Men and Angels by Mary Gordon Read Free Book Online

alone. The only problem was to find someone wonderful to take care of the children. But Laura Post wasn’t that person. It was too bad, really, but she simply wasn’t right.
    By the third week of September Anne hadn’t found a live-in baby-sitter. But she had to go down to New York again. One day she talked Mrs. Davenport into staying until eleven so she could have supper with Ben. He had something to give her, he said, and handed her a packet of Caroline’s letters to Derain. She touched them, trembling with excitement. By the time they were ready to leave the restaurant, she’d looked at them all. But she’d missed the last bus. She called Mrs. Davenport, who sniffed when she answered the phone and said, “It’s the first time for you, but it won’t be the last. It’s always the way. Luckily, I don’t have to be no place tonight.”
    Anne said that she hadn’t dreamed of asking Mrs. Davenport to stay; she could simply bring the children next door to the Greenspans. But Mrs. Davenport said she happened to care too much about the children to risk their health getting them up out of a warm bed to go out on a cold night. Anne said she would phone the children in the morning before they left for school.
    “I won’t tell them nothing,” Mrs. Davenport said. “In case you don’t get around to it.”
    She went back to the table where Ben was sitting and began to cry.
    “The children are perfectly fine,” he said. “Ghastly woman. You must get rid of her, darling.”
    “There’s no one else around.”
    “Something will turn up. It’s bound to. Meanwhile, have another brandy. It’ll help you sleep.”
    The waiter brought them a brandy, and Anne asked Ben if he had minded, as a child, being left so much to servants and then being sent off to school so early.
    “I minded awfully at the time. But in retrospect, I think it was good. It taught one early not to expect too much from human attachments.”
    She looked at Ben, his long spatulate fingers around the brandy glass, and thought, I am abandoning my children. I am teaching them not to believe in human attachments. Mrs. Davenport is making my younger child a superstitious nervous wreck. She wanted to tell Ben it was no good; she couldn’t do the job, she was boarding, with the children, the next plane to France.
    She thought of Caroline Watson’s son, who died at twenty-eight, an alcoholic. Peter would probably not become an alcoholic. Sarah would probably not jump out a window trying to flee the Devil. If only she could find the right person to stay with them.
    When she got home the next morning at eleven, she surprised Mrs. Davenport asleep in front of a TV game show. The woman was befuddled and distraught, and Anne felt sorry for her, waking up in front of so many strange televisions, in so many strange houses. For the first time, she saw Mrs. Davenport as old and vulnerable and unfortunate rather than aggressive and unpleasant and ill-bred. She lied and said she didn’t have the right change and gave Mrs. Davenport an extra five dollars.
    “We’ll straighten it out next time,” said Mrs. Davenport, quickly folding the money and pushing it into her purse, as if she expected Anne to change her mind.
    Anne went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. She saw a pad of lined notepaper that Mrs. Davenport had left and thought that she should put it in a drawer so the children wouldn’t use it. A slip of paper fell out of the pad onto the floor. She picked it up. It was written on, and she didn’t want to read it, but she saw her own name. Her name riveted her; she couldn’t keep her eyes away.
    “This one’s such a slob,” the letter said. “Just to test her last week, I left a cookie behind the door of the playroom. Well, it’s still there. I’m leaving it there to see how long it takes her to get around to it.”
    Anne ran up the stairs as if she had been shot out of a cannon. She opened the door of the playroom. The room was a mess: