Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  chapter 4

  LESLIE WAS HALF RIGHT. Dolores Calfert was an old goose. Even someone handicapped with a glass eye could have made that out—probably because Dolores wanted everyone to. She paraded her goosiness the way an aging fighter might advertise his slowing footwork or his weakening left-hand punch—the better to bring the unwary close enough to be nailed by a hard right.

  There were no glass eyes at the Danielses’ party on Saturday night. Tolerant, friendly, knowledgeable eyes glanced from every corner of the party room in the basement when Dolores, in goosey splendor, walked down the steps with Ben’s hand irregularly supporting her elbow. Leslie thought she heard someone say appreciatively, “It’s Sophie Tucker.”

  Not quite Sophie Tucker, perhaps, but into the uniformity of young professional marrieds—doctors, lawyers, CPAs, an architect and a reporter (also a stringer for Life), Ben’s colleagues and the parents of his patients, the wives as visibly interchangeable as the husbands, Dave Lloyd the oldest and Leslie, of course, the youngest—Dolores splashed like a white Hottentot.

  Her upswept hair was white-blond at a distance. From close behind her Ben saw a rainbow of browns, auburns, lion-pelt yellows and aster reds streaking up into the pale curls. Her fat ears dangled ornaments like half-sized saltshakers.

  She saw Leslie through the crowd and yoo-hooed, waving her arm. The skin of this splendid arm (and of her equally splendid shoulders, of the superlative mammary bundle she swung like searchlights) was as mottled as her hair. Its chief tone was white—the white of a corpse or a toadstool. Around her elbows, dished in the dimples of fat like lilypads in pools, were veritable planetariums of freckles. (Red, white, and blue, Ben thought, surrendering, his dull clutch on reality in the presence of such incarnate fantasy.) He had seen Dolores before. Once he had shared a coffee break with her and Leslie between his morning calls. He had simply never seen her dressed up.

  “Don’t introduce me,” she said breathlessly, over her shoulder to him. He thought it would have been sheer impertinence to try. One way or another, his friends would recognize her as she made her triumphant way down the steps and straight across to the bar.

  He went ahead of her and came up to the other side of the formica counter as she landed both elbows like twin, erotic blimps on its damp surface. Without lowering his gaze from her smile, he tried to count the rings on her dimpled hands. He counted eight, three of them engagement rings of a size that had disappeared with the stock market crash. “Honey, make me something that will catch me up,” she said. He noticed the pallor of her gums inside the crashing scarlet of her lips.

  Then Leslie was on her, hugging the huge, old mottled shoulders above the leopard-skin silk of her overfilled summer dress. An orphan pink pig on the great sow of the world.

  “You’ve got some good heads here tonight,” Dolores rumbled. “Don’t you introduce me to anyone, sweetheart. Now, let me take my time now and look around.”

  Leslie slipped onto the bar stool beside her. “They’re all talking about emphysemas and psittacosises now,” she said conspiratorially. “Some of them are. Our parties always start dull. But you wait.”

  “Wait? What are you talking about? I just got here. Don’t be in such a hurry, love.”

  “No. But I want to be sure.”

  “That I have a good time?” What a vain worry. Dolores shrugged. She had come to have a good time, hadn’t she?

  “Leslie wants you to have had a good time,” Ben said. “The party will only be real to her tomorrow when she remembers it.”

  All at once, for the first time Dolores had ever seen the self-assurance wilt, Leslie looked like a child caught in social error. She sagged toward Ben. “Ah, am I really like that?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “You’re Leslie.”

  “I’m me, all right,” she said, disposing of that grief like garbage on a paper plate and instantly brightening on a new tack. “Dolores, there are all sorts here. You’ll find someone to amuse you. A minute ago Sue Wilder was telling the stupidest story. Really. About a female chimpanzee who tried to seduce the keeper in her zoo.”

  Dolores bellowed happily.

  “No, no,” Leslie insisted, putting her fingers in the soft crook of a fat elbow, “it wasn’t a joke. That’s what was so funny about it. She insisted she’d read it ‘in a book.’ You know how some people will say they’ve read something in a book to make it seem authoritative. Well, this female chimpanzee would look very mournful whenever the keeper got in the cage. That didn’t work. So she began to tug at his hand. Then she’d lie down and point.”

