Eleven (15 page)

“We could go out to the sandbox now,” Nicky suggested. “We always go just in the mornings, but I want you to see our castle.”

The sandbox was in the back of the house in a corner made by a projecting ell. Lucille seated herself on the wooden rim of the box while the children began piling and patting like gnomes.

“I must be the captured princess!” Heloise shouted.

“Yes, and I’ll rescue her, Lucille. You’ll see!”

The castle of moist sand rose rapidly. There were turrets with tin flags sticking from their tops, a moat, and a drawbridge made of the lid of a cigar box covered with sand. Lucille watched, fascinated. She remembered vividly the story of Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca. She had read
Ivanhoe
through at one long sitting, oblivious of time and place just as she was now.

When the castle was done, Nicky put half a dozen marbles inside it just behind the drawbridge. “These are good soldiers imprisoned,”
he told her. He held another cigar box lid in front of them until he had packed up a barrier of sand. Then he lifted the lid and the sand door stood like a porte-cochère.

Meanwhile Heloise gathered ammunition of small pebbles from the ground next to the house. “We break the door down and the good soldiers come down the hill across the bridge. Then I’m saved!”

“Don’t tell her! She’ll see!”

Seriously Nicky thumped the pebbles from the rim of the sandbox opposite the castle door, while Heloise behind the castle thrust a hand forth to repair the destruction as much as she could between shots, for besides being the captured princess she was the defending army.

Suddenly Nicky stopped and looked at Lucille. “Dad knows how to shoot with a stick. He puts the rock on one end and hits the other. That’s a balliska.”

“Ballista,” Lucille said.

“Golly, how did
you
know?”

“I read about it in a book—about castles.”

“Golly!” Nicky went back to his thumping, embarrassed that he had pronounced the word wrong. “We got to get the good soldiers out fast. They’re captured, see? Then when they’re released that means we can all fight together and
take the castle
!”

“And save the princess!” Heloise put in.

As she watched, Lucille found herself wishing for some real catastrophe, something dangerous and terrible to befall Heloise, so that she might throw herself between her and the attacker, and prove her great courage and devotion. . . . She would be seriously wounded herself, perhaps with a bullet or a knife, but she would beat off the assailant. Then the Christiansens would love her and keep her with
them always. If some madman were to come upon them suddenly now, someone with a loose mouth and bloodshot eyes, she would not be afraid for an instant.

She watched the sand wall crumble and the first good soldier marble struggled free and came wobbling down the hill. Nicky and Heloise whooped with joy. The wall gave way completely, and two, three, four soldiers followed the first, their stripes turning gaily over the sand. Lucille leaned forward. Now she understood! She was like the good soldiers imprisoned in the castle. The castle was the Howell house in the city, and Nicky and Heloise had set her free. She was free to do good deeds. And now if only something would happen. . . .

“O-o-ow!”

It was Heloise. Nicky had mashed one of her fingers against the edge of the box as they struggled to get the same marble.

Lucille seized the child’s hand, her heart thumping at the sight of the blood that rose from many little points in the scraped flesh. “Heloise, does it hurt very much?”

“Oh, she wasn’t supposed to touch the marbles in the first place!” Disgruntled, Nicky sat in the sand.

Lucille held her handkerchief over the finger and half carried her into the house, frantic lest Lisabeth or Mrs. Christiansen see them. She took Heloise into the bathroom that adjoined the nursery, and in the medicine cabinet found mercurochrome and gauze. Gently she washed the finger. It was only a small scrape, and Heloise stopped her tears when she saw how slight it was.

“See, it’s just a little scratch!” Lucille said, but that was only to calm the child. To her it was not a little scratch. It was a terrible thing to happen the first afternoon she was in charge, a catastrophe
she had failed to prevent. She wished over and over that the hurt might be on her own hand, twice as severe.

Heloise smiled as she let the bandage be tied. “Don’t punish Nicky,” she said. “He didn’t mean to do it. He just plays rough.”

But Lucille had no idea of punishing Nicky. She wanted only to punish herself, to seize a stick and thrust it into her own palm.

“Why do you make your teeth like that?”

