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reenactments, and caring for his dog, Susie, crippled by a stroke. His wife had left him, for fairly obvious reasons. Hope lessness, for one. People were afoot in other houses on the block, moving around in kitchens, thinking their 3 A.M. thoughts. Do I smell gas? Is there really a Trinity or are there trillions of them? Is my marriage an empty shell, obvious to everyone but me? And am I on the verge of a nervous collapse and don’t know it? Could I suddenly go berserk later today and whack off my ear with a butcher knife? Is there someone just like me in Australia thinking the exact same thoughts, and if so, what time is it there?
    All the 3 A.M. regrets, for the stupid things you said, for not calling up your mother, for not giving money to cerebral palsy.
    And a clear thought that something terrible is happening.
    In the morning, the big orange school bus swung up the street past the blossoming crab apples and the mommies stood on the porches and waved good-bye to the kiddos. And then the phone rang. It was Frank Frisbie. Our friend Corinne had killed herself in Seneca Falls, New York. A cheerful, hardworking, witty, loyal woman, a college teacher, an inspiration to students, and yet late the night before she had paddled a canoe out onto Cayuga lake with her jacket pockets full of rocks and tipped the canoe and sank into the cold water, fists clenched, and vanished from this world, leaving behind a crazy and tearful diary of her last thoughts, so desperate and dark, so unlike the person we knew.
    Frank could hardly get the words out, he was so distraught.
    We knew her at the university, the star of our little gang of writers, the host of every party, the girl every boy wanted to make laugh, and now she was cold and dead on a marble slab, those fluttering fingers, that pearly smile, that girlish voice.
    “I can’t believe she would do it,” said Frank.
     
     
     
    The day of Corinne’s funeral, Iris decided we should have a baby. She announced this as we left the cemetery, having laid a good woman in the ground. It was the right thing to do, to restore our losses. Death and rebirth. We could name the child Corinne. Or not. Either way, it would be Corinne’s spirit among us.
    “If we have a baby, I want to start going to church again,” she said.
    So Iris and I went to work making love on days when her temperature chart indicated ovulation. She read the thermometer hourly and if she seemed to be eggy, she came home on her lunch hour for a Command Performance. Load, aim, and shoot. Every night she peed in a cup and dipped the blue paper tab to see if it turned pink. Months passed. No luck. We refused to contemplate parenthood for fear of jinxing it. No baby things, no books. Just week after week of indentured copulation passed and finally, after four months with no baby in the chute, she asked, “Are you sure you want to do this? Have a baby, I mean.”
    “Of course,” I said.
    What else could I say? Having a kid is up to the woman. Any dope knows that.
    “We’re both so busy all the time,” she said. “I don’t have time to have a kid.”
    That sentence hung in the air for a minute.
    “But if I don‘t, I may regret it someday. You know?”
     
     
     
    So we enrolled at Dr. Wuefer’s fertility clinic in Minneapolis.
    Iris was planning two babies, Hilmer and Corinne. Sometimes Hilmer was named Charles, sometimes Frederick. Sometimes there was a farm in the scenario: a log cabin in the woods with a garden of corn and squash and tomatoes, a golden retriever named Fritz, a horse whinnying in the paddock on clear fall mornings, an enormous woodpile, stacked beside the dirt road.
    We trotted off to the fertility clinic thinking life-affirming thoughts, and the nurse Brianna told us about the ovaries and sent us home with powerful drugs to stimulate egg production. Every day for a month, I jabbed a hypodermic in Iris’s haunch and shot her up with chemicals, and then came the fertilization part. We went to the