Leave Well Enough Alone (14 page)

Jenny dealt the wet cards and announced, “Go fish.” Dorothy picked up her hand and yawned again.

She would just shut down that busybody in the back of her mind. The Hoade baby probably had meningitis, or something else that tactful Mrs. Hoade didn’t want to go into. It might be horribly birthmarked, with dreadful purple streaks all over it. Perhaps it had caught leprosy in the womb in South America and its fingers and toes were dropping off. Lisa and Jenny, if they saw it, would be traumatized for the rest of their lives.

“Do you have any...tens?” Lisa asked Dorothy.

“No,” said Dorothy. The wind blew a dead rose blossom across the deck of cards. The memory of the dream began to open again, like a fan.

“You do so have tens. You have two tens!” said Lisa irritably, peering over the top of Dorothy’s hand, and the image folded in on itself again, leaving Dorothy only with the certainty that whatever it was lay in Mrs. Hoade’s top bureau drawer.

Ever since Mrs. Hoade had informed her, without going into detail, that the baby had died in the hospital early that morning, Dorothy had been carrying on a private war with herself. On the one hand she couldn’t get the drawer, the thing in the drawer, whatever it was, out of her mind. On the other hand, Maureen’s voice, Reverend Mother’s voice, a hundred voices including her own good conscience, warned her that she had already transgressed and must go no further. “O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!” cautioned Sir Walter Scott in Sister Elizabeth’s flawless impression of a Midlothian burr.

The girls sat in the library, with Dorothy between them, mesmerized by
Lassie.
Mr. and Mrs. Hoade were downstairs in the living room. Mrs. Hoade’s face had been ashen since she’d come in. Dorothy prayed her own voice had conveyed enough reverence for the dead when she’d asked if there was anything she could do to help. She could keep the girls entertained. Well, that was what she’d been hired to do. The hamburger tasted dry and uninteresting. Dorothy bit her lip. She’d eaten meat last night. Last night had been Friday.

Suddenly Dorothy longed for the quiet darkness of the confessional. She wanted to wipe out all the nasty suspicions that had gone through her mind that morning. There’s just hardly any good in me, she thought. I wish I were like my mother. I wish I were kind and gentle.

“What are you sighing for?” Jenny asked.

“Oh, I was thinking of your parents. I wish I could help them and make them feel better,” said Dorothy. Jenny turned back to the television without saying anything. Ice clinked in the silver ice bucket in the living room.

Dorothy knew she could do nothing for Mrs. Hoade. She wondered if she could do anything for herself. Could she obliterate the things she’d seen in herself these past weeks that she really didn’t like very much? All her greedy ambitions for illustrious careers? Careers without the hard work; silly, romantic ambitions for fame and fortune at someone else’s expense. She wished she could erase all her impatience with poor Jenny and Lisa, whose parents paid them so little attention. She wished she could destroy her envy, covetousness, as Reverend Mother called it, of the Hoades and everything they owned. What had all their money bought them when the chips were down? Nothing. Their baby had died, just like any poor baby in India—or in Ireland, a century before, during the potato famine there.

The closest that she, Dorothy, had ever been to any sort of tragedy was right now, fifty feet away downstairs. She could hear the Hoades moving about, she could hear the ice in their drinks, tinkling almost gaily. She remembered the power of Mrs. Hoade’s grief, the tremble in Mrs. Hoade’s hands, and Mr. Hoade’s red, sleepy eyes.

A little bleakly, Dorothy came to the conclusion that she would never become a reporter, or a spy, or a famous writer. She would do well, when she got home, to be less critical of Maureen, to be more helpful and loving with Bridget. Supposing one day she were to have a baby of her own and that baby were to die. And supposing she’d hired some teenager who poked her nose into everything, looked in drawers, considered reading private letters, and arrived at preposterous conclusions on the basis of spite, envy, and laziness. Who threw away an autographed picture in the wastebasket, for anyone to come upon, just because it wasn’t of a person famous enough to suit her snooty tastes. She’d gone three times where she’d been told not to go. What did she know about lawsuits? Perhaps her father
would
sue the Hoades if anything happened to her. Not only had she disobeyed Mrs. Hoade, kind Mrs. Hoade who might put her name in a book, but she’d stolen a pair of riding boots. Well, she was just not going to wear those boots, even if they did look terrific. She was going to ask Mrs. Hoade not to put her name down or acknowledge any help on the cookbook in print.

