by Evelyn Piper
Someone in one of the little houses in Henderson Place was playing the piano. Single notes, hunting, it seemed, for a tune. He could be a composer, she thought. Mr. Wilson had told her that many artists and musicians lived in the houses in the mews. Mr. Wilson’s house was the third—fourth—house on the right. Third? Fourth? Fourth, she thought, telling herself that it really was the fourth, that she had not simply made it the fourth because there she could see a light while the third was completely darkened.
She hurried up the white stairs and found the doorbell and rang it, as commandingly as she dared, reminding herself that he had asked her to come inside, that he had been friendly. He had been inside his house on Sunday and had seen her looking at it and had come out and talked to her.
“Cute?” he had said. “Romantic, isn’t it? Not many of these left in the city.” Wouldn’t she like to come in and see the inside, he had asked. “Oh, come on,” he had said. “You may not get another chance. I’m temperamental because I’m a writer. Of course you haven’t heard of me. Do you know how many books are published each year? Come on in,” he had said. “It’s broad daylight, isn’t it?”
Broad daylight. Yesterday. Sunday. The sun had caught his bald head as it caught the panes of glass behind his head so that it glazed. If only she hadn’t cared what Bunny might have said about Mr. Wilson’s bald head, then he would have met Bunny. She pulled down her jacket and took her finger off the bell, then nervously pressed it again. He had been kind. He could not help the way he looked with that shiny head and his pink face coming out of a black turtle-neck sweater and one eye smaller than the other. He must be a kind man, he must be, she thought, hearing the steps inside. She licked her lips as if she were posing for a glamour photograph.
“Yes?” he said, because she just stood there, licking her lips.
His voice was gruff and impatient. This time his mouth looked twisted up toward the smaller eye, which was set higher in his face than the other eye. He was wearing the same black turtle-neck sweater with a tweed jacket over it. “It’s me, Mr. Wilson. Blanche Lake.”
“Blanche?” He pronounced the name in the French way. “Oh, Blanche!”
“Mr. Wilson, I came to you because you’re the only one in the whole city who was friendly to me.” He pursed his lips and was, she saw, about to say that he couldn’t believe that. “Something terrible has happened,” she added quickly. “I’m in terrible trouble, Mr. Wilson.”
“You don’t know what trouble is, Mademoiselle Blanche; you’re not a writer. Sick—sick writer! Sick writer!”
“Please help me, Mr. Wilson! Mr. Wilson . . .” Talking rapidly, she explained about Bunny. When she finished, he merely bunched his lips again.
“Now, Mademoiselle Blanche, you just go to the police, that’s what they’re for. Excuse me.”
He had shut the door. It was of a piece with the rest of what was happening. This was only one more door shut in her face, but it was one door too many; she began hammering on it.
“Now, lookey here, kid!”
“I told you. The police won’t believe me about Bunny. They’re going to shut me up in an insane asylum if I keep bothering them.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because you’re different.”
“A writer, you mean?”
“You told me you knew everything and everybody in Yorkville. Please help me.”
“I did at that. Come on in, then. Turn left.”
She was in a small room with a fireplace on the far wall and a huge unframed cubistic canvas hanging above it. The brilliant colors of the picture made Blanche blink. The fireplace had no logs in it, but there were rows of glasses, some empty and some with cigarette butts disintegrating in amber liquid.
He saw her looking at the glasses. “That’s my housekeeping system while the wife’s away. When the fireplace is full of dead soldiers I know it’s time to have the char in.”
There was a red velvet chair to the right of the fireplace. A big doll, with a crown askew on her head, sat on the velvet chair.
Mr. Wilson said, “That’s my chaperone, Mademoiselle Blanche. No really, can’t you see it?”
Blanche, trembling, was pointing at the doll. “Mr. Wilson, you have a little girl of your own, Mr. Wilson! Oh, if you have a little girl of your own!”
“I have two big girls of my own, Mademoiselle. They’re with their mother in Wellfleet. Didn’t you know that, Mademoiselle Blanche?”
