“Dolores,” she said earnestly, “I’m sorry we—I—we haven’t got your ring back to you yet.”
“I’m not exactly worried about it.”
“No. It’s safe.” Leslie frowned, wondering if the diamond was quite safe. For several days it had been in her jewel box with her own things. She had tried it on. Too big. Probably she would not have worn it herself, but she had quite recognizable wishes to keep it for Ben. After all, it had been pledged in his cause—so she understood. If she could only figure out a way of keeping it for him. Or for his daughter? No end of moony, half-formed thoughts sparkled around that ring.
“Besides, I lost it fair and square,” Dolores said.
Leslie was hardly listening to that kind of reasoning. She was musing over her certainty about the relation between Ben and this woman—and certain she was, even to the point of a nameless kind of jealousy. He had not said much about Dolores. He had not even been eager to see more of her. “Sometimes it spoils things to see too much of people you’ve clicked with,” he said. “It’s just good to know she’s here in the world.”
His crush had no more romantic language than that. And couldn’t have. As a reality it was unseizable. But Leslie had gladdened with the intuition that one of her gifts—and it wasn’t too odd, was it? to think of Dolores as her gift to Ben, brought home from shopping the world for characters—had caught his fancy like fire on a fuse.
“I’ll take you home and oil you and let you get to bed.”
“I’m oiled and I never go to bed this time of day,” Dolores said. “I’d get fired if I dragged you home now.”
“But it’s over.” Leslie pouted.
“Don’t be silly. I’ve been building up my strength. Not sleeping, whatever you thought.”
“But I haven’t,” Leslie said. “I always burn out too fast. It’s true. Gawd, I was some belle when I was in high school. What does it matter? That’s over now. I’m burned out and the party’s still going strong. Nobody told me it was supposed to be this evening too. Do you know I weighed over a hundred and forty-five pounds when I got married?”
“Mmmmm,” Dolores said—a woman in no hurry to find out what this apparently irrelevant information might signify.
“The things that started so, well, adventurously, where I could really respect my own courage, were the ones that always turned out worst.” Leslie sat down cross-legged beside Dolores’ chair and stared in melancholy at the pool. A wind, running ahead of the storm, was raising a miniature chop of waves on its milky-green surface. She tried to guess whether Patch, the Abominable Snowman, might be somewhere laughing to himself about her mistake. It was so trivial really. What difference did it make that she had not known the party would go on? It was absolutely ridiculous of him to be amused that she had not known.
Like a bad gambler moved to want revenge for a small, unexpected loss, she began to plot her moves for Monday, when she was sure to see him at the office. It wasn’t easy to see what could penetrate such insensitivity and convince him how ridiculous he was being.
“What?” she asked.
“I only said everyone’s moving up to the house.” Dolores started to hoist herself out of the chair, squinting over her shoulder at the black rain advancing on the hills behind them.
I can’t even hold her, Leslie thought, sulking; I’m not even entertaining to her. While Dolores poised on the edge of her chair, she began to talk.
“Like one of the first times I took the family car out by myself. Daddy had been teaching me to drive and it was understood that after I passed my fifteenth birthday I would be allowed to go without him in the daytime. He praised me. I thought he made it clear I was a perfectly competent driver. So one day Mary Jo Anavelt was over and I suppose I’d been bragging to her, and anyway, without asking anyone’s permission, she and I got in the car and I drove off, not even on the highway but on a country road after we got out of town. I was in perfect control. It was such a nice day. I wasn’t even trying to impress Mary Jo and I thought, wasn’t that saintly of me, that I could be not only so superior but so humble. If I’d been too proud or something, I could understand what happened then, but I wasn’t. I started to turn around in a little branch lane east of Jamaica, and wouldn’t you know, the rear bumper hooked on a stone culvert opposite the lane. It was Mary Jo who panicked. I knew we could get off somehow. Even if we had to call someone from a farmhouse, there was still time to get the car home before my folks appeared. But she insisted that if I would rock it a little, back and forth, she could lift the bumper just the inch or two it would take to clear and let us free. You know what happened.”
