Pretty Leslie (11 page)

The trouble here was she couldn't help knowing the ducks were something stronger than she was. Altogether—maybe because there were so many of them—they were stronger and they could not be pacified by feeding. Still their hunger would swarm to her feet. The more bread she gave them, the more of them would come across the pond.

Her father could not understand her hesitation. He got definitely out of sorts with her. “For heaven's sake, Leslie. Can't you just open your hand and let the bread
drop?
There's more in the sack if you're afraid it will be gone too soon. Leslie,
throw it
!”

With a sudden flurry of impatience he took the candy-striped paper sack from her right hand and shook it upside down. All the crumbs and crusts she had been saving showered among the darting heads of the ducks.

It was only after the sack was empty that she realized she had wanted to give the bread herself. “
I
wanted to,” she whined. “
I
wanted to give it to them and you've thrown it all out now, Daddy.”

“Can't help it. You were too slow. Come on. Give them what you've still got in your hand and let's go home. Leslie!”

“I don't have enough left to give,” she reasoned cunningly. She knew he was trying to trick her. She had tricks to match more than his. “Carry me, Daddy. I'm cold.”

“A big three-year-old like you? Daddy's cold too. He can't carry you all the way to the car.”

He could, too. She scowled under the broad fold of her stocking cap, planted her feet squarely, stuck out her lip—and he had to carry her.

He didn't intend her to be comfortable while he carried her. Her belly jolted on the bones of his shoulder, padded so inadequately by his overcoat.

But she was getting her way now, making the situation conform to her infant will, and when they had gone thirty yards from the edge of the wintry pond, at last she drew back her left arm and hurled the bread she had been afraid to drop to the ducks.

If they need it so bad, they can waddle up here and find it, she thought self-righteously. I was a good girl. I fed them when they were hungry in the cold water. She could remember that.

Then, satisfied with herself, she hung like a sack and peered back across the jolting shimmer of pond water receding behind her father's steps, becoming smaller, more manageable, more toy-like in the arc of her vision. Across the pond she could still make out the rows of cages where the old lion and the families of monkeys and bears were kept in summer.

It seemed to her she could hardly wait for the winter to be over (though it had hardly begun yet). In the fine weather she would trip along in front of the cages between Daddy and Mother, displaying less fear than Hank or Bob, her brothers. The big, stinky, disgusting animals in the cages had never scared her at all. Then why had she been frightened by the ducks whom she ought to love?

She decided she hadn't been. There would have been no fuss at all if Daddy hadn't got impatient and tried to hurry her.

That was Leslie about twenty-three years ago. Now on a summer Saturday night in a candy-striped bed in her own home she was completing the same emotional orbit. It was three o'clock. Ben lay beside her, apparently drifting toward sleep. But she sat upright, cross-legged, in a filmy pink robe that she had not bothered to tie. She could not sleep until she had balanced her accounts.

“I hadn't been unaware,” she said, “that Dave's been waiting a chance to make a pass. I wasn't born yesterday—maybe the day before—but anyway he's given certain indications. To put it crudely, he's pinched and patted in a pretty stupid way. A certain amount of that, sure. But I've had
marks
just from his helping me out of a car. But when he said ‘Let's take a walk' tonight, I merely thought since he'd been having a hard time with Martha that he needed a little something to build up his ego. I mean, I suppose I knew he'd think it was a triumph if I'd merely agree to step outside. You know how I am about feeling needed.”

Did he know? Yes, he knew. He had been told by Mother Skinner how generously Leslie had responded to Hurricane Ida at the age of six. She had wanted to join the Catholic Church at twelve because Somebody needed her. She had married him because he needed her worse than anyone else, and since this was so, he had no right to quibble.

