The Uses of Enchantment (20 page)

Dr. Hammer denied it all.

Fourteen years later, viewed as sequential pieces of reporting, Bettina’s case appeared ludicrously unwinnable and on its own would have probably amounted to little more than the empty accusations of a provenly troubled liar. But combined with the earlier assault led by Roz and her board and the general climate of paranoia surrounding minors and authority figures in the mid-to-late eighties, Dr. Hammer didn’t stand a chance. His license, already suspended indefinitely, was permanently revoked. Soon thereafter he disappeared from the headlines and, presumably, from Boston.

There existed no photographs of Dr. Hammer entering or leaving the courtroom. Instead the papers printed and reprinted, with evident schadenfreude, his author photo, which, as his situation worsened, slowly transformed from a confident head shot to a cautionary portrait of hubris. The repetitive appearance of this one photo also had a slightly morbid feel to it, as though Dr. Hammer had gone missing and people were hopefully looking for him, even though everyone secretly presumed he was dead.

M
ary had never been inside this particular storefront—a bookstore/stationery/notions/café that approximated the experience of stepping into somebody’s wealthy grandmother’s boudoir, a tensely desexed space that smelled headachingly of tea rose. The tables on which new books spiraled roofward in propeller-shaped piles were draped in toile tablecloths; the identical-looking saleswomen sported dark blond bowl cuts, pleated wide-wale corduroys, duck boots, and matching toile smocks; the square footage afforded the stationery area of packaged vellum greeting cards and wrapping papers and monogrammed desk sets far exceeded the square footage given over to books; the café was in fact a “tearoom,” which was in fact a corner of the store with three tables and a small bar, cordoned off by a few gold posts and a thick swoop of nautical-looking rope.

Mary was assaulted by a perky middle-aged saleswoman wielding a pair of silver scissors and a bolt of kelly green grosgrain ribbon.

“Was it two yards you wanted?” The woman punctuated her question with two emphatic snips of her scissors.

“Excuse me?”

“Of ribbon,” the woman said. “Two yards?”

“You’ve got me confused with another customer,” Mary said.

The woman scanned the store with skittish irritation. Mary scanned along with her, noting that she and Bettina were the only customers under fifty. For the second time that day she found herself feeling wrongly seen, and wondered if in fact she had a mistaken sense of how she appeared to the rest of the world. Like a prospective Semmering parent with a high school–aged daughter. Like a preppily de-eroticized matriarch with a penchant for toile and kelly green ribbon.

Mary lurked behind the “Local Authors” table, grabbing for camouflage purposes the first book her hand encountered. She ruffled the pages while focusing on Bettina, partially hidden behind a freestanding shelf of greeting cards. The greeting-card area was organized by feeling rather than event, the calligraphied signs reading
REJOICE
!
REGRET
,
SYMPATHY
,
EMPATHY
,
CLOSURE
. Bettina picked up a card in
LIMBO
…before shifting her attention to
FORGIVENESS
. Mary partly suspected she was meeting someone, an older mustier someone—why else would she be in this store?—but she also suspected that Bettina didn’t really have much of a purpose. In this store, in her life. In the grand sense, Bettina was purposeless. Unless skin care was a purpose. Unless she was up to something with Roz.

“Can I help you?”

A second middle-aged saleswoman with a blond bowl cut, indistinguishable from the first, flashed her a white-toothed grimace.

“Thanks, no,” Mary said to the woman.

“Oh! Have you
read
that
book
?” the woman gushed nervously. She wore a name tag.
ANNE
. She held an uncapped glue stick. “She’s one of our best-selling local authors.”

Mary looked at the book she’d been fake-reading.

The Tarnished Trivet
, by Rosemary Biedelman.

“Of course,” Mary said, more bitchily than she intended.

Anne retracted inside her too-big smock.

“I mean, who hasn’t read it?” Mary added to soften her remark.

“It’s been one of our most dependable best sellers,” said Anne, with mechanical enthusiasm. “I have customers who have read it four, five times.”

Anne test-drove a second grimace-smile. Poor woman, Mary thought. Obviously the salespeople worked on commission here; obviously Anne’s sales, given her rigor-mortised technique, were negligible to none.

