“We didn’t care then who woke up. We pounded out of her room and down the hall and into the little room at the end where Baby slept. You wouldn’t believe it. The fancy crib he had, and the white chest of drawers, and all that mess of rattles and so on, they were gone, and there was just a writing desk there. I mean it was as if Baby had never been there at all.
“We didn’t say anything. We just spun around and busted into Miss Kew’s bedroom. I’d never been in there but once and Janie only a few times. But forbidden or not, this was different. Miss Kew was in bed, with her hair braided. She was wide awake before we could get across the room. She pushed herself back and up until she was sitting against the headboard. She gave the two of us the cold eye.
“ ‘What is the meaning of this?’ she wanted to know.
“ ‘Where’s Baby?’ I yelled at her.
“ ‘Gerard,’ she says, ‘there is no need to shout.’
“Janie was a real quiet kid, but she said, ‘You better tell us where he is, Miss Kew,’ and it would of scared you to look at her when she said it.
“So all of sadden Miss Kew took off the stone face and held out her hands to us. ‘Children,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I really am sorry. But I’ve just done what is best. I’ve sent Baby away. He’s gone to live with some children like him. We could never make him really happy here. You know that.’
“Janie said, ‘He never told us he wasn’t happy.’
“Miss Kew brought out a hollow kind of laugh. ‘As if he could talk, the poor little thing!’
“ ‘You better get him back here,’ I said. ‘You don’t know what you’re fooling with. I told you we wasn’t ever to break up.’
“She was getting mad, but she held on to herself. ‘I’ll try to explain it to you, dear,’ she said. ‘You and Janie here and even the twins are all normal, healthy children and you’ll grow up to be fine men and women. But poor Baby’s—different. He’s not going to grow very much more, and hell never walk and play like other children.’
“ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Jane said. ‘You had no call to send him away.’
“And I said, ‘Yeah. You better bring him back, but quick.’
“Then she started to jump salty. ‘Among the many things I have taught you is, I am sure, not to dictate to your elders. Now, then, you run along and get dressed for breakfast, and we’ll say no more about this.’
“I told her, nice as I could, ‘Miss Kew, you’re going to wish you brought him back right now. But you’re going to bring him back soon. Or else.’
“So then she got up out of her bed and ran us out of the room.”
I was quiet a while, and Stern asked, “What happened?”
“Oh,” I said, “she brought him back.” I laughed suddenly. “I guess it’s funny now, when you come to think of it. Nearly three months of us getting bossed around, and her ruling the roost, and then all of a sudden we lay down the law. We’d tried our best to be good according to her ideas, but, by God, that time she went too far. She got the treatment from the second she slammed her door on us. She had a big china pot under her bed, and it rose up in the air and smashed through her dresser mirror. Then one of the drawers in the dresser slid open and a glove come out of it and smacked her face.
“She went to jump back on the bed and a whole section of plaster fell off the ceiling onto the bed. The water turned on in her little bathroom and the plug went in, and just about the time it began to overflow, all her clothes fell off their hooks. She went to run out of the room, but the door was stuck, and when she yanked on the handle it opened real quick and she spread out on the floor. The door slammed shut again and more plaster come down on her. Then we went back in and stood looking at her. She was crying. I hadn’t known till then that she could.
“You going to get Baby back here?” I asked her.
“She just lay there and cried. After a while she looked up at us. It was real pathetic. We helped her up and got her to a chair. She just looked at us for a while, and at the mirror, and at the busted ceiling, and then she whispered, ‘What happened? What happened?’
“ ‘You took Baby away,’ I said. ‘That’s what.’
“So she jumped up and said real low, real scared, but real strong: ‘Something struck the house. An airplane. Perhaps there was an earthquake. Well talk about Baby after breakfast.’
“I said, ‘Give her more, Janie.’
“A big gob of water hit her on the face and chest and made her nightgown stick to her, which was the kind of thing that upset her most. Her braids stood straight up in the air, more and more, till they dragged her standing straight up. She opened her mouth to yell and the powder puff off the dresser rammed into it. She clawed it out.
“ ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ she says, crying again.
“Janie just looked at her, and put her hands behind her, real smug. ‘We haven’t done anything,’ she said.
“And I said, ‘Not yet we haven’t. You going to get Baby back?’
“And she screamed at us, ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop talking about that mongoloid idiot! It’s no good to anyone, not even itself! How could I ever make believe it’s mine?’
“I said,‘Get rats, Janie.’
“There was a scuttling sound along the baseboard. Miss Kew covered her face with her hands and sank down on the chair. ‘Not rats,’ she said. ‘There are no rats here.’ Then something squeaked and she went all to pieces. Did you ever see anyone really go to pieces?”
“Yes,” Stern said.
“I was about as mad as I could get,” I said, “but that was almost too much for me. Still, she shouldn’t have sent Baby away. It took a couple of hours for her to get straightened out enough so she could use the phone, but we had Baby back before lunch time.” I laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“She never seemed able to rightly remember what had happened to her. About three weeks later I heard her talking to Miriam about it. She said it was the house settling suddenly. She said it was a good thing she’d sent Baby out for that medical checkup—the poor little thing might have been hurt. She really believed it, I think.”
“She probably did. That’s fairly common. We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe.”
“How much of this do you believe?” I asked him suddenly.
“I told you before—it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to believe or disbelieve it.”
“You haven’t asked me how much of it I believe.”
“I don’t have to. You’ll make up your own mind about that.”
