by Evelyn Piper
“But she could tend you.”
“I will not give you Mother’s address to waste time on so you think you’re doing something. I’m Bunny’s mother. You spend your time on Bunny.”
“That’s just what we’ll do, but . . . Listen, you don’t want to keep calling this way. You want all our lines to be open, don’t you?”
“I see. Oh, I’m sorry! I’ll hang up. I’ll come in next time. I won’t telephone again.”
“Yes,” he said. “You come in. Ask for Lieutenant Duff.”
Before she left the drugstore Blanche ordered a cup of coffee at the soda fountain. She reminded herself that a drugstore was sort of a neighborhood club. She told the soda jerk about Bunny and his eyes filled with tears.
“Gee, that’s lousy, that’s lousy,” he said.
“Would you just ask everybody who comes in if they saw a little girl alone?”
“A little girl alone if you’re lucky,” the soda jerk said. “Hey, Miss!”
If the man two stools away hadn’t been quick, he wouldn’t have caught her. “You’re a damn fool, Joe! Boy, are you one damn fool!”
“Should I throw water on her? What do you mean ‘damn fool’? Wouldn’t it be lucky if she was alone and not with some of those sex fiends you hear about?”
“Wet that towel. I’ll hold her.” He pressed the towel against Blanche’s face. “See if you can get some of that coffee down her, Joe. That’s the best thing, coffee.”
“Some sex fiend couldn’t have got her ten minutes after she sneaked out of the school?” He held the coffee to Blanche’s lips.
The man holding Blanche tilted the cup further. “Shut up, Joe.”
“Like that case that was in the papers?”
Blanche pushed at the coffee cup with such force that the man holding her released her.
“Go on, drink that hot coffee, lady. That’s the best thing. Drink it down.”
Blanche saw how the soda jerk’s hand shook holding the coffee cup. His eyes, bright with tears, dark with terror, stared into hers, and she could not stop looking at him while she swallowed a little of the coffee. The soda jerk couldn’t talk; the man who had held her was drying his hands on a paper napkin. The voice she was hearing came from a man hunched over a plate at the other end of the soda fountain.
“Kid’ll go with anybody. You got to train them up not to. Kid’ll go with any Tom, Dick, or Harry; it’s their parents’ fault.”
Teach Bunny she lives in a jungle terrible with wild beasts? Teach her to be afraid? “You’re wrong,” she said, pointing to the tears in the soda jerk’s eyes. “People aren’t like that!”
The man at the end of the soda fountain shoved his plate away. A big bulky man in a red Eisenhower jacket. “Where do you come from, lady?”
“From Providence.”
“Maybe in Providence,” he said.
Halfway to the door, Blanche remembered that she had not paid for the coffee and took a dime from the change she had put into her suit pocket for the telephone calls.
The soda jerk made a pass in the air with his hands. “No.” His hand shot up. “On the house,” he said.
But she would not let him do that. He did that because he thought that Bunny . . . She came back to the counter, defying the bulky man hunched at the end and the one who had held her, and the dark, terror-filled eyes of the soda jerk, laying the dime down so that they could all see it.
8
He was picking rotted grapes off the bunches of them, but when he saw her undoing her apron, he stood up. “Rose, where you going? It’s not nine yet, Rose.” She was folding the apron. “Rose, I already told you. I’m sorry I rode Eddie.”
“I’m going to look for him. In case you want to eat you got what Eddie didn’t show up for in the icebox.”
“He’s a little kid you got to look for him? First you tell me he’s no little kid, I shouldn’t have rode him, now you’re going out looking.”
“He’s no kid, Georgie, is why I’m looking.”
“Why?”
“You didn’t know my first husband, George.” Mrs. Negrito pulled off the sweater she wore in the place and hung it in the back room. “There’s certain things about my first husband, Emilio, I never told no one. So Eddie is like Emilio. You, George, you’re big, you make a big noise, but you’re not like Emilio.”
“But, Rose . . .”
“But Rose!” She began to walk toward the door of the store.
