The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  He wonders if the fantasy is compensation for not serving during the war. He also wonders if it means that he’s a queer.

  As fantasies go, the driver finds this one peculiar for a couple of reasons. One, he can’t swim and is afraid of the water (another reason he never joined Judy Johansson at the beach). Two, despite the claptrap he mumbles while standing beside Margaret at Mass, he couldn’t care less about the rest of God’s creation and can’t imagine risking his neck for anybody, least of all a total stranger.

  So why, while he’s parked in the dark near the north end of the Cedar Avenue bridge over Lake Nokomis on this sultry July evening, does this vision rise again behind his eyes?

  A boy or young man, rail-thin and probably in high school, is walking toward him on the bridge. The kid is shirtless and barefoot; a belt cinched tight around his skinny waist holds up a pair of light-colored trousers. He has fair, tousled hair and wears glasses. Sometimes in the dream he is smoking a cigarette, sometimes not. Tonight he’s not. Suddenly, near the middle of the bridge, he stops, hops up on the concrete balustrade, and somersaults backward into the darkness.

  A moment later, the driver’s Plymouth is the only car on the bridge, and, a moment after that, the driver is the only person leaning over the balustrade, peering into the black water. He sees the boy’s head and naked shoulders, luminous in the dark, bobbing above the choppy surface. Their eyes meet—the boy is still wearing his glasses—though neither says a word.

  The next thing the driver knows he is in the water. The cold wet is a shock on this hot night. The fact that he can’t swim doesn’t occur to him, and he somehow stays afloat. The boy says, “I am alone.”

  The driver says nothing. He knows the boy’s story. In fact, twenty minutes earlier, he was watching the boy and his girlfriend—she is several years older than the boy, more experienced, and impatient—in the backseat of a car parked in the dark along the north shore of the lake. The boy is nervous, clumsy. The girl tells him to get out of the car.

  Now, in the water, the driver grabs the boy’s belt and begins to swim. A handful of passersby have gathered on the bridge. The driver is exhilarated. He believes he could swim the length and breadth of the lake if he had to, though Nokomis is the third largest in the city’s Chain of Lakes. There’s now a crowd on the bridge and along the shoreline, and he can hear their shouts. Grim-faced cops and firemen in helmets and rubber coats wade into the shallows to retrieve the boy, who sputters and vomits. Amid the noise and confusion, the driver climbs out of the water and walks unnoticed into the darkness.

  The driver often wonders what the fantasy means. He’d love to get a better look at the girlfriend, whose name he somehow knows is Annette and whose imagined role excites him. He pictures her sitting in the car, a short, slim brunette. She is wearing white shorts, and her sleeveless blouse is unbuttoned.

  If he had a good friend, dared speak to Father Dunne at Holy Name, or trusted O’Shaughnessy, he might bring it up over a couple of beers some night. He wouldn’t dream, never mind the pun, of mentioning it to Margaret, who would blame the alcohol or the heat or the Devil for her husband’s foolishness. But he relishes it all the same, especially the swimming. He pictures himself climbing out of the water, shirtless now himself, his dripping torso glowing in the light from the street lamps. He walks back toward his car.

  Alone now in the parked cab, his eyes heavy, he sighs as the image fades and blinks out.

  Arne says nothing to anybody about his and Lily Kline’s breakup. Certainly not to anybody at the courthouse and not to Mel. He almost told Janine Curry after sex one night in early July—Mel was on a week-long fishing trip in Ontario, and there would have been plenty of time to lay bare his pathetic domestic life to his new lover for whatever sympathetic ministrations that might encourage.

  But what would he say? That yet again he screwed up a relationship, though he’s not quite willing to concede it was all his fault? That Lily, as wonderful as she was in bed and the kitchen, when she felt like it, is as difficult a person to live with as he is—moody and demanding and angry much of the time? That her disdain for his work in general and his handling of certain high-profile cases in particular—notably, of course, the murder of Teresa Hickman and the indictment of H. David Rose—got to be more than he could handle? That, despite his denials that he dislikes Jews, he doesn’t like Jews, including members of her family and the few friends of hers they saw socially, pushy and cliquish and superior every one of them?

