by Evelyn Piper
24
Rose Negrito shoved hastily back into the doorway of the house opposite the police station and waited until the girl, the guy, and the cop got into the cab together. But even when the cab moved off, she couldn’t do like she planned and go into the station, just because the girl came out as she was about to cross the street and go in. What difference did it make that the girl came out of the police station? Just because she had seen the girl in the bowling alley looking for the kid by herself didn’t mean she hadn’t gone to the cops, anybody would know that! She had just had the hope. So she had just had the hope.
And if there was anything special about her going to the bowling alley where Eddie hung out, she would have asked for Eddie there. She didn’t ask for Eddie there. She just asked did anybody see the kid.
Rose crossed the street in front of the police station.
The trouble was George. The stuff George had told her about when he lived in New Jersey and the Lindbergh baby being kidnapped. And about that friend of George who had seen Hauptmann. And his friend said such things. Also the other man, the customer in the store who came in every week and bought fruit to bring to his wife’s son in jail. Probably that customer of George’s had never laid eyes on the hot seat, probably just talked and George believed every word of it.
Would it make any difference that Eddie was just a kid himself? Would they take into account that Eddie didn’t have no record? (Staying out of school didn’t give you a record!) She tried to remember if she had told anyone about the kitten. Anyone. If she had told anyone about the kitten and then they turned up at the trial . . . (They would have a trial even if Eddie was a kid.)
Now that she thought about it, Rose thought, nothing happened to the Lindbergh baby right away. It was when Hauptmann became desperate that he killed the poor baby. She began to walk away from the police station. A baby wasn’t a kitten. Cops were what drove them to it.
25
“Somebody talk!” Blanche said. “Somebody say something!” Silence in the cab. Someone walking on my grave.
“Here we are,” Officer Gingrich said, opening the door.
“I’ll get this.” Blanche did not wait for the doctor to pay the taxi but went into the house, hurrying to the elevator.
They followed her as she ran through the living room to the bedroom and pulled out the second drawer of the dresser, which they knew would be empty. Gingrich silently opened the closet and shoved the few clothes from one side of the rack to the other, to show her that all the things there were hers, adult. Dennis stood out of the way so that she could rush into the bathroom and look behind the door, where only her yellow toweling robe hung from the hook. Both men waited until she had looked for herself.
She pressed her hand over her lips to make them stop trembling and whispered, “Somebody took her things. Don’t you see, somebody took her things, too!”
Gingrich cleared his throat. “Klein told the lieutenant a kid of three is all over everything, so we went over this place for fingerprints.” He started to say it to Blanche, but then turned to Dr. Newhouse. “That was the clincher; no fingerprints where a kid could reach.” If Blanche had tried to tell him that someone had wiped off the fingerprints, he could have called it a day, but she just stood there, just stood there, so he said, “Let’s go through the house again. Maybe some of them who wasn’t home when we asked . . . Let’s go through the house again.”
26
Occasionally, the doctor thought, as, for example, it must have been with Keats, where the feverishness attendant on his T.B. added a special quality to his poetry, so with this girl; her delusion added to her piquancy. Her hysteria made her eyes notable and every motion of hers became exciting. When that died down, he told himself, she would resemble the others. It was that quality, he told himself, that made everyone they questioned unable to take his eyes off her, even though she didn’t say a word. She let the policeman ask the questions, stepping forward after he had explained why he was going through this again, like a criminal in the line-up, letting herself be seen, stepping back.
No one in the house had seen Bunny. “New Yorkers see nothing, hear nothing, know everything,” he said, miserably aware that she would not find the small joke amusing, but unable to resist trying to reach her. As if he could, he thought. No one could, he thought, not that way.
There was only one surprise. Only one man said to wait and came out with a boy of about eight. “You see what happens to kids that don’t do what they’re told?” He pulled the boy further toward them. “Take a good look at this one, Officer! One of these days you’re going to be out looking for him!”
