The Nanny (19 page)

“Well,” she said, “that school gave him enough rope and he hung himself! I will say that to them, Miss Pen: ‘You gave him enough rope and he hung himself with it!' That school will have something to answer for in the morning, won't they?” Then she sighed and, her hand to her back which ached from carrying Miss Pen, straightened up and peered at the clock on the bed table. “I must go now, Miss Pen, but first I'll have that bit of cloth from my pillow.”

Mrs. Gore-Green moaned.

“Now you know Nanny has eyes in the back of her head, dear! I saw you trying to hide it. Give it over. It would never do if they found that in your poor dead hand. How'd I explain that, Miss Pen?”

Her lips painfully formed the difficult negative.

“You should know better than to think you could get the best of Nanny! You never could, could you, dear?” She tugged the piece of embroidered linen out of the clenched hand and laid it on the bed table. “There. Now I can't forget it later. Well, dear,” she said, as she had said so many thousands of times before in the exact words she had used when there was something to do for one of her charges, giving her small capable sigh, “well, dear, now I must go and see to Master Joey.”

As if she had to cover him because he had thrown off the blankets, or help him to the bathroom, or administer an aspirin tablet, she was on her way to the boy's room to murder him.
“Now I must go and see to Master Joey.”
And Nanny was able to do murder without even moving out of nursery language because she had made herself believe that murder was something she must do to protect her latest child, her “poor little Madam.” Nanny saw it—oh, impossible, but
true, true
—as another one of a long series of unpleasant things one had to do for the children in one's charge. Oh, it was righteousness which now straightened her tired shoulders and pushed a ramrod down her old spine!

Nanny left the bedroom door open and although Mrs. Gore-Green could not hear the steps over her own breathing, which was deep now, drowning now, she could in her mind, which was perfectly clear, follow the old woman down the steps. In this clear mind's eye, she could see Nanny propelling her great bulk to that servant's room, and this clarity was her punishment, she thought, not dying, but this. She deserved this punishment because, like Nanny, she too had lied to herself. When Althea had come to her and told her these people needed Nanny, when at last she had the chance to get rid of her with honor, she had lied to herself, telling herself how she hated giving Nanny up, how she didn't see how she could manage without Nanny, taking praise for her unselfishness. And the other day, when it looked as if decency demanded that she take Nanny back again, she had jumped at the excuse of Althea and her attachment, grabbed at it. And Nanny had known, had always known, knew that she, Penelope, would never permit her to get her claws in her again, knew that her poor little Madam was her only hope, so that she, Penelope, was responsible for the child's death, this way, also. Her mind's eye, her guilt's eye, saw the old woman in the kitchen now, picking up the plumped, ruffled pillow again.

And now, much too late, for she had thrown her useless life away uselessly, she gasped with the truth which she had allowed to become too rarefied an air for her. Nanny was about to smother him, and after he was unconscious, as she had righteously explained, she would hang him. The pillow would be lifted high with righteousness. The pillow would come down over the sleeping child's face as she pulled the blanket up over the happy infant in the park, certain, no matter how the infant screamed, that it was right. And when Joey is dead, that will be right, and Nanny will straighten up as she straightened up a thousand times when she came to our beds and did some service for us.

Her breathing had gone shallow again, but there was something she could do. In one last attempt to have truth prevail at last, she did manage to pull herself up a few inches, and reach out; did it, did it, grappled with and conquered the piece of ruffle and closed her fist around it. Then she fell sideways while the old woman softly turned the knob to the maid's room.

Mrs. Gore-Green was dead before she could hear the muffled thud the thick pillow made coming down.

Roberta laid the gun on the examining table where she could grab for it, made Virgie gag herself with two of the office towels, one stuffed into her mouth and one tied around her face, then tied Virgie's legs to the chair with the yellow rubber tubing Dr. Meducca used for tourniquets. She tied Virgie's right hand in back of her and then went to a glass cabinet.

Virgie saw the door swing open and heard a clink of metal as the girl carried whatever it was to a sterilizer. Virgie couldn't see what the girl was dropping into the sterilizer. After this, she went to the cabinet again and took other things out, but this time Virgie could see that she was holding a hypodermic and a small vial.

