by Evelyn Piper
No, don’t talk about not realizing things. Best not to reproach Mother for taking Bunny without letting her know. Best not to buy the toy now. Waste time buying the toy. Best to hurry home as fast as she could and hold Bunny tight in her arms and let her cheek slide against her silk hair as she had done with Marie.
Blanche heard her heels on the pavement and they seemed such a slow beat. Surely she could run faster than that?
3
The self-service elevator was there for once, waiting, which looked as if Mother might have been the last person who used it. Most of the people in this house didn’t bother to press the button after they got out of the car, but Mother did. When Mother had come in, she must have lifted Bunny up and let her press the 5 button to take them up, and then let her press the M button, and that was why the elevator was waiting now. Mother was always sweet to Bunny. Mother had stood there patiently while Bunny watched the indicator light flash on in each of the little numbers. Mother had taken Bunny home from school because she loved her.
Blanche leaned against the back of the elevator, wishing it weren’t so slow. She rang the doorbell of the apartment and waited, quietly, so that she would hear the footsteps inside, but then called out, “I’ve got my keys, Mother, don’t bother!” She gritted her teeth because her hand shook so badly that she could not open the catch of her pocketbook. “It’s Mommy, Bunnsy! It’s just me, Mother!” She bit her lip and leaned her elbow against the side of the door to steady her hand, thinking that if anyone came out of the other apartments on the floor, they would think that the new sublet tenant of 5A was a fine one, coming back home so drunk at six o’clock in the evening that she wasn’t even capable of unlocking her door! “Bunny!” she called, throwing the door open. “Bunny! Mother!”
4
“I should have telephoned,” Blanche thought. “Oh, why did I come all the way back? I should have telephoned first!” She would have to telephone the school now. Even though what was hardest was to be still even for a minute, she would telephone first. She walked to the telephone and lifted the receiver, then put it back. She didn’t know the number.
Blanche hurried to the rickety little desk to find the letter from the Benton School which had the telephone number printed on it—quicker than the directory with her hands so . . .
Not quicker, she thought, pulling at the right-hand drawer, which didn’t open easily. She had pulled it evenly, of course; the next thing would be the loose knob coming off in her hands. Always, always when you were in a rush! Telephone book, she thought, and picking it up dialed Information and then propped the phone between her shoulder and her neck so that her hands would be free to turn the pages. So thick, Blanche thought, so many people in Manhattan. “I want the number of the Benton Nursery School on East Eighty-Third Street,” she said, turning pages as she spoke. A race between her hands and Information. She got there first and hung up. How annoyed Information would be.
The telephone rang and rang. “Telephome,” Bunny said whenever she heard theirs ringing, and grinned proudly, showing all her perfect teeth, because she really knew better. She just said “telephome” because it made Blanche smile.
Blanche slammed down the receiver. Could Bunny have wandered out of the room that morning? Could Bunny have tried to follow her when she left? Unwilling to be deposited? Before the teacher came from around the L part? Because, if she had, before the teacher had even seen her . . . So that the teacher thought she had kept Bunny home after all? She should have talked with the teacher then and there, even if she was late, even if it had all been arranged so carefully. The children had seen Bunny; there had been several of them there—but too young to report? Even if it had been the Fours (but why the Fours?) she had left Bunny with, they were surely too young to report that a little dark girl had been left there by her mother while the teacher had been busy in the L part of the room. Too young to know that Bunny should have been stopped when she walked out after her mother?
But even if no one had seen Bunny going down—where? Down too far?
“One—two—eight, ten,” Bunny always counted, going carefully downstairs.
Down one flight too many? There must be a basement in that horrible old brownstone house. Suppose Bunny had gone down into the basement? Fallen down the steps?
Why hadn’t she searched the place except for the classrooms?
