Pretty Leslie (17 page)

Her hair had been chopped short at the time the picture was made. He could recall no other picture that didn't show her with long hair. Her mother had taught her to be proud of it.

Her eyes were squinted as if dazzled by a sundown. And though there was really very little physical resemblance, something about the fierce inwardness of the expression tricked him into thinking, That's the way I must have looked at the same age.

He showed the picture to Leslie.

“It's true,” she said.

“I didn't know you were ever that.… I know how preoccupied you are with your weight, but—”

“‘Pray how on earth do you do it?'” she asked amiably. “Self-discipline, Buster. Without an ideal of beauty I could make two hundred and fifty. Don't you know that?”

Over his faint protest she burned the picture then and there. “I was a fool to keep it this long.”

He supposed he remembered the picture more vividly because she had burned it. It impressed him like a clue.

He still remembered it when he went to Venezuela that summer, for it had suggested to him that she, too, was waiting a proper time to confess a guilt exactly proportioned to his.

Impossible. Her childhood had been mild and sheltered. No one had ever refuted her claim that she, at least, among the neurotics she knew, had had a happy childhood. So it passed through his mind only for a minute that she had always been guilty of something that had not yet happened.

Part Two

chapter 10

L
ESLIE STOOD AT EASE
on the Biemans' lawn. She tapped her sunglasses on the knee of her print dress like a proprietor of the earth, the entrepreneur of June, a lady creator pleased by her creation.

The lush, knee-high cornfields and the pastures piled up to a green horizon looked exactly like the work of her Arcadian good humor. The sky with its little pony herd of clouds was nothing less than a tribute to her taste. All the exurban domiciles around, passing themselves off as farmhouses, seemed to her a joke worthy of the old Leslie. Let it be known she was here among oxygen and foliage to hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Yet, in all humility, she thought this might be an occasion too good to waste on just herself. She was genuinely though resignedly sorry that old Ben had to miss this, just by going to Venezuela, where he was sure to be appreciated less.

She wrinkled her nose at Dolores, who had ridden out from town with her in the station wagon, and knew that Dolores shared some of her mood. But all joy seeks its maximum, and she wished she had Ben there (oh, just for this moment of arrival; things would get dull if you gave them time) instead of merely a jolly friend.

She knew what Ben would say. Wide-eyed and shrewd, he would take in the farmhouse gleaming like alabaster on its mounded hilltop, the sleek tumescent curves of barn roofs way down beyond the swimming pool and the end of the lawn, the Black Angus cattle loafing like bit players on a hick location, bored in the summer doldrums, the Indian grandeur of white silos, the slatted shelter like a Temple of Love amid a grove of poplars, and the parked cars of guests arrived earlier. He would say, “This certainly makes one understand the hunger of the peasants for The Land.” Sharing such a lyrically ridiculous thought, they might have hummed together like two matched tuning forks with a satiric tone. All by herself she made a sound like one hand clapping.

For a moment she stood there transposing it into images she could preserve and carry home to keep for him. She thought she would report that very few sentiments of agrarian reform agitated her spirit. The farm and white buildings seemed a sassy show of conspicuous consumption à la mode, altogether too easygoing in their pretensions to merit the wrath of yelping, finger-pointing sociologists. Seeing this retreat of his old age made her realize just who it was that Daddy Bieman had always reminded her of, for the estate put her in mind of photographs and news stories of the farm at Gettysburg to which Dwight D. Eisenhower had retired.

A buffet and a sparkling table of liquor had been laid out on the vast spread of the unscreened back porch. The employees of the Studio and guests (soft-sold customers of long standing and small accounts—the big deals would be handled elsewhere and otherwise) were scattered down the slope from the house to the swimming pool. They made bright clusters of Tahitian sport shirts and summer prints. Maybe they could be taken for peasants here to sack a manor house, but, if so, they appeared already glutted and spoiled by the ease of their conquest.

She led Dolores down to greet them all, suddenly a little timid, sensing that her exuberant spirits were a kind of exposure.

