Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so. I’m used to being attacked by people who don’t understand anything about the law. I’m going to have some short ribs with old Callahan and get an early night.’

  ‘Sleep well,’ Lily said.

  ‘I hope.’ His voice was rather rocky.

  How unfair, after all his years of scrupulous work. How damned unfair, when other men were taking bribes, peddling influence, keeping in with the boys. Paul ought to be up in Boston with him. The evening felt grey and drained of promise. The loose window over the sofa shook in a gust of rain.

  ‘Let’s have a fire.’

  Harry had brought in some wood from the barn. Paul built a fire in the big stone fireplace, carefully, so that it wouldn’t smoke, and sat by it, weary, in the only chair that was remotely the shape of a human being.

  ‘You two have a good day?’

  He had brought down an evening paper, and was reading what it said about his father. There would be a lot more tomorrow.

  ‘Great.’ Harry handed him a drink. ‘I tried to put the make on your child bride in the barn, but she repulsed me.’

  ‘Tough luck,’ Paul said without looking up.

  Dedham Judge in Court Scandal. Racial Violence Inflamed. Manslaughter Charge Thrown Out – ‘Disgusting!’

  Late news on television carried the story in some detail, going through the events in court, but skimming over the legal explanation. The black man who had been attacked in the parking lot was shown being lifted into an ambulance. A hospital spokesman said he was in critical condition. There was a five-year-old photograph of Judge Stephens, looking quizzical. There had been some minor racial incidents. Various citizens of all colours gave uninformed opinions.

  Next day, Paul went early to Boston and drove his father to work. There was a small angry crowd outside the courthouse. The police cleared a way for the car, but a repulsive woman with hair like a scouring pad thrust her writhing face against the window and screamed, ‘Nigger lover!’

  When his father left the court, Paul had to fight to get him through a swarm of reporters. It was frightening, unreal. It was like scenes you saw, happening to someone else. Bystanders shouted ugly things. Paul thought they were encouraged by the television people, to provide better pictures.

  More reporters waited outside the house, and a television crew. Before they went inside, Paul’s father turned.

  ‘Give us a statement, Judge!’

  ‘Get out of my garden.’

  That evening, a brick came through one of the front windows. When the phone rang, the Judge picked it up and stood for half a minute listening. His hand was trembling when he put the receiver down.

  ‘Don’t answer it any more,’ Paul said.

  When it rang again, he knew the kind of thing his father had listened to: filthy, crude. Shaming that anyone should choose words like that, should enjoy such mindless hate.

  Newspapers and television stations kept calling. The doorbell rang while Paul was making coffee for his father.

  ‘Go away.’

  Two people took Paul’s picture.

  ‘What do you think about the rioting in Dorchester Avenue?’

  ‘What rioting?’

  ‘I guess you don’t know. The black guy that the white kids beat up in the parking lot died in Intensive Care.’

  ‘What do you think… how do you feel… do you think your father’s decision…’

  Questions were thrown at him. Paul went indoors.

  His father had hardly slept. He was feeble and coughing this morning. Paul did not want to tell him about the man dying, but the Judge was watching the news in his bedroom. He looked old and drained enough to die himself.

  ‘Paul.’ He raised watery eyes in a doggy way, nothing like his usual straight look. ‘God help me, I don’t know that I can go to work today.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let you. We’re getting out of here.’

  They drove down to Cape Cod, where Lily had already repulsed two local reporters. At the end of the day, the Judge’s clerk called to say that the District Attorney’s Prosecutor was bringing forward the case to a grand jury, without the testimony of the cautious witness. The furore died down. Repulsive women and opinionated citizens found other things to raise Cain about, but the Judge had to spend a few days in bed, because his breathing was bad and the rhythm of his heart uneven.

  ‘I guess this has hit me harder than I thought.’ He apologized a dozen times a day. ‘Must be getting old. Shocking weakness. Should know better.’

  Each time he said he was going back to work, they persuaded him to stay one more day.

