“A new stroller,” said Joan, unimaginatively.
“Nope,” she said. “A brand-new Mustang convertible, redder ’n red.”
“You can’t accept it,” said Joan, shocked.
“I always wanted one of them,” said Beth, carelessly.
“Are you going to go back with him, then?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” she said, grinning. “I think of it as a divorce present.”
Things in general were looking up: Joan was back at her old job, and I was still at mine, having gotten a raise in salary; Rick Beller had been fired, and the fellow who worked next to me now was jolly and hardworking. Joan and I were passionate again, and I believed we might soon be talking about having another child. Progress. It had taken a while, but it seemed we had weathered the storm.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Nanny
OF COURSE YOU want to know about Amanda. Why else come to me—I’m not pretty enough for movies, never was, even when I was young. “Pretty is as pretty does,” my mother used to tell me, but sometimes I wished I did less and was more. Listen to me going on—I guess I’m a little nervous.
That’s normal, isn’t it? I mean, everybody you’ve talked to’s been a little nervous at first, haven’t they?
I looked after Amanda from the time she was very small. I hadn’t ever had the care of children before, but I had some brothers and sisters, so my mother put my name forward when Mrs. Crawford was looking for someone to help. She wasn’t much older than me, Mrs. Crawford, and just as young looking as if she was still in high school. I was real nervous at the interview—must have dropped my gloves three times—but in the end she said I’d do. I was surprised, as I’d hardly said two words, but Mrs. Crawford said she liked quiet.
Quiet for the baby, I guess; she wasn’t all that quiet. Not that she was a bad woman, oh no; you could tell just by looking that she was bred right. But she and Mr. Crawford got into some awful fights. They’d go at it hammer and tongs in the living room, while I’d be upstairs with Amanda. I guess I was hiding; there weren’t many raised voices in my house when I was growing up, and I thought someone would get killed, from the way they shouted at each other.
But they always quieted down after a while. Mr. Crawford would go out, and there’d be a rattle at the cupboard meaning Mrs. Crawford was making herself a drink, and then she’d call upstairs to me, to bring the baby down. Sometimes I didn’t want to; I could tell that Amanda was upset by all the noise, even if she was so young. I think babies can tell things, don’t you?
I’d bring her down, and Mrs. Crawford would fuss over her for a while, and ask me questions about her diapers and her feeding and such. It kind of surprised me, how little she knew about babies. Even I knew about gassy foods, and things like that. But Mrs. Crawford would give her anything she wanted, even if it wasn’t good for her, and it just got worse as the child grew.
Not that she was a bad mother; oh, no. But she just didn’t spend as much time with Amanda as I did, and she didn’t know what kind of foods made her ill. Babies have their habits, same as older folks. Some babies take to vegetables like they were candy, while other ones won’t have anything to do with green. It’s kind of an art to get a baby to eat what it needs, and sometimes Mrs. Crawford’s spoiling went a ways to ruin my careful work. I was glad when she’d give Amanda back to me and let me put her down for the night. Most times I left then, to go back home, but sometimes I stayed late, so Mrs. Crawford could go out. She went out a lot, mostly with girlfriends, women who didn’t look or act like her, the kind that laughed loud all the time and had no children. Except for just one of her girlfriends, they were all like that.
I don’t like to say, but I think she drank more than was good for her. Sometimes she’d come home late, with all of her girlfriends honking and calling from the car, and I’d have to help her to bed. I could smell the gin on her, strong enough to curl your hair. It didn’t seem to hurt her none, though: the next morning when I came she’d complain of a headache, but she’d be as cheery as ever. I didn’t hold with the gossip that said Mrs. Crawford was a drunk. She wasn’t ever falling-down, just tipsy, and who would blame her, with that husband.
It was a scandal, of course, the way she threw him out in the middle of the night, in the rain. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. And then the divorce. People didn’t divorce then the way they do now. There was something kind of fast about divorcées and no one wanted to be one. There were probably just as many bad marriages then as there are now, but I guess people just tended to stick it out more, and try to make the best of it. I know of one woman who’s been divorced two times, and both times I believe she and her husband could have managed, if they hadn’t been so quick to get offended, and so deaf to each other.
I’ll say this for Mr. Crawford—he was sad about leaving Amanda, even if he and his wife didn’t like each other much. He never had paid the child a whole lot of attention, but you could see he was fond of her. He was a little afraid of her, I think, afraid to hold her, like she might break. No wonder, with his wife snapping at him all the time. ‘Don’t drop her,’ she’d say. Well, to my mind that’s the surest way to get the thing accomplished. Someone says don’t drop, the first thing they do is drop. But he kept on trying—to hold her, to talk to her—for a while at least. So it was hard for me to hate him, even if he was a terrible kind of husband, and not much of a father.