Anne’s agonized smile persisted while she struggled to find a conversational hook.

Mary decided to help her out.

“I know Rosemary Biedelman,” she offered.

“You do!” said Anne.

“I do,” Mary said.

“So do I!” said Anne.

Anne fiddled anxiously with her glue stick. She foundered.

“How do you know Roz,” Mary said.

“She’s a regular customer here. Which is why we have her books stacked so prominently. How do you know…”

Then something occurred to Anne. She reddened. Her attitude toward Mary, previously wary-to-fearful, shifted. Anne visibly calmed, as though she’d been awarded an upper hand in this mysteriously weighted transaction.

Mary understood—Anne assumed that Mary was one of Roz’s patients, and Anne, clearly a self-loathing basket case, still clung to the only bit of flotsam left from her wreck of a life: only weak people went to therapy.

This assumption of Anne’s made Mary unhappy. No, it made her quietly enraged.

“Actually, I’m a colleague of Roz’s,” Mary said. “I’m a psychotherapist.”

“Oh!” Anne said.

“Yes indeed,” said Mary.

“Then you definitely don’t need to read self-help books do you?” Anne said.

“You know what they say about psychotherapists,” Mary said. “The blinder leading the blind.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have any idea since I’ve never been in therapy,” Anne said. “But as the book buyer for the store, I’m obliged to read all the self-help books. I don’t subscribe to most of the nonsense. Which is not to say they’re
all
nonsense,” Anne said quickly.

“Some of them are well beyond the tasteful realm of nonsense,” Mary said.

“Some of them speak to the soul. They’re not about weakness, they’re about
proud survival
. They’re about
self-definition
and
human fortitude
.”

“Also known as how-to denial manuals,” Mary said.

Anne wasn’t listening.

“I assume, since you know Roz, you’ve read this one?” she asked.

Anne hastened to a nearby bookshelf, her duck shoes suctioning across the varnished floor. She returned with a paperback copy of
Trampled Ivy: How Abusive Marriages Happen to Smart Women
.

Mary regarded it noncommittally.

“That was published before my time,” Mary said, scanning the familiar cover. She watched as Bettina made her leisurely way from
FORGIVE
-
NESS
to the tearoom. She left her purse on a table while she ordered at the bar.

“You should read it. Your mother should read it. Every woman in your family should read it,” Anne said fervently.

“That’s quite an endorsement,” Mary said.

“You’d be amazed how intelligent women put up with, well, with
less than ideal
situations, simply out of pride. We thought we were immune to that sort of working-class affliction, simply because we’d read Joyce and Proust. I went to Smith. Not technically an ‘Ivy,’ but as Dr. Biedelman explains in her introduction, the Seven Sisters are really considered Ivy League.”

“I’ve always thought so,” Mary said.

Mary turned the book over and flinched.

“Nice picture,” Mary said. “Of course she looks nothing like this in person.”

“Well,” Anne said defensively, “the photo’s quite old.”

“In person she has a mole—actually, it’s more like a wart—right here.”

She pointed to Roz’s nose.

“And a scar which you can really only see in certain lights. Of course this picture was taken before the cheek implants, which have turned out to be a disaster.”

“Really?” said Anne. “That’s strange. She just gave a reading here last weekend…”

“Stay away from silicon injections, that’s my advice to you. They slide, and one of them’s down around her chin now, rounding the horn, maybe coming up the other side for all we know.”

“Huh!” said Anne.

Anne’s front teeth, perfectly square and thick, reminded Mary of blank Scrabble tiles. They had been capped, clearly; unless she’d been a Smith College hockey goalie, her attachment to Roz’s book made perfect sense.

“Well,” Mary said contritely, “you’re a persuasive salesperson. I’ll take two copies.”

Anne took the compliment hard. She blushed the crimson-red shade of her preholiday turtleneck. This made Mary hate herself all the more.

“Could you wrap one?” Mary said. “I’m going to give one to my mother for her birthday.”

Anne offered to ring Mary up so she could continue browsing; Mary handed Anne her credit card.

“I’ll be in the tearoom,” she said.