  He was sitting with them on the porch, playing cards with Cathy, when the real estate agent came round.

  ‘I thought I should tell you,’ he said to Paul and Lily. ‘You may not be able to rent this house next year.’

  Paul’s first thought was, ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else.’ He loved this place. He had not thought farther than coming back here, year after year.

  The owners had decided to sell the house and land. ‘That’s why I stopped by this evening.’ The agent was a pleasant man, tanned and fit, more at home outdoors than in an office, working to support his racing yacht. ‘I thought you might like to hear about it first, knowing how much you love this place.’

  ‘Oh, Paul.’ Lily turned to him an eager face that wanted to say, ‘We’ll buy it!’ without a second’s thought.

  Paul’s heart raced to match hers, but he said noncommittally, ‘How much are they asking?’

  It was far too much, out of sight for them. But the sudden dream did not retreat. It filled Paul’s mind, although it had no connection with reality.

  ‘That’s a bit beyond us, I’m afraid.’ He smiled, keeping his voice level.

  ‘But we’ve always wanted to buy a summer place here,’ Lily told the agent. ‘I wish it could be this.’

  ‘So do I. It’s a steal, really, for what you’d be getting. These old houses just don’t come on the market any more, and where are you going to find an acre and a half of land in the middle of a village?’

  ‘Need a lot spent on it, though,’ the Judge put in, looking judicial, in case the young man thought anyone was fooled by his sales pitch.

  ‘Sure, but houses like this have been around so long, they can take their time about being done up.’

  Paul and Lily did not say anything. They could not buy it. Someone else would. This was their last year here.

  ‘Well, think about it.’ The agent pushed himself upright from the porch rail, and put down his iced-coffee glass. ‘It’s not on the market yet. Incidentally,’ he said before he left, ‘because this house used to be in the Harper family, the rights to use the beach at Hidden Harbor go along with it.’

  All evening, Paul and Lily talked about the house and the beach and what they would have done with the land and the barn, and went on half the night, lying awake for a long time. Cathy still came into their bed sometimes if she woke, so they incorporated her into the mound of their bodies, and went on talking.

  In the morning, the Judge came down to breakfast before Lily could take his tray upstairs. He looked better.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ he said in a slow, instructive voice. ‘I’m going to help you with the down-payment, so that you can buy this house.’

  He would not listen to objections. ‘The money will be yours when I die anyway. Why not have some of it now, for your heart’s desire?’

  He had a way of occasionally using a sentimental phrase in a perfectly straight, serious way. As he looked at Paul, and Lily across the table, his thin mauve lips moved in and out, releasing and then withdrawing a smile.

  It took several months of surveyors and lawyers and banks and local officials before the purchase of the house went through, but since it had no proper heating system, they could not move into it for weekends before April or May.

  Meanwhile, Lily continued to talk to all the unseen voices at the Day-
Nite Answering Service.

  ‘Dr Reed’s line. No, not today. He’s in Chicago at the A P A. Day-Nite. Good morning, Elizabeth. Yes, a lot, and one you won’t like. Letterman Clinic, one moment please. Vandermeer & Price, one moment please. Day-Nite. I’m on four lines, I’ll call you back.’

  She was quick and efficient and she had made a lot of invisible friends, but every week she vowed that she would look for something more enterprising. On a Monday in November, when she went into work determined to tell Gloria that she must leave, Gloria was one jump ahead of her with an offer to manage the new branch that she was opening in Newton Centre. More money and responsibility. Less travel time.

  Lily surprised Gloria by not accepting at once. The decision to move on, which she had talked about interminably to Paul over the weekend, had made her feel lighter. Jobless, but light and free. Gloria’s offer was a good one. She would have eight or ten people under her, and the chance of supervising several branches later on. But the lightness was escaping. It felt like being dragged back, not pushed ahead.

  ‘Let me think about it.’ She would talk to Paul.

