Nothing That Meets the Eye (27 page)

By half past six, washed and in a complete change of clothing to heighten the pleasure of the main meal of her day, Louisa was on her way down Mrs. Holpert's stairs. She heard the front door close, and saw Mrs. Holpert returning to her apartment down the hall.

“Evening, Miss Trott,” Mrs. Holpert said.

“Good evening, Mrs. Holpert. Is Eleanor any better this evening?”

Mrs. Holpert's wide form came to a stop. “That was the doctor then. Jeannie's down with the same kind of cough, and the doctor says it looks like scarlet fever.”

Scarlet fever! That's quite serious, isn't it?”

“It is.” Slouched in her plain housedress and flat-heeled slippers, Mrs. Holpert looked stricken and resigned. “He's coming back for a look tomorrow, and if it's so, why, I've got my hands full, with Helen away.”

Louisa had almost forgotten Mrs. Holpert was not the children's mother, but their grandmother. Helen was out of town most of the time with her theater work. It was Louisa's opinion Helen was too interested in men. “I'm very sorry to hear,” Louisa said rather formally, for she was not on intimate terms with Mrs. Holpert. “Tell Jeannie Miss Trotte sends her kind regards and for her to get well so we can look at the fur coats together. She'll know what I mean.”

The next morning on her way to the bathroom, Louisa encountered Miss Eldstahl, who lived in the next room to hers.

“Did you hear, Miss Trott?” Miss Eldstahl whispered. “Mrs. Holpert's little girls have got scarlet fever!”

“Really? Are they going to the hospital?” Louisa asked casually, determined not to be as emotional as Miss Eldstahl.

“No, they've been quarantined instead. Mrs. Dusenberre said they looked like two little embers of fever, and Mrs. Holpert told me last night she thinks she's coming down with it, too. I'm certainly going to give the back hall a wide berth, and you can pass the word on to the others.” With a sudden dilation of her eyes, Miss Eldstahl glided up the hall toward her room, her freshly washed face and long bathrobe lending her an air of dramatic tragedy.

When Miss Eldstahl's door had closed, Louisa went and leaned over the thick brown banister. She did not know whether to believe Miss Eldstahl's report entirely. Both she and Mrs. Holpert, Louisa considered, were alarmists. Still, there was a hushed feeling belowstairs. The thought that Jeannie might not stroll out to see her as she looked at the mail, the fact that she had not visited the evening before, sent a twinge of anxiety through Louisa.

Downstairs, as she looked absently through the mail that was not sorted as usual on the long table, Louisa debated whether to go back and call on Mrs. Holpert to see how Jeannie was. She looked at her wristwatch, saw that she had less time than usual, then strode off toward the darkness at the back of the hall. She was especially pleased that Miss Eldstahl was descending the stairs at that moment.

“Come in,” Mrs. Holpert called weakly in answer to Louisa's knock.

Louisa stepped into a dark foyer, from which she could see, through a half-open door beyond, Mrs. Holpert propped up in her four-poster bed. The single light from the lamp on her bedtable gave an atmosphere of gloom. Mrs. Holpert's apartment was always in twilight, for the windows faced on the side alleys or on the walled-in garden at the rear.

Mrs. Holpert waved her hand above the bedclothes. “Don't come any closer. I thought you was the doctor.”

Louisa did not know what to say at first. Mrs. Holpert did not look flushed as she thought the children would. And there was something about the woman's bulk beneath the disheveled sheets that was distasteful to Louisa. “Are the children any better, Mrs. Holpert?”

“They'll get worse of course before they're better.”

“Well, it's not likely grown people will catch the disease, is it?” Louisa asked, feeling rather foolish backed up against the door where Mrs. Holpert had motioned her.

“It's hit me,” Mrs. Holpert averred. “And what it'll do to my heart, Lord only knows. I hear it's death on a weak heart.”

“Really!” Louisa almost added, “If there's anything I can do . . .” But Mrs. Holpert, she felt sure, was still able to do for herself. She looked at the closed door off Mrs. Holpert's room, from behind which came Jeannie's muffled coughing. She would have liked to see Jeannie, but somehow she did not want to ask even this favor of Mrs. Holpert.

