“Oh, the poor darling little angel!” said Mike. “Give him to me, Shorty! You’re handling him like a bag of sugar!”
I stepped gingerly out of the brook and handed him over. Michaele cradled the filthy mite in her arms, completely oblivious to the child’s effect on her white linen blouse. The same white linen blouse, I reflected bitterly, that I had been kicked out of the house for, when I pitched some cigar ashes on it. It made me feel funny, watching Mike handle that kid. I’d never pictured her that way.
The baby regarded Mike gravely as she discoursed to it about a poor drowned woofum-wuffums, and did the bad man treat it badly, then. The baby belched eloquently.
“He belches in English!” I remarked.
“Did it have the windy ripples?” cooed Mike. “Give us a kiss, honey lamb.”
The baby immediately flung its little arms around her neck and planted a whopper on her mouth.
“Wow!” said Mike when she got her breath. “Shorty, could you take lessons!”
“Lessons my eye,” I said jealously. “Mike, that’s no baby, that’s some old guy in his second childhood.”
“The idea.” She crooned to the baby for a moment, and then said suddenly, “Shorty—what were we talking about before heaven opened up and dropped this little bundle of—” Here the baby tried to squirm out of her arms and she paused to get a better grip.
“Bundle of what?” I asked, deadpan.
“Bundle of joy.”
“Oh! Bundle of joy. What were we talking about? Ba—Hey! Babies!”
“That’s right. And a will. And thirty grand.”
I looked at the child with new eyes. “Who do you think belongs to the younker?”
“Someone who apparently won’t miss him if we take him away for thirty days,” she said. “No matter what bungling treatment I give him, it’s bound to be better than what he’s used to. Letting a mere babe crawl around in the woods! Why, it’s awful!”
“The mere babe doesn’t seem to mind,” I said. “Tell you what we’ll do—we’ll take care of him for a few days and see if anyone claims him. We’ll listen to the radio and watch the papers and the ol’ grapevine. If anybody does claim him, maybe we can make a deal for a loan. At any rate we’ll get to work on him right away.”
At this juncture the baby eeled out of Mike’s arms and took off across the grass. “Sweet Sue! Look at him go!” she said, scrambling to her feet. “Get him, Shorty!”
The infant, with twinkling heels, was crawling—running, on hands and knees—down toward the brook. I headed him off just as he reached the water, and snagged him up by the slack of his pants. As he came up off the ground he scooped up a handful of mud and pitched it into my eyes. I yelped and dropped him. When I could see a little daylight again I beheld Michaele taking a running brodie into a blackberry bush. I hurried over there, my eyelids making a nasty grating sound. Michaele was lying prone behind the baby, who was also lying prone, his little heels caught tightly in Mike’s hands. He was nonchalantly picking blackberries.
Mike got her knees and then her feet under her, and picked up the baby, who munched contentedly. “I’m disgusted with you,” she said, her eyes blazing. “Flinging an innocent child around like that! Why, it’s a wonder you didn’t break every bone in his poor little body!”
“But I—He threw mud in my—”
“Pick on someone your size, you big bully! I never knew till now that you were a sadist with an inferiority complex.”
“And I never knew till now that it’s true what they say about the guy in the three-cornered pants—the king can do no wrong! What’s happened to your sense of justice, woman? That little brat there—”
“Shorty! Talking that way about a poor little baby! He’s beautiful! He didn’t mean anything by what he did. He’s too young to know any better.”
In the biggest, deepest bass voice I have ever heard, the baby said, “Lady, I do know what I’m doin’. I’m old enough!”
We both sat down.
“Did you say that?” Mike wanted to know.
I shook my head dazedly.
“Coupla dopes,” said the baby.
“Who—What are you?” asked Mike breathlessly.
“What do I look like?” said the baby, showing his teeth. He had very sharp, very white teeth—two on the top gum and four on the lower.
“A little bundle of—”
“Shorty!” Mike held up a slim finger.
“Never mind him,” growled the child. “I know lots of four-letter words. Go ahead, bud.”
“You go ahead. What are you—a midget?”
