For the Time Being by Annie Dillard

happiness.”
    Whistling-face syndrome, leopard syndrome, and cri-du-chat syndrome are terms to vivify diagnosis. Whistling-face people are, fortunately, rare: Their faces are thickened masks. Their eyes cross and roll up; their mouths and chins pucker. Leopard-syndrome people grow dark spots; their sharp ears protrude. The cri-du-chat babies, mentally deficient, mew. Leprechaunism babies suffer a metabolic defect. Wrinkled and tiny as leprechauns, they have big lips, bigears, and appealing full heads of hair. They fail to thrive, and die.
    In sirenomelia sequence, the infant, usually stillborn, looks (to a delivery room wag, and then only somewhat) like a mermaid. That is, the sirenomelia infant has only one leg, the knee and foot of which point backward, so that if these people lived to hop around—which they do not—they would never see which way they were going. Isn’t this kind of fun, once you get used to it? No. Outstandingly no fun are the dying or dead infants who look like frogs—no eyelids, gaping mouths, scaling skin. “Consanguinity,” the text notes of their etiology: Incest produced them.
    Many damaged infants die in a few days or weeks. The majority of those who live are mentally deficient. In
Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation
, the infants’ visible anomalies—their crushed or pulled faces, their snarled limbs and wild eyes—signal, or rather express in skin and bones, their bollixed brains.
    Here they are, page after page, black-and-white photographs, frontal and profile, of infants and children and adults at every age, naked or wearing briefs. The photographer stands these people, if they can stand, against a wall. A black-and-white grid marks squares on the wall, so we can see how off plumb their bodies are.
    From Degas’s notebooks: “There are, naturally, feelings that one cannot render.”
    Turn the page. Here she is. Of the thousand or so photographs in this book, this one most terrifies me. She is an ebulliently happy and pretty little girl. She is wearing a pair of cotton underpants. She has dark hair, bangs, and two wavy ponytails tied with yarn bows. Sure of her charm, she smiles directly at the camera; her young face shines with confidence and pleasure: Am I not cute? She is indeed cute. She is three. She has raised her arms at the elbows as if approaching the photographer for a hug. Actually, a physician has likely asked her to raise her arms to display them. Symptomatically, she cannot straighten her elbows; no one who suffers femoral hypoplasia—short legs—can. Her legs are pathologically short. (A photograph of an infant victim of this disorder shows feet sticking directly from loins and diaper.) If this child lowered her arms, her hands would extend well below her knees. No plastic surgery could help. Intelligence: normal. She is, in the photograph, delighted with her world and herself. Someone brushes her hair. Someone ties her hair bows. Someone adores her, and why not? “Someone loves us all,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote.
    On the facing page stands another short-legged kid, a crooked boy who is five. His malformed legs are short as fists—so short that his fingers, could he extend his elbows, would graze his ankles. His body is otherwise fine. He can grow up and have children. He has a handsome young face,this boy; he stands naked against the black-and-white grid wall. He looks grim. He tilts his head down and looks up at the camera. His eyes accuse, his brows defy, his mouth mourns.
    The confident girl and the sorrowing boy, facing each other on opposite pages, make it appear as if, at some time between the ages of three and five, these kids catch on. Their legs are short, and it is going to be more of a problem than buying clothes.
    “Rise at midnight,” said a Hasid master, “and weep for your sins.” But we have said that all nature disregards our sins. Our sins have nothing to do with our physical fates. When you shell peas, you notice that