“Well, you certainly can’t be very young.”
“I bet people with big families have station wagons so they have room for all the children.”
“The lucky ones do.”
Cathy stared down at the thin flow of water carrying fat little minnows down to the sea. Finally she said, “They’re too young, and their car is too small.”
In spite of her aversion to having new neighbors, Marion felt a quickening of interest. “Have you seen them?”
But the little girl seemed deaf, lost in a water world of minnows and dragonflies and tadpoles.
“I asked you a question, Cathy. Did you see the people who just moved in?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Before you came. Their name is Smith.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went up to the house to look at things and they said, Hello, little girl, what’s your name? And I said, Cathy, what’s yours? And they said Smith. Then they drove off in the little car.”
“You’re not supposed to go poking around other people’s houses,” Marion said brusquely. “And while we’re at it, you’re not supposed to go anywhere after school without first telling me where you’re going and when you’ll be back. You know that perfectly well. Now why didn’t you come in and report to me after you got off the school bus?”
“I didn’t want to.”
“That’s not a satisfactory answer.”
Satisfactory or not, it was the only answer Cathy had. She looked at her mother in silence, then she turned and darted back up the hill to her own house.
After a time Marion followed her, exasperated and a little confused. She hated to punish the child, but she knew she couldn’t ignore the matter entirely—it was much too serious. While she gave Cathy her graham crackers and orange juice, she told her, reasonably and kindly, that she would have to stay in her room the following day after school by way of learning a lesson.
That night, after Cathy had been tucked in bed, Marion related the incident to Paul. He seemed to take a less serious view of it than Marion, a fact of which the listening child became well aware.
“I’m glad she’s getting acquainted with the new people,” Paul said. “It shows a certain degree of poise I didn’t think she had. She’s always been so shy.”
“You’re surely not condoning her running off without telling me?”
“She didn’t run far. All kids do things like that once in a while.”
“We don’t want to spoil her.”
“Cathy’s always been so obedient I think she has us spoiled. Who knows, she might even teach us a thing or two about going out and making new friends.” He realized, from past experience, that this was a very touchy subject. Marion had her house, her garden, her television sets; she didn’t seem to want any more of the world than these, and she resented any implication that they were not enough. To ward off an argument he added, “You’ve done a good job with Cathy. Stop worrying … Smith, their name is?”
“Yes.”
“Actually, I think it’s an excellent sign that Cathy’s getting acquainted.”
At three the next afternoon the yellow circus cage arrived, released one captive, and rumbled on its way.
“I’m home, Mommy.”
“Good girl.”
Marion felt guilty at the sight of her: the child had been cooped up in school all day, the weather was so warm and lovely, and besides, Paul hadn’t thought the incident of the previous afternoon too important.
“I know what,” Marion suggested, “let’s you and I go down to the creek and count waterbugs.”
The offer was a sacrifice for Marion because her favorite quiz program was on and she liked to answer the questions along with the contestants. “How about that?”
Cathy knew all about the quiz program; she’d seen it a hundred times, had watched the moving mouths claim her mother’s eyes and ears and mind. “I counted the waterbugs yesterday.”
“Well, minnows, then.”
“You’ll scare them away.”
“Oh, will I?” Marion laughed self-consciously, rather relieved that Cathy had refused her offer and was clearly and definitely a little guilty about the relief. “Don’t you scare them?”
“No. They think I’m another minnow because they’re used to me.”
“Maybe they could get used to me, too.”
“I don’t think so.”
When Cathy went off down the canyon by herself, Marion realized, in a vaguely disturbing way, that the child had politely but firmly rejected her mother’s company. It wasn’t until dinnertime that she found out the reason why.
“The Smiths,” Cathy said, “have an Austin-Healey.”
Cathy, like most girls, had never shown any interest in cars, and her glib use of the name moved her parents to laughter.
The laughter encouraged Cathy to elaborate. “An Austin-Healey makes a lot of noise—like Daddy’s lawn mower.”
“I don’t think the company would appreciate a commercial from you, young lady,” Paul said. “Are the Smiths all moved in?”
“Oh, yes. I helped them.”
“Is that a fact? And how did you help them?”
“I sang two songs. And then we danced and danced.”
Paul looked half pleased, half puzzled. It wasn’t like Cathy to perform willingly in front of people. During the last Christmas concert at the school she’d left the stage in tears and hidden in the cloak room … Well, maybe her shyness was only a phase and she was finally getting over it.
“They must be very nice people,” he said, “to take time out from getting settled in a new house to play games with a little girl.”
Cathy shook her head. “It wasn’t games. It was real dancing—like on Ed Sullivan.”
“As good as that, eh?” Paul said, smiling. “Tell me about it.”
“Mrs. Smith is a nightclub dancer.”
Paul’s smile faded, and a pulse began to beat in his left temple like a small misplaced heart. “Oh? You’re sure about that, Cathy?”
“Yes.”
“And what does Mr. Smith do?”
“He’s a baseball player.”
“You mean that’s what he does for a living?” Marion asked. “He doesn’t work in an office like Daddy?”
