by Evelyn Piper
“Me?” Dennis bent to take a glass, grimaced at them, and took the bottle from Wilson.
“You’re usually an awfully thorough guy, Dennis. You usually do a lot of investigation before you call someone insane, don’t you? When you first walked in, I was under the impression that you’d had lots of time to study this case, but if tonight is the first time you saw her . . .”
“Come on, Wilson! Really!” Dennis drank from the bottle of gin.
“This is the second time I’ve seen her, remember. She certainly didn’t seem insane to me yesterday.”
“She didn’t get on Bunny yesterday, did she?”
“Just on the one subject of the child, you mean?”
“Unfortunately, no. What did you think of the tale she told about the Italian boy in the fruit store?”
“A bit far-fetched, I thought.”
“Believe me, Iss, there are precedents for imaginary children.”
“Couldn’t have a child, you mean? Sandy didn’t come along for three years, and Marta certainly was a wild woman. With Mademoiselle Blanche, it wouldn’t be for lack of cooperation, I wouldn’t think.”
“She had cooperation.”
“Oh?”
“The one reality situation in my opinion is that she does feel guilt because of an affair she appears to have had, that seems documented. She certainly thinks she’s the scarlet woman. She said she worshiped some young squirt because he was willing to forgive her sin.”
Wilson noticed how Dennis took another pull at the bottle. “You don’t like that?”
“Do you?” And he didn’t like the way Iss was smiling, either. He said gravely, “I’m trying to make up my mind whether I’m justified in going to the police right now and telling them they better not wait until they can find this damned mother of hers!”
“You don’t like her mother, either? You said it the way I talk about my mother-in-law.”
“Iss . . . this girl’s insane. If she’d go far enough to take the chance of breaking her neck climbing out of your window, she’s apt to do anything.” He set the bottle down and headed for the door.
“The butterfly net? Bellevue?”
“No, a private hospital. I’ll look after her myself.” Wilson caught him just as he was opening the door.
“Wait a minute, Dennis. What I said before . . . You’re being most uncharacteristically quick on the draw here. I don’t think you have any right to get out the wagon for her.”
“Every right. I’m a psychiatrist.”
“You’re not acting like one. Wait a minute,” Wilson said, puffing.
“I didn’t, but I am now.” Dennis spoke as he walked, heading south. “I didn’t act like a psychiatrist when I accepted her dictum about not wanting to be my patient. I had no right to accept that.” Better walk toward First, where he would be more apt to find a cab.
“You’re going to wait a minute.” Wilson got in between Dennis and the door of the taxi and pounded his chest to show Dennis he would have to catch his breath first. “A couple more minutes isn’t going to matter one way or the other. Listen: when you heard her saga about me, you assumed it was a fantasy. So would I. Do I have to hold on to you or will you wait?”
“If you’re brief.” He told the cabby to pull down his flag.
“I’ll be brief. You assumed that story was the product of a disordered mind just as you assumed that what she told you about the child was fantasy.”
“That’s right. Until I found your handkerchief.”
“Othello.”
“What’s the connection? Othello?”
“Othello wouldn’t have believed in Desdemona’s infidelity without that fatal handkerchief. Oh, don’t make a big deal of that; I just said it.” Because Dennis was staring at him intently and rubbing at the top of his nose.
Dennis was remembering how he had let her go to Wilson in the first place because she had told him that her “friend” was a “he.” Othello for jealousy. He had been jealous. “Nobody just says anything. Iss, you’re right. I am intensely attracted to her. I’m going to do everything I can for her, and that means not letting her wander around by herself!”
“Maybe doing all you can includes assuming that her story is true and trying to work it out from there before you get out the butterfly net?”
“Assume what?”
“I say assume, just assume. Find her because she shouldn’t be allowed loose, but at least assume she’s telling the truth.”
“The police went along on that assumption, I assure you. At least they didn’t assume I was the final authority. They couldn’t find anything.” He reached out and opened the door of the cab. “Don’t be a damn fool, Iss. How can I possibly assume such an incredible . . . Get out of my way, Iss, will you?”
