Eleven (14 page)

The stairway was directly in front of Dr. Bauer when he went out into the hall, so he took it, dazedly. A slight blond man came up the stairs, seemed to eye him a moment before he passed him, but Dr. Bauer was sure it could not be he. He felt stunned, without knowing exactly what had stunned him. In the lobby, he looked one way then the other, and finally went to the desk that was half hidden under a different set of stairs.

“You have a Mrs. Afton registered here,” he said, stating it more than asking.

The young man at the switchboard looked up from his newspaper. “Afton? No, sir.”

“Mrs. Afton in room thirty-two.”

“No, sir. No Afton here at all.”

“Then who is it in room thirty-two?” At least he was sure of the room number.

The young man checked quickly with his list over the switchboard. “That’s Miss Gorham’s suite.” And slowly, as he looked at Dr. Bauer, his empty face took on a smile of amusement.

“Miss Gorham? She’s not married?” Dr. Bauer moistened his lips. “She lives by herself?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know the person I mean? A woman about fifty, somewhat plump, light brown hair?” He knew, he knew, but he had to make doubly sure.

“Miss Gorham, yes. Miss Frances Gorham.”

Dr. Bauer looked into the smiling eyes of the young man who knew Miss Gorham, and wondered what the clerk knew that he didn’t. Many a time Mrs. Afton must have smiled at this young man, too, ingratiated herself as she had with him in his office. “Thank you,” he said. Then absently, “Nothing more.”

He faced in the other direction, staring at nothing, setting his teeth until the sensation of reality’s crumbling stopped and the world righted itself again and became hard, a little shabby like the hotel lobby, as definite as the sound of grit under a passerby’s heel on the tile floor, until there was no more Mrs. Afton. He was walking toward the door, when a compulsion to return to routine made him look at his wristwatch, made him realize he could be back for his eleven
o’clock appointment after all, because it was scarcely ten-forty. He veered toward the coffin-like form of a telephone booth that was nearly hidden behind a large jar of palms. A shelf with telephone directories was at the side under a light, and some stubborn, senseless curiosity prompted him to turn to the A’s in the Manhattan directory, to look for Afton. There was only one Afton, and that was the trade name of some kind of shop. He entered the booth and dialed his office number.

“Would you try to reach Mr. Schriever again,” he told his secretary, “and ask him if he can still come at eleven. With my apologies for the changes. And when is Mrs. Afton’s next appointment?”

“Just a moment. We have her tentatively scheduled for two-thirty Monday.”

Would you change that, please, to an appointment for Miss Gorham?” he said distinctly. “Miss Frances Gorham for the same time?”

“Gorham? That’s G-o-r-h-a-m?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“That’s a new patient, Dr. Bauer?”

“Yes,” he said.

THE HEROINE

The girl was so sure she would get the job, she had unabashedly come out to Westchester with her suitcase. She sat in a comfortable chair in the living-room of the Christiansens’ house, looking in her navy-blue coat and beret even younger than twenty-one, and replied earnestly to their questions.

“Have you worked as a governess before?” Mr. Christiansen asked. He sat beside his wife on the sofa, his elbows on the knees of his grey flannel trousers, and his hands clasped. “Any references, I mean?”

“I was a maid in Mrs. Dwight Howell’s house in New York for the last seven months.” Lucille looked at him with suddenly wide grey eyes. “I could get a reference from there if you like. . . . But when I saw your advertisement this morning, I didn’t want to wait. I’ve always wanted a place where there were children.”

Mrs. Christiansen smiled, but mainly to herself, at the girl’s enthusiasm. She took a silver box from the coffee table, stood up and offered it to the girl. “Will you have one?”

“No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”

Well,” Mrs. Christiansen said, lighting her own cigarette, “we might call them, of course, but my husband and I set more store by appearances than references. . . . What do you say, Ronald? You told me you wanted someone who really liked children.”

And fifteen minutes later, Lucille Smith was standing in her room in the servants’ quarters back of the house, buttoning the belt of her new white uniform. She touched her mouth lightly with lipstick. “You’re starting all over again, Lucille,” she told herself in the mirror. “You’re going to have a happy, useful life from now on, and forget everything that was before.”

