Hanno’s Doll (6 page)

Puppchen said, “Hanno?”

And he looked at their faces because it was obvious that this had been a little plot between them, and said, “Children, children!”

And Puppchen came and put her arms on him and leaned her face against him. Her bracelet slipped and he saw the white worm of her scar. And he had told Philip, okay, he would stay. He would see the dean.

He had promised Puppchen. He had promised Philip.

Philip wanted to hurry to the college and tell the dean before Hanno could change his mind, and he himself had, for once, wanted to get away from Puppchen's happiness. So he ordered the lunch and left Puppchen content because he said he would be back for it. This was Bradley; no old friend would appear backstage and need him for something or other so that he would spend his lunchtime with him instead of with Puppchen.

He remembered that on that morning the grounds had looked as if—as if nothing
un
vegetable could happen there, as if nothing
un
vegetable could ever happen there. (It never happened!) Philip held the garage door open for him while he backed the station wagon out. The stiff wool of the mackinaw he had bought in Sears Roebuck and was wearing for the first time was rough and confining. He had the sense, listening to both Philip and Puppchen, that they were in a different world with their smiles and their sunlit concerns. He had not had this sensation since Wien, since the time he, working with the underground, had associated with actors who had only actors' concerns. Then, too, it had been difficult to hold an actor's scale of values in one hand and his life in the other. All three miles to the campus, Philip had talked happily of the happy results of his decision to stay on at the college, and he had wondered that anyone could care about such things. But one forgot, he told himself. My God, how one forgot! He would forget, too, he told himself. He would soon be back in Philip's world, with both feet, both hands. He would soon see Philip's world with his vision corrected.

From the first day, the college had given him the keys to the city. The day he and Puppchen had moved into Felix's house, the dean and Philip had appeared and figuratively offered him the keys to Bradley. Everything at his disposal. Anything they could do. What could they do?

Because Felix's house was very small, the big room, kitchen, balcony, one bathroom, two bedrooms, he had asked whether he could use Felix's office and whether they could find someone to type for him. You couldn't turn over a Broadway production to another director-producer without needing to tie up hundreds of loose strings and bind up hundreds of wounds you had inflicted.

They had given him Felix's office, and the secretary, Miss Mildred, had appeared three days later, produced by the departmental secretary, Miss Grace Metal. (He named her
Miss
Mildred because there was something old-fashioned about her face.) Miss Mildred had been brought all the way from Miss Metal's home town because she had theatrical ambitions. She had come flying from Clifton, Idaho, into Felix's office because she hoped that Hanno Dietrich would be her big chance to make Broadway.

So there, on that morning after, sitting at the shabby desk in the little outer office, was Miss Mildred.

She was the first person he saw in the college. Having arrived at the old building in the middle of an hour, the halls were deserted. Philip, of course, had immediately disappeared to inform the dean. “Good morning, Miss Mildred,” he had said, then “T-t-t!” he had said, because she was sitting at her desk doing nothing.

She had turned to him and he had seen the unmistakable signs of sleeplessness, so touching at her age, so ugly at his. (How he must have looked that terrible morning!) He had seen the shadows under her lids, blue-white, like watered milk. “T-t! Just sitting there, Miss Mildred.”

“I finished the letters you gave me, Mr. Dietrich.”

“Already?”

“I stayed late last night and finished everything.”

“There was no need to do that, Miss Mildred. You are a good child. But I didn't mean just sitting and not typing, Miss Mildred, I meant just sitting and not knitting. Do you think I haven't seen you stuffing away your guilty knitting in that drawer?” He acted it out for her—the start when she heard him (he walked lightly like many fat men), the needles pushed into the wool, the desk drawer opened and closed.

Miss Mildred said, “Oh, it's finished.”

She turned her head away but not before he caught the shine of tears. “Miss Mildred …”

“It's finished. I finished it.” She gave a sob and put her head down on her desk.

