understood the evil importance of appearances. Deborah was taciturn about the way in which she spent her days. She would tell no one where she had been or what she had done. Mrs. Harley had found that she could count on this trait, and so the child and the old woman had come to share a number of secrets.
On several late-winter afternoons when the weather had been bitter and dark and Mrs. Harley had been ordered to keep Deborah out until five, she had taken the child to the movies. Deborah had sat beside her in the dark theatre and never complained or cried. Now and then she craned her neck to look at the screen, but most of the time she just sat quiet, listening to the voices and the music. A second secret?and one much less sinful, in Mrs. Harley’s opinion?was that on Sunday mornings, sometimes, and sometimes on weekday afternoons, Mrs. Harley had left the little girl with a friend of the Tennysons. This was a woman named Renee Hall, and there was no harm in it, Mrs. Harley thought. She had never told the Tennysons, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. When Renee took Deborah on Sundays, Mrs. Harley went to the eleven-o’clock Mass, and there was nothing wrong, surely, with an old woman’s going into the house of God to pray for her dead.
Mrs. Harley sat down on one of the benches in the park that morning. The sun was hot and it felt good on her old legs. The air was so clear that the perspective of the river seemed to have changed. You could throw a stone onto Welfare Island, it seemed, and a trick of the light made the downtown bridges look much closer to the center of the city. Boats were going up and down the river, and as they cut the water they left in the air a damp and succinct odor, like the smell of fresh earth that follows a plow. Another nurse and child were the only other people in the park. Mrs. Harley told Deborah to go play in the sand. Then Deborah saw the dead pigeon. “The pigeon is sleeping,” Deborah said. She stooped down to touch its wings.
“That dirty bird is dead, and don’t you dare touch it!” Mrs. Harley shouted.
“The pretty pigeon is sleeping,” Deborah said. Her face clouded suddenly and tears came into her eyes. She stood with her hands folded in front of her and her head bowed, an attitude that was a comical imitation of Mrs. Harley’s reaction to sorrow, but the grief in her voice and her face came straight from her heart.
“Get away from that dirty bird!” Mrs. Harley shouted, and she got up and kicked the dead bird aside. “Go play in the sand,” she told Deborah. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. They must have given twenty-five dollars for that doll carriage you have up in your room, but you’d rather play with a dead bird. Go look at the river. Go look at the boats! And don’t climb up on that railing, either, for you’ll drop in, and with that terrible current that will be the end of you.” Deborah walked obediently over to the river. “Here I am,” Mrs. Harley said to the other nurse, “here I am, a woman going on sixty who lived forty years in a house of her own, sitting on a park bench like any old bum on a Sunday morning while the baby’s parents are up there on the tenth floor sleeping off last night’s liquor.” The other nurse was a well-bred Scotch woman who was not interested in Mrs. Harley. Mrs. Harley turned her attention to the steps leading down to the park from Sutton Place, to watch for Renee Hall. The arrangement between them had been established for about a month.
Renee Hall had met Mrs. Harley and the child at the Tennysons’, where she had frequently been a guest for cocktails that winter. She had been brought there by a business friend of Katherine’s. She was pleasant and entertaining, and Katherine had been impressed with her clothes. She lived around the corner and didn’t object to late invitations and most men liked her. The Tennysons knew nothing about her other than that she was an attractive guest and did some radio acting.
On the evening when Renee first went to the Tennysons’, Deborah had been brought in to say good night, and the actress and the neglected child had sat together on a sofa. There was an odd sympathy between the two, and Renee let the child play with her jewelry and her furs. Renee was kind to Deborah, for she was at a time in her life when she appreciated kindness herself.
She was about thirty-five years old, dissipated and gentle. She liked to think of the life she was living as an overture to something wonderful, final, and even conventional, that would begin with the next season or the season after that, but she was finding this hope more and more difficult to sustain. She had begun to notice that she always felt tired unless she was drinking. It was just that she didn’t have the strength. When she was not drinking she was depressed, and when she was depressed she quarreled with headwaiters and hairdressers, accused people in restaurants of staring at her, and quarreled with some of the men who paid her debts. She knew this instability in her temperament well, and was clever at concealing it?among other things?from casual friends like the Tennysons.
Renee had come to the house again a week later, and when Deborah heard her voice, she escaped from Mrs. Harley and flew down the hall. The child’s adoration excited Renee. They sat together again. Renee wore a string of furs and a hat piled with cloth roses, and Deborah thought her the most beautiful lady in the world.
After that, Renee went to the Tennysons’ often. It was a standing joke that she came there to see the child and not the Tennysons or their guests. Renee had always wanted children of her own, and now all her regrets seemed centered in Deborah’s bright face. She began to feel possessive toward the child. She sent her expensive clothes and toys. “Has she ever been to the dentist?” she asked Katherine. “Are you sure of your doctor? Have you entered her in nursery school?” She made the mistake one night of suggesting that Deborah saw too little of her parents and lacked the sense of security they should give her. “She has eight thousand dollars in the bank in her own name,” Katherine said. She was angry. Renee continued to send Deborah elaborate presents. Deborah named all her dolls and her pleasures after Renee, and on several nights she cried for Renee after she had been put to bed. Robert and Katherine thought it would be better if they didn’t see Renee any more. They stopped asking her to the house. “After all,” Katherine said, “I’ve always felt that there was something unsavory about that girl.” Renee called them twice and asked them for cocktails, and Katherine said no, no thanks, they were all suffering with colds.
Renee knew that Katherine was lying and she determined to forget the Tennysons. She missed the little girl, but she might never have seen her again if it hadn’t been for something that happened later that week. One night she left a dull party early in the evening and went home by herself. She was afraid of missing telephone calls and she used a telephone-answering service. They told her that night that a Mrs. Walton had called and left a number.
Walton, Walton, Walton, Renee thought, and then she remembered that she had once had a lover named Walton. That would have been eight or ten years ago. She had once been taken to dinner with his mother, who was visiting from Cleveland. She remembered the evening clearly then. Walton drank too much and his mother had taken Renee aside and told her what a good influence she thought she was, and couldn’t she make him stop drinking and go to church oftener? Walton and she had quarreled over his drinking, in the end, Renee remembered, and she had never seen him after that. He might be sick, or drunk, or getting married. She had no idea how old he
