Caught Dead in Philadelphia (2 page)

“In that case, work now. Never rely on Liza. For anything.” Gus was the resident Liza expert. They worked together at a semiprofessional repertory theater. They had done other things together, very briefly, but that history had left him with more scars than Vietnam had.

“She promised.”

“She always does, doesn't she? That's easy for her. It's harder remembering the promise a whole week later.”

“But this was this morning. In my own living room.”

Gus put down his fork. “I didn't think you had coffee klatches at dawn. Or was it the morning after a pajama party?”

“I don't know what it was. The rain washed her in this morning.”

Gus chewed the last of his soufflé meditatively. Vietnam had ruined his left leg, scarred his face, and narrowed his acting ambitions, but it obviously hadn't touched his digestive tract. “Is she still at your house?” he asked.

“Probably. She wanted to nap. Why?”

“We—I have to talk to her. Tried to last night, after the show, but she was having one of her tantrums.”

“She was odd this morning, too. What's up?”

“You tell me. I don't understand a goddamn thing about Liza Nichols. Hasn't she told you that? She's told everybody else.” He stabbed his red square of Jell-O and watched it shudder before pushing it away, his fork sinking in its heart. “I hear she's being coached on how to fit into Hayden Cole's once-and-future life. How to dress, talk, change her style. Senators can be prima donnas, but their wives are supposed to serve tea and smile on the sidelines.”

“Patience, Gus. She isn't a wife yet. And he isn't a senator, either.”

“Details. She'll be his missus in three weeks, and he'll either win the state or buy it, just as he already bought Liza.”

There was nothing for me to say. Gus hadn't gotten what he expected from life or Liza Nichols, and I couldn't do a thing about either situation.

He muttered in semitheatrical fashion. Too softly to be understood and too loudly to be ignored.

“Speak up or shut up, Gus. All I hear is smidgies, and it's making me crazy—sissies and stupids? Sounds like preschool.”

“Sissie Bellinger. Remember her? Skinny blonde who was at the engagement party. It's all her fault. It was her idea to have a benefit show for Hayden Cole, to drag in half the Main Line at one hundred dollars a seat. And how could anybody object? Sissie's one of the biggest backers—patrons—of the Playhouse. Frustrated actress herself. She hangs out there half the time, driving everybody up the wall while she supervises her write-off. Damn her.”

He stood up and limped toward the collection bin. I followed with my full tray, trying not to think of the wide-eyed kids in the starvation ads who would die for want of what I scraped off my plate.

“Benefit! Certainly didn't benefit Liza. She meets Mr. Candidate and kisses off everything she's worked and hoped for. Good-bye, New York, acting. Hello, Hayden, the hope of the bland people.”

“Don't you think you're making a bit much of this? Maybe it's what she wanted all along.”

“Hayden?” He slammed down his tray. “Hayden Cole? Maybe his money. Maybe his power. Maybe his status. Maybe just the ego-pumping thrill of being invited to share it. But Hayden himself? You've seen him—he could be her father, practically. Looks like a desiccated—Maybe I wasn't what she wanted, okay. Maybe I don't understand her. But I understand enough to know she never wanted any Hayden Cole!”

We climbed the stairs together. Neither the food nor the conversation had turned lunch into a leisurely affair, and there were forty minutes left before my last class. I could get some papers marked.

“I think I'll have a smoke,” Gus said. “Coming along?”

“I don't smoke.”

“Again?” He looked at his watch. “I'll try to catch Liza at the end of next period. If she shows.”

“She'd better.” It was the only aspect of Liza that concerned me at the moment.

* * *

Gus once designed a coat of arms for our school. On a shield of rulers and pencils rested a dunce cap. Below it, in elegant calligraphy read the legend: Philadelphia Prep: For the Rich and the Retarded. It was not adopted as the official school emblem, despite its hard kernel of truth. Our building, an imposing center-city mansion, is far more impressive than our students' minds. However, I am still not sure what I want to be when—or if—I grow up, and since my liberal arts degree does not include the courses in audiovisual aids and such that give you public school teaching credentials, I try not to make too much fun of Philly Prep because its slack admission policy provides me with students to teach and the means to pay my rent.

