Leave Well Enough Alone

by Rosemary Wells

  “John, I’ve decided I’m going to do some writing this summer. I thought...I’d like to do a cookbook. Like Vita. But better.”

  “Oh, beautiful!” was the last thing Dorothy heard Mr. Hoade say. She sighed and waited for them to stop arguing about the cookbook. Their voices were lowered beyond her hearing now. Dorothy’s eyes gradually lost their focus in a sapphire-colored lamp that illuminated a drop-leaf table beside her.

  On the table was a pewter dish. In the dish was an envelope, which had already been slit open—a bill, she guessed, as it had a cellophane window. “Modern Gala, Caterers for All Occasions,” she read. Dorothy wondered how much this party had cost the Hoades. Inside of a moment she knew. Seventy-five dollars and forty cents for food, plus a hundred dollars for liquor. Dorothy’s eyes popped. She replaced the bill in the envelope. Underneath it was another bill. It had already been taken from its envelope and lay faceup in the dish. It was from Crestview. Dorothy glanced at it as if she were not glancing at it. “Hoade, Katherine,” it said, and went on to list three indecipherable medical expenses plus something called dietary. The whole thing came to five hundred twelve dollars and that was for one month only. My God! Dorothy whispered, and dropped both bills into the exact positions in which she had found them. She felt awful for having looked. She crossed herself and apologized for having taken God’s name in vain. Five hundred twelve dollars for an old lady’s medical care was bad enough, but one hundred seventy-five dollars and forty cents for one party was something else. It’s a sin to waste money like that she told herself stoutly. No, it isn’t, replied another part of Dorothy. It would be just lovely to have that kind of money to waste.

  “Good night, Mr. Hoade,” she said as pleasantly as she could when he strode out of the living room and nearly bumped into her in the hall.”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked and without waiting for an answer opened the front door and, slamming it behind him, ran down the front steps to his car.

  Dorothy coughed politely as she entered the living room. Mrs. Hoade sat with her legs tucked up beneath her on the window seat. She watched Mr. Hoade’s car pull out of the driveway and dabbed at her eyes. “Never fall in love, dear,” she said, and got up and poured herself a drink. “I hope Mr. Hoade wasn’t rude to you,” she added.

  “Oh, no,” said Dorothy.

  “He really can be so nice,” said Mrs. Hoade, sipping from an old-fashioned glass. “You must have a bad first impression. We never have fights. We love each other very much.”

  “Oh...of course,” said Dorothy.

  “It’s so funny,” Mrs. Hoade said with a smile at the ice in her drink. “It really was one of those love-at-first-sight things with me and John. I was very bad. Sit down, dear. Will you have a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” said Dorothy. She sat in a wing chair.

  “What was I saying? Oh, yes. When I first met John. It was during the war. I’d gone to visit my best friend, Emily Baldwin. Emily and I had been friends all through school. She was engaged to a lovely boy. There was a dance on shipboard that night. This was in Norfolk, Virginia. The big naval base?”

  “Yes,” said Dorothy. She hoped this story would not take too long.

  “At any rate, there was a dance. I hadn’t come prepared, as I didn’t know, and I had no dress. Well, I met John that morning when we visited Emily’s fiancé. He asked me to the dance that night. I couldn’t find a dress in Norfolk. Do you know what I did?”

  “No,” said Dorothy.

  “Emily and I were the same size. That afternoon while we were waiting for the boys to get off duty, I got Emily drunk. I must have gotten three quarters of a bottle of vodka into her. I was drinking water, but she didn’t know it. She was so sick she couldn’t go to the dance. I borrowed her dress and went with John instead. Her fiancé, Richard, was killed at Midway three months later. Emily never saw him again. To this day she doesn’t know I did it on purpose, but I’ll never forgive myself. That’s what love will do to you.”

  “Oh, dear” was all Dorothy could think to say. She hated older peoples’ stories about love. They were always so sappy. She thought she’d change the subject. “What a nifty house this is,” she said, her eyes taking in the maroon damask drapes eagerly. An enormous Oriental rug, its pattern covered with birds and animals, covered the whole floor of the living room. The wood of the baby grand piano that stood in the corner seemed as soft as silk. The finish looked like honey in a jar. “What an elegant room,” she added, guessing right then that nifty and elegant were a poor choice of words. “I just haven’t ever been in a house like this, as big as this with all these things....

