Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  James took her jewelled hand, raised it high, and found a place to drop a kiss, with pouting lips, the way it was done.

  ‘It’s a treat,’ he said, although he had hardly been aware of the comedy. ‘Congratulations.’ He might have added, ‘Dear lady,’ if Nora hadn’t been there.

  ‘I haven’t had my hand kissed for years. I shan’t wash it. Poll, darling, bring the folks by for a drink at my table afterwards.’

  At the big round table in the bar, Jam was so enslaved that he could not worry about what Nora thought. She and Lily were talking, about the children probably. They could go on endlessly about that, just as they used to do years ago about Nora’s patients and Lily’s cases. For a while, before more people joined them, James sat next to Paige.

  He called her Pyge, putting it on a bit to make her laugh. ‘I’m a good old cockney, in’t I, Pyge?’

  ‘Pyge,’ she echoed him. ‘Oh, I adore that. Poll, you do have the nicest fathers-in-law – oops, sorry. Rodney dear,’ to one of the college-student waiters, ‘bring Pyge a double J & B, you know the way I like it.’ She winked at the golden lad, as if they were having it off after hours, damn her. ‘And one for my new friend, James.’

  ‘Jam, they call me. Jam Spooner, Jamspoon, get it?’

  She got it. She loved it. She adored it when he talked about the pub. ‘The Duke’s Head – it’s inspired. I can just see you with all those oak beams and pewter mugs. I tell you what, Jam, let’s you and me start a pub here, a genuine, authentic British pub. The Pyge’s Head. We’ll make our fortune.’

  She chatted and glittered to others, but always turned back to James. Once she took his hand, exclaimed at its size and strength and read his fortune from the palm.

  ‘Journey overseas. Meet a fair lady.’

  ‘Die in bed.’ It was the best he could do. His wits were bemused and dazzled.

  ‘Oh, Jamspoon, you are too much. Whose bed?’

  Luckily she turned away to call to someone across the room. Nora was giving James one of her steady looks across the table. Lily and Paul were laughing together about something. Lily wore a white dress with a low square neck that showed a lot of smooth, sun-tanned flesh. How lovely she was, and my God, she looked fully mature, grown up at last at thirty-two. How can I be the father of a ripe woman almost half-way through her life?

  When the pianist took a break, Paul went up to the piano and played at someone’s request, ‘They Try to Tell Us We’re Too Young’.

  ‘Thank God we’re not.’ Pyge leaned her head sideways, so that James was in a cloud of fine hair, like a scented Scotch mist. ‘I wouldn’t want to have to go through that agony again for anything, would you?’

  ‘Not when it can be like this.’ Jam was either drunk or insane. He felt about seventeen.

  Next day, Pyge rang. She rang!

  ‘For you, Gramps.’ Isobel came in with her curled-lip face. ‘Some old woman. She sounds kinda weird.’

  ‘Cynthia Pigott.’ An ex-neighbour in Granada Road, the reason he had to leave Wimbledon, he sometimes boasted. ‘How could she track me down here?’

  It was Pyge.

  Tonight was the last night of the comedy. She knew how much he and his lovely wife had enjoyed it. It was sold out, but she would leave their name with the usher and they could drop in and stand at the back for that priceless last act, and stay for the farewell cast party.

  ‘Bring Poll and that darling Lily, of course. See you, Jam-spoon!’

  Lily did not want to go. ‘You and Mum have fun without us. You can take my car.’

  Jam’s day went by in exaltation: at the soda-fountain, where Dodo was impressed that he had met Pyge, on the beach, on the porch, teaching the girls and Tony to play cricket in the field with a baseball bat and a rubber ball.

  ‘I thought you had lumbago,’ Nora called from one of the bedrooms where she was changing sheets.

  ‘Instant cure. I am your young and sprightly bridegroom.’

  While the children were looking for the ball in the long grass, James ran up the stairs and pushed Nora back on the bed for a passionate kiss. Better keep her sweet and unsuspecting, swine that he was. Impotent? Who said?

