Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  One evening when they had ridden far enough away from the stables, Harry pulled up, and told Lily to get up on the very good horse he was allowed to ride.

  Paul wasn’t sure. ‘I don’t think she’s ready.’

  ‘Don’t cramp her, Paul. She’s got to know what a good horse feels like.’

  Harry was quite well known in the horse world, and the woman who ran the stables had given him one of her show horses, who needed the exercise.

  He was a big bay. He felt better for Lily’s height and long legs than the smaller brown mare she had been riding. You had to work quite hard to keep the mare going, but with Jacob, as soon as she picked up the reins and moved her leg back – ‘Not too much leg, he’ll take off with you!’ from Harry – he stepped forwards eagerly, neck flexed, dropping his chin and playing with the bit. He was light and quick, and very responsive, but she could feel his strength, and spirit, and she wondered what would happen when he realized he knew more than her.

  He outwalked the other horses.

  ‘Try a trot!’ Harry called.

  Lily was perfectly happy walking, feeling the swing of Jacob’s long stride, the muscle of his shoulder in front of her knee, the nod of his elegant head against her hands, but she thought, ‘Trot,’ obediently, and before she had gathered up her reins, this lovely horse was into his long springing stride, each neat hoof reaching rhythmically forwards to make its print accurately on the sandy grass.

  ‘She’s doing well,’ Paul and Harry agreed with pride, as if they had invented her.

  ‘She’ll ride yet,’ Harry said.

  ‘I’m riding now.’

  They were trotting abreast along a wide path, a low crimson sun at their backs and a soft fresh breeze off from the sea in their faces.

  ‘We’ll canter, then,’ Harry said.

  ‘You want to, Lily? He may take hold.’ Paul never pushed her (she pushed herself). He never minded anyone being nervous. He had not forgotten it in himself, as most people do after they have learned to ride well.

  Lily turned a happy smile to him, then sat down in the saddle and gave the horse a very gentle squeeze with her legs.

  His trot had been magnificent. His canter was like flying, like flowing cream, like dancing.

  They picked up speed. Harry was beside her, Paul behind. She was not aware of either of them. She was the horse, the horse was her. As she Cantered on eternally between the trees with the clean wind washing her face and singing in her ears, she reached a state of exaltation where she felt, not only part of the powerful life that moved and breathed with her, but of the grass which flexed beneath his joyful feet, the moving air, turning leaves, all things growing, lingering small clouds ahead, flushed like shells in the reflection of the setting sun.

  All living things are one, the horse displayed to her.

  Then a bird exploded up out of the grass and the horse shied violently sideways. Lily lost a stirrup and lost her balance and jerked the reins, and Jacob threw up his head, and they were all at odds.

  ‘Sit down,’ Harry said. ‘Sit back, don’t lean forward. He’ll come back to you. Well done. Good girl.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Anxiety made Paul look older. His easily smiling mouth was pulled in.

  ‘Sure she is.’ Harry had taken over. ‘You go ahead, Paul, if this one’s going to be jumpy.’

  They slowed to a walk. Lily and Harry rode behind Paul.

  ‘You love it don’t you,’ Harry said. ‘Your face back there – you’re beautiful, you know that?’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Lily said in an English way. Harry was everybody’s friend. He had better not look at her like that.

  ‘Don’t be scared.’ He was still smiling at her, as if he knew something about her, and found it amusing.

  She pushed the bay horse forwards to ride beside Paul.

  After supper, the moon came up, full and staring. Cathy brought out a book she knew by heart, to prove she could read in the flat white light. There were glow worms in the bushes by the barn. The children stayed up late, because it was too beautiful to go indoors.

  ‘We didn’t get our evening swim,’ Isobel complained, ‘because you guys wanted to ride.’

  ‘Well then, let’s swim now.’ Harry got up. He was not going to let her have a grievance. ‘Come on, a moonlight swim.’

  ‘It will be cold.’ Cathy shivered.

  ‘It won’t, you dope. The sea will feel warmer because the air’s cooler.’

