The Love of a Good Woman

mind in an instant—Ailsa will have to count on Dr. Shantz. Some obliging lack of curiosity on his part and a willingness to see things her way. But that should not be hard for anybody who knows what she has been through. The investment she has made in this family’s respectability and the blows she’s had to take, from her father’s shabby career and her mother’s mixed-up wits to Iona’s collapse at nursing school and George’s going off to get killed. Does Ailsa deserve a public scandal on top of this—a story in the papers, a trial, maybe even a sister-in-law in jail?
    Dr. Shantz would not think so. And not just because he can tote up these reasons from what he has observed as a friendly neighbor. Not just because he can appreciate that people who have to do without respectability must sooner or later feel the cold.
    The reasons he has for helping Ailsa are all in his voice as he comes running in the back door now, through the kitchen, calling her name.
    Jill at the bottom of the stairs has just said, “The baby’s all right.”
    And Ailsa has said, “You keep quiet until I tell you what to say.”
    Mrs. Kirkham stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, square in Dr. Shantz’s path.
    “Oh, I’m glad to see you,” she says. “Ailsa and Iona are allupset with each other. Iona found a baby at the door and now she says it’s dead.”
    Dr. Shantz picks Mrs. Kirkham up and puts her aside. He says again, “Ailsa?” and reaches out his arms, but ends up just setting his hands down hard on her shoulders.
    Iona comes out of the living room empty-handed.
    Jill says, “What did you do with the baby?”
    “Hid it,” Iona says saucily, and makes a face at her—the kind of face a terminally frightened person can make, pretending to be vicious.
    “Dr. Shantz is going to give you a needle,” Ailsa says. “That’ll put paid to you.”
    Now there is an absurd scene of Iona running around, throwing herself at the front door—Ailsa jumps to block her—and then at the stairs, which is where Dr. Shantz gets hold of her and straddles her, pinning her arms and saying, “Now, now, now, Iona. Take it easy. You’ll be okay in a little while.” And Iona yells and whimpers and subsides. The noises she makes, and her darting about, her efforts at escape, all seem like playacting. As if—in spite of being quite literally at her wit’s end—she finds the effort of standing up to Ailsa and Dr. Shantz so nearly impossible that she can only try to manage it by this sort of parody. Which makes it clear—and maybe this is what she really intends—that she is not standing up to them at all but falling apart. Falling apart as embarrassingly and inconveniently as possible with Ailsa shouting at her, “You ought to be disgusted with yourself.”
    Administering the needle, Dr. Shantz says, “That-a-girl Iona. There now.”
    Over his shoulder he says to Ailsa, “Look after your mother. Get her to sit down.”
    Mrs. Kirkham is wiping tears with her fingers. “I’m all right dear,” she says to Ailsa. “I just wish you girls wouldn’t fight. Youshould have told me Iona had a baby. You should have let her keep it.”
    Mrs. Shantz, wearing a Japanese kimono over her summer pajamas, comes into the house by the kitchen door.
    “Is everybody all right?” she calls.
    She sees the knife lying on the kitchen counter and thinks it prudent to pick it up and put it in a drawer. When people are making a scene the last thing you want is a knife ready to hand.
    In the midst of this Jill thinks she has heard a faint cry. She has climbed clumsily over the banister to get around Iona and Dr. Shantz—she ran partway up the stairs again when Iona came running in that direction—and has lowered herself to the floor. She goes through the double doors into the living room where at first she sees no sign of me. But the faint cry comes again and she follows the sound to the sofa and looks underneath it.
    That’s where I am, pushed in beside the violin.
    During that short trip from the hall to the living room, Jill has remembered everything, and it seems as if her breath stops and horror crowds in at her mouth, then a flash of joy sets her life going again, when just as in the dream she comes upon a live baby, not a little desiccated nutmeg-headed corpse. She holds me. I don’t stiffen or kick or arch my back. I am still pretty sleepy from the sedative in my milk which knocked me out for the night and half a day and