Dinna clattered the dishes in the kitchen downstairs. Matthew’s lawn mower buzzed in the front garden and the birds outside sang and whistled like steam kettles.
“Push it to the right,” said Mrs. Hoade, examining the switch on the iron.
“I did,” said Dorothy. “It still isn’t working.”
Mrs. Hoade looked down at her right hand. She held her forefinger and thumb together as if to grasp an invisible pencil. “I’m sorry, the left,” she said. “I never can remember which is which and I’m thirty-five years old.”
“Mommy, do we have to wear dresses?” Lisa whined.
“Now, honey. This is something very special tonight.” Mrs. Hoade squinted out at the sky again.
“You always say whatever Daddy does is very special.” Jenny joined Lisa whining. “Just like when he was going to start a company and when he brought that man home from Las Vegas that you said was a...
“Jenny!”
“I want to watch As the World Turns” said Jenny with a sigh.
“And I want to watch cartoons after that,” said Lisa.
Mrs. Hoade smiled impishly at Dorothy. “Do you promise to be good tonight?” she asked them.
“Yes, Mommy,” came the answer from both of them.
“And go to bed when Dorothy tells you?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
“And try to stay clean in front of Daddy?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
“Well, all right, but after that, after those two programs, it will be time to get ready. Are you sure you don’t mind ironing, Dorothy?”
“Not at all,” Dorothy said, glad for something to do that salved her very guilty conscience. Stealing. There was no other word for it. Going down and bothering Miss Borg was bad enough. Breaking Mrs. Hoade’s injunctions about going near the old foundations was worse. But almost stealing a pair of riding boots. I would have asked her—Dorothy tried to sound convincing to herself. I would have just brought them up to the house and then asked Mrs. Hoade if I could borrow them. But of course that wasn’t true, and she knew it....
Dorothy tried to remember just how her mother dampened cotton voile, exactly how Maureen laid a puffed sleeve on the point of an ironing board. Mrs. Hoade looked on approvingly as Dorothy turned the dress inside out, as if she were trying to learn something. Dorothy was not fooled, but she did wonder, if she were one day to marry a super, rich Englishman like David Niven, whether she too would simply forget all the humdrum things she’d known before, like how to iron a dress.
“Is...this man coming down in the same car with Mr. Hoade?” Dorothy asked, for she now had guessed that “N” was a man as well as a campaign.
“Yes, indeed. They’ll do some business on the way down,” Mrs. Hoade answered. “I hope it doesn’t rain. I hope there isn’t traffic. John’s always in a...bad mood when things go wrong.” She twisted her hands a bit and looked out at the sky again.
“I didn’t know Mr. Hoade was in politics,” Dorothy ventured.
“Politics and advertising are all the same,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Actually John is in public relations. That’s what he prefers to call it.”
“I was hoping,” Dorothy said as meekly as she could, “I mean I know how terribly important you said this man is to Mr. Hoade and to you, but if...well, I have to do a history term paper next year. It’s a big project in second semester and I was wondering if after the girls are in bed if I could just meet...or say I had interviewed a famous political...
“Of course!” interrupted Mrs. Hoade. “Now I’d better see what Dinna is doing. And Matthew ought to have brought in the flowers by now. I’ll tell John and I’m sure anybody you’d like to talk to tonight will only be flattered and glad to help you. You have the two hundred I gave you? I’m expecting people to call from the station within the hour and I may be out when the caterer delivers.”
“Yes, Mrs. Hoade.”
Since that morning, “N” had ceased to be a deodorant or a false-teeth adhesive. “N” was a man running for office, possibly a famous politician. SACRED HEART SOPHOMORE GETS SCOOP ON ELECTION! ran the headline in Dorothy’s imagination. Rather than start next term with a black mark against her, she might be able to impress the daylights out of her teachers, terrifying Sister Theresa in particular. Sister Theresa, according to legend, had once kept a boy out of Notre Dame because he’d written on his final exam that Henry the Eighth had married eight wives instead of six. Sister Theresa knew all about Dorothy, of course. All the Sisters would be watching her next year, watching for notes to be passed. If she showed some honest, innocent initiative, the sort of thing Sister Elizabeth always talked about, independent involvement, then perhaps she would be forgiven a little bit.
