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By Root 478 0

now and then a baby could take me by surprise and make me weep — for instance, an e-mailed photo of my cousin Rosalie’s son, who (I realized as I stared at it, and closed the file, and opened it up again) looked like I’d imagined Pudding, though as it happened we shared none of the same blood. Babies born to mothers who’d been pregnant at the same time as me hurt a little. I didn’t mind hearing about them, but I didn’t want to meet them. That puzzled me since it wasn’t logical, and even in mourning I liked to think I was logical, but it was an unhappiness that rose up in me, even months later when I was already pregnant though not broadcasting it, and I saw a friend who’d had a baby three months after me, a wonderful woman who — because she had just become a mother — was so sympathetic and sweet to me. Most people didn’t even mention Pudding; she enfolded me in a hug and said, “Oh, Elizabeth, I am so sorry about your baby” — and I just wanted her to leave, because I didn’t want to be a good and decent and functioning human being and ask after her baby. Even now I have a hard time with the babies born to friends around Pudding’s birth. It’s not logical, and yet there it is: this one is one month older, this one three weeks younger.

But mostly I just missed my own child.

About a week after Pudding’s death I got in my e-mail box a photograph of the newborn son of a very lovely woman who’d been a student of mine at Iowa. She’d known I was pregnant, but her friends had very wisely kept silent about what had happened, so as not to terrify her, and therefore her husband didn’t know he shouldn’t send me a photograph of a newborn baby boy. A few weeks later, and it would have been fine: by then, when friends reported that someone I knew had had a baby, they usually added, “I didn’t know whether to tell you or not, but I figure . . .”

“Oh,” I always said, “if human reproduction has to carry on, I want it to work out for people I like.”

Still, I wouldn’t have minded a pause in the whole business. A sudden harmless moratorium on babies being born. Doctors would have to tell the unfortunate pregnant, “I’m sorry. It happens sometimes. Tidal, we think. For everyone else, nine months, but for you, eleven months, maybe a year, maybe more. Don’t go outside. Don’t leave your house. Stroke your stomach, fine, but only in your own living room. Keep your lullabies to yourself. We’ll let you know when it’s time.”

That lovely former student sent a horrified apology when she found out what had happened, but of course I understood. That is one of the strangest side effects of the whole story. I am that thing worse than a cautionary tale: I am a horror story, an example of something terrible going wrong when you least expect it, and for no good reason, a story to be kept from pregnant women, a story so grim and lessonless it’s better not to think about at all.

Where in France did we live? In the middle of the southwest of the country. In an area called Aquitaine. In a department called Lot-et-Garonne. Forty-five minutes southwest of Cyrano’s Bergerac. Forty minutes east of the tower where Montaigne wrote for the last years of his life. Our address was in the village of Baleyssagues, but the closest place to buy bread and wine and cheese was Duras: three bakeries, a post office, two bars, two pharmacies; Marguerite Duras took her pen name from the town, which is where her father was buried (though not where her own first child, a son, was stillborn in 1942). The nearest train station was in Sainte Foy la Grand. We were, of course, an hour east of Bordeaux.

My friend Lib has a French friend who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who lost a baby to sudden infant death syndrome. When she found out about Pudding, she said, sadly, “Now France will be ruined for them.” America had been ruined for her, but that loss meant nothing compared to the loss of her daughter. But to lose France, as she knew we would, to lose both France and a child —

It’s a part of the world I will never, ever, ever go back to.

Pregnant with Pudding, I wanted things