His going settled things down a bit. Amanda was very grown-up about it; she only asked once about where her daddy was, and after it was explained to her she kept quiet. It was Mrs. Crawford took things hard, and you’d’ve thought she’d be nothing but glad to be rid of him, the way he treated her. But she mooned around like her best friend had died. She acted real mixed-up; one day she’d get up late and laze around in her bathrobe, and the next she’d be up early and dressed like she was going to a party, even if she had no place in mind to go. She was mixed-up about the child, too. She’d say she wanted to spend more time with her, and she’d hug her close all day, and then the next day she’d push her off onto me and ask me to keep her quiet. It was a real confusion, and I was glad to be there so the little girl had someone she could count on, besides that one friend of Mrs. Crawford’s.
The friend was over most every day, and she knew how to handle babies, it was clear, although she didn’t have any of her own. I heard she had something wrong with her inside. Isn’t that just the way—the ones who want them most can’t have them, and the ones who don’t want them are in the clinic every year. I felt sorry for her, and used to let her give Amanda her bath, even though that was my job usually. She just lit up, and bathed her real gentle, without getting the littlest speck of soap in her eyes. As I say, you can tell a natural-born mother.
I was happy working for Mrs. Crawford. I’d clerked before, but had never liked the job much. Selling ribbons in the five-and-ten with a bunch of giggly girls trading gossip behind the counter and ignoring me. They thought I was low, because I had no education, and it was likely I’d be at work all my life, and never marry. I guess they figured it right; and now it’s no disgrace to be a working woman, but then I felt the shame of it. I used to try all kinds of new things with my hair and face, hoping to look in the mirror and find somebody new and glamorous. It was always me looking back, same old peanut-face under the rouge and curls. “Why bother, Elsie?” Mrs. Crawford asked me. “Anybody can’t see your heart isn’t worth having.” I thought about that, and I can’t say I gave up my primping right away, but it did seem a little less important what I looked like after that. Babies love you no matter what.
And Amanda loved me. Everybody loved her, but she loved me best of all. She told me all the things she thought up by herself and she’d say, “Don’t tell.” A baby’s secrets. I kept them safe. She was a golden child, always sunny; all that spoiling she got didn’t hurt her a bit. She never threw one tantrum, not one; and there’s not many children I can say that about. I would have loved her if she’d thrown a million
fits, I’ve loved children since who hadn’t her good temper, but Amanda was my first, and I loved her best.
Mrs. Crawford took to going out in the middle of the day; she took up with her old friends after Mr. Crawford left, and she’d go shopping with them over in the next town. Or they’d see a movie. They’d drive as far as Charlottesville to see a new movie. When she got back, if she wasn’t too tired, she’d tell me all about it, so it was like I’d seen it myself. And then when it came to Naples I’d go see it; it helped to know about it already, because then I could pay more attention to the people, and not so much to what was happening.
She’d be gone all day, sometimes. I’d go get Amanda from school (they went until noon) and bring her home to dinner. Then we’d color or play dolls, something quiet; I seen the way they let them run around at that school. A little girl needs quiet, and so Amanda had her afternoons, and when her mother got home she saw her little girl all tidy and smiling, pretty as a picture.
If the day was nice, we’d go for walks, just the little girl and me, looking at wildflowers, telling each other stories. That child had an imagination.
I’d get so caught up in her tales that I’d forget where I was, or who. Instead of Naples, it was like we were walking through a fancy-land filled with palaces and kings and fairies. I half expected something magic to happen to us right there while Amanda told me her stories.
That was how I met Winslow. He wasn’t a terribly handsome fellow, or a terribly rich one either. He worked at the organ-building factory downtown, and was kind of plain-looking. But he smiled a lot, and he had big strong hands. Just looking at them made me think of the organ music coming out of those pipes he made.
He spoke to us first. Not to me, really, but to Amanda. She was in the middle of a fairy tale, when he sort of popped out of the bushes, and said hello. She was a well-bred child (I’d seen to that), but she knew better than to talk to strangers, so she just nodded, cool as you please, and we passed on.
He kept after us though, meeting us every day at the same place, and raising his hat like he knew us.
“Who’s that man?” asked Amanda.
“Nobody,” I said.
“Nobody’s nobody,” she said. “He’s probably a prince in disguise.”
Amanda had a quarter, given to her by her grandpa. It was more money than she’d owned at one time, and she kept in her hand from the moment he tucked it there. She’d take it out of her pocket to look at fifty times in fifty paces even though I told her to be careful. “You’ll lose it,” I said, “and then you’ll be sorry.” But she wouldn’t put it up in her piggy bank; it was her first quarter, and she wouldn’t let it go, no matter how I coaxed.
Well, of course she dropped it. Not just on the sidewalk, so that it rolled away, but near a little grating. It disappeared; and she bit her lip and said nothing, holding back her tears. Even though I’d warned her it might happen, and she oughtn’t to have been so careless, I felt sorry for her, standing looking down into the grate so hopelessly.
At that moment, Winslow appeared. I didn’t know his name then, nor anything about him, and I wouldn’t answer him when he asked what was making the little girl cry.
“I lost my quarter,” Amanda told him, pointing down.
“Well now,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do about that.”
Quick as a wink he had his sleeves rolled up, and was on his knees by the grating, pulling some shiny kind of tool from his pocket, and his hat was somehow in my hand. Not ten minutes later he was handing the quarter back to Amanda.
