Pretty Leslie (20 page)

“Why, why, why,” he spluttered, beaming with delight, “why, it's
Mrs. Daniels
. Why, the
goods
felt familiar. Why, I thought … I surely am a-going blind. Need a refresher in your drink, sister?”

“I believe I do. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Save a little room in the glass for water.” She took the glass and squinted through the bourbon as if disapproving the color. “You've got more tricks than Mandrake,” she said.

He shook his head in sorrow. “Honest and straightforward as the day is long,” he swore. This characterization seemed more than the drug man could bear. His laughter blinded him, and in his blindness he staggered forward, groping for support from Mother Bieman's dress.

“Oh, dear. I knew I should have gone home when the rain started,” Leslie said. Circe among her senile swine. The goatish display did something—almost enough—to restore her pleasure in the jubilee, and if Dolores was
really
as content to stay as she claimed, why shouldn't they see it through to the end?

“Parmee, sir,” she said with a flick of her fingertips against Daddy's shirtfront, “the chaps are waiting to dance with me in the parlor. Good show.” As Lady Brett in the robes of Mrs. Miniver (this dress might have fitted well if she got back her thirty lost pounds; it absolutely lacked the charm of her own wet orange print now hanging in the basement laundry room), she swept back to see if this were so.

Some of the chaps were. Not, perhaps, as many as she might have gathered early in the afternoon, but enough to keep her on her feet and chattering. String Bieman and a man named Parmelee both claimed her at the same time. For the hell and fairness of it, they both tried to dance with her at once, slopping drinks as they pranced around in a silly threesome.

She danced with String alone, and they made jokes about the Freudian implications of his dancing with her while she was wearing his mother's dress. “Anyway I'm glad your mother has so much taste,” Leslie said.

“She
is
a kind of gaudy old bag,” String admitted—whether in pride or simply in amazement.

While she was dancing with him in the overcrowded parlor, she saw, out in the passage by the stairway, that Patch and Dolly Sellers had got appropriately together. Knee to knee and thigh to thigh, eyes closed, they were simply swaying to the phonograph music without moving their feet. Leslie sighed with relief. That seemed to take care of one problem that might have arisen since the rain had forced (hadn't it forced?) her to change her plans.

But of course she was mistaken in this hope. Pretty soon there he was, Don Patch, simply taking her in his arms the minute Parmelee let her go without so much as an invitation or by-your-leave. She followed half a dozen steps, noting absently that his red ringlets came just to the level of her eyes. She collected her thoughts, broke away and said, “No. I'm not going to dance with you. I'm sorry.”

“Why not?” Reasons—what kind of uncouth jerk would ask for reasons where taste, or distaste, might alone be involved? She checked an impulse to say, “Because you rather nauseate me.”

“Why not?” he said. “I saw Daddy pinch your bazooms.”

Useless to explain that that was an old man's carnival joke
perfectly
understood between her and the boss. Why then the impulse to explain? Because his whole behavior and attitude suggested a callowness halfway between malice and innocence, not quite justifying a purely hostile response? But the mixture was only more annoying than outright viciousness, she thought. “It's reason enough that you seem to be tagging after and spying on me,” she said. She didn't wait for a response, or need to, since fortunately Lester Glenn had been lurking in wait for his turn to shuffle into the pack with her.

At ten—or thereabouts—she was in a group on the verandah, listening to old Bieman give his real thoughts on modern art versus the traditional. “Mother and I go into New York for a stay twice a year. Always put up at the Plaza—now, there is a hotel for you. We go for the opera. Why can't they write music any more like the old-timers? All corrupt. Why, I like—I tell you what I like. My idea—” He had someone's lapel or collar in his fingers, and a good thing, too, since he really needed support. “My idea good music is
La B M
. Never get tired of it. Not like these frauds. Paperhangers, wallpaper designers at Museum Modern Art. Writers all gone dirty. ‘Chicago, hog-butcher to the world.' Fags and phonies. Liars and propagandists. All shot to hell. Give me
La B M
.”