But there went her eyes too wide again, as if to deny her words. Her eyes looked much like her mother’s when they opened like that, and her mother was part of what she must forget. She must overcome that habit of stretching her eyes. It made her look surprised and uncertain, too, which was not at all the way to look around children. Her hand trembled as she set the lipstick down. She recomposed her face in the mirror, smoothed the starched front of her uniform. There were only a few things like the eyes to remember, a few silly habits, really, like burning little bits of paper in ash trays, forgetting time sometimes—little things that many people did, but that she must remember not to do. With practice the remembering would come automatically. Because she was just like other people (had the psychiatrist not told her so?), and other people never thought of them at all.

She crossed the room, sank onto the windowseat under the blue curtains, and looked out on the garden and lawn that lay between the servants’ house and the big house. The yard was longer than it was
wide, with a round fountain in the center and two flagstone walks lying like a crooked cross in the grass. There were benches here and there, against a tree, under an arbor, that seemed to be made of white lace. A beautiful yard!

And the house was the house of her dreams! A white, two-storey house with dark-red shutters, with oaken doors and brass knockers and latches that opened with a press of the thumb . . . and broad lawns and poplar trees so dense and high one could not see through, so that one did not have to admit or believe that there was another house somewhere beyond. . . . The rain-streaked Howell house in New York, granite pillared and heavily ornamented, had looked, Lucille thought, like a stale wedding cake in a row of other stale wedding cakes. . . .

She rose suddenly from her seat. The Christiansen house was blooming, friendly, and alive! There were children in it. Thank God for the children! But she had not even met them yet.

She hurried downstairs, crossed the yard on the path that ran from the door, lingered a few seconds to watch the plump faun blowing water from his reeds into the rock pond. . . . What was it the Christiansens had agreed to pay her? She did not remember and she did not care. She would have worked for nothing just to live in such a place.

Mrs. Christiansen took her upstairs to the nursery. She opened the door of a room whose walls were decorated with bright peasant designs, dancing couples and dancing animals, and twisting trees in blossom. There were twin beds of buff-colored oak, and the floor was yellow linoleum, spotlessly clean.

The two children lay on the floor in one corner, amid scattered crayons and picture books.

“Children, this is your new nurse,” their mother said. “Her name is Lucille.”

The little boy stood up and said, “How do you do,” as he solemnly held out a crayon-stained hand.

Lucille took it, and with a slow nod of her head repeated his greeting.

“And Heloise,” Mrs. Christiansen said, leading the second child, who was smaller, toward Lucille.

Heloise stared up at the figure in white and said, “How do you do.”

“Nicky is nine and Heloise six,” Mrs. Christiansen told her.

“Yes,” Lucille said. She noticed that both children had a touch of red in their blond hair, like their father. Both wore blue overalls without shirts, and their backs and shoulders were sun-brown beneath the straps. Lucille could not take her eyes from them. They were the perfect children of her perfect house. They looked up at her frankly, with no mistrust, no hostility. Only love, and some childlike curiosity.

“. . . and most people do prefer living where there’s more country,” Mrs. Christiansen was saying.

“Oh, yes . . . yes, ma’am. It’s ever so much nicer here than in the city.”

Mrs. Christiansen was smoothing the little girl’s hair with a tenderness that fascinated Lucille. “It’s just about time for their lunch,” she said. “You’ll have your meals up here, Lucille. And would you like tea or coffee or milk?”

“I’d like coffee, please.”

“All right, Lisabeth will be up with the lunch in a few minutes.” She paused at the door. “You aren’t nervous about anything, are you, Lucille?” she asked in a low voice.

“Oh, no, ma’am.”

“Well, you mustn’t be.” She seemed about to say something else, but she only smiled and went out.

Lucille stared after her, wondering what that something else might have been.

“You’re a lot prettier than Catherine,” Nicky told her.

She turned around. “Who’s Catherine?” Lucille seated herself on a hassock, and as she gave all her attention to the two children who still gazed at her, she felt her shoulders relax their tension.

