Mermaids on the Golf Course Read Online Free Page A

Roland had read, but their doctor, Dr. Reuben Blatt, had detected no weakness in Bertie’s heart. Oh no, Roland thought bitterly, they weren’t that lucky.
    Roland pressed the ballpoint pen with the fingertips of his right hand, pressed it against his palm. The worst thing was that Jane had completely changed. He watched her now, bending forward, smiling and cooing at Bertie again, as if he weren’t still in the room. Jane had gained weight, she wore sloppy espadrilles around the house all the time, even to go shopping, if the weather permitted. They’d lost nearly all their friends over the past four or five years, all except the Drummonds, Evy and Peter, who Roland felt kept on seeing them out of morbid curiosity about Bertie. They never failed to ask “to see Bertie for a few minutes,” when they came for drinks or dinner, and they usually brought Bertie a little toy or some candy, to be sure, but their avid eyes as they looked at Bertie Roland could never forget. The Drummonds were fascinated by Bertie, as one might be fascinated by a horror film, something out of this world. And Roland always thought, out of this world, no, out of his own loins, as the Bible said, out of Jane’s womb. Something had gone wrong, one chance in seven hundred, according to statistics, providing the mother wasn’t over forty, which Jane had not been, she’d been twenty-seven. Well, they had hit that one in seven hundred. Roland remembered as vividly as if it had been yesterday or last week the expression on the obstetrician’s face as he had come out of the labor ward. The obstetrician (whose name Roland had forgotten) had been frowning, with his lips slightly parted as if he were mustering the right words, as indeed he had been. He had known that the nurse had already given the anxiously waiting Roland a fuzzy and rather alarming announcement.
    “Ah, yes—Mr. Markow?—Your child—It’s a boy. He’s not normal, I’m sorry to say. May as well tell you now.”
    Down’s syndrome. Roland hadn’t at once connected this with mongolism, a term he was familiar with, but seconds later, he had understood. Roland recollected his puzzlement at the news, a stronger feeling than his disappointment. And was his wife all right? Yes, and she hadn’t seen the child.
    Roland had seen the child an hour or so later, lying in a tiny metal box, one of thirty or so other metal boxes visible through a glass wall of the sterile and specially heated room where the newborns lay. No one had needed to point out his son to him: the miniature head with its flat top, the eyes that appeared slanted though they were closed when Roland had seen them first. Other babies stirred, clenched a little fist, opened their mouths to breathe, yawn. Bertie didn’t stir. But he was alive. Oh yes, very much alive.
    Roland had read up on mongoloids, and had learned that they were singularly still in the womb. “No, he’s not kicking as yet!” Roland remembered Jane saying half a dozen times to well-meaning friends who had inquired during her pregnancy. “Maybe he’s reading books already,” Jane had sometimes added. (Jane was a great reader, and had been a scholarship student at Vassar, where she had majored in political science.) And how different Jane had looked then! Roland realized that he could hardly have recognized her as the same person, Jane five years ago and Jane now. Slender and graceful, with lovely ankles, straight brown hair cut short, an intelligent and pretty face with bright and friendly eyes. She still had the lovely ankles, but even her face had grown heavier, and she no longer moved with youthful lightness. She had concentrated herself, it seemed to Roland, upon Bertie. She had become a kind of monument, something mostly static, heavy, obsessed, concentrating on Bertie and on caring for him. No, she didn’t want any more children, didn’t want to take a second chance, she sometimes said cheerfully, though the chances were next to nil. Both