Leave Well Enough Alone (15 page)

“You’re safe now, Dorothy,” she said with a sigh when she sat on the soft linen sheets of her own bed. Grasped in one hand were two small bits of paper. “Stop, now, Dorothy,” she said in a low whisper. “This is their business, not yours, and even if there were something fishy going on, which there almost certainly isn’t, just suppose there were, and you found out about it. Do you know where you’d wind up?” Mr. Hoade’s voice answered for her. “Out of a job with your head... She squeezed her eyes shut and walked over to her window in a very businesslike manner.

The first bit of paper was blank on both sides. She tore it into infinitesimal pieces anyway. Dorothy the busybody, she hoped with all her might, had disappeared forever. Dorothy the sane, mature young adult had emerged at last. But the second scrap had a word typed on it. The word was
Witnes
—the second
s
torn off, it appeared.

Nothing stirred in the house or on the cool rain-soaked grounds. Not even the moon, when it broke through the clouds and suffused Dorothy’s bed with extraordinary light, brought her to the surface of sleep. A barn owl hooted softly, somewhere in the woods. Down in the garden, beneath Dorothy’s window, the tiny shreds of both papers rested among the petals of a delphinium.

“D
OROTHY?”

“Yes, Maureen? How are you?” Dorothy gripped the receiver tightly. She knew just how Maureen was and just what Maureen was going to ask. She hadn’t talked to Maureen in two weeks, not since the day after she’d spent the awful few hours in the Hoades’ bathroom closet, not since the day of the baby’s burial. She’d called Maureen then because she’d been frightened. Now Maureen was going to call in her chips, Dorothy just knew it.

“Have you asked if you can get Labor Day off?”

“Well, no, but I will.”

“Dorothy?”

“Yes, Maureen?”

“Two weeks ago to this day you called me up,” said Maureen in a voice as measured as a drumbeat. “You wanted my help. You told me all that silly stuff about hiding in a closet and asked me a bunch of fiddle-faddle about labor unions. The minute you get into trouble you come to your sister, right? Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, but...

“No buts. It was an act of Christian charity, if you ask me, for me to advise you to stay on your job. I could have very well played on your silly, baseless fears, couldn’t I? I would have much preferred you to come home and give me a hand here, but instead I told you to stick to your commitment and stay on the job, didn’t I? To my own disadvantage, didn’t I?”

“Yes, Maureen.”

Mrs. Hoade stepped out of the kitchen. “Almost ready to begin, Dorothy,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Right,” said Dorothy to Mrs. Hoade. “All right, Maureen. I’ll come on Labor Day,” she replied into the receiver.

“Well, that’s more like it,” said Maureen. Dorothy could have kicked herself for making that silly phone call while the Hoades had gone off to the baby’s burial. She had waited at the window until Matthew had started up the station wagon. Mr. and Mrs. Hoade had climbed in the front seat with him. It had been pouring rain. She had watched the sheets of water wash over the top of the old brown wood-sided Plymouth, over the end of the shiny black metal coffin that extended out onto the open tailgate. There had been a metal angel stuck to the back of the coffin sobbing over its lyre, wings spread like the wings of an eagle on a silver dollar. Dorothy grimaced at the memory of that awful angel. “Bridget’s fine,” Maureen was saying.

“Maureen, I have to go. Mrs. Hoade is calling me,” Dorothy interrupted.

“We have two and a half minutes left,” said Maureen pleasantly. “I got a letter from Mother and one from Kevin.” Dorothy hoped Mrs. Hoade wouldn’t mind her going home a day early. Everything had been so fine lately. I guess I do owe a debt of thanks to my sister, really, Dorothy told herself. Maureen had scoffed at Dorothy’s fears. She’d point-blank refused to go to the newspaper or the library and find out which labor union had been involved in a year-old scandal. She’d told Dorothy to mind her own beeswax, to come home with four hundred dollars or Daddy’d have her head, and to take advantage of night rates if she called collect again. Score one for Maureen, Dorothy thought as she listened to the latest injustice to which Arthur had been subjected. If it hadn’t been for my silly imagination, Dorothy told herself, Maureen wouldn’t have had one up on me, and I wouldn’t have gotten trapped into Labor Day.

“Are you still riding on those horses?” Maureen wanted to know.

“Yes,” said Dorothy, “and it’s so terrific! I had the loveliest ride today. I’ve got a pair of boots and...

“How much did
they
cost?”

“Nothing. I found them.”

“You probably took them.”

“I
asked
, Maureen,” Dorothy lied.

“Well, don’t come home with a fused spine.”