Dolores shook her head. She only knew that it wasn’t as bad as Leslie was making out. She made too much of too little. That was good as well as bad. That was why everyone loved Leslie. She made more of them than they were. When she swung to depression she might make less, dragging her creation down with her into collapse and mire.
“She got her damn hand caught between the bumper and the stones,” Leslie said. “It wasn’t even an accident, it was my fault. A better driver wouldn’t have been so concentrated on driving. Shifting gears.” Her hand worked an invisible gear lever. “Then she screamed. I think her scream scared me. It scared me, so I gunned the motor. It just almost stripped the bone on one of her fingers.”
“She lost a finger?”
“No. All the way into town to the doctor’s we kept reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. I mean, trying to remember how it went. I can’t remember it now. Oh.…” The first immense splattering drops of rain swept the surface of the pool like miniature drumfire and splattered on her arms and dress.
Dolores made a move to leave her chair, heaved forward, and then settled back as Leslie said, “Funny we should have prayed. I was all over religion by that time. About twelve I wanted to be a saint and have stigmata. Mother and I had talked it all out by then and we decided, ‘It’s all so simple’—life and death, that is, and where the soul goes.”
“I’m not your mother, honey, and I’m getting—”
“Perhaps it’s not so simple,” Leslie said. She saw her soul like a pet bird abandoned at home while his mistress was enjoying herself in the country.
“—wet.”
“Oh.” She came out of her religious reverie to find that God had sent rain to mortify her flesh, and maybe not with the specific object of shaping Himself another saint. “It’s raining,” she marveled as the water began trickling down her bosom.
Dolores grinned through a slop like tears on her face. “I’ve been trying to point out to you, baby.”
“Let’s run,” Leslie said. They scampered up toward the house as the rain intensified suddenly. Halfway there they were soaked. Leslie slowed, waiting for Dolores, thinking, Now that we’re wet we might as well relax and enjoy it. She heard the teakettle whistle of breath as the fat old legs strained to keep up with her.
“Waaakh … please …,” Dolores gasped. Leslie spun to take her arm and help. She still had the idea of going straight to the station wagon. But since they were soaked and breathless, perhaps they had better go to the house.
It was like being unexpectedly involved in a masquerade to put on one of Mother Bieman’s dresses. When Leslie came into the kitchen wearing it, Daddy Bieman slipped his arm around her and pinched her breast, saying, “Mother, I want you to meet one of the slipperiest crooks in the wholesale drug game. Mother, I tell you … Mother.”
The slippery crook showed his false teeth right up to the gums when she got into the spirit of the horseplay and slapped Daddy’s hand. “Daddy, you all have been too free with the guests today,” she said, “and have forfeited your conjugal rights.”
“Why, why, why,” he spluttered, beaming with delight, “why, it’s Mrs. Daniels. Why, the goods felt familiar. Why, I thought … I surely am a-going blind. Need a refresher in your drink, sister?”
“I believe I do. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Save a little room in the glass for water.” She took the glass and squinted
through the bourbon as if disapproving the color. “You’ve got more tricks than Mandrake,” she said.
He shook his head in sorrow. “Honest and straightforward as the day is long,” he swore. This characterization seemed more than the drug man could bear. His laughter blinded him, and in his blindness he staggered forward, groping for support from Mother Bieman’s dress.
“Oh, dear. I knew I should have gone home when the rain started,” Leslie said. Circe among her senile swine. The goatish display did something—almost enough—to restore her pleasure in the jubilee, and if Dolores was really as content to stay as she claimed, why shouldn’t they see it through to the end?
“Parmee, sir,” she said with a flick of her fingertips against Daddy’s shirtfront, “the chaps are waiting to dance with me in the parlor. Good show.” As Lady Brett in the robes of Mrs. Miniver (this dress might have fitted well if she got back her thirty lost pounds; it absolutely lacked the charm of her own wet orange print now hanging in the basement laundry room), she swept back to see if this were so.
