Sondra heaved the dirty water from the bucket, and it arced out across the living room to drench the priest, Mrs. Ruddle, and the still unbaptized, still nameless child, which now began its usual caterwauling. The priest stood his ground a while, glaring in speechless rage at Sondra, so aghast at the sacrilege against his own person that he quite forgot to continue with the rigmarole of the baptism. Mrs. Ruddle, with less resources of self-confidence, retreated, the child in her arms, to the safety of the bedroom.
“I baptize thee,” she said with satisfaction, placing the empty bucket on the floor and kicking it, football-style, in the direction of the priest. Then, feeling inspired, she added, “In the name of the Mother!”
“I could have you charged. For assault and battery!”
Beads of water were rolling down the black fabric of his jacket, and a bit of wet scuzz had glued itself, neat as a postage stamp, to the square of white collar beneath his chin.
“I asked you to leave, you wouldn’t leave, I was defending my property—and my child. And if you don’t leave right now, I will call the police.”
He considered this a moment, then his face shifted gears. “God forgive you, Mrs. Winckelmeyer. God forgive you.” Having secured the moral high ground, he retreated to the foyer and began to put on his coat, but a regard for its silk lining decided him, instead, to carry it off draped over his arm. He hesitated in the doorway, as though he were forgetting something, and Sondra had the final satisfaction of slamming the door in his face.
Only when his car, a black Audi 5000, was out of sight, did Sondra notice what it was that he’d forgotten. While he was dealing with his topcoat, he’d placed the silver flask of holy water beside the decorative lighter on the whatnot, and there it remained. She picked it up and sniffed at the contents, but the holy water did not have a distinctive smell. The screw-on cap, connected to the spout by a chain of delicate links, clinked dully against the silvered sides of the flask. She looked at her face in its distorting mirror. Her forehead bulged. Her eyes warped out of symmetry. She bared her teeth in a beauty contest smile and tilted the flask to exaggerate the effect of fangy ferociousness. Now she looked the true mother of her monster child. Now…
But she didn’t have to think what she would do now. She could simply do it, the way she’d flung the water at the priest. She could still feel, in her arms and deep within the muscles of her back, the satisfaction of that act, a tingling and aliveness as though she’d just had a good swim.
She capped the flask and snugged it into the back pocket of her jeans. She returned the plastic bucket to its place beneath the kitchen drain. There was nothing that could be done for the stains the water had made on the white carpet, but it was overdue for a shampooing in any case. She went to the bedroom and knocked at the door.
Inside, the baby started to cry, and Mrs. Ruddle emitted a quavering “Yes?”
“Mrs. Ruddle, I have to know if it was you who arranged for that priest to come here.”
Mrs. Ruddle didn’t at once reply. The baby left off its howling as though sensing that its own fate was at stake. Sondra had begun to feel a strange compassion for it. Not love in the usual sense, and certainly not “motherly” love. More what one might feel for a character in a movie—a foreign movie, in another language, filmed in black and white.
“Mrs. Ruddle?”
Mrs. Ruddle opened the door. She had put on her quilted anorak and a winter cap with furry earflaps, and was carrying her purse and a plastic shopping bag brimming with paperbacks, knitting, crossword puzzle magazines, and the other paraphernalia of someone who is paid to sit alone and be bored for days on end.
“I’m not sorry,” she said, looking up at Sondra defiantly. “I did what my conscience told me to do. I wouldn’t treat an animal the way you treat that poor child. You won’t even let it have the dignity of a name of its own. Even a dog has a name!”
“I don’t intend to argue with you, Mrs. Ruddle.”
Mrs. Ruddle pushed past Sondra and stalked down the gallery and across the living room to the foyer. Sondra felt a real regret that she couldn’t thank the woman for having anticipated her dismissal and for offering no protest or resistance. She had been expecting to have to make a scene. Instead, Mrs. Ruddle was practically ice-skating out of the house. It was too bad she could not offer her a kind word of parting, some token of her appreciation, but to adopt a tone of understanding or appeasement now might delay or even prevent her setting off.
The front door slammed.
Sondra went over to the crib. The child—she had begun to think of it as a child, and that seemed ominous, a sign of relenting, she could not delay any longer doing what had to be done—the child was staring at her with its bug eyes, its deformed fist pressed against its lipless mouth. It was silent, as though it knew it was in danger.
