Pretty Leslie (44 page)

“I like cat better than dog,” young Harry said.

“Why?” asked Miss Gompers.

“Cat's smoother like my quilt. Can we keep my quilt and when I have a little boy we'll give it to him?”

“I suppose you can.”

“This isn't my real quilt.”

“It's a very nice quilt.”

“My real one I had before. It wore out. Mama got me this quilt.”

“It's very pretty.”

When the boy noticed him, Ben said, “You can go find Mother now, Harry. Straight down the hall. We've got Sister all fixed up and Mother's dressing her.”

Harry wrapped another turn of the quilt magically around his forearm—no doubt to protect himself against the alchemical smells of the consulting rooms. He sidled past Ben's legs with knowing caution. Then he speeded up past two closed doors and into the end consulting room.

Following, Ben heard him say fiercely to his sister, “It didn't hurt.”

“It was only a little penicillin in the rump-bump,” Mother said, nuzzling into Sue Marie's hair as she pulled on snowpants.

“Why did you cry? I heard you crying,” Harry said. “It didn't hurt.” Drawing back his quilted arm, he hit his two-year-old sister in the forehead. “It didn't hurt, so why did you cry?” he asked.

When the Olivers were gone cheerfully into the falling snow, Ben returned to the first consulting room. Hiking up his stiff, immaculate jacket to sit at the desk, he dialed a number. While he listened—as he had so often—to the other phone ringing unanswered, he watched the comforting, tranquil snowfall beyond the half-raised venetian blind.

Miss Gompers knocked and came in. “Catherine Evergold doesn't want to bring Tim out in this weather. She said would you come by the house if it wasn't too much trouble, after all?”

“Call and tell her I'll be there. What time is it now?”

“Twelve-thirty. You going to lunch now?”

“I'd better, hadn't I? Tell her I'll come, but I'm going to have Dr. Connally take the rest of my calls for the afternoon, if there is anything. I'll take calls at home after … say, seven this evening.”

“The Abbot man wanted to see you when you finished this morning, but he hasn't come yet.”

“I suppose the snow may have fouled him up. I'll have to have chains. Look, will you call the parking lot and ask Bob to put the chains on while I get a bite to eat?”

Miss Gompers said she certainly would.

When she left him alone, Ben dialed the phone again. He was not calling the bank (thank you very much, Martha) to see if Leslie had cleaned him out. He was ringing Don Patch's number again. He hoped that the unanswered phone meant, as he knew it usually did, that Leslie was there. But today he could not be sure.

It was really quite astonishing how much he knew by now of what went on in the apartment behind the sign that said EXHAUST FUMES KILL. It was rather as if it were his life that went on there, his real life and responsibility, unknowable except by inference (but given the habits of inference trained into him like second nature by both his marriage and his profession, easy to know).

Martha had helped him to know (thank you, thank you, Martha), but it was certainly not fair to her to believe she had maliciously informed on her best friend. Martha had had a problem of her own. Partly because it was of Leslie's instigation—but more importantly because of what Ben was, so slow, so judicious and above all so tolerant—she had come to him with it.

Dave was seeing Garland Roberts. Of course it was not Martha's intent to imply that Leslie had
arranged
anything between those two. She hadn't even been able to arrange the job at the paper she had tried to get for Garland. Still, when you got to thinking about it—and Martha had naturally thought about it a very great deal—and when you began at last to have it come home to you how Leslie “did things,” couldn't you see that she'd trailed the flawless Garland under Dave's nose, so to speak, merely by bringing her down to his office for an interview?

“I've never said what I more than dimly suspected last summer about between Dave and Leslie while you were gone,” Martha said—no doubt just to provide one more peak in the mountain range of tactlessness that made up their most embarrassing interview.

Tolerant, slow, and judicious—not really, merely impotent, merely bleeding to death invisibly—Ben told her levelly and honestly that there had been absolutely nothing she need worry about between his lawful wife and her lawful husband.

“If you say so, then perhaps you know,” Martha said, with scorn burning unevenly in her voice. She was trying to play Medea, but she had no children of her own to sacrifice, and the horrid appetite for blood was contradicted by her conviction that she really loved Leslie for undisciplined wonders and even her unconventionality.

