by Evelyn Piper
“You weren’t working yesterday. Sunday. Was Bunny with you since it was Sunday?”
“She was home.”
He did not want to point out that here was still another opportunity for someone to have seen the child, which, for still another good reason—and he saw the reason coming to her lips and being pressed back—had been missed, too. It would be one more plausible or implausible explanation added to the weary list of them. There were more than enough of these already. He could see that she realized that. “Miss Lake, as I said, Iss Wilson is a friend of mine, and although I grant you he looks the part, why would he be so cruel to you, and why should he have locked you in his bedroom? Can you tell me why?”
Her hand rose and fell helplessly. “I don’t know.”
Seeing the dingy blood-stained handkerchief, Dennis told himself that there were any number of ways in which she could have gotten that cut on her hand.
She said, catching the implication from the way he was staring at the handkerchief, “You don’t believe this, either? You don’t believe Mr. Wilson lied to me? You don’t believe that he said those things and that he took me to his house and locked me into his bedroom and wouldn’t let me come out?”
“Now,” Dennis said, “now! I wish you could tell me why you think Wilson would behave that way.” If she had met Iss while sightseeing in Henderson Place yesterday, just as described, could she have used him to fasten the fantasy on because of that twisted mouth, the uneven eyes, the sinister bald head, because of his appearance? “Can you give me any reason for Wilson’s behavior?”
She stood up, “No, I can’t and I don’t have to. Stop talking to me as if I were your patient. I’m not your patient, you know. I don’t have to be if I don’t want to be. I would like you to go away, please.” He didn’t move. He was, she saw, particularly quiet, showing that he wouldn’t leave, would sit there patiently, no matter what she said to him, discounted him, insulted him; but it didn’t matter, really. She had to go out and look for Bunny, anyhow, so he could stay if he wanted to. Blanche picked up her pocketbook and walked out of the apartment.
He heard the door close after her and, shortly after that, the protest of the ascending elevator. He wondered whether she was not forcing him to call the police in. Looking for the telephone, he noticed the handkerchief on the floor and picked up the first piece, but not, he acknowledged, from curiosity or tidiness but simply because of a desire to touch something that had touched her. Wasn’t there an Elizabethan poem about wanting to be her kerchief? “I would I were the kerchief . . .” Or was it the poet wishing he were the rose at her breast? “I wish I were the strait jacket . . .” Dennis said, and then he saw the monogram on the piece of the handkerchief.
So she had seen Wilson tonight! She had gone to Wilson tonight. Dennis stuffed the bloody handkerchief into his pocket and rushed out of the apartment.
34
The reason she was getting nowhere fast, Rose thought, was because she hadn’t asked Georgie to help her. When you’re a widow like she had been, you got to learn to do everything on your own; a married woman, now, she got to depend on the hubby. Five years married and she had to have Georgie help her find her own son, Eddie. She had gone back to the house, right in front of her own door she stood, but the trouble was if she went to Georgie with this, he’d make her go to the cops. Other things, yes. Georgie shot off his mouth at Eddie, sure; he had stood for a lot Eddie did, but this, no. Only a blood father would go to bat for a kid on this. (And maybe not then, Rose told herself. Maybe even Emilio would have gone to the cops on this. Maybe only a mother wouldn’t. And the girl was a mother, too. She could imagine what the girl would do to Eddie if she laid hands on him!)
Where next? She had already asked everybody she knew who would lift a finger for Eddie or lend him a buck. You couldn’t get into a flea circus in this town without a buck. And you couldn’t get out of this town without a buck, either. He would stick in the old neighborhood. Eddie didn’t feel right out of the old neighborhood. Had he stayed in that camp, for instance? The other kids, they took their two free weeks, and thanks, but Eddie got homesick the first night and got himself shipped back home. Eddie didn’t feel safe nowhere else but around here.