  “Not so loud,” Ben said.

  “You think Sue’d be offended? But it’s about a chimpanzee.”

  The way she inflected her protest made it perfectly clear that she suspected Sue of disguised autobiography. Husband and wife trembled delicately with the same laughter. Like acrobats balancing on opposite ends of a bamboo pole, up on a very high wire.

  “What I don’t like about the story,” Dolores said, “is it’s clear that the damn zoo keeper must have been the one who told. All right, it happened. But would a gentleman have gone and complained?”

  “He was a rat,” Leslie said. “Yes. I didn’t see that. Yes.” With love she leaned toward her fat friend. Almost forehead to forehead, the two ladies peered deep into each other’s eyes.

  Ben thought he had never seen such a reservoir of withheld pity as gleamed through the good-humored, cosmetic death mask of his wife’s most recent best friend. It pleased him to think that Leslie could pull nothing on that one.

  Dolores would not be bored with their party.

  It was probable that she had not been bored since—fifty-seven years ago—she discovered that the real prizes afforded by kindergarten were not to be given for pasting cotton snowmen on construction paper or making the longest snake out of plasticene. In this life the prize was given for personality and if you were female (she had discovered in kindergarten that she certainly was) then that was the kind of personality that all her natural intelligence would be devoted to composing.

  The engagement rings (and two wedding rings, one of them her mother’s) did not twinkle on her fingers for nothing. She had learned long ago—though somewhat less than fifty-seven years—that the female personality has to be constantly reshaped. She was old now, and she did not blink the fact, not for a minute. She knew, just a shade better than anyone who had seen her come in to the party, the kind of figure she presented to their eyes. Yes, you bet, the fat old fool, rouged and corseted and hung with jewels (real ones, Buster, look a little closer, a little closer.…) and clad in a print that might have abashed a nineteen-year-old show girl. Even her scent was calculated, right down to the fourth decimal point, to make her seem the stereotype of the ancient, foolish widow.

  She had tried to be a smart widow four years ago when Cy Calfert died in bed at their home in Hawaii. She had enrolled at the U as a freshman, intending to catch up on philosophy and literature and perhaps write a funny novel about the way baseball wives followed the team back in the twenties. She got out of the college trap just in time. If anything was going to bore her before she died, it was not going to be philosophy and literature and trying to live good times at second hand by putting them on paper.

  She had come back here because Sardis had been her home until Cy married her, thirty-eight years ago this month. She had no relatives here any more, thank God; her four sons and a daughter were scattered from Connecticut to California. She wanted to be here because she remembered things about the city. One of the nicest things in her life was that she had never really forgotten anything. She still remembered what a triumph her year in kindergarten had been. But remembering—and shopping a little, keeping up her house—wasn’t a full-time employment. One day she answered an ad in the paper. Then she was working at Bieman’s, learning the switchboard at her age and discovering all over again how fine it was to be a female personality.

  She liked the whole gang at work. She particularly
liked Leslie Daniels for the good reason that everyone else did. She, Dolores, was out of the running, in a certain sense of that word. It did her good when the photographers and layout men and Bieman’s son-in-law, who was not a bad egg, considering his handicap, called her Brigitte and loafed around the switchboard to trade yarns with her. But of course she no longer had what Leslie offered to view, dashing in and out with her air of inspecting the peasants, lounging with the boys and girls in the drafting rooms, filling sweaters that she so often wore to work with unaffected (but not unconscious!) generosity. The girl was all pose, Dolores thought, and there was nothing wrong with posing. What was wrong was when there was no reserve of detachment to give purpose to the pose. A woman ought to be like a box trap for bunnies, bait and deadfall, sweetness and geometric enclosure. In Leslie there was no detectable constancy of intent. Stunning frankness would be followed by “How could anyone think that of me?” The mechanism was all confused with the bait.

