The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

“Maybe that’s because she wasn’t always pumping herself up!” Betty exclaimed. “She was busy doing women’s work, raising theson of God!”

On Friday afternoons, Jane cleaned housebound seniors’ homes. The work was saintly in its lack of glory, its repetitiveness,its occasional small degradations. Most of her clients had home health aides, or a spouse or nearby relatives, but one manwas alone. Mr. Dennison wore cloudy glasses and always the same stained khaki pants, and it took him long minutes to get fromhis sagging plaid armchair to the front door when Jane rang the bell. He silently offered an apologetic smile, a graciousnod, and then returned to his chair.

October, the sun skulking, the breeze woodsy and lowering, the day closing in. Jane was scrubbing what looked like years-old dog food that she’d found encrusting a corner of Mr. Dennison’s mudroom. A sudden stench made her eyes water. Mr. Dennison had shat himself, right there on the plaid. She guided him into the bathroom, silently undressed him, got him into the shower, turned the handle on the window over the tub, pushing it open inch by inch. Got the clothes into the trash. She would have to root around upstairs to find some clean trousers, and maybe call the Goodwill; she would have to call the Department of Sanitation about proper disposal of the chair. The list tabulated in her head, each item a stern jolt of dopamine. It was saintly to be overwhelmed by thankless, invisible work.

As Mr. Dennison painfully exited the shower, one leg and then the other doing an excruciating bend and balance to surmountthe lip of the tub, Jane held out a towel to him. She saw a rusty stain in one corner, but it would do. He looked at the outstretchedtowel and sank to the floor, knees to his chest. Raised gray moles snaking up and around his midsection, his penis, a cleanslug, perfectly horizontal on the tile. They hadn’t taken off his glasses before he got into the shower. Jane lingered uncertainlyover him, then got to her knees beside him, her hand patting his sloping gray shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll get through this together.”

She felt smug in her saintliness and hoped that God would see her acts themselves unobscured by her smugness. As darknessfell outside, though, she accepted that no one could see them at all. No one could hear or smell or judge. They were alonein their suburban pietà.

She raised herself on her knees and nudged him to sling both of his arms over her shoulders. With their foreheads pressedon each other’s shoulders, she helped him to his feet.

You were a baby once, she thought, breathing under his weight. This same body. It was a baby. Go all the way back. Someone held you in their arms.

Pat and Jane watched 20/20 on Friday nights. Jane loved Barbara Walters. She loved the fluty music of her voice. She loved her floaty scarves and floaty hair. She loved imagining how Barbara Walters smelled, like hairspray and lilacs and Chanel No. 5. She loved how, whenever Barbara Walters coaxed a penetrating admission from a celebrity she was interviewing, her eyes would narrow in loving judgment: a snapshot of the maternal state itself. She also loved Barbara Walters because her mother hated Barbara Walters. “She puts on airs” and “she sounds retarded” and “thinks she’s such hot S-H-I-T”—these were the things she would say. Jane’s mother mocked Barbara Walters’s interchange of rs and ws in a manner that even PJ and Sean would find crude. Jane suspected that her mother performed her disgust with Barbara Walters’scomportment and voice to displace her actual frustration, which was that she perceived she wasn’t allowed to say what shereally wanted to say about Barbara Walters, which was that she was an ugly Jew. Jane was always happy if her mother calledthe house in the evening and she could say, “We’re not up to much, just watching Barbara Walters.”

Jane hadn’t eaten before or after working at Mr. Dennison’s house, and she hadn’t eaten any of the spaghetti and meatballsshe prepared that night for her family. A few bites of the leafy green salad was all. She folded herself into the sofa infront of the television in the living room. Tired and hungry, she stared at the 20/20 logo on the screen. Her peripheral vision darkened, her depth perception shot.

If her mother had called the house, right then, Jane would have told her that she saw Barbara Walters in a vision, just asSaint Bernadette saw an angel in the grotto—a holograph of the Immaculate Conception. Her mother would have heard the convictionin her voice, even as she would deny everything that Jane told her.

In the vision, there were children. Undulating mountains of them, wave upon unceasing wave of them, rocking, rocking. Theywere naked, their skin scabrous, their dark hair shaved close. Crooked mouths, eyes too far apart, limbs akimbo. Rocking,rocking. They had been abandoned, walled off, warehoused in cages or cribs. They were in a place that never could have existed,and they were here in their living room, one floor below where Jane’s children slept at night.

One of them, five of them, would have brought tears, but there were too many to cry for. The vision could only accommodate one child. Jane had to find the one child. Barbara Walters would help find her.

Her. It was a girl. Jane knew it was a girl. She was in the cacophony somewhere. She could be seen. Jane knew it. She wouldglow with her own light.

Jane felt it, that nauseating little earthquake of dread and ecstasy. In the year that followed, it was as if the ghost ofthe idea of that girl had been inside her all along. So many times in sleep Jane turned to see the girl’s face, but she wouldalways elude her.

Not for the first time, at home sitting next to her husband, Jane felt the boundaries between herself and the world dissolving.She could flow into the images on