“Look who’s talking! Man, come off it, you’re a psychiatrist, aren’t you? You’ve had more practice than anyone else. Let me tell you, to assume that Mademoiselle Blanche’s little tale is true should be nothing to a guy who assumes that what Sigmund Freud says is true!”
“Look, Iss, some other time, I’ll be happy to . . .”
“How about the Oedipus complex, for the love of Mike!”
“Some other time!”
Wilson watched the cab move off and then went and sat on the steps of the nearest house. He kept seeing the poor kid with her face pressed against the window of the Muenchner Wurstgescheft, and her head full of her latest fantasies about the guy at the Doll Hospital. Wilson straightened his back so suddenly that he gave it a whack against the cement step. He had warned Dennis about assumptions and here he was assuming himself. What was all that stuff one heard about sadists becoming surgeons or butchers, depending on their opportunities and their I.Q.’s? The idea was that in these two trades they could successfully sublimate their sadistic desires. Suppose the creep in the Doll Hospital wasn’t cut out for a butcher . . . cut out wasn’t bad, Wilson thought. Suppose this creep in the Doll Hospital didn’t have the opportunity to get as far as drooling over his frog in elementary biology . . . why not a Doll Hospital? And, what was more to the point, wouldn’t a Doll Hospital with all the little girls flocking around to bring in their busted dollies be a bright idea for a creep like that? Wouldn’t that kind of creep be snug as a bug in a rug in a Doll Hospital?
“Now, wait a minute,” Wilson told himself. “If so . . .” If the Doll Hospital guy was that kind of creep, might he not have had a spot of trouble with the cops already? Might not one of the little girls . . . or a little girl (don’t lay it on too thick!) have snitched to Momma, gone crying to Momma, and might not Momma have gone to the cops? And if she did, if she had, wouldn’t that perfectly explain the creep’s behavior? What would seem to be something out of a nightmare with another man would be perfectly explicable in the Doll Hospital man! And if there had been a doll, if Mademoiselle had left her doll with the Doll Hospital creep, if it was proof, if the only reason she had no proof was because the creep had burned it up, shouldn’t he, Wilson, go straight to the cops and tell them?
Shouldn’t he get the cops up and at the creep? Couldn’t they make the creep admit that he had had such a doll? Third-degree him into talking? Beat it out of him? Even as Wilson had the thought, he realized that his use of such terminology, thinking “third degree” and “beat it out,” both of which he knew to be obsolete in police procedure, indicated how forlorn such an idea was. If the creep, particularly if the creep had these tendencies, he wouldn’t admit that there had been any doll. If he had been in trouble with the police before, he would deny Bunny’s doll to his dying breath. He’d know what would happen to his business if such an accusation got around. If it was true, he’d got rid of the proof, and there was nothing to tie him to Mademoiselle except her accusation, the accusation of Mademoiselle-without-all-her-marbles, and Iss Wilson who would then also be accused of not being all there.
Even Mademoiselle had known better than to go to the police with no doll, no proof. He’d better follow her example.
&n
bsp; There was an electric light over the door in a round glass globe. Inside the globe Wilson could see insects crawling up the side. As if they could get out that way, he thought. God knows how they got in there, but they’re not going to manage to get out that way. He wondered how Mademoiselle Blanche was going to get out. “There’s always the river,” he had told her. “Go down to the river and look,” he had said, and, he thought, standing and pulling up the turtle neck of his black sweater, he would bet that she was ready to consider the river as the way out by now. With what she believed must be happening to her child and the whole world against her, she must certainly be ready for the river by now. She would certainly think that it was all that was left to do by now.
Surely she would be reduced to that, he thought, walking rapidly toward East River Drive; to staring down into the black water, straining her eyes for any suspicious object down there . . . and if she saw something? Anything, half floating, half submerged, might she not? Oh, might she not! Wilson thought and broke into a lope.
