Ariel

by Lawrence Block

  Lord, what a handle for an infant. Caleb Oliver Jardell sounded like some grizzled captain of industry, some board chairman cloaked in respectability but with the soul of a pirate. Would the kid have grown into the name? Or would they have wound up calling him Butch or Sonny or Callie or something of the sort?

  Hardly mattered. Caleb had been born and had died without Jeff’s ever having seen him. Nor would Jeff see him now. The casket was closed, and soon enough it would be in the ground.

  Funny how he hadn’t even wanted to see the kid while he was alive. The affair with Roberta had ended, broken off abruptly at her insistence before he’d had any idea that she was pregnant. He’d been surprised by her decision, and more than a little hurt. At first he tried calling her, but her reaction made it very clear that she wanted him to keep his distance.

  To hell with her, he’d decided, and he had put her out of his mind without further ado. First he’d taken his wife for a week’s vacation in Bermuda, attempting to reinvigorate their marriage while dealing with his guilt over the affair. The trip was a limited success, but on his return he found himself still smarting from Roberta’s rejection. He had promptly plunged into a series of brief affairs, using deliberately casual sex to cheapen whatever he and Roberta had had between them.

  Then he’d found out that she was pregnant.

  He had dealt with this reality by denying it. His first reaction to the discovery was the immediate assumption that she was carrying his child. David, after all, had never been capable of fathering a child. It was true that he did produce living spermatazoa, but Roberta had said that his sperm count was so low as to make his sterility a medical presumption. After several years of trying and extensive series of tests, they had adopted Ariel.

  Now, more than a decade later, she was pregnant. She and David barely slept together. Jeff, on the other hand, was fiercely fertile, and they had made love frequently during the several months their affair had lasted.

  They’d taken precautions, of course. This was something of a novelty for both of them; Roberta had had no need to employ birth control when she slept with her husband, and Jeff’s wife Elaine had had tubal ligation after the birth of her second daughter. So they’d used condoms, which had given their lovemaking a high school lovers’ lane element, and evidently one of the condoms had been unequal to its task.

  Roberta had become pregnant with his child. And, on realizing as much, she had decided to terminate not the pregnancy but the relationship, returning to David and presumably convincing him that his sperm had improved with age. Which he no doubt was pleased not to question.

  Then the denial mechanism had taken over. How did he know it was his child she was carrying? David might not have many sperm, but all it took was one. And a sperm count wasn’t necessarily fixed. It could increase or decrease over the years. And pregnancy after the adoption of a child was such a common phenomenon as to be almost a cliché. When it happened, you didn’t run to the window looking for a bright star in the East.

  She was part of the past, he had decided. And the baby was probably her husband’s, and if not that didn’t make it Jeffs anyway, because who knew how many other clowns she’d been screwing over the months? He at least had used condoms. For all he knew she’d balled the entire Citadel football team, including the coach and the waterboys, and hadn’t even made them use Saran Wrap.

  So the hell with her, and the hell with the kid, and good riddance to both of them.

  When the child was born his denial faded. He recognized that Caleb’s sex was a factor. His own children were both girls, and although he loved them none the less for their gender, he would have liked a son as well. But Elaine had had a hard time with the second pregnancy and was determined to stop at two, and her tubal ligation was a fait accompli by the time Jeff learned about it. He’d been hurt by the way she’d made the decision all on her own, but it was her body, and these days women were making a lot of noise about their right to do as they wished with their own bodies, and maybe two children was enough. Maybe he was better suited to father daughters anyway, maybe he’d have been awkward with a son.

  Then all at once he had a son, had him but didn’t have him. And of course Caleb was his son—how had he managed to make himself believe otherwise?

  Was there a resemblance? His daughters both favored Elaine, although the younger one had her father’s eyes. Whom did Caleb resemble? Himself or Roberta?

  Not David, he knew. Not a chance of that.

  Ever since Caleb’s birth, Jeff had kept his distance from Roberta and the baby without putting them out of his mind. He entertained a variety of fantasies in which he eventually got together with his son. In one of them, David and Elaine both perished in some convenient fashion; Jeff liked the idea of their being copassengers on some airliner that might fly into the side of a handy mountain.

  Then, after a suitable period of mourning, he and Roberta would court and eventually marry. She would be a mother to Debbie and Greta, and he would be to Caleb what he already was biologically, and Caleb would never know the real circumstances of his conception, and—

  Other fantasies were somewhat more likely to be realized at some future date. He thought he might manage to get a look at Caleb sooner or later, if only to see for himself whether a resemblance existed. When Caleb was older, he might manage to meet the boy. Someday, when the boy was old enough to handle it, maybe they could have a few beers together and the truth could come out.

  Anything was possible. Especially when you kept it a fantasy.

  Not now, though. Not with Caleb dead.

  Why had it happened?

