by Evelyn Piper
Blanche saw that a door in the back of the shop which must lead to that cellar was open. She made a wild snatch at the glasses, got them and threw them as hard as she could into the corner, and ran for the open door. Her hand searched frantically along the wall for the light switch, and she felt the knife . . . the splinter . . . the what . . . tear through her hand, the back of it, but did not stop feeling for the switch, and when she found it and put it on the first thing she saw was the mean sullen mouth of the cut, welling blood. Then she saw the pink breathing furnace on the right of the cellar and the pile of trunks up which he had climbed on the left.
Blanche pressed the back of her hand to her lips and tasted the blood there. She sobbed and clattered down the stairs, hearing him moving clumsily around in the room behind her.
On top of the pile of trunks was a box, a crate, with a wire front, a traveling box for some animal, Blanche thought. That was where. She moaned. She could see, pressed against the coarse wire grating, an arm . . . a leg? She clambered up until, by reaching out, she could easily touch it through the grating, but she could not.
She closed her eyes and with her left hand pushed her second and third fingers through the wire. Cold. Smooth. Soft. Giving. Gasping, Blanche pulled the lid up with her right hand, seeing the bright smear of blood. The crate opened and she thrust her left hand in and pulled by the clothes, by the yellow dress with the appliquéd bunnies.
She heard him coming down the stairs, but she could not move. She was so nauseated that she could only stay where she was; the sour saliva filled her mouth. He had another pair of glasses on, silver-rimmed. He came slowly toward her, and when he reached her she was able to talk. She said, “Where is she? Where is she?”
He said, “You got her!”
“Not Bunny’s doll, not Bunny’s doll! Where is Bunny?”
“You see?” he said to no one, to the doll which he pulled from Blanche. “You see, you see?” He ran crookedly across the cellar and pulled open the furnace door. “Give a dog a bad name,” he said, “you see?” He held the baby doll’s body in one hand and pulled at the crooked, dimpled right leg with the other. There was a rending sound.
“No!” Blanche screamed, and frantically climbed down. “You mustn’t! No, I’ve got to take it to the police!”
First he tore off the other leg, and then the body fitted easily into the furnace, and then he said, “You got to take what to the police?”
Although she tried to explain to him how much it meant, what it would mean if he didn’t come to the police with her and tell them about Bunny’s doll, he would not go. She followed him up the stairs begging, but he would not go.
She better go, he said. She better get out of there and go. He had the street door open for her. “You’re not going to get me into more trouble, ma’am; you go. It’s just your word against mine. You can go if you want to!
“Your hand is bleeding, ma’am,” he said.
30
Wilson said, “I’ve been trying to find you!” She was standing in front of, leaning against, face pressed against the big window of the delicatessen store on Lexington and Eighty-Fourth Street. The Muenchner Wurstgescheft, the gilt sign read. “Please forgive me, Mademoiselle Blanche. After you left, I called my wife in Wellfleet. I thought she’d put you up to it, you see. I thought you and Marta were in cahoots.” She wasn’t listening to him. “What are you staring at in there?” He touched her arm but she didn’t stir. “Come on back with me now and I’ll try to help you find your little girl.” She was staring at the sausages—fat sausages, thin ones, huge ones, wrinkled sausages, pink, yellowish, dark red sausages. To get through to her, to get closer, he pressed his own face against the glass. “Blood sausage,” he said, pointing, “head cheese. Head cheese, isn’t that? When I was a little lad . . .” He had her now; he could sense that she was attending now. “When I was a broth of a boy, I thought head cheese was made of heads! All those stories of cannibals I fed on, of course.” She had begun to shiver violently. Wilson said, “Now that I’m grown up, I know of course that it’s only gelatin and bits of . . . stuff . . . but it takes a certain amount of callousness to be able to wolf down head cheese, don’t you think?” She was glued to that window. “Come on, Mademoiselle, you don’t expect to find Bunny in there, do you?” Now she was pressing both hands across her abdomen.
