The Bird’s Nest (24 page)

Bess: And you know how they are all going to laugh at you, when I tell them, Doctor Wright and Aunt Morgen and that nice doctor in New York, that you went wandering and whining all over the city looking for your—

Betsy: now i will tell what you and aunt morgen did and when she came in the door you went to her and said is this true what aunt morgen said and when she looked at you and smiled a little because she was drunk you took your hands—

At this point Bess raised her left hand and dashed the pencil from her right hand, in a gesture of such violence that I was shocked, and half-rose to expostulate.

“This is frightful,” she said, her voice still shaking with anger. “That I should have to sit here and read the ravings of a maniac . . .”

“Then you concede that it is Betsy?” I asked her dryly.

“Indeed not. It is . . .” She thought deeply. “Hypnotism,” she said at last.

“Remarkable,” I said. “You make me out an amazing performer.”

She reached down slowly and picked up the pencil and put it again into her right hand. Then she said slowly and with venom, “Goodbye, Betsy darling. Say goodbye like a nice girl and I won't hurt you any more.”

The pencil wrote, laboriously, “doctor open eyes”

“Betsy,” I said sharply, “you may open your eyes.”

She took a deep breath and said with relief, “I feel sometimes like I would like to start eating at
her
from the inside and eat away at her until she was nothing but a shell and then I would crack her in half and throw her away. And then I would take the little pieces and—”

“She is not an attractive girl,” I conceded with a sigh. “What were you going to write, when she struck you?”

“Nothing.” Betsy spoke more quietly than usual, and when I looked at her I could see that she was suffering from this unending battle; more than either Elizabeth or Beth she was dejected, and weaker. She saw my glance, and perhaps read a kind of sympathy into it, for she said, “It's harder now for me to come out, almost as hard as it was at first with Lizzie.”

I wondered if Betsy was not perhaps ready to give up, and I said, “Elizabeth and Beth cannot fight her.”

Betsy grinned wanly. “I used to want you on my side,” she said. “I always told you she would be worse than I was.”

“Actually,” I said frankly, “she is infinitely worse.”

“I used to know everything,” Betsy said wistfully. “All that Lizzie did and thought and said and dreamed and everything. Now I come out sometimes when
she
lets go for a minute, and it's harder every time, and harder to stay out, with
her
pushing at me. Funny,” she went on, “if I went back under now, after all I've tried.”

“You are none of you going to be ‘under,' as you call it. When Elizabeth R. is herself again, you will all be part of her.”

“Like raisins in a pudding,” Betsy said.

“You might just tell me,” I suggested, “why you are trying to keep me from your aunt.”

“I'm not sure,” Betsy said, and I think she was telling the truth. “I think it's because I know something's going to happen and I'm afraid of Aunt Morgen.”

“What could be going to happen?” I asked cautiously, but Betsy only stretched and made a face at me.

“Fiddle-dee-dee,” she said. “Let
her
walk home; I'm too lazy.”

Bess, sitting in the chair, apparently perceived that she was putting on her gloves, for she rose to go. “I think,” she said, as though nothing at all had happened since she bade goodbye to Betsy, “that I shall not care, Doctor, to try your game again. I am satisfied that it is no more than hypnotism, or a trick like spiritualism.”

Nothing could be more calculated to infuriate me, but I said with restraint, “I am no more anxious to continue than you are, Miss R.”

“Good afternoon, then,” she said.

It was clear to me from her voice and actions that she knew nothing of Betsy's brief visit, and I was greatly relieved to think that, even now, Betsy could still come without Bess' knowledge. I bade her goodbye with some cheerfulness, and took up the telephone to call Miss Jones. I knew that her niece could not reach home, walking, for a good twenty minutes, and I felt that it was no longer possible for me to attempt dealing with my four Miss R.'s without Miss Jones' active and knowledgeable help. If it meant some sacrifice of dignity on my part, that was, I told myself sternly, a minor hazard of my profession, and I kept my voice extremely businesslike, asking Miss Jones only for the privilege of an appointment with her, in order to “discuss the illness of her niece,” and adding that, if possible, I should like our conversation to be unattended by Miss R., and, in fact, kept secret from her, since I had medical details to communicate which were best kept, at present, from Miss R.'s hearing. Miss Jones, as icy and formal as I myself, readily agreed to grant me an audience on the following evening, but preferred not to come to my office; would I consent to attend her at home, since her niece would be hearing a concert with friends.

