The Nanny (12 page)

It was picked up. “Let her see! Let her see!”

Virgie found herself pressed up against the glass looking at the infant. The nurse arranged the blankets so it could be seen better. It was a dark-haired baby, like Joey. Joey had been born with dark hair like that.

“Is that yours?” a man asked. He read the name on the bassinet. “Kasworthy? Is that yours?”

Virgie shook her head.

“Which?” the man asked. “That's my daughter's baby, the one yelling his head off. Which is yours? You rap on the glass and she'll show him.”

The nurse put Kasworthy back into his basket. He cried and then his waving hand touched his open mouth and he began to suck at the back of it. Joey had done that, too. Virgie began to weep.

“She lost her baby in childbirth,” the middle-aged woman said. “It was born dead. Don't kid yourself, even with all the miracles, you can lose a baby!”

Virgie heard:
Baby, baby, baby
, as she turned off that corridor. She moved off as fast as she could, but the shuffling way necessary to hold the slippers on made her glance down at her feet, and instead of the terry-cloth mules, she remembered her feet in sneakers, her legs in bluejeans. It was summer. She was carrying the fifteen-month-old Joey—he had been born on May 6th—to the edge of the cliff behind the cottage in New Milford to show him the view of the lake for which she and Victor had rented the cottage. “But if we take this one, you'll be all alone with the baby while I'm in the city,” Victor had said. “I can manage,” she had told Victor. And she had managed.

Oh, she used to be able to.… She saw herself with her hair cut very short, in those jeans and sneakers, with Joey astride her hip, walking on the balls of her feet, carrying Joey as if he weighed nothing, feeling, because she had been alone with him all day in the cottage, like a pioneer mother with a rifle behind the door, able to fight off hostile Indians, if necessary.

Just then, from a room with the door left open, she heard a child crying. The memory of her feet in sneakers, so firm on the pine-needled ground, her strong legs in jeans, striding with the child riding on her hip, made her go into the room. But then the child, seeing her, only cried louder, and midnight struck, and the magic jeans and sneakers disappeared, and she was wearing a frayed, raddled bathrobe, and Victor was in love with Althea Gore-Green. And it was right, Nanny said. It was right that Victor should love Althea. It was right for Althea to sit there owning him. So it must be right. It must be right.

For a moment, Virgie couldn't remember the number of her room and was afraid she would have to ask someone. Could she ask? “Oh, Nanny,” she thought, “help me. I want to get back to bed. Help me get back to bed.”

Running down all those stairs had dried him off, but his teeth were chattering as he kept his finger pressed down on the bell under the sign
Doctor's Office
. While he waited, he repeated what the doctor had told him:
“You parachute right down.”

It seemed like nobody was there. (But the doctor had said he would be there. Sarah had said she would be there.) Then he heard someone moving inside and he hammered on the door and said, “Please, please, please.” Then she opened the door. She looked like Simon's girl doll, her eyes were that round with round black eyebrows and a round mouth and the same yellow hair. When he told her he had to see the doctor she said, “Go away.”

“I got no clothes on,” he told her. “I can't go nowhere.” She started to tell him to go away again, he could see that, but then she changed her mind, looked around—nobody was there—and grabbed his arm, snaky, and yanked him in and closed the door. Once she made her mind up, she acted quick. (It was like Simon's girl doll again because when you wound
her
up,
she
started right off.) But then she just stood looking at him, making him feel funny. “I just got to see the doctor,” he said. “I got to see him. I just got to.”

“Well, now,” she said, “this sick lady in New York Hospital got to see him worse. This is how the sick lady in New York Hospital is. Watch,” she said.

She twisted herself all up and waved her hands and hung her tongue out of her mouth and then pulled the skin below her eyes down so that he saw the red blood part. But that was where his mother was, in New York Hospital. Maybe his mother was like that. “Don't!”

She said, watching him, off-like, “What's bugging you?”

“Maybe it's my mother like that. The doctor took my mother and my father to New York Hospital. They went in the ambulance. Maybe it's my mother.”

“What's your mother's name?”