“Reach me that water glass, Miss Trott?” Mrs. Holpert requested, extending her arm feebly.

Louisa handed her the glass from the bedtable. Then she glanced at her wristwatch, as though there were things she had to do, too.

Mrs. Holpert, however, did not seem to see the gesture. She was sipping slowly from the glass she held with both hands, and her eyes were closed. “Wish you'd see how the children are, Miss Trott. Just look in, if you will.”

Louisa started for the door, aware of the contrast of her whiplike figure with the sluggish obesity on the bed. The room beyond was dark, and Jeannie sat up and squinted at the light the opening door let in.

“Jeannie, darling? It's Miss Trott.”

As though the sight of her friend recalled the pleasures she was missing, Jeannie screwed her face up and began to wail.

“Jeannie, you mustn't cry!” Louisa felt very inadequate and awkward, with Mrs. Holpert within hearing. She glanced at the smaller Eleanor, who lay sleeping in her big wooden playpen across the room, her arms thrown up beside her curly blond head. Louisa thought her face looked darkly rosy. Scarlet fever! And closed up with her in this room, Jeannie would certainly have caught it, too. Hadn't Mrs. Holpert the sense to have kept them separate? Something in Louisa resented the children's suffering with a fighting compassion. It was perhaps her hatred of inefficiency, her contempt for Mrs. Holpert's carelessness. She wanted to go and lay her hand on Jeannie's forehead, but she was not sure that would serve any purpose at all. Moreover, she found herself somewhat repelled. She felt she could almost see the germs that hung and milled about in the air. There was a strange smell in the room that put her on guard, not merely the smell of medicine, but of sickness.

“Why, you'll be feeling fine in no time, Jeannie. Then we can look at the fur coats together. Remember? Won't that be nice?” How hypocritical she felt.

“Nope. I'm sick!” Jeannie said, the cry of the betrayed.

Louisa went back into Mrs. Holpert's room and closed the door. She wanted to haul the woman out of bed. “You're having a nurse, I suppose?”

Mrs. Holpert shook her head. “Not yet. I'll manage somehow. I'll manage.”

Saving her money, but what about the children? Louisa thought, as she bade good-bye to Mrs. Holpert and walked slowly up the hall. She stopped at the first doors and stood staring at the multicolored lozenges of glass. Then suddenly she turned and went to the pay telephone under the stairs. By the yellow bulb's light she could just see to dial.

“Hello, Miss Freeman? This is Louisa Trotte. Would you tell Mr. Bramford when he comes in that I'll be an hour or so late this morn­ing? . . .”

When Louisa put the receiver down, she felt like a derailed train. For the first time in five or six years, she was not going to be at work by nine o'clock. She had decided to wait for the doctor and to ask just how badly off Jeannie was.

“You give the children one of these every two hours, and Mrs. Hoplert two every two hours. It's a mild anti-phlogistine.”

Louisa nodded and looked at the bottle of white pills the doctor set on the foyer table. She did not like the doctor. In the first place, he seemed too young and too fast about things. In the second, he could not get Mrs. Holpert's name straight, though she had corrected him twice. And knowing nothing about her except that she was one of the lodgers, he had entrusted her with these pills.

“That clear?” Dr. Marlowe said, throwing on his tweed topcoat.

“Yes.” Louisa hesitated. She looked at Mrs. Holpert's door. “But you see I—ordinarily I go to business.”

“Oh. But you're taking today off, aren't you?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“Good. I'll see about getting a nurse or something by tonight. Guess I'll call in about . . . six-thirty.”

Louisa listened to his firm tread up the hall. Then the doors slammed and there was silence. She was closed in with the three bedridden, and there was no one in the house on whom she could thrust the pills. The only one who did not go to business was Mr. Noenzi, who was almost too old to move. And Mrs. Dusenberre, of course, but she was too stupid for any use. Mrs. Dusenberre could kill all three of them.

“Louisa?” Mrs. Holpert's voice drifted plaintively.

