Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

How will we manage? he wondered. How will Teddy manage to feed them and take care of them? How will they learn to speak? Wasn’t speech a process of imitation? Oh, God, what will we do?

The first thing they had to do, they discovered, was to move. The Riverhead apartment on Dartmouth Road seemed to shrink the moment the babies and their nurse were put into the place. The nurse had been a gift from Teddy’s father, a month’s respite from the task of getting a household functioning again. The nurse was a marvelous woman in her fifties named Fanny. She had blue hair and she wore pince-nez and she weighed 150 pounds and she ran that house like an Army sergeant. She took an instant liking to Carella and his wife, and her fondness for the twins included such displays of affection as the embroidering of two pillow slips with their names, action clearly above and beyond the call of duty.

Whenever Carella had a day off, he and Teddy went looking for a house. Carella was a detective 2nd/grade and his salary — before the various deductions that decimated it — was exactly $5,555 a year. That is not a lot of loot. They had managed to save over the past years the grand total of $2,000, and they were rapidly discovering that this paltry sum could barely cover the down payment on a lawn mower, much less a full-fledged house. For the first time in his life, Carella felt completely inadequate. He had brought two children into the world, and now he was faced with the possibility of being unable to house them properly, to give them the things they needed. And suddenly the Carellas discovered that their luck, by George, she was running good!

They found a house that could be had simply by paying the back taxes on it, which taxes amounted to $10,000. The house was a huge rambling monster in Riverhead, close to Donnegan’s Bluff, a house that had undoubtedly held a large family and an army of servants in the good old days. These were the bad new days, however, and with servants and fuel costs being what they were, no one was very anxious to take over a white elephant like this one. Except the Carellas.

They arranged a loan through the local bank (a civil service employee is considered a good risk) and less than a month after the twins were born, they found themselves living in a house of which Charles Addams would have been ecstatically proud. Along about this time, their second stroke of good luck presented itself. Fanny, who had helped them move and helped them get settled, was due to terminate her month’s employment when she offered the Carellas a proposition. She had, she told them, been making a study of the situation in the Carella household, and she could not visualize poor little Theodora (these were Fanny’s words) raising those two infants alone, nor did she understand how the children were to learn to talk if they could not imitate their mother, and how was Theodora to hear either of the infants yelling, suppose one of them got stuck with a safety pin or something, my God?

Now she understood that a detective’s salary was somewhere around five thousand a year — “You are a second/grade detective, aren’t you, Steve?” — and that such a salary did not warrant a full-time nurse and governess. But at the same time, she had the utmost faith that Carella would eventually make lst/grade — “That does pay six thousand a year, doesn’t it, Steve?” — and until the time when the Carellas could afford to pay her a decent wage, she would be willing to work for room and board, supplementing this with whatever she could earn making night calls and the like.

The Carellas would not hear of it.

She was, they insisted, a trained nurse, and she would be wasting her time by working for the Carellas at what amounted to no salary at all when she could be out earning a damned good living. And besides, she was not a truck horse, how could she possibly work all day long with the children and then hope to take on odd jobs at night? No, they would not hear of it.

But neither would Fanny hear of their not hearing of it.

“I am a very strong woman,” she said, “and all I’ll be doing all day long is taking care of the children under the supervision of Theodora who is their mother. I speak English very well, and the children could do worse for someone to imitate. And besides, I’m fifty-three years old, and I’ve never had a family of my own, and I rather like this family and so I think I’ll stay. And it’ll take a bigger man than you, Steve Carella, to throw me into the street. So that settles that.”

And, indeed, that did settle that.

Fanny had stayed. The Carellas had sectioned off one corner of the house and disconnected the heating to it so that their fuel bills were not exorbitant. Slowly but surely, the bank loan was being paid off. The children were almost a year old and showed every sign of being willing to imitate the sometimes colorful speech of their nurse. Fanny’s room was on the second floor of the house, near the children’s room, and the Carellas slept downstairs in a bedroom off the living room so that even their sex life went uninterrupted after that grisly six-weeks’ postnatal wait. Everything was rosy.

But sometimes a man came home looking for an argument, and you can’t very well argue with a woman who cannot speak. There are some men who might agree that such a state of matrimony is surely a state approaching paradise, but on that Thursday night, with the sky peppered with stars, with a springlike breeze in the air, Carella walked up the path to the old house bristling for a fight.