The Responsibility of the Hero

Wittlinger 85 Ellen Wittlinger The Responsibility of the Hero A woman slips from the life preserver into the icy river. A man, only an observer, dives in before he knows it. The television shows her, eyes frozen open, being dragged onto shore. She lives. The story goes: her husband and the baby, eight weeks old, lie in the wreckage of a plane deep in the cold Potomac, dead with some eighty others. The five survivers remain hospitalized, asking for more blankets, all but one happy to be alive. Why couldn't that baby have waited insider her a little longer? Look how strong she was. Her body, still warm with milk and hormones, expert at endurance, saved her. Now she is more than a river or a winter or a mightmare away from what she was. Visiting, the First Lady finds her 86 the minnesota review "touching," as though her tears are merely reasonable. When she recovers they will make her shake her rescuer's hand for the cameras. But he is the best man, the one who forgot his own body, the temperature of his own life the moment he saw her in the river. Now he'll give no magazine his smile. Surely when he feels the ice still in her fingers he will take her inside his coat, love her, husband her, suck her tight dry breast alive, find the abandoned child in himself, his best gift, lead the search for the unforgettable baby maybe, maybe still hiding inside her. He is the hero. How can he do less? ...