Whatever had made her timid proved it had no teeth. The first Studio face they encountered was Don Patch's. Putting him down was surely a practice stroke, a warm-up. He was so utterly easy to get the best of.

He grinned like an urchin pretending to know all about adults and said, “Some layout the Daddybird's got. You think he makes this kind of money out of our work?”

“If he does, we'd do well to organize,” she said.

Patch was not amused by her reply, she thought. Or rather he overlooked it as if doing her a favor by ignoring a stupid comment. He said, “Just get here? You haven't seen the coons who work for him. Couple of women and a big buck in a white uniform. He's some gen'mun, no joke, suh, honey.” His blue eyes probed at her face from under his sweated red ringlets, callous and teasing, wondering if he'd got her goat by calling the Negroes
coons
—when what really offended her was the degree to which he was stimulated by the luxury of the place. Wretched little albino.…

She put on her sunglasses and smiled inscrutably into his chops. She decided very simply that he was the enemy. Today, once and for all, if he didn't leave her alone, she would put him in his redheaded little place. For the common good.

“Ah do love to be suhved bah niggahs,” she said with remote, patrician coolness.

Dolores went upstairs with her while she changed into her bathing suit. Mrs. Bieman—apparently a character in her own right and a fit mate for Daddy—showed them to a bedroom on the north side of the house, from which they looked over the back lawn and the opulent gentle rise of the hills beyond.

“This is the room that
House Beautiful
paid for,” Mrs. Bieman told them. “Daddy knows the people and when I had an idea I said, ‘Daddy, if you'll let me have a photographer and an artist, I think I can sell them on the possibilities of that north room because I have me an idee.' So I got them interested all right and I took me a chance and invested and wrote the copy myself and it paid off and I had my anteekees for nothing. That chest—”

“It's gorgeous,” Leslie said. Barefooted, she skipped across the carpet to the chest, caressed the gnarl of cherry with the flat palms of her hands, made love to the Empire clock atop it, turned and smiled over her shoulder, tossing her hair as she went into the static pose.

As she was meant to be, Mother Bieman was conquered. “You write the copy for Daddy. Some of it, I mean. Don't you?” she asked Leslie. Her mouth stayed open in unguarded admiration as Leslie deprecated herself with a trembling shrug. She was like a woman peering through one-way glass. “Daddy's just raved about you, and String too. Your husband's a chiropractor or something. You're the one—”

“Pediatrician,” Leslie said, skinning out of her dress and beginning to peel down one long stocking. “Not quite the same.”

Mother Bieman derided her own mistake with peals of laughter. “‘Chiropractor.' Isn't that the silliest? Of course I know what a pediatrician is.”

“A foot doctor,” Leslie said gravely, stretching her stocking between her hands and spreading it on the lumpy chenille cover of the great bed.

“Podiatrist. Podiatrist!” Mother Bieman shouted, belching ever so slightly in her delight. “Now, you mustn't tease me because I made a mistake. I know. I know. I think String told me chiropractor. That boy. Both he and Daddy told me you were such a wit, and now you're teasing me.”

Reaching behind her for her brassiere snaps, Leslie switched to the tone she had heard Ben use when he soothed stubborn little boys, flattering and patronizing and ever so faintly menacing. “He's been asked by the State Department's Council on Preventive Medicine to attend a round table in South America. He's there now.”

“I'm sure he's very good,” Mother Bieman said, sucking in her gut and arching her back in an attempt to hoist her own nipples toward the horizontal.

“He's still making his way in this town,” Leslie said, “though he has as big a practice as I want him to have and works two days a week—for free—at the municipal clinic. Little colored children. But he's very much respected by his teachers, and a man from Columbia arranged for him to attend this conference.” If, when she stood completely nude on the fluffy carpet, she paused, it was for no more than a fraction of a second; no more than time enough to recollect something ever so important that she had to say about her husband to this woman who, after all, seemed keenly interested. Then she turned slowly, gracefully, stretched all the way across the width of the bed, straining taut the long muscles of her back, as she reached for her nun-black bathing suit.