  One of the articles he’d read that morning discussed the psychological effect of crib death on the victims’ parents. Almost invariably, the mothers of those babies—and to a lesser extent the fathers as well—blamed themselves for what happened. Because there was no identifiable cause of death, because a seemingly healthy infant had died suddenly for no good reason, the parents assumed responsibility. Some viewed the baby’s death as punishment, just or unjust, for their own sins. Others had a less abstract view of guilt; they felt they must have neglected the baby, that they had cared for it inadequately, that there should have been something they could have done to prevent the tragedy. If only she had checked him during the night, a mother might berate herself. If only she had given him an extra blanket, or no blanket at all, or wakened him for his feeding, or let him sleep through it, or—

  And what could he have done? Forced himself into the picture during Roberta’s pregnancy? Broken up her marriage and his own? Even if he’d made an effort, there was no reason to think she’d have accepted him. He’d been acceptable as a lover, but evidently she’d decided she preferred being married to David Jardell.

  And suppose she’d come to him and told him of her pregnancy? Suppose she’d wanted to leave David and marry him? What would he have done then, if it were not fantasy anymore but a case of hard-edged reality?

  Would he have divorced Elaine? Would he have been willing to give up custody of Debbie and Greta for the sake of a child as yet unborn? For that matter, would he have been that thrilled at the idea of marrying Roberta? She was an exciting bedmate and a stimulating companion, but how well would that kind of stimulation wear? She was sometimes brittle, she was acerbic, she was moody, she smoked too much—how quick would he have been to choose her over the comforting presence of Elaine?

  And what about Ariel? He craned his neck, trying for a glimpse of her over the intervening rows. There was something odd about her, something faintly spooky, some intangible aura the kid gave off. That was the trouble with adoption, you never knew what you were getting, and if he had married Roberta, Ariel would almost certainly have been part of the package.

  Pointless speculation. Caleb had been conceived and born and was now dead. Jeff had not seen him. And never would.

  The damned finality of it—

  It wasn’t fair.

  Just as the minister was hitting his stride, a
joke popped into Erskine’s mind. He couldn’t remember where he’d read it. Mad Magazine, probably. It was their kind of humor.

  Question: How do you make a dead baby float?

  Answer: Take one dead baby, two scoops of vanilla ice cream, a little chocolate syrup, some club soda—

  He felt a whoop of laughter gathering itself within him and headed it off by launching a coughing fit. A woman seated just across the aisle turned to give him a dirty look, which didn’t astonish him. Adults generally gave you dirty looks.

  One dead baby, two scoops of vanilla—

  Classic.

  He just wondered how soon it would be cool to try the joke on Ariel.

  The minister was talking about the will of God. God’s will, he said, had three properties. It was good, it was acceptable, and it was perfect.

  The three words kept echoing in David’s mind. Good, acceptable, perfect.

  It was difficult to identify those properties in certain types of tragedy, like the death of an innocent infant. God’s ways were a mystery to us, the man went on, but our inability to grasp his plan for us did not mean the plan did not exist.

  Good, acceptable, and perfect.

  How, David wondered, could it be good for a baby like Caleb to die? Well, he could see an argument. As long as the human race had existed, infant mortality had been high. Only in recent years, with the advances in medical science and the development of immunization and antibiotics, had this pattern begun to change.

  And wasn’t high infant mortality nature’s way of culling the weaker individuals? When you planted a vegetable garden, you always sowed more seed in the rows than you could allow to grow to maturity. The little seedlings would come up shoulder to shoulder, but in order to give them room to grow you had to thin them ruthlessly, leaving only the best and strongest plants.

  Why shouldn’t Nature thin the crop of human seedlings?

  And, with the original complement of infant diseases no longer as effective, why shouldn’t a phenomenon like crib death emerge, carrying off the weak and infirm quickly and painlessly while they slept. Surely it was a gentler thinning mechanism than whooping cough or diphtheria.

  But why Caleb?

  Well, perhaps there was an answer to that, too. Caleb was a child who should never have been born in the first place. They had been doing fine without him, he and Roberta and Ariel. Certainly there were imperfections in their life. His job, in the traffic department at Ashley-Cooper Home Products, had evolved into a comfortable rut; fortunately his ambition had eroded even as the possibilities for job advancement shrank. His salary was adequate, his position secure, his work pleasant and undemanding. It wasn’t the brilliant career he’d envisioned at twenty-one, but one’s attitudes changed as one’s life defined itself, and he was happy enough doing what he did.

  Roberta’s life, too, had had its discontents. His inability to impregnate her had been hard for her to handle, but after a frustrating couple of years they’d adopted Ariel, and that had strengthened them as a family while giving Roberta the fulfillment of motherhood. And Ariel was an endlessly interesting child, and it was exciting for David to watch the gradual evolution of her unique personality.

  Caleb had disturbed the balance. Ariel, an adopted child of unknown parentage, was equally the daughter of David and Roberta.

  Caleb, on the other hand, was Roberta’s son.

