The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  They named her Lauren, a laurel, green and fragrant, a wreath for the Christmas just gone past. The ceramic nativity scene at Saint Benedict’s was still installed in a side chapel, there until Epiphany: officious wise men in their jewel-toned robes, watchful Joseph, an exuberant angel, beatific Disney livestock. Jane stood dumbfounded by the display, Lauren bundled under her coat, grunting wetly against Jane’s collarbone. Beneath her clothes, Jane was soaking through a maxi pad. Mary was draped in puddling porcelain silks, sunk to her knees in pillows of straw, her hands pressed together in prayer toward the swaddled Jesus in the manger. The mother of God had labored on a donkey and then labored in a barn, her body breaking itself open centimeter by centimeter amid hay and shit and cold, an animal among animals. Away in a slop trough, no crib for a bed.

  Jane felt a certain kind of way that Christ’s suffering on the Cross was exalted, itemized station by station in this same church, an infinity of wood and stone, while Mary’s suffering was heated in a kiln and painted in cartoon colors for a children’s seasonal diorama. She fumbled around inside the cloudy dome of her postpartum brain for the sound of the feeling, hoping she’d recognize it by touch. Earlier that morning, she told Pat that they needed to buy more diaphragms, or more diamonds, or more diapers—that was it. What was the thing she felt? Put out. Pent up. Perturbed! That was it. Perturbed, the er-er-buh requiring an indignant pursing of lips.

  Ringing through her head: O night when Christ was born / O night divine

  Would Jane’s high school English teachers have circled Christ was born in red pencil? Was that passive voice? Mary is the subject and Christ is the object. She couldn’t remember the rules. The cell was empty.

  “I love that they add something every year,” Dee was saying. “Look at the darling little lambs, right there at the angel’s feet.”

  “Who helped Mary clean herself?” Jane thought, and the thoughts turned into muffled words in the air close by—she could hear them. “Who helped her clean the baby?” It was Jane who was speaking. “Did Mary need stitches? Did they find a spare manger for the afterbirth?”

  “Okey-dokey, that’s all, folks,” Pat was saying as he placed his hands on Jane’s shoulders and nudged her toward the exit. The Porky Pig voice he used when he wanted to change the subject, make Jane stop talking. It was Pat’s version of her father’s How about those Bills?

  Later, Jane’s mother told her that Mary didn’t suffer labor pains, because she wasn’t a sinner.

  That month was Roots—there was O.J. sprinting across the screen in loincloth and warrior beads, like Pegasus wings could sprout from his back as he broke from the cold storage of Buffalo—and that month was the blizzard. Midnight in the afternoon, flaying winds, snowdrifts taller than Pat and packed like cement. The roads were unpassable, but the lights and the phone stayed on, the furnace and sump pump chugged away, and so the little house on Maple Way became a moon station, a glowing, lonely pod. Jane and Lauren didn’t leave the house for weeks, Jane living off stockpiles of dried pasta and canned beans, Lauren living off Jane. Pat studied and watched a lot of TV in the basement, talked to Colin and Brad on the phone. He was good with the baby. Jane could rely on him for a solid half hour, forty-five minutes at a stretch, of cuddling on the couch or google-eyed play on the carpet, and she could use the time to do laundry.

  It was good that the roads were unpassable because nursing the baby agitated Jane’s parents. “That’s obscene,” her father said, fleeing the room, the first and only time he saw the baby at her breast. Until the blizzard interrupted her daily visits, Jane’s mother brought with her can after can of Similac—she’d happened to have a coupon for it, and she’d needed to go to the store anyway, she was driving right past, it was right there, so why not grab some, you see, she was only trying to help, just let her help, for goodness’ sake, Jane, you have always been so stubborn—and Jane’s mother stood in the pantry stacking and restacking the cans, each smack a clap of judgment. If Jane gasped or moaned because of a bad latch or a sore nipple, it struck her mother’s ear as an echo of her screaming and crying over Rome—her outlandish need for attention, her perverse insistence on having her way.

  The corners of her mother’s lips turned down when Jane told her the baby’s name. Her mother’s tongue thrust out on the L like she was gagging on it. The only Laurens her mother knew of were the two in Jane’s year, Goldstein and Cohen.

