Or even, when it comes down to it, tucked. Not properly anyway. Only a dusty old airline blanket thrown over them, smoothed about their shoulders and flowing loose about their torsos. Hardly like being in their own beds, though one does one’s best. And recalls the healthy children she has tended. Nedra, reading them stories, stroking their heads, has almost absorbed their soporific comfort, that agreeable ease and comfy coze, their bodies’ balmy thermometry and featherbed climate just so, like a snug tropic. Oh, yes, she knows well enough how they feel, their maiden, their bachelor laze and grand smug innocence and sometimes wonders if she takes this from them to bed with her, if the memory of that heavy rest that lies about her like perfume is not hers but the airy burr they exhalate? Is all this, to her, to Nedra Carp, what their stuffed animals and bits of blanket and fingered cloth and crushed bunches of palmed wool are to them? She rejects the supposition. She stands in loco parentis, after all. Yes, she thinks grimly, like all those wicked stepmothers. Yet she is not wicked, if anything too tender, discipline not her strong suit, her lack of firmness a weakness. Ha ha, she laughs in her reverie, that’s a good one; lack of firmness a weakness is a good one. Yet she knows the literature well enough, the stories of stern nannies, repressed, dried-up old crazies jealous of their privileged charges. Letting them howl their hunger, then tweaking them in the nursery, laying on sharp twists and pinches when no one important’s about, gossiping in the parks among the sisterhood. Oh, well, they probably meant governesses. To the uninitiated, governesses gave nannies a bad name.
It’s ironic, Nedra Carp thinks, but here I am, off to America, to Disney World, Florida, and feels a queer thrill. It was Mr. Disney and the Yanks that made Mary Poppins famous, a household name throughout the world, in all the climes and cultures, a comfort, a tonic. It’s silly, she thinks, I’m no R.C., but Mary Poppins is practically my patron saint.
She was. Nedra Carp imagines Mary Poppins watching over her, not convinced of so much as comforted by the idea of her presence. She has seen the film seventeen times, and though she knows she is nothing like that mysterious woman, has neither her powers nor her flair, yet it is to Mary she turns when she’s in trouble, to Mary to whom she flies now high above the watery rooftops and smoking chimney wisps of the clouded world. And thinks of Mary, that stout, good-natured voyager, of Mary of England and all the globey sky. And knows that it’s because of Mary Poppins that she makes this trip, racing toward Disney World as to a sort of Lourdes, bringing, who has no talent even for changing a diaper and is probably embarrassed by it, no skill with even feverish children let alone dying ones, who cannot make even healthy children laugh or, for that matter, keep them entertained or, if you must know, make them behave, who has none of Mary Poppins’s aptitudes but only her own dull gift of love, flying to Florida, to her patron there — maybe there — to pray before some very likely tarted-up, possibly animated saint. Off to Orlando, who is in the wrong profession and whose love of little children is unrequited, a repressed, dried-up old crazy herself, one muy loco parentis who can’t bear to think of those characters she carries in her handbag like a packet of tame old love letters.
Nedra Carp, Nedra Carp thinks. With my name like a fish. And though most of her employers these self-conscious, egalitarian days call her Mrs. Carp — the Queen herself did; lisping Andrew, keeping his distance, did — she has never married. And knows those aren’t love letters she carries in her purse but only her tepid warrants and credentials — she’s peeked; she’s read them — like the lukewarm references of someone honest and even diligent but uninspired. And knows, too, that if she had married it would probably have been to some widower with kids, in loco parentis again, in loco parentis always who would never have a place of her own. And also knows, as she knows she’s never gossiped about her charges or practiced any of the petty cruelties of her trade, that she would starve rather than deny her stepchildren even one morsel or talk behind their backs to the woodchopper, that unlike Cinderella’s stepmother she could play no favorites, not she, she thinks proudly, not Nedra Carp, who has, for good or ill, like a built-in murmur, her adoptive heart.
Because probably no one but Nedra and those involved know that as a child she had had nannies herself and, as an older child, a governess, or that she was herself a stepchild, her mother having died when Nedra was four, her father remarried to a woman with two children of her own. Hers had been kind enough, nannies, governess, stepmother, stepsister, stepbrother, father, and, later, her half brother and half sister. But then, when she was nine, it was her father who died and her stepmother, not yet thirty-four, who remarried, a widower with two daughters. And Nedra carries with her still a sad sense of fragmentation and dissolved loyalties, a vague notion of having grown up with distant and distancing cousins, who had two stepsisters now, a new baby brother, a new baby sister, and a confused notion of having been raised by aunts and uncles or even just in-laws, all tenuously related and removed, too, by marriage. Only she and the half brother and half sister were Carps, and as much out of confusion as blood and love she sought to make an alliance with them, which they did, but when the last of the stepmother’s children was born, he’d come to her, the half brother. “I find I may no longer in good conscience honor our special relationship,” he said.
“Oh?” said Nedra.
“It would be unfair to my half brother, my new half sister.”
“I see,” Nedra said.
“This complicates things awfully,” the only male Carp apologized.
“It does, rather,” Nedra admitted.
“Though I shall always half love you,” he said, and seemed to fade before her very eyes.
But then it was the stepmother who died and the double widower who remarried, the house filled now with steps and halves and quarters, an ever more fractioned tangle of thinned kinship, practically a decimalized one.
So it was to the nannies she’d turned. Perhaps because they understood even less than she who was who, the strange range of relation in the house. It would have taken a Debrett to work it all out. I was no poor relation, you understand, thinks Nedra Carp, but the only living child in that household of the true founders of the family. The very house in which we lived had belonged to my mother. So it was to the nannies I turned, as bonded and blooded to any of them as to any of the steps and halfs and lesser fractions of alliance there, those amiable nonconsanguineous sleep-in ladies: to them, to the nannies I turned, pitching in, pulling my oar, helping out with the smaller children, a Cinderella of the voluntary, who must have thought of me, if they regarded me at all, as some nanny apprentice or nanny greenhorn, whom though they — the nannies — did not scold, were yet without love, their trained, neutral hearts less in it — yes, and less called for, too — than their time.