Big Easy Bonanza

by a grown-up and sent to bed. Bitty laughed. She didn’t mind if he raced and screeched for a minute. It was her house and he wasn’t hurting anything. Chauncey had sighed and rubbed his head, as if fatherhood wasn’t what he had in mind after all.
    Her father had picked Henry up and sat down with the baby imprisoned, Henry’s legs between his own, holding both of Henry’s hands in one of his, the other clamped over Henry’s mouth so that Henry couldn’t move at all, even his head. Bitty was sitting on the sofa. For a moment she stared unbelieving, frozen. And then she melted, woke up almost, as if she’d blacked out for a second, and found herself standing, clawing at her child, screaming, “Let that baby go! Let go of that poor child!” as if her father was a Nazi officer about to turn her baby into soap.
    “Bitty, what is it? What’s the matter?” her father inquired, concerned, looking puzzled, never letting go of Henry. Not even thinking about it.
    Chauncey stroked her hair. “Bitty, darlin’, it’s all right. Henry’s coming to Daddy, aren’t you, sport?”
    “Take the little monster,” said her father. Henry leaped into Chauncey’s arms as if from the clutches of a kidnapper.
    Later Chauncey said, “Don’t you think you overreacted when your father picked Henry up? Are you tired out after all the excitement?” He kissed the top of her head.
    She didn’t answer because she didn’t know if she’d overreacted or not. She’d been seized by some primeval, elemental force, which might have been the Mother Bear instinct, or it might have been a memory come back to haunt her. Bitty thought it was probably a combination of the two. She was almost sure, when she thought about it, that her father had done that to her at Henry’s age, whenever he wanted; picked her up like a toy and pinned her and gagged her. Her reaction was too visceral, too desperate to leave much doubt.
    Her father didn’t let anything get in his way, certainly not another human being, and most assuredly not one smaller than he was. He wanted what he wanted right now, and if it happened to be peace and quiet, he silenced the noisemaker.
    She was pregnant that Christmas. She didn’t know it yet, but she was pretty sure, and the thought of having another baby made her strengthen her resolve, the vow she made when she learned she was pregnant with Henry. Sometimes she thought it took her so long to get pregnant because she was afraid of what would happen to her children, that her body simply rebelled at giving her children until she knew she could handle it, that she wouldn’t hurt them. Her vow had been to protect her children from violence.
    Her mother, christened Marianna MacDuff Scarborough, earned the nickname Merrie Mac in the first two years of her life—ostensibly for her sunny disposition, but Bitty thought it appropriate that it derived from a battle.
    If Merrie Mac had ever been merry, it had been well before Bitty’s first memory of her, of Merrie Mac buttoning her dress and then smacking Bitty’s bottom in dismissal, performing a distasteful chore and sending away the small irritation that kept getting in her way. Bitty couldn’t once remember her mother hugging her. She did all the necessary mother things but always in the same grudging way she performed the dress-buttoning. Bitty knew she was a nuisance and tried to stay out of the way, especially when her parents were fighting, which was most of the time.
    Her mother would speak just as the soup was served, at the optimum time to make Bitty and her father lose their appetites. “Haygood, did you forget the milk again?”
    “What milk?”
    “I told you this morning we were out of milk.”
    “No, you didn’t, Marianna.”
    “I most certainly did.”
    “You did not tell me we were out of milk. I would have remembered, just like I always do, if you had told me we were out of milk.”
    “I opened the refrigerator and I said, ‘Oh, Haygood, there’s only enough milk for Bitty’s cereal,’ and you said, ‘I’ll pick some up on the way home from work.’ ”
    “Marianna, I didn’t even have breakfast here this morning. I had breakfast with Hugh Del Monte at the Roosevelt.”
    “You did too. You sat right there in that chair and drank your coffee.”
    “I did not, Marianna.”
    “You did. Are you telling me I’m a liar?”
    He would shake his head in disbelief. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’d talk to me about a