She tried to think what to use. A pillow from the bed would be too unwieldy. The comforter! The comforter Mrs. Ruddle had knitted from her endless skein of pink yarn and that hung now on the back of the slat-backed chair at the head of the crib. She took the comforter’s satin-bound hem in her hand and pulled it free from the chair. It could not have weighed more than a pound. Had there ever been an unlikelier murder weapon?
There really was nothing else to be done. The thing showed no sign of sickening. It might live on for years, in constant pain itself and making a nightmare of everyone else’s life. You could see what it had done to Madge Michaels to be burdened with her bed-bound vegetable of a son, and Ned was no monster. But this one, if it lived… Always, before that “if,” Sondra averted her imagination, as she averted her eyes whenever she saw its face.
She draped the comforter over the headboard of the crib and from her back pocket took the flask of holy water. Now that she’d finally resolved to kill the child, she was willing to concede that it was, legally, theologically, human. She would baptize it herself, and if there was a heaven that only the baptized had access to, then it would arrive ticket in hand. She trickled the holy water over its head and recited the simple formula she’d not allowed the priest to complete: “I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” Then she took the pink comforter, folded it to a fourfold thickness, pressed it to the child’s face, and held it in place firmly till the feeble flailings of its arms and legs had ceased and it had stopped breathing.
After all the weeks of agonizing, how easy it had been. As though death were a sunlit room that one entered by a door that said KEEP OUT. You only had to ignore the sign and enter. She felt a hesitant confidence, like the first time she’d driven a car after two months of drivers’ training classes—more a hope than a confidence, a hope that suicide would be no more difficult than murder. She located the bottle of sleeping pills, still nearly full, at the back of the drawer of the bedside table. She took five of them at once, using the holy water remaining in the flask to wash them down. Then she remembered her doctor’s warning never to take alcohol and the Tuinal at the same time, since the combination was a recipe for instant oblivion. She didn’t want to leave the bedroom: the corpse in the crib lent the room a steadying sense of peace and finality that she would not find elsewhere in the house. But it wouldn’t do to put off getting the liquor, she might fall asleep—merely asleep—if she didn’t act at once.
The sideboard that served as a liquor cabinet had been substantially depleted in the past few weeks. She and Ben had both been drinking heavily, and neither had bothered to restock it. She had a choice of sherry, crème de menthe, vermouth, a Christian Brothers brandy, and tequila. The brandy seemed least vomit-making, and the fact that it had been a present from one of her own poor relations, an uncle visiting the Twin Cities for a family funeral, gave it a spice of poetic justice. She poured some into a snifter, added the last of the holy water to take away the worst of the sting, and washed down another ten tablets. Then she refilled the snifter and considered whether to return to the bedroom or to remain in the living room, which seemed, now that she was here, the
most suitable part of the house to die, with its oversize, waiting-room-style furniture, its chilly colors, its stripped-bare anonymity. What a comment it was on their life. She slumped down on the sectional and stared up at the nubbly stucco of the ceiling. She could feel the first wave of wooziness dimming her thoughts. It was a surprisingly pleasant sensation.
She’d always wondered what it would be like to die. Everyone must. You hoped it wouldn’t be too painful or go on too long. She’d thought a sudden violent accident might be best. The way Henry had died. She’d almost envied him the ease of it. Cancer must be the worst. Crabs eating you up from inside. Horrible.
She took another sip of the brandy and felt some delicate digestive balance tipping from well-being to queasiness. She must avoid throwing up. If she botched her suicide, she would almost certainly end up in prison for murdering the baby. She couldn’t expect a jury to be sympathetic. People said suicide was a way of cheating death, but she’d always been a cheater, she didn’t mind that. She’d cheated on Henry, and it hadn’t bothered her at all. If she hadn’t cheated on Ben, it was only because she hadn’t been tempted to. Her life had been comfortable, she was lazy. One day just followed the next. Problem-free, no complaints. But characterless, like this room.