“You didn’t tell me yesterday. You didn’t mention . . .” She stared at the doll hungrily.
“Yesterday,” Mr. Wilson said. “Yesterday I was under the impression that you had just dropped into Henderson Place out of the wild blue yonder for my . . . edification . . . so I didn’t mention that I was the father of two great lumps of daughters. You see? Of course you see. Sit down. Let me get you a drink.”
“No, thank you.”
“Come on, now,” he said, taking her hand and leading her to a chair. “Sit down. Stop making like Pearl White!” He pushed her into the chair, resting his palms on the arms of it, looking into her face with his head cocked.
Couldn’t he see out of the smaller eye? “I can’t waste time, Mr. Wilson.” It seemed to Blanche that she had to talk against the strong current of his smell, made up of liquor, stale air, tobacco, tweed, and black wool, but after she began about the boy in the fruit-and-vegetable store, he moved away, pulling a pipe out of his jacket and lighting it.
“And the police don’t think you have enough to go on? They don’t think that the young men would be driven to such desperate measures by your beaux yeux? How ungallant, the Finest!”
“They just think I’m crazy. This psychiatrist told them I’m crazy.”
“Psychiatrist?”
“His name is Dr. Newhouse. He’s a psychiatrist.”
“Newhouse, yet! Newhouse thinks you’re crazy but me, being a writer myself, you come to me? I’m supposed to have more imagination, is that it? I hobnob with queer ducks and queerer drakes?”
“Please, please,” she said. He had put the pipe back into his pocket; now he clamped his palm against it hard, as if his pocket were on fire.
“I could tell you where to look? I could help you find her, is that the idea?”
“You do believe me!”
“Of course I believe you! Nobody else would, but I do! If the rest of them won’t, it’s because they don’t know that truth is stranger than any tired fiction.” He came and bent over her and kissed her cheek lightly.
She did not dare remind him to hurry; he was being so kind.
“So you thought of me right away?” He walked up and down the small room with his hand clapped to his pocket as if he were stanching a wound there, then went to the fireplace and, looking them over first, chose two of the cleaner glasses.
“Please, there isn’t time to drink.”
“Dutch courage? You may need it.”
“I don’t. Really, I don’t.”
He shrugged and put the glasses back in the fireplace. “Come on, then. I’ll tell you where to look.”
The way he opened the door and the way he looked up and down the alley before putting his hand on her shoulder and pushing her outside made it seem darker and colder than it was. He even turned up the collar of his jacket.
“Now, Mademoiselle, you go straight down to the corner. Cross the street. Got it? Walk through the park and up the steps to the embankment walk there. You’ll find the river straight ahead of you.”
Blanche said, “The river?” He gave her a little push and stepped back into the doorway.
“Yes,” he said, “there’s always the river, isn’t there?”
The sound of the door slamming shut was the most terrible sound that she had ever heard. “Mr. Wilson! Mr. Wilson!”
But he didn’t answer. He wouldn’t answer.
Because she had been told to go straight down to the corner, she began to move in that direction, but when she came out of Henderson Place she sto
pped, shuddering. She turned her face away from the park and the embankment and the river. She thought, “The doll! Bunny’s doll!” and began to run up Eighty-Sixth Street toward York Avenue.
That couldn’t be gone with the rest of Bunny’s things because she had brought it to the Doll Hospital on Friday. “They couldn’t have got that,” she thought. She swerved to the edge of the sidewalk and stood there for a moment, considering. Should she call the police and tell them to come with her? Should she telephone them to go and get Bunny’s doll? The one thing! The proof! (Miss Lake, you give me one shred of proof that there is such a child and I’ll take this town down personally tonight, brick by brick!)
She began to walk again, keeping to the edge of the curb in case a taxi came. She would say to Lieutenant Duff, “Here’s your proof, Lieutenant Duff! Now do you think I’m crazy? That’s paper dolls, Lieutenant Duff!” This one was one of those realistic baby dolls, life-size, almost as big as Bunny, so that it had been like having two children on her hands getting Bunny to the apartment from the station, because Bunny was so particular that the doll be treated like a real baby. Bunny had adored that baby doll Chloe and Gavin had given her so much that she hadn’t even considered leaving it behind in storage. It was as much a necessity as Bunny’s toidey-seat.