“I—I thought it might be hurting you.”

“It doesn’t hurt any more.” And Heloise went skipping out of the bathroom. She leaped onto her bed and lay on the tan cover that fitted the corners and came all the way to the floor. Her bandaged finger showed startlingly white against the brown of her arm. We have to take a nap now,” she told Lucille, and closed her eyes. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” Lucille answered, and tried to smile.

She went down to get Nicky and when they came up the stairs Mrs. Christiansen was at the nursery door.

Lucille blanched. “I don’t think it’s bad, ma’am. It—It’s a scratch from the sandbox.”

“Heloise’s finger? Oh, no, don’t worry, my dear. They’re always getting little scratches. It does them good. Makes them more careful.”

Mrs. Christiansen went in and sat on the edge of Nicky’s bed. “Nicky, dear, you must learn to be more gentle. Just see how you frightened Lucille!” She laughed and ruffled his hair.

Lucille watched from the doorway. Again she felt herself an outsider, but this time because of her incompetence. Yet how different this was from the scenes she had watched in the parks!

Mrs. Christiansen patted Lucille’s shoulder as she went out. “They’ll forget all about it by nightfall.”

“Nightfall,” Lucille whispered as she went back into the nursery. “What a beautiful word!”

While the children slept, Lucille looked through an illustrated book of
Pinocchio
. She was avid for stories, any kind of stories, but most of all adventure stories and fairy tales. And at her elbow on the children’s shelf there were scores of them. It would take her months to read them all. It did not matter that they were for children. In fact, she found that kind more to her liking, because such stories were illustrated with pictures of animals dressed up, and tables and houses and all sorts of things come to life.

Now she turned the pages of
Pinocchio
with a sense of contentment and happiness so strong that it intruded upon the story she was reading. The doctor at the sanatorium had encouraged her reading, she remembered, and had told her to go to movies, too. “Be with normal people and forget all about your mother’s difficulties. . . .” (Difficulties, he had called it then, but all other times he had said strain. Strain it was, like a thread, running through the generations. She had thought, through her.) Lucille could still see the psychiatrist’s face, his head turned a little to one side, his glasses in his hand as he spoke, just as she had thought a psychiatrist should look. “Just because your mother had a strain, there’s no reason why you should not be as normal as your father was. I have every reason to believe you are. You are an intelligent girl, Lucille. . . . Get yourself a job out of the city . . . relax . . . enjoy life. . . . I want you to forget even the house your family lived in. . . . After a year in the country . . .”

That, too, was three weeks ago, just after her mother had died in the ward. And what the doctor had said was true. In this house where there were peace and love, beauty and children, she could feel
the moils of the city sloughing off her like a snake’s outworn skin. Already, in this one half day! In a week she would forget for ever her mother’s face.

With a little gasp of joy that was almost ecstasy she turned to the bookshelf and chose at random six or seven tall, slender, brightly colored books. One she laid open, face down, in her lap. Another she opened and leaned against her breast. Still holding the rest in one hand, she pressed her face into
Pinocchio
’s pages, her eyes half closed. Slowly she rocked back and forth in the chair, conscious of nothing but her own happiness and gratitude. The chimes downstairs struck three times, but she did not hear them.

“What are you doing?” Nicky asked, his voice politely curious.

Lucille brought the book down from her face. When the meaning of his question struck her, she flushed and smiled like a happy but guilty child. “Reading!” she laughed.

Nicky laughed, too. “You read awful close.”

“Ya-yuss,” said Heloise, who had also sat up.

Nicky came over and examined the books in her lap. “We get up at three o’clock. Would you read to us now? Catherine always read to us until dinner.”

“Shall I read to you out of
Pinocchio
?” Lucille suggested, happy that she might possibly share with them the happiness she had gained from the first pages of its story. She sat down on the floor so they could see the pictures as she read.

Nicky and Heloise pushed their eager faces over the pictures, and sometimes Lucille could hardly see to read. She did not realize that she read with a tense interest that communicated itself to the two children, and that this was why they enjoyed it so much.
For two hours she read, and the time slipped by almost like so many minutes.