  ‘Let’s go to Hidden Harbor,’ Lily said. They couldn’t go there in the daytime, because the family who owned it were usually there.

  They left the car at the end of the sandy road that wound alongside the inlet to where the dredged sand had piled up a mounded beach. The group of lighted houses across the canal all faced away, towards the bay. If people were sitting out, they would be on that side, where they could not see this beach.

  Cathy pulled off her shorts and top and went into the water naked, a silver fish, turning and plunging in shallow water.

  ‘You can too, Iz,’ Lily said. But Isobel kept on her swimsuit, and plunged in down the steep slope of the beach to where she could stand in the narrow opening of the canal with the water up to her nose and her thick dark hair floating backwards on the current coming in from the open sea.

  ‘Shall we?’ With his shirt off, Harry put his thumbs into the top of his swimming trunks to pull them down.

  ‘We’d better not.’ Lily looked towards the houses. The beach was in the full floodlight of the moon.

  But Harry did, so Paul did, and then Lily did too. She ran into the deeper pool above the inlet, and swam away from the shore. Her fingers picked silver drops of phosphorescence out of the still, satin sea. The water welcomed her skin. Body and water were not divided by being solid and fluid. It was like that moment of exaltation with Jacob, when everything had shared life.

  Paul swam up beside her. She put out a hand, and he took her arm. It was Harry. He held her, and moved his other hand slowly across her body.

  Lily melted into the sea. She flung her face up to the moon, kicked out and ploughed fast back to the beach, where Paul was with the girls.

  On the sand, she ran for her towel and put it round her.

  ‘Cold, darling?’

  ‘A bit.’ She sat wrapped up, arms round her knees. She wanted to go home, but it was a long time before she could get the others to come out of the water.

  Moon-struck and water-mad, they ambled back towards the car, Paul and Harry taking turns to carry Cathy on their shoulders. Her little water-rat’s head nodded above the bundling towel. She was half asleep. Lily held hands with Isobel and sang, very quietly because they were not supposed to be here. She would not look at Harry.

  When they got home, she went upstairs with the children, and then had a bath and went to bed herself.

  She could hear the companionable talk in the living-room below, the sliding door of the cupboard where the bottles were, Harry’s laugh and Paul’s lighter one. Much later, while she was still reading, she smelled bacon cooking.

  Paul came upstairs and opened her door. ‘You want a BLT?’

  ‘No thanks. Are you coming up soon?’

  ‘Soon.’

  She wanted him to be here, so that she could tell him about Harry. She told him everything. When he did come up, chattering peacefully about the room while he undressed, he told her what he and Harry had been talking about, and something surprising that Harry had said about his first marriage.

  ‘It’s good to be with him. He loves it here. Says it’s his home life.’

  Tell him.

  But when Paul came to bed, she only reached for him in silence, to wipe out Harry’s hands with Paul’s.

  She did not tell him the next day. Why not? She could give herself all sorts of reasons. It was too late, over now, irrelevant, meant nothing. Harry was Paul’s good friend; no point in making trouble. Harry might not care, but it would hurt Paul.

  She loved Paul totally. She would nev
er do anything against him. Why drop the thought into his head that she might? Men were born jealous: little boys trying to get their mothers away from their fathers. Even secure, unpossessive men like Paul had primeval suspicions about what women were really like.

  Those were easy reasons. There was another, which she looked at once and put away. Sex and the sea … for an interminable moment, she had hung still in the water under Harry’s hand. She had melted.

  The telephone rang while Lily was putting together the picnic to take to the Outer Beach.

  ‘Damn them.’ Paul came back into the kitchen. ‘I’ll have to go up to Boston tomorrow.’

  ‘You can’t. You’re on holiday.’

  ‘There’s a small crisis. I’ll have to go, because I’m the one who’s had all the dealing with these people. Leonard says I can take an extra day. Leonard says! I’m his boss, not he mine.’

  ‘Want me to drive up with you?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Thanks, but no. You stay.’

  Harry looked at Lily. He caught her looking at him, and she looked away.