“My dear,” Wilson said, holding her, catching a glimpse of her face, “what is it? What did I say?” (You don’t expect to find Bunny in there, do you? he had said, . . . thought head cheese was made of heads, he had told her.) He pressed her tighter and began to shake her. “Darling! Sweetie! That’s Poe, darling, that’s Evelyn Waugh or whoever the hell it was who wrote that gem about the man who ate . . . You can’t think anyone would . . . You can’t think . . . Come on, sweetie.”
31
She knew that this was Mr. Wilson’s bed she was in because it smelled of him. This was Mr. Wilson’s bed in Mr. Wilson’s bedroom, but how had she got there? Blanche sat up and, raising her right hand to push her hair out of her eyes, discovered a handkerchief tied around it. It must be Mr. Wilson’s handkerchief. Blanche was grateful for it because she always felt sickened at the sight of blood. She shivered, remembering the thin spiteful mouth of the long cut, welling blood. She called, “Mr. Wilson! Mr. Wilson!” and pulled herself out of the bed.
After a little while she could stand upright without the room going away from her and then rushing at her. After a bit, the big chest in the corner of the room ceased from toppling toward her, and stood steady. She must have fainted, she told herself. She must have fainted and been brought here. “Mr. Wilson!” she called, and when there was no answer told herself that perhaps because she had fainted he had gone out to look by himself, so as not to waste any time.
She pulled her hand free of the footrail of the bed and walked shakily to the door. Mr. Wilson would have left a message telling her where he was and what she must do when she came to. “There must be something I can do,” she said, pulling at the doorknob because it would not turn, banging on the door because pulling wouldn’t open it. Then she stood there and the room began to dance again, the bed backward and forward, the chest of drawers backward and toward her like a fantastic square dance. (“I’ll help you find Bunny,” Mr. Wilson had said.)
Blanche stumbled toward an open door and found that it was a bathroom and went in, turning the cold-water tap on full, dashing water at her face until she could look into the mirror and see herself and not the window with the hundreds of sausages, not the arm pressed against the wire of the crate, so soft and cold and small. Blanche closed the tap and, dripping, went to the rack for a towel, but there was only a used one. She took that but could not make herself touch it to her face, it smelled so of him. (Or fish? The man with the hand fishing in the saucer full of eyes?) Her gorge rose at the smell and she could not spend time vomiting. She pulled her skirt up and tried to dry her face on the slip, but it was nylon and wouldn’t absorb the water.
“A closet,” Blanche thought, but there was no linen in it, just two of Mr. Wilson’s suits which, she found, hastily closing the door, also smelled of him.
She went to the chest of drawers because it might contain towels, but, though she looked carefully in each drawer, there was no towel, so she eventually used a laundered shirt. (I will send it to our laundry tomorrow, together with our things, Bunny’s and Mother’s and mine. Tomorrow.) But since it must not be tomorrow until Bunny was found, Blanche hurried to the door again, banged again, turned the knob, pulled at the knob and then, because now she heard someone, began to call, “Mr. Wilson! I’m up! Mr. Wilson!”
“That’s fine, sweetie. Look, will you stop that damn banging? I’m trying to get Dennis.”
“Who?” She stopped hammering on the door and heard what sounded like dialing. When he finished she called, “Mr. Wilson, who?”
“Dennis. Do you happen to know where he is at the moment?”
“Mr. Wilson!” After a few minutes she
heard the phone banged down and then his steps.
“You can’t tell me where Dennis is?”
“Who he is! I don’t know who he is! Mr. Wilson!”
Oh, poor Ophelia! thought Mr. Wilson. “Never mind, Mademoiselle Blanche, never mind. You just rest a while like a good girl.”
“Mr. Wilson, I don’t want to . . . This door is locked, Mr. Wilson. Let me out, please.”
“You just lie down and close your eyes and rest a while. You’ve had a tough night of it.”
As the footsteps became fainter again, Blanche began to bang on the door frantically.