He himself had been finished—done in—but how could he have resisted the tender nape of Miss Mildred's neck? He put his hand on Miss Mildred's shoulder and gentled it until her sobbing quieted; then he gave her his big handkerchief and told her to blow her nose and then go to the washroom and wash her poor face. He had considered giving her the day off, even though he believed that everything should be as ordinary as possible on this day after. If he gave her the day off, he had imagined, she and her troubles would go straight to Miss Metal, the departmental secretary whose protégée Miss Mildred certainly was.

Now he wished that he had done so. Now that it was too late, he wished he had. But he had been undone by the pitiful, childish, bent neck, and therefore stood at her desk to wait for her to return from the washroom and to help her if possible, because Miss Mildred, in a way, reminded him of Puppchen. Not the distinction, the elegant bone structure, of course; like a hundred thousand other young American girls, but still with Puppchen's look of helplessness to distinguish her from the others. That was why he had had to try to help her, Hanno decided. Miss Mildred had not looked like the one hundred thousand other American girls who one and all seemed to him so capable of taking care of themselves that they made his inescapably paternal blood run cold.

He had realized, too, that if Miss Mildred's trouble wore pants (or had not worn pants), Miss Metal would not be a sympathetic listener. Prunes and prisms and Puritanism, Miss Grace Metal. He and Miss Mildred had worked late several evenings and on those occasions Miss Metal had appeared to make sure he had not swallowed the girl up for his dinner, oh, yes!

At the thought of taking on Miss Mildred's troubles, he had simply collapsed into Miss Mildred's chair, grabbing the handles of the desk drawer as he heard the chair creak under his great weight. He had buried the boy, but had dug up, unburied, muscles in his arms and shoulders and back and thighs which had come out of the ground like trolls and tortured him. When he leaned back, still holding to the drawer handles, the drawer naturally pulled open. It was when he had leaned forward to close it that he saw the snapshot.

His hands had carried out the closing movement they had begun because his ears had caught the sound of footsteps. When Miss Mildred came in, he stared at her, wondering if his imagination could possibly have put that face on that snapshot; wondering whether this had been an act of that most famous of clichés, the guilty conscience; desperately hoping that if he looked at it again, with his eyes and not with his conscience, it would turn into another face, any other face.

Miss Mildred said, “Mr. Dietrich, please, if you look at me like that, I'll cry again.”

She had, of course, begun crying again.

He had wearily pulled himself out of her too narrow chair and lowered her in his place, had lifted the hand with his big handkerchief still in it to her convulsed face. He had leaned against her desk and made soothing noises. (There was no American sound so soothing as “
Na, na
.”) “
Na, na
, Miss Mildred, surely nothing is as bad as that?”

At first she had wept but had not talked. Miss Mildred was a true small-town girl. It had taken all his practice—
ach
God, how great it was! How many of these stories he had listened to, before and after Puppchen's, the same story. All of them, he thought, like birth; no one agony quite like the next, but alike all the same, the same beginning, the same end, the same confession having to force its way through the narrow opening between shame and need, with the need always pushing to birth in convulsions.

First he had to hear the part he had known when he connected the photograph and her tears.

It would kill her parents. It would kill her. Oh, oh, Grace Metal! What would Grace think? Grace, from home, from Clifton, Idaho, who had got her this wonderful job with him because she knew how much she wanted to be an actress.

“
Na, na, Kind!
”

The talk! The disgrace! No, he couldn't imagine what it would be like in Clifton, Idaho. He was a man of the world; he couldn't know.

He had to force himself to “
Na, na
” through this. It had to take its own time and he must not seem too interested in the particulars of her case.

“I told him when I wrote him, I couldn't go home like this. I couldn't! I can't, I can't!”

“
Na
—
na
. Not one of the students, Miss Mildred?”

“Oh, no. Oh, no. Not a college boy.”

(“Do I look wet behind the ears?”)

“Older and … and … married. Not from here, Mr. Dietrich.”