“Maybe I’m going to make a big noise now, Rose. Maybe you better stop, look, and listen. I’m your hubby now and I say you stay here. I’m not going to close up alone and I’m not going to eat from the icebox, either.”
“George—I told you. He was right outside her house this morning.”
“So he was outside her house this morning. If she’s old enough to give Eddie hot pants, she’s old enough to take care of herself. Eddie’s no baby and she’s no baby.” He pulled off his dirty white coat. “Rose, you going to be Georgie’s baby or not, Rose? You going to or not, Rose?”
9
There was a grocery store just around the corner, and Blanche hurried to ask them in there. When the woman who kept it said they stayed open until ten, she asked her to question anyone who came in to buy. “Please ask if they’ve seen a little girl in a yellow dress, alone—” Blanche swallowed—“or with someone.”
The woman promised that if any customer had any information she would call the police station immediately. “I got three of my own, grown.” She called after Blanche. “I got two grandchildren.”
After the grocery store, that was the formula: after they said they hadn’t seen Bunny alone—or with anybody—to ask them to question those they talked to and to report anything to the police station on Sixty-Seventh Street. Everyone Blanche asked, once he understood what the trouble was, said he would. Everyone was sympathetic. They all wanted to help find a helpless little girl.
Nobody would hurt a helpless little girl. Nobody.
10
Rose let George take her home to the apartment. She told herself that George was right, that George had sense. The girl wasn’t a baby. The girl had sense. The girl had nothing to do with Eddie and that poor little pussycat when Eddie was a kid. And anyhow, she told herself, that was when Eddie was a kid.
11
When Blanche had been in love with Bert, when she had waited day after day for his letter, she used to go for a long walk just before the mail was due. She wouldn’t let herself go to the post office and ask for a letter until a certain time after the mail had arrived. It made waiting for the next mail that much shorter.
She would not let herself go to the precinct station until she had gone into ten more houses.
12
When Blanche walked into the police station, the relaxed tempo of the place struck her. But ridiculous, she told herself, to have expected them to be scurrying around like the Keystone Cops in the revival movies on television. Calling all cars! Calling all cars! They had done that already, she told herself. The moment that policeman had phoned in, the ones who looked for lost children had gone out looking for Bunny, in cars and on foot, so much more efficiently than she had been able to search, really thoroughly. This is routine to them, she thought. They must have found so many lost children before this. “Lieutenant Duff, please. I’m Miss Lake.” She was accustomed to men looking at her, but not this way, she thought. Why was the policeman looking at her this way?
Ridiculous to expect Lieutenant Duff to be standing before a map, crossing out house after house, street after street, narrowing down the search, closing the net. “That is a movie idea,” she said to herself. “In real life they sit at a desk reading the Daily News.”
“Lieutenant Duff, I’m Blanche Lake.”
He folded his paper. He was not put out at having her see him reading his paper, so that proved he was doing everything possible. “Have you heard anything? Yet,” she added, to show she had faith in the police.
He shook his head, stand
ing up, leaned over his desk, and pulled a chair forward. “I’m glad you came, Mrs. Lake. Sit down. Mrs. Lake, in my opinion, you should let us contact your mother.”
“Please!”
“Somebody then. No? Okay, now I’ll give you a list of the doctors around here, and . . .”
“Hasn’t Miss Benton called you? The director of the school?”
“Now, why do you ask that?” He spoke very clearly as if he believed she was deaf. “Why do you ask if she called?”
“She said she would telephone her teachers and ask them. Could they tell her anything?”
“No, they couldn’t tell her anything, not a thing.” He saw how her hand went to her throat. “She’s keeping in close touch,” he added, again speaking very clearly.
“Keeping in close touch.” It sounded as if there were all the time in the world! Haste makes waste, Blanche told herself. (Mother always said that. “Haste makes waste, Blanche. You don’t get anywhere flying around like a chicken with its head cut off!”) Head cut off . . . Blanche jumped off the chair. “Don’t just sit there! Oh, God, you mustn’t just sit there! Those policemen outside standing around and looking—This is a helpless child, don’t you understand that?”
