Chapter 18 Section 16

At two o'clock that afternoon Wilder began to cry.At six o'clock he was sitting on the kitchen floor looking out the oval window, still crying.We finished dinner quickly, moving around him or stepping over him to the stove and refrigerator.Babette watched him while eating.She also had to teach sitting, standing and walking posture lessons, which had to start in an hour and a half.She looked at me exhausted and pleading.She said comforting words to him, picked him up, kissed him, checked his teeth, bathed him, examined him, tickled him, fed him, and tried to make him Crawl into his plastic play tunnel.The old men she taught would wait in the church basement.

It's a rhythmic cry, a short, urgent rhythmic expression.Now and then he would stop and sob suddenly, an irregular, panting animal moan, but the rhythm was there, stronger, his face flushed with exhaustion and sorrow. "We'll take him to the doctor," I said, "and then I'll take you to church." "Does a doctor see a crying child? Besides, his doctor doesn't see outpatients right now." "Where's your doctor?" "I think he's in the clinic. But, Jack, what's wrong with a child crying! What can I say to the man? 'My child is crying!'"

"Is there a symptom that is more important?" So far, we have no sense of crisis.Just anger and despair.But once we decide to go to the doctor, we start to feel flustered and worried.We searched for Wilder's jacket and shoes, tried to recall what he had eaten in the last twenty hours, anticipated the questions the doctor might ask, carefully rehearsed our responses.Even if we're not sure we answered correctly, it seems crucial that we answer in unison.A doctor loses interest in two people who speak contradictory words.This worry runs through my relationships with doctors, the fear that they will lose interest in me, that their receptionist will skip my name and call others, and take my death for granted.

Babette and Wilder walked into the medical building at the end of Elm Street, and I waited in the car.A doctor's office frustrates me more than a hospital, both because of the atmosphere in which people expect negativity, and because occasionally a patient leaves the office with good news, shaking the doctor's sterilized hand and laughing out loud, Laughing at everything the doctor said, rumbling, boisterous, still grinning irritatingly as he walked through the waiting room, resolutely ignoring the other patients—whom he’d already left with whom he’d spent every week The worries of the first visit, their anxiety, and their unworthy death no longer mattered.I'd rather go to the emergency room, it's the scariest part of the city, where people get bullets in their stomachs, get chopped up, bleary-eyed with opiates, or have broken needles in the arm.None of these things had anything to do with my own doomed death—my death was nonviolent, intolerant, and full of anxiety.

They walked out of the bright little hall into the street.The street was cold, empty, and dark.The little boy walked beside his mother, holding her hand, still crying; they looked like a painting of sorrow and disaster by an amateur painter, and I almost laughed—not at the sorrow, but at the Laugh at the picture they made of their grief, at the disparity between their grief and its expression.My tenderness and pity were spoiled by the way they walked across the pavement: both in puffy clothes, the boy crying relentlessly, and his mother with disheveled hair and hunched back as she walked, a wretched and pitiful sight. right.Neither of them was good at expressing grief in words, it was a great pain without affectation.Doesn't this explain why there are professional mourners?They keep the wake from degenerating into comic pathos.

"What did the doctor say?" "Give him an aspirin and put him to bed." "That's what Denise said." "I told him that. He said: 'Well, why don't you guys do this?'" "Why don't we?" "She's just a child, not a doctor — that's why." "Did you tell him that too?" "I don't know what was said to him," she said. "I've never been sure what to say to the doctors, let alone remember what they said to me. There's something disturbing in the air." "I see exactly what you mean."

"It's like having a conversation dangling in a thick space suit while walking in outer space." "Everything is floating and swimming." "I lie to doctors all the time." "me too." "But why?" she said. As I started the car, I realized that his crying had changed the tone and quality of his voice.The rapid rhythm turned into a continuous, indistinct cry.He is weeping now.This is the expression of mourning in the Middle East, and the pain it expresses is so contagious that it bursts out and drowns out the immediate causes of the pain.There is something eternal in this cry that touches the heart.It was an inherently forlorn sound.

"what should we do?" "Think of it," she said. "Fifteen minutes until your class time. We'll take him to the hospital, to the emergency room. Listen to what they say." "You can't send a child to the emergency room because he's crying. If there's anything that isn't an emergency, it's it." "I'll wait in the car," I said. "What do I say to them? 'My baby is crying.' And, do they have an emergency room?" "Don't you remember? We sent the Stovers over this summer." "why?"

