Leave Well Enough Alone

by Rosemary Wells

  “I just thought,” said Lisa, “that maybe you’d been poking around where you’re not supposed to go. I know there’s an old stable cellar around here. It’s full of poisonous snakes and black widow spiders. Mom said you could sue us for a million dollars if you got hurt.”

  “Lisa,” Jenny interrupted, “if Mom fires Dorothy, you know who we get?”

  “Mom,” said Lisa, “that’s who.”

  “Dinna,” said Jenny.

  Bless you, Jenny, said Dorothy silently. You get an extra cupcake for that. She polished carefully and lovingly while the two girls played Go Fish and then Gin Rummy. She wondered if Lisa would, after all, tell her mother about the boots. Well, it didn’t matter. Dorothy intended to tell Mrs. Hoade herself when the right moment came. An awful thought crossed her mind. Mr. Hoade had looked curiously at them that morning. Could they have been his boots when he was a boy? There was no difference that she knew between men’s and women’s riding boots. She would have preferred them to have been worn by a long-dead groom and not have belonged to Mr. Hoade.

  “Dorothy?”

  “Yes, Jenny.”

  “Lisa’s cheating.”

  “I am not,” said Lisa stoutly.

  Play with them, Dorothy, a silent voice instructed. It was Baldy’s voice.

  “Okay. I’ll play with you,” said Dorothy, dropping the boot and the polishing rag.

  A breeze sprung up, carrying with it the scent of rain and roses. It scattered the playing cards all over the tiles. Several of them blew into the pool. Dorothy jumped in to retrieve them. She swam after the queen of hearts, which had floated down to the deep end. The card turned over in the water and began to sink as her hand reached out for it. She plunged beneath the surface and made another grab for it, but it eluded her and drifted down to the bottom of the pool. Dorothy pulled herself out of the water. She would have to dive for it. For an instant she peered at the queen’s passive face through the clear water. Queens on playing cards were dressed something like nuns. As she forced herself down to the deepest part of the pool, right over the drain where the card lay, she realized she was trying to put bits of a puzzle together in her mind.

  It had started that morning in the kitchen, when she’d fallen asleep. No, not really, Dorothy corrected herself. It started last night. I thought it was the storm that kept me awake. I wanted it to be the storm. Dorothy rose to the surface of the pool, gasping for breath, queen of hearts in hand. She began plucking the other cards off the water. They had not sunk.

  In a queer, unborn dream that had come to her as she had sat slumped over the kitchen table that morning, something had been revealed to her, perhaps some signal. She tried to remember what it was. She’d been sure that she was back in school, sitting in the front row of religion class. Reverend Mother was drilling the class in catechism. Dorothy, in the dream, kept trying not to nod off, but her eyes were too heavy to open and her arms felt paralyzed. She willed them to move, to no avail. In vain she tried to answer Reverend Mother’s questions. What were the questions? Dorothy emerged from the pool, cards in a wet stack, and spread them on a towel to dry. Jenny and Lisa watched. What were the questions? Is God all-wise, all-holy, all-merciful, and all-just? No. There was another question. It lay, like a palpable, visible thing in the very back of Reverend Mother’s throat. The dream had become a nightmare because Dorothy had been afraid Reverend Mother’s mouth would open, revealing that question, and that the mouth would look like the inside of Jonah’s whale, a frightening illustration in an old book of Bible stories. A cavernous mouth, blood red, with a person at the back of the throat.

  Now that she was awake, she told herself she was no longer frightened. She groped for what she’d known in the dream but couldn’t see now. The gentle wind was stirring an unsaid thing to life on the very bottom layer of her memory.

  She began to shuffle the deck. Mr. Hoade’s face, drawn and unshaven, swam malevolently before her. If her father had heard him use the vulgar language of that exchange at the breakfast table, he would have punched Mr. Hoade right in the nose and taken Dorothy home. She missed her father, suddenly. She missed his bushy eyebrows and his “Irish temper,” as her mother called it, that spent itself quickly and settled all things on the side of the angels.

  She dealt out ten cards apiece. “I’m going to get them all wet,” Jenny announced. She threw the deck in a puddle on her right-hand side.

