by Evelyn Piper
“Who called you from the school?”
“Miss Ditmars, the same teacher, but now they tell me she never called me. She’s the one who interviewed me, but now that director says she didn’t.”
“Go on. Don’t get sidetracked. You’ll just be going over the same ground if you do.”
“She asked whether Bunny was ill, checking up because it was so late by then. I said, no, just late. I told her about Mother leaving and so on. I was very apologetic because she was a teacher. Tardiness!”
Wilson said, “Remarkable how it lingers, isn’t it?” Not so remarkable in her case, of course. “We all have these hangovers from school days.” Her school days must have been very recent, poor kid, so young, so lovely, and so lost. He reminded himself that he was assuming this was the truth and not fantasy. (Because of the documentation it had the ring of truth.)
“She said perhaps Bunny better not come today because she would disrupt her group coming in when the other little ones were just settling down without their mothers. I told her Bunny had to come. I mean, Mother wasn’t here and I couldn’t appear at my job, they wouldn’t like it, so she said I better wait until ten thirty when the children had their juice. She told me Bunny’s room number and said I should just leave Bunny there. The others were doing without their mothers, see, and she didn’t want me coming in and maybe starting the rest of them wanting their mothers again. After all, they’re just babies, really.”
“Don’t, please, Blanche dear. And that’s what you did?”
“Yes. I called the office and told them I’d be late and I tidied up a little at home.”
“That shows why none of the parents saw you, but how about the teacher in the room?”
“There was no teacher there.”
“They don’t leave children alone in nursery school, Blanche.”
“There was no teacher there. I can’t help it. Maybe she was in the washroom; she wasn’t there. Just the children were there, about four children.”
“We can’t exactly use them as witnesses, can we?”
“Wait,” she said, “but at ten thirty in the morning don’t they get their orange juice and crackers? That’s why she told me to bring Bunny then, because of that!”
But she never called you, never saw you. “Go on.”
“I was there only long enough to put Bunny in the room. I did what she told me to.”
The comfort of it had faded, Wilson knew, because the strain was back in her voice.
“There were some big blocks on the floor. I had told Bunny there would be these big blocks to play with, so I took her to them. I picked one up and put it in front of her so she could look at it while I was taking off her sweater. I didn’t know where her things were supposed to be put, so I left them next to her. I thought when the teacher came she. . . They’re gone, too, Mr. Wilson! Every single thing of Bunny’s is gone! I—I could tell from her expression that Bunny would get busy with those blocks as soon as I went away, so I went away. She didn’t cry or anything, not once. She didn’t say anything. It was all so quick. I expected to hear Bunny howling any moment, so I went downstairs as quickly as I could so I wouldn’t hear if she did.”
They had been standing at the gates of the playground for some time now. “Here we are,” Wilson said. “Walk to your right. Up to the first pillar.” He waited. “Got it? Now walk through toward the back of the pavilion, counting the pillars. We want the third one from the back. Are you there? It’s hollow, feel it. Sometime I’m going to ask Robert Moses why it is. Broom closet? I should imagine that you fit in there as neatly as Sandy did; push back and anyone would have a hell of a time finding you . . . I know, and Sandy hid there in broad daylight. I only found her because she giggled.” Where he had been able to see an outline of her against the apartment house in the back, there was nothing. She was in the pillar. “I know you won’t giggle, but don’t despair. I have an idea, Blanche.”
She stepped out of the hollow pillar. “What?”
“Just an idea. I’m not going to tell you. I tell you, while you’re waiting there . . . and I think I hear a police car now . . . while you’re waiting for the police to cover the waterfront, you think over what we talked about; maybe you’ll come up with the same idea. So long, Blanche,” he called, and waited a moment before he walked off. He could not hope to hear her say thank you, he told himself. If anyone had put him through what he’d put her through, thank you would be the last thing he’d want to say! “No, that’s an ambulance,” he called out, pulled his turtle-neck up, and walked off.
