Exhausted, she relaxed into letting him go, her hands fixed into fists, her thumbs plunged down inside of them.

“Mr. Chaplin?” It was the nun. She was holding a blue blanket. “This is your son.”

Chaplin’s eyes darted toward the flowers—how colorful they were!— and then the window. Then he extended his arms bravely to accept the bundle. Instead, the nun glided across the room and laid it against Mildred, so that it rested between her arm and her body. The nun glided out of the room. Chaplin willed himself to glance at the baby, and saw that the face was perfectly normal. The face of all newborn babies. He was tucked into the blanket tight as a bullet, though, with his entire body hidden, and a hood went up behind his head.

It looked very much like a baby, and that was all he could really think right now. Chaplin smiled to himself, a smile that vanished, and his eyes went again to the flowers. A dozen white roses from Goldwyn. A wreath with a cartoon drawing of a stork and some other animals on it from Sennett. Oh, it said, “Ol’ Joe Stork Brings One New Krazy Kat.” How nice of them.

“It’s a boy,” he said. He had never been so frightened. The way the bundle was packed up, the hood, something seemed out of proportion, ballooned in odd places, sunken in others. Or was that his imagination? The baby was strangely motionless, its eyes fixed, its upper lip twitching reflexively, but otherwise it lacked all vigor. “So,” Chaplin said.

Mildred began to unwrap the blanket. She started with a safety pin at the chest and then peeled back the layers of swaddling cloth carefully, as if the infant might, with too much handling, come apart in her hands. When it was uncovered, visible to Chaplin completely, the father was quiet. His eyes ran over the little body, unable to understand exactly what he was seeing, looking for the familiar landscape of chest, stomach, arms, legs, and then the curtain of the blanket was drawn closed again. The baby made a strange gasp, like the pop of gas releasing from a swamp.

Then Chaplin was sitting in the wooden chair next to the bed. He was thinking simple thoughts: The giraffe was so soft, the flowers were so bright. Roses from Doug and Mary, how thoughtful. The giraffe had come with spectacles, they were in his pocket, he could put them on the bridge of his nose, that would be funny.

“Is he going to live?”