by Evelyn Piper
“What is it?” Dennis asked. “What do you want to talk about?”
She stayed at the far end of the room so that he could not touch her and quiet her again. “In the park, Mr. Wilson told me what happened about Bunny was just like a certain story . . .”
“Wilson! Wilson and his stories! He’s a writer. Let’s forget Wilson and his stories, Blanche.” This was the first time he had used her Christian name. It made him feel more like a psychiatrist than “Miss Lake.”
“You must know it! The Paris Exposition story where they tell the girl she didn’t leave her mother in the hotel. Mr. Wilson said if I could think up the reason why she would do this!”
“She who, Blanche?”
“Miss Benton. She is the only one,” she said, stamping her bare foot and looking down with surprise to see her shoes off.
“Ridiculous.”
“Miss Benton! Miss Benton! Don’t shake your head. Mr. Wilson said he had an idea . . . he must have figured out why she did it!” She stamped her foot again. “Don’t shake your head at me! ‘Ridiculous’ is that boy stealing Bunny! Why should he? I thought perhaps some rich woman hired him to steal Bunny, but that’s ridiculous, not this!”
“Ah, Blanche!”
“Don’t touch me. She’d read the story, don’t you see? Everyone has. And then when this happened, it was all ready in her mind to use.” Now she ran to him. “Bunny couldn’t have the Plague? You’re a doctor!”
He must touch her; his touch would help but his words wouldn’t. He must wash the grime and dirt and blood smears off her face, bandage that cut on her poor hand.
Blanche pulled away. “No, no, not any sickness! I would have known that this morning. No sickness. And that wouldn’t be Miss Benton’s fault, anyhow, if Bunny was sick, but Bunny ran down after me. Maybe she fell down . . . fell down . . .” She threw her hands across her face as though she could see the little girl who, in her hurry to get to her retreating mother, did not go down the laborious two-feet-on-each-step way she had to with her short, plump legs, who had not clutched as far up the guard rails as she could reach for support, who had not paused at each step or sighed her little sigh of congratulation because it was still so difficult for her. “Bunny was killed,” Blanche said. “She fell down those stairs there. She killed herself and that would ruin a school . . . a thing like that! Would anybody send her child to a school where a little girl was killed like that? It was to save her school! She did it to save her school like the French hotel man did it for the Exposition . . . said Bunny had never been there, tore up the check and the registration, that’s why!”
He picked her up, pressing her close to him. “That wasn’t what Wilson meant.” He kicked his bedroom door open, put her on his bed, and lay next to her. “Lie still, lie close to me and still. I know Miss Benton well enough to be sure. I know what her school means to her and what she would and wouldn’t do. She would not do it, Blanche. It isn’t in her.” He held her with one hand and smoothed her dark, soft hair with the other. “No sane person would, Blanche.” (With a kind of terror, he heard himself using the word “sane” to her.) “And that brings me to what Wilson’s idea really was.”
The minute Wilson had come into the police station, Dennis had told him about the witness they had found, this night watchman who made a habit of sitting at his window during the morning and early afternoon. Some of the residents of the neighborhood had told the police about the old man and they had gone to his place of employment. He lived on the top story of the tenement opposite the school. This witness testified that he had seen Blanche leaving the building that morning at the time she had said she had left and that she was alone. He testified that he hadn’t seen a child following her, he was certain of it. He took a great interest in the comings and goings of the nursery school and swore that he would not have missed a child leaving alone. Children did not leave the nursery school unaccompanied and he would certainly have noticed it. He would, he said, have even gone to the school and told them, because little children weren’t safe alone on the streets. Wilson had looked at Dennis very curiously while he relayed his information, and, when Dennis finished, had shaken his head as if he couldn’t believe his ears.
