The Nanny (15 page)

“Oh, yes, of course, but I can't take it off,” she said, showing the two nurses, pulling at it, trying to cooperate so they would find Dr. Meducca for her. “I was much thinner when my husband gave it to me. It was when my baby was born.” She didn't have to tell them that the baby was Ralphie and that he was dead and it was her fault. Why did she always think she had to tell everyone? “I've gained twelve pounds in the last two years,” she said, trying to smile, trying to win them over. “It won't come off. One of these days, I'll go to a jeweler.”

“Get the ring off, but not those twelve pounds. You put those pounds in the right places,” Mary Lou said admiringly.

But Victor loved that girl. Virgie said, “Thank you. Please, could you get Dr. Meducca for me? I really must go home.”

Mary Lou said, “He's right in nine-fifteen with a patient. You just knock on the door. Nine-fifteen.”

“Oh, Mary Lou!” the other nurse said in a now-you've-done-it voice, as Virgie shuffled rapidly toward 915.

“She really wants out. Why shouldn't she ask him? He can always say no,” Mary Lou said.

As Nanny walked by the bedroom, Mrs. Gore-Green called out. “What are you still wandering about for, Nanny?”

The old woman opened the door, bending in. “I went to the kitchen to see if he was off. He's still up, poor little chap. He's still moving about in there, I could hear him.”

“Why don't you insist that he take the sleeping pill, Nanny? The doctor said you should force it down his throat.”

“No, Miss Pen, but if you could bring yourself to tell him to take it.… You're not going to get your rest if this house doesn't settle down.”

“And you can't settle down, darling, until you know every child within miles is tucked safely into his downy!”

“I'm too old now to change,” Nanny said.

“Why should you change? You're perfect, darling.” She wanted to show the old thing that she bore her no grudge for Althea. Really, she thought, if Nanny could only get her mind off that boy, she would notice how very good
I'm
being! “All right, I'll tell him to take it.”

But Nanny couldn't just send her, had to come herself, of course. Mrs. Gore-Green felt Nanny hovering in back of her. She knocked on the maid's-room door, but the boy only screamed that no one was to come in.
No one
. “No one will come in, Joey. Do be quiet.”

“You got to swear.”

“I swear.”

“Make
her
swear.”

“I won't come in, Master Joey.”

“Swear!”

“I swear.”

“Even if I yell out,
she's
got to swear she won't come in.”

“I swear, Master Joey. But you had ought to take that sleeping pill.”

“No.”

Mrs. Gore-Green felt Nanny's hand on her arm. Nanny's other hand pointed to the kitchen table. She was whispering a word. Vile? Oh,
vial!
“Joey, if you don't want the sleeping capsule, will you leave the vial of them out here on the table?”

“I'm not coming out and nobody's coming in!”

“But it's dangerous to keep the bottle by you, Joey. You might awaken and, half asleep as you'll be, you might overdose. Believe me, it does happen.”

“I won't,” Joey said. “I'm not taking
any!”

Nanny made a despairing face. “But even grown-ups do that, Joey. Come on, be a good little chap!”

“No,” he said.

Nanny was mouthing something else but she couldn't make it out, so Nanny backed out of the kitchen, tiptoes, asking her to follow, and when she was clear of the kitchen, she whispered that she would feel better if she knew that Master Joey had his cinnamon toast, but if Master Joey knew she wanted him to eat it, he wouldn't. What next? What else?

“Yes, he has,” she informed Nanny when she came out from asking him and an expression of extreme pleasure spread over the large old face.

Virgie knocked on the door of 915 and Dr. Meducca was in there. He said, “Come on, come in!” as if he welcomed any company. Virgie saw that Dr. Meducca's patient was in bed. Her round eyes swiveled towards Virgie.

“May I speak to you, doctor?”

He waved her out of the room and then followed her. He took her hand and said that she was in fine shape, in fine shape, would be okay by morning. He'd seen by the chart that she'd even kept down some tea and Jello.