Ah, Christ, she knew nothing—except what Ben knew too: that whatever ailed Leslie was in some mysterious way contagious; that always around her there had been and would be an epidemic of disasters large or small. There was no second Troy for her to burn. She had fallen in the tinder of shabby, yearning lives. She, last of all, would foresee exactly what harms she might do to people. “So we have to take care of her in areas where she's blind,” Martha said.

“Yes,” said Ben, whose gut was full of fire or sometimes ice. He had heard the same commandment from other, more authoritative lips than Martha's.

“I made up my mind last summer to accept anything from Leslie,” Martha said. It was her one grand gesture—and it was rather spoiled if Ben swore to her there was nothing to forgive between Dave and Leslie. In spite of her determination not to burn, Leslie had given her the hotfoot by coming up with Garland. The pretty arsonist was still at large, and those who loved her tolerantly must get the matches out of her hands. “If it wasn't Dave—”

Ben had been resting his face in his hands for several minutes. When he lifted it to reply, he might have scared Martha into silence if she had really been attentive to his expression. “I'm not going to discuss Leslie with
you
,” he said. The you would have killed her if she hadn't been down at grass level sniffing like a bloodhound.

“—it can't have been that incredible Patch.”

This was not the first time Ben had heard the name. He had heard it very frequently from Leslie. The adjective fitted the figure that Leslie had drawn for him in her caricaturing stories—the incredible Patch, goofy Don Juan, seducer of little naive girls … girls with a personality defect … not girls with big handsome loving professional men as husbands … little Patch would never dare aim so high. Already a faint and recognizable trace was appearing in the confusion, something that linked the facts he already knew like an imaginary line, like the mythic figure one's eye draws over the points of the stars, like the figure of a child-killing giant that a pitying diagnostician may read from a skimpy chart.

“Ho,” he said. “That little eccentric fellow where she used to work?”

Martha had been guessing fanatically. She had laid eyes on Patch exactly once—on a day when she lunched with Leslie and her husband. Fishing, going fishing. There had been some talk about his always fishing … and the mad, blind pride of Leslie saying “me” to explain what the man was fishing for. Maybe some time when the talk had gone back to Dolores Calfert's death, she had heard Leslie say, “We took her home in the rain.”
We
.…

Nothing. The frantic, baffled, long-maturing guesses of a desperately envious woman. But in Ben's face some undisguisable recognition of the same name.

“It couldn't have been Patch,” she said. “It's unthinkable. And I want you to remember, Ben, if you feel you can't see me again after I've said these unforgivable things, that it hurt to get them out. It hurt like hell.”

She had taken the scent. One would have had to kick her in the head to get her off it, as one kicks a hound compelled to ignore all halloos or whistles or commands when it smells not only the new scent of the running creature but the fear of death, that irresistible quarry, stretching the steps, hovering under leaves and grass blades, bidding, Come, follow to the end.

She had no notion she was hounding Leslie. She had gone after her own problems. In the classic manner (or in imitation of something she had seen in a Bergman movie, something Continental) she had arranged a showdown with young Miss Roberts.

Miss Roberts had not needed to see the movies. She had the classic manner. It was a gift of unperturbed nature. On the one hand she scarcely bothered to conceal her contempt of the older woman's complexion, features, figure and coarse black hair (she scarcely bothered to feel the contempt either—why should she?). On the other, she was innocent. If Dave Lloyd had slobbered over the pure alabaster of her youth, he had jolly well done so in private, savoring his anticipations and gnawing the dry bone of promises never articulated by anything louder than the hiss of nylon when she rubbed her knees together. She was chaste as the snow that would in its own time end this season of tangled farce and unspeakable torment. She had had “luncheon” once with Mr. Lloyd, yes. She had gone with him to a “place” where he possibly intended her to have a drink. She had drunk 7-Up. Two 7-Ups, to keep the record exactly straight, while Mr. Lloyd, who seemed to know what he was doing, had nine or ten Gibsons. Then—she did not mind being frank, since she had nothing whatever to be ashamed of (and since she could certainly see, as anyone with eyes could, why Martha might be
worried
)—frankly she had gone to a motel once with Mr. Lloyd. She would certainly not explain the circumstances in detail. It was merely that she had finally “perceived” not only what Mr. Lloyd was up to, but how recklessly far he was prepared to go. She had gone to the motel with him in order to be sure of strict privacy while she tried to reason with him and get him to come to his senses.

