speech patterns. The dreams were a substitute—a temporary substitute—for language development. Besides, Jeannette was supposed to keep in mind that he was not yet two, and that he was probably still adjusting to his transfer from a Spanish- to an English-speaking culture, and that in every other respect he seemed to be completely normal. The doctors, of course, had never had to confront the spectacle of his jiggling eyeballs and pulsing whites at one o’clock in the morning. They did not have to square this upsetting image of the child with their picture of the quick, active, curious kid scooting about their dispensary. Nor did they have to worry very much about the enigma of his first eight or nine months.
“What’s the matter, Jeanie?”
She turned and saw Hugo in the doorway, his boxer shorts ballooned about his hips and another cigarette burning in his fingers. “He’s doing it again,” she told him.
“It’s okay. He always stops.”
“I don’t like it.” She gripped the edge of the crib. “I can’t stand it, in fact. It scares the hell out of me.”
“He’s dreamin’. The doctors have told you. Why do you get so”—he gestured with the cigarette—“so histérica?”
“Because I’m a mother!” Anna stirred in her bed and, whispering, Jeannette asked, “What the hell does he have to dream about? And why do his eyes have to come open like that?”
“Maybe he’s not really asleep, eh? Maybe he likes to watch you get riled up like this.”
“Tell me, for God’s sake, what he’s dreaming about.”
“Puppy dogs, and ridin’ in his stroller, and eatin’ ice cream. Who knows, Jeanie, who knows?”
“It’s none of those things.”
“What do you want me to say, then? He’s dreamin’ of his real mother, of España and poverty? You like that better?”
“I don’t like any of this.” She began to cry.
Hugo, his cigarette between his lips movie-gangster fashion, came into the room and embraced her. “It’s all right, Jeanie. We can wake him up if you want to.”
“No. I won’t do that. Let him dream.”
It hurt her to watch him, though. The real John-John—the lower hemispheres of his eyeballs fluttering, his delicate fingers spastically grasping air—seemed miles and miles away, trapped in an eddy of experience forever beyond her knowledge or comprehension. At such times he was utterly lost to Jeannette, and she wanted to be closer, closer, closer. His dreaming was a barrier to closeness, the dream-racked body he left behind an accusation and a taunt.
Finally, averting her eyes from the child, Jeannette permitted Hugo to lead her back to bed.
* * *
The next day she took John-John for a walk through several old neighborhoods to Anna’s elementary school, where the girl was a first-grader. The playground here was a sloping gravel lot, sparsely tufted with grass and cockleburs, enclosed on three sides by a hurricane fence and on the east by the school itself. They left the stroller at home now, and John-John, so eager was he to see the children at recess, trotted the whole last block. Bundled in a nylon parka and a pair of blue corduroy pants, he reminded Jeannette of a penguin sashaying across an ice field. No ice, though; just thousands upon thousands of crinkly fallen leaves. These whirled around him as he ran.
They reached the softball backstop and the solitary set of bleachers at the west end of the playground. John-John waddled to the fence just as a fourth- or fifth-grade boy came running up to retrieve a foul tip, and Jeannette sat down on the first bleacher level.
“Hi,” the boy said, speaking over John-John’s head to Jeannette. “He’s cute. What’s his name?”
Jeannette told him. Almost a year after Kennedy’s assassination, in the middle of Kansas, her son’s name had no special significance for the boy.
“Is he yours?”
“Mine and my husband’s. He’s Anna Monegal’s little brother. Do you know Anna?”
“No.” The boy let John-John hold the softball through the fence. When John-John dropped it, the boy picked it up and returned it to his hands. “You like this softball, fella? Do you? One of these days you’ll be some player, I bet.”
John-John pinned the ball against the other side of the backstop.
“Don’t he talk yet?” The boy’s teammates were demanding that he return the ball, but he ignored them. When Jeannette confessed that John-John had not begun to talk yet, he said, “You talk to him, don’t you?”
“All the time.”
“Do you read to him, too? Read aloud, I mean.”
Who was this kid, anyway? The Grand Inquisitor? “He’s a little young for that yet.