  So Leslie confused people who should only have been confused for a reason. There was little Dolly Sellers, for instance, ready to adore in awe. Dolly could hardly have been more impressed. Leslie was a doctor’s wife. She’d not only been to three colleges; she’d worked for that magazine (which Dolly didn’t read but her father did), she was beautiful (poor Dolly knew herself to be only cute and not even that for long), and she was kind (everyone knew that about Leslie). Dolly had an instant crush. But every day that went by slackened her readiness to adore, diluted it with instinctive contempt. Given Leslie’s advantages (even one of them, O God!) Dolly would not have bothered to spit on Don Patch (though, the economy of providence being what it was, Dolly had done considerably more than spit). If she had even Leslie’s gift of wisecracking, she’d whipsaw Patch until he didn’t know whether he was coming or going. But Leslie … well, whether she thought so or not, Leslie wasn’t keeping loudmouth Patch in his place. He said things to her that she thought were jokes, which Dolly, poor Dolly, knew were the sly, creeping, vulgar insinuations of male authority over all womankind.

  Dolores understood where Leslie fell short. And she was too old to rejoice in finding the core weakness in a woman with so many gifts. She wanted to help, wanted to warn if she could—but how did you warn a woman who sets up all her major defenses precisely to prevent a warning?

  That was it—or was close to the heart of the Leslie problem, at any rate. Leslie didn’t want to be warned. Nothing would have shamed her more than to be shown that she needed a warning—so she careened along like a bicyclist with blinders, daring the traffic to hit such a clever rider if it could.

  Not that Dolores specialized in the caution game. It was God’s business to take care of blindfold bicycle riders—male or female—in His own inscrutable way. She had seen too many ironic reversals of promise to believe she knew when to say “Stop” or had any right to say it. Only with Leslie … well, with Leslie … the damn girl had so much that was good, you wanted her to get away with her games intact.

  The small experiment of cautioning Leslie had come up in connection with Don Patch. Dolores had said, offhandedly, “Watch that kid. He’ll turn nasty on you. He doesn’t talk the same language as you.”

  And Leslie’s reply? She had answered with gasps and chokes of laughter. “Dolores, he eats out of my hand. If I told him to bark or roll over, don’t you think he would?”

  “I think he’d do that.”

  O.K., O.K. Maybe Leslie was right, and even if she wasn’t, Don Patch was too inconsequential to worry over. At most, if he turned nasty, he might spread unpleasant stories about Leslie—which Dolly might believe against her better inclinations, because she had to, but which no one else at the shop would want very much to hear. Or he might make a disgusting pass at her in the freight elevator or the storeroom. He didn’t have the guts for an attacker. If Leslie was playing with fire in this case, the fire was an easily snuffed match flame. But someday someone else might notice Leslie’s blinders and make real trouble.

  And what for? A woman might, from sheer restlessness and excess of energy, like to play the man-and-woman game at all opportunities. Unless Dolores was much mistaken, Leslie lacked the real competitor’s taste and appetite. Leslie was only doing what she had to, alas.

  Unsatisfied at home? Yah, yah, yah, sure. Obviously. But how and why? It wasn’t a question of the bed. She’d listened with gusto and interest to Leslie’s brag about how often the husband “needed” it. That sort of thing always warmed the belly to hear, but it didn’t explain much. Some did it lots, some did it little, some well, some like unwilling cripples, she supposed, and neither love nor personal satisfaction seemed to be among the gains or losses of the romp. A lot of people told you about their sex life—to throw you off the track and hide the smell of what was really hurting.

  She drifted like a fat old flower in a whirlpool through the crowd at Leslie’s party—booming, whispering, giggling, playing the courtly widow dontyaknow, taking the stiffer guests by surprise with shafts of bawdy, being utterly too thrilled to listen to shop-talk about a goiter (Ugh!) from an ass with a huge Adam’s apple himself who gave out that he was, more properly speaking, a colleague of Dr. Daniels than a family friend, though he greatly admired the Manhattans that Mrs. Daniels stirred for him with her pinkie. For reasons best known to himself he divulged to her that he had made “over forty-eight thousand dollars” last year, before taxes, and had recently been threatened, with pistol, by a loony whose daughter had died while he was operating.