“Sweetie! Take it easy, will you? Take it easy.”
“But we have to look for Bunny! You said you’d help me look for Bunny! Aren’t we going to look for Bunny?”
“Not just now, sweetie. We’re going to stay just where we are for a while.”
He wasn’t going to help her look for Bunny. “Then let me out.”
“Uh-uh. I’m not letting you out a second time.”
“Mr. Wilson! Let me out. Let me out! Mr. Wilson, you said now you believed me. You said you’d help.”
“And I intend to help in the best possible way.”
“You don’t believe me? Is that what you’re saying? There isn’t any Bunny, you think?”
“Oh, now, really, Mademoiselle!”
He didn’t believe about Bunny. He had never believed about Bunny being lost. “I will kill him,” she decided quite calmly, and was able, at the first try, to remember exactly where she had seen the revolver. It had been in the second drawer. It had been hidden under the jacket of a Paisley-print pair of pajamas. Blanche slid the drawer open quietly, so that he wouldn’t hear, and removed the revolver, made sure that it was loaded, and then shoved the drawer back in without a bump. Quietly, Blanche went back to the door.
How to get him to open the door? She was a pretty good shot. (He hadn’t bothered to ask about that, had he? He had let her talk about her private affairs and not believed her for a minute, but about guns he hadn’t asked!)
She couldn’t be sure unless he opened the door for her. Blanche looked down at the gun, shivering, because if she killed him they would lock her up. They wouldn’t let her look for Bunny since they didn’t believe, either. She was the only one.
Well, after she found Bunny she would kill him, she thought, because he deserved to die for what he had done to her. She saw her purse lying on the bed and squeezed the revolver into it. Because she was so tired, she sat on the bed, smelling his smell again, which came, she decided, from the sheets.
Blanche ran to the bathroom and, stepping into the tub, shoved the window open, then, perching on the rim of the tub, looked out. Yes, this house must be like the ones which backed on her house; that darker shadow below must be the first-floor extension. (She still smelled his smell. He had tied his handkerchief around her hand where the cut was, that was it.) She ran back to the bed, ripped off the sheets, tied them together and then knotted them at intervals and shoved the sheets out of the window. She pulled in her breath and stuffed her purse with the gun in it into her waistband because she needed it to kill him with later. He would die for all of them who had refused to believe that Bunny was lost, and he should be the one because he had lied to her the worst and locked her in.
She climbed up on the window sill, first taking off the clumsy bandage. She was going to throw it on the floor but when she saw that the cut was bleeding again she stuffed it into her pocket. Turning awkwardly, so as to face the wall of the house, Blanche let herself out. With one hand on the sill, she tested the sheet. It gave a sickening lurch and then held. She yanked her skirt up and twisted her legs around the sheet.
32
There was only one fence to climb because the next three houses in the mews had made a community garden out of their backyards. Although she found a neat little gate that led through the side alley of one of the houses on East End Avenue to the street, so that this was easy also, her hands, she discovered when she shoved her hair back from her face, were both bleeding and splintered. A man was walking along East End Avenue. If he caught sight of the blood, she thought, he might become curious about her. She was able to rip Mr. Wilson’s handkerchief into two and bound her hands, then, with her purse stuck under her arm and both hands thrust into her pockets, she began to walk.
First she would stop in the all-night drugstore there and telephone the police station. She had not called for hours. She opened her purse, but then when she thrust her hand into the pocket where she had put the change for calls, there was no change. She could not ask the druggist for change to call. “Ask nobody for anything,” she told herself. She would have to go to the police station.
Blanche had the money to get to Sixty-Seventh Street; it wasn’t that; it was that it wasn’t safe to go. She turned instead toward her apartment house. Safer to telephone from the apartment. They could not do anything to her if she just telephoned from the apartment. There could be news, and if there wasn’t she could sit down while she thought what to do next. (Of course she could think what to do next!) “Mommy’s coming,” her steps said. “Coming, Bunny. Mommy’s coming, Bunny.” Exhausted as she was, she broke into a trot to change that rhythm.