And then on Friday when she came home from work, Bunny was crying because her baby’s eyes wouldn’t close. The minute Blanche had come in, Bunny rushed her into the bedroom to show her, even before Blanche had her hat off, so Blanche hadn’t taken her hat off. She had lifted Bunny’s baby doll off the big bed and promised Bunny to take her right to the doctor and get her well again.
Mother had been so annoyed. “But you just this minute got in, Blanche. You look so tired, Blanche.”
She had told Mother that if she didn’t have the doll fixed, if Bunny had to keep trying to close its eyes, she was certain Bunny wouldn’t go to sleep either, and then she’d really be tired.
“You spoil her, Blanche,” Mother had said.
Blanche remembered how she had carried the doll out of the apartment, with Bunny watching, as if it were a real baby. It was because her arms ached to carry a child now, to carry it into the police station, to show them (There! There!) that she started running toward the Doll Hospital. It was so near here. It would take her so much less time than the police would need to get there. She would get Bunny’s doll and then get a taxi and go to the police station.
“There!” she would say. “You wanted proof, Lieutenant Duff? There!”
29
The Doll Hospital was on the ground floor of a small corner house on Eighty-Third Street. It had a big painted sign, red on a white background, with a red cross at either end. Blanche pressed her finger against the bell.
She could see inside the window when the light went on. She saw a man’s legs stuffing themselves into trousers; then the door was opened.
“Yes, ma’am?” He hooked a pair of glasses over his ears.
He had thin blond-white hair and a long face. His ears were very big and looked waxen in the dim light; he put his glasses on as if his ears were tender.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted the doll I left here to be fixed.”
“The doll? You want a doll now? Ma’am, do you know what time it is? Come back tomorrow, ma’am.”
“Please, I have to have it now. I must have it now!”
He pulled tenderly at his big right ear. “Matter of life and death? Not that you’re the first. You’re not the first came here in the middle of the night. Had a lady last month who came here like you, said her little girl wouldn’t take her penicillin without her dolly, can you beat it? Like a real hospital, this is!” He stepped backward, nodding to Blanche. “Believe me, a real hospital! When they’re in trouble they come here and price is no object! But when you got the patient cured up—then you’re charging too much! Come on in.” He closed the door after Blanche. “You see how many patients I got on hand?” He waved at the shelves built around the room. “Which one is yours?”
“She had to have her eyes fixed.”
“Yes. What’s your trouble, won’t your little girl take her penicillin without she has her doll? Is that why you woke me out of a sound sleep?”
There was a row of dolls’ legs neatly laid out on one of the shelves. Some of the feet had shoes on them and some were bare. “No, I need to bring her doll to the police.”
“What’s that you say?” He had been turned toward the shelves where the dolls were; now he swung around.
“My little girl is missing. I have to take her doll to the police for proof . . . Oh,” Blanche said, “never mind. Please, where is Bunny’s doll?”
He said, “The police. The police.”
“Where is Bunny’s doll, please?”
Keeping his eye on Blanche, the man swung an arm toward the shelves. “You got a receipt for her?”
“For the doll?”
He watched her shaking her head. “You don’t have no receipt?” He went to the door and opened it. “Ma’am, do you know how many dolls I get in here? I can’t go through all of them this hour of night. You go back and get your receipt.”
“But you didn’t give me any receipt.” He blinked at her behind his glasses. “You didn’t say I needed any receipt.” He pressed his lips together. “If you think, you’ll remember. Please. This was on Friday, in the evening, after work. Please think. It was about seven o’clock on Friday, you can’t have forgotten. Don’t you remember, while you were trying to find the eyes, you asked me about Bunny? I told you about how beautiful Bunny was, what an angel, and how we had just moved to New York?
