The Return of Service

Disguises

The baby that was is not the baby that is. It has come to that. Life, he is aggrieved to report, has gotten out of hand. Everyone seems to have forgotten the way it has been, the way it is supposed to be. The baby that is is an interloper, a baby-come-lately. The true baby, though no longer what he was, is no friend to the new arrangement.

There are characters in this narrative for whom the former baby feels not the slightest responsibility, the imposter baby being a prime example.

“Why do you pretend to be me?” the original says to the imposter when no one is listening. The imposter has no answer to that, seems dumbfounded by the question.

“I’m on to your game, kid,” says the original. “You’re not going to get away with it for long.”

When the father picks up the imposter and says, “How’s my baby?” the original laughs bitterly to himself, amazed by such misperception.

What he needs, he decides, relying as he must on his own counsel, is the restoration of his lost persona, a return to the climate of his faded glories. The idea grows in him, blossoms. Working late at night in his study, he develops a mask that resembles himself as he was.

He will keep the disguise out of sight until a reasonable occasion for its employment arrives. In the meantime, he will pretend to accept the unthinkable terms of the present arrangement. He will even play on occasion with the usurper (anything to divert suspicion) with the kindness and deference he used to reserve for the imaginary.

Sometimes his impatience with pretense, the other’s and his own, gets the better of the baby’s resolve.

“My rabbit, my car, my robot, my G.I. Joe,” says the usurper. “lt’s not yours,” says our story’s hero.

“It’s not yours,” says the usurper, either in echo or in assertion. “I hate liars,” says the former baby, storming off in an unconstrained display of disgust.

The imposter suffers this slight as if it were a painful fall, calling out the other’s name repeatedly in complaint.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” someone big says, picking up the imposter for a whole raft of unearned embraces.

Why can’t he keep his mouth shut? thinks the true baby and he would say it out loud if he weren’t trying to keep a low profile. He wishes one or the other of them — the other his first choice — would disappear.

Indignity follows indignity. The true baby’s own long-forgotten imaginary grandma (reported dead in an early edition of the New York Times) comes to play with the imposter. Perhaps passing away has undone her powers of sight, the true baby thinks, wanting to put the best possible interpretation on unforgivable betrayal. Is there no one left to tell the real from the false?

Some lip service is given by those of the household to his prerogatives, but in fact they have been stripped from him. He is barely allowed to call his old thoughts and feelings his own. While the evening sleeps, he plans his comeback. While his parents are out at a local movie, the true baby puts on the mask of his former self and slips out of the house.

He walks a long distance, six or eight blocks, crossing the streets he has mandate to cross and some others where the area of his authority is undefined, when a tapping on the window catches his attention. A familiar woman he can’t remember having seen before invites him in. If it is soup she has to offer, he has promised himself to refuse.

The question of soup doesn’t come up. In fact, for a while, there is nothing of sustenance offered him except a few heartfelt compliments and a kiss or two on the forehead, “What a big baby,” the woman tends to say in admiration. She offers to put him to bed in the largest crib in the house so that he might be “full of beans” the next morning.

He wouldn’t mind, he says, being full of beans this evening, depending of course on what kind of beans they were.

“I assume,” the woman says, “that when you say beans you’re talking metaphorically.”

She marches him into the kitchen and sets him up in a cramped high chair. She has, she reports, a refrigerator full of leftovers. A metal bib (perhaps only stiff plastic) is tied around his neck, vitiating an otherwise delicate appetite.

The lady serves him a plate of metaphoric beans, which the masked figure picks over disconsolately.

“Would you like me to help you?” she asks.

He nods by mistake, a momentary confusion of signals. Before he can correct his error, a shovelful of leftovers arrives unwanted at lips’ door.

The food refuses to be swallowed and the woman breaks into tears. “What have I done wrong?” she asks. “Why do you hate me?”

