Leave Well Enough Alone

by Rosemary Wells

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  “Well, I was thinking about a party the Hoades had last weekend. I got to spend about an hour and a half at it. I was supposed to help Dinna serve, but I couldn’t stand it so I talked to people. You know I told you, Baldy, that my dad was chief of police?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, he isn’t. He’s just a...a cop with a beat. Do you know I come from a really poor family compared to you or the Hoades? All that stuff I told you about my family having a big old castle on the Irish sea is a lie. My grandfather was never a nobleman put to death by the English. My mother is not related to James Joyce and we don’t live in Hyde Park, New York. We live in Newburgh. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a crummy little town on the Hudson River.”

  Baldy pulled Gabriel up short next to Dorothy. “Why did you tell me that...all that then?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Dorothy. She nudged Charley on and didn’t look at Baldy. “I guess I just wanted to tell you it was all a pack of lies. I wish it were true, but none of it is.” She ducked as a leafy branch nearly hit her in the face.

  “Up here,” said Baldy. “Go to your right.”

  Clear, limpid water, hardly stirring, formed a pool under a wooden bridge. Ancient weeping willows dangled their lower branches into it, the leaves mirrored perfectly in the late afternoon light. Other branches woven and twined around each other made an arch at the end of the bridge. Both girls had to lay their heads on their horses’ necks, not to get swiped by it. “This always reminds me of Black Beauty, crossing this bridge,” said Baldy. “It’s probably the only book I ever finished.”

  “Oh, come on, Baldy,” said Dorothy, feeling a little cheered again.

  “Maybe King of the Wind and a Nancy Drew or two,” Baldy amended. “Anyway, Black Beauty wouldn’t cross a bridge because he knew it had rotten wood in it. Horses know all kinds of things,” she added mysteriously. “Horses have powers unknown to man. That’s why I like them so much better than people. There’s the graveyard I told you about. I’ve never had the nerve to stop. Shall we look?”

  “Sure,” Dorothy agreed. “It’s a funny place for a graveyard and it’s so tiny!”

  “It’s a private one, a family one. There’s lots in this part of the country.” Baldy dismounted. “Let’s see what the names are.”

  Dorothy dismounted too. Baldy had to retie the knot in Charley’s reins. “He’ll get away if you tie it like that,” she explained and showed Dorothy how to tether a horse. “What do the names say? How far do they go back?” she asked, taking off her horn-rims and polishing them on her shirt.

  A whole family with a whole private graveyard all their own, Dorothy thought. Amazing. “Most of them say Coburg, one Miller here. Some are really old,” Dorothy said, lifting a curtain of vines from an ancient stone cross. “Look at this! From the eighteenth century. Emma, wife of John, mother of Asa. No last name.”

  “It isn’t creepy, is it?” Baldy asked. “I thought it would be.”

  “It should be,” Dorothy answered. She looked up at the sun through the bright-green maple leaves of the surrounding woods. A cardinal called to its mate, and a rabbit showed its face around one of the stones. “But it isn’t. I don’t think anybody’s been here in years.”

  “I’ll show you two more next week,” said Baldy. “It sure is nice to have company riding. I’m all alone except for Kenny, the groom, and he never stops to look at anything.”

  Dorothy hoisted herself back up in the saddle. She looked again at the quiet graveyard and crossed herself. Then she noticed a stone that had carved on it the name Chin Wang. There was no date.

  “Houseboy,” said Baldy. “Chinese. People used to bury their servants if they’d been faithful, right with the rest of the family.”

  “Do you...does your family have a houseboy?” Dorothy asked in a small voice.

  “No,” Baldy answered. She laughed. “That’s gone long ago. We just have a cook, Louise, and one maid and Julio, who doubles as gardener and chauffeur. My parents board our horses in Greenwich. That’s how come I like to stay at Uncle’s and really live on the stable grounds. Dorothy?”

  “Yes?”

  “How come you did that thing back there?”

  “You mean crossing myself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Graveyard. I don’t know. Just in case.”

  “Does it help?”