She was going to listen very carefully tonight. Apparently, if one got hold of politicians at parties, when their guard was down and they’d had a drop too many, one could learn the most amazing things. Dorothy wondered if she should take her exclusive interview to the school paper or the Journal-American first. Either way, her teachers would be impressed and her father tickled pink. She decided to wait and see if she could find out anything scandalous. Dorothy Coughlin, Girl Reporter: Dorothy liked the sound of that. It was much more exciting, really, than spending her life writing novels. Much safer and more realistic than being a secret agent. She would have an apartment all her own in New York City or Washington. She would wear one-hundred-dollar suits from Saks Fifth Avenue, and big floppy hats, and carry an alligator bag. She’d have a press card, too. That would guarantee entrance to the Pope himself. Her first assignment, she decided, once she’d been hired by a paper, would be to do an exposé on the senators and their free Scotch.
Dorothy finished the girls’ dresses. Eyeing them critically, she hung them on a clothesline in the laundry room. Shoes! she thought. I wonder if their shoes are shined. Mrs. Hoade was as impressed with her thoughtfulness and organization as Dorothy intended her to be. Dorothy was impressed herself. She polished the girls’ Mary Janes to a patent-leather glow, laid out their lace-topped socks and clean underwear, and then began on her own clothes. She had only the same cotton dress that she’d worn to every party, but Mrs. Hoade had given her a necklace of amber beads to wear that night and the whole effect was a little dressier.
Poor Mrs. Hoade. When she emerged clumsily from the car, after picking up two people at the train station, she looked so frowsy, so unwell-dressed. Dorothy watched from an upstairs window for a second, before going to bathe the girls. Mrs. Hoade had chosen a dress with enormous white peacocks on a black background. Her hair had not been set. She’s probably never had anyone to tell her, Dorothy mused, thinking kindly, for once, of Maureen. Maureen had taught her all about lipstick colors and hairstyles, fat clothes and thin clothes. Mrs. Hoade was hopeless. Perhaps, if I suggest it nicely...Dorothy considered, I can help her.
She ran Lisa’s bath. In case she got rumpled or splashed, Dorothy didn’t want to dress herself until both girls were totally finished. She’d bribe them with dessert to keep them quiet while she dressed.
“Two éclairs each,” Jenny made her promise. “Unless they have meringues. If they have meringues and no éclairs we get three meringues with ice cream and chocolate sauce and whipped cream, and if they have both, we get one of each apiece.”
Lisa upped the ante to one éclair and three meringues.
“We’ll just have to see,” said Dorothy, soaping Lisa’s knees. “I’ll do the best I can.”
A door slammed downstairs. She heard Mr. Hoade’s voice, then many other voices. Ice tinkling in glasses. Someone laughing.
After a few minutes, Mr. Hoade came bounding up the stairs and walked into the bathroom.
“Daddee!” said Lisa.
“Daddy’s little princesses!” he said, squatting down. He straight-armed a dripping Lisa away from him. “No!” he said. “Don’t you get Daddy’s new tux all wet!” Lisa’s face puckered up as if she were going to cry. Mr. Hoade stood up and cracked all the knuckles in his fingers. �
��How are you doing, honey?” he asked Dorothy.
“Fine, thank you, Mr. Hoade,” said Dorothy as she dried Lisa.
“That’s good. Here,” he said, producing a photograph from his jacket pocket. “My wife tells me you wanted this.” He turned and loped away down the stairs as quickly as he’d come.
Dorothy stared at the face. She didn’t recognize it. “Best Wishes to Dorothy,” the inscription ran. She’d never heard of the name either. Best Wishes indeed!
Politics, national and local, was the most discussed subject at her parents’ dinner table. Dorothy’s mother wasn’t overly interested, but politics for her father was an obsession and love. Although he never said so, Dorothy sensed he’d been disappointed that Kevin had not gone to law school, and Terrance had only a football scholarship. He would have loved it if either of them had run for office. Dorothy knew, without a doubt, that this man with the fleshy, drooping jowls and the slicked back hair had never been in newspapers she’d seen and she’d never heard his name mentioned even once, so he must be pretty small potatoes. Even if he was small potatoes, he might have been interesting, but if he thought Dorothy was just another autograph-seeking teenager, he’d never say anything important to her. He’d probably pat her on the head and ask how she was doing at school. Her heart sank. “Now wait in your room till I’m finished,” she told Jenny and Lisa irritably.