  Mrs. Hoade chuckled. “I’m sure your house in Newburgh is lovely and homey,” she said. “The humblest hearth if it is tended with love is worth all the palaces of the tsars, or is it kings? At any rate, the sentiment is the same.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Dorothy earnestly. “It’s just that you could fit three of my house into this one house!” She spread her arms to indicate the immensity she observed and knocked a small glass owl to the floor. Its ear broke off.

  “It’s all right!” said Mrs. Hoade, rushing over to pick up the owl.

  “I’ll pay for it!” said Dorothy. “Oh, my goodness. I’m so sorry. I’m so clumsy. I’ll pay for it, Mrs. Hoade. I promise!” Dorothy discovered she had begun to cry.

  “Please,” said Mrs. Hoade. “It’s only a doodad. You couldn’t possibly pay for it anyway,” she said with a laugh. “It’s Steuben glass. Over twelve hundred dollars. Now you couldn’t do that, so let’s just call it an accident. Dinna shouldn’t have put it so near the edge of the table when she dusted, anyway.”

  “I’ll pay for it, Mrs. Hoade. I’ll pay for it anyway. My mother would make me,” Dorothy gasped.

  “Now listen,” Mrs. Hoade broke in. She was still kneeling on the floor next to Dorothy. She put the owl and the ear on the table, and pulled Dorothy’s trembling hand away from Dorothy’s mouth. “Now listen to me, Dorothy.” Mrs. Hoade said evenly. “It would take you three summers of work to pay for one silly piece of glass. Now I know exactly how you feel. I sympathize. Do you think I always had this kind of money? Believe me, I didn’t. Now listen to this carefully because it’s very important.”

  “Okay,” said Dorothy shakily.

  “I hated that owl. Here’s a Kleenex. I certainly would never spend twelve hundred dollars on an owl. I even hate real owls. Now come. We’ll change the subject. I’ll show you some lovely pictures.”

  “All right,” Dorothy agreed.

  Mrs. Hoade pointed to a photograph on one of the tables. “That’s how the house and grounds used to look,” she said, “years ago before the stable was torn down. There used to be a stable and a greenhouse, and God knows why they tore them down. Fire hazards, I guess. Too much to keep up. See the stable at the back of that picture?”

  “What are those?” Dorothy asked, picking up the photograph.

  “Oh. Fishponds. They were filled in too. The fountains were put up recently.” Dorothy thought she preferred the place as it had been before. A stable! She would have loved to have ridden a horse. The little cupids that held two jugs aloft in the middle of the fishponds certainly looked nicer than the chrome fountains. They went perfectly with the primroses, too.

  “That was my father,” said Mrs. Hoade, picking up another framed photograph.

  “Who is that?” Dorothy asked, noticing a portrait of a woman, done in oils, hanging over a silver liquor tray at the bottom of the stairs.

  “That’s Lisa’s and Jenny’s great-grandmother—of course, when she was young,” said Mrs. Hoade.

  “People really dressed that way!” said Dorothy. “Look at that gorgeous dress!”

  “Very impractical, if you ask me.” Mrs. Hoade used a snippy tone that reminded Dorothy of Maureen.

  Dorothy tried to remember the name of the painter whose style had been adopted for the portrait. Sister Elizabeth wanted her students to know about painters and
styles. Gainsborough, that was it. The woman looked positively regal in her long flowing dress. There was something there that brought to mind Mother Superior. Certainly it wasn’t the scarlet dress, not the eyes, for they were blue instead of brown and open, not hooded like Reverend Mother’s, not the fine bones in the face, for they certainly held no false teeth. One hand was placed delicately on the head of a sitting greyhound, the other, at shoulder level was poised on top of a stone column that still stood in the garden outside. Dorothy recognized it. She’d almost smacked into it and bumped her nose exactly on the spot where the long, supple fingers had relaxed for the painter on a long-gone afternoon.

