Free The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman

became. I was either besotted or unhinged, in thrall to my daughter or terrified of my inadequacy as a mother. I lived at polar ends, but of a severely circumscribed world.
    The plan was that I would continue to contribute to the magazine from home. We had left our greenhouse in the sky for a sturdiernest on the twelfth floor of a fifteen-floor apartment building, with a real bedroom rather than a glassed-in aviary for us, another for Abby, and a small maid’s room I could use as a study. I would work while Abby napped. But there was always so much to do while she slept, and I couldn’t concentrate because I was listening for the whimper that indicated she was awake, and, I am ashamed to admit, I simply did not care as much as I used to about injustice and malfeasance and the rest of the world’s evils.
    My universe had shrunk to infant size and swelled each day with my daughter’s burgeoning awareness. Her giddy perceptions of light and color, sound and touch made everything new and wondrous. When she pulled herself to a standing position in her crib, I saw prehistoric man begin to walk upright on the plains of Africa. When she crawled across the living room floor, I thought of Columbus, Magellan, and Lewis and Clark. I said I was unhinged. Her giggle lit up the room. She had an infectious giggle, my daughter. I know all mothers say that, but Abby’s really was.
    She also had a cry that was a fingernail down the blackboard of my soul. One night Charlie came home and found her screaming in her crib and me sobbing at the kitchen table. He picked her up, cradled her to him, and walked her around the apartment, patting and bouncing and crooning into her ear. She stopped howling, the little quisling. Charlie preened. I bristled with shame, and love.
    Only two people understood. Nancy, who lived on the same floor, and Linda, who was four floors below. At first I had been wary of the two women. This was New York City, after all, not the suburbs. In the city, people did not make friends on the basis of proximity. But I kept bumping into them—literally, since the elevator did not accommodate two or three carriages easily—and I would have had to have been made of sterner stuff to resist their smiles and sympathies and shared dilemmas.
    We sat in one another’s apartments with mugs of coffee or tea, keeping an eye on the crawling babies while we confessed, and comforted,and secretly and guiltily compared. Sometimes when I remember how absent I was from the world in those days, I think I can’t blame Charlie entirely for what happened. Then I remember the timing and know I can’t let him off the hook so easily.
    I managed to go through the motions of being my old self. I kept up with the news. I continued to see people, when I could find a babysitter I trusted. I even gave dinner parties. I remember a particular one on a night in late January when sleet pelted the windows, cars skidded and spun below us on Central Park West, and the snow shushed the noises of the city to a murmur. Despite the weather, everyone turned up. The people we knew missed deadlines but never a party.
    We had rounded up the usual suspects, two editors, a writer, their wives and girlfriends, Frank Tucker, and Sonia Bingham. Sonia had mastered proper usage of the uppercase and gone on to sell several book and art reviews to Compass and a few other little magazines, although sell is perhaps too extravagant a word for the fees they paid. Fortunately Sonia had a small trust fund.
    I was still a little wary of her. It wasn’t only the pinup appearance; it was her eagerness to get her hands on my life. She was always offering to babysit, though the one time I tried to take her up on the offer, she was busy. I’m not faulting her. I called at the last minute. But like a lot of childless women, she was more in thrall to the idea of a child than to the reality. Sometimes in the late afternoon, after work or her appointment with her psychiatrist, she would