“Remember,” said Lisa. “Two éclairs apiece. Not one each.”
“I said I’d do the best I could,” snapped Dorothy.
“You promised!” Lisa whined.
“I did not! And if you keep that up you won’t get anything at all!”
See if I care, she grumped as she combed her hair. Still, perhaps things weren’t that gloomy. If she could find out how advertising controlled political campaigns, even small ones, it might make a good paper for Sister Theresa. If she could uncover some scandalously misrepresented issues, it might be of interest to some newspaper. After all, she told herself, you have to start somewhere.
She heard a terrible shriek from downstairs. It was Lisa. Dorothy dropped her comb and flew out of her room.
She brushed past Jenny, who stood mutely on the stairway, watching her sister. Lisa’s fingernails were dripping nail polish all over the rug, her shoes, and her freshly ironed dress.
“You got it on my pants!” Mr. Hoade was saying to her between his clenched teeth. “Dorothy, get down here!” he yelled as Dorothy ran downstairs. “Look what has happened! I thought you were paid to watch the girls!”
Where was Mrs. Hoade? Would she be angry after having been so nice all day? She’d even let Dorothy take the morning off to go riding. Dorothy could see her outside in the garden with the guests. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hoade. I just had to take five minutes and get ready myself. I couldn’t come down in dungarees in front of all these...
“You are paid to watch the girls, not to fuss with your own hair!”
“She said three meringues!” Lisa sobbed out. “And then she went back on her word!”
“What’s this about meringues?”
Dorothy took a deep breath. “All I said, Mr. Hoade, was if the girls were good I’d get them some French pastry. I didn’t think...
“You bribed them, is that it?”
“Two éclairs and three meringues!” Lisa yelled.
“I said I’d do the best I could, Lisa,” Dorothy began.
“Then you said we wouldn’t get anything at all!” Lisa’s words were nearly unintelligible. Mr. Hoade had marched off into the kitchen in search of kerosene.
“Dorothy’s right,” came a voice from the stairway. “And you know it, Miss Wet-Bed!”
Dorothy stopped Lisa’s lunge just short of Jenny, who’d come sashaying down and was now walking unconcernedly out the door to the garden. “If you get Dorothy into trouble, we won’t get anything, stupid!” was Jenny’s parting shot.
“I’ll get you! I’ll get you!” screamed the surprisingly strong little girl.
“Easy...easy,” said Dorothy as if to a shying horse. Dorothy held her around the middle firmly, but with one tremendous spasm, Lisa bit Dorothy on the wrist and sent them both tumbling backward into the silver liquor tray. Dorothy’s shoulder smashed into the side of the portrait that hung above the tray, but mercifully the painting did not shift in the slightest or swing out into the pointed corner of the breakfront as she had feared, or fall into the broken glass of the sherry decanter that lay at her feet.
“Give her to me!” said Mr. Hoade from the kitchen doorway. “Hold her there,” he instructed Dorothy. Dorothy, her good cotton dress soaked in sherry, with Lisa writhing like a tiger in her lap, sat motionless and watched as Mr. Hoade strode over and hovered above them. “You’re going to get a licking for that. Oh, yes, you are!” he shrieked, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeve.
“John, please!” It was Mrs. Hoade, who’d run in from the garden, breathless.
“I don’t give a damn what you say,” he growled. “She’s going to be punished. Look what she did to my pants! Look what she did to Doris’s arm!”
“It’s Dorothy,” said Mrs. Hoade.
“She could sue us!”
“I won’t sue anybody! I promise,” Dorothy said, sweeping Lisa up in a bundle in her arms. She carried Lisa upstairs. “It’ll be all right. I’ll just get her cleaned up.”
Dorothy glanced down miserably to the runny pink stains and sticky blotches that coursed down her good dress and made the cloth adhere uncomfortably against her legs. Soapy lather did not improve the mess Lisa had made of her fingernails. Lisa’s tantrum had ebbed completely, but in its stead was something close to a wordless panic. Holding Lisa like a wounded puppy, Dorothy sat down on the fluffy hamper lid and rocked her in her lap. She sang her a lullaby her mother had made up and used when Dorothy had been little. Lisa’s pink thumb went into her mouth and she closed her eyes. Dorothy hoped she could transmit some peace to the little girl as easily as Mr. Hoade had imparted terror.