“Dr. Meducca, I want to go home,” Virgie said. She waited patiently while he told her that she couldn't, might have a relapse, and so on. Still needed care. “I'll have care,” she promised him, “really I will. Oh, I didn't mean I want to go
home,”
she explained, trying a smile, “I just
said
that. I mean to someone else's house. Please, Doctor,” she said, seeing the refusal coming. “Oh, when I tell you where, you'll see I'll be well taken care of. You met Nanny in our apartment. I want to go to Nanny's new place. She was better than any nurse when I was sick and I'm really not sick now.”

Then Dr. Meducca told her that Nanny wasn't in her new apartment but was staying with Joey because the new girl had come and gone, refused to take the sole responsibility for the child. “This is understandable,” Dr. Meducca said carefully, “isn't it? So your wonderful Nanny can't take care of you, can she, since she still has your boy on her hands? She has to put all her attention to that, doesn't she? Now you don't want to make it more difficult for the old woman, do you?” He remembered, wincing, that he had used the same argument on the boy; if not in the same words, certainly the same tone. He saw that, although there was no resemblance—the boy took after his father—she could be her son's twin now, the same swallowing, the same hiking up and squaring of her narrow shoulders, the same trembling, delicate chin.

“I didn't know Nanny was with Joey. No, of course I can't go then.”

“That's a good girl,” he said, and coughed to cover the fact that he had again spoken to her as if she were the kid's age, but she didn't seem to notice. He watched her shuffling disconsolately towards her room. “Poor kid,” he thought, “poor, poor kid.” He would brief Roberta's nurse and get the hell out of here.

Fifteen minutes later, Virgie, who was standing at the window, heard a cool voice behind her. It said, “You won't get out that way.”

Virgie turned and saw a girl in a hospital nightgown. She had no robe or slippers, but she had twisted the gown so that it outlined her body.

“Chic?” the girl said. She rounded her eyes.

Virgie recognized the round eyes. “You're Dr. Meducca's patient.”

“You could call it that. Close that window,” she said. “Someone might notice it from the other building. They watch open windows here,” she said; “only place they don't is over there.” She pointed.

“Over there?”

The girl made a stereotype-lunatic face and gibbered through her pink lips and waggled her hands. “Where they keep them. They don't watch there because they got the windows made so you can't get out. I've been a volunteer there. I know.”

Suddenly the girl hurried to her and pulled her into the bathroom. She whispered, “They're coming in here. I can hear them. Listen, I'm not Dr. Meducca's patient, I'm his daughter. Listen. He put me here just because I gave your kid a helping hand.”

“Joey? Oh, what?” she said, beginning to tremble.

“Shut up. Wait. When they come to look in your room, you tell them you're in the can. Now shut up.”

“Mrs. Fane,” Mary Lou called. “You in there, Mrs. Fane?”

“I'll be right out,” the girl mouthed.

“I'll be right out.”

“It's okay, Mrs. Fane, no hurry. Mrs. Fane, I'm just going to close your door now, dear, so you won't be disturbed. Okay?”

“Yes,” Virgie said. Now she mouthed, “What about Joey? Please. What do you mean ‘helped him'?” But the girl wouldn't say anything until the nurse closed the door.

“They won't come in here again,” the girl said. “You heard them. Don't want to disturb you. That's a laugh.” She sat in the armchair and seemed to think that Virgie would calmly get back into bed.

“What about Joey? What did you do to help Joey?”

“Oh, yeah. Well. My pa was in the hospital. I was in his office, getting something. The doorbell rang and there was your kid. In the raw, no less.” She reached out to where Virgie was standing in front of her and pulled up the terry-cloth robe so that Virgie's thigh was exposed. When Virgie pulled away, she said mildly, “I was just showing you. He was in the raw. Cupid without the bow and arrow. He came down to the office so my pa would save him.”

“From what? From
what?”

“You want to hear? Shall I tell you?” she asked, leaning back as if this was a long story which conceivably might bore Virgie. She now pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them, her arms clasping her legs, and began. Her tone was light and unemphatic.

It was frightening, Virgie thought, to see that the girl's eyes hadn't listened to what she said, were unaffected. “Joey really told you that Nanny had tried to
drown
him?”