“Now, Mrs. Lake, those guys out there are doing their jobs.”
“I’m sorry. Of course, there are others looking for Bunny! That policeman who came to the school and looked. Is he out looking for Bunny?”
“Klein? Yes, ma’am, Klein’s out looking for her. You just leave the looking to Klein—and the rest of the boys. Now, I’m going to give you the list of doctors and you pick one out that looks right to you and we’ll run you over to see him.” He fished two sheets of flimsy out of the drawer of the desk and flattened them on the desk top near her, but she would not look at them. “Now, come on, what good is it banging your head against a stone wall?”
“Blanche, talking to you is like talking to a stone wall.” Blanche took the paper and looked at it. Dr. Granit, Dr. Greenspan. She had forgotten why the policeman had given it to her; when she remembered, she handed it back. “Lieutenant Duff, I don’t want a doctor! Lieutenant—don’t you have any children of your own? Then you know!” He had nodded. He pushed the papers back toward her again. “Or your wife knows.” Perhaps men didn’t know.
“This little girl means a lot to you?”
“A lot to me—a lot to me?” Men didn’t know. “Bunny is—she’s my baby, my baby! Oh, ask your wife if you don’t know. Ask your wife what it means to lose your baby!”
“It’s a terrible thing to lose a baby.”
“Ask your wife.” Because of the way he said the words.
“You ever lost a baby before? I mean, did you have a child that passed on, that’s what I mean?”
“I have Bunny. One child. Do I have to lose more than one before you pay any attention?”
“Just asking,” he said. “I mean . . . Look,” he said. “What’s the use of talking; you need a doctor. Where are you going?”
“Home,” she said bitterly.
“That’s the spirit. Go on home. Get something to eat in you. Have a nice hot dinner; that’s what you should do, have a nice hot dinner. You don’t need to reduce like my wife, do you? So you can have a nice hot dinner. Half the women’s troubles these days come from that reducing, if you ask me. You trust Officer Klein; you liked him, right? Just remember Officer Klein and the other boys in the squad are out looking for your little girl, so you can go home and have a nice hot dinner.”
She did not notice that now she was talking the way he did, slowly and clearly. “I have only one trouble. I have only one child. I have not lost a child by death. I lost a child this morning in school.” She heard the policeman asking if they could run her home but shook her head and walked out. When she went into the outer room, the policemen there looked at her that way again, but nobody said anything and nobody stopped her.
13
The police, she reminded herself, could think about good hot dinners because the police were organized. There was probably, she thought, a master plan for finding little girls, and each policeman had his duty and went about it like the firemen did when there was an alarm. Officer Klein wasn’t hanging around that outer office to stare at her; Officer Klein’s duty was to be out looking and that’s what he was doing and so were all the other Officer Kleins. It comforted her to remember Officer Klein’s tall strong body and the way his muscles had bulged out his tunic when he shoved the door to the roof open. It comforted her to remember the expression on his face. Officer Klein cared about Bunny being lost. (And so did the other officers whose duty it was to care.) She hailed a taxi and went home.
The first thing, now that she was home, was to make a cup of coffee. And, perhaps, toast? She would never get the toast down, Blanche thought, going into the kitchen. It was odd to see the mess she had left it in that morning unchanged. At first Blanche did not know what the slight sound was; then she recognized it as a sigh. She was sighing. “No,” she told herself, “stay in the kitchen. Don’t run. Open the tap. Put water in the kettle.” (Up on a high shelf where Bunny couldn’t reach them, matches.) “Light the range. Water on. Measure out the coffee, two spoonfuls to the cup, twice as strong as usual, very good idea.” The smell of the coffee, usually so delicious, made her queasy. Chocolate instead? Quick energy? Her hand reached up toward the box of milk chocolate, but that was Bunny’s box of candy, up on the high shelf where she couldn’t reach it. Two squares daily for Bunny.
