Pretty Leslie (27 page)

“Mother
what?
” she said with a waking screech. (She was convinced she could not have missed more than a few words, but her attention seemed to return to a different conversation, altogether more ominous than the one before.)

“I said it is
not
malignant. Only that she's going to have to have the operation. Perfectly routine. You can ask Ben. The problem is she says they can't afford it, which of course they can. You know Mother.”

“It's been diagnosed?”

“Well, of course it's been diagnosed. But what I thought was that if Ben called her, you know, just to reassure her that she wasn't going to die anyway, she'd give up this line about what it costs, i.e., be more reasonable, which would be a big load off Sally and me.”

So Hank was scared. A man in his thirties, half terrified that his mother was going to die. Oh, not this time, not from a tumor in the left occiput requiring costly but safe surgery, but sometime to depart her role as an anchor in his messy, cowardly little life. It made Leslie sick to hear the note of alarm (it was he who wanted to be reassured by Ben, trusting a brother-in-law to give him the straight and inside dope as he would never quite trust a doctor wholly outside the family), and she wanted to say, Yes, what's wrong with all the Skinners—what's always been wrong—is we're so terribly soft, so self-indulgent. It seemed to her she had just learned how tough men and women could be, how much they ought to bear of pain and delight. What matter who had been her teacher? She had taught herself.

“I'll have Ben call,” she promised, “but really, Hank, this call is costing you a fortune and we'd better hang it up.”

“Don't misunderstand about Mother,” he insisted. “She's going to be all right. If you write to her, you can tell her you
know
. That I told you. It's not a secret any more.”

“I'll write,” Leslie said, baldly answering the accusation and request so delicately implied in his roundabout concern. “I'll write today. Time's hanging heavy while Ben's gone.”

But then when she hung up the phone, she wandered through her house with a heavy resentment—as though her mother's illness were part of a scheme to keep her from something she wanted very much, something all her own, as if the family with a family's horrid prescience had guessed her to be on the threshold of some thrust for liberty. Fictionalizing memory, she thought with indignation that her mother had always timed her illnesses to coincide with one of her affairs. So if these were not precisely frustrated, they always came loaded with a maximum of guilt. That's why I was always frigid, she thought, pausing to lean on the kitchen table in a delicate pose of wonder, remembering now that she
wasn't
frigid, no, certainly not, not at all. With a birdlike smile of cruelty (which fortunately no one was there to see) she entertained the thought that some time during the night just past someone had killed her mother for her, and it served the old girl right for so misusing the prerogatives of illness.

No, she certainly was not going to write any letter of commiseration on Hank's prompting. That would be delivering herself into their hands. Let her mother put the news on paper like one grown-up human being addressing another.

She felt much better when she had fixed herself a very late lunch and eaten it alone on the terrace. Half a bottle of cold white wine, a good wine stashed away for a special occasion or the spoiling attendant on some convalescence, relaxed her into a torpid strength. Now, in the sun, she could permit herself a recollection of how it had been last night. Cured of the morning shakes, she could even congratulate herself on not, after all, managing her adventure too badly.

It
had been
, all things considered, something which she owed herself. She felt the stability of her life restored, and now from afterward she could look at the episode with the same sophisticated detachment with which (for some scattered moments, at least) she had anticipated it. Though in anticipation she would never have expected that her partner could have been little Don Patch.

Was it not tidy? Ben was gone. Ben would never know. All the rest of the world—neighbors, fellow workers, Dolores (poor old Dolores)—fooled or ignorant. Herself appeased (ah, that was most important of all, to come to terms with the old bogeys of the self and find they were not so terrifying after all). Other women had done more. It was not excessive. And best of all (her mood was swinging strongly toward triumph now) there need be no sticky aftermath. As the wine glowed in her veins, it occurred to her that it was positively a stroke of genius to have chosen (yes, chosen) silly Don Patch for the agent. Someone with whom she could not possibly get emotionally involved and go on to do something silly. He was, as of now, dismissed.