“I would have sworn you’d have taken Psychology One, Dennis! That’s all I ever took, but I know about what happens between the eye and the memory in regard to accustomed sights. Your reliable witness saw la belle Blanche. She was new and worth noting, but, Dennis, this old codger sits at the window every morning, you say, knows the routine of the school, you say. Every day . . . I know the routine, too, Dennis. Every day that it doesn’t rain or snow, he sees the teachers taking the kids out to Carl Schurtz Park. Every day, barring bad weather, out come the orange smock and the little darlings. Teacher equals orange smock, Dennis. Kid accompanied by orange smock means watched-over kid. Little girl, coming out of the school door . . . and it needn’t been right after Mademoiselle . . . little girl coming out the school door some minutes later accompanied by orange smock means little girl safe, so he says, ‘No, officer, I can swear on the Bible no little girl ran out after her mother this morning!’”
Even while he had been asking Iss what that proved, since no orange smock had taken the child out of the school building, reminding him that Miss Orange Smock Ditmars who Blanche said had interviewed her had never seen or heard of Blanche, he had known what particular orange smock Dennis meant. Wilson, whose older girl had been in her group, knew all about Ada Ford.
Wilson had grinned at him. “Yes, Dennis, Ada Ford. Ada would fit the bill perfectly.”
He had explained Ada to the police.
Wilson had said, “You know, Dennis, what I can’t make out is why you didn’t think of Ada immediately.”
He had told Iss that he had thought of Ada, thought of her and dismissed her because it was impossible that Ada should have had anything to do with this. Ada, he had reminded Iss, had been gone for a year. (“Gone and forgotten,” Iss had said, shaking his head, wondering.) Wilson had got him sore and he had told him off.
“Did you check, Dennis?” Wilson had asked. “I want to know, did you check before you dismissed Ada as an impossibility?”
He had said, “I’ll check now.” He had called Louise from the police station. (Now he pressed his hot cheek against Blanche’s soft hair, remembering the conversation with Louise.)
“Darling,” she had said, “I’ve been waiting for you!”
He had been afraid that someone in the station might be listening on another wire and so he had been (understandably) stiff with Louise. “I’d like some information.”
“Of course, Dennis. But do you need to sound so curt?”
“I’m calling from the police station.” He had hoped that would cover it. (He had been resentful of the possessiveness of Louise’s “Darling! I’ve been waiting for you!” And why shouldn’t he have resented it, since it wasn’t in the cards? Not “in the bond”? This was quite a night for Shakespeare; first Othello and now Shylock! Dennis told himself that whenever the big uncontrollable emotions popped up, up popped Shakespeare, who dealt in them. Shakespeare and the big uncontrollable emotions were inextricably caught in the dark net of the soft hair brushing his cheek.) “There is something I must ask you, Louise.”
But he had not “asked” Louise; he had fired questions about Ada Ford at her: As far as Louise knew, was Ford still in that old house in Brooklyn Heights? Had Ada been seen again? Had she approached Louise and begged to be allowed to work in the school? Had Louise, after everything he had explained about Ada’s state, permitted Ada to come back into the school in any capacity whatsoever?
“This is incredible, Dennis!” Louise had said.
“There is no possibility that she could have sent Miss Lake the registration blank and interviewed her while you were in Wellfleet? Iss Wilson is here. He suggested that if Ada was around the school, then the whole picture changes. I want to know if, after everything you were told about Ada Ford, she did turn up and you d
id use her in any capacity whatsoever.”
Louise had said, “How dare you!”
He had been so angry that he had simply shoved the telephone toward the policeman and walked away from the desk. (The tension had, of course, produced its usual effect, and the pain behind his forehead had been almost intolerable. He had had to go into the next room where there was a water cooler so that he could take two of the Miltown pills he always kept in his pocket.) When he returned to the inner office, the lieutenant had been waiting for him with such an odd expression on his face that he was sure Wilson had said something outrageous to him. The lieutenant’s expression, that is, Dennis had told himself, striving as usual for precision, had been an extension of, if not a duplicate of, the curious look which Iss Wilson had bent on him.