  “I guess so,” she said, but she wondered about that. Perhaps, she decided, crossing myself would help if I had some dreadful disease and wanted God to cure me. And maybe it helps me not get run over by cars. And maybe, if I were standing under an avalanche and I crossed myself, a boulder would just miss me. But it doesn’t seem to help at all when I’m trying to get out of my mind what’s on my mind. Dorothy ran her forefinger over the two little brass rivets at the top of her saddle. She just loved to listen to the leather, to pull the reins back and forth in her hands, adjusting them, to feel the stirrups hard against the heels of her loafers. She wished she had beautiful high-top boots like Baldy’s. Those weren’t even Baldy’s good boots. What was on her mind was houseboys and cooks and the Pennsylvania countryside in the summer.

  “You look sad again. Is it about... Baldy licked her lips, evidently not knowing how to go on.

  “You know something?” Dorothy broke in. “Do you know something funny? Before this summer I had never, except in a restaurant, eaten butter in my whole life? Even known what a filet-mignon steak was?”

  “You’ve never eaten butter!”

  “Margarine. My mother buys canned vegetables on special. We have franks and beans twice a week and codfish on Fridays.”

  “But why does that bother you so? Why are you so ashamed of that and the fact that your dad’s a policeman?” Baldy asked desperately.

  “Because...I don’t know.” Dorothy heard her voice tremble a little. “A few weeks ago Mrs. Hoade used seven pounds of butter in one recipe! My mother never would dream of making pie crust with butter. She uses lard. And then Mrs. Hoade gave all the pies to Dinna for her family. Gave them away.”

  “Well, that was nice of her,” said Baldy.

  “Yes, but... Oh, my. It’s too complicated. You don’t understand.”

  “I understand one thing. That lady’s lost a few marbles. Nobody makes ten pies.”

  “The point is that God is testing me,” Dorothy said. “He’s showing me how wasteful and sinful people who have lots of money are, and yet... Dorothy couldn’t finish. And yet, she knew very well, when she got her working papers in two years she’d probably have to have a summer job in a department store or waiting tables, and Baldy, who was neither sinful nor wasteful, would be back here again, giving riding lessons and cantering all over the countryside as if it belonged to her.

  “We’ll leave all of this for Dinna in the morning,” Mrs. Hoade announced with a sweeping gesture. Dorothy surveyed the scene in the kitchen for a moment. Thank heaven she was never asked to clean up. “Did you check what the girls were watching?”

  “George Gobel, I think. There’s nothing bad on anyway,” Dorothy said, shuffling the index cards before her, her pen in her teeth. Mrs. Hoade walked over to the counter and poured herself what appeared to be the fourth Scotch of the evening. She had used every pot and pan in the kitchen, as usual. “Do you want me to write this out on the legal pad?” Dorothy asked. “About not putting your nose very close to the risen dough before you punch it down or else you’ll sear the inside of your nostrils for hours?”

  “Don’t you think descriptions like that are useful?” Mrs. Hoade asked, sitting down across the kitchen table from Dorothy.

  “I’ve never seen things like that in a cookbook before,” Dorothy said.

  “Of course not,” said Mrs. Hoade with a very confident smile. “Of course you haven’t. And that’s what’s wrong with most cookbooks. They are not real. They’re just a collection of ingredients. I want to get the feel, to convey texture an
d experience of each of these recipes. I want the reader to be transported to my kitchen. Vita’s book, much as I admire it, and you needn’t say anything to her tomorrow night, but it’s just too organized. It’s cold. It hasn’t the rough edges of hard, loving work in it. That’s why, Dorothy,” Mrs. Hoade concluded in a near whisper, “this book is going to be something new!” She smiled at the ice clinking in her glass. “I could have just asked Dinna for the recipes, but I insist on trying them all myself. That’s reality. How many cookbooks have you seen, Dorothy, with recipes for more than six or eight people at the very most? The Pennsylvania Dutch have very large families. They cook, every day of the week, for all the men who work in the fields. The women get up at four A.M. to start their baking. This is real life, not some dictator’s palace full of Chinese slaves. By the way, I’m changing the title to Amish Surprise!”

  “Is Dinna Amish?” Dorothy asked.

  “No, but it’s all right. The word Amish is more eyecatching and individual than the word Pennsylvania.” Mrs. Hoade drained the rest of her drink in a quick gulp. “We’ll let Doubleday decide that. I’m going to bed. It’s been a hard day and we have an enormous party tomorrow. Did you call the caterer again?”