The former baby protests that he has been misunderstood, that his feelings about the woman and the food are separate and distinct, to be confused at the peril of the confuser.

“What can I do that will make you happy?” she asks. “Is there anything?”

The baby-in-disguise is escaping the high chair when the husband makes an imposing entrance. “What’s all the noise, for God’s sake?” he asks.

The woman gives him a somewhat biased version of the preceding events.

“You don’t know how to handle him,” says the husband.

“What this baby needs is a little discipline in his life.”

“If you were home more often,” she says, “maybe he’d be getting what he needs.”

They shout a few things back and forth. At some point the husband carries the baby-in-disguise upstairs and puts him to bed. “I’m putting you to bed without your dinner.” he says, “because you were bad and didn’t eat it. That’s the kind of discipline you are going to get in this house.”

The next morning, after the husband is gone, the woman tells the former baby a secret. “My husband hasn’t the slightest interest in babies,” she says. “Now that’s not right, is it?”

Her guest can’t help but agree.

“His idea of discipline is putting a baby to bed without food.

Now my idea of discipline is having a baby eat everything that’s good for him.”

During the working day, the woman feeds him continuously until he is immobilized with food. In the evening, in accordance with his idea of discipline, the husband puts the baby-in-disguise to bed without any dinner.

Behind the bars of his crib at night, the prisoner overhears the husband and wife argue. They talk of babies and who wanted and who didn’t want the one they had. The woman says that it is tradition to take the one you get, and if you don’t love it right away, you learn to love it. The husband says that’s all right for her to say, but that he’s never been able to love a stranger.

The former baby decides that it is time to move on and tells the woman of his decision when they’re alone together the next morning.

“If that’s the way it has to be, that’s the way it has to be,” she says. “Promise me one favor, one itsy-bitsy favor before you go.”

“One and no more,” says the former baby.

“I want you to promise to stay with me until you grow up.”

The former baby throws off his disguise. “I’ve grown up,” he announces.

The woman shakes her head in astonishment. “They grow up so fast,” she says, blotting a tear with the back of her hand.

The overaged baby is given his unconditional release and is on his way. It is a little disappointing. In the old days, she would have blocked the door or screamed or thrown herself to the floor.

On his return, the true baby finds the usurper in his room, messing around with his toys. “Those are mine,” he says.

“Those are mine,” the usurper says.

“How can they be yours if they’re mine?”

The question seems to baffle the imposter, who mumbles something in reply and hugs the toys to his chest. As a further insistence, he lets out a scream.

In a moment — how fast they are — the mother sticks her head in the room and says, “Please don’t make him cry. How many times do I have to tell you not to make him cry?”

The true baby answers her in his mind after she has gone. He makes an eloquent case against the unplayable lie of appearances.

Wherever the true baby goes, the image of his former self occupies space formerly reserved for him.

The next night, our hero redisguises himself as a baby and leaves the house, pursuing the pleasure of old adventures.

“What a nice baby,” someone says, and he turns to accept the compliment. In the middle of his turn, he stops himself (the remark might have been meant for someone else) to avoid disappointment. Then curiosity gets the better of him and he turns fully around, confronting the landscape behind. If there was anyone there before, there is no one now.

Later that night, he accepts the hospitality of an older couple, who are seeking to add to their scrapbook of memories.

“We’ll give you a little time to settle down,” the old man says, “and then we’d like to see you do some charming baby things.”

The former baby has difficulty remembering what he used to do that old people found charming. He says that he’ll take requests. But his hosts have that faraway look that comes from willful misunderstanding or obliviousness.

“Just enjoy yourself,” each says to him in private as if such advice had to be kept secret from the other.

The former baby has no easy time stimulating pleasure. He sits on the floor and smiles, then stands up and smiles, then jumps up and down and smiles. It is not the most fun he ever had.

“That’s so cute,” one or the other of the older ones says, but then they begin to yawn and fall asleep.

