Pretty Leslie (15 page)

It was as if she had always been waiting for exactly what had happened, for something large enough—however terrible it might be—to summon strength and intelligence and focus them on a clear necessity. A shrewd, sullen girl, Peg had sparred with life before Ben's trouble. Raised in a loudly religious family, she had seen one older sister marry and go off to Africa as a missionary's wife, then come home shattered with nothing to show for her zeal but an orphaned child and a head full of grotesquely fragmented pieties. Of no use ever again on this earth. She had seen her other sister, Louise, settle down to raising children in a small town, neither happy nor unhappy with her lot, but in a kind of default as if she could imagine nothing better.

Peg had gone one year, herself, to a teachers' college in the western part of the state, had learned few things there that impressed her as much as her distaste for the prospect of teaching. She liked children. She might have liked learning if it had not seemed to her so bloodless and stale.

She might have married, after her year in college, though there was often a kind of sullen condescension in her manner that discouraged young men. And she was not pretty. She would have had to take what came along. So, instead, she had worked seven years for the Light and Power Company before that summer when something had to be done for Ben.

Surely she was the one soul in Green Rock with depth and force enough to face squarely the monstrous impossibility of the fact. She did not know everything. She knew what she knew and, by her very denial, would affirm her knowledge that a fragile, promising child was a murderer. In some fashion that only time and consequence would explain, she must have welcomed the knowledge. At last there was something in her life large enough to unleash the woman she guessed herself to be. The smile that Ben saw reflected in the train window had about it some element of personal satisfaction, of anticipation. It was not for his deliverance alone that she gave thanks.

In Kansas she had declared that he was already punished enough, meaning, if she meant to declare anything more than her wish for the future, that he had been punished in advance of his crime. She had closed the accounts with conscience, with the old conscience that dangled its streamers of living tissue into the caverns of the past.

But this was not at all to say that conscience should have nothing to do with their lives in the future. It was simply that she had taken her terrible cue to write the year One on the calendar. She would make a life for them by choice rather than one smothered by the dictates of what had—who knows how long ago?—been fatally established.

She had not much experience in what to choose. All the better. She had a keen Yankee eye for sound goods and for situations without upper limits. She settled them in a small apartment in Queens in which they lived through the war years. She worked, as long as she had to, in the accounting department of a hospital supply house. By the time the war ended and he was halfway through high school, she was in partnership with a woman named Bishop, running a camera and photographic supply store in Flushing. They had a house of their own by then.

A lesser woman with the same determination to change her life in a strange big city might have gone in for adult education courses and other such ready-to-wear additions to the personality. Not Peg. All she had ever needed was the clear necessity of selecting for herself, of following leads that seemed good. She worked, she mothered Ben, she read a lot and made friends with people who improved over the years. She refused to have even the skeleton of her own past—the twenty-seven years of indecision and purposelessness—in their closet. In the city to which they had come, no one presented them with bills for life over with and done. Why pay out of some profitless remembrance of guilt? She was one of those for whom the city and wartime prosperity were perfectly suited. In what was there to be taken and used, she saw at last the reflection of her true identity.

Ben remembered her during this time as tireless, always eagerly taking on additional work or play from the endlessly offered bounty around them. She was as quick to volunteer as hostess at the USO as to accept invitations for swimming or picnicking on the Long Island beaches, to take on overtime at the office as to run into Manhattan with friends for dinner or the shows she liked at Rockefeller Center. And it was likely that this tirelessness was not so much the sign of inordinate strength—though she was a strong woman—as from the lifting of neurotic handicaps. The incalculable duty she had assumed swept them off and gave her natural strength full play.

Year by year she got better-looking. It was not merely that she dressed better. The habits of her mind and body changed and the old Kansas dowdiness faded like a memory of bad times. She was better-looking at forty than she had been at twenty-six.

