Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  So she and her life were all composed again—crime and punishment balanced splendidly as in the dogmas of a professional church—when she was ready to call Dolores. The future was as much under control as the past. With a Leslie deftness she was already considering the future as past and could think of the evening to come in terms of what Dolores had said or done for her. Dolores gave me that last little necessary pat of assurance when I needed it.…

  The voice of a strange woman answered her call.

  “Are you … one of the family?” the woman asked.

  “Mrs. Daniels. Just a friend.”

  “Oh. We’d been expecting Esther’s call from California.”

  “If Dolores is there—”

  “She isn’t.”

  “If she comes back within the next, well, half hour, she can call—”

  “Mrs. Daniels, I’m sorry to be the one. Mrs. Calfert passed away. Yes. Sorry. I’m Evelyn Graber. I live next door. You see, I knocked this morning and Dolores wasn’t feeling at all well. I had coffee and she took some bicarb but no coffee. She thought it was gas. She wasn’t at all comfortable lying down. I’m so sorry. Then this afternoon when I knocked I didn’t get an answer. I called the police. They’ve just left with the ambulance. I’m waiting here, expecting a call from the children. I know we all loved her.”

  Mother! I meant to write to you! Really!

  “… waaahk …!”

  “It was her poor old heart,” Evelyn Graber said. “I don’t know if you knew it or not, but she’d been warned.”

  We have been warned. Hank called to warn me, Leslie thought. Old Smothers was a warning. All the dreams. The black between dreams. Garland, pretty Garland, who never was alive. All warnings.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Leslie said. She felt her nails in her palm and remembered that when she was very little her mother had made a thumbstall for her because in sleep her thumbnail pressed too sharply into her palm. That was a warning too, one she had ignored with all the others.

  “Why, no, dear,” Mrs. Graber’s soft voice said. “Why, no, it’s all taken care of now. If you’ll give me your number I’ll certainly let you know about the funeral.”

  “Please,” Leslie said. “Oh, please.”

  Now she gyrated through the empty house like a woman locked up with a leopard. It was stalking, it was near. She had to think what might be done to outwit it. Ben would be back soon. Ben would blame her for Dolores’ death. Of course. He ought to blame her. She had been left behind to take care of his friend. No friend when he came home.

  She heard a rending of metal high in the air. Looping, descending, drifting streaks of fire and bodies falling from high up into the gray ocean south of Battery Park. Ben. Ben among them plummeting.

  No, she said. No, I don’t want that.

  I will face it, she said. I will face my woman guilt and beat it.

  Listening for the silent footfalls of the leopard, she once again leafed through the phone book. PAN, PAR, PATCH.…

  “This is Leslie, Mrs. Daniels,” she said. “I’ve got to see you tonight. Tonight. Can I come over, please? Right away? Please!”

  Part Three

  chapter 15

  DESCENDING from the silver belly of the plane, descending past the stewardess’s smile and tacit congratulations for a safe return, he saw within a moment that Leslie was waiting for him. Beyond the mesh fence by the terminal buildings she was standing with—standing against—Martha Lloyd like a young officer well displayed by the company of a floppy civilian. From gemlike toenails to the perfection of her hair (she’d had it cut short, so the ends only flared a little from her head in that succinct curve dear to baroque wood-carvers, carving this time in red walnut) she looked as if the cellophane had just been peeled away a moment before the great airplane touched its wheels on the Sardis runway. Pretty Leslie.

  Martha wore a floppy hat that looked as if it were a part of Leslie’s trick—so ineffective, so not-quite-right beside the precision of Leslie’s white, tan, and auburn sleekness. It was not beyond belief that this defaulting hat was indeed Leslie’s recommendation, made when she stopped to pick Martha up on her way to the airport. (“I’m not wild about it, hon. But it’s only Ben we’re going to meet. He’s only been gone six days. After all.” The deviation in her argument too slight to be the occasion for contention, the advantage she sought too slight to refuse her.)

