To hell with her, he’d decided, and he had put her out of his mind without further ado. First he’d taken his wife for a week’s vacation in Bermuda, attempting to reinvigorate their marriage while dealing with his guilt over the affair. The trip was a limited success, but on his return he found himself still smarting from Roberta’s rejection. He had promptly plunged into a series of brief affairs, using deliberately casual sex to cheapen whatever he and Roberta had had between them.
Then he’d found out that she was pregnant.
He had dealt with this reality by denying it. His first reaction to the discovery was the immediate assumption that she was carrying his child. David, after all, had never been capable of fathering a child. It was true that he did produce living spermatazoa, but Roberta had said that his sperm count was so low as to make his sterility a medical presumption. After several years of trying and extensive series of tests, they had adopted Ariel.
Now, more than a decade later, she was pregnant. She and David barely slept together. Jeff, on the other hand, was fiercely fertile, and they had made love frequently during the several months their affair had lasted.
They’d taken precautions, of course. This was something of a novelty for both of them; Roberta had had no need to employ birth control when she slept with her husband, and Jeff’s wife Elaine had had tubal ligation after the birth of her second daughter. So they’d used condoms, which had given their lovemaking a high school lovers’ lane element, and evidently one of the condoms had been unequal to its task.
Roberta had become pregnant with his child. And, on realizing as much, she had decided to terminate not the pregnancy but the relationship, returning to David and presumably convincing him that his sperm had improved with age. Which he no doubt was pleased not to question.
Then the denial mechanism had taken over. How did he know it was his child she was carrying? David might not have many sperm, but all it took was one. And a sperm count wasn’t necessarily fixed. It could increase or decrease over the years. And pregnancy after the adoption of a child was such a common phenomenon as to be almost a cliché. When it happened, you didn’t run to the window looking for a bright star in the East.
She was part of the past, he had decided. And the baby was probably her husband’s, and if not that didn’t make it Jeffs anyway, because who knew how many other clowns she’d been screwing over the months? He at least had used condoms. For all he knew she’d balled the entire Citadel football team, including the coach and the waterboys, and hadn’t even made them use Saran Wrap.
So the hell with her, and the hell with the kid, and good riddance to both of them.
When the child was born his denial faded. He recognized that Caleb’s sex was a factor. His own children were both girls, and although he loved them none the less for their gender, he would have liked a son as well. But Elaine had had a hard time with the second pregnancy and was determined to stop at two, and her tubal ligation was a fait accompli by the time Jeff learned about it. He’d been hurt by the way she’d made the decision all on her own, but it was her body, and these days women were making a lot of noise about their right to do as they wished with their own bodies, and maybe two children was enough. Maybe he was better suited to father daughters anyway, maybe he’d have been awkward with a son.
Then all at once he had a son, had him but didn’t have him. And of course Caleb was his son — how had he managed to make himself believe otherwise?
Was there a resemblance? His daughters both favored Elaine, although the younger one had her father’s eyes. Whom did Caleb resemble? Himself or Roberta?
Not David, he knew. Not a chance of that.
Ever since Caleb’s birth, Jeff had kept his distance from Roberta and the baby without putting them out of his mind. He entertained a variety of fantasies in which he eventually got together with his son. In one of them, David and Elaine both perished in some convenient fashion; Jeff liked the idea of their being copassengers on some airliner that might fly into the side of a handy mountain.
Then, after a suitable period of mourning, he and Roberta would court and eventually marry. She would be a mother to Debbie and Greta, and he would be to Caleb what he already was biologically, and Caleb would never know the real circumstances of his conception, and—
Other fantasies were somewhat more likely to be realized at some future date. He thought he might manage to get a look at Caleb sooner or later, if only to see for himself whether a resemblance existed. When Caleb was older, he might manage to meet the boy. Someday, when the boy was old enough to handle it, maybe they could have a few beers together and the truth could come out.
Anything was possible. Especially when you kept it a fantasy.
Not now, though. Not with Caleb dead.
Why had it happened?
One of the articles he’d read that morning discussed the psychological effect of crib death on the victims’ parents. Almost invariably, the mothers of those babies — and to a lesser extent the fathers as well — blamed themselves for what happened. Because there was no identifiable cause of death, because a seemingly healthy infant had died suddenly for no good reason, the parents assumed responsibility. Some viewed the baby’s death as punishment, just or unjust, for their own sins. Others had a less abstract view of guilt; they felt they must have neglected the baby, that they had cared for it inadequately, that there should have been something they could have done to prevent the tragedy. If only she had checked him during the night, a mother might berate herself. If only she had given him an extra blanket, or no blanket at all, or wakened him for his feeding, or let him sleep through it, or—
And what could he have done? Forced himself into the picture during Roberta’s pregnancy? Broken up her marriage and his own? Even if he’d made an effort, there was no reason to think she’d have accepted him. He’d been acceptable as a lover, but evidently she’d decided she preferred being married to David Jardell.
And suppose she’d come to him and told him of her pregnancy? Suppose she’d wanted to leave David and marry him? What would he have done then, if it were not fantasy anymore but a case of hard-edged reality?
Would he have divorced Elaine? Would he have been willing to give up custody of Debbie and Greta for the sake of a child as yet unborn? For that matter, would he have been that thrilled at the idea of marrying Roberta? She was an exciting bedmate and a stimulating companion, but how well would that kind of stimulation wear? She was sometimes brittle, she was acerbic, she was moody, she smoked too much — how quick would he have been to choose her over the comforting presence of Elaine?
And what about Ariel? He craned his neck, trying for a glimpse of her over the intervening rows. There was something odd about her, something faintly spooky, some intangible aura the kid gave off. That was the trouble with adoption, you never knew what you were getting, and if he had married Roberta, Ariel would almost certainly have been part of the package.
Pointless speculation. Caleb had been conceived and born and was now dead. Jeff had not seen him. And never would.
The damned finality of it—
It wasn’t fair.
Just as the minister was hitting his stride, a joke popped into Erskine’s mind. He couldn’t remember where he’d read it. Mad Magazine, probably. It was their kind of humor.
Question: How do you make a dead baby float?
Answer: Take one dead baby, two scoops of vanilla ice cream, a little chocolate syrup, some club soda—