  One thing was certain. Mrs. Hoade did not much like the woman, but then people always had trouble with in-laws. Dorothy guessed that she must be Mr. Hoade’s father’s mother, since the name on the Crestview bill was Hoade too. Mrs. Hoade replaced the photograph of her father. “His plane was hit at Pearl Harbor,” she said sadly.

  I like her, Dorothy decided, as Mrs. Hoade drew an album of Jenny’s and Lisa’s baby pictures from a drawer in a huge mahogany table. She tried to think why. Was it because Mrs. Hoade seemed to need taking care of more even than her two daughters? A little. And also because she’s sort of like an older me, Dorothy thought to her own surprise. Perhaps Mrs. Hoade had had a difficult time with Mr. Hoade’s family. Dorothy wondered if the old lady in the picture had been mean. “Nobodies,” that’s what rich old families called people of the working class, very often. One day, Dorothy told herself for the fortieth time since having to slog through The Forsyte Saga, I’m going to write a best-selling book. I’ll use an old matriarch as uppity as the one in that picture. I’ll use a wife who works her way up from the slums and then marries a rich creep like Mr. Hoade. The family won’t accept her, of course, but somehow she’ll show them all.

  The plot of Dorothy’s book changed drastically every time she considered writing it, although the title remained constant. The best part about it was picturing Sister Elizabeth’s face when the Book-of-the-Month Club sent her a copy of Descent into Ashes, by Dorothy Coughlin.

  Dorothy tried to concentrate on the baby pictures. Most of them had been taken in Buenos Aires. “We lived here in Llewellyn,” Mrs. Hoade explained, “until just before Lisa was born. She was born down there. I never want to do that again. South American hospitals... She didn’t explain further. “We’d better get them to bed,” said Mrs. Hoade.

  The best cure for insomnia, Dorothy had read in a mystery story, was to pretend you were an FBI agent assigned to watch a doorway for the emergence of a suspect. This apparently is very boring work. If you make yourself keep both eyes open, you’ll surely enough begin to close one and then both and then bang! You’re asleep. Dorothy fell into an exasperatingly wakeful state in her unfamiliar bed. Jenny and Lisa kept bounding out of the doorway she’d pictured and she couldn’t get them back inside. Why do children do this to me? Why do they always get under my skin? she asked herself. The darkness of her room held no answer. You must try, she instructed herself. If you don’t... If I don’t, what? I’ll be fired, of course, and have to go home in disgrace, without my money, have to spend the summer with Maureen.... More than that, though, she thought. There is something in this place, in this house, with these people that I...that I want, or want to learn about. The key is the girls. If I’m able to manage them and last out the summer, then maybe... What would it be? There had been hints dropped that evening about some connection with Mr. Hoade and politics, with Mrs. Hoade and books. Books actually written by live people. Dorothy had never known anyone who had even met a writer, much less written a book themselves. There had been mention, too, of horseback riding. That was something she’d always wanted to do. So I’ll try, she resolved. I’ll do anything so that I don’t have to— She pictured Maureen. Maureen, who’d married a high-school boyfriend and slipped away to a tiny rented house near the railway. She, Dorothy, never wanted to do that. Never wanted to buy cheap, ugly furniture on time. Never wanted to walk six blocks with a baby carriage and a wrinkled shopping bag to take advantage of a supermarket special on margarine. Just as Dorothy fell asleep, Reverend Mother’s face appeared to her. “The wicked man fleeth where no man pursueth,” said the unsmiling lips: “but the just, bold as a lion, shall be without dread.”

  “I won’t do it the way Mrs. Hoade did,” Dorothy murmured. “I won’t marry some rich guy and have it fall in my lap. I’ll work for it. I promise,” she promised no one in particular.

  Chapter Three

  “JENNY, WON’T YOU GO in, just a little?” Dorothy pleaded.

  “No. It’s too cold.”

  “Jenny, it’s been two weeks almost and you’ve hardly gotten wet up to your knees. It isn’t cold. Not a bit. Your mom and dad made me promise I’d teach you to swim. Won’t you try, Jenny?”

  “No,” said the grim little mouth, half hidden by the Turkish towel Jenny was chewing.

  “Lisa, tell Jenny it isn’t cold. You’ve been splashing around all morning. It’s lovely! It’s warm!”

  “It’s freezing,” said Lisa.