Well, she thought, Mr. Bramford could do without her for one day. After all these years! She turned and went into Mrs. Holpert's room with the same vigorous step she would have used that morning had she been walking down Fifth Avenue.

The morning had slipped into afternoon before Louisa looked at her watch with an eye to finding out the time for herself. It was quarter past one. Mrs. Holpert was asleep after what Louisa considered a rather hearty meal. Mr. Bramford would be returning from lunch, hanging his brown felt hat on the clothes tree that would be quite bare. Louisa looked about at Mrs. Holpert's bedroom, which she had just dusted and swept, at the articles which had become familiar to her in the past four hours, and she found it strange to think of the interior of Mr. Bramford's office some fifty blocks away. It was strange to think of its being quarter past one of a Thursday afternoon and she not there. Mr. Bramford probably thought she had decided to take the entire morning off, and would come in after lunch. But now that she was not there after lunch . . .

She sank down into Mrs. Holpert's armchair, suddenly very tired with the unaccustomed physical activity of the morning, and for a moment yielded to a fancy she had not since childhood, of imagining the movements of a faraway person moment by moment. . . . Mr. Bramford would be standing by the window now, smoothing slowly his graying hair, which had been ruffled by his hat. He would be wondering if she were on her way, or what the matter could be. He would sit down, start to read something, then decide to call her. He would reach for the phone and tell Miss Freeman to dial—

The telephone anticipated Louisa by a few seconds, and she jumped half out of her chair. She hurried into the hall, her heart beating oddly fast as she told herself it could not be he.

But it was Mr. Bramford. The sound of his quiet, hesitant voice reassured her.

“You're not sick, are you?” Mr. Bramford asked worriedly when Louisa had explained.

“No, indeed! It's just that there's no one else here to look after them until the nurse comes tonight. . . . Oh, yes, Mr. Bramford, I'll be in tomorrow. I hope it doesn't inconvenience you too much. . . . Well, thank you, Mr. Bramford. That's very kind of you. And oh, yes, those Phipps Motor letters are in the upper left-hand drawer of my desk. . . .”

Smiling tensely, with an absent look in her eyes, Louisa walked back into Mrs. Holpert's room, through the children's room and down the hall to the kitchen, from whose window she looked out on the little garden she had always seen from her second-story roof. The sunlight fell vertically now on the jungle of pointed leaves of the big tree in the center, and on the scraggly ivy that went partially up the brick wall at one side. She noticed that some of the leaves were turning brown, and realized that it was really autumn now, not merely the vague end of summer. It was nice somehow to have a day in which she did not work as she usually did. She did not feel guilty at all since speaking with Mr. Bramford. She could appreciate the day, even though she had more difficult tasks than usual, just because of its novelty. Funny, she thought, that she should enjoy a break in routine so much, when she knew how devoted she was to routine.

That evening, the young doctor confirmed his belief that Mrs. Holpert had scarlet fever.

“Well,” he sighed to Louisa in the outside hall, “she'll fuss about her weak heart, of course, but there's no danger as long as you keep her in bed.”

“That'll be easy enough,” Louisa said, rather testy after her long day. “Well, shall I try for a nurse?”

Dr. Marlowe shook his head in a way that vexed Louisa. “Miss Trotter, there's not a nurse to be had for a case like this unless you advertise all over the place. I know. I've tried five hospitals.”

“But—I've got my work to do, too,” Louisa protested.

He nodded. “Try and get someone else in the house to relieve you, that's all. They won't need constant attention. I'll look in tomorrow morning.” He screwed his fountain pen cap on and handed Louisa a scrawled note. “Instructions about those new pills. You're doing a fine job so far. See you tomorrow.”

Louisa gave a sniff at his retreating figure. Yet his careless phrase about her service had pleased her. She felt needed. She was also needed at the office, but more, she was needed here. Jeannie needed her. There was no one else in the house she could imagine nursing Jeannie properly. She smiled with a look of stern gratification and bent nearer the lamp to read the new instructions she had crumpled in self-generated shyness.