The Nanny (11 page)

“Don't, Nanny! Stop!” Her heart was hammering. “This is ridiculous! I will take full responsibility. You simply must go in and see he's all right!”

“If you say so, Miss Pen! Oh, I'm that glad you're here tonight!”

And she was across the room and up the stairs and across the balcony in nothing flat, her big face intent, without a backward glance, all her concern as usual for the child. Mrs. Gore-Green closed her eyes and put her head back and tried to slow her heartbeat and she must have dropped off because she screamed when the two small wet hands clutched at her, shook her.

“She tried to drown me,” he was saying. “She sneaked in and shoved me down and tried to drown me!”

With all the force of which she was capable, Mrs. Gore-Green plucked off the wet clutching hands and pushed. “Nanny tried to
drown you! Drown you!
You wicked little liar,” she blazed, standing up, glaring down at the naked boy. “Oh, you wicked, wicked little liar!”

Joey scrambled to his feet. There was a dark blob on the carpet where she had flung him and, for a moment, his mouth working, he stood there; then he turned and ran out of the apartment. Mrs. Gore-Green gasped and started after him, but she couldn't chase him. She would kill herself if she chased him, so holding onto the chair she lowered herself gently, sank back into it as Nanny appeared, the front of her apron all wet. Mrs. Gore-Green pointed to the door and Nanny nodded.

“He won't get far,” she said grimly. “He'll go straight to the doctor.”

“But he'll tell the doctor that you …”

“That's all right,” Nanny said. “The doctor knows better than to believe a child like Master Joey.” She smoothed the wet and rumpled apron efficiently.

Then the poor kind creature plodded back to the bathroom for a towel to cover the child's nakedness when she caught up with him.

It was over an hour since the patient had vomited last. She had held down some weak, sugared tea, a bit of dry toast and a few spoonfuls of Jello. Her pulse was 78 and regular, blood pressure 128 over 70. Mary Lou took the thermometer out of Mrs. Fane's mouth. Temperature 98.8.

“How is my husband now, please?”

“I told you …” Mary Lou began. This was the tenth time that the patient had had her telephone the sixth floor. If she called again Ryan would give her hell. “Why don't you go and see for yourself?” The patient clasped her palms together at this and Mary Lou saw the emerald ring gleaming.
What a rock
, she thought.
Wow!

“May I? Really, may I?”

“Why not? You're okay, why not?”

“But—but I have no robe or slippers.”

“I'll get you a robe and slippers, how about that, and then you just go down to the sixth floor and see for yourself, how about that?”

“Oh, I'd feel much better if I could see him!” While the nurse was gone, Virgie looked at the ceiling, at the light green walls, at the windows from which she could see, across a grassed plot, more hospital windows. She looked at the armchair in the corner and at the bed table with the sick basin still on it. (She turned away quickly from that.) At the straight chair, at the bed table over the foot of the bed and then at the bed itself, the white cotton puckered cover. Oh, the way Nanny turned down her bed every night and laid out her nightgown, she thought, her skin shuddering away from contact with the rough hospital gown. Why was she always remembering fairy tales in connection with Nanny? Because Dr. Berkover told her that Joey had turned Nanny into the
wicked
mother so that she could remain the
good
mother? Now she recalled the fairy tale about the princess turned into goosegirl, and how the head of the princess's faithful horse had been nailed over the gate under which the goosegirl-princess had to pass, and how it said, “If thy mother could see thee now!”
If Nanny could see me now
, Virgie thought, and her throat ached.

The nurse bustled in and said, “Here we are!” She exhibited the toweling robe, faded and raveled, and a pair of toweling mules.

Virgie sat on the edge of the bed and extended her right foot the way she did at home.

Well! Mary Lou thought, but she bent and slipped the mules on the small, narrow, white feet. The patient then stood up, just stood there like a statue with her left arm stretched out. I'll be damned, Mary Lou thought, but the patient looked as though she would stand that way till hell froze over, so Mary Lou held out the robe and the patient slipped her arms into the sleeves. When the robe was on, it became apparent that the mangle had pulled one sleeve at least six inches longer than the other and the patient stared down at the sleeve as if it frightened her. Was she feeble-minded or something? Mary Lou had to step forward again and roll the sleeve up so it matched the other before the patient could come out of it and tie the belt.