  Ordinarily, until recently, if he had to talk about his private life, he would talk to Curry over drinks at the end of a shift. He told Mel, for instance, about his personal Battle of the Bulge and the three German prisoners he executed—there is no other word for it—and the dreams he still has about the blood and bodies sprawled in the snow. But, even drunk, that kind of conversation would require, as far as Arne is concerned, an intimacy that he can no longer, now that he’s sleeping with Janine, presume with Mel—not because of any scruple on Arne’s part, but because it would be too easy to tangle the truth and the lies.

  Arne Anderson, at the age of thirty-seven, has had two wives, a half-dozen serious relationships, and God knows how many booze-fueled one-nighters, backseat quickies, and red-light transactions here at home and in Europe, beginning in a Seven Corners whorehouse on his fifteenth birthday. Lily, whom he met during a chance encounter in the bar of the Waikiki Room downtown, belonged in the “serious” category for the better part of three years. But their relationship had been unraveling for months, even before the Hickman murder. Lily was too smart for him. He was no match for her university education, her irony and sarcasm and derision. She wasn’t interested, after a point, in his wartime experience, harrowing and sometimes heroic as it was, more than once reminding him that she had uncles, aunts, and cousins who’d perished in the Nazi camps. She never liked the fact that he’s a cop.

  Even the intermittent sex wasn’t enough, after thirty-odd months, to keep them together.

  Sex was the magnetic force that pulled Janine Curry into his bed or vice versa. Arne does things to and with Janine that Mel, competent but unimaginative, would never think of doing to or with her. In the steamy privacy of the Currys’ bedroom and sundry hot-pillow joints out past the city limits, she screams and shrieks and begs for more, scoring his pale skin with her manicured nails. Before and afterward, she is sweet-tempered and demure, uncritical, undemanding, and seemingly okay with his (and her husband’s) occupation.

  He refuses to think what he will do when Mel discovers their affair, which Mel will do, sooner than later.

  While Mel’s been in Canada, Arne has spent three nights in the Currys’ bed in their carefully appointed duplex apartment on Columbus.

  Janine talks about her days modeling apparel for Dayton’s and Young-Quinlan, and shows him photos of herself in ads clipped from the Sunday magazines and pasted into an oversized scrapbook. The stylish suits, pretty dresses, and chic loungewear only hint at the compact eroticism of the body that lies beneath. Arne occasionally refers to the war—she has asked about the raised pink welts, thick as short lengths of clothesline, on his back and upper legs—but he doesn’t tell her much. They speak sometimes about the MPD, the handful of officers she’s met through Mel, and the Hickman investigation, but never about Mel himself. Arne knows she met Mel at a wedding nine months ago—he was divorced, she was recently separated, and it was, according to Mel, “love at first sight”—but that’s all. If she has thoughts about her future with Arne, she doesn’t mention them. He’s content to make the most of the moment.

  One night while Mel is gone they drink the Jameson whiskey Arne brought over in a paper bag and talk. They’re lying in the Currys’ bed after sex. It comes out of the blue: a question, apropos of nothing that’s been said this evening.

  “Why on earth would a man do something like that?” she asks him.

  “What man? Do something like what?” he says. He’s been admiring his lover’s glossy legs protr
uding from her undone negligee.

  “Murder that girl.”

  Arne takes a long swallow of the whiskey.

  “The state will say he got her pregnant and she was blackmailing him to keep it quiet,” he says at last. “That he strangled her either in a fit of rage or self-protection.”

  “Is that what you and Mel think?”

  “Mel, yes. I’m still not sure.”

  This is the first time they’ve talked about the case and the first time this week they’ve mentioned Mel’s name. Arne wonders, not for the first time, what Mel has said about him generally and about the Hickman case in particular.

  “Why aren’t you sure? Do you know something Mel doesn’t?”

  Arne is surprised by her questions. She strikes him as more than merely curious, almost provocative, or maybe she’s teasing, though she’s not one to tease. In either case, this is new in their relationship—echoes of Lily, baiting him about this or that aspect of his job. He doesn’t like it.