She saw the policeman directing the traffic on Lexington Avenue. If no one was in the building when she reached it, she would get that policeman. Mother used to frighten her about policemen, telling her that they would put her in prison if she was such a bad girl, but the once she had heard Mother saying that to Bunny she had stopped that. So Bunny wouldn’t be afraid of a policeman.
Because Blanche wanted it so badly, as she walked—since by then she had had to stop running; her lungs were bursting—she could see the black of Bunny’s hair against the blue of the policeman’s uniform as he came up the cellar steps carrying her. “Here’s your little girl safe and sound,” he said, and Blanche saw Bunny’s starfish hand reach up to touch the policeman’s shiny buttons. Bunny wouldn’t be afraid when that policeman found her, and Bunny wouldn’t have been afraid of the dark cellar either the way she, Blanche, used to be scared of the dark. Bunny had always had a night light, so Bunny wouldn’t have been afraid to go down into the dark cellar. And that is why a three-year-old child, perfectly conscious, completely unharmed, could have stayed in a dark cellar patiently waiting.
“I wouldn’t have believed it possible,” the policeman would say, looking down at Bunny’s dark hair resting against his uniform and at her little hand admiringly fingering the brass buttons. “Honestly,” the policeman would say, “I wouldn’t have believed it! You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw her sitting there, not a scratch on her . . .”
The front door of the school was locked. Blanche, leaning against it, breathing with difficulty, pressed the bell and kept her finger on it.
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” the cop would say.
Did she believe it? Could she believe it? Safe and sound? Not a scratch on her? Blanche counted twenty-five as slowly as she could and took as deep breaths as she could before she began running for the policeman.
The people in New York City were no different from the people in Providence. Heads turned as she ran by, but in Providence someone would have asked her why she was running and could they help. Here, it seemed to her, now, the staring people were kept from asking by the fear that they would be made fools of if they should ask; that it would turn out to be some kind of trick, some new advertising scheme, some joke on them. But the police would help her, she thought. “Officer! Officer!”
He heard her voice above the traffic and, directing it, moved toward her. While she told him, he took her arm to hold her up.
“My little girl is locked up in the school and I can’t get in.”
“You go to the precinct station. Get in a cab. Sixty-Seventh Street.”
“Officer!”
“Lady!” He gestured. “I have a job here!”
“She’s only three! Three!”
“Three years old? In school?”
“Nursery school!” Blanche reached for the arm that was supporting her and began to pull at him. “The Benton Nursery School on Eighty-Third Street. Hurry!”
“I can’t leave my post, lady. Go to the . . . Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He took one more look at the cars behind him and began to walk rapidly, speaking over his shoulder. “Okay, I’ll put in a call at the box for you.”
“No! You come!”
“Miss, I can’t. This isn’t life and death, Miss! They won’t be but a couple minutes. There’s the box, see?” He opened it and kept his back turned, not wanting to see her face any longer than he could help. “You go to that school and someone from the precinct station will be along.” With great relief, he heard her running steps.
When Blanche got back to the door, she began to bang on it. In the back of her
mind she remembered a movie she had seen about people trapped in a mine—and when they heard the banging from above . . . She could not feel it as her fists smacked the wood.
“What is it?” a woman’s voice asked from the sidewalk.
“Search me!”
“What’s your trouble, Miss?”
“My little girl . . .”
“Locked in the school?”
“And where was she so the kid got locked up? Late? Couldn’t leave the television set! Call themselves mothers sending tiny little babies to school! All day long, too!”
Blanche began pounding with her palms instead of her fists, but she could hear the woman on the pavement anyhow.
“If anything’s happened it’s a judgment, that’s what I say! That’s what they learn them in college—how to drop their kids and leave them for others to take care of . . .”
“I got a cat does that . . .”
The voices stopped when the policeman came.
“You’re not going to get anywhere that way,” he said, meaning the banging, but he would not take Blanche’s word that there was nobody inside to answer it, and rang the bell himself.