Just after five Lisabeth brought in the tray with their dinner, and when the meal was over Nicky and Heloise demanded more reading until their bedtime at seven. Lucille gladly began another book, but when Lisabeth returned to remove the tray, she told Lucille that it was time for the children’s bath, and that Mrs. Christiansen would be up to say good night in a little while.

Mrs. Christiansen was up at seven, but the two children by that time were in their robes, freshly bathed, and deep in another story with Lucille on the floor.

“You know,” Nicky said to his mother, “we’ve read all these books before with Catherine, but when Lucille reads them they seem like
new
books!”

Lucille flushed with pleasure. When the children were in bed, she went downstairs with Mrs. Christiansen.

“Is everything fine, Lucille? . . . I thought there might be something you’d like to ask me about the running of things.”

“No, ma’am, except . . . might I come up once in the night to see how the children are doing?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want you to break your sleep, Lucille. That’s very thoughtful, but it’s really unnecessary.”

Lucille was silent.

“And I’m afraid the evenings are going to seem long to you. If you’d ever like to go to a picture in town, Alfred, that’s the chauffeur, he’ll be glad to take you in the car.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Then good night, Lucille.”

“Good night, ma’am.”

She went out the back way, across the garden where the fountain was still playing. And when she put her hand on the knob of her door, she wished that it were the nursery door, that it were eight o’clock in the morning and time to begin another day.

Still she was tired, pleasantly tired. How very pleasant it was, she thought, as she turned out the light, to feel properly tired in the evening (although it was only nine o’clock) instead of bursting with energy, instead of being unable to sleep for thinking of her mother or worrying about herself. . . . She remembered one day not so long ago when for fifteen minutes she had been unable to think of her name. She had run in panic to the doctor. . . .

That was past! She might even ask Alfred to buy her a pack of cigarettes in town—a luxury she had denied herself for months.

She took a last look at the house from her window. The curtains in the nursery billowed out now and then and were swept back again. The wind spoke in the nodding tops of the poplars like friendly voices, like the high-pitched, ever-rippling voices of children. . . .

The second day was like the first, except that there was no mishap, no scraped hand—and the third and the fourth. Regular and identical like the row of Nicky’s lead soldiers on the playtable in the nursery. The only thing that changed was Lucille’s love for the family and the children—a blind and passionate devotion which seemed to redouble each morning. She noticed and loved many things: the way Heloise drank her milk in little gulps at the back of her throat, how the blond down on their backs swirled up to meet the hair on the napes of their necks, and when she bathed them the painful vulnerability of their bodies.

Saturday evening she found an envelope addressed to herself in the mailbox at the door of the servants’ house. Inside was a blank sheet of paper and inside that a couple of new twenty-dollar bills. Lucille held one of them by its crisp edges. Its value meant nothing to her. To use it she would have to go to stores where other people were. What use had she for money if she were never to leave the Christiansen home? It would simply pile up, forty dollars each week. In a year’s time she would have two thousand and eighty dollars, and in two years’ time twice that. Eventually she might have as much as the Christiansens themselves and that would not be right.

Would they think it very strange if she asked to work for nothing? Or for ten dollars perhaps?

She had to speak to Mrs. Christiansen, and she went to her the next morning. It was an inopportune time. Mrs. Christiansen was making up a menu for a dinner.

“It’s about my salary, ma’am,” Lucille began.

“Yes?” Mrs. Christiansen said in her pleasant voice.

Lucille watched the yellow pencil in her hand moving swiftly over the paper. “It’s too much for me, ma’am.”

The pencil stopped. Mrs. Christiansen’s lips parted slightly in surprise. “You
are
such a funny girl, Lucille!”

“How do you mean—funny?” Lucille asked curiously.

“Well, first you want to be practically day and night with the children. You never even want your afternoon off. You’re always talking about doing something “important” for us, though what that could be I can’t imagine. . . . And now your salary’s too much! We’ve never had a girl like you, Lucille. I can assure you, you’re different!” She
laughed, and the laugh was full of ease and relaxation that contrasted with the tension of the girl who stood before her.