  From Rockefeller and his goiters she drifted to a real and true friend of Leslie’s, Martha Lloyd, who’d certainly heard of Dolores (who’d heard of her; Leslie was thorough) and they said wasn’t it just like Leslie to be living two lives, and Martha opined that it must be for psychological reasons that Leslie failed to get pregnant, because her temperature chart—had Dolores seen it?—was perfectly even for five months running and there was certainly nothing wrong with Ben Daniels so what else could it be? The mind had literally uncanny powers of subverting the body. Was it fear of admitting her womanhood, springing from Leslie’s well-known happiness as a child? Would a daughter fracture the image of the self?

  “I never believed in the germ theory,” Dolores said. “Cy did his duty and God sent the children when He needed them.”

  To which Martha blinked just once and said, “Oh yes, of course.” Leslie had made this one out smarter than she was.

  Then a nice boy who said he’d graduated from Montana before he went to med school danced with her in the little clear space before the bar and they talked about elk hunting and skiing. She said he must not be too shy to look up some friends of hers if he ever got back in the Northwest at Sun Valley, just tell them Cy Calfert’s wife had told him to, and mention that Dolores still thought the days in Cuba were as good as any in her ancient life.

  The boy said it would be a great pleasure and honor to do this and he’d always been a great admirer and he’d certainly like to talk to her more about her friends, what was her phone number?

  A bald-headed man cut in and said, “If you and I can’t Charleston, nobody in this basement can. Shall we ask Leslie for some suitable music?” But Dolores was out of breath and preferred to sit down with drinks and talk to him about the time Cy shut out the Dodgers when the Dodgers looked like a cinch for the pennant. And that very game had been one of the first games this bald-headed boy had been allowed to go into town to see, and he still had somewhere a ball Cy had autographed after the ’24 Series and if he could find it, just for the hell of it would she autograph it too? He was a “bone man” whose hands looked as if he could snap most parts of the human skeleton like crisp celery, and he said that Ben Daniels was one of the nicest new young men practicing in Sardis. He didn’t seem to avoid or insist on estimating Ben’s brilliance as a practitioner.

  Then there were several others, dancing up or ambling up to where she sat, and perching awhile on the arm of her wicker chair and making so much of her that she got worried Leslie ha
d passed the word “Be nice to poor old Dolores.” Yes, she decided, Leslie had probably done that, and it was sad, quite sad, since she’d never been at a party in her life were anyone had to make any special provision for her. It was sad that Leslie shouldn’t have known that. A woman who wore blinders needed a better intuition than that about how men and women were.

  And through the ceaselessly shifting frame of talk, music, faces, summer dresses and suits—all nicely decorated with a fringe of alcohol, scalloped and ribboned like boudoir curtains at the periphery of her vision—she watched her host and hostess.

  She must have been keeping closer track of them than she realized, because it seemed to her she could have placed within a span of ten minutes the moment when Leslie left the house with David Lloyd.

  Some faint wave of silence amid the continuing noise must have come to her, like seismic waves trembling their way to the heart of a city where in a laboratory room an instrument waits to distinguish them from the violence of traffic and the web of electronic communications. She was not taken by surprise when Martha Lloyd said to her in a strained offhand voice, tugging at her beads, “Have you seen my husband?”

  “Which one is your husband?” Dolores said.

  “Well, he’s the—never mind. Where’s Leslie?”

  “She and her husband were helping some drunk to her car.”

  “Oh. I suppose at every party someone’s going to drink too much. I just hate it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m always looking forward to parties. But I think one ought to have a good time and then go home. Oh, why do people have to keep on drinking until they’re stupefied?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, there’s Ben,” Martha said. Instantly she began to pick her way through the crowd to him. Watching her go, Dolores was perfectly sure that she would ask where Leslie was, where her husband was.

  But if Martha asked that, apparently Ben gave her a good answer. Fifteen minutes later when Dolores drifted past her, Martha was discussing the attack on Cuba with the forty-eight-thousand-dollar goiter man. She was giving such a friendly account of how Castro himself had directed the defense that Dolores took comfort.