Leave Well Enough Alone (13 page)

“D
ADDY, WILL YOU PLAY
with us today? Will you go swimming with us today?” Lisa asked, pushing the cereal up the sides of her bowl to give it the appearance of having been eaten.

“If I have time, Lisa. I have lots to do. I have to wait for a call from Mommy.”

As Dorothy poured herself a second cup of coffee, Mr. Hoade turned to her and remarked, “You’re an ambitious type of kid, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hoade?”

“Daddy, when is Mommy coming home?” Lisa asked.

“I told you before, I don’t know. Sit down,” he said to Dorothy, “but first get me another cup. Pour the rest of that out. It’s cold.”

Dorothy set the coffee before Mr. Hoade. She sat. Her head pounded from a nearly sleepless night.

“You really the editor of your school paper?” Mr. Hoade asked.

“Why, yes,” Dorothy answered. Lying, she figured, would be easier than explaining why she’d lied.

“Well, you must be the best student in the whole school, then.”

“No.” She hesitated. “Not really. Why?”

“Because,” said Mr. Hoade leaning across the table and smiling slyly, “editors of high-school papers are always seniors!”

“Not at Sacred...

“You interested in politics?”

“Yes, well, I...

“Not in labor unions.”

Dorothy took a scalding swallow of coffee. “Well, my Dad belongs to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association and it’s awfully dull,” she said, relieved to be allowed to finish a sentence.

“Daddy, what’s wrong with the baby? Why is it sick? “Lisa asked.

“I told you, it’s just very sick, that’s all. We won’t know anything more until Mommy or the doctor calls. Now shut your mouth and eat your breakfast.”

“How can I eat my breakfast with my mouth shut?” Lisa whined.

“Do you want Daddy to swim with you?”

Lisa toyed with her spoon. She didn’t answer. Mr. Hoade turned back to Dorothy. “I just thought I’d tell you something,” he said smugly, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands over his stomach. “If you want to be a reporter, you ought to know one thing.”

“What’s that, Mr. Hoade?” asked Dorothy, knowing she was supposed to say that and wishing his chair would topple beneath him.

“Power,” he continued, lighting a cigarette, “real power, is never where you think it is. It’s never where people want you to believe it is. You probably think all these glamor boys who run for office are the people who make things work. Not in a pig’s eye,” he said, blowing a stream of smoke straight up in the air. “Except for a few committee chairmen in Washington, and the son of a bitch in the White House, union president, this union in particular, is one of the most powerful jobs in the country. But my man doesn’t get his picture in the papers unless there’s a strike, and he doesn’t have his hair done by some monkey from Paris. Someday,” Mr. Hoade added after making a face at the dregs in his coffee cup, “you’ll know things like that.”

“Thank you for telling me,” said Dorothy as earnestly as she could.

“You never heard of my man before, did you?”

“No, Mr. Hoade.”

“You probably thought you were going to meet somebody like Sparkman or Kefauver, didn’t you?”

“Well, I knew his name began with an N, so...

“My man is a whole lot bigger than Sparkman or Kefauver or Stevenson or all of them rolled into one.”

“Yes, Mr. Hoade.” said Dorothy. She wondered what a “monkey from Paris” was.

“Well, you didn’t get very far last night, so you can ask me what you want for your paper.”

“Well,” she said, swallowing the last of an English muffin, “the only thing I can think of to ask is...wasn’t that the union that had the trouble recently?”

“What trouble?” he asked coldly.

Dorothy gulped down some more coffee. “Well, um, there was a murder, wasn’t there? Of a man who was going to be the president of the union? And there were some witnesses to it? The children’s governess, wasn’t it? And one of them was killed before the trial? And the other one hasn’t ever been found?”

“You know something, honey?” said Mr. Hoade.

“Yes, Mr. Hoade?”

“One of the first things about being a good reporter is getting your facts straight.”

“I didn’t mean... I just thought...

“And if you were a real reporter, instead of a fifteen-year-old kid, and what you just described didn’t happen to be in a different union, which it is, and didn’t happen to be mixed up with the Lindbergh kidnapping, and you brought up anything like that to me or anybody at the party last night, you know where you’d be right now?”

“No, sir.”

“Out of a job with your head in a toilet!”

“Daddy, that’s not nice!” said Jenny.

“Excuse
me
!” he said. “You’re absolutely right, honey, and don’t tell Mommy I said that. But it’s true. There’s a whole lot of things in this world that aren’t so nice, and you know what I’d do if I were you?” he asked Dorothy.

