Leave Well Enough Alone (21 page)

“Too bad you have to baby-sit on a holiday,” he said.

“Oh, yes, well, I don’t really mind. My sister hasn’t had a day off all summer and—”

“Young baby?”

“Nine months. Ten,” said Dorothy. A car whizzed by and swerved to avoid them.

“Drunken kids,” he commented. “There oughta be a law against any kids driving. They cause all the accidents.”

“Yes,” said Dorothy unsteadily.

“Can happen to anyone,” he muttered. “The most innocent people get killed in accidents.”

Dorothy could not think well. The fog swirling around the outside of the car seemed to fill her head as well as the highway. She glanced sideways at Mr. Hoade’s face. She could see no resemblance to Miriam Coburg’s features. There was a more severe distance, however, between his manner and the manner that sprung from the old woman’s being. The gentle hand on the dog’s head, the imperious yet easy smile, had probably surfaced in some sloppy, twisted way in her grandson. Or had it been lost in the two generations that separated them? Dorothy pressed her arms close against herself, as she felt a single drop of water fall into the seam of her sleeve and creep frigidly down her side. She wondered how this Mr. Hoade had become a part of her life. He had come into it like one of fifty strangers emerging from a bus and then vanishing into a stream of other strangers. But he hadn’t vanished. And he wouldn’t if he’d seen the envelope. If there was just that chance, if he wasn’t planning anything, if she got back to Newburgh, he and Mrs. Hoade would fade forever into the context of passengers in her life. In seventeen more minutes, when she was on the train and away, they would become members of the public at large. But there was no real possibility of his not having seen the envelope. Dorothy was tempted just to give over the will. What was he saying now? His words spun past her as rapidly as the white lines on the road. The hairs on the ugly maroon-and-green-plaid seat between them seemed to stand up in electric anticipation. “Accidents can happen to anyone,” he observed, lighting a cigarette.

“I guess they can,” said Dorothy.

“You never know when something’s going to come at you out of the blue.”

“No, you don’t,” Dorothy agreed. The lonely countryside around them showed itself in patches through the fog. No car had passed since the drunken teenagers. Shrouded fields, and black unmoving trees that had cheered her so often on her rides with Baldy, offered her nothing but their mute immortality.

“I hate dark roads like this,” he said.

“I know what you mean,” Dorothy answered.

“Not long ago,” Mr. Hoade went on, “they found a kid near here. See that stone fence? He was around your age. Body all messed up and everything. Nobody ever found out who or why. Ever since then, you know what I carry?”

“What, Mr. Hoade?”

He leaned over and unlocked the glove compartment. Then he withdrew a small revolver and tossed it on the dashboard in front of him. “Your friend,” he said with a smirk, “the fellow you thought was gonna be president of the United States? He always carries one. Never goes anywhere without one. Me too, now.”

“Oh.” This was a real gun, no doubt about it, smaller than her father’s or Arthur’s, but a real gun, nonetheless. Oh, why did I waste time over those silly paperbacks? she asked herself. If I’d come down a minute earlier, Mrs. Hoade would be taking me to the station. She’d read somewhere that fear had a smell to it. The back of her shirt was soaking wet. It prickled against the tweed jacket that she’d tossed on the top of the seat. Could he detect that? What was he waiting for? A turnoff? A thicker patch of fog? The purple thistle flowers gleamed in the headlights as they went by.

“The girls’ll be going to camp next summer,” he said. “Sorry you won’t be around.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. ...

“Hope you get a good job. Maybe something that pays a lot. You’re Irish, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I...

“The world is full of Mick haters.”

“Yes, my father says that...

“Jew haters too. Everything haters.”

“Better put that away,” he added and he tossed the gun back into the glove compartment, locking it securely afterward. Then he slowed the car down and pulled over onto a patch of tire-worn earth.

“What are you doing, Mr. Hoade?” Dorothy asked, but he’d already gotten out of the car. Run, now! she told herself. She would run like a deer. She would fade into the pasture on her right like a ghost disappearing into a wall. She yanked the door handle, and then remembered it hadn’t opened in months. She saw him pass the window on the driver’s side. He’d taken something from the trunk, some metal object, long, like a wrench. He was shouting at her now. “What?” she asked desperately.

“I said turn the headlights to low beam!”

“What?”