  He could not take in much more of the comedy’s last act than he had the first time round. Afterwards, in the bar, he did not get the chance to be next to Pyge, but sitting opposite, he talked and joked with the actors and kept up with their back-and-forth wisecracks in a way that would have left the dull-witted lot at the Duke standing. At the crowded, noisy table, he was playing to an audience of one, and Pyge knew it.

  You could hardly blame Nora for wanting to go home. Back at the house, she undressed before James did, and climbed into bed and was asleep almost at once, the lines on her good, familiar face, which was getting to look quite old when she was tired, smoothed out under the window in the light from a million stars, many more than you ever saw at home.

  Lily and Paul were asleep. Feeling like Lily’s son, James crept past her door and went out and drove the few miles back to the theatre.

  There was only a scattering of people at the tables in the bar. Pyge and the actors had gone on to a night spot.

  ‘Where?’ The barman did not know. ‘Did she leave a message for me? I’m with Mrs Tucker. Where can I find them?’

  ‘Who knows?’ The barman’s face, whose style of moustache had gone out with William Powell, indicated, ‘If you were, you should know where she’s gone.’

  ‘The joys of love,’ Jonesey used to sing at the George, when the mood of the bar was not too rowdy, ’are all too brief. The pain of love is a long, long grief.’

  James suffered all Sunday. Nora reported on how many J & Bs he had consumed the night before. They all thought he was hung over, so he went along with that, lest they should guess at the agonies of love that gnawed at his vitals.

  He would not go to the beach. ‘I ache all over.’ The rocking-chair creaked like a dirge. ‘Sick as a dog, Nora.’

  ‘Spirits are six per cent stronger here, you know, and a single’s like our double.’

  ‘I may be sickening for something.’

  ‘Keep away from the children, then, if you’ve got a little virus. We don’t want to spoil their holiday.’

  ‘I pray I may never get cancer, Nora. You’d pass it off as Jam’s little lump.’

  That evening, Tony Andrade, whose mother was part Wam-panoag Indian, took Paul and his family to the pow-wow in the town of Mashpee. Tony’s mother wore an Indian dress with a lot of beads and fringes and was called Princess Laughing Owl, instead of Betty Andrade. After the children had sung and danced in a more or less tribal way, Tony’s father started the famous fireball game.

  He brought out a huge ball of tightly packed rags which had been soaking for days in kerosene, lit it with a wild cry and hurled it on to the grass, where dozens of children kicked it about, shrieking with joy and fear. The ball flared as it rolled, and the skittering brown legs flickered and jumped in the flame and shadow, as if they were part of the fire.

  Cathy clung with her arms around Paul’s legs, and Rose Mary held Lily’s hand, white-faced, but Isobel was out there with Tony, running and shouting and pushing small bodies out of her way. The only time she got near the fireball, she swerved away and Tony kicked it for her, and she grabbed his shirt and ran behind him into the zigzagging mass of dervish children.

  A bigger boy scooped up the ball and threw it. A wild girl with flying plaits kicked it under a car.

  A drawn-out, ‘O-o-oh’ from the crowd. The children fell back. What now? Paul saw the lumbering figure of James, who had tagged along to the pow-wow with no enthusiasm, suddenly stumble out from the line of watching grown-ups and throw himself flat to pull out the fireball and hurl it away before the car blew up.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Who’s the hero?’

  ‘That’s a junk car anyway. No gas in it.’

  Poor Jam had burned his hand, and it had to be soaked in bicarbonate and bandaged by Nora. She treated hi
m tenderly, although he winced and squealed and told her, ‘Good thing you gave up nursing to pull pints.’

  Poor old James was still a bit off-colour on Monday. When Paul left for work, he found his father-in-law up early and sitting on the swing in the maple tree, moodily drinking tea with the bag still in the mug.

  ‘How’s the hand?’

  ‘Terrible.’ He raised a bundle from his lap that was a scarf tied clumsily over Nora’s neat bandage.

  Before Paul reached the Bourne bridge, the traffic was clotting. Commuting from the Cape was dangerous in bad winters, and hell on wheels in the summer; but thousands of people did it now, and it was worth it to come back in the evening to the narrow land where Paul felt completely at home, as if he had been a fisherman or a saltmaker or an old Wampanoag Indian in a former life.

