With a sob of protest she grapples for the child but the water pushes up at her hands, her bathrobe tends to float, and the slippery thing squirms in the sudden opacity. She has a hold, feels a heartbeat on her thumb, and then loses it, and the skin of the water leaps with pale refracted oblongs that she can't seize the solid of—, it is only a moment, but a moment dragged out in a thicker time. Then she has Becky squeezed in her hands and it is all right.
She lifts the living thing into air and hugs it against her sopping chest. Water pours off them onto the bathroom tiles. The little weightless body flops against her neck and a quick look of relief at the baby's face gives a fantastic clotted impression. A contorted memory of how they give artificial respiration pumps Janice's cold wet arms in frantic rhythmic hugs; under her clenched lids great scarlet prayers arise, wordless, monotonous, and she seems to be clasping the knees of a vast third person whose name, Father, Father, beats against her head like physical blows. Though her wild heart bathes the universe in red, no spark kindles in the space between her arms; for all of her pouring prayers she doesn't feel the faintest tremor of an answer in the darkness against her. Her sense of the third person with them widens enormously, and she knows, knows, while knocks sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.
JACK comes back from the telephone a shocking color. "Janice Angstrom has accidentally drowned their baby."
Lucy asks, "How could she?"
"I don't know. I'm afraid she was drunk. She's unconscious now."
"Where was he?"
"Nobody knows. I'm supposed to find out. That was Mrs. Springer. "
He sits down in the great walnut—armed chair that had been his father's and Lucy realizes with resentment that her husband is middle—aged. His hair is thinning, his skin is dry, he looks exhausted. She cries, "Why must you spend your life chasing after that worthless heel?"
"He's not worthless. I love him."
"You love him. That's sickening. Oh I think that's sickening, Jack. Why don't you try loving me, or your children?"
"I do."
"You don't, Jack. Let's face it, you don't. You couldn't bear to love anybody who might return it. You're afraid of that, aren't you? Aren't you afraid?"
They had been drinking tea in the library when the phone rang and he picks his empty cup off the floor between his feet and looks into the center. "Don't be clever, Lucy," he says. "I feel too sick."
"You feel sick, yes, and I feel sick. I've felt sick ever since you got involved with that animal. He's not even in your church."
"Any Christian is in my church."
"Christian! If he's a Christian thank God I'm not one. Christian. Kills his baby and that's what you call him."
"He didn't kill the baby. He wasn't there, it was an accident."
"Well he as good as did. Runs off and sends his idiot wife on a bender. You never should have brought them back together. The woman had adjusted and something like this never would have happened."
Eccles blinks; shock has put a great analytic distance between him and things. He's rather impressed by the way she has reconstructed what must have happened. He wonders a little why her speech is so vengeful. "Heel" was a strange word for her to have used. "So you're saying I really killed the baby," he says.
"Of course not. I didn't mean to say that at all."
"No. I think you're probably right," he says, and lifts himself out of the chair. He goes into the hall to the telephone and again draws out of his wallet the number written in pencil below the faint name, Ruth Leonard. The number worked once but this time the mouse of electricity gnaws at the remote membrane of metal in vain. He lets it ring twelve times, hangs up, dials the number again, and hangs up after seven rings. When he returns to the study Lucy is ready for him.
"Jack, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest you were responsible at all. Of course you're not. Don't be silly."
"It's all right, Lucy. The truth shouldn't be able to hurt us." These words are a shadow of his idea that if faith is true, then nothing that is true is in conflict with faith.
"Oh mercy, the martyr. Well I can see it's an idea you have that it's your fault and nothing I can say will change your mind. I'll save my breath."
He keeps silent to help her save her breath but after a moment she asks in a softer voice, ` Jack?"
"What?"
"Why were you so anxious to get them back together?"
He picks the slice of lemon up from the saucer of his teacup and tries to squint through it into the room. "Marriage is a sacrament," he says.
He half—expects her to laugh but instead she asks earnestly, "Even a bad marriage?"
"Yes."
"But that's ridiculous. That's not common sense."
"I don't believe in common sense," he says. "If it'll make you happy, I don't believe in anything."
"That doesn't make me happy," she says. "You're being very neurotic. But I'm sorry this has happened. I'm truly sorry." She takes away their cups and swishes into the kitchen and leaves him alone. Afternoon shadows gather like cobwebs on the walls of books, most of them belonging not to him but to his predecessor in the rectory, the much—admired bachelor Randolph Langhorne. He sits waiting numbly but not too long. The phone rings. He hurries to answer it before Lucy can; through the window above the sill where the phone rests he can see his neighbor unpinning her wash from the line.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Jack? This is Harry Angstrom. I hope I'm not interrupting anything."
"No, you're not."
"You don't have any old ladies sitting around sewing or anything, do you?"
"No."
"Why, I've been trying to call my apartment and nobody
answers and I'm kind of nervous about it. I didn't spend last night
there and I'm getting sort of a prickly feeling. I want to go home
but I want to know if Janice has done anything like call the cops
or anything. Do you know?"
"Harry, where are you?"
"Oh, at some drugstore in Brewer."
The neighbor has bundled the last sheet into her arms and Jack's sight leans on the bare white line. One of the uses society seems to have for him is to break tragic news and the cave of his mouth goes dry as he braces for the familiar duty. No man, having put his hand to the plough . . . He keeps his eyes wide open so he will not seem too close to the presence by his ear. "I guess to save time I'd better tell you over the phone," he begins. "Harry. A terrible thing has happened to us."