by Evelyn Piper
“If you’re going to be abusive, there’s no point in our continuing this conversation, Mrs. Lake.”
“No point! No point!”
“I believe you should be under a doctor’s care, definitely!”
“How dare you?” Blanche said. “This is your school Bunny was lost in. How dare you? What is the matter with you?” Silence. “Miss Benton! Miss Benton!”
“Mrs. Lake—”
“Don’t you dare use that tone to me as if I were insane! Of course I’m beside myself, so should you be beside yourself. You’re the director of the school! What kind of director are you, anyway?”
“I’m not using any tone, Mrs. Lake. Mrs. Lake, please do listen to me. A good friend of mine is a physician. He knows about this dreadful thing. I can’t tell you how relieved I would be if you would see him!”
“What can he do?”
“He can . . .”
“About Bunny.”
“Mrs. Lake, I don’t think it will serve any purpose for you to call the parents in the school, but if Dr. Newhouse thinks you should, I will give you the list. This should show you I have complete confidence in Dr. Newhouse.”
“All right. If he hurries.”
“He is here with me now. We’ve been talking about you. He’ll be right over. Oh, wait, Mrs. Lake, what is your address and telephone number?”
“But you have it.”
“Downstairs. In the office where we keep our files. I’m up here in the apartment now. I don’t want to waste time going down and . . .”
“Oh, of course.” She gave Miss Benton her address and telephone number.
“You’ll be there?”
“Yes.” Coffee. She put the telephone back. Coffee. Now she could hear the water boiling on the range because it was so quiet in the apartment. She longed for noise, real noise. If there were no sounds except that water boiling and the sound of her sighs to press against the New York streets, the outside noises would burst in the walls. Like the atom bomb explosions, she thought. On her way to the kitchen, she stopped at the window, seeing how night had settled down. She told herself that it was just as true now as earlier that Bunny wasn’t afraid of the dark. It was no darker where Bunny was now because it was night than it would have been in the dark cellar. “Make day,” Bunny had once commanded imperiously, meaning that she, Blanche, should pull up the Venetian blinds and let the light in. And, “Let there be light,” she had said to Bunny, laughing, jerking up the blinds in a gorgeous clattering gesture, as if she really were God. “Oh, God,” she said, falling on her knees, “help me find Bunny, God, please!”
She got off the floor, telling herself, coffee, to make coffee, good, strong, black coffee which would not remind her of the weak stuff in the drugstore or the soda jerk who had said that Bunny might not be alone in the dark. This coffee needn’t remind her of that coffee.
The kitchen was full of steam because the water she had put up had almost boiled away. She would have to add some and start again. Blanche went to the bread box and took out a loaf of waxed-paper-wrapped bread. At first, she merely held the loaf, poking the nail of her thumb through the waxed paper; then she pulled out two slices and, doubling them over, crammed as much of the bread as she could into her mouth. She was ravenous, she thought, chewing frantically, stuffing more bread in before the first mouthful was down, staring at the kettle, willing it to boil. A watched kettle never boils. (Mother.) A watched telephone never rings. Blanche stayed in the kitchen with the kettle because that was the lesser of two evils.
Evils. Evils.
The steam was coming up out of the spout; not steam from an earth that was hell, not from hell on earth, merely from the kettle.
Coffee, Blanche told herself, and carefully, not spilling a drop, poured the boiling water into the dripolator and sat down at the kitchen table.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The Chinese torture, she thought; a constant drip of water until you went mad with it was the Chinese torture.
Torture. Sex crime.
“No,” she whispered, and quickly wrapped both her hands around the coffeepot, to feel the too hot, to be burned, not to think. And then the doorbell rang.
14
He was so—tidy—Blanche thought when she opened her door and saw him standing there, smiling not too broadly. The smile in place, she thought, like the crease in his dark-gray slacks. Involuntarily, her hand went to smooth down her rumpled and coal-smeared blue jacket. He wore a blue cashmere sweater with a darker-blue scarf neatly tucked into the neckline.
“I’m Dr. Newhouse. Miss Benton asked me to . . .” He saw her frown. Like thunder, he thought, darkening her beauty and making it ominous. Because she is beautiful, he thought, and remembered Louise saying, “She’s really lovely, Dennis. I think I’m rather stupid to send you to rescue such a lovely damsel in distress.” But he had told Louise—and it was the simple truth, he thought—that he was certain she knew him well enough to feel perfectly secure about him and beautiful damsels in distress, after hours. “Helping damsels in distress after consultation hours,” he had assured Louise, “would be a busman’s holiday.”
He smiled at Mrs. Lake. “Miss Benton is very much concerned about you. She asked me to come and see if you were all right.”
“I’m trying to be.” She stepped back and allowed him to come into the apartment. “I just have to remember that the police are out looking for Bunny, don’t I? And that the best thing I can do is keep out of their way and not disturb them.”
He closed the door softly and went to the most comfortable-looking chair and patted it suggestively. “And one other thing to do while you wait is calm down.”
“Of course.”
But she frowned at the chair. He went and led her to it.
“It will only upset Bunny if I throw a scene when they bring her back. Yes, of course,” she said, obediently seating herself, “I’m going to try to calm down.”