  On a couple of evenings, Paige had lent him the nice little chestnut horse she kept at a stable near the theatre, and he had rented another quiet one for Lily, so that they could ride together.

  She was learning well. She could ride a better horse. Paige’s chestnut could ‘walk a hole in the wind’, but Lily’s plain brown horse was used to pottering along yards behind with beginners who did not know how to use their legs. Lily talked all the time when they were walking, so that Paul had to sit turned in his saddle, holding the chestnut back, which made it jog fretfully.

  ‘It’s easier to make a slow horse walk fast than a fast horse walk slow. Kick him, Lily. Here, I’ll pick you a stick. Whack him down the shoulder.’

  Lily kicked and whacked. The brown horse was impervious.

  Next time, he asked the stable for a better horse, and it ran away with Lily on the long stretch of grass that used to be an airstrip. Paul held the chestnut back with difficulty, so as not to race. He caught up with Lily as her horse slowed and swerved at the end of the field and stopped, and suddenly put its head down to tear at grass, although it was winded and blowing.

  Lily fell off down its neck and leaned against the wet, heaving sides.

  ‘My God, are you all right?’ Watching someone else in trouble was much worse than being in trouble yourself. Paul had been in an agony of anxiety. ‘Why couldn’t you stop him? He must have a mouth like iron.’

  ‘I wanted to gallop,’ Lily lied. Her hair-clip had come out, and her thick front hair was over her face. ‘I wanted to go fast.’

  ‘In that case, you don’t charge off without telling the other person.’ Anxiety turned swiftly to anger. ‘If you’re going to learn to ride, you’ve got to do it properly, or I’ll be damned if I’ll bother to teach you.’

  Immediately he wanted to say, ‘Sorry, forget that,’ but Lily said, ‘I love it when you get severe with me. I want to do it right. I want to be the best at it.’

  Paul left work early, and called in at his parents’ house on his way to Cape Cod. He sat with them on the patio and drank Muriel’s lemonade made from her grandmother’s recipe in Indiana, and wished he did not have to join the Monday evening traffic of tourists starting their week.

  ‘But you always say you want to live year-round on the Cape,’ his mother said. ‘The commuting would kill you.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Paul closed his eyes and thought of his boyhood bed upstairs. Once you were married, you couldn’t come home for a night in your old room. ‘What are you having for supper?’

  ‘Baked scrod. Want to stay and eat? There’s plenty.’

  ‘No I’d better get back. I’ll be glad when James and Nora go, and Lily and I are alone.’

  ‘You don’t care for her folk? I thought they were darling.’

  ‘Oh, they are. But they’re there.’

  The Judge had had a cold, and Muriel worried at him.

  ‘He takes on other people’s work. They all take time off, and pretend to be sick when they want to play in a golf match, but your father won’t call in sick even when he is.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m never sick.’

  ‘You are so, Steven. I’ve had some anxious times with you, over all these years. He’ll pass away before me,’ she told Paul, when the Judge went into the house, ‘and that’s the way it ought to be, because he’d be lost if I passed on first. I would manage all right. I wouldn’t come and bother you.’

  ‘I’d want you to.’

  ‘No, I’d join a club, travel with some of the girls, take up reading or something. Go to Florida like Aunt Bessie. My family’s full of widow women. I guess the men couldn’t take it.’

  Muriel stood at the edge of the patio and watched the red car until it was out of sight. There went a good man, her son, the best of the bunch, as far as her sisters and cousins had managed to produce, and their husbands certainly weren’t a patch on Judge Steven. Right from the start, when she dated him at Anderson High in her pink and cream sweater she always loved, she had known he would go far.

  How do I keep up with him? That had always been the point. People thought she was stupid, but she was smarter than most of them, because she had never tried to be what she was not, since Steven liked her the way she was, and that was all that counted. Maybe when he did go to his rest, she might branch out, if she wasn’t too old and foolish by then, but not now.