During the time the man had been gone, before she knew why he had brought the little boy out, she had hoped. “For the love of Mike!” Dr. Newhouse said, taking her arm, spitting fire at the father of the boy.
The man saw what he had done to her. “I figured . . . seeing Bovvy’s always running off . . .”
“Everyone thinks of his own,” Officer Gingrich said, motioning the man to take his boy and close his door. “You can’t help thinking of your own!”
“Why don’t you go to your place and rest and try to think?” Dr. Newhouse said. He could feel her arm shaking.
“You’re just trying to make me stop. I won’t stop.”
“I’m not just trying to make you stop. I’m trying to make you think. Running around this way . . . Hold on, Miss Lake! Please, one minute before you go downstairs again!” She would not wait for the elevator. “Here’s a thought.” He told Officer Gingrich about the letter from her friend which she had given to Chrissie Robbins.
“I told you. I crossed the words out because it was personal.”
“But wouldn’t it be possible that we could make something of it? And if there was a mention of Bunny—from England—that might be the shred of proof that the lieutenant is waiting for!”
“I crossed everything out.”
“You’d be surprised what a magnifying glass can do!”
“Of course,” Dr. Newhouse said, “if you don’t want to prove . . .”
Blanche began to run downstairs. “You don’t,” she said.
27
Why Dr. Newhouse!” Mrs. Robbins called back into the apartment, “Here’s Dr. Newhouse coming to see us! The mountain coming to Mohammed, in other words!” She was a sensitive woman, and her light tone faltered when she noticed Blanche and the exhaustion on her face. “Come in, please. What is it?” When they told her, she looked at her husband. “Go on in and wake Chrissie, Bill.”
Hurry,” Blanche begged. She had warned herself to be quiet, but it seemed to her that everyone was moving in slow motion; a hiatus gaped between their words.
“Can’t I get her a drink?” Mrs. Robbins asked. “Won’t you take a drink? You could use one.”
Blanche shook her head no, because she was willing the husband to hurry, the red-headed boy to wake up, the blue paper with Chloe’s handwriting to appear. Under her breath she was saying, “Please. Please. Please.”
When Mr. Robbins returned, he was holding the blue paper, but before he brought it to them he picked up the magazine he must have been reading when they came in, and put the paper on that; as soon as he got near enough Blanche could see why. Chloe’s letter was dripping water.
“Chrissie was soaking the stamp off,” Mr. Robbins said. “He told me about it. It turned out to be a duplicate so he intended to trade it to a fellow philatelist . . . a philatelist who, unfortunately, doesn’t collect covers as Chrissie does, just stamps.” Mr. Robbins shook his head. “So he was soaking the stamp off.”
Blanche took the magazine with the blue sheet on it. You could see blue smudges that must have been words, but no magnifying glass would help.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Robbins said. His wife had moved close to him and her fingers were biting into his arm through his shirt sleeve. He pressed her hand once and then pried her fingers loose. She just stood there while the girl and the cop and Dr. Newhouse left; then she be
gan to cry. He put his arm around her shoulder and tried to comfort her.
“You saw there was a letter,” Blanche said, holding out the magazine as if she were offering them something to eat. She met the policeman’s eye, then tore the paper across, dropped it and ran. The policeman bent to pick up the pieces and the doctor raced after her. She broke away from him and leaned against the wall and stood like that while they waited for the elevator.
He had a patient who did that. She would not use the couch or the chair; stood like that in the corner with her face pressed against the wall like a child who was being punished, and talked in that position. Except that Mrs. Dickenson was a middle-aged woman, except that her governess used to punish her by making her stand against the nursery wall, except that Miss Lake was far too young for such punishment to have been inflicted on her; it was the same. He wondered what it was that had been done to her by life. He would try to find out, he promised himself. He would try to help her, he told himself, in the only way it was possible to help her. Gingrich was trying to help her, too. She had made quite an impression on Gingrich.