“Hey! Did you know you could roll your eyes like that? Like who? … like who … someone on the Late Late Show. Eddie Cantor! That's how you can roll your eyes, like Eddie Cantor. Banjo Eyes. You could be a ‘stand in' for Eddie Cantor. Hey! You could be a
‘roll in'
for him, how's that?”

She pushed the needle through the rubber membrane of the vial.

“Relax, Banjo Eyes, I know what I'm doing! One of the places Pa sent me to was nurse's training. Daddy's little helper! But it didn't take.” She giggled reminiscently. “Oh, relax, relax, this is just novocain. Novocain. Look, I don't have the right tools to get the ring off without cutting the gold, see? And if I have to take it to a jeweler, not only will they get nosy … I know,” she said, as if Virgie had contradicted her, “but also they take their own sweet time.”

Virgie tried to make her eyes remind this girl that she had promised to give her the ring tomorrow, that she didn't care about the ring, and the girl seemed to understand.

“No. Leo had the right idea. There's nothing to stop you changing your mind, and anyhow a bird in the hand is a ring on the hand. Relax. After I inject this you won't feel a thing. When the dentist yanks a tooth, you don't feel a thing, do you? If you don't stop that the needle will break and then you won't like it.”

But Virgie could not keep her hand still.

“I've got time. Okay. You'd think you'd be the one in a hurry. Don't you want to get your kid away from the maid? You're a
real
mother, Pa says. Not like me. A real mother. Wouldn't you think you'd want to get up there to your kid?” She leaned against the examining table where the gun was. “A real mother scared of her own kid. That's one for the books, isn't it?”

Virgie's eyes said, “You're crazy. You're crazy,” and the girl read her eyes again.

“That's what Pa told me. He got that from the nursemaid. You told her you were scared of him.”

What a lie, Virgie thought. And then she remembered. She had told Nanny that she was frightened, but surely Nanny had understood she meant frightened she would fail Joey again? If Nanny hadn't understood that then she didn't understand Nanny … and if she didn't understand Nanny …

“You had a right, I guess. I mean with him poisoning the tunafish.” This time she misunderstood what Virgie's eyes were saying. “Pa told me. It really got him going, a kid like that putting stuff he thought was kill-dead poison into Mommy and Daddy's tunafish. The nursemaid's, too. I mean, that's really something! Pa said it was the Spirit of Ipecac. Could only make you sick like it did, but the kid didn't know that, so it was as good as a triple-try murder.

“Oh, you didn't know that? No, you didn't know that. Pa didn't tell you, but the nursemaid told him. I guess that's what got her … got her into the spirit of the thing.” She now held the hypodermic between her second and third fingers as if it were a cigarette.

Now Virgie extended her hand stiffly and closed her eyes because this must be endured. There was no chance of the girl letting her go up to Joey until it was over. (And she didn't dare think that she might not even then.) First this—she felt the jab of the needle—then Joey.

“I'm going to give you a couple more shots, spread around. Better make sure you get enough not to feel.”

Not to feel, not to feel, not to feel now. What was the good of feeling now when she couldn't reach Joey? Hurry, hurry, hurry, Virgie said silently, and then opened her eyes at the sound of breaking glass to see that the girl had flung the hypodermic at the wall. Now the vial followed it. She enjoyed destruction.

“We got to give the stuff five minutes to work,” she said, and went to the sterilizer, opening the lid with a foot lever, peering through the steam. But it wasn't five minutes, barely one minute, when she came back to Virgie. “Okay. Here goes.” She took Virgie's ring finger in her right hand and held the hand with her left. “If you try anything funny, I'm going to shoot you, and don't kid yourself I won't.”

It didn't hurt when the girl pulled and twisted the ring, but it didn't come off. The girl said the words she had used before, then dropped Virgie's hand and went back to the sterilizer.

She said, “I wonder what Pa does to cool the scalpels off?”

A scalpel is a knife. She's going to cut my finger off!