“No, sir.”

“I’d go to a nice college and meet a nice boy and have some nice babies and forget about anything else.”

“But,” Dorothy gasped, “I don’t
want
to! I want to
be
somebody!”

Mr. Hoade held his head cocked to one side. A habit of Lisa’s, Dorothy noticed. He looked at her keenly and grinned devilishly. “I knew you’d say that,” he said.

Sensing an opening, Dorothy plunged right in. “Mr. Hoade, may I ask you something? I mean it’s none of my business, I suppose, but I was just curious. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want, but something is bothering me.”

“Like the man said, shoot!”

“Well, do you think it’s right to keep a mongoloid baby separated from its brothers and sisters? I mean its sisters? I mean to say, or to ask, is it just a plain old mongoloid, because sooner or later Jenny and Lisa will...

Mr. Hoade drummed his fingers on the table. He looked quickly at both his daughters. “Go up and get your suits on,” he told them. “I’ll meet you at the pool.”

Jenny shrugged and left the table, twisting her hair around her finger. Lisa slid her uneaten cereal into the sink and followed Jenny out. When they had gone, Mr. Hoade turned back to Dorothy. “What exactly did Maria say to you?” he asked.

“You mean...Mrs. Hoade?”

“Mrs. Hoade,” he repeated slowly, lighting another cigarette.

“She...she told me the truth, I guess. That your...daughter is a mongoloid. She didn’t say that to the girls.”

Mr. Hoade leaned across the kitchen table. He tapped Dorothy’s gold cross with his fingernails. She jumped. “Curiosity killed the Catholic!” he said and chuckled at his pun.

Dorothy wished her head were clearer. She sat in the empty kitchen, staring at the dirty breakfast dishes. I ought to make myself do them, instead of leaving them for Dinna. Her hand lay shadowless on the cool marble table. Dorothy’s head bent, suddenly, like a flower bowed with rain. She slept.

“Where’d you get those boots?” Lisa asked.

“Baldy gave them to me.”

“They sure are awful-looking.”

“They won’t be, when I finish cleaning them up,” said Dorothy, scraping at the heel of one boot with a piece of twig. “Why don’t you take a swim, Lisa?”

“When did Baldy give them to you?” Jenny asked.

“Yesterday.”

“There goes Daddy,” said Lisa.

Dorothy turned to see Mr. Hoade driving away. He was going to the hospital, he’d said with a funny look at Dorothy’s riding boots. “Horses, huh?” he’d added.

“How come you didn’t have them when you came in from riding last night?” Lisa’s voice began to assume a teasing rhythm. Dorothy reddened and clenched her teeth. “I’m gonna tell Mom,” said Lisa matter-of-factly.

“Just what are you going to tell your mother?” Dorothy snapped, rubbing the heel of her boot vigorously.

“That you stole them.”

“I didn’t steal them.”

“How come you went out of your room last night? I heard you. And how come you came back into your room after a while with those boots? I peeked out and saw you.” Dorothy said nothing. “Are you going to hit me?” Lisa asked. Gladly, Dorothy would have thrown Lisa into the pool and drowned her at that very moment.

“When Baldy drove me home yesterday,” Dorothy said, “she dropped me at the end of the driveway because she couldn’t turn around with the horse van. We got...talking and I forgot the boots. I went out to get them, so there.”

“I just thought,” said Lisa, “that maybe you’d been poking around where you’re not supposed to go. I know there’s an old stable cellar around here. It’s full of poisonous snakes and black widow spiders. Mom said you could sue us for a million dollars if you got hurt.”

“Lisa,” Jenny interrupted, “if Mom fires Dorothy, you know who we get?”

“Mom,” said Lisa, “that’s who.”

“Dinna,” said Jenny.

Bless you, Jenny, said Dorothy silently. You get an extra cupcake for that. She polished carefully and lovingly while the two girls played Go Fish and then Gin Rummy. She wondered if Lisa would, after all, tell her mother about the boots. Well, it didn’t matter. Dorothy intended to tell Mrs. Hoade herself when the right moment came. An awful thought crossed her mind. Mr. Hoade had looked curiously at them that morning. Could they have been his boots when he was a boy? There was no difference that she knew between men’s and women’s riding boots. She would have preferred them to have been worn by a long-dead groom and not have belonged to Mr. Hoade.

“Dorothy?”