“The button. The button to the left of the steering wheel. Push it halfway in.”

Dorothy did as she was told.

“Thank you,” he shouted. He got back in the car and threw the wrench up on the dashboard where the revolver had been. “Damn lights,” he said. “They point downward. They’re always slipping. I prop them up in their sockets, but the props always jiggle out.”

The one light on the Monastery Station platform shone down on a single waiting bench. The station house was closed and dark. There were no other passengers waiting for this train. “I guess I’d better stay ʼtil the train comes,” said Mr. Hoade. He dropped her suitcase at his feet. “Better get yourself some decent luggage,” he added, laughing a little.

Dorothy didn’t dare sit. She felt as if any noise or movement on her part might still alarm him into an unpredictable action. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “you might have noticed your things were a little messed up, in your bedroom. Tonight, I mean.”

“Uh, that’s all right, I...

“Lisa was in there.”

A likely story, Dorothy thought. She could hear the whistle of the train beyond the near hills.

“She claimed,” he went on, “she was only reading one of your books, but I guess she went through your...underwear for some reason.... I, uh—I, uh—Here’s a five-dollar bill. I caught her with a...an undergarment and I guess it got ripped a little so this should cover it. There’s your train.”

Dorothy held the money against her stomach with both hands. The train wheezed and stuttered to a halt. Mr. Hoade had gone back to the car, a look of enormous relief to his turned back.

She tried to make herself comfortable in a single space beside a snoring man in overalls. She didn’t dare try to get the suitcase into the overhead rack for fear of dropping it on his head, so she shoved it between her legs. The train was overcrowded. Children and mothers sprawled over the seats, disheveled, exhausted. Dorothy wondered how far they’d come and where they would get off. Who were these poor families? Members of the public at large.

I’ll have to just send it to Mrs. Hoade, Dorothy thought. I’ll put it in a mailbox in Grand Central Station. I need an envelope and a pen. Nothing will be open this late. Careful not to disturb the sleeping man at her side, she pulled a pen from her bag and Mrs. Hoade’s envelope from her pocket. That was good. The envelope was blank. It did not have
Dorothy
written on it. She opened it and looked at the check. “Pay to the order of Dorothy Coughlin,” it said. “Five hundred dollars.” Dorothy smiled. Mrs. Hoade was truly generous. She slipped the check into her wallet. Well, now I’ll do something for you, Mrs. Hoade, she said with satisfaction. Then she pulled out the check again. The name of the bank account was Maria Coburg Hoade.

It couldn’t be, Dorothy told herself. She stared at the printing. If that was Mrs. Hoade’s maiden name then Mrs. Coburg was... It couldn’t be. Hadn’t Mrs. Hoade told her in so many words that she’d come from a poor family? Could someone as sad and sloppy as Mrs. Hoade have been rich all her life? Didn’t all rich people look like Vita, full of beauty parlors and suntans from the South of France, clothed in extravagant little thisses and thats from Paris? Yes, Mrs. Hoade had said she’d been poor. “She tells Daddy’s Jewish friends she’s Jewish and she’s not”—Jenny’s words came back to her. “She tells people things that will suit them, depending on who they are.”

Mrs. Hoade’s been cut off, Dorothy said slowly to herself. I can’t send her this will. She’d destroy it. She’d lose all her money and Mr. Hoade too. Miss Borg would never know about it.

Dorothy looked at the check again. Maria Coburg Hoade. There it was. But hadn’t Miss Borg said it was Mr. Hoade who’d come down and shouted? She slipped her hand into the suitcase,
Ivanhoe
was right at the top. She yanked it out and dug into the spine of the book where both Miss Borg’s paper and her translation lay hidden.

At first, all the German words blurred in front of her. They might as well have been Chinese, despite the fact she’d looked up half of them. There at the beginning was the
Kreischen
, shouting, and the
Anschreien
—shrieking? she had written that night. Well, it didn’t say one way or the other who had done the shouting. Dorothy began to hope a little. She stared at the part she’d so misunderstood:
überhaupt jemand in dieser Hütte gegen ihren Willen zu halten.
“Kept in hut against her will,” she’d written above that part. At the time she’d thought it was a baby and the baby had been kept in the cottage against Mrs. Hoade’s will. Now, of course, all this had changed. Mrs. Coburg had been made a prisoner on her own property. But by whom? Her eyes skipped down the page, through the
Autopsie
part, through the
Medikament
until they found that awful word
Anschreien
, angershrieking, once more....
wenn sie abends herüber kam
, that followed the bit about no decent person could stand this screaming.
Sie
—the little word jumped out at her.
Sie.
She had written it down with its translation at the bottom of the page among other small words to look up.
Sie
meant she. When she used to come down here, something like that.