Blanche’s trigger finger ached and she shoved the revolver back into her purse and flexed her fingers, but she kept the purse open, taking no chances. She found that she could sit on the stone floor of the pavilion with her back against the pillar and her knees drawn up and still be hidden, and that was lucky because she wouldn’t have been able to stand very much longer. The scream of the ambulance (or police car) faded away and she heard nothing but the river behind her and the sluggish noises of traffic on East End Avenue. She could not see the sky from where she sat, but in the big apartment house in front of her on Sutton Place there were lights on the two top floors and she was glad that the whole of this terrible city never slept; always on every street someone was awake and could see and hear. Her eyelids began to droop and it required tremendous effort to keep her head from falling forward on her raised knees. She would think over what Mr. Wilson had talked about and try to discover what his idea was. Was it about the Italian boy? Mr. Wilson (and everybody else) dismissed him because they did not think he’d take Bunny just because he had looked at her that way, but perhaps he was being paid for Bunny? Couldn’t there be some woman who had money and no child? A woman who could not, for some reason, adopt a child? Blanche remembered how particular the adoption woman in the hospital said they were, saying Blanche wouldn’t have to worry about the kind of parents Bunny would have. Parents, the adoption woman had said, making it plural, meaning that a child needed two parents. If I find Bunny now, I promise I’ll give her for adoption because I’m not fit to have her. She was promising this to the adoption woman (to God?) but because she did not trust that promise even as she made it, Blanche took it back. Give Bunny up once she held her in her arms again? Never let her go. Never let her go, she thought, never leave her for an instant!
This woman who wants a little girl is rich, she reminded herself, desperately. Why is it so impossible that somehow she knows the Italian boy and told him how much money she will pay him? Why couldn’t that be the reason he looked at me that way, because he was trying to make up his mind? He must have seen me with Bunny. He was trying to make up his mind. His mother and his father could think it was because of me; he wouldn’t tell them. They wouldn’t let him do such a thing if they knew about it. She tried to think that this was Mr. Wilson’s idea, and that he had gone to the police with it and that they would begin looking for the Italian boy and they would find him, and . . .
Blanche did not think that she had fallen asleep but the step across the cement of the playground startled her. It was one pair of feet and not searching, not tentative; there was no flashlight. The footsteps, she realized with fury, were coming straight across the playground to the pavilion. Whoever that was knew about the hollow pillar. She pulled herself to her feet and held the gun in her right hand, because he had betrayed her again. He had left her here where she would be easily found and gone straight to them and told them. She could not have been asleep—how could she sleep?—so she would have heard other footsteps if there had been any, surrounding her, so that when this one came close enough so that she couldn’t miss, she would shoot and then run out the back of the pavilion and get away in time.
“Miss Lake?”
She recognized the voice; the other one, the doctor. He shared Mr. Wilson’s betraying, she thought, curling her finger around the trigger. He was a part of it. Wilson put her there and he came to get her. He was coming closer. When he spoke again, when the next betray
ing, rotten, lying word came out of his mouth . . . He would say, “I want to help you.” As they all did. And she would shoot. It would be easy, she thought. They had made it easy, she thought. She wasn’t the girl who closed her eyes when there was going to be killing (even in Westerns); she was a Western now; her trigger finger itched; it did. She waited almost impatiently for this final betrayal.
“Miss Lake,” Dennis said. “Miss Lake, I love you!”
“Keep away,” Blanche said, because how could she shoot? Miss Lake, I love you! “Please keep away,” she said again, and how could she add, “or I’ll shoot”? Miss Lake, I love you! “Don’t come any nearer.” He didn’t come any nearer. He just stood where he was.
