Raising Demons (28 page)

I remember the hotel because we had a suite of three bedrooms and a kind of foyer in the middle; nothing was where it is at home. “I guess we're here,” my husband said. “I wish I could remember whether I left the study window open,” I said. I had carefully put Barry's pajamas in the top of one of the suitcases, but he and Dikidiki were asleep before I could get it open. Sally and Laurie and Jannie went around and around the three rooms, moving restlessly, surveying beds and dressers and pictures and admiring the array of towels in the bathroom and reading all the little notices out loud.

We were awakened bright and early in the morning by the chambermaid, who had found Barry in the hall, clad in the top half of his pajamas. He had locked himself out of the room, and when the chambermaid came by he was standing there pounding furiously on the door. “Monsters,” he was screaming, purple-faced, “monsters, monsters!”

At breakfast Laurie and Jannie endeavored to map out our plans for the time in New York. “I don't want to take the kids into any more restaurants than we can help,” Laurie said. “Maybe from now on we could get some bread and peanut butter and milk and stuff and Mom could kind of fix some meals here in the hotel room.”

“Indeed Mom could not,” I assured him earnestly. “One of the things I came to New York
for
was to go to restaurants and have steak and pork fried rice and hot tacos and shishkebab and veal cutlets parmigiana and wiener schnitzel and shrimp curry and—”

“Don't you want to do anything except
eat
?”

“No,” I said, with my eyes shut. “And cheese blintzes and sukiyaki and—”

Laurie said to Jannie, “Well, if Dad and I go to a ball game, you'll have to take Sally and Barry and Mom and go shopping or something.
You
know, clothes and stuff. Maybe take Barry on buses.”

“Mother has to go to the dentist,” my husband said.

“Oh,
Dad
—she can do that at
home
.”

“Certainly,” I said. “So then it's settled; Jannie and Sally and I will go shopping and I will get myself a new housecoat, black, and I think a pair of lizard shoes. Or snake-skin.”

“No,” my husband said.

“And Laurie and Dad can go to the ball game.”

“Sally will need a new hat,” Jannie said. She turned to Barry, and said lovingly, “Now I want you to be
sure
not to fall out the window of the bus.”

“What do
you
want to do in New York, Perfessor?” Laurie asked Sally.

Sally lifted her head from her coloring book. “Where?” she said.

The children retired to their several rooms to dress, and a spirited argument began between Jannie and Sally. Jannie injudiciously pointed out that Sally would sure be excited when she saw the big stores. And the tall buildings. “New York,” Jannie said, “has the tallest building in the world.”

That was precisely the kind of statement to arouse Sally, in whose world nothing was ever so stable as to warrant a superlative. “I just
bet
,” she said.

“Laurie?” Jannie called. “Isn't the tallest building in the world right here in New York?”

“Empire State,” Laurie said.

“I
bet
,” Sally said. “I better just
see
this tallest building in the world, I just guess.”

“Daddy?”

“Indeed, yes,” my husband said. “The very tallest. Mother,” he said, “will take you in an elevator right to the top.”

“No, she won't,” I said, shuddering.

“I don't need to go to the
top
.” Sally was amused. “If it really
is
the tallest there's no sense going all the way to the
top
. But even from the
bottom
I just bet it's not the tallest.”

“Well,” said Laurie, nettled, “the people in New York certainly
think
it is, anyway. They tell
every
body.”

“I just
bet
,” Sally said direfully.

It turned out, Jannie and I subsequently discovered when we were shopping, that Sally was also not prepared to believe in escalators. “No,” she said, standing at the bottom and clutching Barry firmly. “No. Not for me or for Barry neither. Stairs are hard enough by theirselves, not moving.”

“I'll carry you,” I said desperately. “I'll carry you up and then come back down and get Barry.”

“It's
easy
,” Jannie insisted. “I've done it lots of times.”

“Nope.” Sally pressed back against the crowd around us. “I don't know where it goes,” she said.

“Just to the top—see the people getting off?”

“But,” Sally said, “those are not the same people as the ones getting on down here. The people get on and go somewhere but the people who get off are just the ones that old staircase
lets
get off. And look coming down over there—all different.”

I
am afraid of elevators. “Look, Sally,” I said, “I
promise
you—”

“
You
can get on if you want to,” Sally said. “Me and Barry will go back and tell Daddy where you went.”

I think that was the day that Jannie wanted to look at wedding gowns, or perhaps that was the day after. One day Laurie and Jannie went to Radio City with their father, so that must have been the day I took Sally and Barry to the zoo, and Barry and Dikidiki stood and looked silently at the polar bear and the polar bear stood and looked silently at Barry and Dikidiki. Sally was perplexed because the animals were not in cages when so many of the people in the city
were
. “
Why
are they all in cages,” she asked insistently, moving along beside me, “in stores and restaurants and movies and everything, they have someone in a cage? But the big stone lions we saw are just standing right out there and the people in cages?”

“Look at the rhinoceros,” I said.

“And in the hotel, in cages? Do they eat people, like children? Is that bear going to eat Dikidiki? Do baby birds have tiny toy eggs to play with?”

It must have been the same day, because I had Barry and Sally, that we stood, craning our necks, with people passing by smiling at us, three country innocents gaping at the topless towers of the Empire State Building.

“See?” I said to Sally.

She shook her head mournfully. “Poor New York people,” she said. “Going around saying
this
is the tallest.”

“Well, it
is
,” I said.

Sally sighed. “When even a little girl like me can come here and see lots taller right in the same city.”

“It says in the books—”

“How do books know? Just looking around
any
one can see lots taller, and wider too.”