“You say you’ve been in your place two weeks with the little girl. All right, so no one noticed her in the house in two weeks, that could happen, but didn’t you take your little girl anywhere we could check?”
Blanche shook her head. She went downstairs and out with them.
“You were at your job all week, but how about the two weekends? Didn’t you take her somewhere on the weekends?”
“I took Bunny to that school the first Sunday, for that interview. Only they say I didn’t.” She clenched her fists. “I’m sorry. Yes, and on Saturday, this past one, Bunny and I went to the Central Park Zoo. It was a beautiful day. We had lunch on that terrace.”
“Did anyone . . .?”
“Did anyone! Did anyone! I told you it was a beautiful day. Do you think Bunny was the only little girl whose mother took her to the zoo?”
“Yeah. And Sunday it rained on and off, didn’t it?”
Blanche looked up at the sky. “Yes,” she said. “It rained on and off. I went out for a walk, but alone.”
It was heartbreaking the way she looked up at the sky. They got a cab and took her back to her apartment house. There was nothing to do but leave her, but Gingrich was finding it hard to leave her.
“Miss Lake, you being at the job all week . . . Your mother took your little girl out, didn’t she? Maybe your mother took her somewhere we could check?”
Blanche seemed to wake up. She suddenly pointed her arm to the left, down the block. “There’s a lending library there!”
Its lights were visible. The lending library was on the ground floor of another of the big apartment houses.
“Mother went there. ‘I won’t go there again!’” Blanche turned back to the two men, chose between them, chose the policeman, going closer to him, touching his sleeve. “Why did Mother say, ‘I won’t go there again’? That way? Maybe she took Bunny in there.” One morning on the way to work, Blanche thought she would borrow a book to read in the subway and she had tried that lending library, but it wasn’t open. She had looked in through the window and could see that behind the library there was another back room. Mother had taken Bunny in with her. Mother at one of the bookshelves, skipping through a book to see whether she would enjoy it. (Mother had always done that.) Bunny becoming bored, going by herself into that back room, and someone in the back room with little Bunny! Now she saw that horrible boy from the fruit store with Bunny. Bunny crying out. What had the horrible boy done to Bunny? (Why did it frighten her so abominably now to realize that when she read about “sex crimes” in the paper, she didn’t actually know what had been done to the victim?) “Don’t you see that that could have been because Mother took Bunny to that lending library and something happened there?”
“We can ask.” Gingrich hurried her down the street.
When the door of the lending library opened, a bell rang. Dr. Newhouse held out his hand for Blanche because she was shaking. When her hand touched his (as if this had impelled the confidence) Blanche said, “That boy could have a job in the lending library, couldn’t he? Just because he was always in his mother’s store at six doesn’t mean he was there all day?” Blanche pulled her hand loose. “You go, too,” she said. “You’re a doctor. Go.”
Gingrich had gone into the lending library and the door closed after him. When the doctor opened the door the bell rang again. Blanche followed Dr. Newhouse inside. Gingrich was standing with two middle-aged women.
“They run this place,” Gingrich said to Blanche. “Sisters. They never saw your little girl.”
The younger of the two women went to a table near the entrance and pulled out the drawer of a small filing cabinet. “Name Lake?” she asked.
“Mrs. Daniel Lake.” Blanche said to the other sister, “Do you have a boy working for you in the daytime?”
“A boy? Haven’t you heard of television? People don’t read anymore. We can just make out without paying salaries to boys.”
Blanche studied the woman’s face to see whether she could be lying. (Perhaps everyone lied.) The other woman closed the filing-cabinet drawer.
“We don’t have a card on Mrs. Daniel Lake,” she said to the policeman. “We have cards on all our members, naturally. No Mrs. Daniel Lake.”
The doctor, gently taking her arm, led Blanche to the door. Gingrich opened the door. The bell rang.