  It occurred to Jane one afternoon as she was changing Lauren’s diaper, the snow and wind pounding their dark against the window, that her mother had probably hit her for the last time. To entertain the baby and to pass the hours, Jane narrated even her stray and most fragmentary thoughts. “I am therefore declared unslappable,” she told Lauren with a cheery nod, oddly buoyed by the goofy pa-pa-ba of the word she had made up, unslappable, three brisk little kisses, and she blew a raspberry on the baby’s taut round belly. Lauren gurgled appreciatively, all four limbs dancing, looking up at her mother with a surprised pride.

  “I’m unperturbed! I’m unslappable!” Jane said again, tickling Lauren’s ribs and blowing another raspberry, and that was the first time Lauren laughed.

  “Bernice in the rectory office says they have a backlog of baptisms scheduled,” Jane’s mother told her in March. “Nothing major. The blizzard threw everyone off. But you don’t want to leave it too late.”

  To let Lauren go unbaptized was to give her an Achilles’ heel. A sprinkling of holy water would be a vaccine against the disease of the unclean soul. Jane still prayed every night and at Sunday-morning mass, but her prayers had lost their compulsive charge. She tensed up when she reached the point in her litany when she asked God to watch over Lauren. Her throat tightened with what felt like a lie. She remembered how funny it had all seemed in the church in Rome. Now the joke was stale, but she kept telling it out of habit.

  “People get their kids baptized,” Pat told Jane. “It’s what people do. You’re overthinking it.”

  Jane put Lauren in the eggshell-colored gown that Dee’s daughters had worn to their baptisms. It was nicer than her own christening dress had been; its fabric was thicker and softer, the layers of tulle more delicate and numerous. Lauren angled her dribbly chin away from the dress’s lace collar, wearing the same quizzical, stoic gaze she’d cast up at Jane after she’d hurtled down from outer space. Her downy hair, still somehow damp. The baby gestured toward one corner of her mouth, her chubby wee hand an elegant comma, as she did when she was hungry. It made Jane think of how Robert De Niro would write in the air in the second Godfather movie—graciously refusing a parcel of groceries, persuading his friends of a plan over spaghetti, his voice low and trilling, patient. Jane and Lauren sat down in a pew to eat.

  “Not in God’s house, Jane!” her mother said as Jane bent over the baby.

  “Happy Lauren’s christening day, Glenis,” Pat said to her mother, shrugging and opening his palms upward.

  That same spring, late one afternoon, Jane saw Mrs. Vine in the canned food aisle at Bells market. Lauren round-eyed and drooling in the shopping cart, her face its usual picture of startled delight. Jane in duck boots, an old pair of Pat’s jeans, and a maternity coat belted snugly against her still-soft stomach, its hem scarred with dirty snow and road salt. Mrs. Vine had not yielded to sloth during that brutal winter and the sodden, sloppy season that followed: patterned cashmere coat cut to her figure, pants unscathed by sodium chloride, heels high and regal. She moved at precise angles as she chose among cans of green beans, a mission engrossing and humorous. She was a model dropped into an exotic and overlit location for a magazine shoot. Somehow the Vines still lived in Buffalo.

  Jane smiled eagerly at Mrs. Vine as they passed each other. Mrs. Vine grinned back and winked as she said, with a conspiratorial note in her voice, “Why, hello there,” caressing the can of beans, like a jewel thief with her loot, like she was about to press her treasure into Jane’s hand, and it occurred to Jane that she had no idea who she was.

  After
first steps but before confident walking, after babbling but before real words, no longer a baby but not yet a toddler, there was a time when Lauren, getting sleepy at dinner, would take Jane’s hands, open them palms up, like Pat at her christening, and then rest her little head in them, pressing her cheek against the creases. Then she would return her mother’s hands to their rightful owner and get back to the business of getting her mashed potato onto her spoon and making the unpredictable voyage from bowl to lips without spilling. Lauren was equally interested in and pleased by any outcome of this journey.

