by Evelyn Piper
She had sipped at the coffee and had to swallow it before she answered. “They’re in England. I told you.”
“Sure? Are you positive? Perhaps they just made you believe they were in England.” He watched her carefully.
She took the cup from him and set it down. “I had a letter this morning and it was from England. I read it while waiting. Waiting,” she said again, and her hands flew to each other.
He took her hands. “Are you sure it was from England? Can I see it?”
“Chloe said she had known that I wouldn’t give Bunny away.”
“Let me see the letter.”
She shook her head. “I gave it away.” She felt how his hands, holding her clasped ones, jerked suddenly, and looked at his face in surprise. “I was reading it in the hall of the school and this red-headed boy who collected stamps wanted it, so I gave it to him.”
“Red-headed kid of about ten? Two front teeth missing?”
“You know him?”
“Yes, he’s a patient of mine. Chrissie Robbins, a siblingrivalry case. There’s a little sister in the first group in Benton School. He’s calling for her these days . . . We want him to be her superior, but he still prefers his imaginary companion. Chrissie invented this boy for himself, Calfit. Funny name, Calfit.”
“Invented?”
“Haven’t they heard about imaginary companions in Providence? It happens more often than you think and is perfectly okay unless there is a confusion between reality and . . .” She pulled her hands away. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” She left him and walked to the door of the kitchen, looking out into the living room.
“There even was a play where a man invented . . . Did you ever see Harvey? The movie, perhaps? About an imaginary rabbit?” The word had hardly left his lips, she had hardly had time to make the connection—Rabbit, Bunny; Bunny Rabbit—when he felt the hot sting of her hand across his cheek. He turned away, furious with her because the tears had come into his eyes. They always did when he felt pain unexpectedly, and emancipated psychiatrist or no, this embarrassed him. He got himself under control and turned back to face her. “Why did you do that?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have, but . . .” She gestured. “Oh, because she isn’t asleep in the bedroom where she should be—you made me feel she was—erased—with your invisible rabbits. I couldn’t help it. Oh, please, I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re being so kind and here I . . . I’m always doing things I’m sorry for!”
“Are you?” I’ll bet you are, he thought. He hadn’t even heard her moving across the floor then. She was one of those girls who go from stillness into sudden motion. Cats, he thought. He said stiffly, “You were saying?”
“No, I can’t talk anymore.”
“We were talking about this letter from England that you gave Chrissie. Talk, Mrs. Lake, it is much better than thinking. Tell me about coming to New York.”
“You’re being very kind,” she said. “I know you are, and I am afraid of being alone and thinking. Oh, I read the New York Times and answered an ad for a job and they wrote me, so I came.”
“Job?”
“With McClellan and Forrestal. They’re in the Empire State Building.”
“What was wrong with the job in—wherever it was? You’re being rather mysterious, aren’t you, Mrs. Lake?”
“Miss Lake. That’s why. There was nothing wrong with my job but you make more money in New York, and if I wasn’t going to marry Bert . . . There’s more future for jobs in New York. Don’t think I’m a career woman. If I could, I’d stay home with Bunny, but I have to support us. Anyhow, New York is so big that it’s easier not to have people know about you. You reminded me of Bert,” she said. “That was part of the reason I slapped you. He wanted us to wipe Bunny out of existence, too.”
“So when you slapped me, you were really slapping Bert?”
“Yes, you were just an innocent bystander who got in the way.”
“Don’t give it another thought. It’s an occupational hazard; psychiatrists are always getting one kind of slap or another meant for entirely different people.”
“But you’re not my psychiatrist.”
“Let’s talk as if I were. Is it that which makes you want to hit? People wiping out your child as if she didn’t exist?”
She said, “And how would you feel if your child were lost and somebody . . .”
Her hand made the most exquisite outflung gesture of despair. He wondered if she had ever studied ballet.