Finally the policeman tipped back his hat and looked doubtfully at the thick door. “I’ll see if there’s a window open in the rear. You wait here. Generally, in back . . .”
Blanche could not understand where he was going, but one of the women explained to the others that the cop was going into the next house and get to the backyard over the fence.
“Probably bust the fence down . . .”
“Naw, that’s the firemen do that!”
“How come a kid came to be locked in, anyhow?”
“Call themselves mothers and don’t care enough to take care of their own, that’s how. Some people don’t deserve to have kids!”
But a school is where you leave children, Blanche thought. A school is where children are safe. Nothing happens to children in school. Everyone—Blanche turned around to see who had been saying the terrible things: a man, a woman with a bulging paper bag of provisions. “I have to work,” she said to all of them. “I have to work”—she stamped her foot—“and Bunny’s an only child, no one to play with . . .”
“Always excuses!”
It was the one with a baby carriage—hard line of mouth. She stood there, shaking the baby carriage, rattling it.
“If I was the Lord God, I’d be plenty sick of hearing excuses!” She turned the carriage so abruptly that the infant rolled onto its side. Blanche said to the woman with the bag of provisions, “I think she must have followed me out of the room and gone down too far . . .”
“You mean into the cellar? Rats!”
“Rats wouldn’t hurt a kid that age, only the tiny kids—rats wouldn’t—oh, for God’s sake,” she said to the one who had said it. “Rats! Honestly!” Because she could not help, she moved off, too. This was the woman with the bag of food.
“If it was anything like that, she’d have yelled plenty.” The man was sorry he had said that. He couldn’t leave, however, until he saw the door open and the policeman’s face appear.
The policeman dusted his pants with his cap, put it on and let Blanche into the hall. Blanche saw the line of benches again, the lumpy blue paint.
“Now, where’s the cellar door?”
As Blanche ran along the hall she called out that she didn’t know. There was a door and she pulled at it but it was locked. The next door was locked, too, but the policeman saw the key hanging from a hook high up near the ceiling.
“It’s locked so I don’t see how your kid could—wait a minute, they could have locked up when they closed the school.” When he got the door open, he reached in and found the light switch. “You wait here. You wait here,” he repeated.
Blanche saw that the policeman was not sure what he would find and began to call “Bunny, Bunny, Bunny!” as he walked downstairs. When there was no answer, she listened to his deliberate steps, then peered down the stairs, holding on tight.
The cellar, which wasn’t large, was clean and tidy. At the street end, where the faintest light came from a small barred window, was a heap of coal. The policeman, Blanche saw, was rolling some coals away from the bottom of the heap with the tip of his heavy shoe. It was as if he had touched Bunny with his shoe. Blanche moaned, ran downstairs and, shoving at the shoe, began to roll the coals with her hand; then she stopped. “How could a little girl of three get under coals?” she asked, brushing off her filthy hands, almost smiling. The policeman had walked around to the other side of the coal heap and was staring down at it thoughtfully. Then, as she watched, he took up a shovel which had been leaning against the wall and dug it into the coal heap, lifting a shovelful. “Not with that! Not with that!” Blanche tried to pull the shovel out of his hands.
He set his chin. “Get out of my way, lady!”
He meant that if Bunny was under the black coals, the shovel wouldn’t hurt her. Blanche fell down on her knees and began rolling the coals again frantically. “That’s crazy,” she said, pulling down the coals, talking over the roll of them, the dig of his shovel and his grunt as he lifted a shovelful, “that’s crazy because this isn’t an abandoned cellar where someone could . . . This is a respectable school,” she said.
But the policeman continued shoveling until he made sure; then he walked away from the flattened coal heap and, as Blanche watched him, set the shovel between his knees and wrapped a handkerchief around his hand, then jerked the furnace door open. “Don’t!” she screamed.
“Lady, I told you to stay outa here!” The policeman thrust the shovel in among the glowing coals and moved it about. “Okay,” he said, slamming the door and turning his red face toward her. “Thank God, lady! Don’t cry! I had to make sure; you can see that, can’t you, lady?”