“Catherine was our nurse before. She went back to Scotland. . . . I’m glad you’re here. We didn’t like Catherine.”

Heloise stood with her hands behind her back, swaying from side to side as she regarded Lucille. “No,” she said, “we didn’t like Catherine.”

Nicky stared at his sister. “You shouldn’t say that. That’s what I said!”

Lucille laughed and hugged her knees. Then Nicky and Heloise laughed, too.

A colored maid entered with a steaming tray and set it on the blond wood table in the center of the room. She was slender and of indefinite age. “I’m Lisabeth Jenkins, miss,” she said shyly as she laid some paper napkins at three places.

“My name’s Lucille Smith,” the girl said.

“Well, I’ll just leave you to do the rest, miss. If you need anything else, just holler.” She went out, her hips small and hard-looking under the blue uniform.

The three sat down to the table, and Lucille lifted the cover from the large dish, exposing three parsley-garnished omelettes, bright
yellow in the bar of sunlight that crossed the table. But first there was tomato soup for her to ladle out, and triangles of buttered toast to pass. Her coffee was in a silver pot, and the children had two large glasses of milk. The table was low for Lucille, but she did not mind. It was so wonderful merely to be sitting here with these children, with the sun warm and cheerful on the yellow linoleum floor, on the table, on Heloise’s ruddy face opposite her. How pleasant not to be in the Howell house! She had always been clumsy there. But here it would not matter if she dropped a pewter cover or let a gravy spoon fall in someone’s lap. The children would only laugh.

Lucille sipped her coffee.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Heloise asked, with her mouth already full.

The cup slipped in Lucille’s fingers, and she spilled half her coffee on the cloth. No, it was not cloth, thank goodness, but oilcloth. She could get it up with a paper towel, and Lisabeth would never know.

“Piggy!” laughed Heloise.

“Heloise!” Nicky admonished, and went to fetch some paper towels from the bathroom.

They mopped up together.

“Dad always gives us a little of his coffee,” Nicky remarked as he took his place again.

Lucille had been wondering whether the children would mention the accident to their mother. She sensed that Nicky was offering her a bribe. “Does he?” she asked.

“He pours a little in our milk,” Nicky went on, “just so you can see the color.”

“Like this?” And Lucille poured a bit from the graceful silver spout into each glass.

The children gasped with pleasure. “Yes!”

“Mother doesn’t like us to have coffee,” Nicky explained, “but when she’s not looking, Dad let’s us have a little like you did. Dad says his day wouldn’t be any good without his coffee, and I’m the same way. . . . Gosh, Catherine wouldn’t give us any coffee like that, would she, Heloise?”

“Not her!” Heloise took a long, delicious draught from her glass which she held with both hands.

Lucille felt a glow rise from deep inside her until it settled in her face and burned there. The children liked her, there was no doubt of that. She remembered how often she had gone to the public parks in the city, during the three years she had worked as maid in various houses (to be a maid was all she was fit for, she used to think), merely to sit on a bench and watch the children play. But the children there had usually been dirty or foul-mouthed, and she herself had always been an outsider. Once she had seen a mother slap her own child across the face. She remembered how she had fled in pain and horror. . . .

“Why do you have such big eyes?” Heloise demanded.

Lucille started. “My mother had big eyes, too,” she said deliberately, like a confession.

“Oh,” Heloise replied, satisfied.

Lucille cut slowly into the omelette she did not want. Her mother had been dead three weeks now. Only three weeks and it seemed much, much longer. That was because she was forgetting, she thought, forgetting all the hopeless hope of the last three years, that her
mother might recover in the sanatorium. But recover to what? The illness was something separate, something which had killed her. It had been senseless to hope for a complete sanity which she knew her mother had never had. Even the doctors had told her that. And they had told her other things, too, about herself. Good, encouraging things they were, that she was as normal as her father had been. Looking at Heloise’s friendly little face across from her, Lucille felt the comforting glow return. Yes, in this perfect house, closed from all the world, she could forget and start anew.

“Are we ready for some Jello?” she asked.

Nicky pointed to her plate. “You’re not finished eating.”

“I wasn’t very hungy.” Lucille divided the extra dessert between them.