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Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany… Well, a new President was due to enter the White House, the end of Prohibition looked certain, and springtime in these parts is as lovely as our autumn.
I sought the waiting room. Thomas Havig climbed to his feet. He was not a demonstrative man, but the question trembled on his lips. I took his hand and beamed. “Congratulations, Tom,” I said. “You’re the father of a bouncing baby boy. I know-I just dribbled him all the way down the hall to the nursery.”
My attempt at a joke came back to me several months afterward.
Senlac is a commercial center for an agricultural area; it maintains some light industry, and that’s about the list. Having no real choice in the matter, I was a Rotarian, but found excuses to minimize my activity and stay out of the lodges. Don’t get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They’re the salt of the earth. It’s simply that I want other condiments too.
Under such circumstances, Kate’s and my friends tended to be few but close. There was her banker father, who’d staked me; I used to kid him that he’d done so because he wanted a Democrat to argue with. There was the lady who ran our public library. There were three or four professors and their wives at Holberg College, though the forty miles between us and them was considered rather an obstacle in those days. And there were the Havigs.
These were transplanted New Englanders, always a bit homesick; but in the ’30’s you took what jobs were to be had. He taught physics and chemistry at our high school. In addition, he must coach for track. Slim, sharp-featured, the shyness of youth upon him as well as an inborn reserve, Tom got through his secondary chore mainly on student tolerance. They were fond of him; besides, we had a good football team. Eleanor was darker, vivacious, an avid te
“At least it lets Tom and me feel we aren’t altogether hypocrites. You may’ve guessed we only belong because the school board would never keep on a teacher who didn’t.”
I was surprised at the near hysteria in her voice when she phoned my office and begged me to come.
A doctor’s headquarters were different then from today, especially in a provincial town. I’d converted two front rooms of the big old house where we lived, one for interviews, one for examination and treatments, including minor surgery. I was my own receptionist and secretary. Kate helped with paperwork-looking back from now, it seems impossibly little, but perhaps she never let on-and, what few times patients must wait their turns, she entertained them in the parlor. I’d made my morning rounds, and nobody was due for a while; I could jump straight into the Marmon and drive down Union Street to Elm.
I remember the day was furnace hot, never a cloud above or a breath below, the trees along my way standing like cast green iron. Dogs and children panted in their shade. No birdsong broke the growl of my car engine. Dread closed on me. Eleanor had cried her Joh
But when I entered the fan-whirring venetian-blinded dimness of her home, she embraced me and shivered. “Am I going crazy, Bob?” she gasped, over and over. “Tell me I’m not going crazy!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I murmured. “Have you called Tom?” He eked out his meager pay with a summer job, quality control at the creamery.
“No, I… I thought—”
“Sit down, Ellie.” I disengaged us. “You look sane enough to me. Maybe you’ve let the heat get you. Relax — flop loose — unclench your teeth, roll your head around. Feel better? Okay, now tell me what you think happened.”
“Joh
“Huh? Whoa, I said, Ellie. Let’s take this a piece at a time.” Her eyes pleaded while she stumbled through the story. “I, I, I was bathing him when I heard a baby scream. I thought that must be from a buggy or something, outside. But it sounded as if it came from the… the bedroom. At last I wrapped Joh
“What about the strange baby?” I demanded.
“He’s… not gone… I think.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go see.”
And in the room, immensely relieved, I crowed: “Why, nobody here but good ol’ John.”
She clutched my arm. “He looks the same.” The infant had calmed and was gurgling. “He sounds the same. Except he can’t be!”
“The dickens he can’t. Ellie, you had a hallucination. No great surprise in this weather, when you’re still weak.” Actually, I’d never encountered such a case before, certainly not in a woman as levelheaded as she. But my words were not too implausible. Besides, half a GP’s medical kit is his confident tone of voice.
She wasn’t fully reassured till we got the birth certificate and compared the prints of fingers and feet thereon with the child’s. I prescribed a tonic, jollied her over a cup of coffee, and returned to work.
When nothing similar happened for a while, I pretty well forgot the incident. That was the year when the only daughter Kate and I would ever have caught pneumonia and died, soon after her second birthday.
Joh
“We’ve got to keep a closer eye on him,” she declared. “You don’t realize how often he disappears. Oh, sure, a game for him, hide-and-seek in the shrubbery or the basement or wherever. Grand sport, listening to Mommy hunt up the close and down the stair, hollering. Someday, though, he’ll find his way past the picket fence and—” Her fingers drew into fists. “He could get run over.”
The crisis came when he was four. By then he understood that vanishings meant spankings, and had stopped (as far as his parents knew. They didn’t see what went on in his room). But one summer morning he was not in his bed, and he was not to be found, and every policeman and most of the neighborhood were out in search.
At midnight the doorbell rang. Eleanor was asleep, after I had commanded her to take a pill. Tom sat awake, alone. He dropped his cigarette-the scorch mark in the rug would long remind him of his agony-and knocked over a chair on his way to the front entrance.
A man stood on the porch. He wore a topcoat and shadowing hat which turned him featureless. Not that that made any difference. Tom’s whole being torrented over the boy who held the man by the hand.
“Good evening, sir,” said a pleasant voice. “I believe you’re looking for this young gentleman?”
And, when Tom knelt to seize his son, hold him, weep and try to babble thanks, the man departed.
“Fu