He felt a whoop of laughter gathering itself within him and headed it off by launching a coughing fit. A woman seated just across the aisle turned to give him a dirty look, which didn’t astonish him. Adults generally gave you dirty looks.
One dead baby, two scoops of vanilla—
Classic.
He just wondered how soon it would be cool to try the joke on Ariel.
The minister was talking about the will of God. God’s will, he said, had three properties. It was good, it was acceptable, and it was perfect.
The three words kept echoing in David’s mind. Good, acceptable, perfect.
It was difficult to identify those properties in certain types of tragedy, like the death of an innocent infant. God’s ways were a mystery to us, the man went on, but our inability to grasp his plan for us did not mean the plan did not exist.
Good, acceptable, and perfect.
How, David wondered, could it be good for a baby like Caleb to die? Well, he could see an argument. As long as the human race had existed, infant mortality had been high. Only in recent years, with the advances in medical science and the development of immunization and antibiotics, had this pattern begun to change.
And wasn’t high infant mortality nature’s way of culling the weaker individuals? When you planted a vegetable garden, you always sowed more seed in the rows than you could allow to grow to maturity. The little seedlings would come up shoulder to shoulder, but in order to give them room to grow you had to thin them ruthlessly, leaving only the best and strongest plants.
Why shouldn’t Nature thin the crop of human seedlings?
And, with the original complement of infant diseases no longer as effective, why shouldn’t a phenomenon like crib death emerge, carrying off the weak and infirm quickly and painlessly while they slept. Surely it was a gentler thinning mechanism than whooping cough or diphtheria.
But why Caleb?
Well, perhaps there was an answer to that, too. Caleb was a child who should never have been born in the first place. They had been doing fine without him, he and Roberta and Ariel. Certainly there were imperfections in their life. His job, in the traffic department at Ashley-Cooper Home Products, had evolved into a comfortable rut; fortunately his ambition had eroded even as the possibilities for job advancement shrank. His salary was adequate, his position secure, his work pleasant and undemanding. It wasn’t the brilliant career he’d envisioned at twenty-one, but one’s attitudes changed as one’s life defined itself, and he was happy enough doing what he did.
Roberta’s life, too, had had its discontents. His inability to impregnate her had been hard for her to handle, but after a frustrating couple of years they’d adopted Ariel, and that had strengthened them as a family while giving Roberta the fulfillment of motherhood. And Ariel was an endlessly interesting child, and it was exciting for David to watch the gradual evolution of her unique personality.
Caleb had disturbed the balance. Ariel, an adopted child of unknown parentage, was equally the daughter of David and Roberta.
Caleb, on the other hand, was Roberta’s son.
The fact had never been discussed. He had known for some time that she was having an affair, had known it without consciously acknowledging that he knew it. But when she announced the miracle of her pregnancy he had immediately gone along with the fiction that it was indeed miraculous, that his sparse and sluggish sperm had managed an amazing increase in number and mobility, one of them actually charging through to the goal line, planting the flag on Iwo Jima.
He’d never really believed this for a moment. Nor did he think Roberta actually thought he was fooled.
When Caleb was born, David thought he might come to love the boy. He loved Ariel, wholly and without reservation, although he had not fathered her. Why shouldn’t he love Caleb, whom he had not fathered either, but who at least was the child of his wife? His first sight of the baby, through the thick glass window at the hospital, was quite lacking in emotion. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. From what he’d heard, relatively few fathers were overcome with a rush of love at the first sight of their offspring.
Instead of love, what he grew to feel was resentment. Roberta was crazy about the kid, and there was no getting away from the fact that she favored him over Ariel. At first he told himself it was simple favoritism for the needier newborn, a natural maternal prejudice perhaps essential for survival. But he came to see that it was rather more than that. Roberta’s attitude toward Ariel underwent a definite change. She resented the girl as David resented Caleb.
Of course they never talked about any of this. The new house lent itself to their spending time apart. His study was the immensely comfortable masculine room he’d always yearned for, and it quickly became his habit to retire there after dinner with a book and a bottle. Sometimes Ariel would come in and sit on his lap. Sometimes he would spend hours by himself until it was time to go up to bed.
The brandy helped take the sharp edges off his feelings. He would drink slowly but steadily from the time dinner ended, and by the time he left the little room on the ground floor he was generally pretty tight. He held it well, though, and he clung to this fact whenever he found himself wondering whether he was drinking an unhealthy amount. He never showed the effects of the brandy, never threw up or staggered or passed out, and if he experienced a fairly rocky morning once in a while it rarely amounted to more than a cup of black coffee and a couple of aspirins could cure.
Once or twice he’d had memory lapses. More than once or twice, if you counted the short ones. He’d wake up in the morning with no clear recollection of leaving his study. But obviously he’d been all right. He’d made it up the stairs and he’d wake up in his own bed with his clothing hung neatly in the closet. If he’d done anything bizarre during those vacant periods he surely would have heard about it from Roberta. And if he happened to have lost the memory of a few minutes or a half hour or whatever, what earthly difference did it make? A person’s head was cluttered enough with facts and memories; one hardly needed total recall of every time one climbed a flight of stairs.
In any event, the brandy helped. It smoothed things out. Throughout, he’d been confident things would work out. Roberta would get over whatever she was going through with Ariel. He himself would work things out as far as his feelings for Caleb were concerned. And everything would be fine.
Good, acceptable and perfect.
So it was “good” that Caleb was dead. And it was “acceptable,” in that he was able to accept it. And it was even “perfect,” because now they could go back to being the family they had been, strengthened by what they had been forced to endure, closer than ever for having passed through it.
He took his wife’s hand in his and gave it a comforting squeeze.
In the limousine, seated once again between David and Ariel, Roberta turned around to count the cars lined up behind them. There were ten or a dozen of them, their headlights on, queued up to follow the hearse to the cemetery.
“It’s the weather,” she told David.
He asked her what she meant.
“A nice crisp bright fall afternoon,” she said bitterly. “A little rain would have cut the attendance, but the weather’s so good they want their money’s worth.”
She faced forward, looking out through the windshield at the gleaming silver hearse. Was Jeff in one of the cars behind her? Having come to the funeral, would he ride a little farther to see his son tucked into the ground?
Why not? It was, after all, a beautiful afternoon.
David was saying something, talking with Ariel, but Roberta wasn’t paying any attention. There were things on her mind, things she hadn’t been able to make sense of, things she’d barely permitted herself to think about since Caleb’s death.