Leave Well Enough Alone

by Rosemary Wells

  The pool itself was surrounded by stucco arches, each of these covered with Virginia creeper in tender scarlet-and-green leaf. The pool house and the four cabanas that stood beside it were fronted with miniature Doric columns, that was why she thought of Ancient Rome. There were no tacky folding awning-cloth chairs here. All the furniture was heavy wicker, and had been painted with shiny white enamel. A bartender in a brilliant red jacket stood a little way off, polishing crystal glasses. Dorothy watched him. Someone backed into the bar, knocking a glass to the floor, shattering it on the frosty-white tiles. The person looked down for a moment and then resumed talking. The bartender produced a silver dustpan, small enough to be a child’s toy, and swept up the pieces in one soundless, graceful motion. Dorothy discovered she’d half risen from her seat in reaction to the breaking glass. She sat down quickly, hoping no one had seen. There were servants to pick things up here. “No one breaks my Waterford!” her mother’s voice rang in her mind’s ear. At home, when her father’s friends came in for a “quick one,” they just drank out of the Li’l Abner jelly glasses, or whatever happened to be lying around. They poured their own drinks too. We don’t need to have servants! Dorothy told herself proudly. But there was envy on the rim of her feelings, as surely as there were blood-red edges on the Virginia creeper leaves.

  “Dorothy!” called Mrs. Hoade from somewhere, and Dorothy’s agreeable shell of quiet observation broke, giving way to a sense of caution. Dorothy wanted very much to appear at ease. To say the right thing. She had not seen Mrs. Hoade since Mrs. Hoade had left her and the girls in the two rambling bedrooms that were to be theirs for the summer. She had first led them into the kitchen, stranding them there for the moment, and had taken the back stairs like a jackrabbit, saying something about being late for her own party. Dorothy had not dared follow her immediately, for fear Mrs. Hoade might have forgotten something and decided to come barreling downstairs at the same rate, crashing into all three of them. However, Mrs. Hoade had reappeared, more sedately, in a slip, remembering indeed that she’d forgotten to show Dorothy and the girls their rooms.

  “Dear, you’ve met John, I see,” she said. “Are you hungry? We’ll get you something to eat.” Mrs. Hoade’s arm rested easily around Dorothy’s shoulders. She had transformed herself somewhat from that afternoon’s dowdiness, with tiny diamond earrings, a chunky diamond necklace, and a saffron yellow watered-silk dress. The whole effect was to make her look broader and squarer than before, but the silk! Dorothy wanted to finger the soft gleaming silk. Twelve dollars and fifty cents a yard, she calculated silently. And the diamonds! “Oh, come this way, dear, there’s someone I want you to meet,” Mrs. Hoade said, apparently forgetting Dorothy’s empty stomach. Mr. Hoade, another man who had a swarthy, foreign look about him, and a woman stood near the deep end of the pool. The woman was so thin, so exquisitely dressed and combed and made up, that Dorothy wanted to hate her, but she couldn’t because the face was intelligent and had a lively grin. She was introduced as Vita Berensen, Mrs. Hoade’s oldest and best friend. Dorothy didn’t catch the man’s name.

  “Kebab,” he repeated for her. “George Kebab.”

  “Vita’s publisher,” said Mrs. Hoade with unabashed admiration.

  “Just editor, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Kebab.

  “Vita’s a famous author,” said Mrs. Hoade. “She’s been on television.”

  Dorothy’s mouth opened. “You have?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid Maria exaggerates,” said the lively smile. “I was on for three minutes at six o’clock in the morning and I’m really not a famous author, not a really famous one.”

  “What books have you written?” Dorothy asked. “I might have read...

  “I’m sure you haven’t,” said Vita with a laugh. “There’s only one and it’s only a cookbook.”

  “It’s called Cooking for the Great and Near-Great,” said Mrs. Hoade loyally. “It’s a best seller. And it’s wonderful. She even had help from Madame Chiang Kaishek.”

  “Madame Chiang Kaishek!” said Dorothy, finding herself openmouthed again.

  Vita chuckled. “I met her years ago,” she explained. “When I was married to my first husband. He was in Roosevelt’s entourage at Yalta. She and I became friends, and well, when she wanted to do this cookbook, I was a free-lance writer and I said I’d help her.” Vita nudged Mrs. Hoade playfully with her elbow. “If it weren’t for that picture of Madame Chiang holding up a chicken on the dust jacket, it wouldn’t have sold five copies,” she said. Vita turned back to Dorothy. “So you can see”—she swallowed the rest of her drink in one swanlike movement—“I’m hardly a famous author!” Was she expecting Dorothy to agree or disagree?