“No, he just plays baseball. He always wears a baseball cap.”
“I see. What position does he play on the team?” Paul’s voice was low.
Cathy looked blank.
“Everybody on a ball team has a special thing to do. What does Mr. Smith do?”
“He’s a batter.”
“A batter, eh? Well, that’s nice. Did he tell you this?”
“Yes.”
“Cathy,” Paul said, “I know you wouldn’t deliberately lie to me, but sometimes you get your facts a little mixed up.”
He went on in this vein for some time but Cathy’s story remained unshaken: Mrs. Smith was a nightclub dancer, Mr. Smith a professional baseball player, they loved children, and they never watched television.
“That, at least, must be a lie,” Marion said to Paul later when she saw the rectangular light of the television set shining in the Smiths’ picture window. “As for the rest of it, there isn’t a nightclub within fifty miles, or a professional ball club within two hundred.”
“She probably misunderstood. It’s quite possible that at one time Mrs. Smith was a dancer of sorts and that he played a little baseball.”
Cathy, in bed and teetering dizzily on the brink of sleep, wondered if she should tell her parents about the Smiths’ child—the one who didn’t go to school.
She didn’t tell them; Marion found out for herself the next morning after Paul and Cathy had gone. When she pulled back the drapes in the living room and opened the windows, she heard the sharp slam of a screen door from across the canyon and saw a small child come out on the patio of the new house. At that distance she couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Whichever it was, the child was
quiet and well behaved; only the occasional slam of the door shook the warm, windless day.
The presence of the child, and the fact that Cathy hadn’t mentioned it, gnawed at Marion’s mind all day. She questioned Cathy about it as soon as she came home.
“You didn’t tell me the Smiths have a child.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know why not.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Girl.”
“How old?”
Cathy thought it over carefully, frowning up at the ceiling. “About ten.”
“Doesn’t she go to school?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She doesn’t want to.”
“That’s not a very good reason.”
“It’s her reason,” Cathy said flatly. “Can I go out to play now?”
“I’m not sure you should. You look a little feverish. Come here and let me feel your forehead.”
Cathy’s forehead was cool and moist, but her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were very pink, almost as if she’d been sunburned.
“You’d better stay inside,” Marion said, “and watch some cartoons.”
“I don’t like cartoons.”
“You used to.”
“I like real people.”
She means the Smiths, of course, Marion thought as her mouth tightened. “People who dance and play baseball all the time?”
If the sarcasm had any effect on Cathy she didn’t show it. After waiting until Marion had become engrossed in her quiz program, Cathy lined up all her dolls in her room and gave a concert for them, to thunderous applause.
“Where are your old Navy binoculars?” Marion asked Paul when she was getting ready for bed.
“Oh, somewhere in the sea chest, I imagine. Why?”
“I want them.”
“Not thinking of spying on the neighbors, are you?”
“I’m thinking of just that,” Marion said grimly.
The next morning, as soon as she saw the Smith child come out on the patio, Marion went downstairs to the storage room to search through the sea chest. She located the binoculars and was in the act of dusting them off when the telephone started to ring in the living room. She hurried upstairs and said breathlessly, “Hello?”
“Mrs. Borton?”
“Yes.”
“This is Miss Park speaking, Cathy’s teacher.”
Marion had met Miss Park several times at P.T.A. meetings and report-card conferences. She was a large, ruddy-faced, and unfailingly cheerful young woman—the kind, as Paul said, you wouldn’t want to live with but who’d be nice to have around in an emergency. “How are you, Miss Park?”
“Oh, fine, thank you, Mrs. Borton. I meant to call you yesterday but things were a bit out of hand around here, and I knew there was no great hurry to check on Cathy; she’s such a wellbehaved little girl.”
Even Miss Park’s loud, jovial voice couldn’t cover up the ominous sound of the word check. “I don’t think I quite understand. Why should you check on Cathy?”
“Purely routine. The school doctor and the health department like to keep records of how many cases of measles or flu or chicken pox are going the rounds. Right now it looks like the season for mumps. Is Cathy all right?”
“She seemed a little feverish yesterday afternoon when she got home from school, but she acted perfectly normal when she left this morning.”
Miss Park’s silence was so protracted that Marion became painfully conscious of things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed—the weight of the binoculars in her lap, the thud of her own heartbeat in her ears. Across the canyon the Smith child was playing quietly and alone on the patio. There is definitely something the matter with that girl, Marion thought. Perhaps I’d better not let Cathy go over there anymore, she’s so imitative. “Miss Park, are you still on the line? Hello? Hello—”
“I’m here,” Miss Park’s voice seemed fainter than usual, and less positive. “What time did Cathy leave the house this morning?”
“Eight, as usual.”
“Did she take the school bus?”
“Of course. She always does.”
“Did you see her get on?”
“I kissed her goodbye at the front door,” Marion said. “What’s this all about, Miss Park?”
“Cathy hasn’t been at school for two days, Mrs. Borton.”
“Why, that’s absurd, impossible! You must be mistaken.” But even as she was speaking the words, Marion was raising the binoculars to her eyes: the little girl on the Smiths’ patio had a straw curtain of hair and eyes as blue as the periwinkles along the creek banks.