  ‘I’ll give you a week, but I want you to take it,’ Gloria said. ‘This business is growing, and the new branches will have to function a hundred per cent reliably. I really need you.’

  Those magic words almost seduced Lily into accepting on the spot. But thank God she didn’t, because something exciting and marvellous happened before the week was out.

  Since Paul was always willing to look after the children, Lily was filling in at work one night when someone was sick. Mauro and Roger went home at eleven, and by one o’clock, the lines had quieted down. Then out of the silence a call exploded which shocked Lily wide awake from a doze in the armchair, with the lights set to ‘ring’ and her feet on the broad woolly back of Arthur, whom Paul had sent along to guard her.

  ‘Dr Reed?’ The woman’s voice was breathless with anxiety.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s not on call tonight. This is the answering service. Can I –’ Instead of finishing, ‘take a message?’, Lily instinctively asked, ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Oh God, I hope so. Yes – help me! I don’t know what to do.’

  Lily was supposed to ask for the caller’s number, so that whoever was covering the psychiatrist could contact her, but the woman was crying now, desperate, strangling sobs, and when she suddenly dragged in a great gasping breath and started to talk in a muddled rush, it would have been heartless to interrupt, and impossible anyway, since the tumble of anguished words never stopped.

  Lily listened, and paraded her eyes across the long switchboard, forbidding any of the other lines to light up. It was three o’clock; the time for drunken calls from people who had forgotten that it was not business hours, the time that Theodora Benz called on the office line just to hear a voice when she could not sleep, the time that calls sometimes came in from Europe, where it was early morning. Nora was up with the kettle on. Jamspoon was in bed with the radio, cursing politicans.

  The switchboard, braided with plugs and wires, was dark and mute. There was only Lily and Louise, who was going to kill herself while her son slept.

  She had sleeping pills and vodka. Her husband had left her two years ago after she tried to hang herself. Her parents were in Canada and she would not see or talk to them. She wanted to take all the pills, but she did not want to be dead. She knew she must kill herself, because she had known all her life that she must, and she was on the floor with the pills and the bottle, crouched between her bed and the wall, shivering in a cotton nightgown, terrified to die and terrified to go on living.

  Her son – Damon?

  ‘His father will take him. He’s been trying to get him for months. I won’t let him. But I must. I’ve got to make myself disappear. He’ll be better off without me.’

  ‘Why tonight?’

  ‘I must.’ The whisper was very faint.

  ‘Talk to me instead. Remember, you did call your doctor. Doesn’t that mean you were looking for help?’

  ‘It means I was going to tell him I’d broken my contract with him. I was through.’

  ‘And then he would have called the police and they’d have broken into your apartment.’

  ‘But he can’t because he’s not there. He wouldn’t talk to me because he doesn’t care.’

  ‘Dr Rosen is on call for him. Why not speak to her?’

  ‘No!’ Louise came to angry life. ‘She’s a hard bitch.’

  ‘Talk to me, then.’

  ‘I can’t.’ But she did, and the switchboard, benign tyrant, stayed quiet. Lily got Louise to go and put on a sweater, and then she got her to say what she might do tonight if she didn’t kill herself.

  ‘I can’t sleep. I’m not going back to bed. It has nightmares in it.’

  ‘What else could you do, then?’

  ‘It’s Damon’s birthday tomorrow. He’s having some friends in. I could make the spaghetti sauce, I suppose.’

  ‘Do it.’

  It was amazing how Louise could switch direction. ‘When you’ve tried to kill yourself as many times as I have,’ she told Lily, fairly calmly now, ‘it’s no big deal. You either do it, or you don’t.’

  Two jacks lit up. ‘I’ve got to answer a couple of calls. Don’t go away. I’ll come back to you.’

  ‘No, I’ll be all right. Calm down, don’t worry,’ Louise said, as if Lily were the one in trouble, and hung up.