“That's right.” The girl suddenly released her legs and they shot out in front of her. She slid down on the chair and raised her arms in the air, then her body was Joey's small naked body, but her arms were Nanny's thick arms. With Nanny's strong thick arms, she pushed a struggling gasping Joey under the water and held him there until, threshing, turning, slippery with soap, he managed to escape. Whereupon the girl sat up demurely and folded her hands on her lap. “Isn't that
awful?”
she said, and her round eyes smiled and her brows arched serenely above them.

Virgie nibbled her knuckles, shivering.

The girl said, “You want me to get you out of here?”

“Out of here?”

“You want me to get you out of here? I heard you asking my pa. He won't. I can. Well?
You don't?”
she asked, genuinely startled, the extraordinary placidity gone. “I tell you that this nursemaid tried to drown your kid and you don't want to get to him?”

“No. No.”

“I don't get it,” the girl said.

“Of course I want to go,” Virgie explained, “but I mustn't. I'll do something wrong. No, I better stay here. No. Nanny better handle him.”

The girl's eyebrows went up, up. “You want
her
to handle him?”

“You don't understand,” Virgie said.

“No.” The girl smiled like an angel. “I'd like my pa to hear that one, though.”

The Nembutal capsule, at home so reliable, simply did not work here. Mrs. Gore-Green sighed. She had done her best to make it effective, reading Jane Austen so she wouldn't think of Althea or the future, or that extraordinary child, or what a day this had been. She had immersed herself in Jane, seeing in her mind's eye a movie of
Persuasion
, but the street noises kept obtruding. (Eighty-sixth Street much noisier than Seventy-fourth Street. Won't complain about my flat any more.) Because the street noises were louder, the sudden inexplicable silences which fell, even in Manhattan, were worse. Did everyone nowadays immediately think of the atom bomb? These days did any sudden cessation of noises instantly make everyone wonder if it had happened and one was the only human left alive in the world?

It was in one of the silences that she heard Nanny's step pass the door. Mrs. Gore-Green fumbled for and clicked on the bed lamp and got out of bed, but by the time she opened her door Nanny was too far ahead to see it go on. At first, because the only light was from that lamp, from her bedroom, she had the confused impression that Nanny, on the dining gallery by now, was carrying, as she so often used to, her baby sister Drusilla in her long nightdress. But when she snapped the hall light on (not going to break
her
neck) Drusilla turned out to be a pillow, and Drusie's long nightdress, the scalloped ruffle of a pillow case. Mrs. Gore-Green said petulantly, because
really
, “What in the
world
are you doing, Nanny?”

Nanny swung around. “Did I wake you, Miss Pen. I am sorry.”

Mrs. Gore-Green stared. “Why, that's one of your old pillow cases from home, isn't it, Nanny?”

“Fancy you remembering!” She laid the pillow on the dining room table and came down the steps and back across the living room. “I was just going to slip it under Master Joey's head as a special treat. He loves sleeping high, just like you did, Miss Pen.”

“You mustn't!” Mrs. Gore-Green said.

“Mustn't
, Miss Pen?”

She felt an impulse to stamp her foot at the shapeless figure softly lurching toward her. “You
said
you wouldn't go into his room. You
swore,”
she said, childishly, pouting.

Nanny, chuckling, waved her promise away airily. “He'll have forgotten that by morning and only remember that while he was asleep Nanny gave him a treat. I want that child to love Nanny,” she said, smiling. Now she was close enough to reach out and tip Mrs. Gore-Green's chin up and study her expression. “I do believe you're jealous, Miss Pen! Yes,” she decided, now laying her hand under Mrs. Gore-Green's elbow, turning her firmly back toward the bedroom, “yes, that's it. I do believe you're jealous of Nanny because she's become soft in her old age, allowing a child to sleep high when she never would let you, no matter how you teased!”

Mrs. Gore-Green felt the shamefaced embarrassed smile break out and heard her snorting schoolgirl giggle because … oh, what fools we mortals be … it could be the truth. “Maybe you're right, Nanny.” With the shamed grin breaking out again and again, she permitted Nanny to help her back to bed.

“We mustn't be dogs in the manger, must we, dear? Because you couldn't have what you wanted when you were Master Joey's age, you mustn't mind if, for once, he has it.”