  Jane pressed her own hands together as she watched her child. She felt a crushing panic in moments like this, remorse for the crime she had briefly considered committing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the phantom nurse, who probably wore a fond smile, who probably would have convinced her it was all for the best if Jane had even once looked her full in the face. Jane was terrified of something she hadn’t done, that could now never be done, as potently as if it could never be undone, as if the nurse could tug her by the arm, press her into a parallel world, white and ceaseless, without Lauren in it. Alone in a pod on the moon. All because Jane had consented to the thought. It was Jane who had invited this apparition into the nursery, something out of a bad movie, her cold, elegant fingers drumming on the wooden rails of Lauren’s crib.

  Lauren. Her crooked, crinkly-eyed smile. The honey-and-almond folds of her knees and elbows. The café au lait mark on her hip, the size of Jane’s thumbnail; Jane had flipped through an atlas one feverish night, Lauren wheezing in the crook of her arm, and determined that the mark was in the shape of Finland, with particular fidelity to the topography of its eastern border with Russia. The feathery fur on Lauren’s shoulders and in the V between her shoulder blades, still lingering there long after her infancy. Toddler Lauren’s heartbreaking byeee-bye when a door closed that she wished to stay open. Lauren telling an anecdote in her own slushy, temperate language, gesticulating in fluent De Niro, furrowing her brow as she searched for the perfect turn of phrase. In these moments Lauren looked a lot like Sonja, who still called when she was home on break, who still came around.

  So did Geeta, but only with Sonja. They were a package deal. Elise would join them or come on her own. Christy faded out, although she was going to UB and still living at home.

  The worst was the first year. Geeta and Sonja brought Mylar balloons when they visited Jane after the baby. Nursing Lauren on the couch, her friends cross-legged on the matching overstuffed chairs that Mrs. Brennan had chosen from Kittinger, Jane watched the balloons nudging against the ceiling of the living room, clumsy and aimless blobs, and saw herself as an invalid in a hospital full of false cheer, as if she were recovering from a severe head injury as her friends guided her through some remedial small talk. Part of her rehabilitation. She told them too eagerly about what she was reading, Wordsworth and Winnicott and Ordinary People, but she didn’t admit that she couldn’t pay attention for more than a few pages at a time.

  What cannot be taken for granted is the mother’s pleasure that goes with the clothing and the bathing of her own baby. If you are there enjoying it all, it is like the sun coming out for the baby. That was Winnicott.

  “I’ll definitely have to check all those books out,” Geeta said finally, and Jane’s uterus performed one of its last contractions, letting go a sorrow that she could not name but was nonetheless sitting in front of her.

  Enjoy being turned-in and almost in love with yourself, the baby is so nearly a part of you. That also was Winnicott. And it was true that Jane could enjoy this, so long as it was only her and Lauren.

  Pat’s sister, Marie, ten years older, businesslike in her courteousness and with three small children of her own, always included Jane in her card games and PTA fund-raiser meetings with her friends, all in their late twenties or older, with children who were mostly in school already. But Jane could never entirely learn their repartée of weary disparagement: of their husbands, their children, and the mothers in the group who didn’t happen to be present that day. Jane’s mother frequently commented on how Marie “carried herself with such grace,” like she was a widow or bearing the burden of some unjust opprobrium—or maybe the burden was the fact that Marie looked exactly like Pat and yet, by some abstruse geometry, he was the pretty one. That was the kind of thought that Jane’s mother would have.

  Her mother often told Jane, “You are so lucky to have Marie.” Or, “She gave you a leg up.” Or, “She showed you the ropes.” Or, “She’s been very good to you, really gone out of her way.” These were accusations. Her mother’s praise of Marie was a euphemism for a darker thought: that Jane had cut corners, received a gift in error, gotten away with something, she had cheated, she had lied, and look, it had all worked out for her anyway, like it always does, this smooth, easy life laid down for her by the work and thoughtfulness and compassion of others.

  In the ordinary things you do you are quite naturally doing very important things, and the beauty of it is that you do not have to be clever, and you do not even have to think if you do not want to. Winnicott again.