“Let’s try another bath,” she said, when Lisa’s breathing steadied.
“I had a bath already.”
“I know. I know, but it isn’t just to get you clean. It’s also... Well, when I’m upset about something I sit in a hot tub. It makes me feel much better.” Dorothy drew the bath water. “And while you’re sitting in it, we’ll play Twenty Questions. How would that be?”
“I guess so,” said Lisa, her voice shaking a little.
“Now get in so you don’t catch cold. Does Mommy have any nail-polish remover?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did you find the nail polish?”
“In her top bureau drawer.”
“Okay. Now while I get it, you think of the nicest thing in the whole world, okay?”
“What is that?” asked Lisa, lowering herself into the bubbles.
“Anything you want it to be,” said Dorothy. She closed the bathroom door so that Lisa would not be in a draft, and went off in search of nail-polish remover.
Mrs. Hoade didn’t seem to be the type to wear nail polish in the first place. Her nails were bitten and the cuticles overgrown. Dorothy opened the top drawer, inhaling as she did the sweet, nostalgic smell of lavender sachet. Curiously enough there were at least five bottles of nail polish, all the same color, Windsor, lined up against the side of the drawer. Fortunately there was a bottle of remover at the end of the row. Under the bottles, along with combs, powder puffs, a key ring, the gold locket Mrs. Hoade usually wore, an embossed silver pencil, a reading magnifier, and all sizes of emery boards, was a stack of photographs in a yellow envelope. Underneath that was a pile of letters. Dorothy glanced guiltily over her shoulder. She felt curiosity overcome her as surely as the tide taking an unmoored boat out to sea.
The envelope had been processed by Kodak in the fall of 1944. She was about to look furtively at what she hoped were old love letters underneath, when she thought she’d see if there were any pictures of the stable. She flipped through the
photographs. Sure enough, the stable stood right about where the cottage had been built. She could tell by the presence of an ash tree that still grew in the very same spot. The stable had been built of board-and-batten siding, Dorothy told herself proudly. Sister Elizabeth’s English classes covered a whole range of what Sister considered an educated young man or lady should know. There was a hayloft and a cistern right near the entrance. There were several pictures of horses, but the people seated upon them or holding their lead lines were too small to identify. She came upon a picture of the fishponds as well, and saw the cupids once again. They looked so fine and innocent in the sunlight. Dorothy was sorry that they should now be buried away in the cellar like dead bodies. There were a few interior shots of the house. One showed the greenhouse from the inside. Instead of the present living-room wall, where the painting hung and the highboy stood, there was no wall at all, only a pleasant vista of sunlit glass and aspidistras sitting in wrought-iron planters. Otherwise, nothing but the wallpaper seemed to have changed downstairs.
“Dorothy, come!” Lisa’s muffled voice called to her from the bathroom. What a shame that stable was destroyed, Dorothy thought as she stuffed the pictures back in the envelope.
Lisa sat in the bubbles, smiling and composed when Dorothy reached the bathroom. She extended a dreadful pink hand and placed it on the rim of the tub for Dorothy to clean, and grinned as if nothing had happened. “Did you think of the nicest thing in the whole world?” Dorothy asked.
“Yup.”
“What was it?”
Lisa looked up slyly and grinned. “Two éclairs,” she said, “and three meringues with chocolate sauce and whipped cream and ice cream.”
No trace of a stain remained on Mr. Hoade’s trousers when Dorothy came out into the garden, her traveling skirt and blouse replacing the cotton dress. With the disappearance of the nail polish his anger, too, seemed to have vanished. Maybe he swallowed some of the kerosene, Dorothy thought. I wish he had.
“This is my little princess!” he said, scooping up a pristine Lisa now outfitted in a slightly outgrown yellow dress and presenting her to the flaccid-jowled gentleman whose signed photograph now adorned the inside of Dorothy’s wastebasket. They must have retouched out half his chins in the picture, she decided.
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