“It was so stupid of me to say ‘chiropractor.'” Mother Bieman lamented. She waved her arms as if she might lacerate her flesh with the long scarlet nails of both hands. She did not grind her teeth in chagrin, but the long molars clicked a couple of times. “I'd no more think of going to a chiropractor than to a veterinarian,” she said. “I think it's disgraceful they're not outlawed like patent medicines or something you don't know what you're buying. Quacks.”

Leslie tied the halter string of her suit around her neck. Meekly she said, “I'd love to see your place in
House Beautiful
.”

“Oh. Oh, no. Oh, it's nothing. It's not even a
page
. I'd be ashamed to let
you
see it,” Mother Bieman protested. She began to back away from Leslie, moving irregularly, as if in the middle of a tug of war. She backed almost to the door, protesting that she would never, never, never show it. Then she said, “Would you look at it? Just a minute. I'll get it. You really want to see it?”

At the window, watching the summer idlers on the lawn, making her notes on them as well, Dolores had missed none of this play. The fluffy, starch-white curtains enveloped her vision like smoke, hiding nothing from her amusement.

Dear God, the girl can't help it, she thought. She's got to do it to them all, whatever age, whatever sex, maybe even animal, mineral, or vegetable. They've got to love her. Wait'll she goes to make friends with those Black Angus.

Dolores not only did not mean to swim; she did not mean to suit up in company like this. She took a seat in a canvas sling chair near the pool, and—what with one thing and another, one person and another coming to jabber with her, to bring her food and drink—there she seemed to stay. Near the center of things. Near the crossroads where a person no longer inclined to the strenuous could to some extent be in on everything.

The pool itself pleased her, the proximity of water which comforts all animals when their skin feels drought. Come right down to it, it wasn't much of a pool. Perhaps it was forty feet long at the most and not more than twenty wide. Though it was of concrete, there was hardly any lip skirting it. The splendid blue grass of the lawn grew almost to the water's edge. The water itself was cloudy—not changed as often or as efficiently as the water in public pools, she supposed, and she was sure of that when Daddy Bieman, wearing a vast straw sombrero on his bald head, went out of his way to declare that biochemical tests proved his water to be not only pure but “positively bacteriostatic.”

Leslie crawled out of the pool right at their feet when Daddy said that. “What do it mean, Daddy Bieman?” she wanted to know. She had worn no bathing cap, and her hair was sleeked down to show the bony back of her head. Her black and rosy figure eased onto the grass and Daddy squatted beside it. Leslie had never called him anything but Mr. Bieman before. “What do that mean?” she repeated, edging her smile under his sombrero like a spatula thrust under a frying egg. “You mean your water will cure boils? Prevent hematosis? Ease gout? Cure possessions? I never swam in this here bacteriostatic stuff before.”

In Bieman's eyes appeared the misleading satyric glint that old men affect. He put his arm around Leslie's slippery shoulders and ever so slightly squeezed.

“It means I think one of the dogs drowned in it last week,” he said, “and the damn stuff is so dirty we ain't found him down there yet. Honey chile, with a torso like yours, if you can't recognize a pure bull-shitter yet at your age, you need someone to look after you. You don't see me swimming in that slop, do you?” He nodded solemnly, forgetting that the hat hid the resemblance between his head and an often-used battering ram. “The truth is it's all right. I'd use it to water my bourbon if the bourbon was stout enough to stand it. Having a good time, little girl?”

Yes, she was. She was having a marvelous, tremendous, gigantic good time, and not the least of the pleasures was to win the easy heart of her boss as completely as she had won his wife. When he found she hadn't eaten yet and had only taken one drink, Daddy Bieman rose ponderously to his feet and yelled to his colored man on the verandah to bring a plate and a bourbon for a lady.

Who? How many? the Negro pantomimed.

A freckled, pendulous forefinger indicated only one nymph at the master's feet. The answer to that was a circled thumb and forefinger and a grin that flashed like a naval semaphore. Plainly Daddy and his servant were on the best of terms, and that made the day all the nicer. Daddy might joke about dogs in the water, but not about “coons.”

While she ate, sitting in the grass at his feet and by no means excluding Dolores from the conversation, Leslie got him talking about his early days as an art student.