“Maureen.” Dorothy felt herself choke. She tried to bite back the tears that filled her eyes and made her whole mouth ache. She might as well have tried to stop the rain.

“Try to write Mom a little more, too. I’ve written her twenty-one times and she’s only had four letters from you. Time’s up. Take care of yourself. Good-bye,” said Maureen.

Dorothy looked at the receiver. She listened into the empty line. “Good-bye,” she said softly.

“Dorothy?” Mrs. Hoade asked, equally softly, from the kitchen doorway. “Would you like a little drink?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Hoade,” she said, “I’ll be fine.” Dorothy thought she might like one after all, but liquor affected her thinking badly. She had promised to help Mrs. Hoade with what was to be the
pièce de résistance
of the cookbook, and she didn’t want to ruin anything by being light-headed. “Jenny and Lisa!” Dorothy called up the stairs. “Very soon now!”

“We hear you,” one of them called back down. Dorothy wiped her eyes, went into the kitchen, put on a clean apron, and sat down at her desk with a stack of blank note cards. She was to observe Mrs. Hoade’s actions and record them.

“I wish Dinna was here,” said Mrs. Hoade.

“Wouldn’t she stay?” asked Dorothy.

“She refused to do anything as complicated as this. At least she made the broth,” said Mrs. Hoade hopefully.

“Oh,” said Dorothy. According to the French cookbook from which Mrs. Hoade was cribbing, Cold Turkey Gallantine in Aspic took two days all together to make. “Cold Boned Turkey in Amish Jelly” wrote Dorothy at the top of the first card. “Is that right?” she asked Mrs. Hoade.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Hoade answered. “Now watch me carefully.” Dorothy watched, pen in hand. Mrs. Hoade made a deep slit with a knife through the length of the turkey.

“Wait!” said Dorothy. Quickly she consulted the cookbook that lay open beside her. “I think you ought to turn it over,” she said.

“Why?” asked Mrs. Hoade.

“Well, it says here you’re supposed to cut it through the backbone, not the stomach.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Hoade. She flopped the twenty-five pound fowl over on its other side. “I hope it doesn’t leak,” she said. “If it does, I have two reserve turkeys in the icebox. Just in case I make an irreversible mistake.”

“We have all evening,” said Dorothy. “Let’s go slowly. Now, it says remove all the bones without disturbing the skin.”

Mrs. Hoade put the turkey down and walked around to stand behind Dorothy and read the cookbook’s instructions. Dorothy sat, her eyes on Mrs. Hoade’s face, her pen poised. Mrs. Hoade read through two pages of turkey anatomy. “We’ll need a pair of pliers to pull the sinews out,” she said. “Jenny!”

After a moment, “Yes, Mom?” floated downstairs.

“Get me a pair of pliers, will you please? In the drawer in the hall table.” Slow steps thumped down the hall and then down the back stairs.

“I’m going to do it another way,” said Mrs. Hoade, sighing at the cookbook. “That way will take all night.” Dorothy wrote down
Step One.

Mrs. Hoade busied herself with the knife for at least ten minutes without speaking. Dorothy wrote down,
Remove all meat from carcass. Discard bones. Place all the pieces of meat according to the bone they came off of
(sic,
better grammar) in neat stacks on another table.

Jenny came in with the pliers. She plopped them down on the table with a loud clank. “Did you save me any apples?” she asked.

“In the icebox,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Next to the cream.” Jenny took two green apples and walked back upstairs to the library.

“Now,” said Mrs. Hoade. She brushed her hands clean on her apron. “I wonder which the sinews are. Well, we’ll leave them in for now.” She took a needle and thread out of a drawer. “Now, I’m going to sew it back together again,” she said.

“You are?” Dorothy asked.

“Much easier,” said Mrs. Hoade. She sat in a chair and placed the three bits of meat from the left-hand drumstick together and stitched them into a drumsticklike form. Dorothy wrote
Step Two: Stitch all parts together to retain original shape of the turkey.
“Won’t there be a lot of thread when it’s finished?” Dorothy asked.

“We’ll take it out,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Dinna used thread on a chicken cavity last week.”

“But don’t you think it’ll fall apart?”

“The aspic will hold it together,” said Mrs. Hoade with a smile.

“But how will we get the thread out through the aspic?” asked Dorothy.

Mrs. Hoade snapped a piece of thread off between her teeth. “I think it will dissolve in the cooking,” she answered. Dorothy and Mrs. Hoade sewed the rest of the turkey up as best they could.

“I think I put some breast pieces on the wings,” Dorothy admitted.

“Well, it looks nice,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Look at that! It looks like a turkey again!”