Dorothy crumpled Miss Borg’s paper in her hand. Then she thought better of it. Naturally, it would have to be given, now, to the authorities, whoever they were. It can’t be, she said again. It couldn’t have been Mrs. Hoade. Mrs. Hoade’s too nice.
Sie ist in ihrem Bad.
Even Jenny’s smattering of German had given her the meaning of that. She is in her bath. It came back now, as if to answer her last question.

Mrs. Hoade, who’s done so much for me, and been so generous, Dorothy thought miserably. She jammed the paper with the nasty little
sie
and the will into the deepest compartment of her wallet. Mrs. Hoade, who got her best friend drunk and betrayed her, Dorothy also reminded herself.

A will was an important legal document. It was rather like having a fifty-thousand-dollar bill in her possession. She would bring it to the attention, naturally, of responsible adults. They would take steps. You couldn’t take steps if you were not even fifteen. Nothing would happen to the Hoades, of course. It could never be proven that they’d kept Mrs. Coburg in the cottage against her will. “Miss Borg. Miss Borg?” Dorothy found herself saying, as if Miss Borg were on the train sitting right next to her. Miss Borg would be brought back from Germany. Mrs. Hoade had the autopsy.
Bewiesen.
That was a word that had caught her eye. Proof. Mrs. Hoade had the proof that Miss Borg had given none of the prescribed medicine that night. No matter how Miss Borg managed to explain this, it wouldn’t look very proper in light of the fact that she stood to inherit. Miss Borg had not known about this will. She’d said she had no savings or inheritance. But who could prove she hadn’t known? Miss Borg had let Mrs. Coburg die out of compassion, but it would be easy for the Hoades to say Mrs. Coburg was just about to sign a new will. Who could prove otherwise? At any rate, this was not for Dorothy to decide.

When she gave the will over to the authorities, through her father, through Sister Elizabeth or Reverend Mother, great excitement just might lie in store for her. THE GIRL WHO BRAVED ALL FOR JUSTICE! She might get her picture in the paper.

Dorothy began picturing herself at the lectern, after a glowing introduction from Reverend Mother. Bravery, courage! She could almost reach out and touch the eight hundred well-scrubbed faces that would be looking at her, envying her, waiting for her to describe her adventures, after they had finished singing the anthem that always opened the assemblies. “Holy God, we praise Thy name.... The words of the old hymn sounded glorious when sung by hundreds of fervent young voices, when played with great gusto by little Sister Angelica Shipman on the huge organ at the back of the hall.

Dorothy felt her face breaking into a smile. A rush of tremendous pleasure filled her whole being until at last the young singers faded and became the weary travelers around her again. Reverend Mother’s features slipped away and grew dim, until all that was left was Miss Borg’s wistful, trusting little smile.
“Danke schön.”
I won’t bother you anymore, Miss Borg.
“Danke schön.”

What is lawful is what is right, Dorothy argued against that part of herself that said, Miss Borg will go to jail. She’ll never inherit the money. You mustn’t show this will to anyone, Dorothy. It will be easy for the Hoades to prove—What would it be called? Criminal negligence? Manslaughter? If you bring it to light, Dorothy, the Hoades will have no choice. Dorothy’s elbow found a minuscule armrest. She squeezed her eyes shut with her thumb and forefinger. If there was to be a GIRL WHO BRAVED ALL FOR JUSTICE! it would have to be followed by a NURSE GUILTY.

Just before she began to tear the will and Miss Borg’s paper too, the one she was saving to show Sister Elizabeth, a voice screamed at her. “You can’t do this, Dorothy!” It was Maureen’s voice, a voice she’d thought so often was her better self. “You’re breaking the law. You’re taking the law into your own hands! Who do you think you are? God?”

She ripped both papers in half and then in half again, and then again until all that remained was a mound of white shreds in her lap. The window beside her was partially open. She let them fly, bit by bit, into the quiet fog outside.