But according to the lieutenant, who relayed what Louise had said to him, Louise had simply not known what he was “raving” about. Louise had denied his accusations “categorically.” She had not seen or heard from anyone who had seen Ada Ford. She could be in the house her mother had left her in Brooklyn Heights or she could be in Siam. Ada had not written again after the letter last year begging to be allowed to work in the school again, and if she had, Louise would certainly not have permitted it. Louise had told the lieutenant that Dennis couldn’t be more mistaken. She had followed the advice he had given her when the Ada Ford thing came up, to the letter, and simply could not understand him.
He, of course, could understand himself. His behavior had been standard for a man who wanted to be shed of a girl: find something to blame her for, blame her for it, and get her off your conscience. He had used Ada Ford, that was all; had accused Louise of flirting with her after he had warned her off, just as other men used rivals, real or, as here, as imaginary as Ada Ford.
Dennis held Blanche close to him with one arm, and stroked her cheek and caressed her soft dark hair with the other and told her what Wilson’s idea had really been. “Iss is a very acute person, Blanche. He would certainly pick up the resemblance between this” (this what?) “and that story; he might tell you to see if you could work out a motive for Miss Benton’s having lifted that French hotel story and using it for her own purposes . . . but, believe me, Blanche, he said it because he thought it would keep you occupied in the dark there, and not because he thought there was any truth in it.”
Blanche stirred in his arms and spoke. “What?” Dennis asked. He had not switched the light on so he could not see how her lips moved as she spoke, but he could visualize them perfectly. “What did you say, darling?”
“It was occupational therapy, you mean?”
“That’s right, busy work. Iss Wilson knows that fiction is fiction and fact is fact. Iss is a damn smart guy.” She stirred again, but only to lie more comfortably. “Rest,” Dennis said, “just rest. Trust me.”
Iss was smart enough. And what, Dennis wondered, remembering the expression on Iss’s face and its extension on the face of the police lieutenant, had smart Iss Wilson said about him? But then Dennis forgot about Wilson and the police lieutenant because Blanche moved again, because the quality of her breathing changed. (Became an extension, a copy, of his breathing, which had also changed.) He did not need to hold her any longer. She was not more relaxed, but he did not need to hold her. The texture and temperature of her skin had changed. Dennis said to himself, And who do you think you’re fooling with this clinical observation you’re doing? Humans, like animals, did take comfort from another body near them, and his body had leeched the hysteria and tension from hers, and that was therapeutic, but a little more of this, enough of this to make it unmistakable, and he might do her a great deal of harm. He took her hand, turned up the palm of it, and kissed it, then laid it down. “Blanche, I have to go out for a while. Will you trust me and stay where you are?”
“But Bunny . . .”
“There is nothing you can do now. Let me go out and you stay where you are.” She pulled herself up on one elbow as he got off the bed. He understood that she believed he was going out on behalf of her child, but he did not correct the impression. He leaned over her and gently pressed her down again and kissed her forehead lightly.
As he went into the other room, he saw that she had stayed where he left her. He thought, taking one last look at her, that she might even sleep, and if she did, it would be the best thing she could do.
36
The cops said, all right so she was a decent woman; she was no floosie. The guy they did know all about. He was a drunk they picked up regularly, but, they said, attempted rape was out of his line. That he should have taken a bottle of belly wash up there was to be expected—with the El empty and comfortable as it was, why shouldn’t a bum without the price of a bed hide up there?—but if she was a decent woman the way she said, what was she doing up there?
She kept telling them that she had yelled, hadn’t she; she had yelled, hadn’t she? Yes, the cops said, she had yelled, all right, but what had she gone up there for in the first place?
The trouble was that they saw Rose was scared to talk. If the cops saw you were scared to talk, they wanted to make you talk. They wouldn’t let her go home. They took her in.
The cops did their best to make her talk, but they couldn’t make her talk, not when it might mean the hot seat for Eddie if she told them.
They could book her for soliciting and could lock her up, but they couldn’t make her talk.
37
It was a different story when they brought George to the Sixty-Seventh Street police station. George was a different story from the police. The cops, naturally, they were nosy, but George was her husband and that was a different story. When they told George about the drunk and her being up there in the El station and he asked her what she was doing up there, she had to tell him. “I was looking for Eddie,” she said.