I should point out, I think, that Miss R. was at this time so much quieter than she had been at various previous times—Bess and Betsy having apparently established a kind of equilibrium in their warfare, and both believing that any overt hostile act might endanger the perpetrator more than the victim—that it was felt by Miss Jones, and approved by me when consulted by Elizabeth, that Miss R. might with safety be allowed into public under supervision. As I have pointed out before, no one, without using actual restraint, had much control over her actions generally, and she came and went largely as she pleased when alone. To public functions such as concerts, where she would certainly be seen by people who had known her since childhood, and her slightest abnormality remarked, she went only when accompanied by her aunt, or by trusted old friends. She did not leave her home often, except for visits to my office, and when she went out alone it was always by day, and for never longer than an hour or so; I was confident that, operating under the dangerously poised balance of power between Betsy and Bess, so delicate that neither dared jolt the other unduly, she had heretofore kept her actions under strict control, but I made a point of discovering from Betsy where Miss R.'s journeying had taken her. There was, I thought, no longer any need to fear Betsy's eloping again, with the powerful opposition she must meet from Bess in any such attempt, and when it began to be apparent that Betsy was going to need all her strength to cope with Bess, and so must give up her unkind practical jokes upon Elizabeth and Beth, there was not even any danger of her repeating her favorite prank—taking them too far away to get home, and abandoning them. She spent much time walking, and even more time, when Bess was dominant, in going from one bank to another, where she stood outside and examined the architecture of the institution, presumably trying to decide upon the one least vulnerable to bandits; she sometimes went alone to soda shops—this usually Betsy's doing—where she indulged herself in quantities of chemically sweet concoctions; once she went to the museum and entered as a visitor, going from exhibit to exhibit, and showing the greatest interest, quite as though she had never come near the place before. She never visited any place of amusement, such as a theatre—which I believe she knew instinctively might overexcite her and shake her stability—but spent her time, largely, in mere wandering. She once rode a bus as far as the bay, and spent an afternoon looking out over the water, and, of course, mainly, there were Bess' famous shopping trips, where she went earnestly from store to store, fingering cloth and sniffing perfume, and lavishing upon herself numerous small rich indulgences.

It was thus relatively easy for Miss Jones to guarantee that her niece would be absent during our interview, and my cold tone and insistence upon my entire preoccupation with business had, I think, the effect of persuading her that she was entirely secure in both honor and reputation (oh, that I knew what Betsy had written her in my name!) in permitting me to visit her alone in the evening. Indeed, I felt as I set down the telephone that my disagreeable task was half done.

 • • •

Betsy, unchastened still, made one more attempt to prevent my seeing her aunt, although I do not believe that she was aware that our appointment had already been settled. I had half-expected to see Betsy on the afternoon following my conversation with her aunt, but I reached my office late, after having been unavoidably detained by a most disagreeable session at the dentist's, and found upon my desk a note, written in a childish, unformed hand. This note was from poor Beth, and it said, “Dearest dearest Doctor, I did think you liked me in spite of everything and I didn't ever think you would really want me gone, but if you want to there isn't anything poor Beth can do. I guess there's no one in the world who likes me any more now that you have given me up. I guess I will just be lonely and sad all the time. Your own Beth.”

I was grieved, and a little perplexed, at this epistle, and at a loss how to reassure the poor child until, happening to glance into the wastebasket to see if my pen had accidently fallen within, I took out several sheets of my office paper. The top one was a note of my own, left on my desk when I went out, and meant to tell Betsy that I would be a few minutes late that afternoon, because of an unavoidable appointment elsewhere. Below this, on the same sheet was scrawled, in the stylish handwriting which Bess affected, “Dear Doctor, just dropped by to say hello. Sorry I missed you. Elizabeth R.”