“Your husband is in six-fifty-three. Just go halfway down the corridor, turn to the right and take the elevator to six.” In case she
was
simple-minded, she added, “When you get to six ask where six-fifty-three is, okay?” She watched the patient shuffle off down the corridor. (The slippers were much too large, of course.) Then she went back to the charge desk to give them an imitation of 905 waiting to have her slippers and robe put on. “Helpless as a babe in arms,” she would say, but then remembered that rock of an emerald on the patient's ring finger. “Maybe we should all take lessons from nine-oh-five,” she would say.

Virgie knocked on the door of 653 and was told to come in. She saw the nurse moving toward her as a white blur and Victor quiet on the white bed as another blur, and this was because of the way Victor's secretary, Miss Gore-Green, was sitting there on one of the straight chairs pulled as close to Victor's bed as she could get. Miss Gore-Green didn't even notice when Virgie came in.

“Yes?” Victor's nurse asked. “Yes?”

“I'm—I'm—M-M-Mrs. Fane—”

“The wife?” The nurse swung round to Miss Gore-Green, who had jumped up. “But I … who are you?”

Althea Gore-Green threw her head back and grinned. “Guess! The usual! The secretary, of course, the office wife! Don't be stupid, nurse!” she said, because the cat was out of the bag, that was obvious.

Virgie swerved past Miss Gore-Green to the bed. Victor seemed to be sleeping. Someone had parted his hair on the left side so that he looked wrong. His face was very pale and he was breathing heavily through his mouth.

“That's the sedation, Mrs. Fane,” the nurse said. “Dr. Meducca has given him heavy sedation to help stop the vomiting reflex, but he's going to be fine. Come on, now, Mrs. Fane, there's nothing to it. Your husband is going to be
fine!” Healthwise, anyway
, she told herself.
“Guess! The secretary, of course. The office wife!” What a nerve! What gall!

The nurse had assumed Miss Gore-Green was Victor's wife, Virgie told herself. She did not blame the nurse. Miss Gore-Green had looked like Victor's wife sitting there that way. Virgie kept staring at Victor but what she saw was the way Miss Gore-Green had sat, bent forward, owning Victor. She's in love with him. All right. Any girl would fall in love with Victor, that doesn't mean … Oh, why shouldn't he love her? He hates me now, she thought. Nanny knows. He will never forgive me for Ralphie. He had a date with her tonight, she told herself, that's why he wouldn't stay home even on Joey's first evening because he'd rather be with her. She's the one he's been seeing all those evenings he went out. And now she saw, as she had seen from the window of the apartment, Victor hurrying towards First Avenue. Towards
her
.

“Now, Mrs. Fane, there's no call to cry.”
Now
it came to her that the wife had eaten the tunafish, too, and was up on nine.
Now
she remembered! But Mrs. Fane wouldn't kick up a fuss about her having let the other one in. Mrs. Fane, she decided, studying Virgie, couldn't kick up a fuss about anything. Her money was on the secretary; she could wipe the floor with the wife. “Tomorrow morning, when you've had some sleep and Mr. Fane is out of sedation, you'll see all this worry is just silly.”
This healthwise worry
, she added to herself, jerking her head at the secretary, who took the hint and got the hell out while she took the wife by the elbow, grasping firmly through the raveled toweling, and got
her
out of the room. “Now you come back in the morning,” she said, moved in spite of herself by the black misery on the pretty face, because in her opinion it was always the wife's doing if she lost her man.

“Nanny, Nanny, Nanny,” Virgie was intoning inwardly. She wanted Nanny. She ached for her.

“Well?” Althea Gore-Green said, blocking Virgie's way in the corridor. She moved her feet so that she was planted there even more solidly. “The cat's out of the bag, so let's have it. Well?”

Virgie bit her lip hard. Miss Gore-Green's voice was as firm as her posture. She was so self-assured in the rose silk suit. Virgie felt crippled in the raveled toweling robe. She managed to squeak, “Well, what?” in a tiny voice, like a mouse.

“Well, would you like to know, for instance, how I knew that Victor was here? When Victor left the office to drive to Joey's school, he was in perfect health. We had a date at the Plaza at nine. Wouldn't you like to know how I knew he would be in a bed in New York Hospital instead?”

