Go to Sleep, My Darling

At 46, Bertrand Baxter was a man's man, still struggling to adapt himself to a smotheringly woman's world. His work, selling sporting goods for Abernathy and Crisp Co., was his element. Not only was he an ex-All American tackle, but his abiding love for sports had led him into a business where he dealt almost exclusively with men.

Old Crisp had once told him, "Bert, if we had two more salesmen like you we could fire the other twenty. You have a sixth sense dealing with these coaches and school superintendents. They love you."

Yes, Bert Baxter could anticipate his male customer's requirements, objections, moods and buying habits with an almost clairvoyant insight. But give him a woman! He was licked before she opened his catalog.

Women found him attractive enough. His six-foot-four, square-jawed athletic prowess had given him the pick of the class of '29, including the statuesque Rolanda. But to marry a woman and to understand her were different matters: the former ridiculously easy, the latter bewilderingly impossible.

The easy familiarity he enjoyed with men of the slightest acquaintance was something he could never establish in his own home with his own wife and his own daughters. Fate, as if to further confound him, had presented Bertrand with four daughters.

Of all these females, Rolanda, Aileen, Grace, Norma and Annie, only two month-old Annie was currently making sense to Bert Baxter. That was because she was a baby, and not yet a female in the baffling sense of the word. His other three daughters had had their turns, but as they emerged from infanthood into childhood they became unmistakable girl-children almost with their first mama-papa lisps, and thereby removed themselves from Baxter's realm of fathomable human beings.

He lay sleepless one November night beside the gently snoring Rolanda, debating the wisdom of having induced her to try once more to provide him with a son. Although Rolanda was forty at the time, Annie had arrived without undue trouble, fitted immediately into the Baxter feminine regime and established herself in Bert's heart quite solidly, if only temporarily.

The misgivings that beset him were vague ones. Annie was the apple of his eye, but in a few short months she would add to the flooding tide of womanhood that swirled through his house, squealing, giggling, moping, hair-curling, nylon-rinsing, plucking, powdering, painting, primping, ironing, sweater-trading, lipstick-snitching and man-baiting.

Too soon—much too soon—dear, understandable little Annie would move off in her own miasma of perfume and verbal nonsense, leaving Bertrand once again a lonely man in his crowded home.

The illuminated dial said precisely two o'clock when a tiny whimper seeped through the adjacent wall from the nursery. Baxter was on the verge of slipping into a doze, but it brought his eyes open.

The two o'clock feeding!

He loved Annie dearly, but it was high time she was omitting the late feeding. It meant rousing Rolanda, who never heard the call. It meant lights and commotion, short tempers, bottle-banging in the kitchen. It meant disturbing the other girls, which occasioned a slipper-shuffling parade to the bathroom with attendant flushing, tap-turning, glass-rattling and ostentatious whispering that turned the hall into a rustling snake-pit.

Don't wake daddy! He has to get up early.

Indeed daddy had to get up early if he hoped to enjoy his shower in peace in the stocking-strewn bathroom.

"Go to sleep, Annie," Baxter said in the deep recesses of his mind. "Go to sleep, my darling," he urged gently. "Please don't start the circus! Let me rest. Go to sleep, my darling."

Annie's whimper faded. Stopped.

In the hazy realm between waking and slumber, it didn't seem remarkable to Baxter. Not until he was stuffing his briefcase the following morning did he recall that Annie had at last skipped her late feeding. The memory of his urgent, silent pleading with her came back, and he smiled to himself. If it were only that easy, he thought.

He had a strenuous day driving out to a rural school district and rounding up five members of the athletic board to complete a nice contract for basketball equipment. He dribbled an Abernathy & Crisp basketball around the gym twelve times for the coach, lugged four sample cases of uniforms up a flight of stairs, and made uncounted round trips to his distantly-parked station wagon for afterthought items to satisfy inquiries.

But he had energy enough to bowl all evening at the athletic club, of which he was a board director. When he arrived home at ten o'clock, a "bargain" in fireplace wood which Rolanda had purchased from a late peddler was heaped across the short driveway and had to be tossed into the basement before he could garage the car.

He had learned not to question Rolanda's bargains, regardless of the time of day or night they occurred. She welcomed such criticisms as occasions to strike for an increase in the household allowance. "Of course, I wouldn't have to take advantage of these penny-savers that you say cause more trouble than they're worth—if we could afford another five dollars a week...."

So he changed clothes, threw in the wood, showered and sank gratefully into bed. Rolanda was still wiping on cold cream. He asked, "Would you please open the window before you jump in?"

"But it's cold out, dear."

"It's barely November," he pointed out. "We had that all out last year. Closed windows only during blizzards and high winds."

"I know, dear, but summer's just over, and our blood's still thin. Besides, we put on the electric blankets today."