  He laughs and takes another drink. He doesn’t want to discuss the case—not now, and not with his partner’s wife in his partner’s bed.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t know anything the rest of the squad doesn’t know. It’s just a feeling I have. Anyway, whether Rose is guilty or not, Scofield is going to have to prove it in court.”

  Janine reaches for the pack of Winstons on the table beside the bed. The new filter-tipped brand, in what will become a familiar red-and-white package, has been on the market for only about a year. He decides to try one and motions for the pack.

  After a moment, Janine rearranges herself against the bed’s headboard and says, “I went to Dr. Rose a couple of times.”

  Arne blinks.

  “What?”

  He’s not sure he heard her right. If he did, he wonders if she’s putting him on, this entire conversation her idea of a gag. “You went to this Dr. Rose? When?”

  She blows a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. She doesn’t look as though she’s joking.

  “It’s almost three years ago now,” she says. “When Dr. Rose’s name and picture were in the paper, I went back and looked at my calendars—I keep them, I don’t know why, going back a few years. It was in the fall of 1952, during the presidential election. One of the other girls at the agency gave me his name. She said he was nice. Kind of weird, but nice. She said he was Jewish, though that didn’t matter much to me.”

  Arne is looking hard at her now.

  “So what happened? Did he give you a pill?”

  When she shrugs, one of the strings holding up the peignoir slides off her shoulder.

  “No, I’d just gone in for a checkup. He found a small cavity during the examination, as I recall. I needed a little novocaine when he filled it.”

  “Did he say anything off-color, or touch you where he shouldn’t?”

  “No. He was nice, but, like the girl at the agency said, there was something strange about him. I kept thinking it was odd, for instance, that both times I was there no one else was in the office or the waiting room.”

  “This was in the evening?”

  “No. Both times it was late afternoon—four-thirty or five. He did say, though, that if it got late, he would drive me home. I was working downtown, but still lived with Bill, my ex, up off Stinson Boulevard. I thought that was strange—that my dentist would offer to drive me home—but it never happened and I forgot all about it.”

  Arne climbs off the bed and pulls his trousers over skivvies. He has the sensation of the world tilting a bit.

  “You’ve never mentioned this to Mel?” he says.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugs again, and the string slides off her other shoulder.

  “I don’t know. If something had happened, if Rose had made a pass at me, I suppose I would have, but nothing did, so . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “I don’t tell Mel everything,” she says, looking at Arne standing at the foot of the bed, watching her nightie fall away like the unveiling of a work of art. She knows she is beautiful, and when men look at her a certain way she knows she can have what she wants.

  “A girl should have a few secrets, doncha think?”

  The week of July 11, marking the last few days before the beginning of his trial, Dr. and Mrs. Rose open their Linden Hills home to the press.

  The idea of “exclusive features” that would run in all four Twin Cities dailies and in the dozens of Upper Midwest papers served by the local wire service bureaus is Dante DeShields’s. The lawyer is surprised that Homer Scofield hasn’t launched his own public relations offensive and decides to throw the first punch in what will be, he likes to say with typical grandiosity, “a battle to the death for the hearts and minds of the citizens of this community.” Meaning, more precisely, the Hiawatha County citizen pool from whom Rose’s jury will be drawn.

  DeShields is a practiced hand at press initiatives. He has the home phone numbers of the Upper Midwest’s important publishers, news directors, editors, reporters, and photographers, and does his best to hide his utter contempt for the lot of them, knowing if he can get them on his side, he can use them to significant advantage, and, if he can’t, they can add to the difficulty of his job. As always, he expects to win in the courtroom. He wouldn’t take a case, even a tough one like this, if he didn’t. And his detractors are right: like all prima donnas, Dante loves to see his mug in the papers.