That, in all its horror, was the simple truth. Martha could only gnash her teeth and try to swallow it. The chunk was too big to go down. If she had paused to take good stock of her position, she might have seen she could stand to be the wife of a philanderer; it was considerably harder to be the wife of a ridiculously unsuccessful one.

She wanted to bury Garland under an avalanche. She had only wads of tissue paper to fling. She flung them anyway. She knew that Garland respected Mrs. Daniels, and Mrs. Daniels would be told forthwith that Garland did not deserve her confidence.

Was she crazy? Garland wanted to know in all sincerity. “You must be crazy. My friend Mr. Smothers warned me about Mrs. Daniels long ago. She's got a steady boyfriend who lives across the river. Vendham—Mr. Smothers—knows who he is.”

Before Garland let her out of the trap into which she had stuck her neck, Martha knew too. At any rate her suspicions were confirmed by something Vendham Smothers had heard from Flannery, who had overheard a few telephone conversations that didn't sound quite right to her.

Confirmed suspicions plus a badly dented ego and a wish to be helpful had brought Martha to something she had never done in her life before. She went spying. She had a name to go on. She had a telephone book from which to get the address. She knew Leslie's schedule. She needed no more.

From a candy shop across the street she watched Leslie arrive in a cab before the building with its morbid sign. She watched Leslie scamper for a green door and start upstairs beyond its tall, narrow windows. It was nearly two hours before Leslie came down again and walked north to a bus stop. Now that her spying was successful, Martha made up her mind never to tell what she knew. Unless at some just imaginable crisis in the Danielses' lives it became expedient to use her information.

Waiting for an
overt
crisis can be a dull, dry business. Many people maintain a façade of tranquility which may be a blessing to their friends and social peers but is no service to themselves. Heart disease and ulcers are the only too well-known consequences of repressions, not least among professional people, and now it was clear to Martha that in spite of what had been said about taking care of Leslie, it was Ben who best deserved consideration.

Something else bothered her about the impression Ben and Leslie gave of going on exactly as lovingly as before. They still saw the same friends and acquaintances on about the same schedule. Still gave parties and went to others. Would still pop up downtown at some theater or bar, looking pleased with each other's company. And this, ever so faintly but definitely, hinted at collusion. Not only was there a continuing irregularity. It must have been agreed on.

Martha was in collusion with exactly nobody in this world on anything that counted, and she felt the anxiety of the natural-born insider left out. Suppose Ben had quite consciously lied to her about Leslie and Dave? He had been gone several days last summer. Both Patch
and
Dave might have profited from whatever agreement he had with Leslie. Just as Macbeth had murdered sleep, Leslie Daniels murdered the assurance of those who thought they had taken her measure.

Martha came to Ben's office one day, dressed in her best, as if for a funeral or wedding, and waited until all the patients and Miss Gompers were gone.

She had thought everything out. She was determined that for everybody's good it was time that the truth was known. She told him where Leslie sometimes went on her “free” afternoons. Stiffly she asked him if he did or did not know that. (“Tell me the truth,” she said. He only answered, “Oh my” in the tone of a man much older than he was, though perhaps not even the ancient could seem sadder than he when he was truly shaken.)

The poor man hadn't known. But he had to know. She felt deeply that he deserved to know. So she told him as much as her evidence made absolutely positive. Of course she didn't know precisely what went on up in the apartment. But from the candy shop across the street she had tried Patch's phone number before, during and after Leslie's visits. While Leslie was there, the phone was left unanswered. Any other time—and as
soon
as she was gone—a piping brusque voice said, “Patch of Bieman's Studio” because after all it was a business phone (and after all Patch was the pompous little ass Leslie had caricatured him to be).