“How Bunny had never even ridden in an elevator before. Oh, try to think! You must remember me. I told you I had a job and couldn’t be with Bunny and how Bunny was going to go to the Benton School . . .”
He shook his head.
“You knew the school. You told me. I told you that I wanted to have the doll fixed before Monday . . . today . . . so Bunny could take it to the first day of school with her, something from home. I told you. Why, of course you must remember; why, you said you knew just how I felt about wanting her to have the doll to take with her and you asked for my address so if you could get hold of a pair of eyes the right size before Monday from the wholesale place, you’d bring it over so Bunny would have her in time for school. If you could get them.”
“If you had a receipt . . .”
“You took the address and you said you’d bring the doll over yourself if you could get the eyes fixed before Monday!”
“I don’t remember a thing, ma’am. I’m going to ask you to go. I don’t remember a thing and I’m asking you to go. You got no receipt and if you don’t go I’ll call the cops!”
But she heard how softly he closed the door after her, as if the last thing he wanted was to call attention to himself. Even when he had said he would call the cops, he had kept his voice soft.
He put out the light in the Doll Hospital, but she believed that he was still there in the dark, watching her. Blanche walked away, turned the corner. How could he not remember Friday when she brought Bunny’s doll in? She had brought Bunny’s doll there.
He had said, “Yes, ma’am?” He had hooked the glasses over his big waxen ears. “T-t-t,” he had said. He had tilted Bunny’s doll back and forth several times. He had looked at Bunny’s doll, shaken his head, and then, holding out his right hand with the pinky finger stiffly extended, had put his index finger into the doll’s eye. When she had gasped—because it had looked awful—he had smiled at her. “Broke,” he had told her.
Then he had seated himself and, holding the doll’s body between his knees, he had grabbed the wig and pulled. When the wig came off, he had flung it onto the table behind him.
She remembered the hollow sound the eyes had made falling into the cavity of the head. She remembered the blind eye sockets, the scalped head with the dried glue on it like a scrubby rash. She remembered that he had asked her to sit down but she had
not been able to sit comfortably with the mutilated bodies all around, the severed heads . . . as if heads could be put back . . .
She remembered how he had thrust his hand into the head and fished the eyes out.
He had held the eyes in the palm of his hand, studying them; then he had put the doll on the work table, horribly settling the skirts as if they must be made decent. His hand had had many small cuts on it which, catching in the soft material of the baby doll’s dress, had rasped. “It’s the size worries me.” He had taken several small boxes from a shelf, then had reached up and taken down a cracked saucer. “Maybe here. These are odds and ends, all mixed up.” He shook the saucer, she remembered. “I’ll go through the regular boxes and you can see if you can find . . .”
She had felt so uncomfortable, swallowing hard as he fished around among the eyes and then held the cracked saucer toward her. He had noticed how uncomfortable he made her.
“Bothers you, don’t it? Like fish eyes. They tell me the Chinese eat fish eyes; you think that could be so? They eat rotten eggs; heard that, too. Bury them and dig them up ten years later and eat them. Takes all kinds, don’t it?”
Now it seemed to her that he had enjoyed her discomfort, that when he had picked up the doll again, he had liked looking at the empty eye sockets, the scalped head with that dried glue like a rash.
As she stood there around the corner of the house, Blanche saw a light go on in the basement underneath the Doll Hospital. She crouched down so that she could stare into the small barred window.
She saw what he was carrying. She saw where he put it.
She heard herself telling him that he knew the school, that he knew her address, knew where she and Bunny lived.
The light in the cellar went out.
She ran around the house to the door of the Doll Hospital and began to bang on it, and he came almost immediately and opened it. One side of his pajama top had come out of his trousers. From carrying, from lifting, from raising his arms. Blanche said, “I called the police! I just called the police!”
“Let them come then. Let them come one and all!” He took off his glasses and began to polish them on the pajama top that hung over his trousers. He said, “I got nothing to hide,” and held his glasses out, then breathed on them.
