The Front Runner

specimens. You understand, don't you?"
    "I hate doctors."
    "This is a gay doctor," I said. "I think he'll be all right."
    "Actually," she said, "it's not as if I'm going to take the baby away to the North Pole. I'll be around here, probably. We'll see each other, the children can get together. Maybe we can live in the same neighborhood or something. I think you'd feel sad if I took one of Billy's children far away somewhere. Wouldn't you?"
    The doctor found her to be a healthy female with a clean medical history. He ran some tests, ensured that she was ovulating and determined the exact day for her insemination. One day in November, we were in his examination room. I had requested to be there, because every cell of my body cried out that I should be there, and Betsy, after some vacillation, had agreed.
    She lay draped modestly on the table, her knees up and her bare feet on the sides of the table. She had refused to put her feet in the metal stirrups. Her cheeks were afire.
    "Now don't you look at me, Harlan," she said.
    "Why the hell would I want to look at you?" I said.
    The doctor was very gentle with her, but she winced anyway when he inserted the speculum. Then, as he had explained, he inverted a small cup containing the precious thawed semen over the cervix.
    "Now just lie there for twenty minutes," said the doctor.
    We were alone in the room, the door closed, hear-
    ing the nurses bustle gently in the corridor outside, smelling the medical smells. Betsy lay looking up at the ceiling, her knees flat now, completely covered by the stiff white drape.
    Suddenly she smiled.
    "What?" I said.
    "Oh, I was just thinking," she said. "It's a front-runner's race going on in there."
    I found myself smiling. "How do you know there aren't any kickers in there?"
    I found myself taking her slender hand and patting it.
    "You're one of the few women I've ever known," I said, "that's worth a damn."
    Nothing happened that month, and we both got very worried. I was keeping track of the days on an old training schedule, and I think I was more nervous than she was.
    But the next time around, in early January, Betsy said gloatingly, "I've missed my period."
    She finished her senior year getting bigger and bigger. "Betsy, have you gone straight?" the students asked her incredulously. She smiled mysteriously. Only she, I, Vince and John Sive knew that it was Billy's child.
    Betsy became very involved in her pregnancy. She took scrupulous care of herself, exercised moderately, jogged clear into her sixth month, and talked about natural childbirth to anybody who would listen.
    The baby was born on September 2, 1977, three weeks early, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. I would have liked to be in the delivery room, but under the circumstances that was hardly possible. And it was probably just as well—Betsy had a difficult delivery because of her narrow hips.
    John and I went through the waiting-room agonies., If I'd been a smoker, I'd have filled a couple of ashtrays at least.
    Finally the doctor came in, smiling. "It's a boy. He's a small baby, only five pounds, eight ounces. But they're both fine."
    "Billy was small when he was born too," said John.
    Later, when we went into her room, Betsy was propped up on the pillows in a pink lace pegnoir. She looked exhausted, out cold like a runner after a hard race. She was very pale. She had the pegnoir open, and was giving the baby what she had impressed on us as being the important first breast-feeding.
    She colored when she saw us, but she smiled a little, weakly, and didn't cover her breast. Her eyes were almost a little defiant. We sat down by the bed and watched.
    "I'm a little disappointed," said Betsy. "I wanted a girl. But it doesn't matter, he's a lovely baby."
    When the baby finished nursing, she put him in my arms and opened the wrap so we could see him. He was a quiet little thing, so small and slender that I worried. He had the fine bones and fair skin of both his parents. But he kicked his tiny feet against me with surprising strength. He had a few wisps of pale brown, hair, and his squinty blue eyes looked up at me un-seeingly.
    I sat riven with pain, thinking of the body that had sired this mite of life.
    That pain never seemed to diminish. I would go along for days, surviving, managing to be businesslike and cheerful and concerned about other people's lives, and suddenly the ground would give way under my feet and I'd fall 10,000 meters into pain. In New York, we might pass