Since, theoretically, expensive electric blankets were supposed to add to one's security against chilling, the argument detracted not a whit from Baxter's convictions, but he was too tired to pursue the annual debate about chilling-versus-fresh air requirements.

He inhaled the dense mist of aromatic, warm, humid boudoir essences and fell into exhausted slumber. His dream was a recurrent one wherein he wandered barefoot through an echoing chamber. He was a Lilliputian, searching the interior of Rolanda's skull, a great, empty, reverberating dome. He had no notion for what he was searching, but all he found were the roots of her yellow hair sticking down through the pate.

The edge of his fatigue had just nicely worn off to that treacherous point, where to be awakened would result in hours of wakeful tossing, when the whimper came. It came again, and Baxter swam up from the depths until he was half awake.

"Sleep, baby!" he urged. "Close your eyes and go to sleep, my darling." His lips didn't move, and he was only dreamily aware of the foolish hope that his good luck of last night might be repeated.

It worked. Annie quieted, went back to sleep and stayed asleep until morning.

A week later Rolanda remarked about it at the breakfast table. It did, indeed, seem that Annie had reformed her nocturnal habits; but Baxter knew better. Each night, now, at the first whimper he sent his silent, mental message winging through the plaster, lath and pink wallpaper to the pink baby under the pink blanket in the pink crib. Annie was still waking at two a.m. each night, but she was still complying with his soothing thought-appeals.

That night, the whimper found him sleepless again. Starkly awake, with eyes wide open, it seemed ridiculous to repeat such a foolish, wishful-thinking process, and he refrained from doing so. Telepathy was nonsense!

The whimper grew in volume, welled up into a full-throated wail that prickled the short hairs of his neck. "Oh, no! Annie, for heaven's sake!"

Without thinking further on it he slipped into his silent pleading. "Go to sleep, baby. Go to sleep, my darling."

Annie had too much momentum to capitulate easily. He pleaded and cajoled, and finally he mentally hummed three stanzas of "Rock-a-Bye Baby."

The wail trembled and fell off into a few reluctant sobs. Annie was comforted, reassured. Annie slept.

For all his preoccupation with sports and other manly extroversions, Bertrand Baxter was not unimaginative. His stunning victory on this seventh night was too dramatic to ignore. He said not a word about it to Rolanda, but the following night he deliberately stayed wide awake until Annie sounded off.

Instead of immediately flooding his infant daughter with the warm reassurance and pleading requests that she sleep, Baxter let his mind "feel" of the situation. He spoke softly to her in his unmouthed mind-talk, and for the first time he became aware of a tiny but positive mental response. There was a faint fringe of discomfort-thoughts—a weak hunger pang, a slight thirst, a clammy diaper. But mostly there was the cheerless darkness and a heavy feeling of aloneness, a love-want, an outreaching for assurance.

As his thoughts went out he could sense that Annie did receive them and take comfort from them—and the little physical hungers and discomforts faded from her mind.

She felt reassured now, loved, petted, cosy and warm in the velvety gloom, in the restful quiet.

He sensed the peace that settled through her, and the same peace flooded through him, a rare sensation of security, understanding and blind trust.

Annie slept. Baxter slept.

And then it was Saturday morning. Baxter stayed abed, yielding the bathroom to his three teen-age daughters. Annie was still asleep, too, so Rolanda was stretching leisurely beside him like a long, pink cat. Noticing the time, she raised to an elbow and viewed him with some concern. "No golf this morning? Aren't you well, Bert?"

Had he plunged out of bed to forage for his golf shoes as usual, she would have grumbled about how it must be Saturday, and she wished that she had a whole morning off each week to herself.

He replied slowly, "Later, maybe. Want to rest a little bit. Don't stare! I feel fine. Just thinking a little."

She shrugged, put on her robe and entered the bathroom competition.

Baxter lay waiting, eyes closed, concentrating. Then it came. The sensation of gentle awakening. Light—at first just a diffused pink light, then outlines forming: the ceiling fixture, the yellow-billed ducks on the pale pink wallpaper, the round bars of the crib. The sensation of movement, stretching, a glorious feeling of well-being.

Annie was awake.

Then in rapid succession, the sensation of wet diaper, cramped toe, hunger pang, hunger pang!

Annie yelled.

The sound came through firmly and demandingly, interrupting Baxter's concentration and breaking the remarkable rapport, but he had proved to himself beyond all doubt what he had been dubiously challenging: He had established a clear, telepathic entry into his daughter's mind.

Now he was so excited that he forgot himself and tried to explain the whole thing to Rolanda. She seemed to listen with half an ear as she assembled breakfast. She didn't understand, or she misunderstood, or she understood but disapproved—Baxter wasn't at all certain which it was. When he finished she simply paused in her oatmeal dishing, pulled her housecoat tightly about her and said, "Nonsense! You went back to sleep after I got up. You're dreaming these things. It is high time that Annie began skipping her night feeding."