  “What did you do that for?” Lisa whined.

  “Because I know what cards are wet and I can tell them from the back,” said Jenny. She placed all fifty-two on the towel. Lisa moaned. Dorothy waited and yawned, her thoughts elsewhere.

  Mr. Hoade had certainly been upset at the suggestion of trouble in his precious candidate’s precious union. Was it, after all, the union that had been in the papers with the murder? He hadn’t seemed too pleased at the reminder that his daughter was a mongoloid, either. Leave well enough alone, Maureen warned her silently. Trouble trouble and trouble will trouble you.

  Once again God had smiled upon her. Dorothy mouthed a prayer of thanks as Jenny methodically blotted the cards. Mr. and Mrs. Hoade had not noticed her last night when she’d come in, drenched by the cloudburst. Only Lisa had noticed the boots that she’d hidden in the garden until she was sure the coast was clear. But Lisa’s guess about stealing could be easily gotten around. Mrs. Hoade had been too busy with her suddenly washed-out party to bother about Dorothy. Mr. Hoade had been obliged to drive his quadruple-chinned client all the way to Philadelphia in the storm. The rest of the guests, in a procession of a dozen cars, had left shortly after. So much confusion. Mr. Hoade had probably not returned until early that morning. He was no doubt exhausted and in a bad mood. Dorothy knew she had an overactive imagination. Even Sister Elizabeth, who was very fond of imaginations, had told her that.

  Jenny dealt the wet cards and announced, “Go fish.” Dorothy picked up her hand and yawned again.

  She would just shut down that busybody in the back of her mind. The Hoade baby probably had meningitis, or something else that tactful Mrs. Hoade didn’t want to go into. It might be horribly birthmarked, with dreadful purple streaks all over it. Perhaps it had caught leprosy in the womb in South America and its fingers and toes were dropping off. Lisa and Jenny, if they saw it, would be traumatized for the rest of their lives.

  “Do you have any...tens?” Lisa asked Dorothy.

  “No,” said Dorothy. The wind blew a dead rose blossom across the deck of cards. The memory of the dream began to open again, like a fan.

  “You do so have tens. You have two tens!” said Lisa irritably, peering over the top of Dorothy’s hand, and the image folded in on itself again, leaving Dorothy only with the certainty that whatever it was lay in Mrs. Hoade’s top bureau drawer.

  Ever since Mrs. Hoade had informed her, without going into detail, that the baby had died in the hospital early that morning, Dorothy had been carrying on a private war with herself. On the one hand she couldn’t get the drawer, the thing in the drawer, whatever it was, out of her mind. On the other hand, Maureen’s voice, Reverend Mother’s voice, a hundred voices including her own good conscience, warned her that she had already transgressed and must go no further. “O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!” cautioned Sir Walter Scott in Sister Elizabeth’s flawless impression of a Midlothian burr.

  The girls sat in the library, with Dorothy between them, mesmerized by Lassie. Mr. and Mrs. Hoade were downstairs in the living room. Mrs. Hoade’s face had been ashen since she’d come in. Dorothy prayed her own voice had conveyed enough reverence for the dead when she’d asked if there was anything she could do to help. She could keep the girls entertained. Well, that was what she’d been hired to do. The hamburger tasted dry and uninteresting. Dorothy bit her lip. She’d eaten meat last night. Last night had been Friday.

  Suddenly Dorothy longed for the quiet darkness of the confessional. She wanted to wipe out all the nasty suspicions that had gone through her
mind that morning. There’s just hardly any good in me, she thought. I wish I were like my mother. I wish I were kind and gentle.

  “What are you sighing for?” Jenny asked.

  “Oh, I was thinking of your parents. I wish I could help them and make them feel better,” said Dorothy. Jenny turned back to the television without saying anything. Ice clinked in the silver ice bucket in the living room.

  Dorothy knew she could do nothing for Mrs. Hoade. She wondered if she could do anything for herself. Could she obliterate the things she’d seen in herself these past weeks that she really didn’t like very much? All her greedy ambitions for illustrious careers? Careers without the hard work; silly, romantic ambitions for fame and fortune at someone else’s expense. She wished she could erase all her impatience with poor Jenny and Lisa, whose parents paid them so little attention. She wished she could destroy her envy, covetousness, as Reverend Mother called it, of the Hoades and everything they owned. What had all their money bought them when the chips were down? Nothing. Their baby had died, just like any poor baby in India—or in Ireland, a century before, during the potato famine there.