5
The cellar door shut with a bang and they heard the key turn in the lock. The policeman’s hand went to his holster. For a moment, before the voice sounded, Blanche knew from the look on his face that the policeman believed that this was a part of it, part of what had happened to Bunny, but then the voice said, “I warn you down there. The police are on their way!”
The voice was prim and precise. It sounded uncomfortable with the words it was using.
The policeman’s face cleared, and he took his hands off the holster and wiped off the sweat which had formed on his forehead. “Open up!” He took Blanche’s arm and led her to the steps. “You don’t have to get the police; this is the police, lady.”
“You can’t expect me to believe that!”
“Yes, I expect you to believe that!” The policeman pushed Blanche up the stairs and banged on the door. “Open up!” He gestured to Blanche, grinning, then lifted his foot and kicked at the door. “Can’t you hear the flat feet, lady?”
“This is not funny.”
“You’re going to look funny if you call the cops, lady. Open up! Open up!” he shook his head. “Go outside, there must be one of those people out there left. Go ask if a cop didn’t come in through the back.”
“No. We can’t wait here wasting time,” Blanche said. “Ask her who she is. Who are you?” Blanche asked. “Is that Miss Benton? She’s the director of the school,” she explained to the policeman. “Miss Benton? This is Blanche Lake speaking. We can’t wait locked up in here.”
“I’ll go out and ask.”
“Then, go on!” Blanche banged her palms against the door and pushed, as if she could push Miss Benton away through the wood. They heard diminishing footsteps, then the front door closing. Blanche stood that way, her palms against the door, her face resting on her hands. Suppose all those people had left? How long did New York people wait for anything? Always in such a hurry. Perhaps she should have insisted that Miss Benton call the police; perhaps that would have been quicker. Every time she chose the wrong way, the slower way. She hadn’t searched the building thoroughly. Perhaps in one of the cots she hadn’t examined . . . Suppose, because her mother had left her for the first
time, Bunny had—retrogressed, as the psychology book put it, was sleeping the way she used to when she was an infant? She used to be able to do anything in Bunny’s room when she was an infant and she wouldn’t awaken. (Retrogression often occurred after a shock, the psychology book said. Worse retrogression than this, much worse. Grown children forgetting how to talk . . .) Well, if only Bunny was sleeping now it wouldn’t matter so much that her mother made stupid choices. Blanche saw Bunny’s sleeping face as she had seen it so often when she went in to make sure she hadn’t thrown her covers off. She put her hand to her forehead and felt the grit on it. Her hands must be black with coal dust. She must not touch Bunny with the coal-heaver hands; only the softest, cleanest, most gentle hands should touch Bunny. “Oh, God,” she prayed, “don’t let any hands have touched Bunny!”
“Don’t break down, lady,” the policeman said. “You’d be surprised how many lost kids we get! Take it from me, and when you find her, just harden up your heart and give her a good walloping! You might want to give her an ice-cream soda, but a good walloping . . .”
“Bunny?” She smiled at him because the word “walloping” in connection with Bunny was so preposterous.
“You see?” The cop asked no one. “You see? Here she comes now!”
The key turned and the door was opened. “Please excuse me,” Miss Benton said. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She was a small young woman with documentary features. It wasn’t only her lineage which had given her the clear eyes, the good nose and the firm mouth, but the life she had had and the life she intended to have. Everything about Miss Benton was a credential. “When I came in and heard noises in the cellar—why those people out there on the sidewalk let me walk into the building without . . .” She caught Blanche’s gesture of impatience and stepped to one side. “Your child was locked in here after school? I simply don’t understand how that could have happened.” She stretched out her hand to help Blanche. “This door is always kept locked, so she couldn’t have been down there. If only I had been here—did you search the building thoroughly? Although I really don’t see . . .”