I no sooner got the second syllable of that word out when the baby scuttled over to me and rocked my head back with a surprising right to the jaw. “That’s the last time I’m going to be called that by anybody!” he roared deafeningly. “No! I’m not a … a … what you said. I’m a pro tem changeling, and that’s all.”
“What on earth is that?” asked Mike.
“Just what I said!” snapped the baby, “A pro tem changeling. When people treat their babies too well—or not well enough—I show up in their bassinets and give their folks what for. Only I’m always the spitting image of their kid. When they wise up in the treatment, they get their kids back—not before.”
“Who pulls the switch? I mean, who do you work for?”
The baby pointed to the grass at our feet. I had to look twice before I realized what he was pointing at. The blades were dark and glossy and luxuriant in a perfect ring about four feet in diameter.
Michaele gasped and put her knuckles to her lips. “The Little People!” she breathed.
I was going to say, “Don’t be silly, Mike!” but her taut face and the baby’s bland, nodding head stopped me.
“Will you work for us?” she asked breathlessly. “We need a baby for thirty days to meet the conditions of a will.”
“I heard you talking about it,” said the baby. “No.”
“No?”
“No.”
A pause. “Look, kid,” I said, “what do you like? Money? Food? Candy? Circuses?”
“I like steaks,” said the child gruffly. “Rare, fresh, thick. Onions. Cooked so pink they say, ‘Moo!’ when you bite ’em. Why?”
“Good,” I said. “If you work for us, you’ll get all the steaks you can eat.”
“No.”
“What would you want to work for us?”
“Nothin’. I don’t wanna work for you.”
“What are we going to do?” I whispered to Mike. “This would be perfect!”
“Leave it to me. Look—baby—what’s your name, anyway?”
“Percival. But don’t call me Percival! Butch.”
“Well, look, Butch; we’re in an awful jam. If we don’t get hold of a sockful of money darn soon, we’ll lose that pretty little house over there.”
“What’s the matter with him? Can’t he keep up the payments? What is he—a bum?”
“Hey, you—”
“Shut up, Shorty. He’s just beginning, Butch. He’s a graduate caterer. But he has to get a place of his own before he can make any real money.”
“What happens if you lose th’ house?”
“A furnished room. The two of us.”
“What’s the matter with that?”
I tensed. This was a question I had asked her myself.
“Not for me. I just couldn’t live that way.” Mike would wheedle, but she wouldn’t lie.
Butch furrowed his nonexistent eyebrows. “Couldn’t? Y’know, I like that. High standards.” His voice deepened; the question lashed her. “Would you live with him in a furnished room if there were no other way?”
“Well, of course.”
“I’ll help you,” said Butch instantly.
“Why?” I asked. “What do you expect to get out of it?”
“Nothing—some fun, maybe. I’ll help you because you need help. That’s the only reason I ever do anything for anybody. That’s the only thing you should have told me in
the first place—that you were in a jam. You and your bribes!” he snapped at me, and turned back to Mike. “I ain’t gonna like that guy,” he said.
I said, “I already don’t like you.”
As we started back to the house Butch said, “But I’m gonna get my steaks?”
Aunt Jonquil’s house stood alone in a large lot with its skirts drawn primly up and an admonishing expression on its face. It looked as if it had squeezed its way between two other houses to hide itself, and some scoundrel had taken the other houses away.
And Aunt Jonquil, like her house, was five times as high as she was wide, extremely practical, unbeautifully ornate, and stood alone. She regarded marriage as an unfortunate necessity. She herself never married because an unkind nature had ruled that she must marry a man, and she thought that men were uncouth. She disapproved of smoking, drinking, swearing, gambling, and loud laughter. Smiles she enjoyed only if she could fully understand what was being smiled at; she mistrusted innuendo. A polite laugh was a thing she permitted herself perhaps twice a week, providing it was atoned for by ten minutes of frozen-faced gravity. Added to which, she was a fine person. Swell.
On the way to the city, I sat through this unnerving conversation:
Butch said, “Fathead! Drive more carefully!”