On another sheet, and written with my pen instead of the pencil which the others had used, I found Betsy's characteristic blind scrawl: “i wont go i will stay you cant make me remember i can tell” and, again, “i will write what i please you cant hurt me i will tell him about what you did”

And, on still another sheet, in what seemed an attempt at imitating my own handwriting—an attempt, I must confess, which would delude no one but the sillier Miss R.'s—but the same attempt, I reflected wryly, that Miss Jones might have read—was written the following composition:

“Miss R., although I have been patient with you for a long time, and put up with a good deal of your nonsense, I will not stand for your bad habits any longer. This is therefore my final and only notice that I am giving up your case, permanently and for ever. Do not come to my office again, if you please. Notify your aunt. Yrs. very truly, Victor J. Wright.”

Even allowing for the execrable literary style of this masterpiece, I found it one of Betsy's more entertaining pranks, and amused myself in endeavoring to plot out what had taken place: I imagined that Bess had for some (probably financial) reason come to my office, and found my note. She had, reasonably enough considering that it was Miss Hartley's day off and the office was therefore empty, jotted down a note telling me she had called, and, of course, once Betsy got the pen between her teeth (oh dear; I am trying to learn to do without metaphors, and would have said I was getting on nicely, but see what comes up here to plague me!) she was off into a conversation with Bess, taunting and tormenting, and driving Bess closer toward that dark area where Bess felt herself in danger and was easily overcome, until, once dominant, Betsy could hold her precarious position for a while. Then, with what malicious gigglings I could only imagine, I thought that Betsy had with loving care composed the pseudo-letter from me in which I so blithely gave up Miss R.'s case. Betsy would then retreat, bring Beth forward, and lie back in delight while Beth remained long enough to read the unkind letter (which by a positive effort of silliness she might believe was actually from me) and write her plaintive answer.

I later learned that my recapitulation was largely correct, although Betsy had, in the refinement of her wickedness, first allowed Elizabeth out to read the letter of dismissal, before she summoned Beth, thus, if I may be permitted to phrase it so, killing two birds with one stone; Elizabeth had been too shocked and hurt to do anything but retreat silently, and Betsy, returning, had with great delight gathered up and thrown away all but Beth's final sad cry, and left
that
one for me.

It is a kind of practical joke of which I must warn the reader to beware, involving as it does the swift and almost certainly bewildering shift in identity of the joker—although if, as in this case, successful, an alarmingly thorough kind of prank! I should call it, as a matter of fact, a completely
practical
practical joke, not for the general order of person, but most effective if one just happens to have four warring personalities, and one pencil.

 • • •

Having been so roundly dismissed, I dined pleasantly, and then, donning a dull necktie and a forbidding medical scowl, and forgetting my overshoes, I made for Miss Jones'. My steps were labored, for I went rehearsing the sounding phrases with which I intended to bring Miss Jones to an understanding of the precarious situation of her niece; withdrawn as I tried to hold myself, I could not help an involuntary feeling that we were all “choosing sides,” as the children call it, and Miss Jones was too powerful a figure in our game to remain long unsolicited.

I dare not, in my capacity as writer, essay an attempt at describing either Miss Jones or the house in which she lived with her niece. My feelings with regard to Miss Jones are, I fear, too strongly tinged with prejudice to enable me to picture her with absolute accuracy, and, as for her house, I thought it an abomination. Let me only say, then, that I regard Miss Jones as a singularly unattractive woman, heavy-set and overbearing, with a loud laugh and a gaudy taste in clothes, as much unlike the prettier aspects of her niece as could be conceived, although it must be admitted that Betsy bore a strong family resemblance to her aunt. The house where they lived, in a neighborhood generally regarded as the most exclusive in our town, had, I thought, been put together by some family eccentric whose taste found its most perfect expression in the bleak, pudding-colored style so popular not too long ago among our grandparents, when taste and financial security were felt to be most surely expressed by a kind of ruthless ornamentation. I do not mean to say merely that Miss Jones' home was ugly; to my mind it was hideous. It had been freely embellished outside with many of the small details which so depress a lover of the classic in architecture; it was heavy with wooden lace and startling turrets, and gave the impression (and here I confess I am malicious) of having been assembled by the same unartistic hand as Miss Jones.