She decided that, after all, she’d rather die in the bedroom and placed the snifter, carefully, on the coffee table, beside the blue-and-white glass ashtray. Getting to her feet took all the concentration she could muster, walking was next to impossible. Her body seemed to want to tip forward from her hips. The white carpet stretched out in front of her like the sands of some vast desert. The light had become much too bright. She had a nagging sense of having left something important undone, and as she reached the bedroom door, she remembered that she’d not said “Amen” at the end of the baptism. Would it work without the “Amen”? Was it too late to add it now? Her hand was on the doorknob, but she wasn’t able to twist it round so that the door would open. She began to tip forward at her hips and this time she couldn’t keep from falling forward. As she lay on the carpet, she tried to whisper the “Amen” of the baptism, but not even her lips and tongue would do what she asked now. It didn’t matter, really. God couldn’t be as stupid as all that. She closed her eyes and yielded, gratefully, to the ease and comfort of her death.
53
Ben asked Mrs. Ruddle to wait in the car until he’d had a chance to talk to Sondra and be certain she’d calmed down. Mrs. Ruddle was herself in such a state of fretfulness that, though normally taciturn and unforthcoming, she had already twice recounted the tale of Father Youngermann’s visit and his abortive attempt to baptize “the poor child.” One moment she would be effusively apologetic for having contacted the priest, the next she would be fuming at Sondra for having emptied the bucket of water on the priest. “I was soaked through myself, but that’s no matter. I don’t blame her: she was so upset she didn’t know what she was doing. But a priest, to do that to a priest!”
Mrs. Ruddle’s two declared objects in returning home with Ben were to offer an apology to Sondra (and try to get her job back) and (if the apology failed of its desired effect) to retrieve various of her possessions that she’d forgotten in the excitement of her first leave-taking: an umbrella, overshoes, a box of decaffeinated tea bags, and a hand-knitted comforter she’d left by the baby’s crib. “And what’s going to happen to that poor child without me there I’m sure I don’t know!”
Ben had managed to keep the lid on his own temper through Mrs. Ruddle’s nonstop monologue, though the cumulative effect of it was almost as maddening as being kept awake by the baby’s screams. She had arrived at his office in midafternoon and refused to take Mrs. O’Meara’s hint that he was in a meeting. She’d simply outwaited him until, at four o’clock, he’d agreed to see her, and the long whine began. Listening to Mrs. Ruddle carry on was like hearing the baby’s strident, nonnegotiable demands rescored for an adult voice. No wonder Sondra had finally cracked under the strain of having to contend every day with the pair of them, the baby and its nurse. By the time they had got back to Willowville, Ben was inclined to think that of the two, Mrs. Ruddle was the worse.
Though it was after sunset, there wasn’t a light on in the house, not even the flicker of a TV screen. But that only meant (Ben supposed) that Sondra was taking a nap, and that the kids had stayed late after school. “Sondra?” he called out, as he went round the living room from lamp to wall switch, turning on the lights. There was an almost empty snifter on the coffee table, standing in a puddle of spilled brandy. “Sondra?” he repeated, raising his voice. He looked into his office, where she would sometimes nap on the leather sofa in order to be away from the baby, but there was no sign of her there, or in his bedroom.
Even when he found her sprawled in the hallway outside the door to her own bedroom, his first assumption (remembering the snifter) was that she was drunk, and when he stooped to lift her up and carry her to bed, it was with a smile of commiseration and indulgence. Only as he entered the room with the weight of her in his arms did he realize, from the utter limpness of her neck and arms, that this was not drunkenness but death. He placed her on the floor so as to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, though he knew from the coldness of her hands and feet that it was too late. Then, as he drew the first breath that he meant to force into her stilled lungs, the thing in the crib began to cry. Just a feeble whimper at first. Then a second cry, louder, but with a catch in it, as though it were having some mechanical difficulty.
Even before he’d looked into the crib and seen the folded comforter still covering the child’s nasty little face, Ben understood what had happened. Sondra had thought she’d put the thing out of its misery and then, unable to bear the guilt of her action, had committed suicide. But the guilt was his. He’d known for weeks what he ought to have done. He should have murdered the brat himself, not left it to his wife. Infanticide is a man’s job, and he could have done it with as little qualms of conscience as Herod himself. It was only the fear of being suspected and brought to trial that had stopped him. And now Sondra was dead and the little fucker was still alive and ready to continue the long scream of its existence.