She mothered him conscientiously. No doubt in the beginning she was overprotective and overalert. Their new life was still precarious. The best of the choices open to her now was the freedom to choose correction of this fault. In a year or two when she saw—when she had learned how to see—that he was making good and normal headway, she loosened the apron strings and let him know it. Her own contentment and increasing poise were the best of what she had to give him. Her shrewdness in realizing this was the pin on which her success hinged.

Only, wasn't there some ineradicable shadow in this resurrection for which she deserved so much credit? For the easiest-breathing nights, the absence of bad dreams, the nonchalant freedom of fighting her hard when they quarreled (over his coming in late from a high-school party, smelling of bourbon though by no means drunk), standing up to her with a clear conscience in defense of his whims—like any other boy of his age and intelligence—for these privileges of normality wasn't there some excess payment of gratitude, at least some rumor of debt that could absolutely never be silenced?

In the end he thought so—and was happy to believe she had lost the ability to detect it. She married, at last, when he was in college. It was a sign of her faith that they had made it all the way, she and he, up from that graveyard where Billy Kirkland died to the height where neither would need the other's guarantee that it had never really happened.

She married well. If her first marriage had been to an enormous ghost of disorder, she had lain under that horror uncomplainingly until it was spent, vanquished by the sheer female loyalty she had paid it. She had earned her fun. Bill Capwell, who had worked through two other wives in his search for her, meant to see that she got it “on the sunset trail,” as he said good-naturedly of them both. He was a good sort—an electronics engineer and amateur, star-class yachtsman on the Sound, still of good appetite in his fifties and in love with Peg as if they were both adolescents.

She died about eighteen months after her marriage. Death came without warning; she died of an embolism developing after an operation so commonplace that no one was worried.

There was a superficially cruel irony in her death at forty-seven, so short a time after she had begun to live for herself instead of for Ben.

Nevertheless he suspected she had died at the right time. Victory was more important for her than happiness. Happiness and leisure might have given her time to question her triumph. She had died still under military discipline, so to speak—in unquestioned obedience to the idea that human salvage can always be chosen. She might have looked back from the safe terrain of her happiness. She had brought them out of Kansas on terms that forbade looking back.

She had made him live with those terms. She had taught him not to ask who killed Cock Robin or Billy Kirkland, either, and if that meant never quite satisfying himself about who he was, she supposed that his accomplishments would give him his identity. If he had been nothing, he could become something. If he had been a murderer, his life was doomed before he had a fair chance to begin. (“Fair”—there was nothing on earth or in heaven that Peg prized more than fairness. The word
fair
echoed in the memory of her after she was dead. She had turned her back on religion, one supposed, because it held with a view of life that was to her unfair.)

Time would test the quality of her victory. But victory it had been, unquestionably. She died while it was still bright.

She had lived long enough to know that Ben and Leslie were going to marry. That completed her design. As Dolores Calfert would later, Peg simply loved Leslie. Leslie was the prize for unfaltering gallantry.

Here was Peg's Ben, the rescued child of catastrophe, entering his interneship and preparing to marry Miss Manhasset herself, Leslie Skinner, late of Barnard College, now junior reporter (self-made, from pencil-sharpening office girl up, by dint of vigorous socializing and incredibly devoted work) on a famous news magazine, hard-handed from tennis, five times engaged, the unscathed partner in seven fornications (though neither Ben nor Peg knew this, of course, at the time; both would have shrugged off the knowledge anyhow), flirtatious with older people (she kept Bill and Peg Capwell giggling all evening, drinking a little more than they were used to to keep up with her), liberal, articulate, broad in the pelvis (not quite
fat
, just strong, Peg would have noted), wisecracking, pretty, just restless enough to suggest she'd want at least two children quickly (which Leslie claimed was indeed the case).

So it was good that Peg died before she understood how much this girl still needed. She might well shrug at the shortcomings. Everyone has them. Peg knew that. Had she guessed, even as well as Ben did before he married, what abysses yawned in Leslie's boredom, she would have been broken by the unfairness.

chapter 9

F
ROM EARLY IN HIS COURTSHIP
Ben guessed what he would have to do for this one. Sometimes when he tried his best with her—times when she could most have trusted his gentleness—he had seen something go badly wrong with her. He saw how unaccountably she gave way her positions of strength, as mystified as he by her unreasonable failures.