He told her. “Is my mother like that?”

“Like this?”

She did it again. “Hey, don't!” He was going to cry and she saw he was going to cry, but funnily, she didn't ask why or anything, just watched him starting to cry with her round eyes. Then she shook herself loose of the knots and pulled herself straight and moved pretty.

“Is your mother like that?”

He nodded because Mommy was like that.

She held her left hand out, the fingers spread. “With a square cut emerald as big as a house?”

“Green.”

“Green and square and gorgeous.” When he nodded, she said, “No, your mother isn't the one who's like that. She's okay.”

“Could you please call my mother then? Could you ask my mother to come and get me? If she's okay,” he cried in disappointment.

“Not that okay. You're on your own.”

She was wanting to see him cry more. “Then kin I hide here? Let me hide here.”

“Why?”

He told her, watching her anxiously, moving away in case she was going to hit him like the lady did. When he finished telling her why, he said, “Do you believe me?”

“Do I believe she tried to drown you? Oh, sure,” she said easily, “sure I do.”

“The lady didn't believe me. She called me a liar. I'm not a liar.”

“Take it easy,” she said. “I believe you.” She smiled. “I know a girl who drowned a kid once.”

“Why?” he asked, anxious. “Why did she drown him?”

She looked surprised, as if there didn't have to be a reason. She had to think, jerking her chin up, her two round eyebrows even rounder. “I guess she didn't want a kid around. Kids are a pain in the neck. It was easy. He was much smaller than you.”

He nodded wisely. “He couldn't get away the way I did.”

She smiled and smiled. “You got it in one. He couldn't get away like you did.”

“It was because I had soap all over, see? I was too slippery to hold, see? But kin I hide here? I won't be a pain in the neck, honest.”

“Maybe you can't help it. Is that why she tried to drown you?”

He kicked his foot against the floor, forgetting he had no shoes on. “No,” he said, “it's because of Ralphie, I guess.”

“Give,” she said. “Go, go, go! Tell me about Ralphie.”

He had just about told her when she put her finger to her round mouth, and that was because she had heard
her
outside the door before he did. When
she
rang the bell because he knew it was
her
he began to shiver again. The girl pulled off her moccasins so
she
wouldn't hear her not going to the door but away from it, to hide him, and motioned for him to follow. Boy, wouldn't he!

They went up the hall and through a doctor room and into another hall which had doors on both sides. She stood still and looked at him again, putting her head to one side, like smoothing her cheek with her shoulder; then she smiled. “You're freezing. I'll get you warmed up.”

She opened one of the doors and went in and he followed her. It was a little room without any window. He could hear the doorbell ringing and his teeth kept chattering. She took a chair and she set it in front of a machine thing. Then she pulled a kind of TV screen down to the same height as the chair, but it wasn't a TV (of course not!) because then she kind of swiveled the screen out of the way. She pointed that he should sit on the seat. “Why?” he asked.
Fleuroscope
, he read.

“This'll warm you up.”

She pushed him into the seat because he didn't move fast enough. He whispered, “What's Fleuroscope? Isn't Fleuroscope like X-ray? You shouldn't be
exposed
to X-ray—it has radiation—like Hiroshima!”

She pushed him back on the seat. “Smart kid! Listen, dopo, this is a
doctor's
X-ray. It's different. You think doctors are killers? This is
healthy
radiation. It will warm you up good. And don't think it isn't working because it warms you from inside out. Catch?”

There was
good
radiation, good for your health. There must be. She said so. Of course doctors didn't kill you.
Parachute right down
. “Okay,” he said. He hoped it would warm him quick. He was afraid
she
might hear his teeth going if this girl let her in the door.

She went to the back of the machine and put on a switch and Joey heard a hummy sound begin. But this was healthy radiation.

“Excuse me, miss,” Nanny said. “May I see the doctor, please?”

“Not here.”

“Just a moment, miss. I'm looking for a little boy. I'm afraid something will happen if I don't find him.”

“What could happen to a little boy? Who'd hurt a little boy?” She made her eyes even rounder.

