The Auctioneer

The wooden pews creaked as people strained to see, and a few couples pushed their heads close together to whisper.

Perly moved up the center aisle, holding the baby out on one side, then on the other, like an usher with a collection plate. Each couple leaned in toward him and examined the baby. When he came to the Moores, he carefully showed them too. The child was wide awake, staring solemnly up at them from the folds of a pink sleeper, a pacifier stuck in her mouth. She had the deep blue eyes and wrinkled face of any newborn baby and could have belonged to almost anyone.

Perly stood over them until Mim glanced up at him. His eyes were as glittering and impersonal as diamonds.

He returned the child to the car bed and she began to whimper. He leaned over her and she quieted down. Mudgett took the car bed away.

Perly returned to the high pulpit. “God’s ways seem dark,” he said softly, to deprive this perfect child of home and natural kin.” Perly looked out over the people, his eyes gone flat and accusing, as if it were they who had abandoned the child. Finally he leaned back on his heels and smiled. “I’d keep this little beauty for myself, if I could find me a wife,” he said. He shuffled a sheaf of papers before him on the pulpit.

Perly went on, reciting almost in a monotone. “Adoption is a very expensive procedure. In this particular case, we had to pay a good sum to the child’s grandparents to keep for the child’s mother. As it all works out, we can’t let this baby go for under ten thousand dollars.”

There was a gasp from the crowd.

“Now keep in mind,” Perly went on, his voice rising, “this is a white child with the very best racial antecedents. Her mother is part German and part Swedish and her father is English. She promises to be your perfect blond blue-eyed child. If you’ve tried to adopt a white infant elsewhere, you know you have to wait four years or so, and even then, if you have other children, it’s virtually impossible. Independent adoptions like this one are entirely legal, but they’re hard to find—very hard to find—especially if you want your perfect white brand-new baby.”

Perly stopped. He stared at the back of the sanctuary and ran his eyes over every person there, as if he were privately making his choice among them then and there.

“When he finally broke the uncomfortable silence, it was in a hard staccato voice. This baby is available now. Today,” he said. “So unless you want your grandchildren to have slanty eyes or nappy hair, here’s your chance. The fact is that you get what you pay for in this world.”

A couple two pews in front of the Moores exchanged a look. The woman nodded. She was slim and good-looking, but not young.

The man, who had crew-cut salt-and-pepper hair, raised his shoulders slightly and turned back to Dunsmore.

“Now the most economical way to settle the thorny problem of who takes the child is to offer her by the time-honored New England methods of the auction.” Perly banged his fist on the pulpit like a preacher making his point. “So,” he said, “do I hear ten thousand?”

The crowd shifted and made no bids.

“Now I know you feel shy and uncomfortable,” Perly soothed. “It’s an uncomfortable business. But I know you want to be parents or you wouldn’t be here. I wish there were some easier way, both for these children and for you. But remember, even the usual way costs money, with hospitals the way they are. This is a mighty painless way to go home with a brand-new baby. No red tape. No labor pains. No racial problems forever after. So let’s hear some bids. Ten thousand. Do I hear ten thousand for a start?”

This time the woman in front of them looked over at her husband and he raised his hand.

“Ten thousand?” Perly asked, almost as if he were surprised himself.

The man nodded.

“Good. Now do I hear twelve?”

“Eleven,” said a woman in the front row. She was tall and dark with the high cheekbones of a gypsy, and an expensive dark brown coat and matching turban.

“Twelve thousand,” said the man in front of them.

Then a voice on one side said, “Twelve five.” There was a long pause in the bidding. People stared at the man who had offered $12,500. He was standing on the pew in order to be high enough to see. His legs were as tiny as a five-year-old’s, though his head was perhaps even bigger than normal and puffed out further by a generous crop of black curls.

“Come on,” Perly coaxed. “Let’s hear how badly you want to be parents.”

The man in front of the Moores upped the bid to thirteen thousand dollars.

The child finally sold for fifteen thousand dollars to the gypsy woman in the front row, who sat with her head bowed when it was clear that she had won. Her husband, a pale man with cream-colored hair and a white shirt, continued to puff on his pipe as if nothing had happened at all.