She had met him that summer. That summer Miss Mildred had gone as an apprentice to a summer-stock company in Idaho. The Hilltop Theatre. She had met him then. No, not part of the company, a real professional … laughed at their director … He had made her want to make an impression on him at first just because of being a professional.… You know.…

Then she had fallen in love with him. He had stayed awhile.… Until … until …

“
Na
,
na, Kind!
”

Then he had gone away. He had given her a post-office address in case. In case of trouble. And there had been trouble, and she had written him at the P.O. address in New York. How could she blame him? It was as much her doing as his. She had been so crazy in love. No, at first he hadn't told her he was married, that was true, but neither had he said anything about marrying her. And that was the same thing, the same thing.

“Then you wrote him and …” (And he came to Bradley? Yesterday he came?)

Yesterday he had telephoned her and said to expect him. He didn't know what time he could make Bradley because he was hitching. She had told him she would wait in the office. (On account of Grace.) She had told Grace she had to work late. She hadn't eaten any lunch which worried Grace, and Grace came up to the office at about five and that was when she said she had to work late. Grace had brought her some supper from the cafeteria on a tray.

Then he came. Around seven. Then she told him and she cried. He offered her money, but she didn't want money. She told him Mr. Dietrich was paying her a wonderful salary; she didn't want money, and he said, What could he do, then? He was married.

He was very sorry about it. He said he'd go out and have something to eat and think what he could do.

Miss Mildred said, “He took the sweater. It was all finished. I had it all finished for him, and he put it on and it fitted so nice. Oooh,” she wept. “He looked so handsome in it.”

“
Na, na
—” And that was when he had become certain … because of the sweater. Why had he not recognized the sweater when he saw it on the boy? (Why should he have?) Why hadn't he recognized Miss Mildred's knitting and known that the boy hadn't appeared like a devil from hell in a clap of thunder, but prosaically, via Miss Mildred?

Miss Mildred wailed, “I waited until one o'clock and he didn't come back, so I went home. I thought he had just fooled me, saying he'd think it over and come back … but now …” She clapped her hand to her mouth and above her mouth, her eyes saw horror. “Something's happened to him! Something's happened to him!”

The “
Na, na
” stuck in his tightened throat. He could only shake his head; of course not, of course not.

“But he said he'd come back last night. He said he'd come back and then he didn't.”

“
Said! Kind!
He
said!
”

She had flown to the door, to the window, to the telephone. “I have to make sure.… Who should I ask?”

She thought of the police. Miss Mildred hadn't been in the college long enough to think of the K.K.K. She had turned from the phone to him, and he had been so frightened, so afraid his face would show his confusion that, to hide himself from her, he threw his arms around her and pressed her face to his chest, saying, “Miss Mildred, Miss Mildred, Miss Mildred.”

And just then Puppchen came in. Puppchen in her autumn suède, light green, dark green and orange. Puppchen standing just inside the door.

She said, “I came to take you home for lunch, Hanno.”

He had tried to keep Miss Mildred's face pressed to his chest, knowing that Puppchen would understand when she heard Miss Mildred was in trouble, but, on hearing Puppchen, Miss Mildred pulled away, and when she saw Puppchen standing there, so beautiful, she gave a yelp like a stepped-on puppy.

He said to Puppchen, “Miss Mildred is in trouble, darling.”

Then poor Miss Mildred yelped like a punished puppy, nose in it. He had to make her feel better. “Miss Mildred, don't! No need to—My wife can understand, can't you, darling?”

The clear voice, “Oh, yes, Hanno.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of?”

She shook her head, so gravely.

“We understand such things, Puppchen and I. We're not Miss Metal, metallic.”

Puppchen moved closer to Miss Mildred. “Don't cry. Hanno will help you.”

How kind Puppchen had been! It had been Puppchen's kindness which had persuaded Miss Mildred and not his bumbling efforts. And Puppchen had helped him, too, because he had not been able to think, only that he must have time to think, and that Miss Mildred must not go to the police before he had time to think. (Yes, by then he did not want to confess to the police, to take whatever was coming to him. Yes, Miss Mildred had shown him how far he was committed. “Police,” Miss Mildred had said, and every bit of him answered, “No, you shall not!”)