“I suppose it was foolish to go down the alley, but we'd already moseyed around the block and were smoking a cigarette by the hedge when that crazy-ass Vendham Smothers came out from behind it, pulling that transistor plug out of his ear—” Ben's thick chest began to throb with chuckles. Vendham Smothers had been given a new radio by his grandchildren. He carried it in a leather case slung round his neck. From it a slack wire ran to a nickeled plug in his ear, and it was his habit to remove this plug when approached and explain that he certainly wasn't listening to rock 'n' roll (yellow smile) but only “the best” from a station in Iowa that played classical records all day long.

“—and saying, ‘That yee-oo, Mrs. Daniels?' Christ, I felt like some high-school broad caught red-handed. So I thought we'd better stay off the sidewalks in case we have any other crazy neighbors. After all, even if we aren't permanent here, I have to live with these biddies. So I made the mistake of cutting through the alley with him. Two blocks over.”

“You don't have to tell me.”

Leslie tinkled her drink thoughtfully—the last, reluctantly finished perpetuation of their party—and said, “I know you don't take this seriously, but I tell you your friend Dave went right to the point. There was a panel truck parked back there and he was trying to get me in it.”

Ben laughed. He knew. Yes, he knew.

“No joke. He made me
really
angry. I told him off. I said a few truly unforgettable things about their marriage. I suppose that's the end of the Lloyd-Daniels friendship, and who's sorry?”

“I doubt it.”

“I let him understand that I considered it pure charity to have left with him in the first place and I thought it a clear sign of waning virility that he had to go for me like that in a dark alley. I actually used those words, which I suppose are pretty hard on a man. Ben?”

“Mmmmm?”

“We give too much to other people.
Look
at all the time I spend hauling kids to the pool or to church, listening to every frigid housewife in the block. That sounds hard. I want to be hard. Ben, let's live for ourselves. Have a kid and move to the country. Build a house with our own hands.”

“Yes.”

“Ben? Make love to me. I want to forget everything.” She finished her drink, walked to turn out the light, came into his arms.

She had been afraid in the alley with Dave. He had opened the doors on some stranger's panel truck and tried to force her onto her back on the floor. He had touched her in a frightening way before she got both feet drawn back together and kicked him in the chest. It was very much as she had been afraid of the ducks a long time ago. She had not understood how they could stand the cold. She could not understand someone who wanted to take another man's wife in the back of a truck that smelled of dry cleaning.

Ben reassured her. He made her feel generous as she had felt when she threw the bread to the ducks a long time ago. She needed to be needed. But only by him. She needed to give him the sleep he needed. They fell asleep together.

They passed each other that night on the immeasurable voyages of sleep. While she settled downward in the gravity of a black star, he rose, choked and fighting, to a sort of intensified wakefulness.

Waking in an hour, he could not recognize the room. The actual darkness was transposed by his insomniac condition into a surface, like a face of coal on which an intense light is played. It was not, by now, an unfamiliar state.

The threshold into such states was always a dream with a particular root, a particular connection with a reality that was not a dream but a purposely suppressed memory. So naturally (he thought of it by now as natural, perhaps merely because it was so common) the dreams were structured on mystifying accusations against which he had no strength to defend himself.

Unidentifiable authorities accused him of infecting every one of his patients, of being the propagator of the diseases that each week he cured. Right in front of him, children began to cough and gag, grow flushed and comatose. Arms and legs broke like hard candy when he meant to examine them. Eyes began to squint, disgusting rashes appeared. Tongues became coated like sugared crullers. When he offered medicine, the multitude of children began to recede “according to the laws of perspective”—that phrase was printed across his vision to explain his frustration at seeing them diminish in size and become unreachable.

The Negro boy, Austin Calumet, ate lead pellets—small mushroom-shaped bullets, they turned out to be—and fell asleep at his feet like a faithful black puppy.