  “Yes,” said Dorothy, fishing around under the cookbook notes for the party notes. “I ordered twenty-four herring in dill sauce. Two dozen avocado cocktails. The melon-prosciutto hors d’oeuvres. Stroganoff for twenty-four. Salad for twenty-four. Pears in wine.” She stuck the pen back between her teeth and flipped over the page of the yellow legal pad. “Oh, and they don’t make baked Alaska. Only assorted French pastry. I got that. Okay?”

  “Perfect,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Liquor?”

  Dorothy turned to another page. “I have it somewhere. Yes. A case of Bell’s Scotch, not the cheap stuff. Twenty bottles of...I can’t pronounce it...

  “Chateauneuf-du-Pape.”

  “Sha-toe-nuf-doo-pap nineteen forty-nine.”

  “Right,” said Mrs. Hoade.

  “And all the rest. It’s all coming. Here’s your list,” said Dorothy. “Mrs. Hoade?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why would anyone put a pear in wine?”

  “You’ll see tomorrow,” said Mrs. Hoade. “By the way, dear.”

  “Yes?”

  “The pen is leaking down your cheek.”

  Dorothy wiped her mouth on a dish towel. She could hear Mrs. Hoade pour herself one more nightcap, discreetly, from the living-room liquor tray. Bell’s. The expensive stuff. Nowhere in this house had Dorothy ever seen a bottle of Four Roses or Seagram’s Seven, the two things her father drank. As she stood at the sink, looking out the kitchen window at the big copper beech tree in the middle of the lawn, its bottom branches illuminated slightly by the light from the fountains on either side, the fountains that went on automatically at sundown, she repeated the words, “We’ll let Doubleday decide.” We! Of course Mrs. Hoade was just using a figure of speech, but still... She was a generous woman. She was paying Dinna for the family recipes. I don’t want to be paid, Dorothy realized, but to see my name in print. Wow! She found herself grinning. A real book. Doubleday! She threw the inky dish towel into the laundry. If I wiped ink on one of Mom’s dish towels at home she’d have my head, Dorothy realized suddenly, and at the same moment she thought she understood something. How easy it is, just without thinking, to start acting as if I had all the money in the world. I wonder if Mrs. Hoade once came from a crummy little town like Newburgh. I wonder if she had to get over a million little habits of saving money but never really got over them without feeling a little guilty every time she gives a party or buys a dress. There was no denying that Mrs. Hoade had seemed a bit jumpy. Was that it? Or guilty, that evening after she’d come in from seeing the baby and before she’d sat down to go over the day’s notes with Dorothy. She’d handed Dorothy two hundred-dollar bills to pay the caterer tomorrow. Two hundred-dollar bills. Two weeks’ salary for her father. Three weeks’ salary for Arthur. Dorothy picked the dish towel back out of the laundry basket. She scrubbed at the ink as best she could and hung the towel up to dry.

  The crickets chirped outside in the garden and a fresh east wind blew in the window of Dorothy’s bedroom. She settled herself on the big mahogany double bed and shoved three pillows under her back. Thirty pages of David Copperfield, she instructed herself, then I’ll let myself finish that Perry Mason. She reached over to the night table to wind Mrs. Hoade’s watch. The watch was not on the night table. It was not on the bureau. It was not on her wrist.

  Dorothy squeezed her eyes shut in panic. She slammed David Copperfield down on the bed. The watch was probably worth over a hundred dollars. Maybe two hundred, maybe four hundred! Maureen’s graduation watch had cost over seventy-five dollars. Had she lost her whole summer’s salary? She knew her mother and father would make her pay for it, she knew it was right and decent and moral to pay for it even if Mrs. Hoade didn’t insist. Dorothy began to tremble. The watch was no chrome Sears, Roebuck special. It was gold. “I had it at the stable,” she said slowly. I remember looking at it there. Could it be in Baldy’s car? Baldy dropped me near the end of the driveway. She had the horse van attached today and didn’t want to turn around. That was it. She’d had to slam the door three times to get it closed right. Dorothy dressed. Her shirt stuck to the sweat on her back. Her hands shook as they did the buttons. She ran downstairs, let herself out, and traced her steps all the way down the driveway. There was a nearly full moon, but she’d remembered to take a flashlight anyway.

