Second Son by Robert Ferro

Author:Robert Ferro [Ferro, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Gay Men, New York, AIDS
Publisher: ReQueered Tales
Published: 1988-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

LATER WHEN MARK WAS COMING UP the stairs Sarah was putting the baby down in the pink room. The pink room off the landing was where the crib lived. Sarah looked up and smiled; the baby against her shoulder was too excited to sleep; and since they were always together they now played quietly. Sarah had stripped him to diapers, fitting, Mark noticed, like the hand-embroidered pantaloons of the Enfantina. The baby’s skin, into which, like the finest white pate, unto mousse, the flesh was forced, was a matte, sheer, translucent glaze. How obvious to all who did not themselves have babies that cannibalism, as an instinct, was as old nearly as hunger itself; the root of the biblical threat, to families, of unattached males: that they will eat your young; that in a world in extremis, babies have often been considered succulent delectables, to be guarded in gilded food safes – their cribs – and suspended in alcoves of taboo. Mark and Sarah sat on the end of the bed as the baby – beyond good-natured, into benevolence – stood up against the railing of the crib as at the balcony of a tall palace or cathedral, and blessed his mother, his great-uncle Mark, with fake smiles of immense beauty. They watched his expressions evolve and shift, alter and fade, a time-stop picture of his own glee like a flower opening and closing; until with a bump he lost his grip, hit his lip, and looked up at his mother, all in an instant, in sudden wonder, sudden doubt. In the same instant Sarah felt Mark flinch and said quietly, “Don’t react,” and Mark watched his niece, whom he could vividly recall holding at this age, smile brightly at her baby, unperturbed, unaffected, untouched by any possible harm to the two perfect little teeth or lips. Nasty black bird fly over. Not so much recovering as making an ironic comment, already a student of the ironic, the baby returned the smile, and at whom they roared as if at Jack Benny’s best joke.

“You have just saved this child endless lonely nights and hours of computer dating,” Mark observed.

“Oh Mark!” Sarah laughed. Even the baby laughed.

“Who taught you that?” he asked her. “Tessa would have done her Maria Callas imitation for less.”

Claudia came in. “She certainly didn’t learn it from me.”

The large house was filled now with people moving about. Tessa’s son had come to get a surfboard out of the garage. The two middle girls, Tessa’s and Vita’s, were downstairs beside the toaster, each on one leg like graceful birds, discussing in the driest terms a woman on the beach with enormous cracked emeralds. George and Mr Valerian, in Geneva, were talking business in stupefying detail, to which Neil listened with the attention of a boy by the window enthralled with the view. To him, as to all the Valerian in-laws, this on its own was paradise. Tessa and Rose, in the kitchen, cooked. Vita and Bill had gone for a walk around the pond.

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