I sat at my desk marking compositions. I fought the urge to retreat from the plodding sentences, but eventually I lost, and I put my head down, wondering why I didn't inspire my classes the way Liza did. I liked to think it was because I was always there and Liza was an unreliable and sporadic treat. In any case, she made plays come alive and her delight was contagious.

She was currently generating interest in
Macbeth
with a class of seniors. They had only two months of school left, and they had never known a scholarly urge in the first place. Their grades were long since submitted to colleges, their fates by and large determined, and the two remaining months of school were no more than glorified day care in their eyes. Even so, they listened to Liza and to William Shakespeare. Until you've faced a crowd of graduating seniors, you have not experienced apathy and cannot appreciate the heroic and historic feat Liza had accomplished.

She was very involved with her work. “I'd like to rewrite this play,” she'd told me once of
Macbeth.
“With a more sympathetic Lady M. She wasn't a bad old girl. No different from the rest of us, really. She wanted to get somewhere in life. She was just clumsy and overly moral, carrying on like that. She should have hung around until the crown settled onto her head. Once it was old, she wouldn't have gotten bad press.”

“Come on,” I'd protested. “There were a few murders on her record.”

“You're naive, Amanda. Once you've arrived, it doesn't matter how you got there. People don't peep behind the stacks of money. Hayden's handsome trust was built on shaky land grants, Yankee slave ships, a lot of dead Indians, and God knows what else. But it happened long ago. So who cares now? Who cared twenty years ago when his daddy was governor? Time washes off the blood, Mandy.”

She paced around, thinking. “For example, my engagement ring. You'd be upset if you thought I'd stolen it. But if it's an antique—if it was stolen a few generations ago, would anybody care? See this locket? Hayden's mother gave it to me, and you should have seen the ceremony attached to the presentation.”

She hunched over, transforming her curvaceous body into a sexless, heavy mass. “Liza, dear,” she said in a low, nasal voice, “this was Grandmother Lucy Bolt Hayden's, and then her son, my father, Benjamin Sedgewick Hayden, gave it to my mother, and my mother gave it to me. Now you are to have it, and someday…”

Liza straightened up and became herself again. “Now where did Gramma Lucy get it, do you suppose? Her daddy probably dumped a shipload of slaves down South and blew part of the profits on a trinket for his kid. Does anybody care if this locket cost a life? Time has cleaned it off.”

She'd picked up the twelfth-grade anthology with
Macbeth
in it. “The point is, Lady Macbeth should have stuck it out. Silly fool, washing and washing those bloody hands, when all it took was time. She was much too moral.”

The two o'clock bell jarred me out of my reveries. Students barreled through the door, looking for Liza.

Their disappointment was nothing compared to mine. I waited. I took roll. I simmered. Then I broke into a boil. Maybe now that Liza was moving into money and power, she could break the rules the rest of us followed.

But that didn't mean I couldn't protest. “Please read the play silently for a few minutes. I'm going to see if I can find Miss Nichols.”

I charged down the hallway, hoping to bump into Liza. But I saw only Gus, closing his classroom door.

“The actress is AWOL,” I snapped, as if his pessimistic predictions had made it come true. I stormed past him toward the school office. I wasn't sure what I could accomplish, but I was angry and needed to let it out on someone, somewhere.

But not on Helga Putnam, the office witch. As I neared her, she pulled her gray cardigan tightly around her shoulders as if suddenly chilled. She didn't like her domain invaded by teachers. Or students. Or parents.

“Miss Pepper!” Helga never wasted time on pleasantries. “I was about to send a messenger to your room. When Miss Nichols completes her hour, send her here. She hasn't signed in at the office, and we cannot tolerate such unprofessional behavior!” Her nose glowed at the tip in a red blotch of congealed rage.

As furious as I was with Liza, I was not about to ally myself with the harpy behind the desk. “I'll tell her,” I said. It wasn't really a lie. I would tell her—whenever I could. I walked over to the telephone at the far end of the room. A grid of mailboxes covered much of the nearby wall. I'd emptied mine that morning, but it had been fed more squares of paper, more of Helga's reminders about “professional behavior.”

