SHE STAYED WITH THE CHAPINS for five years, until they went bankrupt. She would have stayed longer — the twins loved her, she always knew which was which, she had a nest egg and could go without pay for a while — but no, it would add to his humiliation, Desmond said; and anyway they were going to move out of town.
The Chapins introduced Val to the Greens and their three little girls. The Greens hired her instantly, although they were disappointed that she wouldn’t occupy their attic retreat. But Val still wouldn’t leave her basement flat. In winter she appreciated the warmth of the nearby furnace, in summer the cool of the half-submerged rooms. Meager sunlight slipped like an envelope into one after another of her high windows and then lay on the floor as if waiting to be picked up. Solitude, silence … living in would subject her to constant voices and movements, bothersome even in a courteous family, worse still among the irrepressible kin she’d grown up with.
She spent several contented years as the Greens’ nanny. But then their work took them to Washington.
Sitting with Val at the kitchen table, Bunny Green said: “Think about coming with us. The capital …”
“No, but thank you.”
Bunny sighed. “You are a gem. I wish you had a twin.”
Val looked at her lap.
“One of my friends is pregnant again,” Bunny said, “and that scattered family around the corner needs a nanny, though they don’t know it yet. Your telephone will be ringing off the hook.”
Not quite. She did get some offers as she met one family after another. But no situation would do. One house was located on the edge of Godolphin where it met a western suburb — she’d have to take two buses to get there. Another family had piled lessons and activities on their four children — Val would become a chauffeur. A third had an ill child who needed constant attention. The burdened mother’s eyes silently pleaded. But Val said firmly, “I’m sorry, but I’ve found I am unsuited to such work.”
So she took a temporary job — a couple with a three-year-old was staying in Godolphin for the summer. She’d start searching again in the fall, though without confidence. The Chapin and Green references counted in her favor, but her manner probably worked against her — that hint of the governess that Desmond Chapin had spotted was out of fashion. And by now either her color or her age made her a misfit on the playgrounds. Beautiful women from Uganda and Burkina Faso, thin and smooth enough to be teenagers, tried to include her as they watched their charges from benches, but they soon lapsed into their dialect, or French, and their kids didn’t approach Val’s shy three-year-old. British au pairs avoided her as if she were a headmistress. Scandinavians smiled at her as if she were a pet. The mommies — there were some of those, too, unmannerly — ignored her entirely: they were too busy boasting about their children as if someday they meant to sell them.
She missed the Greens. By the time they had decamped, their girls did not need supervision at the park or anywhere else — they needed only dinners when their parents were out and occasional reminders about homework. But they craved her company, especially at bedtime. They wanted to hear the tales that Val had concocted with them when they were younger. Case Histories of Ethical Dilemmas, Val called her stories. The girls called them Vallies. They took place in vaguely medieval cities. Royalty lived at a distance, and there was no romantic love and no hidden treasure; but there was sometimes casual enchantment and once in a while a quest. In one Vallie a girl’s ailing mother was partial to caterpillar sandwiches: Was the daughter obliged to prepare the meal? And then share it? In another, a six-year-old boy wanted to watch a beheading — the penalty in Vallieland for sanctimony. Was he too young to see gore or would he become enlightened, and someday join the campaign against capital punishment? After a greedy squire was transformed into an ox, should he be put to the plow, or was change of identity punishment enough?
Yes, she missed the Greens. She wondered what they were doing this Monday morning … had they made friends in Washington? She still missed the Chapin twins, who must be almost in high school. She missed the three-year-old now back in California. But mooning over losses, regretting a child no longer in sight … that never got her anywhere. It was nine o’clock and she’d better hurry. She had an interview at ten.
The entire family was present at the interviewing — the parents and their two daughters and their son. Nine, seven, five. The father taught at the local university — a form of mathematics, he grudgingly revealed. “Topology.” He had a strawberry mark on his left cheek, no more disfiguring than a stripe on a shirt. The mother was petite, almost child-sized herself, with colorless messy hair and a long elfin nose. “I don’t work,” she said. “I don’t work yet,” she corrected. “I’m looking for a craft.” The children were quiet and appeared healthy, though the boy — the youngest — was too thin, and did not meet her eyes. “Your references,” Professor Duprey said tonelessly, “are impeccable.” Their shabby townhouse was located on the Boston end of Godolphin, a short walk from Val’s apartment.
But with the Dupreys it was a condition of employment that she live in.
How flexible her principles had become. This family had no gaiety and she guessed they hadn’t much small talk, either. Silence and solitude might still be hers. And Godolphin had become less safe at night, at least for a woman walking alone. A developer had recently bought her apartment house and might turn it into condominiums.
She followed Professor Duprey down a perilous staircase. The others trooped after them. They entered a group of rooms which resembled her own, even to the tiny high windows. Light would slot itself downward in the same impersonal way.
“Yes,” said Val. “But I have a lease,” she remembered.
“There’ll be a penalty for breaking it. We’ll pay,” said the professor. “You’ll have Thursdays and Sundays off, twenty-four hours each.”
A civilized form of servitude, then. But she had never indulged in much of a social life since leaving home — an occasional afternoon movie with one of her few friends.
“It isn’t that we go out much, Miss Gordon,” said the wife. First names would probably not be the rule here.
“They don’t go out at all,” said Win, the nine-year-old.
“But the household requires another adult,” said the professor.
“If God had wanted people to have three children—,” began Mrs. Duprey.
“—he would have created a third parent,” finished young Liam, and this time he did look at Val.
AND IF VAL HAD WANTED to live in a houseful of adults and kids and bugs (the Dupreys’ screens needed patching) she might never have left her own noisy family in their ramshackle Toronto house, where no one had a room to herself; she could have watched the generations replace themselves; she could have made up Vallies for whatever children were around. What she wanted, she had discovered at twenty, was a life alone, with a family at fingertip distance. And she’d gotten that for a while, hadn’t she, with the Chapins and the Greens and that little girl this summer … She swatted a mosquito. Besides insects flying in through the screens, there were beetles making free with her kitchen as well as with the one above it — Theirs. First names were to be avoided, so she thought of her employers as pronouns. He, She, They. The pair of Them.
He was tall and ill-kempt. She was a child herself. She burned the meals or left them half cooked, sewed buttons on the wrong garments (“You’ll start a new style,” Val comforted Fay, the second daughter, who was dismayed at a cardigan adorned with toggles). And She started projects and then abandoned them, didn’t care that insects ruled the household. She was at ease only with the children and, gradually, with Val.