My father said he had never seen or held anything more beautiful. This had made the doctor’s task harder, Emily told me later that century. My mother was still under her chloroform, upstairs, when my father received his fragile 5-pound bundle.
"I must congratulate you, Mr Johnson, on the safety of Mrs Johnson. She will do very well." He cleared his throat. "Unfortunately the child. Very difficult to say."
My father looked up at him with unnerving tranquillity.
"Must do the best we can, Mr Johnson. The best we can."
This is where the parent should ask what is wrong with the baby, but Jacob Johnson failed to fulfill his role. The doctor, with other claims on his time, must have felt some irritation at being forced to pursue the matter himself.
"The child may live some days, weeks--possibly even years," he continued. "Some infants of his condition reach early adulthood. He is not merely premature, Mr Johnson. You have heard of Down’s Syndrome, commonly called mongolism?"
Of course he had. Back then, in the years between the wars of the 20th century, the mysterious syndrome affected about one in 1000 babies. A large proportion of us died in early childhood from heart defects or minor infections. Nowadays, mid-21st, you rarely see a Down’s baby: human rights dictate that no law can make abortion mandatory, but the mother loses access to state healthcare, pension rights etc. if she opts out of any part of the fetal screening process. Nowadays we use nicer words than "mongol", and we suppose this makes us a gentler society.
Gentler than the mediaeval North, where a newborn who didn’t gasp and breathe when dunked in cold water was not viable. Or Sparta, where I would have been left out for the wolves, and my mother would have been told to finish bleeding and do better next time.
My mother, married at the late age of 33, had never brought any of my five brothers and sisters past four months’ gestation. For more than three years after that, my father, a communications technician, was away at the great war, and now finally at 45 I was her last hope for a healthy child and her final failure. She had stopped bleeding and tried again five times; perhaps I might live, but it was not enough. Once more she was to waste her blood, this time through the wrists, and leave the whole tragedy to my father.
"The muscle tone, you observe," the doctor was explaining. "Very poor. The suckling reflex doubtful. If he takes feeding within the next few hours we must be careful for the lungs. You will want an early christening, Mr Johnson. As soon as possible."
"We will call him Methusaleh," said my father.
"Very nice. A bible name, isn’t it. The crippled prince, the son of Jonathan."
"Not Mephibosheth," my father replied. "Methusaleh. The Oldest Man on Earth. ’All the days of Methusaleh were nine hundred sixty and nine years, and he died.’"
"Well, well. We all do in the end, Mr Johnson. We all do in the end. I shall return later, and see how little Methusaleh does."
Emily, my father’s sister, remained silent and deferential until the doctor had left. She would have preferred the name Mephibosheth. My father’s choice seemed to her a pathetic denial of reality, a sort of impotent kick against fate, a complaint, even, against the will of God. She should have known him better than I ever would, but I cannot see him that way. To me it sounds like a denial not of Death but of the power of Death to harm a loved one--a claim that two weeks, thirty years, seventy, nine hundred, were all the same. And I disagree, but still I like what he did.