But her eyes were narrowed cat-slits, and Baxter felt a positive warning in them. He felt that since creation, probably no man had actually penetrated a woman's brain to probe the willy-nilly logic that functioned there:—functioned well, for somehow things got done, but functioned in such a topsy-turvy manner as to drive a serious male insane if he pondered it too long.

He retreated to the morning paper and said no more about it. Before he left for the golf club he had another remarkable experience. He stepped into the nursery and stared down at the adorable little pink-cheeked Annie. He closed his eyes and sought her mind—and saw himself standing above the crib—through her eyes! It was clear as a TV image. In fact he noted that he needed a shave and looked quite strange with his eyes closed.

In the days that followed Baxter became addicted to slipping into Annie's innocent little mind at almost any hour of her waking. At the office. In a customer's waiting room. Even out on the golf course while waiting for a slow foursome to tee off ahead. Distance was no obstacle to the telepathic rapport.

And he began to make fabulous plans. As Annie grew he would follow her mental progress, investigating every aspect of her thought processes to learn the key to womankind's inexplicable mind. Through her eyes and other senses he would experience the woman's world as it impinged upon her, and one day he would fathom the deepest, eternal secrets of all womanhood.

Whether Rolanda divined his intentions Baxter never knew, but when Annie was three months old she suddenly began resisting her father's mental intrusion.

He first noticed it one evening right after Annie had been tucked in for the night. Baxter was pretending to doze in his leather chair in the den, but actually he had been keeping mental watch until Rolanda cleared out of the nursery—for some reason he feared communing with Annie while his wife was in the room.

Rolanda had come out, down the hall, stopped in the open door of his den, and he had felt her gaze upon him for a long minute.

When she passed on without comment, Baxter sought to enter Annie's mind and enjoy her nightly snugged-down feeling of contentment. He probed gently, and to his surprise he met a barrier, an impalpable resistance, a shutting-out that he had never encountered. He pressed more firmly. Dim perceptions began to come through to him, but they were dominated by displeasure emotion.

Annie cried out.

Baxter withdrew instantly, feeling somewhat guilty. Then he tried again.

Annie screamed.

Rolanda came down the hall, paused at his door and said, "What do you suppose is the matter with her tonight? She always drops off."

Without waiting for an answer, she passed down the hall to the nursery and comforted Annie to sleep. Baxter tried no more that night.

It was the same each time he tried thereafter. Abruptly, Annie had become irritable, intolerant of his probing. How she could understand what was happening mystified Baxter, but he was determined to retain contact. He kept pushing, gently but firmly, and although it brought on some furious yells, he succeeded in making at least one daily survey of his infant daughter's mind.

For a week Rolanda became increasingly hostile for no apparent reason. Baxter felt that the tension that grew between them was in some way connected with Annie, but his wife never spoke of it. Never a particularly demonstrative woman, she became even colder, and often he caught her regarding him with an enigmatical look of suspicion.

As a long-sufferer to her moods, Baxter had no fear that an open break might develop. His life was insured for $75,000, and Rolanda was much too hard-headed to consider divorcing such a solid "producer" of bread and luxuries as she and her female brood had learned to enjoy.

Meanwhile, Annie's mind was becoming an even more fascinating field for exploration. In spite of her resistance, Baxter's shallow penetration revealed the amazing network of learning that daily increased her web of knowledge, experience and stimulus-response conditioning. Often Baxter pondered what a psychologist would give for such an opportunity as this.

He became so bemused with his objective study that, the night Annie withdrew her barriers, Baxter fell into her mind like a lion into a game-hunter's animal pit.

He was, again, in his leather chair. Rolanda had just put Annie to bed and passed his open door. He probed for Annie's mind and leaned the heavy weight of his own strong mind on the expected barrier. It was gone!

He sank deeply into his daughter's brain and caught his breath. He had forgotten what it was like, this total absorption with her physical and emotional sensations.

Annie was feeling good. Her stomach was full, she was warm, dry and pleasantly tired from her evening romp. She stretched and yawned, and a feeling of euphoria swept over Baxter.

Never had he completed such a transfer. He could feel every little primitive pleasure sensation that rippled through Annie's healthy, growing body. Conversely, two dozen trivial but annoying twinges, aches, pains and bodily pressures that slowly accumulate with the years vanished from his 46-year-old body.

The abscessed tooth that he should have had pulled a month ago quit hurting. The ache from the slightly pulled muscle in his back faded away. The pressure from the incipient gastric ulcer in his stomach eased off and disappeared. All the tensions and minor infirmities that had slipped up on him, almost unnoticed with middle age, vanished; and Baxter knew once again the long-forgotten, corporeal ecstasy of a young, human animal in the rapid-growth stages.

