Cookie studied her a long moment with the grave unblinking eyes of childhood. “Is not!” he finally said dispassionately.
“Why, Cookie!” Miss Baker rebuked gently. She crouched down by the high chair, bringing her head to the level of his. She put a finger to his chin and guided it. “Turn around and look at me good.” She found time to flash a tolerant smile to Moran over his head. “Don’t you know Miss Baker any more?”
Moran was embarrassed for the child, as though it made him out the parent of a mentally retarded offspring. “Cookie, what’s the matter with you, don’t you know your own kindergarten teacher?”
“Is not,” said Cookie without taking his eyes off her.
Miss Baker looked at the father, completely at a loss. “What do you suppose it is?” she asked solicitously. “He’s never been that way with me before.”
“I dunno, unless... unless—” A remark his wife had made came back to him. “Margaret warned me just now before she left that he’s starting to tell little fibs; maybe this is one of them now.” He put an edge of authority into his voice for his auditor’s benefit. “Now, see here, young man—!”
She made a charming little secretive gesture with her eyelids, a sort of deprecating flicker. “Let me handle him,” she breathed. “I’m used to them.” You could see she was a person who had infinite patience with children, would never lose her temper under any circumstances. She thrust her face toward him cajolingly. “What’s the matter. Cookie, don’t you know me any more? I know you—”
Cookie wasn’t saying.
“Wait, I think I have something here—” She opened her large handbag, brought out a folded sheet of paper. Spread, it revealed an outline drawing, printed, filled in with crayon coloring by hand. The crayon filling did not match the guidelines very accurately, but the will was there.
Cookie eyed it without any visible signs of pride of accomplishment.
“Don’t you remember doing this for me this morning — and, I told you how good it was? Don’t you remember you got a gold star for doing this—?”
That, at least, had a familiar ring to Moran’s own ears, if not his offspring’s. Many a night on coming home he’d gotten the vertically ejaculated tidings, “I got a gole star today!”
“Are you Miss Baker?” Cookie conceded warily.
“Ho!” She worried the lobe of his ear. “Of course I am, bless you! You know that.”
“Then why don’t you look like she does?”
She smiled amusedly at Moran. “I suppose he means the glasses. He’s used to my wearing horn-rimmed glasses when teaching class; I came out without them tonight. There’s a fine point of child psychology involved, too. He’s used to seeing me in the kindergarten and not in his home. I don’t belong here. So” — she spread her hands — “I’m not the same person.”
Moran was secretly admiring her scientific attitude toward the child and the thorough knowledge it was obviously grounded on, so different from Margaret’s irrational, emotional approach.
She stood up, evidently not a believer in pressing a contested point too far with a reluctant child at any one given time; rather winning it over to her viewpoint by degrees, a little at a time. He’d heard Margaret say that was the way they handled the youngsters at the kindergarten.
“He’ll forget all about this refusal to recognize me himself in five minutes — watch, you’ll see,” she promised brightly in an undertone.
“You’ve got to know just how to go about it with kids, don’t you?” he said, impressed.
“They’re distinct little entities in their own right, you know, not just half-formed grown-ups. That’s a mistaken old-fashioned notion that we’ve discarded.” She removed her hat and jacket, started toward the ravaged kitchen. “Now, let me see what I can do here to help. How about you yourself, Mr. Moran?”
“Oh, never mind about me,” he said with insincere self-denial. “I can go out to a cafeteria later—”
“Nonsense, there’s no need for that at all. I’ll have something ready before you know it. Now, you just read your evening paper — I can see by the way it’s still folded over you haven’t had a chance to go near it yet — and just forget everything, as though your wife were here looking after things.”
She was, thought Moran with a grateful sigh, one of the nicest, most competent, most considerate young women to have around that he’d ever yet had the pleasure of encountering. He strolled out into the living room, rolled down his shirt sleeves and eased back behind his evening box score.
It seemed a longer ride than it had the summer before, when she and Frank had last made the trip up, although Garrison hadn’t moved any at one end, or the city at the other. But that was because she was making it alone, for one thing, she supposed, and under unfavorable auspices, for another.
Frank had got her a seat by the window, and no one came to claim the one beside her, so she was spared the added discomfort of having to keep up a desultory conversation with some well-meaning seatmate; the penalty for refusal being, as she knew only too well, the even greater discomfort of sitting in strained, hostile awareness of each other after the preliminary snub.
The countryside spilled past with the rippling motion of overturned earth, as though the bus were plowing a steady furrow through it but carrying its trees, houses, fences along with it intact. She saw it only with the physical surface of her eyes, it wasn’t transmitted through the iris. Every twelve minutes, regularly, she remembered something she’d forgotten to tell Frank about Cookie or the house or the milkman or the laundryman. But then — and she realized this herself — even if she had remembered in the first place and told him, he probably would have forgotten it himself by now. That docile nodding outside the bus window hadn’t fooled her; it had been too facile.
Between the twelve-minute intervals she did a lot of worrying about her mother. The way one does, anyone does.
But she realized she was only making herself feel worse, borrowing trouble ahead of time, writing an obituary, so to speak, before there was any need to. As Frank said, it would be all right. It had to be. And if — God forbid — it turned out not to be in the end, then rushing to meet it halfway was no help, either.
She tried to shorten the trip, take her mind off its purpose, by thinking of other things. It was not easy to do. She had not the pictorial eye; inanimate scenery had never meant much to her. And since, on the other hand, she had never taken a passionate interest in the study of human nature in the abstract, what else was there left on a vehicle of this sort? She wondered if it would have helped if she’d bought a book or magazine at the terminal and brought it with her. Probably not; it would have remained opened on her lap at one certain page the whole way. She’d never been any great shakes as a reader.
In desperation that was almost pathetic she started to tally up her household expenses for the past week, and then for the past two weeks. The figures blurred in her mind, became fantastically senseless. She could not forget the hard little knot of worry that lay heavy within her.
It had grown dark now, and the view became restricted to the midget, tubular world she was confined in. The other people around her in the bus were — the other people usually around in a bus. No sublimation to be found there. Just the backs of heads.
She sighed and wished she were an Indian or whatever those people were who could leave their bodies and get there ahead of where they were going. Or something like that, anyway; she wasn’t sure of the mechanics of it.
Around eight they stopped at Greendale for ten minutes, and she had a cup of coffee at the counter in the bus station. As far as Cookie was concerned, at home, the worst was already over by this time, she realized. Either he had a bad case of stomachache by now or else Frank had fed him the way he should be fed and there was nothing further to worry about.