The mailbox labeled “L. Nichols” was overflowing with old notices, new notices, and a small brown package. Since I'd already implied that Liza was in the building, I surreptitiously emptied the contents of her mailbox into my pocketbook.

My descent into a life of duplicity continued when I picked up the office phone. I could feel Putnam's eyes bore into my back, I could sense another memo about personal-call vouchers. I pushed down the button and spoke into the dead receiver. “Operator? What is the area code for Fargo, North Dakota?” There was a gasp behind me, then the scratch of pen on paper. “Of course I'll get the charges, Helga,” I said without turning around.

“Thank you,” I told the dead receiver, and then I dialed several numbers before I released the buttons, waited for a dial tone, and called my house. The phone rang fourteen times before I slammed it down. She wasn't there, then. She wasn't anywhere.

Helga snorted as I left the office.

My class was midway through a small war or bacchanal. “Back in your seats,” I said. “We'll read the play together.”

The room was overheated, and the rain on the windows lulled us all. The kids droned through their lines. It wasn't the same without the resident actress.

Lance Zittsner, who had trouble reading an Exit sign, stammered and spluttered through his part. “Bo-bloody instructions, which being taught, return to—” He looked up at me, sweating. “To plaque? Like on teeth?”

“To plague. ‘We do but teach bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.' That means—”

But the 3:00
p.m
. bell rang, and the students, passionately uninterested in my words or Shakespeare's, stampeded toward freedom. So much for anybody's bloody instructions.

I stood awhile at the rain-streaked windows. The bright slickers and umbrellas of escaping teenagers punctuated the square of park across the street. I adjusted the hems of my window shades. Philly Prep put great emphasis on keeping its rooms, if not its students, in pristine order.

When the building hushed with the unnatural quiet of an empty school, I left, carrying a wad of still unmarked papers.

I walked behind the school and splashed through the puddles on the makeshift parking lot. At least, having been late this morning, I was the blockee, not the blocked. It didn't make me happy enough. I thought about Gene Kelly tap-dancing through a downpour. The thought mellowed me out all the way to Good Samaritanism. Gus's car, nosed against the wall in front of mine, had an open rear window. Rain funneled in onto his torn upholstery. I tried squeezing my hand through the opening to unlock the door. Then I tried all the other doors. Failure. I ended up with my roll book in a puddle, my head sopping, and the realization that, unlike me, Gene Kelly was given big bucks to make merry in the rain. So I drove home.

Or near home. I live on a cute street, as streets go. It has history, cobblestones, and hitching posts. It doesn't have parking. My lot is two blocks from home. This allows me to enjoy fully Philadelphia's range of weather conditions. In summer I can perspire profusely. In winter I can cultivate chilblains. And on this particular spring Monday, I was able to determine how much moisture can seep through suede boots during an exhilarating jog.

Nothing happened when I turned the key. At first I thought my locks had been changed or I was losing my mind. Then I had a mental breakthrough, and I turned the key back in the other, wrong direction.

The door opened.

Liza had left the house unlocked. The magnitude of her irresponsibility overwhelmed me. I kicked the door all the way open, slammed it shut behind me, and sloshed toward the small closet at the back of the first floor. As I pulled off my raincoat, I caught a glimpse of the kitchen floor. The coffee, with sugar, cream, and cat food, was still there.

I felt enraged, and then defeated, because there was nothing to be done about people like that who left the work of the world up to people like me. I was cold and damp, and I had boring compositions to mark, and I vowed that when I saw Liza again, I'd—

But in midvow I turned back toward the living room and swallowed whatever threat was building. Because I saw Liza. Or part of her. A foot in a small gray shoe sticking out from the side of the sofa near the fireplace.

Odd, unconnected thoughts popped through my brain. Nobody naps in shoes. Strange position. No answer on telephone when I called. Unlocked door.

I moved in slow motion across the room.

Nobody naps on the hearth with a sofa nearby.