“Yes, Jenny.”

“Lisa’s cheating.”

“I am not,” said Lisa stoutly.

Play with them, Dorothy, a silent voice instructed. It was Baldy’s voice.

“Okay. I’ll play with you,” said Dorothy, dropping the boot and the polishing rag.

A breeze sprung up, carrying with it the scent of rain and roses. It scattered the playing cards all over the tiles. Several of them blew into the pool. Dorothy jumped in to retrieve them. She swam after the queen of hearts, which had floated down to the deep end. The card turned over in the water and began to sink as her hand reached out for it. She plunged beneath the surface and made another grab for it, but it eluded her and drifted down to the bottom of the pool. Dorothy pulled herself out of the water. She would have to dive for it. For an instant she peered at the queen’s passive face through the clear water. Queens on playing cards were dressed something like nuns. As she forced herself down to the deepest part of the pool, right over the drain where the card lay, she realized she was trying to put bits of a puzzle together in her mind.

It had started that morning in the kitchen, when she’d fallen asleep. No, not really, Dorothy corrected herself. It started last night. I thought it was the storm that kept me awake. I wanted it to be the storm. Dorothy rose to the surface of the pool, gasping for breath, queen of hearts in hand. She began plucking the other cards off the water. They had not sunk.

In a queer, unborn dream that had come to her as she had sat slumped over the kitchen table that morning, something had been revealed to her, perhaps some signal. She tried to remember what it was. She’d been sure that she was back in school, sitting in the front row of religion class. Reverend Mother was drilling the class in catechism. Dorothy, in the dream, kept trying not to nod off, but her eyes were too heavy to open and her arms felt paralyzed. She willed them to move, to no avail. In vain she tried to answer Reverend Mother’s questions. What were the questions? Dorothy emerged from the pool, cards in a wet stack, and spread them on a towel to dry. Jenny and Lisa watched. What were the questions? Is God all-wise, all-holy, all-merciful, and all-just? No. There was another question. It lay, like a palpable, visible thing in the very back of Reverend Mother’s throat. The dream had become a nightmare because Dorothy had been afraid Reverend Mother’s mouth would open, revealing that question, and that the mouth would look like the inside of Jonah’s whale, a frightening illustration in an old book of Bible stories. A cavernous mouth, blood red, with a person at the back of the throat.

Now that she was awake, she told herself she was no longer frightened. She groped for what she’d known in the dream but couldn’t see now. The gentle wind was stirring an unsaid thing to life on the very bottom layer of her memory.

She began to shuffle the deck. Mr. Hoade’s face, drawn and unshaven, swam malevolently before her. If her father had heard him use the vulgar language of that exchange at the breakfast table, he would have punched Mr. Hoade right in the nose and taken Dorothy home. She missed her father, suddenly. She missed his bushy eyebrows and his “Irish temper,” as her mother called it, that spent itself quickly and settled all things on the side of the angels.

She dealt out ten cards apiece. “I’m going to get them all wet,” Jenny announced. She threw the deck in a puddle on her right-hand side.

“What did you do that for?” Lisa whined.

“Because I know what cards are wet and I can tell them from the back,” said Jenny. She placed all fifty-two on the towel. Lisa moaned. Dorothy waited and yawned, her thoughts elsewhere.

Mr. Hoade had certainly been upset at the suggestion of trouble in his precious candidate’s precious union. Was it, after all, the union that had been in the papers with the murder? He hadn’t seemed too pleased at the reminder that his daughter was a mongoloid, either. Leave well enough alone, Maureen warned her silently. Trouble trouble and trouble will trouble you.

Once again God had smiled upon her. Dorothy mouthed a prayer of thanks as Jenny methodically blotted the cards. Mr. and Mrs. Hoade had not noticed her last night when she’d come in, drenched by the cloudburst. Only Lisa had noticed the boots that she’d hidden in the garden until she was sure the coast was clear. But Lisa’s guess about stealing could be easily gotten around. Mrs. Hoade had been too busy with her suddenly washed-out party to bother about Dorothy. Mr. Hoade had been obliged to drive his quadruple-chinned client all the way to Philadelphia in the storm. The rest of the guests, in a procession of a dozen cars, had left shortly after. So much confusion. Mr. Hoade had probably not returned until early that morning. He was no doubt exhausted and in a bad mood. Dorothy knew she had an overactive imagination. Even Sister Elizabeth, who was very fond of imaginations, had told her that.