This was the day Wilder started crying at two in the afternoon. At six he was still crying, sitting on the kitchen floorand looking through the oven window, and we ate dinner quickly, moving around him or stepping over him to reachthe stove and refrigerator. Babette watched him as she ate. She had a class to teach in sitting, standing and walking.

　　It would start in an hour and a half. She looked at me in a drained and supplicating way. She'd spoken soothingly tohim, hefted and caressed him, checked his teeth, given him a bath, examined him, tickled him, fed him, tried to gethim to crawl into his vinyl play tunnel. Her old people would be waiting in the church basement.

　　It was rhythmic crying, a measured statement of short urgent pulses. At times it seemed he would break off into awhimper, an animal complaint, irregular and exhausted, but the rhythm held, the heightened beat, the washed pinksorrow in his face.

　　"We'll take him to the doctor," I said. "Then I'll drop you at the church.""Would the doctor see a crying child? Besides, his doctor doesn't have hours now.""What about your doctor?""I think he does. But a crying child, Jack. What can I say to the man? 'My child is crying.'""Is there a condition more basic?"There'd been no sense of crisis until now. Just exasperation and despair. But once we decided to visit the doctor, webegan to hurry, to fret. We looked for Wilder's jacket and shoes, tried to remember what he'd eaten in the lasttwenty-four hours, anticipated questions the doctor would ask and rehearsed our answers carefully. It seemed vital toagree on the answers even if we weren't sure they were correct. Doctors lose interest in people who contradict eachother. This fear has long informed my relationship with doctors, that they would lose interest in me, instruct theirreceptionists to call other names before mine, take my dying for granted.

　　I waited in the car while Babette and Wilder went into the medical building at the end of Elm. Doctors' officesdepress me even more than hospitals do because of their air of negative expectancy and because of the occasionalpatient who leaves with good news, shaking the doctor's antiseptic hand and laughing loudly, laughing at everythingthe doctor says, booming with laughter, with crude power, making a point of ignoring the other patients as he walkspast the waiting room still laughing provocatively— he is already clear of them, no longer associated with theirweekly gloom, their anxious inferior dying. I would rather visit an emergency ward, some urban well of trembling,where people come in gut-shot, slashed, sleepy-eyed with opium compounds, broken needles in their arms. Thesethings have nothing to do with my own eventual death, nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful.

　　They came out of the small bright lobby onto the street. It was cold, empty and dark. The boy walked next to hismother, holding her hand, still crying, and they seemed a picture of such amateurish sadness and calamity that Inearly started laughing—laughing not at the sadness but at the picture they made of it, at the disparity between theirgrief and its appearances. My feelings of tenderness and pity were undermined by the sight of them crossing thesidewalk in their bundled clothing, the child determinedly weeping, his mother drooping as she walked, wild-haired,a wretched and pathetic pair. They were inadequate to the spoken grief, the great single-minded anguish. Does thisexplain the existence of professional mourners? They keep a wake from lapsing 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 didn't you do it?'""Why didn't we?""She's a child, not a doctor—that's why.""Did you tell him that?""I don't know what I told him," she said, "I'm never in control of what I say to doctors, much less what they say to me.

　　There's some kind of disturbance in the air.""I know exactly what you mean.""It's like having a conversation during a spacewalk, dangling in those heavy suits.""Everything drifts and floats.""I lie to doctors all the time.""So do I.""But why?" she said.

　　As I started the car I realized his crying had changed in pitch and quality. The rhythmic urgency had given way to asustained, inarticulate and mournful sound. He was keening now. These were expressions of Mideastern lament, ofan anguish so accessible that it rushes to overwhelm whatever immediately caused it. There was somethingpermanent and soul-struck in this crying. It was a sound of inbred desolation.

　　"What do we do?""Think of something," she said.

　　'There's still fifteen minutes before your class is due to start. Let's take him to the hospital, to the emergency entrance.

　　Just to see what they say.""You............