Rachel’s face had grown very white, but she had remained calm.

“He seems normal to me,” she said.

Louis nodded. “He does to me too. But I don’t want to ignore this, babe.”

“No, you mustn’t,” she said. “We mustn’t.”

Tardiff had measured Gage’s skull and frowned. Tardiff poked two fingers at Gage’s face, Three Stooges style. Gage flinched. Tardiff smiled. Louis’s heart thawed out a little. Tardiff gave Gage a ball to hold. Gage held it for a while and then dropped it.

Tardiff retrieved the ball and bounced it, watching Cage’s eyes. Gage’s eyes tracked the ball.

“I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’s hydrocephalic,” Tardiff said to Louis in his office later. “No-the odds may actually be a bit higher than that. If so, it’s mild. He seems very alert. The new shunt operation should take care of the problem easily… if there is a problem.”

“A shunt means brain surgery,” Louis said.

“Minor brain surgery.”

Louis had studied the process not long after he began to worry about the size of Gage’s head, and the shunt operation, designed to drain excess fluid, had not looked very minor to him. But he kept his mouth shut, telling himself just to be grateful the operation existed at all.

“Of course,” Tardiff went on, “there’s still a large possibility that your kid just has a real big head for a nine-month-old. I think a CAT-scan is the best place to start. Do you agree?”

Louis had agreed.

Gage spent a night in Our Sisters of Charity Hospital and underwent general anesthesia. His sleeping head was stuck into a gadget that looked like a giant clothes dryer. Rachel and Louis waited downstairs while Ellie spent the day at Grandma and Grandda’s, watching “Sesame Street” nonstop on Grandda’s new video recorder. For Louis, those had been long, gray hours in which he found himself totting up sums of varying ugliness and comparing results. Death under general anesthesia, death during a shunt operation, mild retardation as a result of hydrocephalus, cataclysmic retardation as a result of same, epilepsy, blindness.

… oh, there were all sorts of possibilities. For really complete disaster maps, Louis remembered thinking, see your local doctor.

Tardiff had come into the waiting room around five o’clock. He had three cigars.

He plugged one into Louis’s mouth, one into Rachel’s (she was too flabbergasted to protest), and one into his own.

“The kid is fine. No hydrocephalus.”

“Light this thing,” Rachel had said, weeping and laughing at the same time. “I’m going to smoke it till I puke.”

Grinning, Tardiff lit their cigars.

God was saving him for Route 15, Dr. Tardiff, Louis thought now.

“Rachel, if he had been hydrocephalic, and if the shunt hadn’t worked… could you have still loved him?”

“What a weird question, Louis!”

“Could you?”

“Yes, of course. I would have loved Gage no matter what.”

“Even if he was retarded?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have wanted him institutionalized?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “I suppose, with the money you’re making now, we could afford that… a really good place, I mean… but I think I’d want him with us if we could… Louis, why do you ask?”

“Why, I suppose I was still thinking of your sister Zelda,” he said. He was still astonished at this eerie glibness. “Wondering if you could have gone through that again.”

“It wouldn’t have been the same,” she said, sounding almost amused. “Gage was.

… well, Gage was Gage. He was our son. That would have made all the difference. It would have been hard, I guess, but… would you have wanted him in an institution? A place like Pineland?”

“Let’s go to sleep.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“I feel like I can sleep now,” she said. “I want to put this day behind me.”

“Amen to that,” Louis said.

A long time later she said drowsily, “You’re right, Louis… just dreams and vapors… “ “Sure,” he said, and kissed her earlobe. “Now sleep.”

It seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.

He did not sleep for a long time, and before he did, the curved bone of the moon looked in the window at him.

43

The following day was overcast but very warm, and Louis was sweating heavily by the time he had checked Rachel’s and Ellie’s baggage through and gotten their tickets out of the computer. He supposed just being able to keep busy was something of a gift, and he felt only a small, aching comparison to the last time he had put his family on a plane to Chicago, at Thanksgiving. Ellie seemed distant and a trifle odd. Several times that morning Louis had looked up and seen an expression of peculiar speculation on her face.

Conspirator’s complex working overtime, boyo, he told himself. She said nothing when told they were all going to Chicago, she and Mommy first, perhaps for the whole summer, and only went on eating her breakfast (Cocoa Bears). After breakfast she went silently upstairs and got into the dress and shoes Rachel had laid out for her. She had brought the picture of her pulling Gage on her sled to the airport with her, and she sat calmly in one of the plastic contour seats in the lower lobby while Louis stood in line for their tickets and the loudspeaker blared intelligence of arriving and departing flights.

Mr. and Mrs. Goldman showed up forty minutes before flight time. Irwin Goldman was natty (and apparently sweatless) in a cashmere topcoat in spite of the sixty-degree temperatures; he went over to the Avis desk to check his car in while Dory Goldman sat with Rachel and Effie.

Louis and Goldman joined the others at the same time. Louis was a bit afraid that there might be a reprise of the my son, my son playlet, but he was spared.

Goldman contented himself with a rather limp handshake and a muttered hello. The quick, embarrassed glance he afforded his son-in-law confirmed the certainty Louis had awakened with this morning: the man must have been drunk.

They went upstairs on the escalator and sat in the boarding lounge, not talking much. Dory Goldman thumbed nervously at her copy of an Erica Jong novel but did not open it. She kept glancing, a little nervously, at the picture Ellie was holding.

Louis asked his daughter if she would like to walk over to the bookstore with him and pick out something to read on the plane.

Ellie had been looking at him in that speculative way again. Louis didn’t like it. It made him nervous.

“Will you be good at Grandma and Grandda’s?” he asked her as they walked over.

“Yes,” she said. “Daddy, will the truant officer get me? Andy Pasioca says there’s a truant officer and he gets school skippers.”

“Don’t you worry about the truant officer,” he said. “I’ll take care of the school, and you can start again in the fall with no trouble.”

“I hope I’ll be okay in the fall,” Ellie said. “I never was in a grade before.

Only kindergarten. I don’t know what kids do in grades. Homework, probably.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Daddy, are you still pissed off at Grandda?”

He gaped at her. “Why in the world would you think I was that I didn’t like your grandda, Effie?”

She shrugged as if the topic held no particular interest for her. “When you talk about him, you always look pissed off.”

“Ellie, that’s vulgar.”

“Sorry.”

She gave him that strange, fey look and then drifted off to look at the racks of kid books-Mercer Meyer and Maurice Sendak and Richard Scarry and Beatrix Potter and that famous old standby, Dr. Seuss. How do they find this stuff out? Or do they just know? How much does Ellie know? How’s it affecting her? Ellie, what’s behind that pale little face? Pissed off at him-Christ!

“Can I have these, Daddy?” She was holding out a Dr. Seuss and a book Louis hadn’t seen since his own childhood-the story of Little Black Sambo and how the tigers had gotten his clothes one fine day.