She scared him, but he loved her all the more stubbornly for not yet understanding why such strength could fold so cheaply. It was awful to see her give in. Then he could feel a taut fishline tremble and sear in his hand. He recognized unwillingly what it was that tore at her throat when she began to cry without good cause, blaming her tears on “the lousy curse” or blaming it on nothing, saying “It's the way I am,” defying him to find an explanation that would keep her from suffering her own special Leslie nature.

“You could analyze me,” she said with a curious, mongrel glare in her ritzy eyes. “You're no doubt very good at that. ‘Psychoanalytically oriented'—someone at your party said that about you and I wrote it in my diary as an example.”

He held stuffily to his middle ground. “I'm too oriented to try to impose it.”

“Then baby me,” she said, almost as if she hated him. “You know about babies and can get around their childish humors.”

“I leave my tricks at the clinic. I promised to do that.”

“I don't think I'm schizo,” she said gravely. “I purposely never remember those terms, though. I think psychological terms are the ugliest. I'm very sensitive to people and know a lot about them and it never makes sense if I try to codify it in terms like
schiz, paranoid, neurotic, manic, catatonic
. I'm so sick of smart people who think they explain something if they can put on a label.”

“Fortunately you aren't any of those things and neither are the people you know.”

“What am I, then?” she asked in a moment of splendidly trusting candor, not asking him because he was a doctor, but because he was the man she meant to have for a true husband. “Tell me what I am.”

The fishline had stopped burning his hand. Nothing hurt her throat. So the answer was plainly “You're a great and wonderful girl. You have a pelvis that would carry a Minotaur. Life pinches you sometimes. It's bound to hurt sometimes.”

“Am I some kind of a Madame Bovary, then? Nothing satisfies me. Really. You oughtn't marry me.”

“I oughtn't smoke unfiltered cigarettes or drink after dinner or buy things on time. Look out, I'm
going
to marry you. Willful fellow. Too late to warn me now. And my literary friends used to make it a point that they and I and
everyone
else were Madame Bovary. So what can you do?”

“Marry me anyway,” she answered promptly. “Please, oh please, marry me.”

“No problem,” he said.

So—always—it was easy to dismiss the hints of his intuition. They were there. They were not persistent. They were not useful. They were needles over which a sizeable haystack of good times and good sense—growing up—had been accumulated. But, unlike the proverbial needles, they had ways of finding themselves, of asserting that they were, after all, needles, and not hay.

He was then, during his engagement to Leslie, not only “devoted in word, thought, and deed,” as she said of him teasingly. He was normally elated that she was letting him sleep with her in her snug, economical apartment on Grove Street. He was in love and in love with all the luxuries of her body, drunk with the pure delights of sense she gave with unabashed fondness, comradely, passionately and just a tiny bit condescendingly—as if she were priestess or queen offering grace to a confessed but worthy sinner.

One muggy August noon when they had slept late after a party and the drug of heat and fatigue had done odd things to his nerves, he found himself unexpectedly and weirdly in contest with her. Both of them were nude on a bed cluttered with sheets,
Journal-American
comics, coffee cups and toast crumbs. Mounted, he was riding lazily between her slightly flexed, immobile thighs. Half raised on his hands, he smiled down at her face turned sideways on the pillow, at the crude blush that discolored her neck from shoulder to the point of her ear, at the damp, wisping hair pasted to the side of her jaw—smiled and adored. His nostrils were full of the hot perfume from the street beyond the window blind. And in the sticky, slow idling of time, the laving of his senses produced first a pure gratitude and then an increasing anxiety to repay, repay. He was not on her to take his pleasure but to pay a debt, to give even against the resistance and unwillingness of the taker.