  Three years with Lauren, the idyll of the only child, was so much of what Jane imagined the first months of a romance to be: the hours alone together doing nothing in particular, staring into each other’s eyes, laughing at jokes they couldn’t have explained to others or even themselves, lolling in grass or snow, kneading each other’s flesh, eating off each other’s plates. Even Lauren’s tantrums, infrequent and easily resolved, could be observed with some degree of detachment. A summer storm through a frosted pane.

  Duck, Lauren whispered for dark, when she woke in the first inklings of dawn. Bight, Lauren whispered for bright, when her mother switched on the lamp by her crib. Her little face opening like a flower when she found the names for things.

  “That’s right, Lauren. It was duck and now it’s bight,” her mother told her. This was the best time of day, at dawn, before Pat woke, when Jane and Lauren could share secrets about their world and decide, just the two of them, how to name everything in it.

  Marie’s friends complained about the early starts, the relentless menial labor that multiplied with two and then three children. Pretty much everyone was stopping at three these days. “You’ve only got the one,” they would say. “Just wait—you’ll see.”

  They complained about having to read the same books aloud over and over. For Jane, who could recite The Snowy Day and The Story of Ferdinand and Goodnight Moon by heart, extreme repetition had granted these stories the calming, incantatory quality of the prayers that she no longer felt compelled to say. “Where mouse go?” Lauren asked on every page of Goodnight Moon, and Jane intoned the rodent’s Stations of the Cross with a lowing reverence. Mouse on the mantelpiece. Mouse on the drying rack. Mouse near the fire.

  “Where mouse go?” Lauren asked when the book was closed, and Jane was happy to begin again.

  When Pat was sweet, he was so sweet. But even in the midst of the sweetness, there was the foreshadowing, the menace of when he would not be sweet. The two Pats were always in the room with Jane and Lauren.

  The first time Jane thought about running away was the night he snapped a garbage bag in her face when she was holding Lauren, whipping it like a suburban matador as he harangued her about—what? What was it? How could she forget? Something about the cat food, or the cat litter, or the cat. Jane laughed, out of nerves. He crowded her against a wall of the kitchen for laughing and then he taunted her for cowering. He shouted until the baby began to cry—a frightened, staccato cry that Jane had not heard before—and he taunted Jane for letting the baby cry. Lauren had just started holding up her head on her own.

  “I will leave you,” Jane told Pat. “I will take the baby, and I will get a divorce.”

  “You would never,” he said.

  A Saturday in summer, not long after Lauren had started crawling. Jane sensed the stink of incipient anger on Pat as the three of them finished lunch. Proximity to him was da
ngerous, but packing Lauren into the car for a “shopping run” might be seen as a rebuke. She took Lauren into the backyard with a pitcher of lemonade and a blanket: a storybook scene she hoped Pat might see from the kitchen window, a scene that might calm him, a young mother and her gorgeous baby girl lounging in the low summer sun, discussing the grass, exploring the clouds. He could watch from his house and savor the privilege of what he owned. There was a sinful vanity in this little scheme, the same vanity that poked at the corners of Jane’s lips whenever a stranger mistook her for Lauren’s big sister. But still: she would set a scene that belonged to Pat, awaiting his benediction.

  Jane wondered if her father had ever menaced her mother like this, if his blandness ever turned like Pat’s sweetness did. If there was a precedent, if this was normal.

  When it was time for Lauren’s nap, Jane lifted her off the grass, cuddled in the blanket, to carry her inside. She turned the knob of the back door and, curiously, found it locked; with Lauren on her hip, she walked around to the front of the house to find that door locked, too. She knocked on the door intermittently for an hour, tapped at windows, and otherwise sat on the stone stoop, drowsy Lauren slumped on her lap, thumb in her mouth, Jane hunched over to shield her from the afternoon sun. The glare her mother had warned about.

  When Pat finally opened the front door, he wore a mask of contemptuous disbelief.

  “Why are you out here?” he yelled. Lauren rubbing her cheek against Jane’s neck.

  The best thing was to enter the house as quietly as possible, put the baby to bed, wait for the menace to dissipate. There was nothing she could say or do to make it better. She was the cause and she would be the effect.

  Don’t say a word don’t react don’t say a word don’t—