When they reached the apartment house, Mrs. Bartlett entered first as her age entitled her to do, but she noticeably did not hold the door for Madeline, who had to catch and hold it in order to be able to make her way in. At the upstairs door, when Mrs. Bartlett took out her bunch of keys, her hand quivered so that she couldn’t manage to insert the right one in the lock. They jangled loudly in the silence of the hall. But when Madeline reached out to try to take them, in order to do it for her, she snatched them back out of her reach with an abruptness that almost suggested animosity.
When she finally had the door open, Mrs. Bartlett stepped in, but then turned around and faced Madeline coldly, standing there in such a way that Madeline could not enter herself. He face was gray with pain, pitted with it, the texture of a pumice stone.
“Why do you want to come in here? I have no more children.”
Madeline drew in her breath, sharp and cold as a razor cutting her throat as it went down.
“I had only the one. Find someone else’s house now to bring sorrow into.”
Madeline kept silent.
“You’re the one,” the bereaved woman went on. “You did it. I knew it when you wouldn’t come into the church with me.”
And little by little she began to close the door between them, still speaking as it narrowed.
“You did it. You.”
The door closed.
Madeline’s body gave a half roll-around of despair that brought her shoulders back against the wall, to one side of the doorway. She hung her head.
After a while she straightened, turned again, and knocked softly, entreatingly, on the door.
There was no answer.
After a while she went away.
At eleven the next morning the door opened and Mrs. Bartlett came out trundling a small wheeled shopping cart behind her. She saw Madeline standing there waiting, but didn’t speak.
When she returned over an hour later, the small cart was filled with the purchases of her shopping tour. She saw Madeline still there, but didn’t speak.
The door closed after her.
At about noon the next day the door opened again, and she came out again. She saw Madeline standing there waiting again, but didn’t speak. When she came back some time later, she was holding a dry-cleaning garment of some kind protected by a plastic bag. She was holding it by a wire hanger whose hook protruded from one end of the plastic bag, and it was hard for her to hold it up clear of the floor and at the same time get out her door key.
Madeline stepped forward and unobtrusively took it from her hand and held it for her, while she brought out her key and unlocked the door. Then, just as unobtrusively, Madeline handed it back to her. She went inside with it.
The door stayed open behind her.
After a while Madeline timidly went in after her and closed it behind her.
Mrs. Bartlett had set two cups out on the table.
“I married when I was very young. Seventeen. We had nothing but misfortunes, almost from the day of our marriage. When I look back now sometimes, it almost seems like an omen.
“We had a little baby boy first, before Starr. Then we lost him, when he was about five years old.”
“He died?” Madeline asked.
“No,” she said. “Or, if he did, we never knew.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He just disappeared one day. Disappeared from the face of the earth. We never saw him again. One minute he was playing in front of the door, in full sight. The next minute there wasn’t a sign of him. I don’t know if some degenerate enticed him away, and then got rid of him. If he’d simply been lost, he would have been found again eventually. No child stays lost indefinitely. The police worked on it for months. Months and months. They finally came to me about a year later. It must have been fully a year. Over a year. By that time I’d got used to living with it. They told me there was only one conclusion they could come to. He was no longer alive, or he would have been found before then. They told me he must have been killed right away, within the first day or two, before the hue and cry had got fully started. And his body disposed of in some way so that it never turned up again. A child that age has such a small body,” she said wanly. “You could almost hide it in a woodburning stove or a canful of ashes. Or roll it down an open sewer.”
Madeline shivered and bit the back of her own hand. God, there isn’t anything on the face of the earth more hideous than child murder! Adult murder is a clean, upright thing by comparison.
“I didn’t give up hope even then. What mother does? But the weeks became months, and the months — Bennett, my husband, saw that I was brooding, eating my heart out, and he finally suggested that we have another. I guess to take my mind off it, give me a new lease on life. I refused point-blank. I didn’t want to go through that a second time, the fear of losing it just as you’ve grown attached to it, learned to love it. I told him I wouldn’t know a minute’s piece if I had another child, after what had happened to the first one. It would be bad for the child, and worse for me. Nothing he could say would prevail upon me.
“Well, I suppose this is a rather delicate and personal matter to discuss, but so many years have gone by it’s no longer very important. I don’t know how he did it, but I suddenly found that I was carrying a child again. I even went to a doctor, to ask him to do something about it, but he talked me out of it. And Starr was born nine months later.”
Poor Starr, Madeline thought poignantly. Even her own mother didn’t want her.
“And after that?”
“It drove a wedge between us, it drove us apart. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, the marriage had just been ill-starred. Some marriages are. There was a long period of — I don’t know what word to use. Tolerance. Indifference. Then in later years he started to drink. I guess he’d grown embittered. It’s a terrible thing to see a man drink himself to death right before your eyes. The falls on the floor. The vomiting. The bodily indecencies. I kept the child from seeing as much of it as I could. Kept her in her room under lock and key. I mean, once he’d come back home at nights. But children are smart. They know things, they can sense them.
“And then — I suppose this is a dreadful thing to say, but God in His infinite mercy was kind. Kind to him and kind to me and kind to his child. He lay stupefied in a doorway all one bitter below-zero night, unable to get up and walk, and he died of exposure.”
And was God good to Starr too? Madeline wondered iconoclastically. Carrying her off at twenty-two, after giving her such a childhood!
“When Starr was small, did you worry and dread a repetition of the first child’s disappearance, as you had expected you would?”
“No, strangely enough, I didn’t,” Charlotte said. “I went to my priest, and he played a great part in relieving my mind. He said, in effect, that lightning never strikes twice, and it was almost outside the bounds of possibility that such a thing should happen a second time to the same family, the same parents. I saw what good sense this made, and from that time on I lost all my fears.”
“Are you sure you have no objection?” Madeline asked, before untying the slender packet Charlotte had handed her.
“No, go ahead; you’re welcome to read them if you want to,” Charlotte invited. “There isn’t anything of consequence in them; just the typical letter a girl away from home sends home.”
Then she added pensively, “I suppose it’s foolish to keep letters — especially after the writer is gone.”