Virgie couldn't control her wobbling chin.

“How did I know to come here? This will kill you,” she said, laughing.
“Nanny
told me Victor was here!”

She waited, nodding, while Virgie, who could not say it aloud, repeated it to herself, “Nanny told you?
Nanny
told you?”

“And not because she thought Victor had some dictation to give me tonight, either. I thought that would get you,” she said. “And that isn't all Nanny told me. You might as well get the whole picture,” she said, and wet her lips, but then as if she were afraid this might disturb Victor (and as if Virgie didn't mind disturbing Victor) she, too, grabbed the sleeve of the raveled toweling robe, and began to move Virgie away from 653, talking as she went. “Nanny told me she's known about us for months.” Her voice became harsh and loud and a passing nurse frowned. “Nanny found a note I wrote to Victor in the pocket of a suit she was sending to the cleaner's. All very sordid, isn't it? Yes, it is. The note didn't say much. Actually I only wrote I'd better not meet him because Mummy had been nattering at me again. I didn't even sign the thing but, don't kid yourself, Nanny's a bright old bird! She got the message. The ‘Mummy,' I suppose, and ‘nattering,' or perhaps Mummy'd told her that she suspected there was someone unsuitable. I can just hear Mummy! Anyhow, Nanny knew!”

Virgie pulled her sleeve loose because she had lost one of the slippers. She walked back down the corridor to retrieve it.
Nanny knew! Nanny knew!
She had to look down to pick up the mule and when she looked up again, Miss Gore-Green was there again, talking again.

“Nanny knows, which doesn't mean a thing except that she can put two and two together, but Nanny told me yesterday that she approves … which means a lot! That's what I wanted to tell you: Nanny knows and Nanny approves!”

Virgie held the mule to her breast as if she had been stabbed there. Althea noticed that.

“And you know what it means that she approves. You know there isn't anything anybody could do to make her approve something she considered wrong. I knew that much when I was two! Yes,” she said, stabbing again, “we have Nanny's blessing! When I called tonight and she told me Victor was in the hospital, I warned her that if you saw me here, even you would guess, and she said it was time you did. How about that? Nanny must have decided this had better come out tonight or she wouldn't have told me where Victor was, how about that?”

Virgie began to shake her head. No, no, no.

“Yes,” Althea said. “I was as shocked as you are. Nanny's approval? How could I have Nanny's approval? But the reason must be that no one knows better than Nanny—except perhaps. Victor—that you're not his wife. You're nobody's wife. You're not even a woman, and who would know that better than Nanny? And even she knows a woman needs a man and a man needs a woman.” Now Miss Gore-Green's hand went to
her
breast, but not to stanch a bleeding wound, but rather to show that
she
was a woman. “Whereas,” she said, “whereas a child—” here she pointed at Virgie's bare foot, at the raveled robe, at the fair hair lying on Virgie's shoulders—“only needs a nanny!”

“Sh!” someone said. “Sh! Sh!”

But it was no longer necessary. There was nothing more for Althea to say. She would say it again if challenged, her stance proclaimed, over and over again, to anyone. Her head went up defiantly, but she saw that she wasn't going to be challenged, that Virgie wasn't going to say a word, so she shrugged and moved on to the smoking room. A cigarette would help her think because she had done it now and no mistake!

Released, Virgie began to run in the opposite direction. The slippers came off and she picked them up but ran on barefoot. The elevator came up and to get away, to get away, she stepped into it. The operator looked curiously at her bare feet, and because she was afraid he would stop her, she put the mules on again, trying to hold them on with her toes. When the elevator stopped, she got out and scuffled off to the left, but for no other reason than that on the sixth floor, Miss Gore-Green had walked to the right. There was a thick knot of people in the corridor, and since Virgie was unable to ask them to let her go by, she simply stood there. Everybody was facing one of the glass windows set into the corridor wall because behind it was the nursery with its rows of Plexiglas bassinets. Behind the glass, the nurse was just about to scoop up the infant in the fourth bassinet and exhibit it. Then a middle-aged woman noticed Virgie in her hospital bathrobe, and clicking sympathetically, spread her arms wide, like a policeman holding back a mob, and made room for Virgie. “They don't let you see! It's a shame! Let her see,” she said. “Let the mother see!”