Some of the chaps were. Not, perhaps, as many as she might have gathered early in the afternoon, but enough to keep her on her feet and chattering. String Bieman and a man named Parmelee both claimed her at the same time. For the hell and fairness of it, they both tried to dance with her at once, slopping drinks as they pranced around in a silly threesome.
She danced with String alone, and they made jokes about the Freudian implications of his dancing with her while she was wearing his mother’s dress. “Anyway I’m glad your mother has so much taste,” Leslie said.
“She is a kind of gaudy old bag,” String admitted—whether in pride or simply in amazement.
While she was dancing with him in the overcrowded parlor, she saw, out in the passage by the stairway, that Patch and Dolly Sellers had got appropriately together. Knee to knee and thigh to thigh, eyes closed, they were simply swaying to the phonograph music without moving their feet. Leslie sighed with relief. That seemed to take care of one problem that might have arisen since the rain had forced (hadn’t it forced?) her to change her plans.
But of course she was mistaken in this hope. Pretty soon there he was, Don Patch, simply taking her in his arms the minute Parmelee let her go without so much as an invitation or by-your-leave. She followed half a dozen steps, noting absently that his red ringlets came just to the level of her eyes. She collected her thoughts, broke away and said, “No. I’m not going to dance with you. I’m sorry.”
“Why not?” Reasons—what kind of uncouth jerk would ask for reasons where taste, or distaste, might alone be involved? She checked an impulse to say, “Because you rather nauseate me.”
“Why not?” he said. “I saw Daddy pinch your bazooms.”
Useless to explain that that was an old man’s carnival joke perfectly understood between her and the boss. Why then the impulse to explain? Because his whole behavior and attitude suggested a callowness halfway between malice and innocence, not quite justifying a purely hostile response? But the mixture was only more annoying than outright viciousness, she thought. “It’s reason enough that you seem to be tagging after and spying on me,” she said. She didn’t wait for a response, or need to, since fortunately Lester Glenn had been lurking in wait for his turn to shuffle into the pack with her.
At ten—or thereabouts—she was in a group on the verandah, listening to old Bieman give his real thoughts on modern art versus the traditional. “Mother and I go into New York for a stay twice a year. Always put up at the Plaza—now, there is a hotel for you. We go for the opera. Why can’t they write music any more like the old-timers? All corrupt. Why, I like—I tell you what I like. My idea—” He had someone’s lapel or collar in his fingers, and a good thing, too, since he really needed support. “My idea good music is La B M. Never get tired of it. Not like these frauds. Paperhangers, wallpaper designers at Museum Modern Art. Writers all gone dirty. ‘Chicago, hog-butcher to the world.’ Fags and phonies. Liars and propagandists. All shot to hell. Give me La B M.”
(And wouldn’t that be worth reporting to Ben? Provided she was still sober enough to remember it, and she thought she was. “I’d been so carried along by what he said in the afternoon, all this talk about Bellows and all. And it seemed to me just awful to think that perhaps the kind of bigoted drivel he had come to later was a natural, I mean an inevitable, consequence of starting out right.” And no doubt Ben would say, “But if he really pronounced it that way—La B M—wasn’t he possibly pulling the leg of the people he was talking to?” Ben thought what he liked to think. That was what was so nice about him. But in truth, wasn’t it more a matter of our virtues fathering unnatural vices? Again she thought she ought to have gone home and was angry—at something—that she had not done so.)
“Persistent little demon,” she said, after Don Patch made one more attempt to get her to dance with him.
She was dancing with bald-headed Seymour Rife. “That’s his one talent,” Seymour said.
“I supposed he must have something.”
“There are times I find him touching. He’s a lone wolf, if you’ll pardon the vulgarity, and I’m told he keeps goldfish. Fish anyway. I always think of guppies and such fauna as goldfish.”
“He keeps fish,” Leslie agreed.
Tactful Seymour adjusted to the note of her dislike and said, “I’d say something stronger than persistent. At other times I think he’s definitely disturbed. He paints funny allegories and imagines he’s Gauguin.”
