Norma Jeane's guilt over losing Baby and hope for another child

Norma Jeane's guilt over losing Baby and hope for another child are expressed through an intensely physical relationship: she brings The Playwright's hand to her pregnant belly, imagines the child as a presence within her, and, after a miscarriage, asks to try again. Baby is not only an anticipated child but the focus of a new life she has chosen, a fragile promise repeatedly tested by fear and loss.

A pregnancy shared between two people

At two months and six days into the pregnancy, Norma Jeane turns a declaration of love into a shared address to Baby. She takes her husband's hand and places it on her warm, rounded stomach; The Playwright answers as though the child were already included in their marriage. The scene makes the pregnancy relational before Baby can speak or be seen: a hand, a belly, and the plural language of a family still in the making.

In bed, The Playwright rubs his cheek against her bare stomach and kisses it. He is astonished that her pale skin is already stretched taut so early, and imagines a tiny heartbeat within her. The imagined heartbeat matters because it gives intimate form to a life he cannot yet verify. His touch also encounters the small scalloped scar left by Norma Jeane's appendectomy years before. Pregnancy thus occupies a body already marked by earlier medical experience, rather than an untouched or abstract ideal of motherhood.

Norma Jeane has resolved to follow a strict diet so Baby will be well nourished from the womb. She has stopped taking pills apart from vitamins, and has withdrawn from her career to devote herself to what she calls a real life in marriage and motherhood. The narration presents this retreat not as an angry rejection or a regretful surrender, but as a pragmatic renunciation of her former worldly life. The scale of the choice gives the pregnancy a consequence beyond private tenderness: she is reorganizing daily life around the child she expects to have.

Fear, care, and the body at Captain’s House

That confidence is not uncomplicated. Among The Playwright's friends, Norma Jeane is shy and hesitant, often speaking only after someone draws her out. The narration imagines Baby clinging desperately inside her and gives her fear a stark, repeated shape: the child may harm her as before. The reference to a previous time establishes that this pregnancy carries the emotional weight of prior reproductive loss, although the passage does not specify its circumstances. Her hope is therefore joined to apprehension rather than replacing it.

At Captain’s House, her care extends beyond her own pregnancy. From the second week of the stay, Norma Jeane begins feeding the Stray cats despite The Playwright's advice. One gaunt black male with clipped ears is followed by a pregnant female; soon about ten cats wait at the back door. They keep their distance, hiss when she tries to approach, and rush to eat when she sets out the dishes. Their wary dependence gives her maternal attention a concrete, daily practice, while the pregnant cat offers an outward echo of Norma Jeane's own condition.

The cats also bring the household's concern for a vulnerable creature into the space where the crisis unfolds. Because an outside door leads to the cellar, The Playwright thinks a cat may have gone down and become trapped. Norma Jeane descends with a flashlight to rescue it. The imagined danger to the animal is soon overtaken by the danger to her own pregnancy: The Playwright hears a cry, runs downstairs, and finds her injured at the foot of the cellar steps. The rescue she undertook becomes an emergency in which she begs him to save her and the creature, pulling at his hands as if asking him to help bring it into the world.

Miscarriage and its aftermath

The Playwright calls an ambulance, and Norma Jeane is taken to Brunswick General Hospital. The pregnancy ends in miscarriage at fifteen weeks, on August 10. The passage gives the loss a precise gestational point and date, setting them against the earlier image of Baby's imagined heartbeat and the couple's intimate attention to the growing belly. What had been treated as a shared future becomes a sudden medical crisis, and the request to save the creature cannot prevent the loss.

For three days afterward, Norma Jeane does not speak. The Playwright sees her as gravely diminished and whispers that he loves her, hoping she can hear and will forgive him. On the third evening she smiles, takes his hands, and appears to recover with startling abruptness. The narration calls this the actor's genius: a capacity to draw energy from depths others cannot understand. That description frames her return to speech both as an act of performance and as a force that leaves the people beside her powerless to explain it.

The promise to try again

When Norma Jeane finally speaks, her first insistence is not that the loss is over but that the couple should try again, and then try again. She addresses The Playwright as Daddy and asks him to promise that they will never give up. The repeated appeal turns the earlier language of shared love into a vow directed toward a future that has not yet arrived. Baby is gone, but the relationship to motherhood persists as a hope she asks her husband to share.

That hope remains unresolved in the evidence. The scene records a promise sought after the miscarriage, not a subsequent pregnancy or a child born. Its emotional conclusion is therefore an act of recommitment rather than recovery: Norma Jeane insists on another attempt while the loss is still recent. The placement of this exchange immediately before the heading for the 1959–1962 afterlife section gives the promise a precarious edge, but does not disclose its fulfillment. The bond with Baby is defined by both attachment and absence, and by Norma Jeane's effort to make the possibility of another child survive the loss of this one.