(And wouldn't that be worth reporting to Ben? Provided she was still sober enough to remember it, and she thought she was. “I'd been so
carried along
by what he said in the afternoon, all this talk about Bellows and all. And it seemed to me just awful to think that perhaps the kind of bigoted drivel he had come to later was a natural, I mean an inevitable, consequence of starting out right.” And no doubt Ben would say, “But if he really pronounced it that way—
La B M
—wasn't he possibly pulling the leg of the people he was talking to?” Ben thought what he liked to think. That was what was so nice about him. But in truth, wasn't it more a matter of our virtues fathering unnatural vices? Again she thought she ought to have gone home and was angry—at something—that she had not done so.)

“Persistent little demon,” she said, after Don Patch made one more attempt to get her to dance with him.

She was dancing with bald-headed Seymour Rife. “That's his one talent,” Seymour said.

“I supposed he must have something.”

“There are times I find him touching. He's a lone wolf, if you'll pardon the vulgarity, and I'm told he keeps goldfish. Fish anyway. I always think of guppies and such fauna as goldfish.”

“He keeps fish,” Leslie agreed.

Tactful Seymour adjusted to the note of her dislike and said, “I'd say something stronger than persistent. At other times I think he's definitely disturbed. He paints funny allegories and imagines he's Gauguin.”

“Paints them …? With an airbrush?” The idea of Gauguin bound to a mechanical rendering tool seemed very funny to Leslie.

“No doubt. I've never seen one. I'm profane.”

“You're creative.”

“Don't make fun of us hacks,” Seymour said. “Just dance with us and
noblesse-oblige
us.”

“Ah,” Leslie said, smitten with remorse, “have I seemed snotty? Around the shop, I mean? That is, Jesus, what right would I have …? All of you can do things.”

“You're our poetess,” he said in an attempt to paste her feelings back. “I didn't mean anything, honest. Come on, sweetheart, let's go crush joy's grape against our palate fine.”

“That sounds appropriately lewd,” she told him, swinging as quickly as she had stumbled.

While they sipped their refilled drinks, Seymour said, “Young Patch once confided me a story I wish I hadn't heard.”

“Tell me.”

“He pulled a knife on a big colored man. Or maybe a
little
colored man who was bigger than he. It appears to have started when our fellow worker was walking through a park with his wife. He has a wife, somewhere—divorced, abandoned or fled, who knows? He claims that he heard a noise in the bushes and ran over to find this man making out with some girl. He ordered the man out of the park. Ordered is his word.”

“Ordered!” Leslie breathed, wrinkling her nose.

“The man didn't want to go—naturally enough—so to back up his Aryan authority little Patch produced the knife. Don't ask me if that's true. But I think it's indicative—isn't it indicative?—that he would think it was all right to
tell
such a thing about himself.”

“It's indicative all right,” Leslie said.

“He's a pretty good airbrush man,” Rife said. “Finicking. Just unbelievably neat. He does things it would take a kook to do. I'd like to know more about his toilet training. Frankly, I would. But in the meantime, I'm serious in advising you to be careful of him. You shouldn't encourage him or—”

“Encourage!” Leslie said, a little angrier than she would have expected to be. Rife began to bob his head apologetically, to put a belated qualification on what was apparently an offensive remark. He decided he'd better not make matters worse by going on, and talked to her after that about his sister trying to break into show biz in Washington. In Washington because that was where she lived, with the elder Rifes, not because it was the best place in the world to begin a theatrical career.

Mother Bieman, one hand at her mouth, the other trailing dramatically behind her, leaned into the pack of dancers to put her mouth near Leslie's ear. “Your friend. Bathroom upstairs.”

Leslie walked with the excited woman to a clear space near the front door, waited questioningly.

“I can hear her in there being sick,” Mother Bieman said. “I knocked and called, as discreetly as I could. She wouldn't answer. One of the grandchildren last spring locked himself in and we had to get a ladder and cut out the screen, and I've told Daddy we had to get a key—”

“Are you sure it's Dolores?” But under the formal protestation of the question, Leslie was guiltily, angrily, quite sure in her own heart just how things had worked out. Because
didn't
they? Wasn't that what she had been feeling and saying—to Dolores herself, among others—since the best, innocent pleasures of this day in the country began to sour? Good intentions were the surest guarantee of bad ends.