“Paints them …? With an airbrush?” The idea of Gauguin bound to a mechanical rendering tool seemed very funny to Leslie.
“No doubt. I’ve never seen one. I’m profane.”
“You’re creative.”
“Don’t make fun of us hacks,” Seymour said. “Just dance with us and noblesse-oblige us.”
“Ah,” Leslie said, smitten with remorse, “have I seemed snotty? Around the shop, I mean? That is, Jesus, what right would I have …? All of you can do things.”
“You’re our poetess,” he said in an attempt to paste her feelings back. “I didn’t mean anything, honest. Come on, sweetheart, let’s go crush joy’s grape against our palate fine.”
“That sounds appropriately lewd,” she told him, swinging as quickly as she had stumbled.
While they sipped their refilled drinks, Seymour said, “Young Patch once confided me a story I wish I hadn’t heard.”
“Tell me.”
“He pulled a knife on a big colored man. Or maybe a little colored man who was bigger than he. It appears to have started when our fellow worker was walking through a park with his wife. He has a wife, somewhere—divorced, abandoned or fled, who knows? He claims that he heard a noise in the bushes and ran over to find this man making out with some girl. He ordered the man out of the park. Ordered is his word.”
“Ordered!” Leslie breathed, wrinkling her nose.
“The man didn’t want to go—naturally enough—so to back up his Aryan authority little Patch produced the knife. Don’t ask me if that’s true. But I think it’s indicative—isn’t it indicative?—that he would think it was all right to tell such a thing about himself.”
“It’s indicative all right,” Leslie said.
“He’s a pretty good airbrush man,” Rife said. “Finicking. Just unbelievably neat. He does things it would take a kook to do. I’d like to know more about his toilet training. Frankly, I would. But in the meantime, I’m serious in advising you to be careful of him. You shouldn’t encourage him or—”
“Encourage!” Leslie said, a little angrier than she would have expected to be. Rife began to bob his head apologetically, to put a belated qualification on what was apparently an offensive remark. He decided he’d better not make matters worse by going on, and talked to her after that about his sister trying to break into show biz in Washington. In Washington because that was where she lived, with the elder Rifes, not because it was the best place in the world to begin a theatrical career.
&nbs
p; Mother Bieman, one hand at her mouth, the other trailing dramatically behind her, leaned into the pack of dancers to put her mouth near Leslie’s ear. “Your friend. Bathroom upstairs.”
Leslie walked with the excited woman to a clear space near the front door, waited questioningly.
“I can hear her in there being sick,” Mother Bieman said. “I knocked and called, as discreetly as I could. She wouldn’t answer. One of the grandchildren last spring locked himself in and we had to get a ladder and cut out the screen, and I’ve told Daddy we had to get a key—”
“Are you sure it’s Dolores?” But under the formal protestation of the question, Leslie was guiltily, angrily, quite sure in her own heart just how things had worked out. Because didn’t they? Wasn’t that what she had been feeling and saying—to Dolores herself, among others—since the best, innocent pleasures of this day in the country began to sour? Good intentions were the surest guarantee of bad ends.
Probably Dolores really had wanted to go home hours ago, but—out of some misguided notion that she had wanted to stay—had vetoed their leaving. She, at the same time, knew she shouldn’t have left Dolores so much alone since they came to the house where all the dancing was going on. They’d begun such a good talk down at the pool before the rain broke it up. Good for Leslie, at least—but again treacherous. Because if she hadn’t relieved her feelings by hauling up that old story about Mary Jo’s finger, she might have overridden all quibbling, got in the damn station wagon and been home, reading in bed now. Dolores had been too good to her.
It was Dolores in the bathroom, all right. Apparently she had composed herself by the time Leslie knocked and tentatively called her name. She came and unlocked the door at once, but then immediately hobbled back and sat on the stooltop again. Except for the sunburn—which by now was a dark red like hung beef—her skin had no more color than the porcelain. Her lips were a vivid blue. Her face seemed to be decomposing into a collection of little white sacks suspended by the strings of her hair, perhaps. In spite of the open window there was a harsh, vile smell in the room.
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