The nanny and the knife

It all happened so long ago, and it happened so fast, and I was so young. Yet I'm the only surviving witness, and the memory of what happened— or could have happened—continues to haunt me.

It was the summer of 1947, or perhaps 1948. I was five or six; my brother Bob was either two and a half or three and a half. In those days my grandparents had a summer place in Putnam Valley, New York, about 50 miles north of New York City— a sprawling Colonial-era house set on 85 acres of forest land.

We called the place "Redmount"— our family's Anglicization of "Rottenberg." My grandparents had bought it in 1941, the year before I was born, so from my perspective it had always been ours. Redmount's previous owners had bequeathed us several hiking trails through the woods (marked in colors painted on trees and rocks), a carriage house, a tennis court, an old barn full of rusting tractors and pitchforks, a chicken coop (which we used to elude food rationing during the war) and a natural brook-fed swimming hole, which we shared with assorted frogs and water snakes.

Houseful of women

It was a wonderful retreat from New York's steamy sidewalks, and every summer several related households in our family moved up there, each with its respective housekeeper (they were called "maids" in those days). But from Monday through Friday, when the men worked in the city, the only adults at Redmount were women— the Jewish Rottenberg women and their black housekeepers.

That summer my mother had also hired a young nanny to help take care of my brother and me. I don't remember her name or much about her— just a vague feeling that I liked her. (I don't remember hearing the word "nanny," either, but I'm damned if I can think now how her job was defined.)

One morning while my mother slept, as was our routine, my brother and I woke up early and the nanny dressed us and took us downstairs, where she gave us breakfast at the kitchen table. It was a large kitchen with the table planted in the middle. Two other housekeepers were in the kitchen as well, standing by the sink; our nanny was standing by herself at the far end of the room.

Innocent banter, and then…

As Bob and I ate our breakfast, largely oblivious to what was going on, the women engaged in what I assumed was good-natured banter. At some point the two women by the sink started teasing the nanny.

She responded by picking up a kitchen knife and waving it and saying, "You'll be sorry when I come after you with my knife!" I didn't think much of it— I thought she was just kidding around— I think she was smiling. But the women by the sink started shrieking.

The next thing I knew, there was my mother, in her bathrobe, standing at the passageway from the kitchen to the front hall.

"Put down that knife," she was saying to the nanny. "Go upstairs and pack your bags— I'll drive you to the station— you're through here." Or words to that effect.

The way things were

Mom then returned to her bedroom and got dressed, leaving Bob and me to accompany our chastened nanny back upstairs and watch while she packed her bags. She was crying, and I remember thinking: Everything was fine when we got up this morning. Why can't we just go back to the way things were?

A few minutes later, Mom drove the nanny to Harmon Station and put her on the next train back to the city. We never saw her or heard about her again.

My mother was only 30 or 31 at the time. She had to make a snap decision without guidance from my father or any other adult. And she hadn't actually witnessed the context in which the incident occurred. So I was left to wonder: Did she do the right thing?

Murder in New York

A few years ago I asked my father, now 96, whether he recalled the incident. He said he did— but of course, he hadn't been there; he was working in the city. My brother Bob was too young to remember it. Mom has been gone for more than 30 years, and in any case she didn't actually see what happened. The other housekeepers and the nanny herself, I suspect, are dead as well by now.

So that leaves me as the lone witness, haunted over the years by a vague feeling that my mother overreacted.

I thought of the incident again— in a different light— this fall when an apparently emotionally disturbed nanny on New York's Upper West Side went berserk and fatally stabbed her two charges, ages six and two, in their bathtub— and then tried to slash her own throat as well. The older victim was a kindergarten student at my grandchildren's elementary school.

You can see where I'm going with this. Each of us, from time to time, is called upon to make a snap judgment based on incomplete information. We base that judgment on experience or instinct. Sometimes it's a matter of life and death; sometimes it's inconsequential; and other times you never learn the consequences at all.

It's taken me 65 years, and the murder of two children in New York, to realize that maybe I'm here today, and Bob too, because of the snap judgment my mother made that day at Redmount. Like a lioness in the jungle, she protected her cubs until we were able to fend for ourselves, and when her work was done, she moved on.