Bettina had since returned to her table with a mug and a white plate on which a single chocolate truffle was centered. She’d taken a handful of greeting cards from the greeting-card section and absently wrote in one with a gold pen.

Mary sat at a table opposite Bettina. Though she’d never had an articulated plan, she’d loosely intended to introduce herself to Bettina as a reporter who was interested in writing a book about women’s traumatic experiences with male therapists and she recognized Bettina from the papers and did she mind the intrusion and etc., etc. But she’d lost her appetite for pretending to be people she wasn’t. She decided to leave the encounter to chance. Either Bettina would recognize her from Mary’s own ages-ago newspaper photos and they might talk, or she wouldn’t recognize her and nothing more would happen. Bettina would drink her tea and put on her red coat and leave. Mary would go home. In fact, she realized, she was extremely ready to go home. She was exhausted and she was starving in that exhausted starving way—starving but not in the least bit hungry.

Up close and without her hat, Bettina appeared older than Mary had originally thought—her eyes threatened by the fine concentric creases of skin surrounding them, her hair dyed a uniform chestnut color. She wore a stretchy black tunic over stretchy black pants. Mary watched as Bettina made an extended meal of her dusted truffle, pincering the tiny ball between two copper nails and taking tiny nips from it with her front teeth. Cocoa powder accumulated in the corners of her mouth unattractively like dried blood.

Mary tried to recall the strange power that Bettina, or rather the spectral story of Bettina, formerly exerted over her. Every study hall found Mary examining Bettina’s yearbook photo in the new library wing, her averagely pretty face framed by her trademark braids and appearing all the more malice-tinged for seeming so unexceptional. Even her list of activities was unexceptional, especially by overachieving Semmering standards.
FIELD HOCKEY I
,
II
,
III
.
ART CLUB I
,
II
. The photo promised that Mary, too—another unexceptional girl—might harbor darker impulses beneath her plaid skirt and navy cardigan and iron-on school crest.

Mary narrowed her eyes, reducing Bettina to a hazy outline. She tried to recapture that shadowy side of Bettina, but couldn’t. It saddened her, in the way the fog-shrouded coastline that used to evoke in her a sense of spooky promise and now left her dull saddened her. She couldn’t even summon the logic that allowed her to view Bettina as a wronged girl, a New England Dora whose stories were dismissed by the authorities as fantasy—or worse, lies. Bettina wasn’t a victim. The shame Mary endured while spinning through the microfiche in the Grove library convinced her that in her quest to avenge, in some misguided and unarticulated way, Bettina Spencer, she’d only wrongly involved more innocent people. So now, appropriately, Mary was unable to discern within Bettina a shred of her former enchantment. Again, the weighty feeling of age dropped over her. She was too old to be piqued by mistaken teenage fervor. She was too old to locate in another flawed being the seeds of her own bewitching potential.

Despite the increasing level of scrutiny Mary lavished upon her, Bettina remained unwittingly engrossed in her truffle and her greeting cards. Mary coughed. In an attempt to influence chance, she tried to catch Bettina’s attention, but Bettina, when she did glance up, was only interested in tracking the harried trajectories of the interchangeable saleswomen.

Anne approached Mary with a bag. “Here you are,” she said. She waited while Mary signed her credit card receipt.

“Thank you,” Mary said loudly. Bettina still had not noticed her.

“Excuse me for prying,” Mary said. “But didn’t you teach at Semmering Academy?”

“Me?” Anne said.

“Semmering Academy,” Mary repeated. “You look so familiar. I used to be a student at Semmering Academy.”

Bettina glanced up from her greeting cards; she stared intently at Anne’s face.

“No, I’m sorry, I never had a job until this one,” said Anne.

Mary watched as Bettina, eyes still locked firmly on Anne, slipped the greeting cards she’d yet to pay for into her purse.

It was all Mary could do not to laugh. Brilliant, she thought. Add shoplifting to a list that already included arson and perjury. (
ARSON I
,
II
.
PERJURY III
,
IV
.
SHOPLIFTING II
.)

“My mistake,” Mary said. She watched as Bettina donned her gloves with the languidness of a practiced thief. She even possessed the nerviness to pause by the door and ask the cashier for the time.

She was gone.