It Was a Crime!

I had a neighbor named Betty who was married to Jim and they were the parents of a four-year-old boy. Betty was about 25 or so, and I was 20. We became good friends as she was cheerful and hospitable and very likable. She seemed very happily married.

But Betty was saddened by the fact that she couldn't have any more children. So she cooked up a plan with a friend of hers in a neighboring state.

This friend had been married, but her husband left her because she had had an affair and became pregnant by this illicit lover of hers. She desperately wanted her husband back. He was willing to take her back, but he wanted nothing to do with another man's child.

So the plot was hatched.

The friend, who probably had no pre-natal care, would enter the hospital under Betty's name when the time came. Betty eventually showed me the birth certificate with Jim and her as the parents. There was the baby's footprint on this birth certificate.

So Betty brought this little baby boy home. It wasn't working out very well. Betty did not bond

with the baby at all, and I was appalled sometimes when she would ignore his heart-breaking crying. Jim even said to me once as he was tying his fishing flies, "I don't begrudge the baby a

little milk!"

It was 1946 and diaper flannel was almost impossible to find. I found a few yards of it to make my expected baby some diapers, but luckily I received lots of diapers as gifts and didn't have to

make any myself. So Betty wanted to buy my flannel for her new baby's diapers. She would pay

me later, of course, but------

Betty and Jim suddenly left town without as much as a goodbye. I heard later that they got

a divorce.

I never knew what happened to that poor little baby. But I fantasize that a loving couple adopted him and when he grew to young manhood he found his biological father. I don't know

whether I want him to put his arms around his real father or if I want him to shoot him dead in my fantasy. What would you fantasize?