And it had to be where no one would notice when the kid began crying. (If the kid couldn’t cry any more then she didn’t want to find Eddie because then it was too late.) By the river? But since that time the guys threw Eddie in the river, he wouldn’t go down there on a bet. He would go, she figured, if all he could think of was that was the place to get rid of the body, in the river, but if that’s what it was, it was too late also.
She was on Third Avenue now, Eddie’s old hangout. Now it came to her why the street seemed so peculiar tonight, not because of Eddie and being out so late looking, no! Now that she was here where they’d left the steps and the old station and part of the platform, she could tell it was because, dope that she was, she had been thinking the El should still be up, and of course it wasn’t. The Third Avenue El. The times, she thought, she had chased Eddie up those steps to catch him and make him go on home to bed. She used to almost bust her lungs running up those stairs because Eddie would be under the turnstile in a minute, and she’d have to pay to get out to the platform after him. The times he got up there first and out on the platform with the man from the little making-change room chasing out after Eddie, cursing.
Then her heart started pounding as if she had already run up the iron-rimmed steps, because wouldn’t Eddie be up there now? With nobody up there, with no lights on? Eddie knew it like a cat in the dark! Wouldn’t that be where he could take the kid so if she cried nobody would be around to ask questions, and if she cried a lot, the people on one side of the street would suppose it was a child crying on the other side, and vice versa?
She moved away from the steps, back toward the houses, craning her neck to see if there was anyone up there on the jagged bit of platform, but, of course, with no light on she couldn’t make out a thing. She began climbing the old stairs, and, setting her hand on the rail, prayed, because she was scared to death of heights. When people used the El if you kept away from the edge of the tracks you were all right, but now? Now she didn’t know what was left of it. Now if she took one step too many, she’d be down in the gutter mashed like potatoes. She thought of the way Eddie stood in the store eyeing that girl; what he said when Georgie needled him with that kidding . . . and the kitten. She hurried up the old steps of the El.
The steps were okay. Of course the steps were okay, those she had seen. She cursed herself because she didn’t pay more attention to what they’d torn down, because exactly how much of the platform was left, she didn’t know. (She could see Eddie with the kid in his arms, moving away the closer she got . . . and then?)
The door to the room you waited in when it was cold or raining was still there.
To the left, the change booth was still there.
The thing you put your nickel in was gone. What would they want that for? It took nickels, not tokens. But they could fix that easy, she thought. Of course they could fix that up, hadn’t they fixed the subway ones from a nickel to a dime and then to tokens?
She was scared to go out on the platform. The platform was what scared her stiff. It seemed to Rose that she heard a stirring behind her in the waiting room, and she realized that it could be from the steps she was hearing the noise. Somebody, she realized, could have seen her going up the stairs and had called the cops, and that could be a cop coming to find out what she was doing up here. She found the courage to go through the doors to the platform because no one was going to find her until she got to Eddie.
She felt the guard rail to hold on to. If they had taken that away, she would crawl on her hands and knees, but it was there. All she had to do was take one step at a time, holding with everything she had to the guard rail, and feel with her foot ahead of her. Even if one foot stepped into air, she could pull herself back if she held on. She took a step and called, “Eddie!
”
If the kid was sleeping and her voice calling woke it, maybe it didn’t cry because Eddie had his hand over the baby’s mouth but not hurt it. (Not to hurt it. You could put your hand over a kid’s mouth and not hurt it!) “It’s me, Eddie.” She took another step and then another and then another. “Where are you, Eddie?” Another step. “I don’t want to yell out, Eddie. There’s people down in that street and if I yell out they’ll hear me and then even if the kid is okay it will be too late for you. You did it, then, you see what I mean, Eddie? I mean I won’t be able to talk her out of it. If I bring the kid back now, Eddie, I’m sure I can talk her out of it. Eddie!”
She could not take another step. “I get dizzy, Eddie. You know that’s the truth, Eddie; you want to murder your own momma?” She squatted down and felt with her hands along the wooden floor boards. She couldn’t go any further. “Eddie,” she said, a little more loudly this time so that he couldn’t miss this, because if Eddie was here and she said “in the name of your dead father, Eddie!” . . . She said, “Eddie, in the name of your dead father!”