Would that require some management? It might, it might. But in her present mood she welcomed the challenge of holding him at a distance by superior social strategems. (She giggled to recall how solemnly he had announced his respect for
doctors
. Much might be accomplished by sticking to the line, “The
doctor
is at home again. Silly boy, of course I can't see you.”)

And if he talked—what could he say? To whom could he talk? She thought that even if he told Dolly Sellers, Dolly would assume he was lying. If he told any of the other men at the Studio, they might beat him for the insult. If he wrote things about her in the john, wrote her number in a slum telephone booth—well, she told herself with the high heart of a cavalier, she was living big now and had to expect some losses.

At the very peak of her euphoria—when the sun was still a handsbreadth above the gilded motionless elmtops and the perfect weather seemed to embalm the lasciviousness of some antique island in the Grecian archipelago, herself the drowsing priestess of this suburban, Delphic silence—that old cardiac busybody Vendham Smothers had to intrude with a special errand.

“This is Garland Roberts, Mrs. Daniels,” he said, crouching toward her. A corded arm, extended behind him in a circling gesture, indicated a blond girl of eighteen.

Leslie started from her doze. Since Vendham was both familiar and unpleasant to look at, she stared at the girl.

Garland was perfect. At least her skin was the pure and flawless color of honey. Her hair was nearly the color of the wine still left in Leslie's glass, and the individual strands had the luster of a golden mirror. The features didn't count much. She might have been anyone—Miss Rheingold or one of those incredibly depersonalized photographs in
Playboy
. Her nice, anonymous features, including brown eyes, gave skin and hair a chance to reveal their perfection.

She said, “Hi.”

“Garland lives on Burridge Place,” old Smothers said, and then with a hundred flourishes explained his special mission. Garland, at the crisis of her life, was confronted with a problem—university, college, or a career. Her academic record in high school was perhaps no indication of her genuine concern with things of the mind. It was the foundation of her acquaintance with venerable, dying old Smothers that she adored poetry.

“Yeats,” Garland said. She showed all of Miss Rheingold's matching teeth in a shyly frank smile. “I really do.”

“‘Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone, and not for your yellow hair,'” Smothers said. “Remember the evening I quoted that to you?”

Garland nodded and he explained that he had been taking his constitutional on Burridge Place one evening in the springtime just past, had seen her “right there in the middle of the sidewalk” and
could not help
shrieking (as he no doubt had) the appropriate verse into her face, an old man's prerogative.

Did not Mrs. Daniels understand how, after this, the friendship—and with it friendship's generosity and concern—had ripened; how in the winter of his life he had championed in this blooming girl the hidden spiritual core?

“Really, I'm more at ease with Vendham than—” Garland made an openhanded gesture to illustrate the myriads with whom she found barriers to confidence. She sat on the chaise at Leslie's feet. Leslie withdrew her toes a safe six inches from contact. “Vendham's—” Another gesture appealed for the words to express his ineffable warmth, insight, and high-mindedness.

“I've argued …
college!
” Vendham said, grinding his toe on the flagstones like a delicate adolescent as his secret bias popped out. “Oh, now listen, Garland.… If you'll permit me, maybe I can summarize a few of your arguments for Mrs. Daniels so we can get the benefit of her view on the matter. May I? Well, Garland has an older brother in the Military Academy.”

“Not West Point,” Garland explained.

“She feels that the financial burden on her parents of sending her to—say, if she's accepted there as I have every reason to think she would be—to Smith, or to Vassar, or to Radcliffe, or Barnard—I believe you told me you'd attended Smith and Barnard, Mrs. Daniels?”

Probably she had. As she stared on them both with drugged eyes, already feeling like the victim of vampires, Leslie told herself she had no one but herself to blame for ever opening her mouth to the old vulture. Someday, inevitably, he would have brought to mock her this shiny, virginal, imperturbable reminiscence of the years that had never kept their whole promise to her, saying—as he did now—“I saw that you could tell her whether it was worth requiring a sacrifice, as it would be, by her parents to ask for the best.”