  ‘You stay with Lily and the kids. You and Lily have fun.’

  Trusting fool.

  After the day on the Outer Beach, everyone was tired, so they didn’t do much of anything when Isobel’s father went to Boston. Isobel had not yet reached the point where she complained, ‘There’s nothing to do on Cape Cod; going to the beach is boring,’ but she hung about aimlessly with her lip stuck out, because if Daddy were here, he would have taken her to fish off the bridge over the river that ran through Sandwich marsh.

  Not Cathy. Not Mudder. Just Isobel. She loved him passionately. That was why she fought with him, because it scared her, how much she loved him. And he must be made to show that he loved her, no matter what. She couldn’t make it easy for him.

  Dumb happy kids like Cathy and Maggie thought that life was simple. It wasn’t. Life was difficult and dangerous. Terry had told her that a long time ago.

  ‘If you know that,’ he had said, ‘you got it licked.’

  Nobody noticed that her lip was stuck out, so she went to the small local beach with a friend, and then did ball boy for Harry and Mudder at the tennis courts. Harry played well. Mud played rottenly, and laughed too much. Fifty cents was the going rate for being ball boy. Harry gave her a dollar, which was why she had agreed to do it. He also gave Cathy a dollar for hunting for balls that Mud hit over the wire fence, not being able to find them, and dashing across the court to pick up a ball just when he was going to serve. Not fair.

  Later, Harry went into the barn to see how it could be made into stables for horses. He was crazy about horses, worse than Daddy. He looked at everything as a place where he could ride, or keep horses, or build a jump.

  When Tony came back from work with his father, he came up to the house, and he and Isobel rode their bikes to the drug store for a soda. Cathy whined to come too, so they gave her a quarter not to.

  ‘What good is that? I wanna come.’

  ‘So now you have a quarter and the forty cents you’d have spent on the soda, that’s sixty-five cents,’ Isobel said. ‘Plus the dollar Harry gave you for doing nothing except getting in the way, which is a dollar sixty-five which is more than I ever had at your age.’

  ‘Gee, it must be great to be educated,’ Tony said.

  He was much cleverer than Isobel, and could measure and draw plans for carpentry, and do complicated things with figures, as well as drive a bulldozer and use a buzz saw; but they had this pretence about Isobel being so grand, to make a joke about the difference between their lives.

  Isobel had climbed the rope ladder into the tree-house during the time that she was sticking out her lip. While she was up there, above the world which did not understand her, she had trodden on the end of a floor board, and the nails had pulled out and her whole leg had almost gone through and crippled her for life.

  ‘And you could have said it was my fault,’ Tony said.

  ‘Serve you right.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Being a Cape Codder.’

  They were sitting on the worn red stools at the drug-store counter.

  ‘Being a Portugee, you mean. That’s worse.’

  ‘Oh, much worse,’ Isobel agreed.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Behind the counter, talking to a giant trucker whose rear end spilled over the stool, Dodo was also sharing their conversation. ‘The Portugees run this town, is what I think.’

  ‘You better believe it.’ Tony’s ancestors came from the Cape Verde Islands, off Africa, and he told Isobel that they were royal.

  They went back to mend the floor of the tree-house. ‘Better strengthen it if you’re getting so fat and heavy,’ Tony said. ‘There’s some short pieces of two-by-twos in your barn. Maybe I can use some of those.’

  ‘Someone in there?’ Tony heard a voice inside the barn.

  ‘Harry went in there to play make-believe horses.’

  It was beginning to rain. Tony stood on a block of granite that lay by the wall and looked through one of the small windows where the cow stalls used to be.

  Isobel stepped up beside him. She stood on tiptoe, and then Tony pushed her down and muttered, ‘C’mon, let’s get the wood from my yard.’

  Isobel did not ask, ‘Why?’, because before he pushed her away from the window, she had seen Harry and her mother, half in shadow, half in dusty light.

  Going across the back field, Isobel had to ask. ‘Tony.’ She coughed. It was hard to say. ‘What were they doing?’

