·PULL DOWN VANITYI
463
something wrong; but I could not think what in my weariness and the
unbroken heat.
"Here!" Judith said into the embarrassed silence that followed.
"Hold her! She's so cute! I want her to like you. I want her to marry
someone like you. I want her to be happy."
I took the baby into my arms awkwardly, and she began to cry,
pushing at me furiously with her tiny hands. "She doesn't like me," I
said, a little mournfully.
"She's upset, poor thing. She's been teething. Oh,
Milton!"
Judith
flung her arms around my neck, resting her head, under its golden
burden of hair, against my right shoulder, while the baby squirmed un–
comfortably against my other. I had not known infants were so heavy.
"Tell me the truth, darling. When you didn't-when you couldn't–
I mean in bed, when you-
It
was
really
your wife, wasn't it?" Her
refusal to call my impotence by its proper name irked me. "I mean, it
wasn't that I didn't attract you, that you didn't
like
me at all?
It
was
your wife!"
"I don't have a wife," I cried in my impatience to be through with
all lies. It seemed to me that even yet, at the very last moment, every–
thing might be saved. "The one I had until three months ago, I hate,
do you understand,
hate!
And I don't have seven children. I don't have
any children! It was all a stupid joke!" I thrust the baby back at her
for emphasis, and she folded it, screaming in terror now, into her arms.
"Oh, darling," she moaned, "what's the matter with me, what's the
matter? First Hank and then you! I'm young, I'm pretty. What do I
do
to people?" How much she believed of what I had told her was not
clear; but she knew certainly that I wanted to hurt her. "You hate me,
too. Don't deny it! You and Hank sneaking off together. What's the
matter with me?"
Her eyes widened dreadfully, not in fury but in fear, the insides of
them going to pieces, the centers sucked down into some interior vortex
of wetness and dark; and her fingers plucked senselessly at the folds of
her skirt. "I hate myself! I don't want to live! I don't want to live, do
you understand me? I hate myself, and oh, I'm scared, Milton, I'm
scared!"
She clutched me again, the sobbing baby between us unnoticed,
even Hank forgotten, though we were standing now between his limp
legs; and he turned slightly, moaning a little, as if her cries had reached
him. I could feel her uncontrollable trembling against me, her whole
body like the frantic nerve that throbs inexorably in arm or thigh. "I
don't know what's happening. I've never been so scared. Why am
I
so
scared!"