“Mrs. Borton, I’m not likely to be mistaken about which of my children are in class or not.”
“No. No, you’re—you’re not mistaken, Miss Park. I can see Cathy from here—she’s over at the neighbor’s house.”
“Good. That’s a load off my mind.”
“Off yours, yes,” Marion said. “Not mine.”
“Now we mustn’t become excited, Mrs. Borton. Don’t make too much of this incident before we’ve had a chance to confer. Suppose you come and talk to me during my lunch hour and bring Cathy along. We’ll all have a friendly chat.”
But it soon became apparent, even to the optimistic Miss Park, that Cathy didn’t intend to take part in any friendly chat. She stood by the window in the classroom, blank-eyed, mute, unresponsive to the simplest questions, refusing to be drawn into any conversation even about her favorite topic, the Smiths. Miss Park finally decided to send Cathy out to play in the schoolyard while she talked to Marion alone.
“Obviously,” Miss Park said, enunciating the word very distinctly because it was one of her favorites, “obviously, Cathy’s got a crush on this young couple and has concocted a fantasy about belonging to them.”
“It’s not so obvious what my husband and I are going to do about it.”
“Live through it, the same as other parents. Crushes like this are common at Cathy’s age. Sometimes the object is a person, a whole family, even a horse. And, of course, to Cathy a nightclub dancer and a baseball player must seem very glamorous indeed. Tell me, Mrs. Borton, does she watch television a great deal?”
Marion stiffened. “No more than any other child.”
Oh dear, Miss Park thought sadly, they all do it; the most confirmed addicts are always the most defensive. “I just wondered,” she said. “Cathy likes to sing to herself and I’ve never heard such a repertoire of television commercials.”
“She picks things up very fast.”
“Yes. Yes, she does indeed.” Miss Park studied her hands, which were always a little pale from chalk dust and were even paler now because she was angry—at the child for deceiving her, at Mrs. Borton for brushing aside the television issue, at herself for not preventing, or at least anticipating, the current situation, and perhaps most of all at the Smiths who ought to have known better than to allow a child to hang around their house when she should obviously be in school.
“Don’t put too much pressure on Cathy about this,” she said finally, “until I talk the matter over with the school psychologist. By the way, have you met the Smiths, Mrs. Borton?”
“Not yet,” Marion said grimly. “But believe me, I intend to.”
“Yes, I think it would be a good idea for you to talk to them and make it clear that they’re not to encourage Cathy in this fantasy.”
The meeting came sooner than Marion expected.
She waited at the school until classes were dismissed, then she took Cathy into town to do some shopping. She had parked the car and she and Cathy were standing hand in hand at a corner waiting for a traffic light to change; Marion was worried and impatient, Cathy still silent, unresisting, inert, as she had been ever since Marion had called her home from the Smiths’ patio.
Suddenly, Marion felt the child’s hand tighten in a spasm of excitement. Cathy’s face had turned so pink it looked ready to explode and wi
th her free hand she was waving violently at two people in a small cream-colored sports car—a very pretty young woman with blonde hair in the driver’s seat, and beside her a young man wearing a wide friendly grin and a baseball cap. They both waved back at Cathy just before the lights changed and then the car roared through the intersection.
“The Smiths!” Cathy shouted, jumping up and down in a frenzy. “That was the Smiths.”
“Sssh, not so loud. People will—”
“But it was the Smiths !”
“Hurry up before the light changes.”
The child didn’t hear. She stood as if rooted to the curb, staring after the cream-colored car.
With a little grunt of impatience Marion picked her up, carried her across the road, and let her down quite roughly on the other side. “There. If you’re going to act like a baby, I’ll carry you like a baby.”
“I saw the Smiths!”
“All right. What are you so excited about? It’s not very unusual to meet someone in town whom you know.”
“It’s unusual to meet them.”
“Why?”
“Because it is.” The color was fading from Cathy’s cheeks, but her eyes still looked bedazzled, quite as if they’d seen a miracle.
“I’m sure they’re very unique people,” Marion said coldly. “Nevertheless, they must stop for groceries like everyone else.”
Cathy’s answer was a slight shake of her head and a whisper heard only by herself: “No, they don’t, never.”
When Paul came home from work, Cathy was sent to play in the front yard while Marion explained matters to him. He listened with increasing irritation—not so much at Cathy’s actions but at the manner in which Marion and Miss Park had handled things. There was too much talking, he said, and too little acting.
“The way you women beat around the bush instead of tackling the situation directly, meeting it head-on—fantasy life. Fantasy life, my foot! Now, we’re going over to the Smiths’ right this minute to talk to them and that will be that. End of fantasy. Period.”
“We’d better wait until after dinner. Cathy missed her lunch.”
Throughout the meal Cathy was pale and quiet. She ate nothing and spoke only when asked a direct question; but inside herself the conversation was very lively, the dinner a banquet with dancing, and afterward a wild, windy ride in the roofless car …
Los Angeles Noir 2 Page 17