The Love of a Good Woman

Jill and I.
    At last she put me down, more gently than she would have liked to do, and I quieted, in my relief it seemed at getting away from her. She tiptoed from the room. And it wasn’t long before I started up again.
    So it continued. I didn’t cry nonstop. I would take breaks of two or five or ten or twenty minutes. When the time came for her to offer me the bottle I accepted it, I lay in her arm stiffly and snuffled warningly as I drank. Once half the milk was down I returned to the assault. I finished the bottle eventually, almost absent-mindedly, between wails. I dropped off to sleep and she put me down. She crept down the stairs; she stood in the hall as if she hadto judge a safe way to go. She was sweating from her ordeal and from the heat of the day. She moved through the precious brittle silence into the kitchen and dared to put the coffeepot on the stove.
    Before the coffee was perked I sent a meat cleaver cry down on her head.
    She realized that she had forgotten something. She hadn’t burped me after the bottle. She went determinedly upstairs and picked me up and walked with me patting and rubbing my angry back, and in a while I burped, but I didn’t stop crying and she gave up; she laid me down.
    What is it about an infant’s crying that makes it so powerful, able to break down the order you depend on, inside and outside of yourself? It is like a storm—insistent, theatrical, yet in a way pure and uncontrived. It is reproachful rather than supplicating—it comes out of a rage that can’t be dealt with, a birthright rage free of love and pity, ready to crush your brains inside your skull.
    All Jill can do is walk around. Up and down the living-room rug, round and round the dining-room table, out to the kitchen where the clock tells her how slowly, slowly time is passing. She can’t stay still to take more than a sip of her coffee. When she gets hungry she can’t stop to make a sandwich but eats cornflakes out of her hands, leaving a trail all over the house. Eating and drinking, doing any ordinary thing at all, seem as risky as doing such things in a little boat out in the middle of a tempest or in a house whose beams are buckling in an awful wind. You can’t take your attention from the tempest or it will rip open your last defenses. You try for sanity’s sake to fix on some calm detail of your surroundings, but the wind’s cries—my cries—are able to inhabit a cushion or a figure in the rug or a tiny whirlpool in the window glass. I don’t allow escape.
    The house is shut up like a box. Some of Ailsa’s sense of shame has rubbed off on Jill, or else she’s been able to manufacture someshame of her own. A mother who can’t appease her own baby—what is more shameful? She keeps the doors and windows shut. And she doesn’t turn the portable floor fan on because in fact she’s forgotten about it. She doesn’t think anymore in terms of practical relief. She doesn’t think that this Sunday is one of the hottest days of the summer and maybe that is what is the matter with me. An experienced or instinctive mother would surely have given me an airing instead of granting me the powers of a demon. Prickly heat would have been what came to her mind, instead of rank despair.
    Sometime in the afternoon, Jill makes a stupid or just desperate decision. She doesn’t walk out of the house and leave me. Stuck in the prison of my making, she thinks of a space of her own, an escape within. She gets out her violin, which she has not touched since the day of the scales, the attempt that Ailsa and Iona have turned into a family joke. Her playing can’t wake me up because I’m wide awake already, and how can it make me any angrier than I am?
    In a way she does me honor. No more counterfeit soothing, no more pretend lullabies or concern for tummy-ache, no petsy- wetsy whatsamatter. Instead she will play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, the piece she played at her recital and must play again at her examination to get her graduating diploma.
    The Mendelssohn is her choice—rather than the Beethoven Violin Concerto which she more passionately admires—because she believes the Mendelssohn will get her higher marks. She thinks she can master—has mastered—it more fully; she is confident that she can show off and impress the examiners without the least fear of catastrophe. This is not a work that will trouble her all her life, she has decided; it is not something she will struggle with and try to