Rose waited for what seemed a long time squatting like that, with one arm aching from holding it pulled back so she could grasp the guard rail; then she pulled herself up and started back along the platform to the waiting room.
When she was inside, when she was just standing there, she heard the tap, tap. It was coming from the little place the station man who gave out the change stayed in. It had been like a little room, she remembered. She heard the tap again, distinctly, and, as she was moving toward it in the dark, Rose was already explaining to the girl that Eddie had been careful of the baby, had taken her to this little room, just kept her there. “I’m coming,” she whispered. As she approached it, she could make out the door of the change booth opening.
Rose was so sure it was Eddie down there on the floor that she merely reached down when she felt his hand on her leg, but then, of course, she knew that it couldn’t be Eddie and grabbed frantically for the hand. She had time enough to realize that once she yelled, the cops would be in on it, but she couldn’t help yelling as she fought the hands off. Any decent woman had to yell.
35
Wilson was up. Dennis could see him pacing up and down in his living room. He pressed the bell and remembered her description of Wilson shutting the door on her, telling her there was always the river. (He told himself that what he was feeling was relief at being able to project his monumental anger at a human being instead of whatever combination of genes and life situations had done this to her.) Wilson came to the door immediately, tilting his head to make out who his visitor was.
“Newhouse! Am I glad to see you!”
“I’ll bet you are!” He brushed by Wilson and got into the house before pulling the bloody handkerchief out of his pocket. “I would like an explanation of this!”
“That means you’ve found her! Thank God!”
“I would like an explanation of this,” Dennis repeated. “Why lock her up? Why didn’t you get me?”
“I tried hard enough! Where were you? Didn’t she tell you I was trying to get you?”
“She did not. You tell me, Wilson. You explain.”
“The explanation would seem to be more in your line than in mine. You’re the psychiatrist.”
“I’m the psychiatrist, yes, and what kind of a son of a bitch are you?”
Wilson chose a glass from the rows of them in the fireplace and poured gin into it and then shook bitters over the gin. Both men silently watched the pink appear in the colorless fluid. “Dennis, I could use your services. I don’t think I’m ever going to be the same after tonight.”
“If what I heard has any truth in it, I would agree with you.” He watched Wilson gulp the gin. “You mean it is literally true? She was telling me what actually happened?”
Wilson nodded grimly.
“You threw her out when she came to you? A blind man could have seen her . . . condition . . . no less a sensitive soul like you, but first you told her to go drag the river . . . No thanks to you they’re not dragging it for her! And after what she went through . . . or thought she went through with the guy in the Doll Hospital, to cheer her up with head cheese and cannibalism.”
Wilson set his glass down. “What do you mean ‘guy in the Doll Hospital’?”
“Where she went . . . or thinks she went . . . after you were so hospitable! Didn’t she tell you about that?” Then he told Wilson, who groaned, filled his glass again and then stared at it as if it disgusted him. “What the hell kind of a sewer do you live in? What kind of a bastard are you, anyway, Wilson? Put that glass down,” Dennis said. “Put it down! I don’t want to cut out your good eye. I just want to knock you for a loop!”
Wilson reached into his pocket for his glasses and shoved them up on his nose.
“I’m not joking, Iss! Leave the glasses on, if you prefer. I find I do want to cut your eye out, after all!”
“Cut the comedy! Cut the comedy, will you? How do you think I feel? I agree with you. I’m supposed to be sensitive. I should have seen immediately that she really believed she lost a child.”
“She believes it!”
“She mentioned you, of course. She said that you thought she was crazy, but I just figured that was putting a little English on the story. I didn’t believe for a minute that she was a patient of yours. Damn it, Dennis, if only you’d told me about her before tonight! If you guys weren’t so stodgy about professional ethics!”
“I couldn’t have told you in any case. I never saw her before tonight.”