No. He would not allow Sondra’s death to have been nothing but a bad joke. He lifted the screaming infant by its throat—and squeezed. The grotesque face turned cherry red, and its tongue protruded from the doubly deformed mouth. He shook its carcass until he felt something snap and then, resisting the urge to hurl it for good measure against the wall, he dropped it into the crib, wishing that the crib were a bottomless pit, an incinerator, a grave. He hadn’t realized, until his hand had been about its neck, the depth of his hatred for the thing. Sondra’s suicide seemed more comprehensible now. She must have felt the same satisfaction in the thought of its death. Instead of remorse or guilt or some more morally appropriate response. Instead, this obscene elation. This pride, as though he’d defeated some enemy in single combat! What a cesspool the human heart is. Or, as someone famous had said, probably Shakespeare in one of his plays, “What a piece of shit is man.”
He replaced the comforter on the baby’s face. Again he took up Sondra’s body (it had seemed light before, now it was almost beyond his strength) and carried her from the room.
Despite his having told her to stay in the car, Mrs. Ruddle had come into the house. William and Judith were with her. At the first sight of Sondra’s body in her husband’s arms, Mrs. Ruddle became officiously professional, ordering Ben to place the body on the sectional for her to look at, ordering William to phone the hospital.
“I am taking her to the hospital myself,” Ben insisted. “That will be faster than waiting for an ambulance. William, would you open the door for me?”
“The baby,” Judith said. “How is the baby?”
“The baby’s dead.”
“No,” Mrs. Ruddle insisted, with calm nursey authority, “that can’t be.”
“Don’t you understand?” He glared at the nurse, trying to assert his own authority
. “Sondra killed the baby, and then she killed herself.”
“No, the baby’s still alive. I heard him just moments after we came in the door. He was crying, and then he stopped, suddenly. We all heard it.” She turned to William. “Didn’t we?”
William shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“You must have mistaken what you heard, Mrs. Ruddle. The child is dead. See for yourself. But there might still be hope for Sondra. I must get her to a hospital.” In fact he was desperate to get out of the house and away from Mrs. Ruddle.
William went to the front door and held it open.
Mrs. Ruddle grasped Judith by the arm. “You heard the baby crying. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
Judith looked at her father, and looked away. She needed no further explanation. She understood everything that had happened.
She nodded her head. “Yes, I heard the baby crying.”
Mrs. Ruddle tightened her crimsoned lips in a grimace of triumph and went to the telephone. She dialed 911, and when the operator came on the line she asked for the police.
Ben lowered Sondra’s corpse to the sectional. He looked at Judith. Judith looked down at the stain on the carpet. William, in the foyer, closed the door.
From this point it all seemed inevitable: the arraignment, the indictment, the trial. And the verdict. Ben Winckelmeyer had killed his nameless infant son. That had been established. The only question that remained was whether he’d be allowed to plea-bargain down from a charge of murder in the first degree.
With chagrin for his own stupidity, and admiration for her own larger courage, Ben kissed his wife and waited for the police.
54
So far, two weeks into the month, April had not represented much of an improvement on March. The streets had stopped being slushy, and most lawns had progressed from tawny to green, but the weather was weather that only a garden could love, with one gray day after another, and the temperature seldom rising into the fifties. The last two weekends had been cold and drizzly, and now on the first day of Easter vacation there was a steady, coat-sopping rain that had been coming down since early morning. He ached to be away from the house, where he felt as much a prisoner of his bedroom as if he were Ned. The Obstschmecker house no longer registered as a great mansion the way it had when he was a kid. He missed the wide-open, unpartitioned arrangement of the Winckelmeyer ranch house. This place was like the house for small mammals at the Como Zoo, a honeycomb of separate little burrows, each generating its own peculiar smell, which mingled into a single overwhelming mammalian stench. Theoretically after you’ve lived with any smell long enough, you’re supposed to get acclimatized to it so that it becomes as undetectable as your own bad breath, but William had been back here for two months already and every time he came in the house he recoiled at the amalgamated smells of Ned’s bedside diaper pail, woodrot, burnt milk, ashtrays, in pungent and varied association with the twice-daily mistings of Grandma O.’s favorite pine-scented air freshener.
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 32