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Iona ducked past her and ran up the stairs. Now she’s screaming. Dead. Dead. Murderer.
She knows nothing about the pills. So why does she scream “Murderer”? It’s the blanket. She sees the blanket pulled up right over my head. Suffocation. Not poison. It has not taken her any time, not half a second, to get from “dead” to “murderer.” It’s an immediate flying leap. She grabs me from the crib, with the death blanket twisted round me, and holding the blanketed bundle squeezed against her body she runs screaming out of the room and into Jill’s room.
Jill is struggling up, dopily, after twelve or thirteen hours of sleep.
“You’ve killed my baby,” Iona is screaming at her.
Jill doesn’t correct her-she doesn’t say, Mine. Iona holds me out accusingly to show me to Jill, but before Jill can get any kind of a look at me I have been snatched back. Iona groans and doubles up as if she’s been shot in the stomach. Still holding on to me she stumbles down the stairs, bumping into Ailsa who is on her way up. Ailsa is almost knocked off her feet; she hangs on to the banister and Iona takes no notice; she seems to be trying to squeeze the bundle of me into a new terrifying hole in the middle of her body. Words come out of her between fresh groans of recognition.
Baby. Love my. Darling. Ooh. Oh. Get the. Suffocated. Blanket. Baby. Police.
Jill has slept with no covers over her and without changing into a nightdress. She is still in yesterday’s shorts and halter, and she’s not sure if she’s waking from a night’s sleep or a nap. She isn’t sure where she is or what day it is. And what did Iona say? Groping her way up out of a vat of warm wool, Jill sees rather than hears Iona’s cries, and they’re like red flashes, hot veins in the inside of her eyelids. She clings to the luxury of not having to understand, but then she knows she has understood. She knows it’s about me.
But Jill thinks that Iona has made a mistake. Iona has got into the wrong part of the dream. That part is all over.
The baby is all right. Jill took care of the baby. She went out and found the baby and covered it up. All right.
In the downstairs hall, Iona makes an effort and shouts some words all together. “She pulled the blanket all the way over its head, she smothered it.”
Ailsa comes downstairs hanging on to the banister.
“Put it down,” she says. “Put it down.”
Iona squeezes me and groans. Then she holds me out to Ailsa and says, “Look. Look.”
Ailsa whips her head aside. “I won’t,” she says. “I won’t look.” Iona comes close to push me into her face-I am still all wrapped up in my blanket, but Ailsa doesn’t know that and Iona doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
Now it’s Ailsa screaming. She runs to the other side of the dining-room table screaming, “Put it down. Put it down. I’m not going to look at a corpse.”
Mrs. Kirkham comes in from the kitchen, saying, “Girls. Oh, girls. What’s the trouble between you? I can’t have this, you know.”
“Look,” says Iona, forgetting Ailsa and coming around the table to show me to her mother.
Ailsa gets to the hall phone and gives the operator Dr. Shantz’s number.
“Oh, a baby,” says Mrs. Kirkham, twitching the blanket aside. “She smothered it,” Iona says. “Oh, no,” says Mrs. Kirkham.
Ailsa is talking to Dr. Shantz on the phone, telling him in a shaky voice to get over here at once. She turns from the phone and looks at Iona, gulps to steady herself, and says, “Now you. You pipe down.”
Iona gives a high-pitched defiant yelp and runs away from her, across the hall into the living room. She is still hanging on to me. Jill has come to the top of the stairs. Ailsa spots her. She says, “Come on down here.”
She has no idea what she’s going to do to Jill, or say to her, once she gets her down. She looks as if she wants to slap her. “It’s no good now getting hysterical,” she says.
Jill’s halter is twisted partway round so that most of one breast has got loose.
“Fix yourself up,” says Ailsa. “Did you sleep in your clothes? You look drunk.”
Jill seems to herself to be walking still in the snowy light of her dream. But the dream has been invaded by these frantic people.
Ailsa is able to think now about some things that have to be done. Whatever has happened, there has got to be no question of such a thing as a murder. Babies do die, for no reason, in their sleep. She has heard of that. No question of the police. No autopsy-a sad quiet little funeral. The obstacle to this is Iona. Dr. Shantz can give Iona a needle now; the needle will put her to sleep. But he can’t go on giving her a needle every day.
The thing is to get Iona into Morrisville. This is the Hospital for the Insane, which used to be called the Asylum and in the future will be called the Psychiatric Hospital, then the Mental Health Unit. But most people just call it Morrisville, after the village nearby.
Going to Morrisville, they say. They took her off to Morrisville. Carry on like that and you’re going to end up in Morrisville.
Iona has been there before and she can go there again. Dr. Shantz can get her in and keep her in until it’s judged she’s ready to come out. Affected by the baby’s death. Delusions. Once that is established she won’t pose a threat. Nobody will pay any attention to what she says. She will have had a breakdown. In fact it looks as if that may be the truth-it looks as if she might be halfway to a breakdown already, with that yelping and ru
For all this-which has gone through her 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 ru
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 all upset 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 ru