The bell ringer didn’t get tired soon enough. David kept watching the red sweep hand on his wristwatch; the bell ringer didn’t get tired until two forty-seven A.M., which was a half-hour after he had first begun. In all that time, Helga hadn’t said a word. It was almost as if she wasn’t even in the house.
For the next two weeks, the doorbell rang almost every night at two in the morning or a little after. David’s father let it ring each time, without getting out of bed to answer the door. Once, while the doorbell was ringing, David sneaked out of bed and went to the other end of the apartment, near the service entrance, to see if Helga was in her room. But the door to her bedroom was closed, and he couldn’t tell whether she was there or not. The doorbell woke the entire family each time, but they simply pretended it wasn’t ringing. Each time, David’s mother would come into his bedroom after the doorbell had been ringing a while, to see if it had awakened him.
“David?” she would whisper.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Are you awake?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“You poor darling,” she would say, and then she would sit on the edge of his bed and put her hand on his forehead, the way she would sometimes do when she thought he had a fever, though he certainly didn’t have any fever. The doorbell would continue ringing and his mother would sit in her nightgown in the dark, her hand cool on his head. In a little while, she would kiss his closed eyes, and he would drift off to sleep, not knowing when she left him, not knowing when the doorbell stopped ringing.
This went on for two weeks. By the end of that time, David was getting used to waking up at two in the morning and getting used to his mother’s visits each time the doorbell rang. He was beginning to think, though, that once Helga left on her vacation, the doorbell ringing would stop. He was beginning to think that Mary Vincent was right, that Helga was ringing the bell just out of spite, just to cause misery for others. But on August the twelfth, Helga went off, and that night at two o’clock the doorbell rang. It couldn’t have been Helga because she had taken a plane that morning at Kennedy Airport, bound for Copenhagen where her parents lived.
The next day, David’s father called the police.
It was David’s guess that his father had suspected Helga, too, because he told the two detectives right away that it couldn’t have been the housekeeper since she was in Denmark. That explained why he hadn’t called the police up to now; he had thought it was Helga and had expected her to quit ringing the bell after a while. The two detectives didn’t look anything like television policemen at all. One of them looked like Mr. Harriman who ran the candy store on Madison Avenue, and the other looked like Uncle Martin, David’s father’s brother. Mr. Harriman did most of the talking.
“When did your housekeeper leave?” he asked David’s father.
“Yesterday morning.”
“And you say the doorbell rang again last night?”
“Yes, it did.”
“Who else lives on this floor?” Mr. Harriman asked.
“Mrs. Shavinsky and her housekeeper.”
“Her name is Mary Vincent,” David said.
“Thank you, son,” Mr. Harriman said. “Would either Mrs. Shavinsky or her housekeeper have any reason to want to annoy you?”
“I don’t think so,” David’s father said.
“He may be after Mrs. Shavinsky’s demitasse cups,” David said.
“What was that, son?” the one who looked like Uncle Martin asked.
“Mrs. Shavinsky’s demitasse cups. They’re worth several thousand dollars.”
“If the intruder wanted her cups,” Uncle Martin said, “why would he ring your doorbell?”
“That’s just what I said to Mrs. Shavinsky.”
“Is there anything you can do about this?” David’s father asked the detectives. “Can you leave a man here?”
“Well, that’d be a little difficult, sir,” Mr. Harriman said. “We’re always short-handed, but especially in the summertime. I think you can understand...”
“Yes, but...”
“What we can do, of course, is to dust the hallway and the doorbell for fingerprints.”
“Will that help?”
“If the intruder left any prints, why yes, it could help a great deal.”
“And if he didn’t leave any prints? If, for example, he was wearing gloves?”
“Why, then it wouldn’t help at all, would it?”
“No, it wouldn’t,” David said.
“Mmm,” Mr. Harriman said, and smiled at David the way some grownups smiled at him when they meant Shut up, kid.
“Well, if you can’t leave a man here,” his father said, “and if dusting or whatever you call it doesn’t come up with any fingerprints, well... well, what are we supposed to do? Just let this person keep on ringing our doorbell forever?”
“I suppose you could spend a night sleeping in a chair near the door,” Mr. Harriman said. “That might help.”
“How?”
“You could open the door as soon as the bell rang.”
“We never know when it’s going to ring,” David’s father said, “or even if it’ll ring at all. There’s no pattern to it.”
“Well, perhaps you could spend a few nights sleeping by the door.”
“I could spend a few weeks sleeping by the door,” David’s father said. “Or maybe even a few months.”
“Well,” Mr. Harriman said.
“Well,” David’s father said, and everybody was quiet.
“Mrs. Shavinsky thinks it’s some drunk,” David said.
“It might be, son,” Uncle Martin said.
“He doesn’t use the elevator.”
“He probably comes up the service steps,” Mr. Harriman said. “We’ll talk to the elevator operators and ask them to keep an eye open. Though, you know, there’s the possibility he comes down from the roof. I’ll check and see if there’s a lock on the roof door.”
“Why would anyone be doing this?” David’s father asked.
“The world is full of nuts,” Mr. Harriman said. “This is something like calling up a stranger on the telephone, only this guy uses your doorbell.”
“But how long will he continue bothering us?”
“Who knows?” Mr. Harriman said. “It can go on forever, or he can get tired next week. Who knows?”
“Well,” David’s father said.
“Well,” Mr. Harriman said, and that was that.
That night, David’s father slept on a blanket in the entrance hall, and the doorbell didn’t ring. The next night, he slept in the bedroom, and the doorbell rang at two o’clock. The night after that, he slept in the bedroom again, but this time the doorbell didn’t ring. At breakfast the next morning, he told David’s mother there was no way to figure this damn thing out, but that night he slept just inside the entrance door again. David woke up with a nightmare at about one o’clock, and went into his mother’s bedroom. He climbed into bed with her, and she held him in her arms and said, “What is it, darling?”
“I’m afraid,” David said.
“Of what?”
“That he’ll get Daddy.”
“No one’s going to get Daddy.”
“Suppose Daddy opens the door, and he’s standing there? Suppose he kills Daddy?”
“No one’s going to kill Daddy. Daddy is very strong.”
“Suppose. What would we do?”
“Don’t worry about it. Nothing’s going to happen to Daddy.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to Daddy.”
She put him back in his own bed in a little while and he lay there and looked at his watch and wondered if the doorbell would ring that night. He was just falling asleep again when it went off. It went off with a long loud ring, and then a short sharp ring but by that time his father was on his feet, making a lot of noise and unlocking the door as quickly as he could and throwing the door open and running into the hallway. David lay in bed with his heart beating faster and faster, waiting for his father to come back. At last, he heard him close the door, and walk through the apartment to the bedroom.