Leslie wet her lips with her tongue. She felt, simply, that these unlikely two knew everything about her, had heard her cry out in Ben's dishonored bed, and had come now with a special, tantalizing form of inquisition to play at cat and mouse with her. She stared again at Garland's perfect smile and had all she could do to hold her lips steady over her own herbivorous front teeth.

“I've considered working for a year. Two years,” Garland said. The voice had the pure impersonality of a recorded message answering back from some number frantically dialed while one hand held the lips of a wound together. “I'm still young,” she said with terrible simplicity. For the first time, fully, Leslie realized that she was not. Reminded by this walking signboard of youth, she understood what price she had squandered in last night's transformation.

“I'm still young and I could work two years here in Sardis and
then
go to college,” Garland said. Her speech was not only lacking in qualification but seemed to forbid any. These were facts and she was a fact. Her beauty and her uncomplicated virginity were facts tough as steel.

“I'm afraid,” the sugary voice of Vendham Smothers said, “I'm afraid that
if
you went into business you'd never get to college. Now, as sure as we are sitting here, earnestly discussing what it is right to do, in your case, there would be the temptation to …
marriage
.” His neck stretched like a lascivious turtle's, and his sick eyes wobbled on the girl's blouse as he hurled this probability onto the fertile suburban air. Phallic and phalloid, the trees and telephone poles and the very grass around the terrace thrust toward Garland's inviolate potentiality.

“Well, there are boys,” she admitted, not so much with gravity as with the authority of an extraterrestrial visitor from a mineral planet, not greatly moved by biological phenomena.

“There are boys,” Vendham Smothers said in agony. “Oh, I've seen it happen so many times. Girls with promise. Girls with something to
contribute
. They've been lost, lost to the
world
, because they dallied and thought they'd go on to college
later
.” Lost to Vendham Smothers, some sag-haunched, four-eyed, blooming slip of a sow's ear. Lost to the library. Lost to “things of the mind.” Gone to business.

“I'd be delighted to hear your experience at Smith, Mrs. Daniels,” Garland said politely.

That was mere formality. Neither of them meant to talk to Leslie. Neither cared that she had even graduated from junior high. They were exploiting her like some neuter duenna whose presence gave to their unlikely courtship some flavor of the reasonable, the conceivable.

They talked for the better part of an hour over her nearly prostrate body. Vendham's arguments—in favor of any college, even the local University, but preferably a select girls' school, the best—danced like a faun. Out of the rotting forest of his body, lust bellowed. But still the maiden was unseduced. There were “financial considerations.” There were the wishes of her parents to keep her home. There were boys.

“It's mostly that I'm not sure of myself,” Garland said with a delicate frown—Garland who was more offensively, terribly sure of youth and position than any mortal had a right to be.

“A-a-a-ah.” Smothers laughed. “If you think you're unsure of yourself now, wait—just you wait, young lady—until they get through with you at a really good school. They'll tear every one of your ideas wide open. Rip 'm into little pieces. Go right through everything you think is certain. Make you question, question.…” His eyes glowed bright red with this vision of (presumably intellectual) rapine. “Then! Then you'll slowly gather up what is your own, and in your own time put it all back together again.” The image was of a nymph alone, assembling her tattered clothing from marsh and sward, pensively covering her ravishment with the salvaged rags.

“You could be a great woman!” he cried in despair. “Help me persuade her, Mrs. Daniels. Help me make her see.” Garland could be what she was—already great enough for her task of demoralization—or she could be crowned with academic laurels; and she would never, never, never, never, never be for dying old Smothers anything but a vision that must torment him into his grave. That was what the wheezing vowels and the froth at his mouth declared.

This scene should have been pure comedy. It was meant to be one of those lurid grotesque vignettes from life in which Leslie delighted, part of the human scrapbook she had been assembling since she quit hoping to be Thomas Wolfe.