  ‘I didn’t see nothing.’

  ‘You did. I did. What were they doing?’

  ‘Oh.’ Tony walked faster. ‘Just kissin’.’

  Grown-ups kissed and fooled around all the time, like a sort of game. ‘But their faces weren’t together. Harry looked stern, not like his usual self. She – why was my mother’s face like that?’

  ‘Forget it.’ Tony’s forehead was screwed up into ridges. ‘You didn’t see nothing.’

  ‘I’m telling my father.’

  ‘If you do,’ Tony turned and looked at her, his dark face scowling, I’ll break your little white neck.’

  Then there was something to tell.

  ‘Tell me.’ Isobel ran up behind him.

  ‘Do me a favour, will ya?’ he brushed a hand backwards at her, as if she were a mosquito, or a child.

  On the other side of the wall in Tony’s yard, when he was turning over wood behind the open shed where his father kept the tractor, Isobel tried again.

  He pulled out a couple of pieces of wood and threw them hard on the ground near her feet.

  ‘Cut it out.’

  She did. Tony was the only person she obeyed without arguing. He was her real friend. Different from friends at school who she bickered with back and forth, and strove to defeat.

  ‘Tony!’ Mrs Andrade shouted from the house. They could hear her from the farmhouse when she was in full cry.

  ‘Yeah, Ma?’

  ‘Bring Isobella inside. It’s raining.’

  When the tree-house was mended, Isobel went indoors and sat in the fascinating hot room, which had a carpet on the table and velvet chairs with lace pinned on the arms, and a gorgeously coloured bead curtain between the dining-room and living-room. If you went through it with your hands behind your back, it massaged your face like rain.

  Mrs Andrade let Isobel sew some beads on the back of the fringed jacket she was going to wear when she went to the Martha’s Vineyard pow-wow at Gay Head in September.

  ‘I like it here.’ The bead work was easy, big needle and big holes in the beads.

  ‘We like you to come down here.’ Sitting with Isobel at the table, working on the jacket sleeve, Mrs Andrade’s face was folded in fat, comfortable creases. ‘Tony always liked to be with kids younger than him. That’s okay by me. Better than some of those girls at the high school.’ She made a face, snarling as she bit off a thread.

  In a while, she gave Isobel a root beer and sent Tony up to the farmho
use to ask if she could stay for supper.

  Paul fretted at the traffic which held him up crossing the canal bridge. He badly wanted to talk to Lily.

  When she ran out to him, bare feet on wet grass, he asked at once, ‘Did you see the six o’clock news?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘My Dad’s in a bit of trouble.’

  ‘On the television? What’s he done?’

  ‘Nothing, of course. It’s what’s being done to him. Come in the house and I’ll tell you.’

  Before Judge Stephens in Superior Court that morning, two young black men had been charged with assault and manslaughter, after mugging an elderly white man, who died of a heart attack in the street.

  Another white man, a witness, had refused to testify because he had broken a probation order which forbade him to leave New York state, and was afraid of bringing more trouble on himself.

  ‘Leave me put of it,’ he had said in court. ‘I’m not going to help the Law.’

  Since Even Steven could not compel the man to testify without a court order from the District Attorney, he had to throw out the charges, accepting only a charge of endangerment and attempted robbery.

  The black men were free on bail, and hiding from a storm of public protest. Paul’s father was accused of being ‘scared of the blacks’.

  ‘Even Steven?’ an angry white man had shouted to reporters outside the courthouse. ‘It’s Chicken Steven!’

  That afternoon, a gang of white teenagers had set upon a black man in a parking lot and fractured his skull. He was in the hospital, ‘fighting for his life’, as they say when someone’s body is trying to die. The Judge was accused of ‘setting racial integration back twenty years’.

  Paul had gone to Dedham to see his father, but a neighbour told him that the Judge was staying at his club in Boston.

  Paul and Lily called him there.

  ‘You heard about it?’ The Judge sounded a bit anxious. ‘Damnedest thing. I had no choice but to reduce the charges against those men, and now you’d think I was the criminal.’