Sometime in the night the doctor came at last. Not Dr. Jackson. It was a strange doctor.
It was afternoon before Katherine woke up. Nobody said anything about Martians, and she assumed it had all been a crazy nightmare. Her little girl was fine, just fine, they assured her; but she had to ask and ask before anybody would bring the baby for her to hold.
When they did bring her in, Katherine’s first thought was: Why, she looks like Mickey Mouse. Both her eyes were blacked and all the dome of her head was one black-purple bruise.
“Oh, that’s normal, sugar,” a nurse told her, too quickly. “She just had a big head, that was all. The bruises’ll go away.” The baby lay quiet and waxen in her arms, barely moving, but they told her that was normal too.
It wasn’t normal. Bette Jean was an exquisite baby, with delicate white skin, with perfect little features, with enormous solemn eyes the color of aquamarines. Her hair was black and wavy. She looked like a doll, but by her first birthday she was still unable to sit up.
When it became impossible to deny that something was wrong, Katherine wrote to Mother. Mother sent money—Anne had the lead in a Broadway show now, she could afford to—and told her to take the baby to a specialist.
There was a doctor in Chapel Hill who saw “slow” children. It was most of a day’s drive in the old truck but Bert took them, tight-lipped and miserable. Bette Jean stared at the trees, the sky, the mountains, and exclaimed in her funny little unformed voice, a liquid sound like a child playing with panpipes.
In the waiting room were retarded children, spastic children, children blank and focused inward on private and inexplicable games, gaunt listless children sprawling across their parents’ laps. Overalled fathers silent, shirtwaisted mothers staring like wounded tigers. Bert took one look and murmured that he had to see the man about the mortgage, and he left. “It’s all right,” Katherine whispered to Bette Jean, who wobbled her head and looked astonished.
Through the transom she heard a man’s voice raised. “She’s still not thriving. You can’t be following my orders! I told you she needs lots of green and yellow vegetables. What on earth have you been feeding her?”
“Corn bread,” replied the raw cracker voice, defensively. “Corn’s yellow, ain’t it?”
Katherine shuddered.
The doctor was tired, and perhaps not as kind as he might have been. He listened to Katherine’s story, interrupting frequently as he examined Bette Jean. When he had finished he leaned back against a cabinet and took off his glasses to rub his eyes.
“Well, Mrs. Loveland—your baby has spastic paralysis. I’d conclude she was brain-damaged at birth, either by the forceps or the fact that birth was delayed so long. There is no cure for her condition, unfortunately. Given that the family is of limited means—I’d recommend you put her in a home.”
“Oh, I couldn’t!” Tears welled in Katherine’s eyes, but the doctor raised his hand.
“She’d receive decent care. Do you understand that her illness is only the result of an accident? You’re young; there is no reason why you can’t have healthy, normal children after this. When you do, you’ll find yourself increasingly hard-pressed to give this abnormal child the attention she’ll require every day of her life. You owe it to the child, to your prospective children—and, I need hardly say, your husband—to put this unfortunate occurrence behind you.”
Katherine wept and refused. The doctor wanted to speak to Bert, too, but he never put in an appearance. He was nowhere in sight when Katherine carried Bette Jean out to the truck. They waited another half-hour before he came up the street, unsteady, and climbed into the cab. He’d had a drink or two. It was a long ride back, in the dark.
When they understood the diagnosis, Bert and his parents argued at once that the only sensible thing to do would be to follow the doctor’s advice and place Bette Jean in an institution. Katherine screamed her refusal, wrote a tearful letter to Mother. Mother received the news with her customary stoicism and responded by inviting Katherine to bring Bette Jean to New York for Christmas, thoughtfully sending money for the train fare.
It was almost Heaven. No boarding houses anymore: a fashionable apartment nowadays, because Anne’s name was in lights on Broadway, and there was talk about Hollywood. And, oh, the Metropolitan Museum! The bookstores! The music! The shows! Katherine took Bette Jean to Central Park to watch the ice skaters, and Bette Jean stared and stared from her arms in wonder, never cried at all.
But there were telephone calls, there were letters and visits from all her aunts and uncles, who’d loaned Mother money over the lean years, who’d shaken their heads over The Divorce. Every one of them told her to put Bette Jean in an institution, for the sake of her marriage if nothing else. After the latest such call she put down the phone and wandered disconsolately out to the sitting room, where Anne had Bette Jean on her lap at the big Steinway piano and was pretending to play a duet with her. Bette Jean was whooping in delight. Mother looked up from her book, peering at her over her glasses.
“And what did your Uncle James have to say?”
“Just—more of the same.” Katherine glared at Mother. She wanted to seize Mother by the shoulders and scream at her, but what could she say? If you hadn’t gotten The Divorce, I’d never have been in such a hurry to get married to the first handsome boy I met. You never once explained it to us. You never once apologized. Not you. Why should you apologize, when you were entirely the offended party?
Oh, when will I ever escape from your life?
Instead, Katherine sank down by Mother’s chair. She drooped forward and leaned her head on Mother’s arm, wanting to cry.
“They want me to put her away and let strangers care for her,” she said. “They say it’ll be more convenient. They say I’ll forget about her when I have another baby.”
Mother stared straight forward.
“Don’t do it, child,” she said at last. “The human heart doesn’t work that way.”
Katherine raised her head, thinking: What would you know about human hearts?
“You’d regret it the rest of your life,” Mother said. “Believe me, daughter. Our emotions don’t answer to reason.”
Bette Jean caught a cold on the train going back; she was feverish and wailing when Bert picked them up at the train station. Katherine sat with her in the rocking chair beside the kerosene heater, rubbed her tiny chest with Vicks VapoRub, desperately fought off pneumonia. She slept sitting up with the child’s head cradled on her shoulder. Bert bought a steam vaporizer and set it up beside them, with the pan of water and eucalyptus oil simmering over its little flame. It was a week before she felt safe leaving Bette Jean long enough to attend to any chores.
Scattering feed for the chickens, she looked across at the pen where she’d kept the black one and saw that it was empty. When she questioned Bert he looked away, and said at last:
“Ma had me kill it. It couldn’t hardly walk, Katherine, you know that.”
She wouldn’t let him see her cry. She went into the house. Bette Jean was awake, and her eyes tracked to follow Katherine as she came close and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Ma-ma.
Katherine was so shocked she just sat staring. After a moment the voice came again, odd and artificial-sounding as a doll’s but with a note of pleading. Bette Jean’s mouth was slack, did not move, but her eyes were intent.