  Dorothy tried to sound cheerful. She tried to look as if she and Lisa were in on a joke. “Oh, it is not!” she said with a laugh. “If I do my double flip again will you just get your feet wet?”

  Jenny shrugged. “Maybe,” she answered, still chewing her towel.

  “Make it a cannonball dive and splash Matthew!” Lisa instructed. Matthew, the gardener, knelt only a few feet from the pool, weeding among the phlox and marigolds. Matthew was deaf and dumb. Over the previous two weeks Lisa had devised several tests to see if he really was unable to hear or speak. Matthew did not flinch at this latest test. Dorothy sprung off the diving board in the best back flip she could manage.

  As her head passed cleanly into the water, she smiled, for she had not splashed him in the least. At the moment, she almost envied the old man. How nice it would be not to have to listen to Jenny and Lisa for a while. Dorothy bobbed up in the middle of the pool just in time to see Lisa jump into the deep end of the pool. Her cannon-ball was not sufficient to get Matthew. Without turning to watch her, he had disappeared just a second earlier around the back of the arch.

  “Damn!” said Lisa.

  “Okay,” Dorothy said when Lisa had dog-paddled to the edge of the pool. “I’ve had enough. You do not go into the deep end until you learn to swim better. Your mother doesn’t want you to dive. You try not to splash people and you don’t swear. All right, Lisa?”

  “Get out of my life!” Lisa spluttered.

  “If you do anything like that again, especially being unkind to a poor deaf man, I’m going to spank you.”

  “You can’t spank me. Mom says you can’t.”

  “I’m warning you that I will.”

  “I dare you!” sang Lisa, beginning to dance on the rim of the pool.

  Dorothy sat down in the nearest chaise longue. Keep your temper, she told herself. Remember she’s only nine. Remember your mother’s last letter. “Be patient and firm. Give them love and discipline and it will work out, I’m sure, dear. They will blossom before your eyes,” said the gentle, clear handwriting, in the letter Dorothy used as a bookmark for David Copperfield. Her mother, of course, was three thousand miles away. And she’s never seen kids like these, Dorothy thought to herself. She picked up her book and ran her hand over the blue airmail paper, as if to derive some strength from it. She watched Lisa flick tiny drops of water on her sister’s shoulders. Jenny sat in a disconsolate lump, her feet dangling into the pool.

  “Stop it. Cut it out,” Jenny cried.

  “Cut what out?”

  “Cut out splashing me.”

  “Lisa, get the ball and we’ll play some more volleyball in the pool,” said Dorothy wearily. It was better to distract than punish, her mother’s letter had advised.

  “Scaredy-cat won’t go in,” Lisa whispered loudly.

  “Lisa, just shut up,” said Dorothy.

  “You’re not allowed to s
ay that. I’m telling Mom!”

  “Yes,” Jenny agreed, “just shut your mouth, Miss Wet-Bed!”

  Lisa shoved her sister right into the pool. Luckily Jenny had not been sitting too near the shallow end. She did not crack her head on the tiles. She only screamed and swallowed a great deal of water. By the time Dorothy had fished her out of the pool, dried her off, and calmed her wailing, Lisa had disappeared into the pool house.

  “If you don’t come out of there this instant,” said Dorothy, blinking into the cavernous darkness of the pool house, “I’m coming in after you.” No answer. Dorothy flicked the light switch. It did not work.

  “It doesn’t work,” sobbed Jenny.

  The pool house was filled with old gardening equipment, parts of the torn-down greenhouse, parts of a croquet set, a badminton set, and various other games that Dorothy could just make out, leaning against the walls, strewn over lawn mowers and piles of flower pots.

  “The longer you stay, Lisa, the worse you’re going to get it,” said Dorothy.

  “She won’t come out,” Jenny said. “Let’s play Monopoly.”

  I hope she stays there for hours, Dorothy grumbled under her breath. Jenny, after all, wasn’t so bad. She was a curious, quiet little girl, given at times to sitting in her “cave,” a spacious, wicker-fronted closet in her parents’ bathroom. There she kept her books and counted the money in her piggy bank almost every day. Dorothy had promised not to tell Lisa about the cave or the piggy bank.