  And the last touch of a female calculation he despaired even yet of understanding was that, for the first time since their wedding, Leslie was wearing a girdle that morning. (“I don’t like fat girls,” she had always explained—as if her refusal of this illusion were an explanation that qualities of character alone kept her slim and trim. To wear a girdle would be to confess a lack of spiritual fastidiousness. Or so she had always tacitly maintained.) He thought when he came grinning into her arms that he had seen a girdle’s effect. To make sure, he pinched her, tweaked elastic.

  “Here now, here!” she said when she realized what he was doing. (He would think later, pondering the discords of the day, that bad timing had made his slight offense enormous, the way a finger held close to the eye can blot out mountains. Yes, he would blame himself first for the botched communication between them.) An immense blush that seemed to start below the neckline of her dress boiled up and over her jawbone to confirm for him (an ace too late) that wearing the girdle had been no small decision for her, that on this triviality she had staked big wagers. “I put on a couple of pounds while you were gone, darling,” she told him. She broke quickly from his kiss and turned her head away in some offense that only a child would have been willing to claim aloud.

  “Kiss for me?” Martha demanded. “Yum, yum. Your bitch wife didn’t even want me to put on lipstick.”

  “I was afraid we’d be late,” Leslie said.

  “Compulsion neurosis. Worse than cancer.”

  “It was compulsion to bring you at all,” Leslie growled fondly. And Ben wondered why she had—why on this specific morning she had had to.

  At once he got a sufficient explanation. Almost before the escalator had carried them up to the main corridor of the terminal, Leslie was fumbling bluntly into the terrible news she had to greet him with. “… that day we all went out to Bieman’s farm. A riot. I misunderstood everything. She’d been cautioned, apparently, from what the neighbors told me, about the condition of her heart.…” It seemed then odd to him (and in time would seem the oddest thing of all, and finally an enormity not odd at all but merely incomprehensible, absurd) that she was well into her account before he understood her to be telling him that Dolores Calfert was dead.

  When he understood this, the bob of his head was merely a professional agreement, a concurrence in the easy prognosis for a woman of Dolores’ age and weight.”Oh my,” he said. “Oh my.”

  It was Leslie’s responsibility to confess and she was not shirking it. “My grand stupidity was in not guessing, when she was sick in the bathroom. Out there. I simply can’t forgive myself for not guessing what was going to happen.”

  “Maybe it couldn’t have been prevented,” Ben said.

  Leslie tossed her head as if he missed the point altogether (as in fact and from sympathy he had intended to do). “I talked to Jack Whitelaw. He said that. I meant that if I had guessed, I might have stayed with her. I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Like the Catholics,” Martha said. “They claim they weep for the living and all that bullshit.” She had heard Leslie’s formula of remorse on the telephone yesterday morning (Monday) and now had her answer fully formed. “If it hadn’t been that day it would have been another. You just happened to be with her immediately before the seizure. You can’t imagine you killed her.” On the phone yesterday morning that was exactly what Leslie had accused herself of, and she was not going to get away with it here. Leslie tried to claim everything for herself. But marriage did not entitle her to such sweeping melodrama any more than friendship did, Martha thought. In her role as de
flater Martha felt her one justification for being with the two of them this morning.

  “Oh my, oh my,” Ben said. Magnitudes of bewilderment were in his mild protest. Someone seemed to be trying to tell him there was a reason for the old woman’s death. He could not quite get it straight what the reason was. It did not occur to him that she had died because he needed her. It was not entirely clear to him that he did. But he sensed the greatness of the gulf of death, demonstrated by her taking off the way the common spaces of life are demonstrated to a child in its high chair by a spoon or cup shoved off the tray. He said nothing stronger than “Oh my.” But at the moment when the news impacted, he was grateful both that he was a doctor and that he had not been Dolores Calfert’s.