“I cannot talk like this calmly! I can’t sit here talking. I don’t know what I’m saying because . . . underneath . . . all the time . . .” She laid her hand on her breast. “No, there’s one thing I want to ask you . . .” She waited for his permissive nod. “When I was waiting outside the school for the policeman to come there was this woman. There were a couple of people behind me on the sidewalk and I could hear them talking about Bunny. This woman said it was like a judgment.
“I turned around—her voice was so—awful. She had a baby in a carriage and she kept shaking it. Rattling it. She said mothers who didn’t stay home and take care of their babies . . . it was a judgment on them.”
“Perhaps she was referring to herself, Miss Lake. People often do, don’t they? From your description of her treatment of the baby in the carriage—‘rattling’ is very vivid—perhaps she wanted to shake her own baby out of her life and attributed her desire to you. Or perhaps she was jealous. There was a teacher in the Benton School last year who was jealous of the parents because she couldn’t have a child of her own, and she projected abominations on their heads . . .” But she wasn’t interested in the teachers in the school; she was merely waiting for him to be done, so she could continue.
“She did mean it would be a judgment of God on me if something happened to Bunny, didn’t she?”
“Perhaps.”
She came and stood very close to him, whispering, “You see, before I was sure that Bunny was coming, I prayed not to have a baby. I was so frightened.”
“Frightened,” he said, encouraging her to go on, because she was obviously having difficulty.
“Terribly frightened,” she whispered, as if it couldn’t possibly be spoken aloud. “I prayed not to have a baby.”
“Yes, you prayed not to have a baby? I see, you mean that if the baby is gone now, you have no baby?” Her skin had turned chalky white. “So your prayer is answered?”
“That’s superstition, isn’t it? That’s not religion! To believe that God would answer a prayer that way? That would be savage, wouldn’t it? I mean, whatever punishment I deserve, Bunny doesn’t . . . God wouldn’t hurt a little child!” She didn’t wait for him to agree or disagree, but challenged, threatened. “I would never believe in Him again,” she said, “never!” She saw how he shook his head, how he smiled. “But I heard her saying it was a judgment every time I thought of a new horrible thing that could be happening to my baby. That’s what’s been driving me crazy,” she whispered.
15
If George reached out and grabbed her again just when she got to the edge of the bed, she would go crazy. Emilio used to do that when Eddie was little. Eddie would yell in his crib and it wouldn’t wake Emilio. Nothing woke Emilio once he got off, but when she’d roll away to go to the kid, that skinny arm of his would reach out and grab her. Like a cat with a mouse. Like Eddie that time with the black pussycat.
The way to keep the springs from creaking was to press down the same time you got up. She didn’t do it right, and the springs creaked. Let him wake up then, Rose thought. She stood there next to the bed with her hands on her hips. I’ve been a good wife to him. If I want to get up from the bed and go find Eddie, I got the right!
“You lie there sleeping, you big lug, but me I lay there thinking about Eddie. Because I know Eddie and you don’t, Georgie!”
She felt her way across the room to the chair where she had thrown her clothes. It was because she was scared she didn’t know Eddi
e, how far he’d go. Her own kid.
But she knew he had less than two bucks on him, and she knew the fellows he went with, where they hung out. In that bowling alley near Third.
All she wanted to do was find out where Eddie was so she could rest herself. All she wanted was so Eddie would really say to her the way she’d been saying to herself lying there next to Georgie, “You’re nuts, Mom. You honestly thought because George rode me that way . . .?”
Because Eddie had found out where the girl lived. Because why else was he hanging around her house, for the air?
“You’re real nuts, Mom.”
“Because of that pussycat, Eddie.” Because he had stretched out on the floor with it, playing. Lying on the floor with it. Because he got a piece of rag from the kitchen and tied it on a piece of string and played so nice with the kitten. Because the kitten got tired playing with the string and went under that table they had with the long cloth on it, and Eddie went under the table after it. And then the string.