  When the morning people came on at seven, Lily had her coat on to leave, when the office line rang for her. It was Martha Bradley, the director of the Crisis agency, with whom Lily had made friends in the days when Crisis still had to use the answering service at night. Louise, whom Crisis knew well, had called them after she had talked to Lily, to report that she had made a passable bolognese sauce, and would they please let Lily know, because she didn’t want to bother her if the switchboard were busy.

  ‘How can she be at the end of her rope one minute, and thinking about something else the next?’

  ‘Oh, she can,’ Martha said. ‘She’s amazing. Thanks for taking care of her. I guess you did a pretty good job. She said, “That woman at the answering service was more use to me than any of you guys that are supposed to be so well trained,” which is a typical Louise remark.’

  Lily wanted to get home before the girls left to catch their school bus on the corner. Arthur was whining and scratching to get out of the door, but she and Martha liked each other, so they exchanged brief news. Martha was in her normal state of chaos and frenzy.

  ‘Only more so at the moment. I’m in despair, I’m in a crisis, I’m going to call my own service. As well as never having enough volunteers, my assistant’s leaving. I’ve interviewed a dozen people, and they’re all either too clever and efficient for me, or too stupid and slow, or too neurotic, or much too clinical. I wish I could find someone like you.’

  Here it was. What she had been waiting for. Grab your chances, Dear Doctor Lily.

  ‘I’m leaving this job,’ she said quickly. ‘Would you honestly ever think that I…’

  ‘Why not? You had quite a bit of experience in London. But it’s not that so much. It’s whether you’re right for the work, and I could teach you the rest. Want to come and talk about it now?’

  ‘Let me just go home and get my children off to school and have a bath. Then I’ll be there.’

  Seven

  Ida’s good friend Shirley from Watkins Air Force Base had separated from her husband and gone to live in the old fishing town of New Bedford, south of Boston. She had found rooms for Ida there, when she left Lily’s house, and when Shirley took over her Aunt Gertrude’s house after the old lady went off to the Sacred Heart Rest home, Ida and the children moved in with her.

  Buddy was far in the past now – a dream, a nightmare. She had not heard of him since he wrote to her four years ago to say he’d been kicked out of the service with a dishonourable discharge, and would she come to New Hampshire and help him get his life together? />
  Ida had written back, ‘No way, José,’ and Buddy had disappeared out of her life. She had not given him her address, because she didn’t want him coming after her. When she and Bernie wanted to talk nicely about him, they could say that this was the reason he never sent them any money.

  Shirley was running a cleaning service – homes, offices, small motels – and Ida worked for her, on what they called the black economy, so she could still get her welfare cheque and family aid for the kids. She could pay her way in Aunt Gertrude’s narrow green shingled house and run a car and get some things of her own together, to make up for what she had abandoned. Life was better than it had been for a long time.

  Bernie was learning things at the high school which amazed Ida. He would go into computers and better himself so far beyond the Lotts in Staple Street and the Legges in New Hampshire and Ida herself, that it dazzled her to think what could happen to you in this country. She did not feel bitter about poor old Buddy, because that poisoned you, as Clara Lott had poisoned herself, and Ida could always remember that if it hadn’t been for him getting hot and heavy at that drill hall dance, she never would be living in America.

  Maggie was in special classes and learning to be of some small use in the world. She sometimes went with Ida to a weekend cleaning job, for which Shirley gave her spending money. Fred was in kindergarten, with his hair like copper wire and his chunky little body that he would gladly hurl into any fight that was going.

  ‘Just like Puppa,’ Bernie said, which made Ida laugh, because she was thinking, ‘Just like Jackson.’

  Ida had never got her figure back after Fred, but then she didn’t have it before Fred. Men didn’t seem to mind. She and Shirley both had guys off and on, in and out, come and go. Nothing serious. They were hard-working, independent women who had each been tied down to a bastard, and were never going to let themselves fall into the same trap again.

  Mike was a bit different. He wasn’t one of their fellas. In fact, he was a bit lacking in that department. He did not seem to have any girlfriends, and was too young for Ida or Shirley anyway.