The Nanny (8 page)

Joey's big head wilted on his neck. “She—she—”

“She won't let you get away with the stuff a new one would, is that it? She's on to all your tricks, is that it? Not let you see all the TV you want? That's it, isn't it?” The kid just stood there with that dropped head, clutching at his leg. “Make you brush your teeth? Wash behind the ears?” Joey clamped onto his leg. “Not any of those? Come on, Joey, I'm a reasonable kind of guy.… If you can give me a reasonable reason …” The boy was one solid negative. Dr. Meducca felt a hundred years old and a hundred thousand miles away from comprehension. “Come on, come on, Joey!” He took another look at the old woman. Spare the rod, spoil the child; that was it, was it? That was why they went and hired a new one? Discipline? These modern parents scared to death of any discipline. “Will she
spank
you if you don't mind, is that it, Joey? Will she spank you?” He put his finger under the small pointed chin and drew the face up. “Tell me, will she spank you, Joey?”

“She'll kill me,” Joey said simply.

Dr. Meducca pulled his supporting finger away because the kid meant it.
Kill
. “Now, that's enough of that,” he said, and at his tone felt the clamping fingers loose their hold on his leg as if the nerves had been severed. “Shame on you! Shame on you!” He turned back helplessly to the old woman, but apparently she was taking even this in her stride; she didn't bat an eyelash.

She said, “Master Joey, you remember my talking about my Miss Penelope, don't you? Mrs. Gore-Green, Doctor. I was her nanny when she was Master Joey's age, and I came to the States to take care of her little girl. Master Joey, while you were gone, Mrs. Gore-Green rang up and I took the liberty of asking her to stay here with us tonight.”

“See, young man?” the doctor said. “You're going to have two nice ladies to look after you! A harem!” But the kid who had been so full of life was lifeless. He had to do something. “Joey, if you don't buck up, I'm going to have to throw up my hands and take you back to the hospital, and if I do that, either your father or your mother is going to have to worry about you, and that means that one of them isn't going to be able to give all his attention to getting well. Now, you wouldn't want that, would you, Joey?”

“No.”

“You wouldn't want to do anything to hurt Mommy or Daddy?”

“No.”

“Okay. So be a good boy.” His smile shriveled before the boy's eyes. “Remember, you can always parachute down to my place, son!”

“Not out the window, Doctor!”

This kid was no dope. Christ's sake! “Joey knows better than that. Parachute down the elevator, right?” Joey did not answer, but as he walked by to go into the apartment he gave such a look that Dr. Meducca shuddered. Never had seen such a look in a kid's face. On patients' faces when they found out they had an incurable carcinoma—hopeless, trapped; but not a kid's face. He was very glad when, stepping out of the elevator, he saw a woman and heard her asking for the Fane apartment. Because of that trapped look, he went up to her and introduced himself and asked if she was Mrs. Green.

“Gore-Green, yes, Doctor.”

Mrs. G.G. was one of those women who felt that any doctor they met, under any circumstance, wanted to be told their case history, and so, standing there with the elevator waiting, she told him about her rheumatic heart and how it had started with a childhood rheumatic fever and what her present medication was and how difficult everything was for her. He listened patiently, for the kid's sake, since it was obvious that she needed reassurance about herself before she could give anything to the kid. He hadn't been in practice for twenty years without learning how to tell this type of woman that he'd see her in office hours if she wanted to consult him. Finally she went up to the kid.

Now he could get Joey off his mind. He did have a couple of other things on it, God knew.

But he hadn't been home more than a minute when the house phone rang and it was the English nurse again saying, please sir, she must see him at once, sir. Mrs. Gore-Green had come, she said, and would stay with Master Joey, so if she could just step down for a minute.…

He went across the lobby to his office. Then she stood there in front of his desk in the consultation room, a big old woman, twisting her apron between her two hands, such a picture of shame that his mind jumped, of course, to Roberta. So many times Roberta's victims had that look of shame on their faces when they told him what his daughter had done. And because he now believed it was something to do with Roberta, he became frightened. “Well? I haven't got all night,” his voice said, as if only impatient. Because a physician must not show such fright.