  “There’s a good Chinese restaurant we go to sometimes,” Dorothy answered. She was about to tell this woman that she never ordered chow mein or chop suey like the rest of her family, but had more adventurous tastes.

  “It isn’t Chinese food,” said Vita. “It’s all French. The Generalissimo has a Belgian cook for his Western visitors. His Chinese guests are never great or even near-great.”

  Dorothy wanted to ask how Mrs. Chiang managed to write a cookbook if she didn’t do any cooking when Lisa, smiling coyly, came to her side carrying a plate loaded with carefully arranged delicacies. It must have taken considerable time to compose it. Jenny followed looking dour. “How sweet of you!” said Mrs. Hoade to her daughter, and as soon as Dorothy was ensconced in a chaise, plate on her knees, she and her companions turned away as if Dorothy no longer existed.

  “Lobster salad,” said Jenny in a bored voice.

  “And this, these?” Dorothy asked.

  “Crab turnovers. And that’s a quiche Lorraine. And those are white asparagus. They come out of a can but they’re supposed to be better. And that’s hearts of palm. That comes out of a can too.”

  “Hearts of what?”

  “Palm,” said Jenny. “We hate that food. After tonight, though, you’ll have to eat with us.”

  Dorothy marveled at each new taste. Lisa was busy cramming a piece of cake into her mouth at a great rate, and so for once was quiet. Lisa had not stopped asking questions since that afternoon, when Dorothy had very nearly thrown her out of her room.

  Mrs. Hoade had shown Dorothy through the upstairs of the house, all the while getting undressed and then dressed as they walked around. When she’d brought Dorothy back to her own room where she’d first left her suitcase, she’d discovered the girls had gone through her things rather thoroughly. “We unpacked for you,” said Lisa blandly to Dorothy’s angry face.

  Dorothy had asked both girls to please wait for her in their own rooms.

  “What size bra do you wear? What’s your last name?” Lisa had gone on.

  “Thirty-four B and Coughlin and if you don’t mind... Dorothy had paused for breath.

  “You better put on something nicer than that,” Lisa had said. “Everybody’s really dressed up. I saw a dress in your suitcase,” she had added with her head cocked to one side. Dorothy had flounced out of her skirt and blouse and into the cotton dress the moment she’d got Lisa and Jenny out of the room. She’d had to threaten Lisa with a spanking to do it.

  Luckily she hadn’t cried in front of the girls. She’d had to stand for a moment, grasping the corners of the dark oak dresser, “her” dresser, with the ram’s head carved over the center of the mirror. She’d ground her teeth until the ache in the back of her throat had subsided and then come back all over again and spent itself in tears when she’d seen that her best dress was hopelessly wrinkled because it was pressed up against Ivanhoe and Nicholas Nickelby all day long.

  “Don’t eat so fast, you’ll get hiccups,” she said gently to Lisa, as Lisa stuffed an enormous bite of cake into her mouth.

  Lisa rolled her eyes, swallowed the cake, and whined to her sister, “Who does she think she is? A jailer?”

  “I hope you don’t try and teach us manners,” said Jenny. “We get enough of that garbage at school. This is
supposed to be a vacation, for heaven’s sakes.” Dorothy did not like the for heaven’s sakes one bit but she was determined to make a new start with the girls.

  “I’m sorry,” she said genuinely.

  Behind her, Mrs. Hoade’s voice was getting louder and louder. Dorothy had seen her accept at least three drinks from a tray that circulated in the hands of a large, yellow-haired maid. Mrs. Hoade was speaking to Vita and Mr. Kebab. Something about a book. Her own book? Mr. Hoade was not successful in changing the subject.

  At last Mrs. Hoade turned around and asked Dorothy to take the girls up to the house for cake and milk and television.

  “No!” they howled in unison.

  Dorothy tried to sound cheerful. She tried to march off with them, hand in hand, like the Pied Piper. They paid her no attention.

  “I’m kissing Daddy good night,” said Lisa, and she threw her arms around her father’s neck.

  “What have you got all over you?” he demanded, pushing her away with a terrible look at Dorothy.