  Still—it came like the shadows that dogged them as they passed window after window in the long corridor from the flight line to the heart of the terminal—not to have been her physician was to have been nothing to her. It left him with no formalities of termination, so to speak, with no way to bury someone who had been mysteriously important to him. In his life he had had enough problems with the unburiable dead.

  Two weeks ago he had expected something to come from his new friendship, was content to wait and see what it could be. Now nothing, ever, except the grim itch of wondering what it might have been and if it might have saved him and Leslie.

  He caught Leslie squinting at him to measure how he was taking her news. Her concern prompted him to think—but not to feel—that it was somehow worse than he could yet grasp. He wanted to mourn. Something held him back, a sense that it was improper to cry for someone whose relation to you was ambiguous. The impounded tears, the ache in his throat that could not be either a wail or a speech, sickened him a little, and he felt that something irksome as a lie was anesthetizing him to his loss. He shivered as if with disgust.

  “I practically made her run uphill when the rain started,” Leslie said.

  “My relatives,” Martha began. “My relatives—”

  “Nonsense,” Ben said, more grumpily than he intended.

  “She’d been loafing in a sling chair. I’m sure she was all right until. … She was in no shape to run. But she tried.”

  “—I have two uncles who can afford it, and every time they overeat they’re on the phone pleading with doctors. Someday one of them will go out—”

  “I should at least have guessed what indigestion meant.”

  “Coronary. Bing. Then he’ll have the great satisfaction of having been right that once. The doctors just won’t come any more. It happens at least every Christmas and every Thanksgiving. No joke.”

  It was as if the prolonged sonority of the motors that kept him partly deaf, now, to the appeals of the two women, were the anesthesia that kept him from quite absorbing what was being communicated. His head was still full of images of his morning’s flight—the drive-in theaters like drab fans spread on the grass, the green, square-cut emeralds of suburban swimming pools, the delicate necklaces of traffic on the parkways, the dress-form shapes of towers that supported high-tension wires, the scabs of erosion mottling the cultivated fields, the clam-shell motion of the flaps beginning to open on the wing when the plane was ready to descend. Weren’t all these things of equal importance with an old lady’s death? No. Yes. Yes. No.

  Irritably, smiling, he said to his wife, “I don’t understand quite what it is you have to tell me.”

  “About Dolores,” she said, shocked that his attention might have wandered from this overwhelming theme.

  Then they both laughed together. “Yes,” Ben said. “I heard you say she’d died. I’m not that deafened.”

  “Just my feelings,” Leslie said. “I’m sorry. I knew Daddy would come home and kiss and make it all well.”

  The luggage had not yet come from the plane. They were not in a hurry—Maureen Connally was still covering Ben’s practice through today and would have got a message to Leslie if any of his patients urgently required him. So they took most of an hour in the airport bar to sort out the clutter of other subjects they had, after six days, to exchange.

  “Stamp out all that yellow fever?” Martha asked. “Can Theodore and me go ahead with the Canal now?”

  With a smile like a custard pie smashed on his face, Ben answered that he had seen “a lot of lovely kids. Boy, a lot of them.”

  Leslie, catching her breath, said, “Finally I had my showdown with Mrs. Bodeen. Friday afternoon I went to her study club with her, like I’d promised, being dutiful while you were away, dear—and I’ve finally cleaned the basement, and all the books are in order by subject and author. You know what Bodeen always said—‘There was a little old lady, blind and deaf, who was such an inspiration to us all.’ There she was, blind and deaf all right, talking all the goddamn afternoon about Please Don’t Eat the Daisies!” She decided she was sounding too consistently the victim of each episode she had to tell about, and she recognized the warning in that. He knew her so well that even the wrong tone might clue him in and … why not? Why not, just today, tell him everything, since it was, like an acute disease, over with now and done? As soon as they got rid of Martha.…

  Ben said, “Awfully cute. Vital.”

  “And here you are, back in the land of Mighty Mouse drinking his atomic milk,” Martha said. “I did some reading up on South America while you were gone, Ben. You ought to start a boy farm. You really like kids, don’t you?”