Dennis felt his face burning. Miss Lake, I love you! He heard it ringing out into the darkness. Miss Lake, I . . . that was it—the Miss Lake, the incongruity, he thought. It had been the contrast between the formal address . . . Miss Lake . . . and the tumult and tumbling inside himself which had produced that. It was the tension and trembling of his voice as he had said the formal “Miss” that had undone him. Undone. Yes. Precisely, the Victorian word was precise. The thing had been pure Victoriana: Miss Lake, may I ask you for the honor of your hand in marriage? The formal address spoken into the soft night in a voice which had trembled appropriately had led to the “I love you,” which was, when you understood it, perfectly rational.
“He told me I would be safe here and then he went straight to you.”
“No, he went to the police and I was there.”
“He told the police!”
“He told me. I went to the police station because I was afraid for you, what would happen. I intended to ask them to find you.” (What is happening to me, he wondered, remembering the change of heart as he had walked toward the desk there, remembering, “Miss Lake, I love you.”) “I didn’t ask them to find you. I simply asked whether they had any news. They had none,” he added hastily, feeling how the hope must have leaped in her. “They had another piece of evidence against the possibility that your child slipped out of school after you . . .”
“I don’t want to hear it!” Blanche said. (I want to hear, “Miss Lake, I love you.”)
“All right. I came here to persuade you to give the police your mother’s address. I’m sure you’re past caring whether she’ll blame you now. And once they get your mother and she puts an end to the doubts in their minds . . .” He heard the snap of her pocketbook clasp. (It must be. Getting a handkerchief out, no doubt.) “Don’t cry, or do cry, but first give them the address.”
She came out of the pillar and moved toward him. He put his arm around her and she did not mind it or, this time, the softness of his sweater.
“My place is right here. The quickest thing to do will be to call from there.” She did not agree but she was silent, and that, he knew from his experience with his other patients, was permissive. “I’ll call the police and get them started and you rest a bit.” She did not say no. Her exhaustion was so distinct that he could feel it through her body. “Ah,” he whispered, “poor . . .” and stopped short, avoiding the word “child”; the word, he reminded himself, which one might never be able to say to her. And how little “Miss Lake, I love you” meant when one could never say “child” to one’s girl! But this was no time for words, Dennis told himself. Words would come later; later he would help her with words, but now (he could feel this too, where his arm touched her shoulder) wordlessness and the comfort of touch.
In the elevator she allowed him to put his arm around her again. He could see the blue veins in her white eyelids and how they trembled, although her face was set and she was biting her lower lip.
Dennis had given his apartment a good deal of thought. There was no room in such a small place for mistakes, and he didn’t have the money (or the time) for mistakes, and mistakes, you could say, were his business all day long, so he made sure there were none here. Dennis had a feeling for design and balance, and each piece of furniture was exactly where it should be (in his opinion, of course) to make the room the kind of picture he desired. He knew the effect of certain colors on himself and had been careful to avoid those which unsettled him. (Unsettled people were his business all day long, of course.) He was sensually responsive to textures and here he could indulge his sensuality. (Although not, of course, during the day.) Tidiness here was a restful contrast to the untidiness of neurosis and it was natural, he felt, that nothing should be out of place here.
She was out of place here.
Her tension, her misery, the color spectrum of her insanity did not belong here. After tonight, Dennis told himself, he would see her in his office, where she did belong. Just tonight.