“Good.” Her hands clasped each other on her lap, clung to each other. Poor kid. She was exhausted. Moving unhurriedly, he chose a seat where she did not have to look at him. “Let’s talk, then.” He sat in his consultation room, waiting for her to talk, but she was silent. He could see her lips, the line of them in repose. Eloquent, he thought, just as they are. Not needing, he thought, the thousands of words, the hundreds of thousands of words. (As if, he thought, it could be done without words. With mirrors, he thought.) He leaned forward inviting her to speak.
She understood. “I’m afraid I can’t—discuss,” she said.
She had a mouth for marble, Dennis thought; that is, he could see that mouth in marble, the sweet, deep curve of it arrested. She had a mouth like the one on that head of a girl found drowned in the Seine he used to have a cast of. In his room in medical school. He would hear the other students going out to make a night of it, and he would get up restlessly and walk around his small room. He would touch the marble lips of the girl and sigh and go back to his desk again. Dennis told himself that this was what happened when a person kept her trap shut with him, just because he got so damn much talk in his line of business! “Of course you can’t discuss! Naturally, you can’t do that. Talk about anything that comes into your mind.” Now he could see her lips trying to smile, modeling a smile for him. “Just say anything that comes to your mind, anything at all.” He leaned his head back out of her line of vision and pressed his thumb and third finger against the ethmoid bones in response to the sensation there which always accompanied tension. He was, of course, trained to be observant of his own reactions as well as those of others, and he wondered why he should feel tense. Because his plans had been disrupted this way? On Monday evenings he had dinner with Louise, and tonight they intended to catch The Gate of Hell at the Sutton. So rigid that any disrupting influence caused tension? But how else could he manage? It was all very well to be flexible, but within limits. He had to keep within strict limits if he was to spend his time the way he wanted to. Could the tension, he wondered, pressing
hard on the ethmoids, be guilt toward his patients, because if he was to give them his full attention tomorrow (and Tuesday was his heaviest schedule) he should be—rigidly—carrying out the usual Monday-night procedure? He had to smile at that. But selection, he told himself firmly, did entail a certain amount of rigidity. You could not let yourself be shifted by every wind—by every smile, he corrected, smiling. Nor could you help everybody. He had chosen his obligations as well as his pleasures. It was natural that he should feel this tension because his Monday evening with Louise was being loused up this way. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said you sound like a psychiatrist.”
“How did you guess? Have you had much experience with psychiatrists?”
She said, “Providence isn’t exactly darkest Africa.”
“Providence, Rhode Island?”
“That’s where I was born. I haven’t lived there for three and a half years. Bunny is three,” she said.
He saw her blush and throw her head up.
“In case you didn’t notice the connection between Bunny’s being born and my leaving Providence; Bunny is illegitimate. That’s why I had to go away.”
“I see.”
“I suppose you think that’s awful!”
“Haven’t they heard in Providence that psychiatrists don’t think anything is ‘awful’? If anyone can reserve value judgments, psychiatrists should.”
She said, “Should!”
“Where did you go when you left home?”
“I had a teacher, my favorite teacher, and she moved to—a small town. I wrote her when I knew I was pregnant. You see,” she said, “my mother didn’t reserve value judgment! Mother does think it’s awful about Bunny.”
“She does?”
“She does, yes. She thinks—well, never mind Mother.”
“The lieutenant from the police station told Miss Benton that you won’t give him your mother’s address.”
“Why? Why should Mother have to go through with—this waiting?” She paused. “I suppose you’ve guessed the other reason I won’t let them tell Mother.” She waited for him to speak, but he was silent. “Of course you’ve guessed! Because she’ll blame me. Because Mother will say this is my fault!”
“Your mother will blame you?”
“If she could help . . . Do you think that would stop me if she could help? Do you think anything would?”
She was out of her chair. She was standing over him. She thrust her hand through her hair and he thought he could hear it crackle. That kind of hair. “I’m not thinking anything, Mrs. Lake. Why do you think I’m thinking anything would stop you?”
She looked at him, shrugged and went back to her seat.
“Tell me about this teacher.”
“She didn’t think I should be stoned through the streets with a big red letter ‘A’ embroidered on my bosom, that’s all.”
“The father of the child?”
“The father . . .” She grimaced. “The father was married. He still is married,” she said defiantly.
The head going up again, making a taut and beautiful line from her throat to the tip of her chin. “Still is married,” he repeated.
“He has a lovely wife and four children and it wasn’t his fault any more than it was mine and he didn’t want to marry me any more than I wanted to marry him.”
“It was just one of those things?”
“Just one of those things. It happened and we were both very sorry, but why should his wife and the children suffer for what I did?”
“You’re very generous.”
“Oh, he probably wouldn’t have, anyhow. All I would have accomplished would have been to break up his marriage and hurt the children. When Chloe—that’s my English teacher’s name—said I should come and stay with her, I did.”
“I see.”
“Bunny was born there and we lived with Chloe. She was wonderful to me. Nobody knew.”
“You didn’t want anybody to know?”
