Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense Read online

  Mrs. Christiansen took her upstairs to the nursery. She opened the door of a room whose walls were decorated with bright peasant designs, dancing couples and dancing animals, and twisting trees in blossom. There were twin beds of buff-colored oak, and the floor was yellow linoleum, spotlessly clean.

  The two children lay on the floor in one corner, amid scattered crayons and picture books.

  “Children, this is your new nurse,” their mother said. “Her name is Lucille.”

  The little boy stood up and said, “How do you do,” as he solemnly held out a crayon-stained hand.

  Lucille took it, and with a slow nod of her head repeated his greeting.

  “And Heloise,” Mrs. Christiansen said, leading the second child, who was smaller, toward Lucille.

  Heloise stared up at the figure in white and said, “How do you do.”

  “Nicky is nine and Heloise six,” Mrs. Christiansen told her.

  “Yes,” Lucille said. She noticed that both children had a touch of red in their blond hair, like their father. Both wore blue overalls without shirts, and their backs and shoulders were sun-brown beneath the straps.

  Lucille could not take her eyes from them. They were the perfect children of her perfect house. They looked up at her frankly, with no mistrust, no hostility. Only love, and some childlike curiosity.

  “. . . and most people do prefer living where there’s more country,” Mrs. Christiansen was saying.

  “Oh, yes . . . yes, ma’am. It’s ever so much nicer here than in the city.”

  Mrs. Christiansen was smoothing the little girl’s hair with a tenderness that fascinated Lucille. “It’s just about time for their lunch,” she said. “You’ll have your meals up here, Lucille. And would you like tea or coffee or milk?”

  “I’d like coffee, please.”

  “All right, Lisabeth will be up with the lunch in a few minutes.” She paused at the door. “You aren’t nervous about anything, are you, Lucille?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Oh, no, ma’am.”

  “Well, you mustn’t be.” She seemed about to say something else, but she only smiled and went out.

  Lucille stared after her, wondering what that something else might have been.

  “You’re a lot prettier than Catherine,” Nicky told her.

  She turned around. “Who’s Catherine?” Lucille seated herself on a hassock, and as she gave all her attention to the two children who still gazed at her, she felt her shoulders relax their tension.

  “Catherine was our nurse before. She went back to Scotland because of the war. I’m glad you’re here. We didn’t like Catherine.”

  Heloise stood with her hands behind her back, swaying from side to side as she regarded Lucille. “No,” she said, “we didn’t like Catherine.”

  Nicky stared at his sister. “You shouldn’t say that. That’s what I said!”

  Lucille laughed and hugged her knees. Then Nicky and Heloise laughed too.

  A colored maid entered with a steaming tray and set it on the table in the center of the room. She was slender and of indefinite age. “I’m Lisabeth Jenkins, miss,” she said shyly as she laid some paper napkins at three places.

  “My name’s Lucille Smith,” the girl said.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to do the rest, miss. If you need anything else, just holler.” She went out, her hips small and hard-looking under the blue uniform.

  The three sat down to the table, and Lucille lifted the cover from the large dish, exposing three parsley-garnished omelets, bright yellow in the bar of sunlight that crossed the table. But first there was tomato soup for her to ladle out, and triangles of buttered toast to pass. Her coffee was in a silver pot, and the children had two large glasses of milk.

  The table was low for Lucille, but she did not mind. It was so wonderful merely to be sitting here with these children, with the sun warm and cheerful on the yellow linoleum floor, on the table, on Heloise’s ruddy face opposite her. How pleasant not to be in the Howell house! She had always been clumsy there. But here it would not matter if she dropped a pewter cover or let a gravy spoon fall in someone’s lap. The children would only laugh.

  Lucille sipped her coffee.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” Heloise asked, her mouth already full.

  The cup slipped in Lucille’s fingers and she spilled half her coffee on the cloth. No, it was not cloth, thank goodness, but oilcloth. She could get it up with a paper towel, and Lisabeth would never know.