  “Icing,” said Lisa, and glanced at her hands. She withdrew from her father quietly. It was the first quiet thing Dorothy had seen her do all day. I’ll try to be nice to her, poor thing, Dorothy vowed.

  “What a pretty dress you have, Lisa,” she said when Lisa had fallen, strangely obedient, into file next to her.

  “It’s awful,” said Lisa.

  “I hate mine too,” said Jenny.

  Dorothy laughed. “I guess I hated dresses when I was a little girl too,” she said.

  “I’m not a little girl,” Lisa declared.

  “Neither am I,” said Jenny.

  “Did you say you were fifteen?” Lisa asked.

  “Yes,” answered Dorothy, wondering if this incessant questioning was retribution for her lie.

  “You look younger,” said Lisa.

  “Mom said you were seventeen,” Jenny remarked matter-of-factly.

  Dorothy searched her memory with a small sensation of panic. Surely she hadn’t told Mrs. Hoade that much of a lie. Could she have done so and blocked it out? But Jenny continued, “Just so we’d think you were bigger and scarier, I guess.

  “Mom’s a big liar anyway,” she went on. “She usually tells people things that will suit them, depending on who they are. For instance, she tells Daddy’s Jewish friends she’s Jewish even though she isn’t, and she told our Spanish nurse in South America that she was Catholic, which she isn’t.”

  Lisa looked at the gold cross that hung from a chain around Dorothy’s neck. “You Catholic?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Dorothy answered, “but I don’t think...

  “I thought so,” Lisa went on. “We have a girl in our class, Patty Finzio, who has a cross like that. She’s the only Italian we have. Did Mom tell you she was Catholic?”

  “No,” said Dorothy, “and what’s more, I don’t think...

  “I know you’re fourteen!” Lisa began to sing.

  Dorothy flushed. “And just what makes you so smart?” she asked.

  “You know that little statue of Mary or whoever it is on your bureau? I looked underneath and it says Dorothy whatever your name is, October sixth, nineteen forty-one. That’s fourteen.”

  “For your information,” Dorothy sputtered, “that’s the Virgin Mary, Mother of our Lord. And also for your information it isn’t nice to go through other people’s things. I’ll have to tell your mother.” She decided to lock her door from now on.

  “I’ll tell her you’re fourteen,” said Lisa, tossing the flower of a Queen Anne’s lace at her sister.

  “That’s a copper beech,” said Jenny suddenly, coming to a halt in the middle of the lawn.

  “How do you know?” Dorothy asked, grateful for a change of topic.

  “I got my merit badge in nature,” said Jenny. “I have twenty-two. I’ll show you my sash. That’s a Japanese maple and those are buttonwoods with the bark falling off and those big ones around the house are elms.” Dorothy’s gaze followed Jenny’s forefinger. Lisa, at the first mention of merit badges, had run up to the house. For this Dorothy was also grateful.

  On either side of the copper beech stood two chrome fountains, their water falling in graceful arcs. Whether their forms were artistic or utilitarian Dorothy couldn’t guess. Ringing each fountain was a bed of primroses. She was struck by the incongruity, the fountains putting her in mind of an ugly new statue in front of the Newburgh City Hall and the roses suggesting life an infinite time ago, before cars and televisions and children who talked back.

  Dorothy and Jenny walked slowly to the house, both of them solemn, neither talking. Once Dorothy glanced back at the party. She half expected Fred Astaire to come dancing through it. This place! The circular driveway, the fat green grass and the whispering trees. What a curious mixture of penance and treat this summer looked to become. There was no denying that the girls would be the bane of her life for the next two months unless she found a way to control them. But the place and the people she’d seen tonight, they were something wonderful. Her own backyard in Newburgh with its two straggly locust trees and the clothesline would never be quite as bearable again.

  She wondered what her mother would think of the Hoades and their friends. She could see her mother’s full red mouth become a tight little line of disapproval. Her mother would dislike these people with their easy money and their easy talk and their peacock clothing. She wouldn’t care a bit what they thought of her. Maureen would hate them, just the way Maureen hated anyone who had more money or more time or more looks than she. “Think they’re better than us, do they?” Maureen would sniff. Well, let them! Dorothy felt a small surge of loathing herself, but the more she let it encompass her the more she knew it was for the us, not the them, that she felt it. The us meant people who counted every last penny, whose halls smelled of cabbage and whose back stairs smelled of diapers. The part of you that wants what the Hoades have, Dorothy told herself, is a lazy, greedy, ungrateful part. I have a loving family and that’s the most important thing in the whole world. These people have spoiled kids and divorces. But couldn’t I have both money and a loving family? “No,” said Maureen primly in her ear. Dorothy’s feet glided through the thick dewy grass. She didn’t believe Maureen.