All the Hoades had shown her, after all, was kindness. She had met wonderful, sparkling people at their parties. She’d ordered hundreds of dollars worth of fancy food for them, and eaten half of it. She’d learned to ride and had been given generous time to do so. The Hoades didn’t expect her to do a lick of housework. She didn’t even have to make her bed—Dinna would do it. And how had Dorothy repaid the Hoades? Shabbily, she told herself. With a multitude of sins and ugly thoughts. By wishing Mr. Hoade dead on at least two occasions. By insulting his associates, by wishing Lisa dead at least four times that summer, once that very morning when the Hoades’ baby was off in a hospital, dying. Dying, for all she knew, in great suffering. Reverend Mother’s voice, at its most provoked, flooded her conscience. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you!”

She decided to give herself a penance of ten Hail Marys and one Our Father for every sin she’d committed and no cheating on the sins by lumping them together. Using the buttons of her shirt for a rosary, she kept up her prayers, right through the whole of
Playhouse 90.
By the time she tucked the girls into bed, Dorothy had finished eighty Hail Marys and eight Our Fathers. As she said good night and closed their door, she remembered about eating meat on Friday and missing Mass and Confession for so many weeks. She said twenty more.

The Hoades were talking quietly in the living room. Dorothy decided not to disturb them. Determined to tackle
Ivanhoe
, she strode with a tranquil heart at last down the hall to her room. She felt so strong now, so happy, so determined to spend the rest of this summer being modest instead of proud, passive instead of prying, that she put her hand to her heart. There she felt what she guessed might be the beginnings of forgiveness and something close to universal love. “The Lord ruleth me,” she murmured as she passed the door of the Hoades’ bedroom: “and I shall want nothing.” She paused for a moment and listened to the rhythm of the conversation downstairs. Dorothy, DON’T! she told herself, almost aloud. But it was too late. She had already gone into their room, opened the drawer, and begun to search for whatever it was that had eluded her thoughts that morning.

Nothing had been disturbed. The odor of sachet, the same Windsor nail polish, the same dark-yellow photo envelope... The gold locket was still there. Dorothy picked it up and opened it. A tiny picture of a man’s face popped out and fell back into the drawer. She recognized Mrs. Hoade’s father from the photo downstairs. On the back of the photograph was written in purple ink, “Krasilovsky
12-6-48
.” Dorothy smiled. She counted back eight years—1948. So Maria Hoade had once been Maria Krasilovsky. Well, that was something. Dorothy wondered if the now-transformed Miss Krasilovsky had once come from a place as dull and poor as Newburgh, New York. She licked the dry glue and replaced the picture exactly as it had been before, then snapped the locket closed. The name and date and the serious face were not what she was looking for.

Dorothy rummaged through the rest of the drawer’s contents. There was a jade-handled letter slitter that looked quite lethal, the emery boards, two pencils—both embossed silver and both leadless—a reading magnifier with a light that didn’t work, assorted Indian-head pennies, and a few stamps. There wasn’t a single thing that Dorothy could see that fused itself to that slippery idea that had made her look in this drawer again. The only thing left was the stack of letters. She closed the drawer and listened in the hallway again. The Hoades were deep in liquor and conversation; besides, if they did decide to come up, she’d have plenty of warning as the stairs creaked so horribly.

She stepped back to the bureau and thought about the letters. Poking through nail files and old junk was one thing. Looking at people’s private mail was another. Still... She opened the frayed ribbon that kept the papers in a neat stack. The first was a bill, dated several years before, from the We-Get-Em Exterminating Company. It simply listed “insects—kitchen” and “rodents—cellar” and came to a sum of thirty-eight dollars. The rest were all old bills too. One from a dairy, several from a grocery, and several from a local dry cleaners’. All the papers were equally uninteresting to Dorothy. Newspaper clippings, lists of plant foods for specific kinds of plants, lists of Christmas presents to names that Dorothy didn’t know. The last paper in the stack was on memo paper that had printed on it “Don’t forget!” The message was
Rotate all your tires on the station wagon.
Not a love letter among them. Not a personal item of any land. Not anything she was looking for at all.