George had shoved his pants on and shoes without socks and a topcoat, but naturally he hadn’t combed his hair. George had this thick black hair and he used Bryl-creem on it, but sleeping that way, a tuft of his hair stuck out and it bothered Rose. Without thinking, she reached out to smooth it back into place, the way she did a thousand times mornings, in bed, but when she touched George’s hair with her hand, that made him see red. (Maybe it made him think she had touched the drunk’s hair that way, loved the drunk up, too.) She could tell then that she would have to admit the true reason why she would go up to the El like that or George would be through with her. It was either Eddie, then, or George, so she asked could she speak to George alone without cops around, and the cops left them alone.
She told George why it was so important to her to find Eddie that she would take a chance like that with herself. She told him about Eddie knowing where the girl lived, and about Eddie and the kitten and how when she found out in the bowling alley that the girl’s baby was lost, she knew!
“Go on!” George said. “Just because I kidded him a little?” She told George about Eddie and the kitten again. She didn’t know how to say it the way it had been. If Georgie could have seen with his own eyes, the way she had seen with hers, he wouldn’t say nuts!
“Your really mean it, Rose?”
She got down on her knees in front of George and begged that he should get her out of here and go with her to find Eddie and not tell the cops. When she saw the way George was looking down at her, Rose grabbed his legs. “That’s why I wouldn’t go wake you,” she shouted. “That’s why I was scared to wake you, George!”
George said, “You should’a, Rose. You wasted a hell of a lot of time.” He pulled himself free of his wife’s arms and went out where the cops were.
38
She did sleep. She had not meant to sleep, just to lie there and be able to rest, to breathe without it hurting when she breathed, to feel the buoyancy of a mattress, the smoothness of the bed cover, the coolness of the pillowcase, and under the coolness the softness of the goose down in the pillow. She had meant to just lie there waiting. Men must work and women must wait. To lie there thinking that
a man was working for Bunny and all she had to do now was wait. To lie there thinking, for the first time since she had known that Bunny was missing, that she was not alone with everyone in the whole world against her.
It was her body that had taken advantage of her and put her to sleep so deeply that she did not know what had awakened her, and it took what seemed a long time for her to place the noise and the ringing and ascribe the ringing to the telephone. Then she realized that it must be he calling . . . because he had news for her! And she ran, ran, ran until she located the telephone and snatched it up. It was because she was so breathless with anticipation that she didn’t say hello.
“Darling,” the woman’s voice said. “I’ve been waiting for you, Dennis. I’ve been keeping dinner, darling! It will be breakfast soon!”
His name was Dennis. Dennis. He hadn’t come to dinner. Blanche put the telephone back into its cradle.
Darling, I’ve been waiting for you, the woman had said. Darling, for men must work and women must wait. Dennis. Her body knew its treachery before her sleepy mind did and expressed its loathing primitively. Her mind only caught up with her body after she had vomited, and the sour smell of the vomit, the feeling of being torn apart inside were perfectly symbolic.
Blanche knelt over the toilet bowl until the retching stopped, then pulled herself up and staggered out of the bathroom. She stood in the living room, staring at the yellow-green chair in which she had sat, where he had kissed her. Her torn and soiled jacket lay on the floor where he had thrown it. Blanche walked over to it and stood looking down at the soiled, flung thing, then turned and found her pocketbook.
It was impossible, she thought, to go on in a soiled world which had no Bunny, only people like those two, the two of them. She thought of the two of them together in the school director’s apartment seated across from each other at the small table covered with the long white unsoiled cloth. He would be telling her not to worry, that he had fixed it for her. He would be telling her that Miss Lake (Miss Lake, I love you) had finally realized what it was all about, but he had fixed that. How he had fixed that, Blanche thought, remembering that she had kissed him as much as he had her, that she had lain on his bed pressed close to him. She would not live, she thought, in a soiled body which had done that, and she took her gun out of her pocketbook.
