I left the children’s room and went into my bedroom and opened my jewelry box and took out the bottle of diet pills and swallowed one without water. Then I went into the bathroom and found some aspirins and took two of them and put my mouth under the faucet and drank.

In half an hour I was in the station wagon driving to the park, the children in the back dressed in blue and white sunsuits with sandals on their feet. I had on yellow shorts and a new white piqué blouse. You never could tell, Robert might decide to come with Hilton to the park. He owned the newspaper. He didn’t have to go to work unless he wanted to.

That afternoon I took the baby, Jimmy, back to the doctor, a Jewish pediatrician who had gone to Tulane. He was overworked and had little patience with young mothers. He always kept me waiting for at least an hour and never spent more than five minutes with the baby when he finally saw him. This time, however, I made him talk to me.

“My maid says it’s the mosquitoes.” I took his arm, holding his sleeve so he couldn’t leave the room. “She said he got something from the mosquito bites.”

“What bites?”

“He got covered with mosquito bites right before he got sick. He got impetigo from them. Don’t you remember? You gave me some medicine for it. It was in February. Right after that first warm spell. My maid said to tell you it was from the mosquitoes.” He shook my hand from his sleeve, took the chart down from the door, began to read it again. Then he took Jimmy out of my arms and carried him to the examining table and began to stare into his eyes. “I want to put him in the hospital this afternoon and run some tests,” he said. “I may want to do a spinal tap.”

“A what?”

“A test for encephalitis. There was an epidemic of it in Monroe last month.”

“We were in Monroe. We went to see my cousin play the organ.”

“Could you bring him to the hospital this afternoon? Could you spend the night there with him?”

“Sure. I can do whatever you want me to. I’ll have to call my husband and my maid. Can I use your phone? You want me to go to the hospital right now?”

“No. By five is plenty of time. They can do the blood work and if we need to do the spinal tap I’ll do it in the morning.” He picked up the baby and held him in his arms. He seemed to sniff him. He put his head down next to the baby’s chest.

“I told you there was something wrong with him,” I said. “He sleeps all day and he always has that fever.”