against her breast. She'd never again see the tiny pink mouth open in the tiniest, most absurd of yawns. In a frenzy of horror she would ring the nurse's bell wildly and demand her baby again. She must make him nurse. She would make him understand that he must nurse. But when once again the little warm bundle, that smelled so fragrantly of milk and talcum powder, lay against her breast, she knew that he would not nurse and that she could not make him understand his danger.
Sometimes a baby cried in the nursery. Dot's heart would constrict and the pulse in her throat would flutter fearfully. "Is that my baby?" she would call to the nurse.
"That's my baby," Mrs. Vernon would say, and the nurse would laugh at them both and tell them they had never seen the child who was crying.
The woman on the third bed would dream blankly up at the ceiling during these moments. She had no part in them. Sometimes at night her sobs were heard by the other women, and then Dot would cry too.
The day that Dr. Stewart took the data for the birth certificate, the baby had accepted no food for hours. Dot was in a morbid state. She thought of this formality as an unnecessary pain. Her baby was going to die. What difference did it make where his grandfather had been born? She gave the required information without looking at the doctor.
When Eddie came that night, she asked him if she had been right in assuming that his father had been born in New York.
"Yeh," he answered. "He was born on Ninth Avenue. What do you want to know for?"
"I gave Dr. Stewart the dope for the baby's birth certificate."
"Oh. What else did you have to tell him?"