“He’s doing all right,” said Mike. “Really. It surprises me. He’s usually an Indian.” She was looking very lovely in a pea-green linen jacket and a very simple white skirt and a buff straw hat that looked like a halo.
Butch was wearing a lace-edged bonnet and an evil gleam in his eye to offset the angelic combination of a pale-blue sweater with white rabbits appliquéd on the sides, and fuzzy Angora booties on which he had insisted because I was a wearing a navy-blue and he knew it would come off all over me. He was, I think, a little uncomfortable due to my rather unskilled handling of his diapering. And the reason for my doing that job was to cause us more trouble than a little bit. Butch’s ideas of privacy and the proprieties were advanced. He would no more think of letting Mike bathe or change him than I would think of letting Garbo change me. Thinking about this, I said:
“Butch, that prudishness of yours is going to be tough to keep up at Aunt Jonquil’s.”
“You’ll keep it up, son,” said the infant, “or I’ll quit working. I ain’t going to have no women messin’ around me that way. What d’ye think I am—an exhibitionist?”
“I think you’re a liar,” I said. “And I’ll tell you why. You said you made a life’s work of substituting for children. How could you with ideas like that? Who you trying to horse up?”
“Oh,” said Butch, “that. Well, I might’s well confess to you that I ain’t done that kind of work in years. I got sick of it. I was gettin’ along in life and … well, you can imagine. Well, about thutty years ago I was out on a job an’ the woman was changin’ my drawers when a half-dozen babes arrived from her sewin’ circle. She left off workin’ right where she was and sang out for them all to come in and see how pretty I looked the way I was. I jumped out o’ th’ bassinet, grabbed a diaper off th’ bed an’ held it in front of me while I called the whole bunch of ’em what they were and told them to get out of there. I got fired for it. I thought they’d put me to work hauntin’ houses or cleanin’ dishes for sick people or somethin’, but no—they cracked down on me. Told me I’d have to stay this way until I was repentant.”
“Are you?” giggled Mike.
Butch snorted. “Not so you’d notice it,” he growled. “Repentant because I believe in common decency? Heh?”
We waited a long time after we rang the bell before Jonquil opened the door. That was to give her time to peep out at us from the tumorous bay window and compose her features to meet the niece by marriage her unfastidious nephew had acquired.
“Jonquil!” I said heartily, dashing forward and delivering the required peck on her cheek. Jonquil expected her relatives to use her leathery cheek precisely as she herself used a napkin. Pat. Dry surface on dry surface. Moisture is vulgar.
“And this is Michaele,” I said, stepping aside.
Mike said, “How do you do?” demurely, and smiled.
Aunt Jonquil stepped back a pace and held her head as if she were sighting at Mike through her nostrils. “Oh, yes,” she said without moving her lips. The smile disappeared from Mike’s face and came back with an effort of will that hurt. “Come in,” said Jonquil at last, and with some reluctance.
We trailed through a foyer and entered the parlor. It wasn’t a living room, it was an honest-to-goodness front parlor with antimacassars and sea shells. The tone of the room was sepia—light from the background of the heavily flowered wallpaper, dark for the furniture. The chairs and a hard-looking divan were covered with a material that looked as if it had been bleeding badly some months ago. When Butch’s eye caught the glassed-in monstrosity of hay and dead flowers over the mantelpiece, he retched audibly.
“What a lovely place you have here,” said Mike.
“Glad you like it,” acknowledged Jonquil woodenly. “Let’s have a look at the child.” She walked over and peered at Butch. He scowled at her. “Good heavens!” she said.
“Isn’t he lovely?” said Mike.
“Of course,” said Jonquil without enthusiasm, and added, after searching her store of ready-made expressions, “the little wudgums!” She kitchy-cooed his chin with her sharp forefinger. He immediately began to wail, with the hoarse, high-pitched howl of a genuine baby.
“The poor darling’s tired after his trip,” said Mike.
Jonquil, frightened by Butch’s vocal explosion, took the hint and led the way upstairs.
“Is the whole damn house like this?” whispered Butch hoarsely.