“Sir, it would be better for the master and madam if you knew what made them sick.… Is that correct, sir?”

Nothing to do with Roberta, thank God. “Sure. Why? Are you suggesting it wasn't the tunafish?”

“Yes, sir. That is, no, sir. Oh, I'm not sure!” She lifted the apron and took a bottle out of a pocket and set it on the desk. “I found this in Master Joey's room, sir.”

He picked up the bottle. “Spirit of Ipecac. It's an emetic. Makes you vomit. Are you saying that this is what made them sick?”

“Back home we used to give it as a tonic, sir, for children. Three drops. It picked them up something wonderful, sir, so, not knowing if I could get it in the States, I just took it along with me from home. Well, sir, the long and short of it is, I used to give it to Master Joey. A very peaked child he was. It was wicked of me, sir, because Madam didn't wish me to give it to the children. It is very old-fashioned, I suppose, but sir, the long and the short of it is, I did.”

“Go on. Go on.” Because he didn't want her to go on. He knew what was coming.

“Because he was a willful child and wanted to dose himself … you saw how willful, sir … well, I told Master Joey that he couldn't dose himself because if more than three drops went into his pudding … I used to give it to him in his pudding, sir … it would …” she swallowed hard. “It would kill him.”

He heard how dry his voice was. (To hide what he felt.) “Are you saying that this kid put the Spirit of Ipecac into the tunafish to kill his parents?” Then she told him everything, how it could have been done: opportunity, method, timing. How the kid's own pudding was marked but he hadn't touched it anyhow, to make absolutely sure. (God, how careful they were!) She reeled off the whole thing. “And he guessed you found it and that's why he was so scared? That's why he said you'd kill him, huh? What's he got against his folks?” he said wearily.

“Of course they had to send him off to that School, sir. He didn't want to go but the doctor thought it best, so they had to send him.”

“A doctor sent him to school? Why a doctor?” He could see her closing up. “I think you better tell me. You better tell me how come you suspect that a kid of …”

“Master Joey is just past eight, sir.”

“… tried to murder …” It was an attempt to murder since he believed that more than three drops would be fatal. There must have been a hell of a lot more than three drops to make them vomit up their guts that way! “What makes you suspect this kid could …”

She said quietly, “You don't know about Master Ralphie, sir, how he died.”

“No,” he said grimly. “I don't know how Master Ralphie died. You sit down and tell me. Sit down,” he repeated. “Make yourself comfortable.” Because he had been so drawn to this kid, because in contrast to Roberta this kid had seemed to feel … to care.… His eyes had seemed so haunted by even the little he had seen of what his mother and father were enduring, whereas Roberta's eyes … Looking into hell, Roberta's eyes would be as clear and untroubled as a Siamese cat's! And, to him, that was the worst of it! What was that quotation now? He glanced at the blue book on the shelf:
The Mask of Sanity
, a textbook on the psychopath, of which his nineteen-year-old daughter was a prime example. Yes, that was the worst of psychopaths as far as he was concerned, that they didn't even feel what they had done. How did that quote in the book go? “All the horror is in just this, that there is no horror.”

The old woman sat on the patient's chair, her shamed glance on her lap, and told him. “You mean he left this unconscious baby to bleed to death? Deliberately created a—a diversion so as to make sure? Jesus!”

She was shocked. “Oh, no, sir! The doctor explained all that to Madam.”

He listened as long as he could to the
explanation
and then jumped up with such violence that the revolving seat of his leather chair whirled round. “Crap!” he shouted. “Crap!”

“Sir?” She blinked.

He banged both palms on the desk. “Crap. Nonsense. Untrue!”

“The School doctor said so, also.”

“Natch! Of course! Told you there was no such thing as a bad child! Bad parents, bad environment, bad luck!
Crap!
And what did they do to him in that school?”

“Do, sir?”

“Do. For murdering his brother. What did they do? Give him a medal?”

“A medal? I don't think so, sir.”