The older sister said, “Alice!”
“Of course!” Alice said. “Lake!”
Blanche felt the doctor’s hand tighten on her arm as he swung her around.
“We did have a card for Mrs. Lake. I’m sorry, we forgot for a moment. Mrs. Daniel Lake.”
“She was—outraged—because we wouldn’t let her take out a copy of Marjorie Morningstar she saw on the desk here.”
“It was a reserve, naturally.”
“No,” the elder sister said, “I don’t remember her coming in with any little girl, though. Do you, Alice?”
“She only came in a couple of times,” Alice said. “No, as far as I can remember, there was no little girl.”
The bell rang as the door closed.
Gingrich cleared his throat. “Well . . .”
He was going to go back to the police station. Blanche ran to him and touched his sleeve. “Please . . . please—anyhow,” she said, “please! You can do it! Go back and tell him you saw something . . . or somebody said something, so that . . . Oh, please!” she begged. “Just tell him so he’ll look for her.” Gingrich kept his eyes on the doctor’s face as if he didn’t dare look at her. “Lie,” she said. “Can’t you lie to save my child?”
“I couldn’t do that, Miss Lake. Miss Lake, look, you won’t come to the station any more, will you? The lieutenant doesn’t want you coming around again.” He said to the doctor, “If she comes again, he said he’s going to have to . . . You know.”
“She won’t,” the doctor said. “Miss Lake understands that she mustn’t go to the precinct station again.”
“You tell her, won’t you, Doc? She can understand, can’t she? I mean, after all, it’s not our place . . .”
“She can understand.” He stood ready to hold her if she tried to follow the policeman Gingrich again. She wasn’t going to go to Bellevue if he could help it.
As Gingrich strode away, she simply stood looking after him. He heard her deep, painful sigh. He wished he could make her know that he, at least, was aware that her agony over this lost child was no less because the child was imaginary. Her tired hand pushed at her strong hair. That was, he thought, how it seemed to him: strong hair, electric and resisting under the push of the tired hand. “Don’t you think you could rest for a while?”
She said wearily, “Go away, please.”
“I can’t leave you alone this way. Please believe me. I want to be your friend.”
“A friend would believe me. Go away.”
He found, flushing, that he had raised his hand involu
ntarily as if to guard himself against a blow, and, of course, she might hit him. She was unpredictable, of course, he thought; it was impossible to count on her. But if she had meant to hit him (and something in her voice or in her body must have given him that idea), the impulse had been deflected. Her face cleared. She started to walk off. “Where are you going?”
“I have a friend,” she said. “Yes, I do have a friend. I forgot.”
“Let me take you to her, then I’ll leave you.”
“No, I’ll go by myself. Him,” she said.
He noticed that she smiled before she hurried off. She had said “him,” and had actually smiled, was amused, realized perfectly then that he was drawn to her; knew that saying “him” would hurt! Dennis stayed where he was, watching the way she moved down the street. “Let him take care of you, then,” Dennis said to her back. “Let’s see what he can do for you!” She wasn’t alone and she wasn’t his patient. You take care of yourself, he told himself. He thought again of the cast of the head of the girl drowned in the Seine. He remembered how he used to look at it when the other medical students went out and he stayed in his room and plugged. Let her go, he told himself, and began moving in the opposite direction to the one she had taken. Then he heard himself whistling. Let her go, let her go, God bless her . . . ’Twas down in St. James Infirmary . . . so cold, so white, so . . . Marble. Lips meant for marble.
But it was Louise’s dinner which would be so cold by now.
But not Louise, he thought. Never Louise. And now he heard himself sigh.
28
She hurried along York Avenue and turned up Eighty-Sixth Street. The doorman of the big white building looked through the glass door and yawned as she passed by. It wasn’t that late, not that late, Blanche thought; simply that the doorman was tired. She turned the corner and walked up the street about a fourth of the block, and then darted across.