  “Piggy!” laughed Heloise.

  “Heloise!” Nicky admonished, and went to fetch some paper towels from the bathroom.

  They mopped up together.

  “Dad always gives us a little of his coffee,” Nicky remarked as he took his place again.

  Lucille had been wondering whether the children would mention the accident to their mother. She sensed that Nicky was offering her a bribe. “Does he?” she asked.

  “He pours a little in our milk,” Nicky went on, “just so we can see the color.”

  “Like this?” And Lucille poured a bit from the graceful silver spout into each glass.

  The children gasped with pleasure. “Yes!”

  “Mother doesn’t like us to have coffee,” Nicky explained, “but when she’s not looking, Dad lets us have a little like you did. Dad says his day wouldn’t be any good without his coffee, and I’m the same way. Gosh, Catherine wouldn’t give us any coffee like that, would she, Heloise?”

  “Not her!” Heloise took a long delicious draught from her glass which she held with both hands.

  Lucille felt a glow rise from deep inside her until it settled in her face and burned there. The children liked her, there was no doubt of that.

  She remembered now how often she had gone to the public parks in the city, during the three years she had worked as maid in various houses (to be a maid was all she was fit for, she used to think), merely to sit on a bench and watch the children play. But the children there had usually been dirty or foul-mouthed, and she herself had always been an outsider. Once she had seen a mother slap her own child across the face. She remembered how she had fled in pain and horror.

  “Why do you have such big eyes?” Heloise demanded.

  Lucille started. “My mother had big eyes too,” she said deliberately, like a confession.

  “Oh,” Heloise replied, satisfied.

  Lucille cut slowly into the omelet she did not want. Her mother had been dead three weeks now. Only three weeks and it seemed much, much longer. That was because she was forgetting, she thought, forgetting all the hopeless hope of the last three years, that her mother might recover in the sanatorium. But recover to what? The illness was something separate, something which had killed her.

  It had been senseless to hope for a complete sanity which she knew her mother had never had. Even the doctors had told her that. And they had told her other things, too, about herself. Good, encouraging things they were, that she was as normal as her father had been.

  Looking at Heloise’s friendly little face across from her, Lucille felt the comforting glow return. Yes, in this perfect house, closed from all the world, she could forget and start anew.

  “Are we ready for some dessert?” she asked.

  Nicky pointed to her plate. “You’re not finished eating.”

  “I wasn’t very hungry.” Lucille divided her dessert between them.

  “We could go out to the sandbox now,” Nicky suggested. “We always go just in the mornings, but I want you to see our castle.”

  The sandbox was in back of the house in a corner made by a projecting ell. Lucille seated herself on the wooden rim of the box while the children began piling and patting like gnomes.

  “I must be the captured princess!” Heloise shouted.

  “Yes, and I’ll rescue her, Lucille. You’ll see!”

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bsp; The castle of moist sand rose rapidly. There were turrets with tin flags sticking from their tops, a moat, and a drawbridge made of the lid of a cigar box covered with sand. Lucille watched, fascinated. She remembered vividly the story of Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca. She had read Ivanhoe through at one long sitting, oblivious of time and place just as she was now.

  When the castle was finished, Nicky put half a dozen marbles inside it just behind the drawbridge. “These are good soldiers imprisoned,” he told her. He held another cigar box lid in front of them until he had packed up a barrier of sand. Then he lifted the lid and the sand door stood like a porte-cochere.

  Meanwhile Heloise gathered ammunition of small pebbles from the ground next to the house. “We break the door down and the good soldiers come down the hill across the bridge. Then I’m saved!”

  “Don’t tell her! She’ll see!”

  Seriously Nicky thumped the pebbles from the rim of the sandbox opposite the castle door, while Heloise behind the castle thrust a hand forth to repair the destruction as much as she could between shots, for besides being the captured princess she was the defending army.