Someone told him it was “a violation” to have saved the Tabor baby. He was obliged to peer at the magnified cross section of a vein, twitching obscenely, and the speaker said crossly, “If you put your noodle in that, thee'll put thee in jail.” It was Dolores Calf Love who told him this. She appeared in a short skirt and wearing her hair in Mary Pickford braids. She took him for a drive to show him what he had done. On a country road, in a swale between hills, she showed him a row of flat, marble tombstone faces glittering at the bottom of a muddy rut. “You've killed nine,” she said. “Call yourself Savior!” He understood that he was guilty of irregular birth control measures.

Leading him onto a “fair hillside” (he could see the ordinary enough landscape, but these phrases and explanations kept being supplied him so he would not have the chance to make up his own mind), Dolores changed into his Aunt Peg, but a very young Aunt Peg, not the woman he had actually known. There on the “fair hillside,” she showed him an illustrator's sunrise beginning to mount behind some ink drawings of trees. When the sun itself scorched the horizon, Aunt Peg said, “You've done it again,” and he understood he had, once more, singed the feathers off Leslie's beautiful bird. How dared he tell her now? He should have told her the first time he did it. That was clear.

From this preparatory dream he woke with an inaudible laugh. The dream was a riddle—but a riddle so easy that it seemed to have been offered purposely to make him seem brilliant in solving it.

The riddle and dream were recurrent. They were so familiar that they seemed like the structure of his mind itself. Of course they came from a very bad time in his childhood, but not so much from memories he had repressed as from some which had merely been suspended for just about twenty-one years like stinging insects preserved in a clear jelly, wicked-looking, banded and barbed, but always powerless to get at him.

It was from this dream that his superstitions about the living and the dead child had come. (And of course the dream, in this return, had come from the superstitious play of the last few weeks. Dream and wakefulness were linked, and the riddle turned like a giant wheel half in light and half in darkness.)

It seemed to him just exactly as easy (and as difficult) to remember consciously as to dream that he had murdered a playmate when he was nine. But it was easier to remember the circumstances (and apparently easier to convert them into the disguises and substitutions of the dream) than to fix once and for all that the killing had been murder.

He wasn't sure. Nobody ever had been. A sweating, heartbroken Kansas sheriff had seen the enigma very clearly more than twenty years ago. “Lord,” he said, “you can't call it murder when there's just a boy done it.”

No one since then had really made much headway against that riddle of responsibility, though his Aunt Peg had tried. She went to her death assuming she knew what the answer had to be. He was innocent, Aunt Peg always said.

That verdict had stuck for everyone except, perhaps, for Ben himself. All these years he had neither discarded nor bowed before the bewildering facts. They had remained with him undigested, unresolved, and in some awful sense neutral, neither innocent nor guilty. The truth had always hovered over them elusively. It seemed waiting to be seized, spoken, repented and perhaps then remanded to the superior judgment of oblivion. He had never yet known how—or to whom—to speak them. Perhaps now that he and Leslie were settling, the time was approaching. That was his relieved response to the bad dream.

Something
had happened
in a Kansas July. The events had the strongest consequences in Ben's life up to now. Whatever they had not changed radically they had tempered. In all likelihood it was just that unpunishable killing which had made him stretch his modest original talents to produce consistently admirable achievements in school and in his private life. They had made him “watch himself”—thus encouraging the foresight and control which functioned nicely in the professional man.

The killing acted like a governor for his life. On a wild boy it had held him to an uncanny counterfeit of that moderation some people have as a pure gift of nature.

He had killed—so he grew up agreeable and responsive to people, friendly, fairly popular in high school, a predictable, nice fraternity boy in college and again in med school. He always studied hard enough to make up for his lack of brilliance. He retained what he learned with a quietly desperate determination. (To let go of the task before him meant to remember abominations; to let go meant to forget. He was, by the event, simply forbidden to do either. Self-sentenced to the middle path.)

But yet it was not quite so simple as that, nor he so callous. All these years he had been aware of something uncanny in his very normality. Every time he saw strangeness in his wife, he sensed that this strangeness was calling to its counterpart in him. There were little wisps of the uncanny like dust mice under a bed, frightening a child by meaning something worse than they were.