  The closest that she, Dorothy, had ever been to any sort of tragedy was right now, fifty feet away downstairs. She could hear the Hoades moving about, she could hear the ice in their drinks, tinkling almost gaily. She remembered the power of Mrs. Hoade’s grief, the tremble in Mrs. Hoade’s hands, and Mr. Hoade’s red, sleepy eyes.

  A little bleakly, Dorothy came to the conclusion that she would never become a reporter, or a spy, or a famous writer. She would do well, when she got home, to be less critical of Maureen, to be more helpful and loving with Bridget. Supposing one day she were to have a baby of her own and that baby were to die. And supposing she’d hired some teenager who poked her nose into everything, looked in drawers, considered reading private letters, and arrived at preposterous conclusions on the basis of spite, envy, and laziness. Who threw away an autographed picture in the wastebasket, for anyone to come upon, just because it wasn’t of a person famous enough to suit her snooty tastes. She’d gone three times where she’d been told not to go. What did she know about lawsuits? Perhaps her father would sue the Hoades if anything happened to her. Not only had she disobeyed Mrs. Hoade, kind Mrs. Hoade who might put her name in a book, but she’d stolen a pair of riding boots. Well, she was just not going to wear those boots, even if they did look terrific. She was going to ask Mrs. Hoade not to put her name down or acknowledge any help on the cookbook in print.

  All the Hoades had shown her, after all, was kindness. She had met wonderful, sparkling people at their parties. She’d ordered hundreds of dollars worth of fancy food for them, and eaten half of it. She’d learned to ride and had been given generous time to do so. The Hoades didn’t expect her to do a lick of housework. She didn’t even have to make her bed—Dinna would do it. And how had Dorothy repaid the Hoades? Shabbily, she told herself. With a multitude of sins and ugly thoughts. By wishing Mr. Hoade dead on at least two occasions. By insulting his associates, by wishing Lisa dead at least four times that summer, once that very morning when the Hoades’ baby was off in a hospital, dying. Dying, for all she knew, in great suffering. Reverend Mother’s voice, at its most provoked, flooded her conscience. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you!”

  She decided to give herself a penance of ten Hail Marys and one Our Father for every sin she’d committed and no cheating on the sins by lumping them together. Using the buttons of her shirt for a rosary, she kept up her prayers, right through the whole of Playhouse 90. By the time she tucked the girls into bed, Dorothy had finished eighty Hail Marys and eight Our Fathers. As she said good night and closed their door, she remembered about eating meat on Friday and missing Mass and Confession for so many weeks. She said twenty more.

  The Hoades were talking quietly in the living room. Dorothy decided not to disturb them. Determined to tackle Ivanhoe, she strode with a tranquil heart at last down the hall to her room. She felt so strong now, so happy, so determined to spend the rest of this summer being modest instead of proud, passive instead of prying, that she put her hand to her heart. There she felt what she guessed might be the beginnings of forgiveness and something close to universal love. “The Lord ruleth me,” she murmured as she passed the door of the Hoades’ bedroom: “and I shall want nothing.” She paused for a moment and listened to the rhythm of the conversation downstairs. Dorothy, DON’T! she told herself, almost aloud. But it was too late. She had already gone into their room, opened the drawer, and begun to search for whatever it was that had eluded her thoughts that morning.

  Nothing had been disturbed. The odor of sachet, the same Windsor nail polish, the same dark-yellow photo envelope... The gold locket was still there. Dorothy picked it up and opened it. A tiny picture of a man’s face popped out and fell back into the drawer. She recognized Mrs. Hoade’s father from the photo downstairs. On the back of the photograph was written in purple ink, “Krasilovsky 12-6-48.” Dorothy smiled. She counted back eight years—1948. So Maria Hoade had once been Maria Krasilovsky. Well, that was something. Dorothy wondered if the now-transformed Miss Krasilovsky had once come from a place as dull and poor as Newburgh, New York. She licked the dry glue and replaced the picture exactly as it had been before, then snapped the locket closed. The name and date and the serious face were not what she was looking for.