“Do scalpels cool off the minute you take them out?” She opened the sterilizer and lifted a scalpel out with a tongs, giggling at what Virgie's eyes did when she saw it gleaming. “If I put this under the cold water it's going to unsterilize it, Banjo Eyes.” Then she shrugged, walked to the sink and, pressing the floor control for the water tap, Held the scalpel under the water, turning it carefully to cool all of it. “I don't want to burn myself. That ring's not going to do me a bit of good if my hands get burned.”

In the dim lobby, Patrick was writing his letter on the lined pad, slowly. As he finished each sentence, he read it over, his full lips forming the words:
The boss here is a sod, Da. I'm not able to save tuppence ha'penny, and if you're thinking I'm throwing the good money away
—
you wouldn't believe how close I'm keeping myself, Da. A glass of ale to wet my dinner, a cinema with Tom Kerrigan, Uncle Jack's pal's boy, that is. “Ah, it's the girls,” you'll be saying. “Patrick's throwing away the good money on the girls.” Well, Da, it's been a good three months since I touched a girl
. He crossed that out, licked his pencil and wrote:
Well, I have not
. It
was
three months since—Frowning, he began to write again:
Here it's “Don't do this. You can't do that, Reardon.” Mother of God, Da, I'm quitting this scurvy job
. Patrick repeated this, nodding, frowning at the empty lobby. Then he folded the paper three times, making the crease on his knee so that it would lie flat, and pushed the paper into the envelope he had readied. He thrust it into the pocket of the uniform jacket, gave it a pat, set his shoulders, and swaggered across the lobby.

When the doorbell rang, Roberta laid the scalpel down and picked up the gun. “Don't try anything!” she said.

Virgie couldn't take her eyes from the knife. There was no feeling in her fingers at all, perhaps no feeling anywhere in her, all anesthetized, all numbed.

Her hips clicking, Roberta walked to the door. Virgie heard the door open and close and then the voices.

The girl said, “Now?”

“Or never,” a man's voice said. “Now or never, I'm saying, because I'm quitting this scurvy job in the morning, sure.”

Virgie didn't have to think what to do because she had seen it in the movies. She leaned her body so far over to one side that the two legs of the chair did go up and then came down with some noise. Enough noise. The man's voice said, “What's that?”

The girl said, “I'll go see.” As she came in, she picked up the knife daintily and all in one movement, one rush, came to Virgie and drew the knife over the back of Virgie's left hand. For a moment both of them looked at the thin line of blood which marked the cut, then Roberta drew the knife slowly through the air in front of her own throat, smiling.

She called out, walking away. “Nothing. Okay. It's okay.”

Virgie couldn't lift her eyes from the red line thickening on her hand, but she heard steps, and then the door opening and closing, and then nothing.

“That's your da back,” Patrick whispered. He rolled away from Roberta. “I can always tell the way he parks the car and all.”

Naked, Roberta ran to the window in the front of the apartment to make sure. When she returned to her bedroom, Patrick was scrambling into his clothes, and a minute later he climbed out of the window and dropped to the street, just as Dr. Meducca was putting his key into his front door lock.

Roberta threw one pillow back in place at the head of the bed, but there was only time to clasp the other in her arms, when her father came in.

He said, “So there you are! I've been all over looking for you.”

She gave herself a few seconds by acting as if he had awakened her and more time by jumping out of bed, as if half awake, as if confused. Roberta realized that it made her father uncomfortable to see her naked, she didn't know why. It wasn't
that
, she knew that, but she didn't know why. There were many things the reasons for which she didn't understand, but the facts themselves she grasped, and it was a fact that her father seeing her in the raw would see nothing else. Sure enough, he backed hastily out of the bedroom.

“Come in the living room,” he said. “Put something on, for God's sake.” Because she was quite capable of neglecting to, no modesty, no morals, nothing.

Roberta thrust the pink volunteer uniform under the mattress, then studied the room for anything which Patrick might have left. (Once she was decent, the old man would take a good look and she didn't want him finding out about the mick.) She pounced on the wallet which had dropped out of Patrick's trousers, near the chair where he had put them, and, feeling the thickness of the wallet as she hid it, smiled.