She stared at her own face in the mirror for a moment. Something is wrong here, in this place, in this house, she told herself. Something is very wrong, I can feel it tingling all around me in the air. There was a creak on the stairway. Dorothy put out the light and rushed for the doorway, realizing as she did that the hall light was still on and she would be seen coming out the bedroom door. She went the other way, into the Hoades’ bathroom, and vanished into Jenny’s cave. The fretwork door shut beside her, Dorothy crouched and prayed.

Dear God, please forgive me. I know You are punishing me for looking in that drawer. For breaking my word to You. It was a mortal sin and I know it. Oh dear Jesus, You can strike me dead on the spot if I ever do such a thing again, I promise, but please, please don’t let them open this closet door. Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name.... She heard Mr. Hoade drop himself into a leather chair not two feet away. They were separated only by the bathroom wall. “What’s that, what are you putting away?” she heard Mrs. Hoade ask him.

“Death certificate, autopsy report, doctor’s bill, emergency-room bill, pathologist’s bill,” Mr. Hoade answered.

“How much?” she asked.

“All together? Five eighty.”

Mr. Hoade dropped his shoes into the closet with a bang. Some paper was torn in the room. “What’s that look on your face?” Dorothy heard him ask.

“Meticulous people have copies of everything,” Mrs. Hoade answered.

“Listen, I’ve checked and I’m telling you no such thing exists!” he said in a barely controlled whisper. “I’ve checked and we’re home free. All right?”

“All right,” said Mrs. Hoade at last, in a low, reluctant tone.

He went on in a faintly discernible staccato. “Borg, if you’re worried, is hardly in a position to bring anything out now.” This was followed by a short laugh. There was no more discussion. Someone came into the bathroom.

The light cord was pulled in the middle of Dorothy’s fourth recitation of the Apostles’ Creed. Tiny octagons of light filtered through the wicker latticework. Jenny had a lovely hideout here. Several books dug into Dorothy’s back and the piggy bank pushed up against her ankle in the corner. “Maker of heaven and earth,” said Dorothy, pressing herself as far back against the wall as she could.

She could see nothing. She could not tell whether it was Mr. or Mrs. Hoade who stood at the sink brushing their teeth, or who it was using the John. As the water flushed with an unseemly racket Dorothy gritted her teeth. She would have given all four hundred dollars of her salary to be able to go to the bathroom at that moment. She knew it would be a long while before she dared come out. “The holy Catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen,” she repeated, digging her fingernails into her palms. She jiggled one leg and then the other imperceptibly. It did not help. Whoever it was left the bathroom and another pair of bare feet padded in.

The water in the sink ran unbearably again. This is my test, Dorothy told herself, please God, let it be my only punishment. Her bladder ached with repression, her shoulder throbbed where she’d hit it the night before, and her back agonized against the pointed corners of Jenny’s books.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” A toothbrush was banged against the sink. “And forgive us our trespasses.” The light was switched off and the plumbing flushed almost all in one motion, although the person had not used the John. “As we forgive those who trespass against us...forever and ever.” The house turned silent once more. She hadn’t actually heard the person leave the bathroom. Could someone be out there, knowing she was in the closet, waiting for her to come out? Dorothy started on her catechism.

She could discern a faint rising and falling of breath, a tiny snore in the next room. After a length of time that defeated Dorothy’s whole sense of time, she thought she ought to open the door. Surely no one could stand in the bathroom that long and not make a noise. Bit by bit she pushed the door open. The night was cloudy, but after the pitch-dark blackness of the closet she could see enough, in whatever little light the small bathroom window afforded, to know that no one was there.

She tried not to think of that little devilment that had bubbled up and around her catechism the whole time she had sat waiting. I just want to get to my own bathroom and my own room, she told herself. But why had the john been flushed if it had not been used? “Kleenex. Just a piece of Kleenex,” she whispered back at her own questions. Fleetingly her hand explored the floor beside the john. Nothing. But wait. There was something. A piece of paper, two, just under the lid.