33
He was sitting in front of her door with his knees pulled up and his face resting on them in the pose called “siesta,” seen on thousands of ashtrays and plates and other souvenirs from Mexico. After blinking down at him for a long moment, Blanche recognized him. Because he was barring her door and the telephone, she hated him. (“We have found Bunny for you,” the policeman would tell her the moment she called the precinct station.) But then, as she stood there, he stirred and opened his eyes and she stopped hating him.
“Miss Lake! I thought you would never get back. I should never have let you go by yourself, no matter what you said!” He saw the streaks of blood on her forehead and her hands bound up in blood-stained rags. “What’s happened to you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I want to get inside my apartment, please.”
“Let me see your hands. Have you hurt yourself? Please, let me help you.”
“You can’t help me. No one can help me unless they believe in Bunny.”
Dennis thought of Peter Pan and Tinker Bell asking, “Do you believe in fairies?” But he was a man of thirty-two and a psychiatrist. He wasn’t a child. He could believe neither in fairies nor in Bunny, but he could help her, he told himself, just because he was what he was and not a credulous child. Because he was a psychiatrist and not credulous, he was the only hope.
“I must call the police station.” Just in time she remembered to turn away so that he could not see into her purse while she was clumsily finding her key. When she tried to open the door, he took the key from her and did it. “Thank you.” He was coming in. Let him come in. While she dialed the precinct station, she saw how he was brushing himself off. He always was brushing himself off, she thought. She tucked the telephone receiver under her chin and, as if taking gloves off, pulled off first one and then the other half of Mr. Wilson’s handkerchief and revealed the small cuts and the long thin, angry one.
He said, “What happened to you?”
She shook her head at him because the phone was being answered. (“We have found Bunny for you.”) She told the policeman who she was. “Nothing? Nothing at all? Please, you will let me know if . . . After all, she may be brought in there any moment, so please let me know.” She put the telephone in its cradle, and when the bloody handkerchief halves fell on the floor from her lap, she kicked at them.
Dr. Newhouse pointed to her hands. “What happened to you? Please tell me, won’t you?”
She ignored this. “What shall I do now? What time is it now?” She pulled up her sleeve and he saw the smudge of dried blood on the watch band.
“Tell me about it, won’t you?” He seated himself and smiled at her quietly. In his practice he said this innumerable times every day and they always told him. She told him.
“It was Bunny’s doll, of course. I needed it but when I touched it, it . . . Is it rubber? The skin felt . . . It’s supposed to feel that way, of course, but when I touched it . . .”
“And then, you say, he tore it limb from limb and burned it in the furnace? That’s a pity, isn’t it?”
“Pity! It would have been proof! Pity!”
“That’s what I said. Go on. And then what happened?”
Perhaps it was his air of authority, his calm expectation that if she did tell him he could help, perhaps her fury against Wilson was so great that she had to talk, perhaps it was only because she did not know what to do next and had to do something, but Blanche told him.
“Who did this? Who said that about the head cheese? Your friend, you mean? The man you went to?”
“Mr. Wilson, yes.”
“Iss Wilson? Does he live on Henderson Place? In that mews on Eighty-Sixth Street?” She was nodding that it was Iss Wilson.
“He locked me in his bedroom,” she said. “I had to climb out of the window!”
“Iss? Mr. Wilson locked you in his bedroom?” What she wanted from him was an echo of the anger she was feeling, but this, or course, was the last thing to give her. Dennis, not smiling now, rather expressionless, did not comment. Iss Wilson was a friend of his. Her delusions, Dennis thought, were spreading rapidly, alarmingly broadening in scope, covering more and more territory. Now she was waiting for him, Dennis saw. He would have to give her something or her fury might be directed against him. “Iss Wilson is a friend of mine, too. Where did you meet him?”
“I passed his house. I was looking at it and he began to talk to me. On Sunday.” It would never have occurred to her to say “yesterday”; how could it have been yesterday?