  She stepped off the flagstones on to the grass to turn off the sprinkler and pull some weeds while the ground was damp. Agh! I’m putting on weight. I get gas when I bend. Takes away your breath the way the pain goes right up into your teeth. The pain – oh no, please, oh no. A red car driven by Paul – she could see his darling good-natured face through the windshield – came at her and struck her in the chest and crashed her down.

  When Paul got home at last, Lily came out of the screen door more slowly than usual.

  His father had called. Paul’s mother had been dead when the Judge came down from his study and found her.

  ‘She can’t be dead.’ Paul was so tired, he could have fallen down at Lily’s bare feet. ‘I was just with her.’ They were talking about someone else, not him, not Muriel.

  The dog Arthur, distantly related to a large pale poodle, greeted Paul with his shy smile, lifting one side of his lip above his teeth, and waited with forelegs lowered and apart, to jump in whichever direction Paul would go. He went upstairs to get night things and a razor, and then back to the car.

  ‘Stay and have something to eat, darling.’

  ‘I’ll get something with Dad. I must go to him.’

  ‘You can’t go alone. I’ll just put on a skirt.’

  ‘No, you stay with the kids.’

  Arthur, who was everyone’s dog but considered himself Paul’s, stood with his ears down and his eyes wounded, as if he had seen suitcases packed. Paul knelt and put his face against the dog, wiping off tears on the rough coat. Then he got back in the car and drove fast on the empty side of the road, against the crawling cars piled with families and bags and bicycles and beach-chairs.

  When Terry and Brian came down off the mountain, they walked along a road, not bothering to get on to the verge, making cars go round them, into a shabby Vermont town, with a dead car or the hulk of a trailer in every side yard.

  Brian had wanted to stay up in the hills, but three nights of sleeping out was enough for Terry, and they had no more food. In the top apartment of a tall narrow house, they found a room which they could only reach by walking through two other bedrooms. Outside their room, a balcony sloped crazily, with part of the railing missing.

  ‘Better not sleepwalk,’ Brian said. The balcony was propped up by a slanting two-by-four in the backyard.

  They left their back-packs, since the room had a lock and key, walked through a room full of odorous sleeping babies and another room with piles of dirty clothes on an unmade bed, and found a diner at the empty crossroads which was the heart of town. They ate in silence, taking turns to get up and put a quarter into the juke-box. They had nothing to say. They had not fought, but they were already fed up with each other.

  Brian was a health freak. He had been jogging and doing long hikes for years, and he outwalked Ter
ry, who was much smaller than him.

  Terry had finished growing, too soon. Boys were always taller than their mothers, but his mother was only five foot four. He used to choose smaller friends, like Eddie Waite. He had seen Eddie the other day in the shopping plaza.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  Eddie had dropped out of school two years ago, lucky swine.

  ‘What’s new?’ Eddie had asked.

  ‘Hunhnyah.’

  ‘Want to go out some night?’

  ‘Nah.’

  At this stage of his life, Terry often did not let himself do things he wanted, to prove that he never got anything he wanted. One of the reasons he went with Brian, who was half a head taller, was to prove that he was too small.

  When Brian enthused about the view, Terry sat with his back to it. Some of the time, the mountains and the freedom and the gallons of oxygen put Terry into a great spirit of excitement and nervous energy that made him run down the slopes when Brian kept his steady pace, and needle Brian about the things he set store by: his body, his girl, his uncle’s ski lodge at Dixville Notch. But then Terry would be sitting on a rock, throwing orange peel into the trickle of ice-cold stream in which his feet were soaking, and the inert spongy mass that was his soul inside him would fill up with poured concrete and the weight would drop him down with it, and none of all this was any use, any use at all, and he could not dredge up words to speak to Brian.

  There was a pay phone at the end of the diner.

  ‘Gonna call your mother?’ Brian asked.

  Terry shook his head. His mother was the reason he was here. Since she married that zombie with the glossy beard and greedy white fangs, who hoped to revolutionize Terry’s low-key life, he had kept out of the house as much as possible.

  ‘My mother is a tramp,’ he instructed Brian.

  ‘Who says?’ Brian had several big yellow teeth and a white one that had been put in after a football mishap, and one of those long noses that curl over and look as if they have a drip on the end, but it’s a drip of cartilage.