  Dorothy rummaged through the rest of the drawer’s contents. There was a jade-handled letter slitter that looked quite lethal, the emery boards, two pencils—both embossed silver and both leadless—a reading magnifier with a light that didn’t work, assorted Indian-head pennies, and a few stamps. There wasn’t a single thing that Dorothy could see that fused itself to that slippery idea that had made her look in this drawer again. The only thing left was the stack of letters. She closed the drawer and listened in the hallway again. The Hoades were deep in liquor and conversation; besides, if they did decide to come up, she’d have plenty of warning as the stairs creaked so horribly.

  She stepped back to the bureau and thought about the letters. Poking through nail files and old junk was one thing. Looking at people’s private mail was another. Still... She opened the frayed ribbon that kept the papers in a neat stack. The first was a bill, dated several years before, from the We-Get-Em Exterminating Company. It simply listed “insects—kitchen” and “rodents—cellar” and came to a sum of thirty-eight dollars. The rest were all old bills too. One from a dairy, several from a grocery, and several from a local dry cleaners’. All the papers were equally uninteresting to Dorothy. Newspaper clippings, lists of plant foods for specific kinds of plants, lists of Christmas presents to names that Dorothy didn’t know. The last paper in the stack was on memo paper that had printed on it “Don’t forget!” The message was Rotate all your tires on the station wagon. Not a love letter among them. Not a personal item of any land. Not anything she was looking for at all.

  She stared at her own face in the mirror for a moment. Something is wrong here, in this place, in this house, she told herself. Something is very wrong, I can feel it tingling all around me in the air. There was a creak on the stairway. Dorothy put out the light and rushed for the doorway, realizing as she did that the hall light was still on and she would be seen coming out the bedroom door. She went the other way, into the Hoades’ bathroom, and vanished into Jenny’s cave. The fretwork door shut beside her, Dorothy crouched and prayed.

  Dear God, please forgive me. I know You are punishing me for looking in that drawer. For breaking my word to You. It was a mortal sin and I know it. Oh dear Jesus, You can strike me dead on the spot if I ever do such a thing again, I promise, but please, please don’t let them open this closet door. Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name.... She heard Mr. Hoade drop himself into a leather chair not two feet away. They were separated only by the bathroom wall. “What’s that, what are you putting away?” she heard Mrs. Hoade ask him.

  “Death certificate, au
topsy report, doctor’s bill, emergency-room bill, pathologist’s bill,” Mr. Hoade answered.

  “How much?” she asked.

  “All together? Five eighty.”

  Mr. Hoade dropped his shoes into the closet with a bang. Some paper was torn in the room. “What’s that look on your face?” Dorothy heard him ask.

  “Meticulous people have copies of everything,” Mrs. Hoade answered.

  “Listen, I’ve checked and I’m telling you no such thing exists!” he said in a barely controlled whisper. “I’ve checked and we’re home free. All right?”

  “All right,” said Mrs. Hoade at last, in a low, reluctant tone.

  He went on in a faintly discernible staccato. “Borg, if you’re worried, is hardly in a position to bring anything out now.” This was followed by a short laugh. There was no more discussion. Someone came into the bathroom.

  The light cord was pulled in the middle of Dorothy’s fourth recitation of the Apostles’ Creed. Tiny octagons of light filtered through the wicker latticework. Jenny had a lovely hideout here. Several books dug into Dorothy’s back and the piggy bank pushed up against her ankle in the corner. “Maker of heaven and earth,” said Dorothy, pressing herself as far back against the wall as she could.

  She could see nothing. She could not tell whether it was Mr. or Mrs. Hoade who stood at the sink brushing their teeth, or who it was using the John. As the water flushed with an unseemly racket Dorothy gritted her teeth. She would have given all four hundred dollars of her salary to be able to go to the bathroom at that moment. She knew it would be a long while before she dared come out. “The holy Catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen,” she repeated, digging her fingernails into her palms. She jiggled one leg and then the other imperceptibly. It did not help. Whoever it was left the bathroom and another pair of bare feet padded in.