The Nanny

The apartment, she can see at a glance, though grand, in the French style, with a black-and-white marble-floored entrance hall and a curving staircase, could be cleaner. The brass banister is not polished, and she notices as she puts her small suitcase down in the entrance hall that the soil around the big green plant needs water. When the maid ushers her through the glass doors and into the large living room, she stares at the blue-and-gray oriental carpet, which could do with a good vacuuming. The maid who opened the front door, despite her white apron and cap, is negligent, the nanny thinks, and the mistress must not care. The nanny would also like to open one of the French windows onto the small terrace, as she finds the room too warm. She is a great believer in fresh air, even on a cool fall day.

She stands up to greet the mistress of the house, who has entered the room in a pretty pink linen dress with buttons down the front, the new baby in her arms.

The nanny inspects the baby boy in his blue blanket and smiles. "Beautiful," she says, as she always does, but she thinks it is the mother who is good-looking, with her soft, slightly slanting blue-green eyes and her thick auburn hair, which she has tied back untidily from her face in a ponytail.

Newborn babies all look identical to the nanny, who has taken care of so many over the years that she has lost count. She makes it a principle never to stay for more than the requisite month and, if she is ever asked back for a new baby sister or brother, to decline.

But the mother smiles at the compliment and sighs. She looks down at her baby with something that the nanny recognizes as panic. They sit down on the Louis XV damask-covered sofa, side by side, facing the row of French windows that look out onto a narrow terrace and the gardens across the street. The nanny draws herself up and smooths down her dark, thick hair, which she has twisted behind her head into a neat coil. For such a formal place, she thinks, glancing around at the French furniture, the Chinese porcelain, the Italian paintings, she should perhaps have worn her good black suit instead of her traveling dress, a black-and-white crepe dress that does not crease. She had left in a hurry. She is sweating slightly.

She prepares herself for the inevitable onslaught of questions, though she knows the mother already has her excellent references. She has made sure they are excellent. She rather prides herself on her imagination. She has even come up with a few words of criticism that could be construed as desirable. In one reference she has said that the nanny, though wonderful with the baby, was not particularly friendly with the mother. Now she wonders if this mother has even taken the trouble to read her chef d'oeuvres. She looks very thin for a woman who has just left the hospital. Has she been eating enough?

"I'm not sure I'm giving him enough milk. He doesn't sleep much," the mother says, blinking her long, dark lashes and looking down at the nanny with tears in her eyes.

The nanny wonders where the father of the new baby is and why he is not present at this interview. These people seem very casual about hiring someone who will have complete charge of their child. The mother appears very young, too, almost an adolescent, certainly not much more than twenty. The nanny wonders where the money comes from. Perhaps the husband is older, an older man with an important position who might have been married previously, has other children in tow?

She watches warily as two tears trickle down the mother's flushed cheeks and fall onto the baby's face. She is aware that she should now come up with some sort of last-minute excuse not to take this position, which she can already see will...