She told him about the School but she didn't have to tell him. And now they had sent him home. Not—what did they call it—not “disturbed” now. Same thing every time! Let them commit a crime and they are called “disturbed” or insane and are put away, then, because they don't hear voices or hallucinate, because they have the devil's own cleverness, because they can talk themselves out of anything … Philadelphia lawyers … they're no longer insane, so out they go. This kid's no longer “disturbed” so they sent him home where the first crack out of the box, he created another “disturbance” … and what a disturbance it could have been!

“Sir, I don't know for certain that Master Joey did this thing. Perhaps you could show him the bottle and ask him.”

“Ask him? Ask
him?
No, I won't ask him, Mrs.…”

“Please call me Nanny, sir. Everyone calls me Nanny.”

He wouldn't ask him because he'd get nothing but lies. He wouldn't ask him because had that Spirit of Ipecac been, as the kid believed it was, a fatal poison, he would feel nothing. “All the horror is in just this, that there is no horror.” His touching concern about his parents' suffering had been pure fake. If Roberta slid into
his
bedroom tonight and slit his throat, for a whim … and she was capable of it, God knows … there would be no remorse. She would wash her hands of his blood, change into another of her God-knows-how-many dresses and feel as innocent as if she had just taken Holy Communion. “No, I won't ask him, Nanny, but I'll check with the lab. They should have the analysis by now.” While he waited for the report, he looked at the old woman. Her bent face had no hope in it. She was, he saw, sure.

It was the Ipecac, all right. He told the old woman.

She said, “My poor Madam! Sir, when they said at the School he was to come home, do you know what my poor Madam said to me? ‘I'm frightened, Nanny,' she said. And what could poor Nanny do? You know that Mr. Fane has sent me away, sir? Madam must take care of Master Joey herself, if you please, Oh, sir, will you help my poor Madam, sir?”

I'm a fine one to help, he thought. How have I been able to help myself? I'm a fine one to turn to.

“There's no one else, sir.”

“Okay. Okay. I can do one thing, anyhow, Nanny. Mrs. Fane must have eaten much less of the stuff because she's in much better shape. In fact, had I known it was only Spirit of Ipecac, I would have discharged her. Well, the first way I'm going to help is to make sure she stays right in that hospital bed until I can think what to do.”

“Bless you, sir.”

He pulled the telephone towards him. “I'm going to give strict orders that on no condition is Mrs. Fane to be released. For one thing, I'll have them remove her clothes now, before she gets any maternal ideas.”

“And Mr. Fane?” Nanny asked while he was dialing.

“I had to put him under heavy sedation. He won't know a thing until morning.”

Mrs. Gore-Green was rather put out with darling Nanny for darting off the moment she arrived and leaving her alone with this child. What was the trouble with him? The way he kept staring at her made her frightfully uncomfortable. From the first moment, he kept his eyes fixed on her until she felt like something pinned under a microscope which he was studying, but not, oh, not, from curiosity … this was the uncomfortable part … but as if he had to make sure whether she was … benign or malignant. Yes, that was it! She was under a microscope, wriggling, and he was studying her to see whether she meant life or death. “Neither, child,” she told him silently. “I'm just a tired, middle-aged British widow with a wonky heart and please stop looking at me like that because it is bad for me to be made anxious.
My
life and death,” she thought, and wanted to say, “Stop it, stop it, you little beast!” Mrs. Gore-Green managed a smile. “Nanny told me there was a bedroom I could use tonight. Perhaps—er—Joey—you could show me?”

He nodded, but disconcertingly did not unglue his eyes but simply walked backwards across the sitting room and then awkwardly backwards up the three steps and down a short passage. His enormous eyes were so speaking that to get away from them she opened the door to the right and was sorry because she realized, from the low, child-height shelves and blackboard, the child-size maple table and two small chairs, that this must be the nursery. It was impossible to prevent herself from glancing towards the bathroom where, she knew,
it
had happened.

She took a hasty step backwards, but the child had followed so close on her heels that she bumped into him. (Why? Was he frightened? Was he clinging to her?) She heard him gasp. “I beg your pardon,” she said, but it wasn't the bump she had given him. He was now staring glue-eyed at what she used to call Nanny's Rogue's Gallery, set out on top of a white chest of drawers against the far wall. She recognized her photograph and Drusilla's and Althea's, but this child wasn't interested in them.