He awoke to see the fuzzy image of Rolanda over him. It was morning. Her face was faintly troubled, but she smiled with a rare warmth when he cooed at her. She caught him up in her arms, murmuring endearing sounds. Snuggled to her breast, he felt the satisfaction of a great subconscious yearning as the scented woman-smell pervaded his nostrils and her strong, warm arms cuddled him tightly.

There was the unpleasant business of a diaper change, during which he became sharply aware of hunger. He yelled lustily for food, and soon he was sucking hungrily on a deliciously flexible rubber nipple that yielded an ambrosia of warm sweetness.

A jumble of clear, high voices chirped familiarly in his ears, but he paid no attention to the words as such. His bath was delightful, although he sneezed violently at the talcum dust afterward. Now the voices were silent except Rolanda's occasional soft words to him. Again he enjoyed his liquid meal and slipped into delicious slumber with the shades drawn.

Voices awakened him. A man's voice mingled with his wife's.

"In here, doctor. We managed to carry him to bed, and he hasn't awakened yet."

Baxter heard the words with mild interest but no comprehension. The man's voice came through the wall of the nursery from the next bedroom, a low rumble of pleasant sound. "No sign of physical impairment. Resembles a catatonic trance. Strange. Heartbeat is rapid, light—respiration, too. Like a baby's. We'd better take him down to the hospital."

"Is it that serious?"

"Will be if he continues unconscious. He'll starve."

"I'll call the ambulance."

Baxter fell asleep again. The chirping voices returned that afternoon, but there was a subdued air about them. For a few days the routine continued: eating, sleeping, eating, bathing, sleeping, eating—a wonderous, kaleidoscopic fairyland of enjoyable sensations.

The subdued air disappeared, and the voices chirped loudly and happily around him again. All was pleasant, comfortable, secure.

Then one morning his heart beat heavily, awakening him from his nap. His eyelids tore open to a weird sight. Several strange men and woman stood around him. They were dressed in white, and he was in a hospital bed. As he traced a rubber tube from its stand-hung bottle down to his arm, a rush of unpleasant sensations, twinges, pains, stiffnesses swarmed back into him.

Reluctantly he heard the doctor speak and he tried to pay no attention. "The adrenalin did it. He's coming around, I think. No, dammit, he's closing his eyes again. Doesn't seem interested. I thought for a minute...."

Baxter clenched his eyes tightly and tried to ignore the burning emptiness of his emaciated stomach, the harsh roughness of the hospital sheets against his weak, bed-sore calves. The drug was fire in his veins, and his heart threatened to jump out of his breast.

Annie, where are you?

A soft, nonverbal little response touched his wracked brain, inviting him to return. He concentrated, blocking out the muttering voices around him....

"—can't keep a man his size alive indefinitely with intravenous—better phone Mrs. Baxter—call a priest, too."

He made it. He was back in the crib. Rolanda was pulling up the nursery shades terminating his nap. The phone was ringing.

"Be right back, sweetheart," Rolanda said. "Mother has to answer the phone."

Her voice came only faintly from the hallway in dull monosyllables. Then she was back, scooping him up in her arms. She sat in a rocker and looked down at him thoughtfully, a serious frown across her wide, white brow. "You poor little darling. You'll never know your daddy."

For an instant Baxter's consciousness flickered back and forth across miles of intervening space. A cold panic clutched his heart. He heard a sharp sob escape from Annie's lips, then Rolanda was rocking him and comforting him.

"Don't you worry, sweetheart. It's all right. We'll get along. Daddy's insured. And there's his service pension. We'll get along just fine."

An intuitive flash of horror chilled Baxter. He struggled to escape to his own brain, his own dying body, but now the barrier was up again, not impalpable but tough and impenetrable.

The more he struggled the weaker he became. Sensations from the nursery began to fade. The light grew dimmer, and Rolanda's face became hazy. Frantically, he tried to withdraw from Annie's mind, but he was mousetrapped!

Was this Annie's doing? Was this the vengeance she took against her own father for his invasion of her privacy?

Or was it his own mind's refusal to face life again through the network of pain and misery of his adult identity? Infantile regression, the doctor had called it—but the doctor didn't know about Annie.

He could still feel the gentle rocking motion and his wife's arms holding him tenderly in the warm blankets.

"We'll get along just fine, honey," she was saying. "When we get the insurance money we'll have a larger house and a new car."

Rolanda! For God's sake, make Annie let me go!

"And you'll have a pretty room all to yourself when you are older. And—and there's no reason why you can't sleep in my room tonight. Would you like that, Annie?"

Now the light was dimming fast, but Baxter sensed the glow of pleasure in Annie's tiny body and heard her soft cooing.

"Why, Annie," Rolanda's words came from a great distance, "you're smiling! As if you understood every word! Why, you little dickens!"

Annie stiffened suddenly, then she sighed and gurgled happily—as though she had just gotten something off her mind.