The baby-in-disguise can see that they are trying to please him, and he makes every effort, short of succeeding, to experience pleasure. The stares of these people unnerve him, their unspoken demands. He speeds up his playing, strives for feverish gaiety.

“Are you having fun?” they ask him.

“Fun,” he repeats as he remembers the imposter doing.

After a while, a certain amount of disappointment sets in on both sides. The old couple feel only the barest stirrings of lost youth, the breath of forgotten distaste, and the former baby experiences an incompetence unlike any other failure he has known before. The full and easy gesture of babyhood eludes him. Still, he continues to play, to throw himself around the room as he imagines he had at an earlier, more reckless time.

The old man, peering out of one eye, is the first to give voice to the obvious. “This is not working out,” he says. “It exhausts me just looking at this baby.”

The old lady defends the former baby’s behavior at length and without conviction. A parting of the ways is arranged, under which the stigma of fault is avoided on all sides.

“You’ll visit us, won’t you?” they say for the sake of form as he leaves. “There’ll always be a place for you here.”

The old couple give him a stale fortune cookie as a parting gift.

The message, which he reads at earliest opportunity, is: “Appearances may be deceiving.”

Disguise apparently deceives itself. The former baby works at reestablishing his former sense of babiness, studies the imposter for clues. The imposter uses repetition to extraordinary effect, reciting the same name or word over and over again until it becomes other than itself, until it becomes a flower of sound.

Reciting his name to himself at the dinner table, the true baby discovers that his mother and father are deceptive appearances, expert imitations of the real thing. He confronts them with his recognition.

“You’re not my real mother and father,” he says, then watches them dance their awkward denial. “I want my real parents,” he says.

“Dear,” says the false mother, “we are your real parents. What can we do to prove it to you?”

Several tests are set up for the imposter parents, which they pass but in a way that makes their success seem in itself a deception.

The true baby pretends that the false parents are no different from the real ones; he must be careful not to create dangerous suspicions.

“Do you think I’m not your mother?” the woman asks the next day.

“I’m not saying,” he says.

“Well, I am.” she says.

Later, the true baby takes the imposter aside and says, “You’re going to have to help me. This is an emergency.”

“Help me,” the imposter echoes.

“This baby is all right,” he says to no one in particular.

An alliance between them, an arrangement of mutual interest, enters the first stages of negotiation. They play the rest of the day together as if they were both imposters.

The apparent parents are in their bedroom when the baby that is lets himself in the door. The other, the author of the plot, hides himself outside.

“Mommy. Mommy. Mommy,” the baby chants.

The woman raises her head. “Yes, my sweetpie?”

“Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.”

“What is it, darling?”

“Mommymommymommymommymommymommymommy. “

“What do you think is the matter with him?” the woman says to the man.

“Maybe he wants you to pick him up,” the man says.

When the woman gets out of bed, the baby runs screaming from the room.

“What’s bothering him, do you think?” the woman asks.

At first the man doesn’t say anything. Then he says. “Maybe the baby’s on to you.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that the baby knows you’re not what you pretend to be.”

After that the woman closes the door.

It is hard for the former baby to believe that what he knew to be true is actually so. Still, the evidence is inescapable.

There is nothing for him to do with his information except live with it in swollen silence.

The two of them share the secret now, although the presumptive baby has a limited understanding of its implication and that frail awareness will become the shadow of itself in time.

Even the other, the older (the no-longer-baby), will one day forget his discovery and accept the household as it appears to everyone else. Yet in some distant part of him the realization survives and it will return to him at certain moments as a warning against unequivocal trust. At any moment, those closest, those one loves, he knows, can turn out to be enemies in disguise. Once you know that, even if it is something you refuse to countenance, it remains with you like the residue of a dream.

One day he will wake up from a different dream no longer himself, transformed in his sleep as his parents had been, as others will be, into a perfect imitation of the real thing. It is his fortune, he supposes. It is the way things are.