"Their car happened to be being repaired." "Leave that alone." "They sucked some kind of spray out of some sort of stain remover." "Send me to class," she said. posture.Some of her students were walking down the basement entrance steps when I pulled up in front of the church.Babette looked at her son with searching, earnest, desperate eyes.He has been crying for the sixth hour.She ran down the sidewalk into the building. I considered taking him to the hospital.But if the doctor sitting in the comfort of his clinic—one whose walls are covered with paintings in elaborate gold frames—has thoroughly examined the child and can find nothing wrong with it, then the emergency technician —the ones trained to jump on top of people in one fell swoop, pumping hard on their chests to stop beating hearts—what else can they do?

I carried him into the car, leaning on the steering wheel, facing me, with his feet on my lap.The loud wailing kept going, wave after wave.The sound was so loud and pure that I could listen to it and consciously understand it, like a psych recorder in a concert hall or theater.He was not sobbing or crying, but he was crying and saying something unnamed in a way that was so deep and rich that it really moved me.It is an ancient elegy all the more moving for its downright tediousness.lament.I supported his arms with both hands and made him sit up straight.While he kept crying, a wonderful change occurred in my thoughts.I found that I didn't necessarily want him to stop crying, and I thought maybe it wouldn't be so scary to sit like this and listen to him cry a little longer.We look at each other.There was a complex spirituality at work behind that bewildered visage.Supporting him with one hand, I squeezed his mitten with the other and counted his fingers aloud in German.The inconsolable crying went on and on.I let it pour down on me like a torrential rain.In a sense, I got into this crying.I let it fall, bouncing on my face and chest.I began to think that he had disappeared into the wailing voices; if I could join him in the space of his bewilderment and stagnation, we might be able to perform some brazen but understandable miracle together.I let it penetrate my body.It might not be so terrible, I thought, to sit here for another four hours with the motor and heater on, listening to this monotonous cry.That might feel good, and it might be oddly soothing.I get into it, sink in, let it wrap and cover me.When he cried, he opened and closed his eyes for a while; put his hands in his pockets for a while, put on and took off his gloves for a while.I sat there nodding my head like a sage.Suddenly, I had an idea, turned him over and let him sit in my arms, then I started the car and let him take the steering wheel.We had done this once before, for a distance of twenty yards at dusk on a Sunday in August, when our street was deep in the shadows of silence.This time he cooperated with me again, except that he kept crying as he steered the wheel, as we turned, and as I finally braked to a stop behind the Congregational church.I put him on my left leg, hooked an arm around him, pulled him to my side, and let myself fall into a half-sleep.Crying and swimming, suddenly near and now far away.Occasionally a car drives by.I leaned against the car door and felt his breath on my thumb slightly.After a while, Babette knocked on the window, and Wilder climbed over the seat next to her and unbolted it for her.She got in the car, straightened his hat, and picked up a crumpled wad of tissues from the floor.

We were halfway from home when the crying finally stopped.It stops abruptly, without the slightest change in tone or intensity.Babette said nothing, and I stared at the road.He sat between us, watching the radio.I waited for Babette to glance at me from behind him, over his head, relieved, happy, worried, yet hopeful.I don't know what I feel, and I want to figure it out.But she stared straight ahead, as if afraid that any change in the sensitive structure of any sound, movement, or expression might trigger a renewed burst of crying. No one at home spoke.They all moved silently from room to room, watching him from afar with wincing and respectful eyes.When he asked for a little milk, barefoot and in pajamas, Denise ran softly into the kitchen, realizing that only simplicity and lightness of footsteps could not spoil the seriousness and drama he brought into the house. .He was still fully clothed, with one glove pinned to his sleeve, and he gulped down the milk. They looked at him with something like awe.Almost seven full hours of non-stop, serious crying!It was as if he had just returned from wanderings in some distant, sacred place, from the desert wilderness or the snow-covered mountains—the words spoken, the sights seen, the peaks climbed, those of us who live in the midst of ordinary hardships One can only look up with admiration and wonder.This admiration and wonder we reserve for the noblest and most elusive of feats.