  “You’re falling asleep,” said Lisa sharply, and indeed, Dorothy had dozed off on the window seat of the library in front of the television. It was completely dark outside now. The lights were no longer on at the pool. Only a faint glow came from a little cottage down at the end of a grassy drive.

  “I want some more cake,” said Jenny. “Dinna won’t get it for us.”

  “Who’s Dinna?” Dorothy asked.

  “The maid. The cook. You saw her tonight with the tray. She was going to take care of us this summer but we got you instead. Anyhow she put the cake on top of the fridge and we can’t reach it. You get us some.”

  “Will you go to bed nicely if I do?” asked Dorothy.

  “Yeah,” said Jenny.

  “I don’t want any,” Lisa announced, “and I don’t want to go to bed.”

  Dorothy decided to put off dealing with this. She got up and left the library, where the television set had been placed between two bookcases. The bookcases ran from floor to ceiling and were filled with leather-bound volumes. Imagine having a library! Dorothy thought as she made her way downstairs. It’s like something out of a romantic novel! But then the whole place is sort of like Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. All it needs is a fog and a ghost.

  The kitchen was outsized; like most of the rooms in the house, it appeared to have been designed to accommodate a dozen people. There were two sinks made of a dull pitted metal, and another in the pantry around the corner. The black iron stove had three ovens and six burners. Standing beside it, stirring milk in a pot, was a stumpy little woman in a nurse’s uniform. Her glasses were very thick and she wore her hair tightly pulled back and braided in a coil at the back of her head. She smiled when Dorothy said hello, but she didn’t answer. Finally she said so
mething that sounded like “Ya ya” when Dorothy introduced herself.

  “Dorothy,” said Dorothy pointing to herself. Again the nurse smiled silently and smoothed out the wrinkles in her uniform skirt. Then she drank the warm milk in a single gulp.

  Mrs. Hoade’s voice, just a little shrill, drifted in from the living room. This gave Dorothy an excuse to walk as purposefully as possible in that direction. Thinking to say good night, she turned around once, but the nurse was gone. Since there was an argument going on between Mr. and Mrs. Hoade in the living room, Dorothy retreated to a respectful distance in the hall. She was not, however, completely out of earshot. Mr. Hoade was calling Mrs. Hoade a damn fool. He said it three times in a row.

  “John, perhaps it was foolish, but I didn’t have a chance to think...

  “And you’re going to have to go through with it. Live with it!” he shouted.

  “How was I to know?”

  “You could have asked, for one thing!”

  “John, I was as surprised as you when she told me. Now I just can’t fire her and that’s that.”

  Dorothy’s ears pricked. Fire her! What had she done? Mr. Hoade was calling his wife careless now. A careless damn fool was what he said. “You could have asked,” he repeated.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Hoade countered. “I’m supposed to ask the whole history of her family, is that it? Just tell me how you would have gone about doing that without sounding rude.” Mrs. Hoade’s voice turned sarcastic. “What does your father do? What is your mother’s favorite food? What are the names and exact ages of your brothers and sisters? Do you have a dog? What is your dog’s name? Is that the kind of interview you expected me to conduct?”

  Oh, God, thought Dorothy, what can this be about? There’s only one thing it could be. She couldn’t have possibly found out I lied about Arthur’s and Daddy’s jobs so it’s got to be that I have no experience. Maybe she doesn’t mind but he does and I don’t blame him. Why didn’t I tell Mrs. Hoade that Maureen and Kevin and Terrance were older than me in the first place? She would have hired me anyway because she doesn’t seem to care and at least I wouldn’t have told a half lie. Half lie indeed! she snorted to herself. It’s a lie. A sin of omission. Please, dear God, don’t let him fire me. I’ll try the best I can with the girls. I really will. Dorothy attempted to hear more of the conversation, but Mrs. Hoade was weeping now, sobbing miserably. Mr. Hoade’s voice rose sharply, to an angry shriek, so odd for a man’s voice. “All your stupid, misguided idea in the first place!” he said. “Why can’t you take care of your own children like any other woman? Tell me that! Just tell me that!”