He turned the corner quickly, going toward Eighty-Second Street, where there was another entrance, because the promenade dipped lowest there and she would certainly go where it was lowest in order to get closer to the river. He pulled at his turtle-neck sweater because running, and imagining her climbing the railing, going in, committing suicide, had made him sweat.
He did not notice her and wouldn’t have if she hadn’t started to run. “Blanche, this is Wilson! Is that you, Blanche?” It had to be her, anyone else would have stopped running when he announced it was Iss Wilson. Nobody but that poor creature was scared enough of Iss Wilson to run from him. “I won’t follow you, just listen. Listen, I’m not following you!” Her footsteps slowed down. “I guessed you’d be down here and I came to stop you. Don’t do it, Blanche! Don’t do it. I want to help you.” He heard her voice. “What did you say?”
“Again?”
“Not again. I want to help you. Now. If you don’t want the police to put you away, although it probably is the safest thing, I’ll see they don’t get you. I owe it to you after what I did.”
She said, “No, just leave me alone.”
“The police won’t let you alone. They’ll certainly think of the river. It’s a cliché, the river. They’ll detail men to find you, and they’ll find you sure.” He saw how she moved off, too tired to run, he thought, just moving. He stayed where he was and raised his voice. “I’ll take you to a place right near here where you can lie low while they’re searching down here.” Her steps were slowing down. “Trust me. It’s where my Sandy once hid in the playground on Eighty-Fourth Street. Blanche, may my Sandy disappear if I mean anything but what I say.” She stopped walking.
“Tell me where.”
“In the playground on Eighty-Fourth Street where that pavilion is, with a john on one side and an office where they keep play equipment on the other, but I can’t tell you where Sandy hid, I’ll have to show you. Do you want to walk ahead? You know where the playground is, don’t you?”
“No. That proves I have no child, doesn’t it? No, I don’t.”
“Shall I walk ahead of you and show you? If I’m ahead of you I can’t grab you, can I?”
“Yes. All right. Go ahead of me.”
He started off. “I’m glad after what I did that you trust me enough for this.”
She smiled because she did not trust him. This I trust, she thought. In gun I trust. She held her purse open against her with her left hand so that her right hand could be on the revolver, but he couldn’t see that, of course, and he wouldn’t. Because if this was another trick, he wasn’t going to see the gun or the bullet that killed him, either.
“Blanche, can I try to excuse myself while we’re getting there? I was sure my wife had put you up to this, that she had lifted your story from the Paris Exposition one. You know the one. Where the girl arrives with her sick mother in a Paris hotel at night and is sent on an errand . . . faked . . . so that when she returns, her mother is gone and she can’t get a soul to admit to having seen her mother . . . or herself, for that matter.”
“I know the story,” Blanche said. “I do know the story.”
“Then, Blanche, don’t you see? Don’t you see the similarity?” Wilson heard the earnestness in his own voice. He was talking to her as if she were sane. He hoped it wasn’t dangerous to talk this way, to bring this up. Maybe Dennis would tell him this was the worst thing he could do to her, and it was an awkward way to talk to someone, behind you this way so you couldn’t see the other person’s face. Perhaps if he could see her face, he would stop talking this way.
And he was listening to her, Wilson thought, with his third ear. That was Theodor Reik’s expression, “the third ear,” without which, Reik said, no psychiatrist was worth his salt, since this was the ear which heard what was not said, the ear which, hearing the unsaid, the unsayable, imparted its secret facts to the mind, which then made the leap to knowledge. He was listening with his third ear for the discordance of insanity in her, and he could not hear it, and because he could not hear it, he was talking to her as if she were quite sane.
“Everyone knows I believe I have a baby girl, but they don’t believe in Bunny. I left her at that school, and everybody says I couldn’t have.”
“Exactly like the girl in that Paris story.”
“They ask me if I think anybody would have kidnapped Bunny and I tell them about that Italian boy, but they only ask me to find out what else I believe.”
“But the boy only looked at you. Blanche, I want you to forget about the boy now. While we’re walking will you tell me a couple of things in detail? I didn’t care to go into detail earlier; why should I? But now . . . will you?”
