Willa bent down to the cradle and slid her hands under the newest soul. Her fingers found a place beneath his head and her thumbs hooked around his moist armpits and she swung him up onto her shoulder. This always satisfied him for a while; he slept again, his nose against her neck, pressing the pulse there, life to life.
She brought him to the changing table that was wedged between sink and tub in the apartment’s bathroom. The floor tiles were chipped but there was a stained-glass window featuring a tall, robed redheaded figure. “After Burne-Jones,” the mother had bewilderingly said when she was showing Willa around. The mother was a part-time professor. The father was an engineer.
Willa changed the baby. He opened his eyes and stared at her. She carried him into the living room and handed him first to the dentist, who pressed him against her dress; and then to the father, who laid the child on his own wide thighs and stared at him as if to memorize the eyelids, the lips, the damp folds on the neck; and then to the mother, who said, “Thank you, Willa.” The mother released her firm little breast from her shirt; milk was already spurting.
“What a warm night,” the dentist said.
“Warm,” said the father serenely. “Warm?” he repeated with a nervous twitch of his cheek, as if he sensed a hurricane.
“Warm, sir,” said Willa. That nightmare child in the bottom drawer — it was like having a secret family.
The baby suckled. The father and the dentist and Willa silently watched. They might have been underwater; they might have been floating on the surface of a pond; they might have been sitting on lily pads like the illustrations in the favorite book of the second boy, the eight-year-old — a textbook about frogs.
The mother shifted the baby to the other breast. “Good night,” said Dr. Gurevich. She let herself out and walked down the three flights and crossed the street.
A week later, at five in the afternoon, Willa opened the drawer and looked at another picture.
Its subject seemed to be female — at least, the figure was wearing a smocked dress. There was trimming on the puffed sleeve; she could tell from the swift little circles that the trimming was lace. Fine lines on the slender hands represented wiry hairs; broader lines on cheeks and chin were hair too. There was fur on the scalp. This creature’s eyes were dull. Her nose was all nostrils. The upper lip was long, and the mouth stretched widely in a smile without happiness.
The date on Monkey Girl’s portrait was eight years ago, and the paper was initialed with the father’s two letters. If he were hers, Willa thought, she’d insist that he purge his bowels with bark, once a week if need be.
Willa came out of her room to find Dr. Gurevich in the kitchen, heating some of her own soup. “My electricity has been turned off,” said the dentist. “The janitor is hooking it up again, to somebody else’s line, please don’t ask me how.”
“All right,” Willa said.
“Willa, Willa, what is to become of me?”
Back home this old woman would have been respected. She would not have been forced to work. People would have brought her stew and beer and smokes, and she would have sat on her porch and looked at the sea. “I have a…leaf,” Willa said.
Dr. Gurevich was silent. Then: “Something I could roll?”
Willa nodded. “I can show you how.”
The woman sniffed. “And will it find me a new apartment and a new office?”
“It will ease your spirits.”
They exchanged a long look. “Please,” said Dr. Gurevich.
All of Willa’s herbs were in the third drawer from the bottom, above the chess pieces. Rolling took a few minutes. She left Dr. Gurevich smoking in the kitchen. She picked up the baby without waking him and went down to the curb to meet the day-camp bus. How tanned they had become. The five-year-old buried his face in her belly — it was a long day for him. The ten-year-old trudged into the building, the eight-year-old at his heels.
Upstairs the boys crowded into the kitchen to help prepare the evening’s baked rice and salad. Dr. Gurevich took her weed into the living room. There, dark and featureless against the window, she looked like Aunt Leona, who’d told the future. “You will be useful to the family in New York,” Leona had promised Willa. “They will be kind to you, in their way.”
The father came home. The mother came home. The janitor rang the bell and called up through the intercom that Dr. Gurevich’s electricity was on again. Dr. Gurevich, throwing Willa a sweet glance, left the apartment to join him.
Dr. Gurevich’s water got turned off early one August morning. The janitor — no longer on salary, but still occupying a room in the basement — said he could attach their pipes to another main, but not before nightfall. The dentist canceled that day’s patients. She had fewer patients now than formerly, and those who came urged her to find new premises. “They think it’s easy to pull up roots,” she said. “You understand how hard it is, Willa.”
Willa nodded. She was holding the five-year-old on her lap. He had begged to stay home from camp that day. So the dentist, the mother, the baby, Willa, and the five-year-old all sat on the stoop of the family’s apartment house and watched the empty brownstone next to Dr. Gurevich’s house get wrecked. Neighborhood children who didn’t go to day camp watched too, and some of their mothers. The wrecking ball swung forward and backward, attacking the façade like a boxer. Stone and glass and wood and plaster crumpled at its touch. Debris piled up. Meanwhile an earthmover in back picked up the junk and deposited it into an enormous dumpster. A few scavengers hung around.
Willa, abruptly homesick, thought of her aunt’s little house on stilts, and the foaming sea, and her own three daughters in their school uniforms, there without her.
The building gradually collapsed. The debris mounted in its stead. By midafternoon the wrecking truck had driven off, leaving the busy earthmover to its work. The ice cream truck jingled down the street.
The mother took the baby upstairs for a bath. The five-year-old dozed in Willa’s lap. The street got more crowded: cars, teenagers on skates, the knife grinder, a bicycle whose wide basket carried stacks of straw boaters. “Hats! Hats!” the cyclist shouted. When the camp bus came, it couldn’t pull up against the right curb and so it parked on the left. The children would have to step out into the street, Willa saw. The bus had its flashers on but who knew? “Hold him, please,” said Willa to Dr. Gurevich, transferring the five-year-old to the dentist. Willa went out into the middle of the street and stood beside the bus, staring down the impatient cars. She heard the children behind her, crossing the street — her two, and some others from the building. The father rounded the corner from the subway, and he started to run, though it couldn’t have been easy, he was so fat. “Where’s Paul! I don’t see Paul!” he yelled, and Willa pointed to the child on the dentist’s lap, and the father stopped running and took off his seersucker jacket and mopped his face with it, though she had ironed all his handkerchiefs just yesterday.
That night she looked at the third picture. This one was a baby dressed only in a diaper, a baby of about a year, the age of toddling. This child would never toddle. Instead of legs, he had flippers; instead of arms, flippers. His eyes had no pupils. His bare chest was like any white baby’s: pink, the nipples suggested by rosy dots, so sweet she wanted to kiss them.
The date on Seal Baby was ten years ago. There were no more drawings: just the three.