  The willow trees brushed her arm as she ran down to the end of the driveway. The night air was delicious, full of perfume from the gardens, but Dorothy noticed none of it. Where did Baldy drop me exactly? Here. There, over there. She knelt down in a ditch by the side of the road. The watch stared up at her solemnly in the moonlight. “Thank you, God, dear Jesus,” said Dorothy. Tears streamed down her face. She held the watch in her hands and said the Lord’s Prayer. She vowed she’d ask the Hoades to take her to Mass on Sunday. If she had to walk, she’d walk, even if it took all morning; she’d give up a riding day with Baldy. Slowly, now enjoying the soft, fragrant night, she made her way back to the house. I’ll finish David Copperfield too, she promised, and Nicholas Nickelby as well, before I touch another mystery. “Thank you, God!” she shouted to the stars as loudly as she could.

  Dorothy took a shortcut past the cottage. Stupid, she told herself immediately, as prickly wild-raspberry runners caught at her ankles. She tripped and fell flat on her face. “Clod! God dammit!” she said. She’d dropped the watch. And I just took God’s name in vain, she added to herself. And now I’ll never find it. The moonlight did not penetrate the woods here. She turned on the flashlight. The weak beam illuminated something metallic, then something else metallic. When she’d retrieved the watch and thanked God again, she bent over to look at the something else. It was a brass ring, badly corroded, attached to a wooden door. Dorothy stamped. There was a floor beneath her instead of earth. Now go back to the house, Dorothy, she advised herself. Come back tomorrow if you want to have a look. Come back in the daylight. The little house was dark and peaceful. Miss Borg and the baby were no doubt asleep. If she came back tomorrow, Mrs. Hoade might find out. I’ll just have a peek, she said as she raised the door. The vines pulled away unwillingly. She flashed the light down into the hole. There’s probably a family of water moccasins down here, she thought. Possibly copperheads, or huge black widow spiders. A fairly secure ladder led down, however, and the light from her flashlight bounced down seven ancient but solid steps, as thick as the wood of a telephone pole.

  The bottom of the cellar was dry and sandy, not a place for snakes, Dorothy hoped, for leaning against a wood joist was a pair of dusty riding boots. I know what this is, she told herself. This is where the stable used to be. This is the cellar of the old stable! I bet I could shine those boots up even if they are twenty years old. They don’t belong to you, Dorothy. Go back! she also told herself. She put one foot on the
ladder, holding tight to the trapdoor frame as she went down. The step held firm. Thief! Dorothy whispered.

  Cautiously she kicked over one boot, then the other. No dead mice in the toes so far. At the other end of the cellar a second ladder reached up to another trapdoor at a place that must have been directly under the cottage. I’d better be quiet or Miss Borg will hear me. As she reached for the boots again, the beam of the flashlight petered out to a weak flicker. She turned around deliberately, like a robot, she told herself, all the while saying, I’m all right. I can see where I came in. I can see up through the open door.

  One step at a time. Seven steps and I’ll be at the ladder again. Her foot hit against something. She dropped the flashlight. It thudded softly on the earthen floor. Dorothy reached down to feel for it. Then her hand touched another hand, an arm and then a tiny shoulder. It was the body of a baby covered with a kind of slime.

  Chapter Five

  NICE MISS BORG. SWEET Miss Borg. Miss Borg had not told Mrs. Hoade. Dorothy shook out the frills in the dress she was to iron and Lisa was to wear. Mrs. Hoade was too worried about the clouds that were gathering in the afternoon sky, threatening her party. She had not even noticed the nettle scratches on Dorothy’s hands and elbows.

  Dorothy did not remember screaming. She did remember the other trapdoor opening, the one that led up to the cottage. In the bright light that had suddenly flooded the cellar, she had seen both Miss Borg and the two stone cupids from the vanished fishponds at once. They lay side by side at her feet, one holding a jug, the other jugless, the two of them covered with a mossy growth. Body of a baby indeed! How she could have mistaken an old limestone statue for the body of a baby, she didn’t know, but Dorothy was determined not to let her imagination run away with her like that again. Dorothy had apologized profusely to Miss Borg, remembered the watch, forgotten the boots, and bowed her way up the ladder and out of the cellar like a mandarin.