind of echo effect—a memory just beyond his reach. He paused, and Danny stepped forward to present his firstborn. “Here she is!” he said. But then the moment slid sideways like a phonograph needle skipping a groove, and all at once it was Lucy he was presenting. “I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life,” he said. His face was very solemn but Lucy was smiling. “Your what?” she seemed to be saying. “Your, what was that? Oh, your life.” And she tipped her head and smiled. After all, she might have said, this was an ordinary occurrence. People changed other people’s lives every day of the year. There was no call to make such a fuss about it.