“You never saw her before tonight? Never? Oh. Then she mightn’t know your first name was Dennis. I thought it was another evidence of insanity when she said she didn’t know who Dennis was after she talked about you. Man! When I discovered she was gone! You don’t have to cut my heart out, Dennis; I could do it myself, man!” His hand began to tremble so that he had to set the glass down. Trying to put it back into the fireplace, he hit it against the next glass and knocked that one over. This acted like a signal, a starting bell to Newhouse, because the next thing Wilson felt was the thud of his shoulder hitting the mantelpiece. He shook his head clear and grabbed Dennis, holding him in a bear hug. “My God,” he said, “you don’t know why, do you?”
Wilson was much heavier than he was and more accustomed to brawls. By a tremendous effort Dennis could get himself free of the bear hug, but that was about all. He stood a way off, pulling his sweater straight. “No, I don’t know why, and there is no reason on earth I can think of to excuse . . .”
“. . . think she just walked in here, told me the story, and cold I just kicked her out into the cold night? Listen, you don’t walk in on anybody cold! As a psychiatrist you know that better than anyone else. You walk in on a ready-made situation and this one was a lulu. Two weeks ago, tomorrow, maybe, no go; if she walked in here tomorrow it would be a different story, but get a certain concatenation of events, one following the other, and . . . the works, man! What else do you think makes history?
“For god’s sake, Dennis, you know me, Al! Last week I sent Marta my latest manuscript. Today I had a letter from her. For Christ’s sake, sit down and have a drink. Marta says what I’m writing isn’t realism. She says, for Christ’s sake, it’s only in my book that nothing happens. She says, read the papers, turn on the radio. She says, by God, she’d make something happen if I didn’t. I’ll show you her letter if you don’t believe me . . . ‘Make something happen if you don’t.’ Oh, hell, Dennis, call Marta! She’s in Wellfleet with the kids, you know that!
“I assure you that when this kid appeared on the doorstep after fifteen minutes of conversation together yesterday when I found her rubbernecking into my parlor window, when she comes to me as her only friend and tells me this Gothic tale, it never occurred to me that this wasn’t Marta’s childish notion of . . .
“Marta is my wife and I suppose she’s entitled to goose me occasionally, particularly when, if my manuscript is as dull as she th
inks, the kids are apt to go hungry, but I didn’t see why this girl should get into the act gratuitously! I’d been nice to her yesterday, and that made me feel foolish, too. I didn’t see why this kid should get away with it, so I pretended to believe her and then kicked her out and told her to go drag the river.
“All I could think of was that Marta had insulted my intelligence. Maybe Marta doesn’t think I can write, I thought, but she should certainly know I can read. It was an insult to my intelligence to expect me to fall for that story. I didn’t give the girl another thought after I kicked her out. I just called Marta up in Wellfleet to give her hell, but when she convinced me that she’d never heard of the girl—and it took some convincing—man, I was out of the house like a bat out of hell to find her!
“I locked her in the room so I could get hold of you. Where the hell were you? And then, when I found she’d climbed out the bathroom window using my bed sheets . . . knotted sheets, yet! She could have killed herself! I haven’t had your experience with lunatics, Dennis. I thought she’d stay put in there until I could get her psychiatrist to her . . . meaning you. Where is she now, Dennis? I’ve got to try to make it up to her somehow.”
“I don’t know where she is. Oh, where do you think she is?” He made a face. “She’s out looking for the lost Annabel Lee!”
“She isn’t with you? You don’t . . .?”
“I couldn’t. She reminded me that she’s no patient of mine. She would have none of me because . . .” he remembered Tinker Bell . . . “because I couldn’t believe in fairies.”
“Couldn’t believe in fairies . . . And you’re not her psychiatrist, and you never laid eyes on her before tonight?”
“That’s right. After what you did to raise men in her estimation, she would have none of me. Damn it, Wilson, how could you go off half-cocked like that?”
“I told you how.” Wilson chose another glass and poured some gin into it. “For that matter,” he said thoughtfully, “how could you?”