“Of course not! Of course not!” she said. Her voice trembled and her hands moved away from each other and each of them clenched. “Having Chloe was very lucky for me.”
Dennis looked at the clenched fists. Not as lucky as all that, maybe.
“Chloe had a little house and when Bunny was six months old she made me go to secretarial school and then, when I was trained, Chloe found this nice woman to come in and take care of Bunny while she was away and I got a job, too, so I could start paying my way.”
The old expression “the woman pays” flashed through Dennis’s mind, because she did, of course. Because this was payment. Friend or no, lucky or no, broad minded or not, this girl believed she was a wicked girl and that she should be stoned through the streets with a big red letter “A” on her bosom. (He could see the rapid rise and fall of her bosom, so agitated by just recounting this story.) “That seems to have worked out for the best, then. Why did you come to New York?”
“Chloe got married,” Blanche said. “She met this Englishman and went to live in England.”
“And left you alone?”
“My goodness, you sound as if she shouldn’t have. Of course she should have married Gavin. He’s very nice. And I wasn’t alone. I have Bunny.”
“Of course. Bunny.”
“Chloe’s husband wanted to adopt Bunny. He wanted to take Bunny to England with them. He fell in love with Bunny. Everybody does.” She jumped up. “That would have been good for Bunny, wouldn’t it have? To have a mother and a father?”
“Children can use a mother and a father.”
“You think I could have given her to them, too! Just like Mother!”
“Your mother wanted you to give Bunny away?”
“For her good! How do you think I feel when Mother says ‘for her own good’? Don’t you understand, Mother thinks Bunny is wrong. Not what I did, only, but Bunny, too! And that’s not so!”
Now she was wringing her hands. Little soft hands wringing like the hands of heroines in old-fashioned books. “That is not so?”
“Of course not so! It can’t be so! I mean God wouldn’t let an innocent child—I mean, the sins of the fathers—we don’t believe in that, anymore, do we?”
Don’t we? he thought, while shaking his head at her. Don’t we? He wondered what guilt could be more racking than this which made this girl feel she had been damned until the third generation. To fight such a guilt would take a giant. Hercules would stagger under a load like that, and now, although he had thrown his head back and had his eyes closed, he could still see the delicate body, the narrow wrists and ankles, the sloping shoulders and the small, soft hands wringing. Not Hercules, Dennis thought. No.
“Mother thought it was a gift from heaven, Chloe and Gavin wanting to take Bunny, because, then—You see there’s a boy from Providence—He’d marry me in a minute. We’d been going around for a year before—He’s forgiven me for what I did—” She frowned.
But you haven’t forgiven yourself for whatever you did, Dennis thought. No God so implacable as self, he thought. No God, anywhere, so lacking in mercy.
“Bert’s an engineer. He went and got this job in Sao Paulo where nobody would know. Sao Paulo in Brazil. I thought he was so marvelous when he would . . . honestly, I just worshiped him because he knew and he still wanted me, but he wanted me to give Bunny away, too. He leaped in the air when I wrote about it. I never thought for one moment he would, I just wrote about it, and how Mother—”
“So you wouldn’t marry him?”
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”
He had no idea, of course, whether any of this was the truth, but the shame was true and the guilt (for whatever sin) was true, and that was enough. She suddenly parted her hands and, as he watched, rubbed them down her sides, frowning. He had seen so many look at their hands after rubbing them the way she was doing. He had seen people trying to wash their hands of so many sins, and how rarely they could do it, he thought. Now she was pacing up and down. “Do I smell coffee
?” he asked.
“Coffee? Oh, I was just going to have some.”
“Could we both?” He stood up and walked toward a door in the room.
Blanche said, “That’s Mother’s bedroom, the kitchen’s the other door. No the other door!” Because now he had gone to her bedroom. He stood there looking in at it.
“That’s my bedroom.”
“Of course. Sorry.”
By the time he joined her in the kitchen, she had poured two cups of coffee for them.
He picked up a cup. The coffee was very black.
“May I have some milk in mine? If you have it, of course. Silly of me,” he said, going to the refrigerator. “Where there’s a child there’s always milk.”
“Yes, and Mother always has her hot milk at night.” She watched him pouring milk into his coffee. “Mother wouldn’t sleep a wink, she says, if she didn’t have her hot milk before going to bed.” She put down her cup without tasting the coffee. “I don’t think I can get it down.”
“Try.” He drank some of his coffee. “When did you eat last?”
“I was stuffing bread into my mouth when you came.”
“Good.”
“Good? When did Bunny eat last? When did Bunny eat last? I can’t talk anymore! I can’t.”
“Please try.” She shook her head. “There are a couple of questions I think I should ask you. Tell me, do you think there is any possibility that Bunny was kidnapped?”
Why did she think of the spittle sliding down the apple? Because it was dirty, because it was filth, and an apple, fresh and rosy—Because spittle sliding down an apple was like a kidnapper’s hands on Bunny. She shook her head. “Why should Bunny be kidnapped? I haven’t any money.”
He came to her, lifted the coffee cup, and held it to her lips. “Well, it occurred to me, those people you mentioned, the ones who want Bunny so badly—the school teacher and her husband—do you think they could have . . .”