Probably Dolores really
had
wanted to go home hours ago, but—out of some misguided notion that she had wanted to stay—had vetoed their leaving. She, at the same time, knew she shouldn't have left Dolores so much alone since they came to the house where all the dancing was going on. They'd begun such a good talk down at the pool before the rain broke it up. Good for Leslie, at least—but again treacherous. Because if she hadn't relieved her feelings by hauling up that old story about Mary Jo's finger, she might have overridden all quibbling, got in the damn station wagon and been home, reading in bed now. Dolores had been too good to her.

It was Dolores in the bathroom, all right. Apparently she had composed herself by the time Leslie knocked and tentatively called her name. She came and unlocked the door at once, but then immediately hobbled back and sat on the stooltop again. Except for the sunburn—which by now was a dark red like hung beef—her skin had no more color than the porcelain. Her lips were a vivid blue. Her face seemed to be decomposing into a collection of little white sacks suspended by the strings of her hair, perhaps. In spite of the open window there was a harsh, vile smell in the room.

Dolores appeared sober. That is, there was about her none of the babbling liveliness of a person who has drunk too much. At the same time—as if the liquor had worked strangely on her nervous system—she responded slowly, with a kind of ghastly apathy, to Leslie's questions.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Sure. She'd been sick. Locked door. Naturally. Wanted to be alone. Heard Mother Bieman knock. Thought … thought,
pretty soon
. Sorry. No. Sunburn didn't hurt. Nothing. Hurt. How. Could. It? (Attempt to smile.)

Leslie fussed at her. “Now, you're not to try to walk downstairs yourself. Unless you're perfectly sure you're all right, you're to go in and sleep on a bed.”

Mother Bieman, who was right on hand, worrying, said, “Yes. Yes, you bet. We count on sometimes they will stay the night.”

Ever so slowly, like an old turtle or elephant or something, with all the weight of a century of experience painfully dazing her, Dolores looked at the woman and said she … would … go … home.

Home. Thanks.

In spite of feeling sorry—and in spite of her own partial responsibility—Leslie couldn't help the growing irritation she felt as she saw how complications had begun to multiply.

Wouldn't you know, with things already as dismaying as they'd got, that—on the stairway as she and Mother Bieman were holding Dolores' arms to help her go down—there at the bottom insidious little Patch would appear?

Then—of course, what could you do?—his offer to help had to be accepted. Dolores was so shaky on her pins (and so damn lardy) that she might literally fall at any minute. A man could be of service, and there just wasn't anyone else handy, johnny-on-the-spot at the particular, lousy moment.

Outside, under the dripping trees, they trundled the sick woman like a burden of flesh hung on them for an unexplained penance. The air was cloying with night odors: grass, wet leaves, and the moistened dung of the barnyard. It was black as the inside of a purse until they turned the corner into the floodlighted parking area by the garage. Through the dripping blackness they supported the unwelcome load as best they could, the ill-sorted three Samaritans, linked as close as they would ever be by the unwisdom of an old lady's appetite for booze and lights. It was strange how small communicative muscular forces carried their signals through the slack body they supported together.

Then, when they had Dolores in the front seat of the station wagon and Leslie had already put her hand on the ignition key, Patch opened the other front door and got into the seat on the opposite side.

“What—” Leslie started to say.

“Miss Sellers stole my car,” the gnomish mouth said.

“What?”

“Dolly Sellers stole my car and drove back to town in it a while ago,” Patch said. “She may think it's quite a joke, but I've phoned the highway patrol that it was stolen. Dirty bitch thinks she can take advantage of me.”

He was so solemn—so absurdly, pathetically, forever unable to see the humor in his own situation, the last twist of absurdity in all the absurdities that had bumped them together, at the Studio, here, on the stairway as they brought Dolores out—that Leslie had to laugh for him. The poor little vicious mite of a man, showing his weakness in every attempt at authority or toughness—what was to be made of such a grotesque?