  “I am the wife,” Leslie said in haughty jest. “I didn’t do any reading. What’d you do for your country?”

  “I offered a statistical amendment,” Ben said, happily swinging into the familiar formula of banter. “The truth is that the conference might have succeeded without me. There were a lot of army wheels from the Institute of Tropical Medicine who even knew more about pediatrics than I. Actually,” he said with the straight-on, little-boy gravity that softened Leslie more than anything else about his company manners, “actually my trip was straight out of the pork barrel.”

  “At least it got us away from each other for a while,” she said. “We were beginning to show the need for a vacation.” Their eyes met, wondering, as both of them weighed this observation for truth. They had said nothing like this before he left. Had they only been too enmeshed, now freed and healthy enough for belated frankness? Did it have something to do with Dave Lloyd and the night of their party?

  He went on with his observation to Martha. “You’ve heard us talk about Dr. Carroll. I used to think I was at least one of his fair-haired boys in my time at Columbia. I’ve kept in touch, with some servility, you know. He pulled the strings to get me down there and I’m grateful he got me away from Les a few days. And I learned a lot, really. But I’m beginning to think I’m just one of his boys. Not so fair-haired. See, Martha, doctors are politicians, some of them, and they have to pass out patronage like any other would-be power figure. Surprised?”

  “Not,” Martha said.

  “You offered a statistical amendment,” Leslie prompted.

  “Of course you aren’t. Leslie, we were talking about aid. For Venezuela and all of Latin America.”

  “Deplorable,” Martha said. For a moment she poised on the rim of an occasion to express her feelings. She had read plenty about the exploitation of not-so-white peasants. But she checked herself by reflecting that the Danielses must be lightly submerging their feelings about Mrs. Calfert beneath this shallow foam of facts. She simply beamed quietly to show she knew what they were so bravely doing and approved.

  “I was way out of my depth,” Ben said. “Unfortunately, Martha, it was our friends from south of the border—probably instructed, since they were nice guys; I liked them—who tried to get some highly questionable figures into the record before I spoke up.…”

  And said we fucked all night two nights and part of a third, last night. Honesty, what jewel is like thee? And if he looks at me now, I would tell him except for his sake and Martha being here. Why should they suffer? “Honesty—you carried the torch of honesty,” L
eslie said with thin, fond derision.

  “At least I’d been doing my homework before I went. Reading,” he said.

  “Homework,” Leslie laughed—and suddenly felt relieved, safe. This morning she had felt herself absolutely and entirely the victim of an involvement she had never wanted. She had seen, like a pillar of cloud, the enormity of what she had suffered, hoping for the best. Obsessed with her conviction, she had been afraid that literally she might utter the words which would tear the scaffold down. But she heard her real voice now and realized she was doing fine.

  Ben hardly noticed her counterpointed comment. “Colonel Whearty—he was chairing this particular panel—just sat breathing hard while I clutched my notes in my hand and cited my figures. I think—as a matter of fact I’m sure—that he knew as well as I what was wrong with their submissions, but meant—or had also been instructed—to let it go in the name of higher strategy—let them screw us here so, higher up and where it counts, we can screw them.”

  Momentarily his forehead wrinkled as if with pain—actually only with the memory of a long process of calculation which had brought him finally to accept a compromise of justice as the price of order and things going on as they were.

  He had had nightmares in Caracas. They had been, actually, quite manageable nightmares, the sort that dissolve and relax their grip briskly in the morning light. As he understood them, they represented the simultaneous conjunction of several currents of experience. They were overdetermined—to use a Freudian word he had always liked.

  First of all there was his absence from Leslie, a primary current of novelty and faint disturbance. It had been a long time since he slept in any bed without her. Not to hear her breathing beside him was more disturbing than he would have anticipated. Then, sequitur, to find his anticipations in error made him take a brand-new look at the marriage they had made.