Bobby's Baby

A foundling left on the doorstep of a boisterous tenement becomes the epicenter of a carnival of panic when Bobby, a bashful clerk with custard-yellow gloves, is mistakenly fingered as the father by a gaggle of clucking matrons. From the first shrill accusation the stairwells echo like cathedral naves, every cracked tile a witness to his mortification. The infant—swaddled in a lace doily that once graced a parlor organ—wields tyrannical power: one gummy smile and landladies swoon, rent collectors genuflect, policemen drop their batons like broken rosaries. Bobby, propelled by the gravitational pull of scandal, sprints across linen-draped rooftops, tumbles through bakeries dusted with snow-white flour, and ricochets off pushcarts heaped with emerald pickles, all while clutching the squalling bundle as if it were the original sin in portable form. In the climactic courthouse sequence the air is thick with sepia gloom; the judge’s gavel descends like a guillotine on the neck of propriety until a last-minute affidavit—ink still wet, smelling of cheap violets—restores chromatic order to the monochrome universe. The final shot freezes Bobby mid-wink, the baby hoisted like a trophy, the city’s chimneys exhaling steam that curls into the words THE END spelled by sheer accident against the sooty sky.