He led her to the yellow-green, raw-silk-covered chair and motioned for her to sit. The telephone pad was where it should be and, while he dialed the precinct number, Dennis wrote down her mother’s address and telephone number. “They’ll get her.” He saw that she was sitting on the edge of the chair, but he didn’t have to see to know. He was as conscious of every movement she made as if her body were an extension of his own, which was, of course, traditional to the state, always this magnified consciousness of the other. “I want you to rest now.” She could not lean her filthy jacket against the raw silk; he knew that and knelt in front of her, tugging at the sleeve of her jacket. “You must rest now.” She allowed him to get the sleeve off, then the other sleeve, and then the jacket. “Now, lean back and put your feet up.” She frowned because, he understood, she was fastidious, too, about soiled shoes against fine fabrics. He squatted back and, lifting her foot, pulled off her right shoe and began to massage her foot, not speaking, just massaging and looking up at her. He felt that he could not have enough of looking into her face, or thinking of touching or kissing it. What was it in her face, the oval shape of it, its coloring, the fine pale oval in that dark setting of her hair, in the texture of the skin? In the dark eyes, was it their shape, their position in that face, or was it the blue veins he had noticed on her eyelids in the elevator? “It,” he told himself, smiling at the word; was it the precise scale of her voice, was it that her mouth was made for marble, was it that rather dirty hand, was it the way her body moved, or smelled? Because “it,” he knew perfectly well . . . who better? . . . was something as preposterous as that most of the time, something in the eye of the beholder much of the time. He remembered Mrs. McKenna, from 11:05 to 11:55 that morning. Mrs. McKenna had been telling him of how she had fallen in love at first sight. “He was standing there talking to Madge Caspary. Madge was doing her best. He wasn’t even looking her in the face while she talked, looking down his nose at Madge and the rest of us at the party. I was with Bill. He was looking us over,” she said, “giving us the once-over! I know what I thought, Dr. Newhouse. I thought, that man doesn’t think we’re good enough for him. I like that, I thought, who does he think he is? To hell with him! And then he looked straight at me over Madge’s head and I was in love with him. You can laugh,” Mrs. McKenna said.
He hadn’t, of course, laughed. Mrs. McKenna falling in love at first sight because a man didn’t think she was good enough for him was a perfect fit for her pattern, but it wasn’t so easy to understand why Blanche fitted his. He remembered that Freud had been quoted as saying that in the choice of a mate one should always be governed by these “yes sir, that’s my baby” decisions coming from the deep needs of the unconscious. And he would heed the master, Dennis thought, if only she weren’t insane. As it was . . .
He had pulled off her other moccasin and was holding both her feet in his hands, not massaging them, just holding them, and that, he saw, looking at her relaxed face, must have been the right thing to do. For the first time since he had met her, her face looked as it would if she were . . . herself. Dennis could not help himself; he bent and kissed her feet, first one and then the other.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
He set her feet on the floor gently and started to pull himself off the floor. With his hand on the arm
of her chair, he was very close to her; he heard her rapid breathing and saw how the white eyelids fluttered, and he put his two hands on her face and kissed her. Because response leaped in her lips as in his body, he released her. With Blanche what she was, the Oath of Hippocrates had better be the oath of chastity. He must be careful not to do her harm by adding to her guilt and self-hate because she was capable of response to him.
It was the smell of this man which made Blanche think of the other. It was because she enjoyed his smell, because her nostrils sought it out, drew it in, that she remembered what Mr. Wilson had told her to think about. “I want to talk,” she said. Mr. Wilson had asked her if she could think why the director of the nursery school would have done it. Before she spoke out, she tried to be just and called up the image of the girl in the narrow black pants and the black sweater and the bracelet, but wearing all of these as if they were a gift to someone, as if her choice would be something different, something more modest, something more Boston. (To go with her voice, Blanche decided.) She thought of the modest way in which the director had deferred to Dr. Newhouse; not genuine deference, that is. She thought that anyone who could run a nursery school like that, and cook the dinner Blanche had smelled, and set the table that way would not really defer to anybody. Yes, Blanche thought, I think she is capable of doing it. She told herself that the dislike she felt for Miss Benton and the conviction that she was a hypocrite were intuitive. It must be intuition, she thought. Mr. Wilson had mentioned this story in which the hoax had been concocted because the mother had died of the Plague and all the money spent on the Exposition would be wasted if word of this got around Paris. Why would the nursery-school director tear up the application she must have received, and the check? Why would she get the teachers to lie? Why would she—like the people in the story—just say there was no Bunny? Blanche moaned and jumped out of the yellow-green chair, beginning to pace the room.