he is most sensitive to the threat the infant is trying to warn them of. Some shadow invisible to their better-formed senses seems to grab Rebecca as soon as she is left alone. Rabbit puts her down, tiptoes into the living-room; they hold their breath. Then, with a bitter scratch, the membrane of silence breaks, and the wobbly moan begins again, Nnnh, A-nnnnnih!
“Oh my God,” Rabbit says. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”
Around five in the afternoon, Janice begins to cry. Tears burble down her dark pinched face. “I’m dry,” she says. “I’m dry. I just don’t have anything to feed her.” The baby has been at her breasts repeatedly.
“Forget it,” he says. “She’ll conk out. Have a drink. There’s some old whisky in the kitchen.”
“Say; what is this Have a drink routine of yours? I’ve been trying not to drink. I thought you didn’t like me to drink. All afternoon you’ve been smoking one cigarette after another and saying, ‘Have a drink. Have a drink.’ ”
“I thought it might loosen you up. You’re tense as hell.”
“I’m no tenser than you are. What’s eating you? What’s on your mind?”
“What’s happened to your milk? Why can’t you give the kid enough milk?”
“I’ve fed her three times in four hours. There’s nothing there any more.” In a plain, impoverished gesture, she presses her breasts through her dress.
“Well have a drink of something.”
“Say what did they tell you at church? ‘Go on home and get your wife soused’? You have a drink if that’s on your mind.”
“I don’t need a drink.”
“Well you need something. You’re the one’s upsetting Becky. She was fine all morning until you came home.”
“Forget it. Just forget it. Just forget the whole stinking thing.
“Baby cry!”
Janice puts her arm around Nelson. “I know it honey. She’s hot. She’ll stop in a minute.”
“Baby hot?”
They listen for a minute and it does not stop; the wild feeble warning, broken by tantalizing gaps of silence, goes on and on. Warned, but not knowing of what, they blunder about restlessly through the wreckage of the Sunday paper, inside the apartment, whose walls sweat like the walls of prison. Outside, the sky holds a wide queenly state, blue through the hours, and Rabbit is further panicked by the thought that on such a day his parents used to take them on long pleasant walks, that they are wasting a beautiful Sunday. But they can’t get organized enough to get out. He and Nelson could go but Nelson’s strange fright makes him reluctant to leave his mother, and Rabbit, hoping to possess her eventually, hovers near her like a miser near treasure. His lust glues them together.
She feels this and is oppressed by it. “Why don’t you go out? You’re making the baby nervous. You’re making me nervous.”
“Don’t you want a drink?”
“No. No. I just wish you’d sit down or stop smoking or rock the baby or something. And stop touching me. It’s too hot. I think I should be back at the hospital.”
“Do you hurt? I mean down there.”
“Well I wouldn’t if the baby would stop. I’ve fed her three times. Now I must feed you supper. Ohh. Sundays make me sick. What did you do in church that makes you so busy?”
“I’m not busy. I’m trying to be helpful.”
“I know. That’s what’s so unnatural. Your skin smells funny.”
“How?”
“Oh I don’t know. Stop bothering me.”
“I love you.”
“Stop it. You can’t. I’m not lovable right now.”
“You just lie down on the sofa and I’ll make some soup.”
“No no no. You give Nelson his bath. I’ll try to nurse the baby again. Poor thing there’s nothing there.”
They eat supper late but in broad light; the day is one of the longest of the year. They sip soup by the flickering light of Rebecca’s urgent cries; her fragile voice is a thin filament burning with erratic injections of power. But as, amid the stacked dishes on the sink, under the worn and humid furniture, and in the coffin-like hollow of the plaited crib, the shadows begin to strengthen, the grip of the one with which Becky has been struggling all afternoon relaxes, and suddenly she is quiet, leaving behind a solemn guilty peace. They had failed her. A foreigner speaking no English but pregnant with a great painful worry had been placed among them and they had failed her. At last, night itself had swept in and washed her away like a broken piece of rubbish.
“It couldn’t have been colic, she’s too young for colic,” Janice