“Why?”
“Because of that Paris story. Because once the motive was uncovered there it becomes perfectly understandable, if highly dramatic, that a respectable hotel would spirit a woman away and deny that she existed. We’re going to leave the Italian boy out of our calculations for the moment and see if there could be any reason why, if you brought your child to school, they tell you you didn’t.”
“But I can’t think why. Don’t you think I’ve tried to think why?”
“Then we’re back on how. How could it have happened as you say it did?” He remembered what he had said to Dennis about assumptions. Nobody had assumed she could be telling the simple truth. “Will you answer some questions? Can you?”
“I can answer questions,” she said. “I can do anything but think about what may be happening to my baby. If he is hurting her . . . if now, this minute . . .”
“He” was her King Charles’s head popping up, and the character with the King Charles’s head affliction was mad as a hatter. “Can’t I walk along with you?”
“No.”
“This is an awkward way of talking, but all right. Assuming that you left Bunny in school this morning, how could she not be there at five? Start with nobody seeing you bring Bunny into the school this morning, how could that be?”
“I don’t know how they didn’t. I only know what I did.”
“Tell me what you did this morning, then. Give me the details about this morning and let me see if I can see how you and Bunny could have been invisible in the school. My kids went there, you know, so I know the ropes.” She didn’t speak. He stopped walking and turned and faced her. “For God’s sake,” he said, “make me believe you! What else can you do besides jump in the river?” That suggested something. “Blanche,” he said softly. “I believe, Lord, help Thou my disbelief!”
“Tell you about this morning?”
“This morning.” He turned and walked on.
“Everything went wrong,” she said. “Every single thing. It was one of those mornings like a dream where you can’t go forward. What I mean . . . Mother is supposed to dress Bunny while I shower and dress for work. We had that all figured out so that I could manage to take her to school, but then Mother made up her mind about her house. I was showering when she to
ld me. She’d had this letter on Saturday, she said, saying if she wanted to clinch the sale she could. On Saturday Mother wasn’t going to let these people buy it, but now she was. She’d never be able to hold her head up at home, anyhow. You know. Mother had to catch a train, so she couldn’t help with Bunny. Then she took up a lot of time, too. She couldn’t find her overnight bag, and what should she take? When I finally got Bunny dressed, I had to help Mother find the overnight bag, and I’d borrowed the mirror out of it and I couldn’t find that. I finally remembered I had taken it to the office to keep in my desk.” She sighed. “Things like that. Then while I was busy looking for the bag for Mother, Bunny wetted. She was excited, too, her first day in school!”
“Don’t cry,” Wilson said. “Go on talking. Do you see the pavilion to your right there? Go to the open part of it.”
“I had to change all of Bunny’s clothes, top to bottom, and then it turned out that Mother had forgotten to do Bunny’s things in the machine in the basement, and that started another fuss because there were no clean blue jeans for Bunny. You see, I’d told Bunny that you wore blue jeans and T-shirts to school. She had that in her head and I had a terrible time persuading her into a dress-up dress, which was all that was clean.”
He could see how eagerly she was throwing herself under the spell of these details, what a respite it was for her to think of wetted panties and no clean clothes as troubles. Good, he thought.
“And then Mother chose this morning to lecture me on the importance of good breakfasts for little children. You can imagine that . . . a crime to send Bunny off without a good breakfast, and wouldn’t that keep happening with the rush we’d be in? I could only stop her by warning her she would miss her train. And then, because her feelings were hurt, I had to go downstairs with her, waving her off when she did get a cab. That’s when I saw that boy outside the house.”
“Uh huh,” Wilson said.
She drew a long shaky sigh. “Well, when I went upstairs, on account of Mother . . . I suppose it’s childish to think Mother knows best, but, anyhow, I just couldn’t get Bunny off without a good breakfast, and the only thing to do was to read to her from The Little Engine That Could. She loves that book. Well, then she did eat and then I had the telephone call from the school.”