But the girl wasn’t a dumb little pussycat. Any girl knew better than a dumb little pussycat.
16
He put the coffee cup back into her hands and she did drink some of it, although it had, of course, become quite cold. He told her that she must stop blaming herself. “Suppose you try to blame someone else. Do you think that the boy who wanted to marry you . . . The child stands in his way, doesn’t she? Do you think that it is at all possible that he could have come to New York?”
“From Sao Paulo?”
“It doesn’t take too long by plane.”
“Bert doesn’t even know where I live in New York.”
Something in the way she held her head made him ask the question. “But there is somebody who does know where you live?”
She said, “Yes, somebody does.”
He asked her to tell him and she told him: a boy in a fruit-and-vegetable store to whom she had never even spoken. Who had never even spoken to her; who, according to her, had simply leaned against a bin of potatoes and stared at her. (He had those swimmy eyes. Feverish, she called them. He wondered whether the boy in the greengrocer’s could be nearsighted. Couldn’t this possibly explain the quality of his stare? Didn’t nearsighted people often stare like that?)
“You don’t think I should call the police and tell them about him?”
“No, I don’t. I wouldn’t bother the police with that.”
“I suppose not.” She sighed. “I suppose not. Of course not. It was you who made me think about him. I wouldn’t even have thought of such a thing if not for you.” She had the feeling that he wanted her to accuse someone of kidnapping Bunny. Not to make her feel silly, she told herself, but probably because now she was supposed to feel that whatever else she might be imagining was equally as ridiculous as the theory of the boy in the fruit-and-vegetable store. Well, she thought, looking at Dr. Newhouse, he looks satisfied anyhow. She went to the telephone.
He heard her explaining to the police how terrible it was just to wait, asking if she couldn’t go along with the policeman, go along with Officer Klein, for instance. She listened to what they said and then hung up.
“Detective Klein is looking for her. He’s a detective. He’s out looking and they can’t reach him until he calls in. I can’t seem to reach them. There’s a kind of a wall between me and them,” she said.
He saw her walk to the table and pick up her pocketbook. “Where are you going?”
“Out looking.” She held out her hand for him to shake and he took it. “Thank you for trying to help me. It was very kind of you.” She pulled her hand away and walked to the door, then paused with her hand on the knob. “They don’t seem to feel it,” she said. “As if it weren’t important. They seem to be taking it in their stride so.” She opened the door. “How can a little lost girl be routine to anyone?”
He followed her as she hurried to the elevator. “What is your plan?”
She pressed her finger on the bell. “Plan? Like what to do when the atom bomb strikes?”
She was making fun of him, he thought, of the prim way he had said that. Dennis felt himself blushing, because it was true, he thought. At least that was what he felt every time he read or heard some of the civil-defense stuff. Laughable, it seemed to him, too, for that was what she meant by her remark. Canute commanding the waves to stop. Ant citizen hurrying around carrying off microscopic crumbs in the face of monumental disaster.
“All the plan I can think of is to keep moving,” she said bitterly. The elevator came and she stepped into it. “I’ll keep moving and I’ll keep asking.”
She moved and he moved with her. She stopped people and asked them, and he waited in back of her while she received the completely negative answers. She must have been in the drugstores already because she just walked in and the pharmacist and the soda jerk began to shake their heads. When she came to the brightly lighted bowling alley, she stood for a moment staring up at the huge neon sign in which a bowling ball rolled perpetually toward pins which fell to rise again. She seemed puzzled, as if she could not believe that any mechanism should be working tonight, and he could understand that, too, he decided. (How transparent her face was!)