“Well,” I said compromisingly, “maybe you better just not say anything about it. It's not polite to come here from Vermont and start finding fault. And if the people here want to think this
is
the tallest, it's not up to a little girl like you to get them all upset about it.”

“But if I tried to tell someone that Daddy was the smartest man in the world and it said so in a book, you would say I was not telling the truth? Why do they have all those cars in the street but everybody walking? Can Barry and I each have a present because we've been good? Can Barry have a little fire truck?”

I had Sally with me most of the time because it made her father very nervous when she was talking because he had no answers for her questions, but when she was not talking he was always worrying over what she was probably thinking. Consequently, it must have been on the third day of our visit that Laurie and his father and Barry were on a ferryboat, and I agreed to Jannie's eager proposal that we take Sally to lunch in the Automat. Once, for a very brief period of my life, I worked selling books in Macy's, and although they have remodeled the book department since my time, and I can no longer direct anyone to the section devoted to books on psychiatry and reincarnation, I can still recall, poignantly, the rare flavor of the cafeteria lunch. I was able to explain to Sally, standing before the cafeteria rail in the Automat with the usual little group of amused cynics listening, how you got something to eat in a cafeteria. Sally accepted the concept of a cafeteria, with reservations, but when I then directed her to the little cubbyholes with their glass fronts she balked absolutely. “No,” she said.

“I'll show you,” I said.

“No,” Sally said flatly, regarding a nesselrode pie. “It won't work.”

“
Other
people—”

“Like that tall building. They just
think
so, is all.”

“But look at Jannie.” Jannie's tray held a little pot of baked beans and a glass of milk; she was going slowly back and forth before the fairyland of desserts, eyes bright and nickels clutched firmly.

“Jannie's just lucky,” Sally said. “They didn't grab it first.”

“Who didn't grab what?”

“The people in the cages,” Sally said. “On the other side of that glass where the people are, in the cages.”

“There
are
people back there, surely. But they put things
in. We
take them
out
.”

“Well, they're not going to get any of
my
nickels,” Sally said. She reached up and opened the little glass door and took out the piece of nesselrode pie.

“No,” I said. “Sally, no, that's
not
the
way
. You
have
to put the
nickels
in.” I flapped my hands helplessly at the little glass door, swinging open. “Put it back,” I said.

“No,” Sally said. “On the other side, in the cage, they put
their
nickels in, and I just reached and grabbed fast. If I,” she added complacently, “had of put
my
nickels in first, and if
they
'd been quicker, then
they
—”

“Jannie,” I said, and skidded down to where Jannie was trying to balance a piece of chocolate nut cake and two cinnamon buns on her tray. I took the tray away from her and got it to a table, and she followed me, insisting, “Wait, wait, I didn't get
half
the things there were, I got to get—”

I told her to stay right at the table and not move, and went back for Sally, who was remarking patronizingly to a gentleman trying to get to a parkerhouse roll, “—might
think
it's the tallest, but even a little girl—”

 • • • 

There came one moment in our New York visit when we all sat wearily in the hotel room together. I had taken my shoes off, and my husband was trying to read his paper by the bedlight. Laurie, flung over the desk chair, observed suddenly that, golly, tomorrow night was band rehearsal at home. Jannie said that she hadn't practiced “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” for days and days and
days
. Sally lifted her head from her jigsaw puzzle to ask if people in New York stayed there all the time, or only came when we did, and Barry, on the floor pushing his fire engine half-heartedly, said, “You know there was a big white house where we used to live before we lived here and maybe sometime we can go and visit
there
again for some days in a little while.”

My husband telephoned his coin-collector friend that night and offered him an ancient silver dollar if he would meet us in Albany the next afternoon.

When I walked in through our own front door and Yain and Gato came to cross back and forth between my ankles I put my little black suitcase down on the floor and said to my husband, “You know, I didn't get to the dentist after all.”

In the morning, at my own breakfast table, where the coffee was decently strong and the toast was hot and crisp, I told my husband that we had come off pretty well, considering. “We lost Sally's hat, of course,” I said, “and that glove of mine and the bottom half of Barry's pajamas in the hotel room.”

“I forgot to mail the postcards,” my husband said. “You'll have to drive around today and deliver them.”

“Dikidiki went on a train,” Barry said.

“We only saw two movies,” Laurie said. “I figured we'd see more.”

“Sally,” I asked, “did you have a good time in New York?”

Sally lifted her chin from the edge of the table. “Where?” she said.

 • • • 

The next morning was Monday and everyone went off to school again, world-bemused travelers. I picked up Toby at the kennel, which of course meant that on Monday we had two cats and one dog. Toby is actually the second oldest child in the family, being, we estimate, one year younger than Laurie. He has been Laurie's personal dog ever since the bright spring morning when Laurie was four and a half and we were still recovering from the impact of our first Vermont winter. When Laurie came through the back door that sunny morning, asking as he came, “Can I have a dog?” my husband and I both, staring at the great embarrassed creature trying to edge through the door behind him, said, with one voice, “No.” “Don't let that beast in here,” my husband said, putting down his coffee cup; “Shoo,” I said. The dog, horribly upset, tried to curtsy ingratiatingly, put his left hind foot into an empty milk bottle, mistook the dining room doorway for a way out, and, hurrying, sideswiped a dining room chair, skidded on the milk bottle, and brought up sprawled flat against the buffet, wagging his tail and smiling in a sheepish manner.

“I want to name him Toby,” Laurie said, regarding his dog with pride.

When my husband attempted to herd the dog outside again, the dog clearly interpreted the anxious, brushing motions as friendly overtures; with a wriggle of pure delight he rose, put his front paws on my husband's shoulders and put his head down and licked my husband's ear.

“Go away,” my husband said, looking up into the dog's face. “Heel. Play dead.”