Blanche’s gorge rose, this time because—to have been so careful about such a thing as chocolate and to have walked out this morning and left Bunny . . . But that was because it was a school, Blanche told herself. All mothers left their children in school. Her own mother had left her in school.
She forgot about the coffee and hurried to the telephone. She turned the torn-off pages with Bunny’s scribbles on them face down. Now she recalled that Bunny had also scribbled on the letter from the nursery school which had the telephone number of the school printed on it. Because Mother had been telling Bunny that school was where you learned to read and write, and telling Blanche at the same time that it was ridiculous to put Bunny in a school. Bunny, irritated by the voices, had scribbled all over the letter to show her grandmother that she could, too, write. The pencil had crumpled and torn the paper so the letter had been thrown out.
And Blanche had not jotted down the school’s number when she had called it.
For a moment, she could not remember whether it had been quicker to look up the number or ask Information. (She almost went into a panic because she could not remember that.) Look it up, then. Better to do something than to wait. Her fingers were as stiff as twigs. She found the number and dialed it. Suppose Miss What’s-Her-Name is up in her apartment and it is a different number? I can ask Information if it is a different number. Director of the . . . Suppose I forget her name the way she couldn’t seem to remember mine? “Miss Benton? Hello, Miss Benton. Oh, I’m so glad you’re there! This is Blanche Lake.”
“Hello, there! How are you feeling?”
I don’t need to tell her how I’m feeling with Bunny lost. It’s just a thing one says. “Fine,” she heard herself saying, because that was quicker. “Miss Benton, I’ve been running around trying to find Bunny like a chicken with its . . . Stupidly. I want you to give me the names and telephone numbers of the mothers in your school, please. Start with the ones in the room where I left Bunny. I will ask them to ask their children . . . One of them probably saw where Bunny went when I left. I know they’re all too young to have tried to stop Bunny. I’m not blaming the children, for goodness’ sakes! But if their own mother asks them calmly about the little girl in yellow who . . .”
“I’m certain that won’t help, Mrs. Lake.”
“You can’t possibly be certain! Children notice a lot more than one thinks; at least I’ve discovered Bunny does. Many times . . . some other time I’ll argue about that. I’m sure you know they do as well as I do. Bett
er,” she coaxed, the flattery coming because she could sense the director’s opposition. She picked up the pencil and pulled the memo pad to her. “I’m ready, Miss Benton. For the names and telephone numbers,” she reminded.
“Now, Mrs. Lake, you must be reasonable. I can’t do that, Mrs. Lake. I can’t have you worrying my parents.”
“You think any parent would mind being worried? You think any human being would consider this being ‘worried’? To try to find out if one of the children . . .”
“The police, Mrs. Lake . . .”
Blanche had to think a minute to get past the impenetrable surprise at being refused; then she nodded. “Do you mean that the police have already questioned them, is that what you mean?”
“That’s it, Mrs. Lake.”
Questioning the mothers had been high up in the master plan the police had, see, and she had just thought of it! “Of course, but, anyhow, I would rather . . .”
“This was earlier, Mrs. Lake. By now the children must be asleep.” She laughed. “At least I hope they are.”
“If they don’t want to, they don’t have to wake their children. I can’t make them wake their children, but I can ask!”
“I can’t do it, Mrs. Lake. You must leave it to the police. They’ve already questioned my staff.”
“Your staff! Your staff! I can’t believe that the mothers would mind if I asked them to just calmly question . . .” That nice woman in the gray slacks; she would help. Blanche saw the woman running, her wide rear wobbling. That nice woman wouldn’t just sit back. That nice woman would run all around New York if she knew. Did she know? “Are you sure the police have questioned them, Miss Benton?” And the others on the bench in the hall. They’d been nice, too. Given the chance, they would help, too. “Are you sure you haven’t convinced the police that none of the children could possibly help so why bother the parents? You certainly wouldn’t want them to know that Bunny was allowed to wander out of your precious school and get lost! You’d be afraid that if the parents found out they wouldn’t leave their children in your precious school again—for fear they wouldn’t find them when they came back for them!”