  Suddenly Nicky stopped and looked at Lucille. “Dad knows how to shoot with a stick. He puts the rock on one end and hits the other. That’s a balliska.”

  “Ballista,” Lucille said.

  “Golly, how did you know?”

  “I read it in a book—about castles.”

  “Golly!” Nicky went back to his thumping, embarrassed that he had pronounced the word wrong. “We got to get the good soldiers out fast. They’re captured, see? Then when they’re released that means we can all fight together and take the castle!”

  “And save the princess!” Heloise put in.

  As she watched, Lucille found herself wishing for some real catastrophe, something dangerous and terrible to befall Heloise, so that she might throw herself between her and the attacker, and prove her great courage and devotion. She would be seriously wounded herself, perhaps with a bullet or a knife, but she would beat off the assailant. Then the Christiansens would love her and keep her with them always. If some madman were to come upon them suddenly now, someone with a slack mouth and bloodshot eyes, she would not be afraid for an instant.

  She watched the sand wall crumble and the first good soldier marble struggled free and came wobbling down the hill. Nicky and Heloise whooped with joy. The wall gave way completely, and two, three, four soldiers followed the first, their stripes turning gaily over the sand.

  Lucille leaned forward. Now she understood! She was like the good soldiers imprisoned in the castle. The castle was the Howell house in the city, and Nicky and Heloise had set her free. She was free to do good deeds. And now if only something would happen . . .

  “O-o-ow!”

  It was Heloise. Nicky had mashed one of her fingers against the edge of the box as they struggled to get the same marble.

  Lucille seized the child’s hand, her heart thumping at the sight of the blood that rose from many little points in the scraped flesh. “Heloise, does it hurt very much?”

  “Oh, she wasn’t supposed to touch the marbles in the first place!” Disgruntled, Nicky sat in the sand.

  Lucille held her handkerchief over the finger and half carried her into the house, frantic lest Lisabeth or Mrs. Christiansen see them. She took Heloise into the bathroom that adjoined the nursery, and in the medicine cabinet found mercurochrome and gauze.

  Gently she washed the finger. It was only a small scrape, and Heloise stopped her tears when she saw how slight it was.

  “See, it’s just a little scratch!” Lucille said, but that was only to calm the child. To her it was not a little scratch. It was a terrible thing to happen the first afternoon she was in charge, a catastrophe she had failed to prevent. She wished over and over that the hurt might be in her own hand, twice as severe.

  Heloise smiled as she let the bandage be tied. “Don’t punish Nicky,” she said. “He didn’t mean to do it. He just plays rough.”

  But Lucille had no idea of punishing Nicky. She wanted only to punish herself, to seize a stick and thrust it into her own palm.

  “Why do you make your teeth like that?”

  “I—I thought it might be hurting you.”

  “It doesn’t hurt any more.” And Heloise went skipping out of the bathroom. She leaped onto her bed and lay on the tan cover that fitted the corners and came all the way to the floor. Her bandaged finger showed startlingly white against the brown of her arm.

  “We have to take our afternoon nap now,” she told Lucille, and closed her eyes. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” Lucille answered, and tried to smile.

  She went down to get Nicky and when they came up the steps Mrs. Christiansen was at the nursery door.

  Lucille blanched. “I don’t think it’s bad, ma’am. It—it’s a scratch from the sandbox.”

  “Heloise’s finger? Oh, no, don’t worry, my dear. They’re always getting little scratches. It does them good. Makes them more careful.”

  Mrs. Christiansen went in and sat on the edge of Nicky’s bed. “Nicky, dear, you must learn to be more gentle. Just see how you frightened Lucille!” She laughed and ruffled his hair.

  Lucille watched from the doorway. Again she felt herself an outsider, but this time because of her incompetence. Yet how different this was from the scenes she had witnessed in the parks!

  Mrs. Christiansen patted Lucille’s shoulder as she went out. “They’ll forget all about it by nightfall.”