  The fact had never been discussed. He had known for some time that she was having an affair, had known it without consciously acknowledging that he knew it. But when she announced the miracle of her pregnancy he had immediately gone along with the fiction that it was indeed miraculous, that his sparse and sluggish sperm had managed an amazing increase in number and mobility, one of them actually charging through to the goal line, planting the flag on Iwo Jima.

  He’d never really believed this for a moment. Nor did he think Roberta actually thought he was fooled.

  When Caleb was born, David thought he might come to love the boy. He loved Ariel, wholly and without reservation, although he had not fathered her. Why shouldn’t he love Caleb, whom he had not fathered either, but who at least was the child of his wife? His first sight of the baby, through the thick glass window at the hospital, was quite lacking in emotion. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. From what he’d heard, relatively few fathers were overcome with a rush of love at the first sight of their offspring.

  Instead of love, what he grew to feel was resentment. Roberta was crazy about the kid, and there was no getting away from the fact that she favored him over Ariel. At first he told himself it was simple favoritism for the needier newborn, a natural maternal prejudice perhaps essential for survival. But he came to see that it was rather more than that. Roberta’s attitude toward Ariel underwent a definite change. She resented the girl as David resented Caleb.

  Of course they never talked about any of this. The new house lent itself to their spending time apart. His study was the immensely comfortable masculine room he’d always yearned for, and it quickly became his habit to retire there after dinner with a book and a bottle. Sometimes Ariel would come in and sit on his lap. Sometimes he would spend hours by himself until it was time to go up to bed.

  The brandy helped take the sharp edges off his feelings. He would drink slowly but steadily from the time dinner ended, and by the time he left the little room on the ground floor he was generally pretty tight. He held it well, though, and he clung to this fact whenever he found himself wondering whether he was drinking an unhealthy amount. He never showed the effects of the brandy, never threw up or staggered or passed out, and if he experienced a fairly rocky morning once in a while it rarely amounted to more than a cup of black coffee and a couple of aspirins could cure.

  Once or twice he’d had memory lapses. More than once or twice, if you counted the short ones. He’d wake up in the morning with no clear recollection of leaving his study. But obviously he’d been all right. He’d made it up the stairs and he’d wake up in his own bed with his clothing hung neatly in the closet. If he’d done anything bizarre during those vacant periods he surely would have heard about it from Roberta. And if he happened to have lost the memory of a few minutes or a half hour or whatever, what earthly difference did it make? A person’s head was cluttered enough with facts and memories; one hardly needed total recall of every time one climbed a flight of stairs.

  In any event, the brandy helped. It smoothed things out. Throughout, he’d been confident things would work out. Roberta would get over whatever she was going through with Ariel. He himself would work things out as far as his feelings for Caleb were concerned. And everything would be fine.

  Good, acceptable and perfect.

  So it was “good” that Caleb was dead. And it was “acceptable,” in that he was able to accept it. And it was even “perfect,” because now they could go back to being the family they had been, strengthened by what they had been forced to endure, closer than ever for having passed through it.

  He took his wife’s hand in his and gave it a comforting squeeze.

  In the limousine, seated once again between David and Ariel, Roberta turned around to count the cars lined up behind them. There were ten or a dozen of them, their headlights on, queued up to follow the hearse to the cemetery.

  “It’s the weather,” she told David.

  He asked her what she meant.

  “A nice crisp bright fall afternoon,” she said bitterly. “A little rain would have cut the attendance, but the weather’s so good they want their money’s worth.”

  She faced forward, looking out through the windshield at the gleaming silver hearse. Was Jeff in one of the cars behind her? Having come to the funeral, would he ride a little farther to see his son tucked into the ground?

  Why not? It was, after all, a beautiful afternoon.

  David was saying something, talking with Ariel, but Roberta wasn’t paying any attention. There were things on her mind, things she hadn’t been able to make sense of, things she�
�d barely permitted herself to think about since Caleb’s death.

  The ghost in the bedroom, for one. Obviously the ghost had come for Caleb. But was it really a ghost? Had the apparition truly existed? Contradictions in terms … likely her own subconscious mind had conjured up the woman, creating her out of some inner knowledge that Caleb was going to be taken away. She’d know more one way or the other if someone else had either seen or not seen the woman, but only she had been awake to witness the appearances.

  The ghost had not walked on the past two nights. More accurately, Roberta had not seen it. But she couldn’t swear it hadn’t put in an appearance, because she herself had been so sedated she could have slept through a nuclear attack. The morning of Caleb’s death David had put in a quick call to Gintzler, who immediately phoned in a prescription to the drugstore. Roberta, numbed out on Valium, had made it through the days and slept as if comatose through the nights.

  No Valium today. They were putting her son in the ground. If there was something to feel, she wanted to feel it.

  But if the ghost came back tonight—

  Worry about it when it happens, she told herself. They were approaching the cemetery. She was going to have a lot to get through in the next little while. She would just have to take it as it came, and when it was bedtime she could worry about the woman in the shawl.