“It’s amazing,” Dorothy agreed. She thought she would put a discreet change in her notes.
Use all light-colored thread,
she wrote.

“Jenny! Lisa! Come down now!” Mrs. Hoade yelled, in the meantime squeezing a large wet dish towel.

The girls sauntered into the kitchen after a minute or two. “What’s that?” Lisa asked.

“A turkey,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Now, Jenny hold one end of the towel and Lisa the other. That’s right. Now, here goes the turkey in the middle.”

“How can it be a turkey?” Jenny asked. “It’s just a big ball of...something.”

“Hold the towel,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Dorothy, are you taking notes?”

“Yes, Mrs. Hoade.”

“Okay,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Now hold it up like this. That’s it. Twist the end. That’s right.”

“It’s getting heavy, Mom,” said Lisa. The girls held the suspended turkey between them like a jump rope.

“Now swing it!” Mrs. Hoade instructed.

“Wrap string around circumference,” Dorothy read aloud, “in several places to prevent slippage during cooking.”

After the turkey had been rewrapped in the towel and held, this time by Mrs. Hoade at one end and Dorothy at the other, while Jenny tied the string around the middle, Dorothy wrote:
Two adults needed to hold turkey while the string goes around. Do not let turkey fall.

“Now,” said Mrs. Hoade, placing the bundle gently in the large baking pan of broth. “We need a weight, don’t we?”

Dorothy checked the Gallantine recipe. “Yes,” she said. “About ten pounds.”

“How about that iron pot up there?” Jenny suggested.

“That’s an antique,” said Mrs. Hoade.

“There’s half a cinder block outside the kitchen door,” Dorothy said. “I could go get it and wrap another wet towel around it.”

“Good thinking,” said Mrs. Hoade.

First Dorothy wrote down
Cinder block (half) or other weight.

Dorothy, Mrs. Hoade, Jenny, and Lisa all took one final look before they closed the oven door.

“Is it supposed to be that flat?” Lisa asked.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hoade.

The girls were permitted to stay up and watch
Dragnet
, in honor of this, the last recipe. Dorothy was asked if she would have a little celebration drink. Mrs. Hoade washed her hands, removed her apron, and ushered Dorothy into the living room. She sat down in her favorite chair, a wing-back covered with plum-colored velvet, next to a brass whaler’s lamp. She poured herself a Scotch on ice. “Now tell me what’s wrong with your sister,” she said. “You were so upset before.”

Dorothy settled herself on the sofa, her hands between her knees. “Oh, it’s really nothing,” she explained. “She wants me to go home Labor Day. That’s not what bothered me. She thinks my riding is a bad thing to do.”

“A bad thing to do! But you enjoy it so. Didn’t you have a good ride today?”

“Oh,
yes.
It was the most perfect day of the summer. We went back to... Dorothy stopped herself. “An old apple orchard,” she invented on the spur of the moment.

“You must have a drink. You must keep me company,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Get yourself a glass.” Mrs. Hoade walked, a little unsteadily, over to the liquor tray. Reluctantly Dorothy roused herself to fetch a glass from the kitchen. She wished she could have shared the day’s lovely experience with Mrs. Hoade. The sky had been bright blue, without a suggestion of haze. The air was dry and nearly cool. The birds had sung all over the woods like a chorus in a great leafy cathedral. She and Baldy had returned to the little Coburg graveyard. There a new grave, with a haze of baby-green grass upon it, marked Miriam Coburg, had taken its place among other members of its family. Again, Baldy had said that it ought to have been creepy. Dorothy’s gaze had fastened on all the other peaceful old stones and crosses, some so vine-covered that the names were illegible, some so old that even if the latest Coburg to pass had lived to a hundred and ten, she couldn’t possibly have known the ancestors who’d gone a century before. Whoever rested there, Dorothy had decided, rested, as the saying went, in peace, also in dignity and privacy. Her own Uncle Dennis had been buried in the St. James churchyard in Newburgh, she had told Baldy, “with strangers all around.”

Dorothy congratulated herself on her tact, as she brought an old-fashioned glass in from the kitchen. To mention the graveyard, no matter how beautiful it was, might have saddened Mrs. Hoade.

“No. That’s the wrong kind of glass for wine,” Mrs. Hoade said. “You’ll want an aperitif glass.” She fetched a gold-chased sherry glass from another cabinet. Pouring out some very dark red liquor, she told Dorothy, “Now this is only blackberry wine. It won’t hurt you and you ought to learn to drink properly. If you don’t start with something light now, you’ll be a drunk by the time you’re twenty-one. Now tell me. Is it money you’re worried about? I heard you tell your sister about the boots Baldy gave you. Something about paying for them?”