  “Nightfall,” Lucille whispered as she went back into the nursery. “What a beautiful word!”

  While the children slept, Lucille looked through an illustrated book of Pinocchio. She was avid for stories, any kind of stories, but most of all adventure stories and fairy tales. And at her elbow on the children’s shelf there were scores of them. It would take her months to read them all. It did not matter that they were for children. In fact, she found that kind more to her liking, because such stories were illustrated with pictures of animals dressed up, and tables and houses and all sorts of things come to life.

  Now she turned the pages of Pinocchio with a sense of contentment and happiness so strong that it intruded on the story she was reading. The doctor at the sanatorium had encouraged her reading, she remembered, and had told her to go to movies too. “Be with normal people and forget all about your mother’s difficulties. . . .” (Difficulties, he had called it then, but all other times he had said “strain.” Strain it was, like a thread, running through the generations. She had thought, through her.)

  Lucille could still see the psychiatrist’s face, his head turned a little to one side, his glasses in his hand as he spoke, just as she had thought a psychiatrist should look. “Just because your mother had a strain, there’s no reason why you should not be as normal as your father was. I have every reason to believe you are. You are an intelligent girl, Lucille. Get yourself a job out of the city—relax, enjoy life. I want you to forget even the house your family lived in. After a year in the country—”

  That, too, was three weeks ago, just after her mother had died in the ward. And what the doctor said was true. In this house where there were peace and love, beauty and children, she could feel the moils of the city sloughing off her like a snake’s outworn skin. Already, in this one half day! In a week she would forget forever her mother’s face.

  With a little gasp of joy that was almost ecstasy she turned to the bookshelf and chose at random six tall, slender, brightly colored books. One she laid open, face down, in her lap. Another she opened and leaned against her breast. Still holding the rest in one hand, she pressed her face into Pinocchio’s pages, her eyes half closed.

  Slowly she rocked back and forth in the chair, conscious of nothing but her own happiness and gratitude. The chimes downstairs struck three times, but she did not hear them.

 
“What are you doing?” Nicky asked, his voice politely curious.

  Lucille brought the book down from her face. When the meaning of his question struck her, she flushed and smiled like a happy but guilty child. “Reading!” she laughed.

  Nicky laughed too. “You read awful close.”

  “Ya-yuss,” said Heloise, who had also sat up.

  Nicky came over and examined the books in her lap. “We get up at three o’clock. Would you read to us now? Catherine always read to us till dinner.”

  “Shall I read to you out of Pinocchio?” Lucille suggested, happy that she might possibly share with them the happiness she had gained from the first pages of its story. She sat down on the floor so they could see the pictures as she read.

  Nicky and Heloise pushed their eager faces over the pictures, and sometimes Lucille could hardly see to read. She did not realize that she read with a tense interest that communicated itself to the two children, and that this was why they enjoyed it so much. For two hours she read, and the time slipped by almost like so many minutes.

  Just after five Lisabeth brought in the tray with their dinner, and when the meal was over Nicky and Heloise demanded more reading until bedtime at seven. Lucille gladly began another book, but when Lisabeth returned to remove the tray, she told Lucille that it was time for the children’s bath, and that Mrs. Christiansen would be up to say good night in a little while.

  Mrs. Christiansen was up at seven, but the two children by that time were in their robes, freshly bathed, and deep in another story with Lucille on the floor.

  “You know,” Nicky said to his mother, “we’ve read all these books before with Catherine, but when Lucille reads them they seem like new books!”

  Lucille flushed with pleasure. When the children were in bed, she went downstairs with Mrs. Christiansen.

  “Is everything fine, Lucille? I thought there might be something you’d like to ask me about the running of things.”

  “No, ma’am, except . . . might I come up once in the night to see how the children are doing?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want you to break your sleep, Lucille. That’s very thoughtful, but it’s really unnecessary.”