He followed her into the bowling alley and watched her as she moved along the benches which lined the wall and questioned the men and women sitting there. He saw the heads shake and then, as she passed on, the eyes following her. She had reached the last of the benches when he saw her stop. Her hand went to her mouth and then she ran, stiffly, crookedly, as if her legs were both stiff and too loose, to a tall blond man who was lifting a ball out of the rack. She pulled on the man’s arm, and they stood staring at each other, then, as she ran toward the door, the man turned back to the alley and, without pausing for preparation, bowled the ball. His arm had moved viciously, as if he wanted to knock down not only the pins but the whole alley, although only one pin toppled. Somehow, the sound sickened Dennis. He did not rush after Blanche, and because he was standing there, he saw the dark woman’s face after Blanche brushed past her. He saw how the dark woman stared after Blanche, and how her lips moved as if in prayer; then he hurried out of the alley to catch up with Blanche. It was difficult; not that she was running so fast but something about the way she was moving, he thought, made the people in the street clear out of her way only to stop when she passed and stand there staring after her so that they impeded his progress.
17
Rose crossed herself. She did not recognize any of the people bowling, but Gino Ricciardi was sitting there on the bench, so she hurried to him. “Gino, you seen Eddie?”
He was watching the bowling and she was standing in his way. “Saddy night.” He leaned sidewise to see better.
“You ain’t seen Eddie since Saturday night, Gino? You’re certain?”
“Saddy night.”
Rose put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Gino, that girl who just ran out of here, what was the matter with her, anyway?”
“She lost her kid, it seems. She asked everybody did they see her little girl?” He measured the little girl in the air. “She lost her little girl. She could be my little girl any time she says the word.”
“What do you mean she lost her little girl, Gino?”
“Hey! Mrs. Negrito!” He pulled her hand off his shoulder. “She took her little girl to school this morning and the kid ran out after her and nobody can find her.”
“Gino, do you think she went to the police, the cops?”
“How do I know?” He had to lean so far to the left that he shoved the man next to him on the bench. “Excuse it,” he said.
“Gino, you dead sure you didn’t see Eddie since Saturday night? You can tell me. I’m Eddie’s momma.”
“Saddy night. I’m sure.”
“Did any of the other boys see Eddie, Gino? You got to tell me. I got to find Eddie right away.”
“Search me. That’s a funny thing. You lost Eddie and she lost her little girl. You should get together with her, Mrs. Negrito.
” He shoved back against the wall, the red coming into his face. For a minute there, he thought she was going to take a sock at him. “What’s the matter with her?” he said, watching her run out of the place like a crazy woman. If he saw Eddie, he’d tell him his old lady was on the warpath. If he was Eddie, he’d keep out of the old lady’s way. If he was Eddie.
18
She was talking to the policeman at the high desk by the time he caught up with her in the precinct station.
“That’s right, off duty,” the policeman said.
She was holding on to the high desk. He put his hand on her arm and she turned to him. Her eyes were so distended that he could see the shining whites of them, all around.
“He was in that bowling alley,” she said. “The one I told you about, Klein. The nice one who cared. He’s supposed to be looking for my baby and he’s in a bowling alley!”
“Klein’s off duty,” the policeman behind the desk said to Dennis.
“They just told me he was out looking! Where is that lieutenant? In there?” She began to run in that same jerky way toward the wooden door to the right of the desk.
Dennis caught her arm. “You only saw the man for a . . . You can’t be . . . Are you sure?” he asked weakly, because there was such scorn in the distended eyes.
“Yes, I’m sure.” She knocked on the door and then flung it open. “I don’t understand,” she said to the man behind the desk. “Why did you lie to me? Why is that Klein bowling and not looking for Bunny?”
Dennis said, “I’m Dr. Newhouse. I spoke to you before, Lieutenant Duff.” He said to her, “They did lie. A white lie, don’t you see? It was obvious to Lieutenant Duff that you trusted Officer Klein so when you telephoned, Lieutenant Duff had them tell you he was out looking. Because you trusted him, to make it easier on you. Officer Klein, as you saw, is off duty. It is the Missing Persons who are looking for Bunny, isn’t that right, Lieutenant Duff?”