  “I’ve made preliminary arrangements with Appel, Rystrom, Joe Clayburg of the Pioneer Press, Doyle Hibbert of the Dispatch, Rice from the AP, and Mckenzie from the United Press,” he told the Roses the preceding Saturday. “They’ll each get a bio and fact sheet and an exclusive half hour one-to-one with you. Mike and I will prepare you and be present for every interview. You will find this unpleasant—I wouldn’t want those barbarians in my living room—but it’s necessary and we’ll help get you through it.”

  “You’ll do fine,” Ronnie says from behind Ruth’s chair. Nobody looks his way or acknowledges the comment. Like Michael Haydon, Ronnie is now almost always present at these discussions, usually silent, and generally as unobtrusive as the floor lamp in the corner. Even in the stuffy heat, he keeps his suit jacket on, probably to keep a shoulder holster out of site.

  Rose himself, after the brief return to work three weeks ago, has sunk into a torpid funk that Ruth attributes to tedium as much as worry about the future. “I just wish David gardened or enjoyed nature hikes or would go out to Oak Ridge with one of my cousins,” she tells Haydon as she refills his tumbler with iced tea. “Of course, he’d have to learn to play golf,” she adds with a chuckle.

  Imagining Rose with a five iron in his hands, young Haydon muses, smiling, is as difficult as imagining Ben Hogan with a dentist’s drill.

  At that moment, Dr. Rose—who has never played a sport, had the slightest interest in the outdoors, or enjoyed a hobby of any kind if you don’t count his phonograph records and meerschaum pipes—is sitting in his preferred wing chair in the living room, staring out through the bay window at Zenith Avenue. Ruth is right about his state of mind (he can hear her talking in the kitchen), but he doesn’t have the vaguest idea what to do about it. He doesn’t believe he’s depressed in a clinical sense—that has never been his problem—nor does he worry much about the pending trial. On the surface, he is a model of calm and equanimity, just as he’s always been unflappable at the office, and, to the best of his knowledge, he is not very different underneath.

  He rarely thinks about Teresa or Grace, either, and doesn’t make an effort to revisit the night and early April morning that will be the focus of his trial. DeShields brings it up, often and insistently, but the lawyer has obviously come to understand and accept that Rose has said all he is able and willing to say on the subject. DeShields will construct his defense on the defendant’s personal character and professional reputation and, by stark contrast, on the reputation of Teresa Hickman and the bungling of the police.

  When
the members of the press come trooping into the house this week—thank God it’s not winter and it’s been dry of late, otherwise the mess they’d make on the taupe carpeting might drive poor Ruth around the bend—Rose will not speak of the fateful night. DeShields, hovering like a watchful parent, will make sure of that, and if it does come up, violating the “ground rules” the lawyer has laid down for the reporters, he will stop the interview and show the offender to the door.

  Ordinarily, arranging a press meeting with a client, DeShields would use his posh, mahogany-lined Foshay Tower office, but in this instance he wants to emphasize the Roses’ genteel yet unpretentious home life, with the family photos on top of the baby grand, the tasteful if not especially distinguished artwork on the walls, and the doctor’s classical record collection leaning against the phonograph—all of that in marked contrast to the disreputable, vagabond environments of Teresa Hickman. The pearl gray Imperial and the large men inside it will be parked out of sight in the alley.

  Rose still insists that he remembers nothing of those fateful hours in April. “Blacked out” is, as it was when he was grilled by detectives, the most accurate way to describe his state of mind at the time of the woman’s murder and to explain his ignorance and absence of memory of the relevant events. The passage of time has not lifted a corner of the opaque shroud nor shone any light under it. On the rare occasions when Rose sits behind the wheel of his Packard, nothing he sees, touches, or smells jogs more than the dimmest memory, certainly nothing worth mentioning, nor has anything he’s read in the papers rung any bells. His brief return to the office in June brought back only professional nostalgia and pedestrian recollections of dance music and doors slamming and rowdy laughter from elsewhere in the building.

  No matter. DeShields isn’t going to let his client talk about any of that. The summer’s lone patient, Haswell’s girl, Geraldine Fiola, will not be mentioned. DeShields, moreover, has made it clear that Rose won’t testify in his own defense when the trial gets under way next week.