`Edgarina,' he went on. `Edgarina Ecstein.'
He looked up at me. `Who named her that?'
'Don't ask silly questions. The baby's healthy, Arlene's healthy, I'm healthy: that's what counts.'
`You're right,' he said. `But do daughters rebel against their mothers too?'
`Here she comes,' I said.
Two nurses wheeled Arlene down the hall and past us into her room and, after she'd settled back into bed, they brought
the baby in for her to hold. Jake and I watched benevolently. The baby squirmed a bit and hissed, but didn't say much.
`How'd it go, Arlene?' I asked.
`It was a snap,' she said, cuddling the child against her swollen breasts and smiling ecstatically. She stared at her infant
and smiled and smiled.
`Doesn't she look just like Eleanor Roosevelt as a baby?' she said.
Jake and I looked; I think we both concluded it might be true.
`Edgarina has dignity,' I said.
`She's born for greatness,' Arlene said, kissing the top of the baby's head. 'Die willing.'
`Or nothingness,' I said. `You don't want to force any patterns on her, Arlene.'
`Except for making her cast the dice about everything she does, I plan to let her be entirely free.'
`Oh Jesus, Jesus,' said Jake.
`Cheer up, Jake,' I said, putting my arm around him. `Don't you realize that as a scientist you're getting in on the
ground floor of something which is of immense scientific importance?'
'Maybe,' he said.
`No matter how Edgarina turns out under Arlene's regime, it's scientifically significant. Genius or psychotic, something
new has been demonstrated.'
Jake perked up a bit.
`I suppose you're right,' he said.
`This may be your greatest case study since "The Case of the Six-Sided man."
'Jake looked up at me, beaming.
`Maybe I ought to do some more experimenting with the dicelife,' he said.
`You'll need a title, of course,' I went on.
`You certainly should,' Arlene snapped at Jake. `Any father of Edgarina Ecstein had better be a full-fledged diceperson
or I'll disown and discredit him.'
Jake sighed.
`That won't be necessary, honey,' he said.
` "A Case of Random Rearing,"' I suggested. `Or perhaps, "Dieper Training."
'Jake shook his head slowly and then squinted aggressively up at me.
`Don't bother trying, Luke. It's beyond your depth. The title has already been made: "The Case of the Child of Whim."'
He sighed. `The book may take a little longer.'
Chapter Seventy-two
The sun dazzled down and warmed and softened my mountain of flesh. I writhed myself deeper into the hot sand,
feeling the rays above like long-range caresses on my skin. Linda lay beside me, bikinied and beautiful, her lovely breasts breathing skyward against the strip of cloth that was theoretically a bikini top like two fruit growing and shrinking in a speeded-up biological film of the growing process. She had been reading Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma and we had been talking about group dice therapy, but for the last fifteen minutes we had both lain silently, enjoying the solitude of the vast expanse of the Bahamas beach and the love-making of the hot touch of the sun. It was February in New York, but summer bare.
`What do you really want, Luke?' Linda suddenly asked. From the smudge at the corner of my half-closed eyes I
gathered she had sat up or raised herself on an elbow.
`Want?' I said, thinking. The rhythmic thud of the surf thirty yards away made me long for a swim, but we'd only been
out of the water for fifteen minutes and were only just now dry.
`Everything I guess,' I finally said. `To be everybody and do everything.'
She tossed her hair back away from her face with one hand and said `That's modest of you.'
`Probably.'
A sea gull careered into my reduced field of vision and then out again.
'You've been sort of quiet today. Just another dice-decision?'
`I've just been sleepy all the time.'