“No. I don’t know. Shut up,” said Mike. My sharp-eared aunt swiveled on the steps. “And go to sleepy-bye,” she crooned aloud. She bent her head over his and hissed, “And keep on crying, you little wretch!”
Butch snorted and then complied.
We walked into the bedroom, austerely furnished, the kind of room they used in the last century for sleeping purposes only, and therefore designed so that it was quite unattractive to anyone with anything but sleep on his mind. It was all gray and white; the only spot of color in the room was the bedstead, which was a highly polished pipe organ. Mike lay the baby down on the bed and stripped off his booties, his shirt and his sweater. Butch put his fist in his mouth and waited tensely.
“Oh—I almost forgot. I have the very same bassinet you used, up in the attic,” said Jonquil. “I should have had it ready. Your telegram was rather abrupt, Horace. You should have let me know sooner that you’d come today.” She angled out of the room.
“Horace! I’ll be—Is your name Horace?” asked Butch in delight.
“Yes,” I said gruffly. “But it’s Shorty to you, see, little man?”
“And I was worried about you callin’ me Percival!”
I helped set up the bassinet and we tucked Butch in for his nap. I managed to be fooling around with his bedclothes when Mike bent over dutifully to give him a kiss. I grabbed Butch’s chin and held it down so the kiss landed on his forehead. He was mightily wroth, and bit my finger till it bled. I stuck it in my pocket and told him, “I’ll see you later, bummy-wummy!” He made a noise, and Jonquil fled, blushing.
We convened in the kitchen, which was far and away the pleasantest room in the house. “Where on earth did you get that child?” Jonquil asked, peering into a nice-smelling saucepan on the old-fashioned range.
“Neighbor’s child,” I said. “They were very poor and were glad to have him off their hands for a few weeks.”
“He’s a foundling,” Mike ingeniously supplemented. “Left on their doorstep. He’s never been adopted or anything.”
“What’s his name?”
“We call him Butch.”
“How completely vulgar!” said Jonquil. “I will have no child named Butch in my house. We shall have to give him something more refined.”
I had a
brain wave. “How about Percival?” I said.
“Percival. Percy,” murmured Jonquil, testing it out. “That is much better. That will do. I knew somebody called Percival once.”
“Oh—you better not call him Percival,” said Mike, giving me her no-good-can-come-of-this look.
“Why not?” I said blandly. “Lovely name.”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “Lovely.”
“What time does Percival get his dinner?” asked Jonquil.
“Six o’clock.”
“Good,” said Jonquil. “I’ll feed him!”
“Oh no, Aunt J—I mean, Miss Timmins. That’s our job.”
I think Jonquil actually smiled. “I think I’d like to do it,” she said. “You’re not making an inescapable duty out of this, are you?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Mike, a little coldly. “We like that child.”
Jonquil peered intently at her. “I believe you do,” she said in a surprised tone, and started out of the room. At the door she called back, “You needn’t call me Miss Timmins,” and she was gone.
“Well!” said Mike.
“Looks like you won the war, babe.”
“Only the first battle, honey, and don’t think I don’t know it. What a peculiar old duck she is!” She busied herself at the stove, warming up some strained carrots she had taken out of a jar, sterilizing a bottle and filling it with pineapple juice. We had read a lot of baby manuals in the last few days!
Suddenly, “Where’s your aunt?” Mike asked.
“I dunno. I guess she’s—Good grief!”
There was a dry-boned shriek from upstairs and then the sound of hard heels pounding along the upper hallway toward the front stairs. We went up the back stairs two at time, and saw the flash of Jonquil’s dimity skirts as she disappeared downstairs. We slung into the bedroom. Butch was lying in his bassinet doubled up in some kind of spasm.
“Now what?” I groaned.
“He’s choking,” said Mike. “What are we going to do, Shorty?”
I didn’t know. Mike ran and turned him over. His face was all twisted up and he was pouring sweat and gasping. “Butch! Butch—What’s the matter?”
And just then he got his wind back. “Ho ho ho!” he roared in his bullfrog voice, and lost it again.
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