“It’s covered with germs,” I said. “Give it to me; I’ll wash it when we get home.”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” said the man. “But we could as easy wash it in the fountain, and it would make the little girl happy.”
Of course then she would have nothing else; so we walked with the man to the fountain, where Amanda washed her quarter, and the man washed his arm, which was all dirty from messing about in the grating. He began to talk then, and that was when I found out his name and where he worked. For a factory man, he was very polite. He offered to walk us home, but I wasn’t that taken with him that I didn’t know what was proper.
“He didn’t talk like a roughneck up to no good,” said Amanda, on the way home.
“I think maybe I was mistaken, dear,” I told her.
The next fine day, we saw him; and all through that summer. And when Amanda started school again in the fall, our little walks had to stop, as she was going for a full day now, and it got dark soon after she got out.
The winter came, and dragged on. Amanda was learning to read, and we spent the afternoons sounding out words together. By February she was reading almost as well as me, and the first time she brought me a word I didn’t know, I felt afraid.
“Why so blue?” asked Mrs. Crawford one day, noticing my mood.
“Guess I’m just longing for spring,” I said, and it was true. I was looking forward to the warm, when Amanda and I could walk outside again, and stop all this fussing with books. And I had a hope too, without even knowing it, that we might see Winslow again.
The first warm day came early, and Amanda and I took our walk. She was bigger now, and ran ahead of me. I went slowly, telling her that a lady didn’t run, but all the time I was looking for Winslow, thinking he might come looking for us.
We didn’t meet him that day, or the next time, or the next. I began to despair; what if he had moved on, left the factory for some other job, gone back to his home in the Tidewater? I had no way of knowing what had happened to him, and after awhile I tried just to forget him. Amanda and I took shorter and fewer walks; she wanted to read, or to play with her schoolfriends in the afternoons. Our walks shrank down to just the distance between school and her house, one way in the morning, home again at two.
I always left the house at a twenty to, so I’d be in good time to meet her. In early May it could still get chilly, and one day I took along an extra sweater for her, so she wouldn’t be cold, coming back.
I had just rounded the corner when Winslow popped out of the bushes, the way he had that first time.
“Hello,” he said, just like before, but this time I didn’t snub him. There was a whole winter past full of things to say. We’d been there fifteen minutes before I thought of the time. It was ten past two!
“I have to hurry,” I said. “I’m late getting Amanda.”
“I’ll walk with you,” said he.
So we walked fast, nearly running. Seven blocks have never seemed so long. And all the time we didn’t talk; I think Winslow guessed I was upset. I was seeing poor Amanda, standing outside the school and waiting, not seeing me, maybe even starting off for home by herself, crossing the street …
When we got to the school, she wasn’t there.
“She always meets me right here,” I said.
“Maybe she went inside to wait,” said Winslow. “It’s nippy.”
But she wasn’t inside; her teacher hadn’t seen her since the bell rang; none of the children could tell me if they’d seen her on the playground, or even if she’d been at school at all that day. One of the little girls finally said that she’d seen her, but she wouldn’t say anything more.
“Where did she go?” I asked.
The child put her finger in her mouth and looked at me.
“Which way?” I cried, startling the little girl so that her mouth opened in an O.
“Mama,” she said, and went off toward a figure at the edge of the playground.
We looked and looked, and finally Winslow suggested that we walk back toward the house, the way she might have gone. We did, but didn’t see her; and when we reached the house again I burst inside, hoping against hope she’d be there.
But she wasn’t. No little coat tossed on the floor, no impatient little voice scolding, “Where were you?” She was gone, that was all, just gone. She had disappeared into thin air.
Winslow was outside on the steps. I hadn’t let him in the house, knowi
ng what was proper. After a while, he knocked at the door.
“We’ll find her,” he said.
“Like you found the quarter?” I cried. “She’s a little girl.”
He put his arms around me, and then I got angry. It was his fault, wasn’t it, that I’d been late to get her. I’d never been late before. He had caused all of this, with his sweet talk and his charm.
“Go away,” I said, pushing him.
“Elsie,” he said.
“What if she’s been run over? You’re a murderer, the same as if you’d done it yourself,” I said. “Go away.” I was pushing him with one hand, and in the other was the little sweater, and I started to cry again, and gave him a shove so that he fell right down, and then I slammed the door.
I never saw him again. Oh, he came around from time to time, and knocked on the Crawfords’ door, but I wouldn’t answer. If Amanda had come back, I suppose I would have forgiven him. The whole thing would have been lost, gone the way of all bad days. But it wasn’t just a bad day; it never ended; and Winslow was all tied up with it in my mind. I remembered how happy I was that day to see him, how we were flirting and laughing at the very same time that Amanda was waiting for me … I hated myself, and I hated him, and I couldn’t put any of it aside.
Mrs. Crawford was very kind to me; she said it wasn’t my fault, and even when she’d been crying all day she tried to look on the bright side.
“You stay on, Elsie,” she said. “She’ll want you here when she comes back.”
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