“Miss, have you seen a boy with no clothes on?”

“Sure thing,” the girl said. She planted herself in front of the old woman to keep her from entering the foyer. “Sure I saw a boy with no clothes on … and a bow and arrow!
Cupid, stupid!”
she said, slamming the office door after her and moving out into the lobby.

Nanny watched the girl's rounded hips click like clockwork as she walked across the marble lobby to the door of apartment 1A; then Nanny said to the young Irish doorman, “Patrick, I'll go over the house, but then it will have to be the police, I'm afraid.”

The patient in 905 had come back from her husband's room on six looking like the wrath of the gods. Kelsey, behind the desk with Mary Lou, watching the patient stumble to her room, shook her head. “Mary Lou, you'd better …”

“You think I better?” She saw the weak fumbling way 905 was pushing at the door to her room.

“I think you better, Mary Lou.”

So, sighing, she followed 905 back into her room and there she was in bed with the tears rolling down her cheeks. “Can I do anything?”

Virgie began to shake because she did not know what could be done, because only Nanny would know what could be done now.

Mary Lou said, not unkindly, “Hold it, hold it! How about a nice cold glass of juice, or I can get you some milk? You'll feel stronger if you …”

But she didn't want juice or milk. She did not know what she wanted; then she burst out, “I want to brush my hair! I haven't brushed my hair!”

“Now, that's a good idea,” Mary Lou said fervently, because although hair-brushing was a new one on her, any action at all would seem therapeutic right now. “I'll see if I can find you a brush.”

Mary Lou rolled her eyes at Kelsey behind the desk. “Wants to brush her
hair,”
she said, and Kelsey rolled her eyes that this was a new one on her, too. But when Mary Lou came back with a sterilized brush and tore off the Cellophane and gave it to 905, she just stared at it. (The brush wasn't that bad, Mary Lou thought. 905 was looking at it as if it was a dead rat.)

Virgie had not really wanted to brush her hair, what she wanted was to feel as she did each evening with each of the hundred strokes of the brush: that Nanny was with her and would be with her. That if it was right, as Nanny seemed to think, that Victor should love this girl, she wouldn't be deserted.

But she would be, she thought. Nanny had gone already, she thought, and the horrible, scabby-back black bristled brush dropped from her trembling hand.

Roberta turned the TV off when he came in, actually turned it off, and then Roberta said, “How's Mrs. Fane, Pa?”

You could have knocked him over with a feather, Roberta asking how anyone was! “I didn't see Mrs. Fane, didn't need to. I did drop in and make sure they took my order seriously not to release her. Anything happen while I was out?” Roberta had taken a McIntosh apple from the bowl of them on the table, and polished it down on her angel-blue robe; now she held the apple and studied it.

“Not a thing, Pa. I think I'll go to bed, Pa.” She bit into the apple with her strong even teeth.

He waited in his bedroom as he had learned to until he actually heard Roberta climbing into bed before he even began to undress, but once she was—he hoped—safe for this night, anyhow, he threw his clothes off rapidly. He was pooped. Finding out that the boy upstairs was another of them had taken all the starch out of him. He had been
drawn
to that kid. He had told himself that if he had a boy like that instead of Roberta—Driving back with him from the hospital had been the enactment of one of the dreams he had had when Lucy was pregnant with Roberta. How the child would come along while he made calls, so they'd have time to become real friends. How he would teach him what satisfaction there was in being a physician, a healer. How when the child was old enough, he would even tell him about diagnosis in interesting cases, because if you were good at diagnosis (and he had been, he had been!) it could be as fascinating as a detective story.

“Boy,” he said, waking up from the dream, “you're a fine detective! A kid of eight can fool you!” He put out the lights before opening his bedroom windows. Living on the ground floor made him feel he was sleeping in Macy's window. But what could you do when you had to take what you could get? He sighed and warned himself that if he started thinking about Roberta now, he wouldn't close his eyes all night. But then it looked as if he wasn't going to close his eyes anyhow, because some damned inconsiderate bastards were talking right underneath his windows, leaning against the building.