Dear Doctor Lily (20 page)

‘What brewch?'

‘It was in your pocket.'

‘You silly cow, I told you to leave my things alone.'

‘And let them go through the washer and drier? Oh, fine, fine. I'll know next time.'

‘Where is it?'

‘In the drawer with the rest of the Elite stuff.'

‘Oh, Jesus.' Buddy ran up the stairs in his socks, with Maggie
after him like a puppy. She had not gone to school today. When she cried and put two fingers in her mouth, upside down with the elbow stuck out, Ida usually let her miss the bus. What difference did it make? Ida could teach her as much at home.

During the week, a few more pieces appeared which Ida was not to show, because they were for special buyers. Cora and Duane came round to fetch a couple of rings with large blue stones.

‘They look almost like sapphires.' Ida put on one of the rings. It was too big for her. Her fingers had remained small and fine. She twirled it around under the lamp to sparkle for Maggie, who had a nice eye for things of good taste. ‘Marvellous what they can do.'

‘Sure is.' Cora took the ring off Ida with her long curved nails that were coloured like jewels themselves. ‘It's a new line. Keep it under your hat. They're not to be marketed until the price is right.'

‘Are they stolen, then?' Ida asked for a joke.

‘What kind of talk is that?' Cora looked at her sharply. ‘In front of the kid.'

‘That dummy don't know if it's Christmas or Easter,' Buddy said.

Unless you spoke directly to her, Maggie did not listen, like Bernie did, to what grown-ups were saying, or look at them; but why did he let her down to other people? He liked to cuddle Maggie when he was in a good mood, or roll with her on the floor until she giggled and shrieked from the tickling. On the road, he would sometimes repeat names of towns and makes of cars to her, as if he were trying to teach a parrot, so why couldn't he be loyal? Instead of trying to impress Duane and winking at Cora, who was supposed to be Ida's friend anyway.

‘Don't knock it,' Cora said. ‘Better than living with a genius like our Harvey.'

Cora and Duane, who was a flashy dresser, always had everything the best: kids, cars, stereo. Duane had one stripe on Buddy now.

Ida took Maggie to the kitchen to work on her reading book. If the others knew something she didn't know, she didn't want to know it anyway. She gave Maggie a piece of candy.

‘Make the best of it, eh, Mags?'

That was how she had coped with this marriage, in this country. Millions of GI brides had given up and gone home. Ida had done well, making the best of it.

The next thing Buddy brought back from the bar was a small brown dog with a Ho Chi Minh beard, and a white patch over one eye.

‘This guy gave it me to pay off a debt.' Buddy brought it in on a short piece of rope, and it gave Ida a short, squeaky bark and went under the table.

‘You've gone soft,' Ida said.

‘Give the kids a treat.'

The bark had woken Bernie. He hurtled down the stairs, and then up again to wake Maggie. Stupefied with sleep, and half blind without her glasses, she lay under the table, her arm over the watchful dog, her mouth curved up in a clownish slice-of-melon smile.

The dog's name was Abraham. ‘A-ham.' Too difficult for Maggie, so Bernie shortened it to Adam.

‘First man in the world, first dog at Ten-oh-nine Pershing.'

He adored the dog. He was the one who fed him, and ran out with him as soon as he came home from school, but Adam, an apologetic, insecure mutt, forever looking in corners and under furniture for something that wasn't there, attached himself to Maggie. He slept on her bed and padded about after her on longhaired feet that were too big, as if he were wearing someone else's socks. She pulled at his hair and his wispy beard, and tied scarves over his frayed ears, and patted him as if she were beating a carpet, but he stuck by her.

Maggie had always been given to wandering off. When she was little, Ida sometimes tied her to a small tree with a long piece of clothes line around her waist. One of the neighbours complained.

‘She's to be shut indoors away from the sun, then?' Ida squared up to the neighbour. She was not afraid of any of these women, including a couple of English wives from Surrey, who fancied they would not have spoken to Ida, back in England.

‘Put up a fence around your backyard.'

‘My husband's going to.'

They had priced the lengths of fencing and the posts, and he was going to borrow Franklin's pick-up to fetch it; but he never did.

Now when Maggie wandered off on one of her dreamy walks, along the paths among the pines and scrub oaks, or across the backs of the houses toward the baseball park, from which she sometimes had to be brought back by Ida or Bernie, the dog went with her. Just about the time when Ida began to worry, she would hear the high single bark, which sounded like ‘Yuck!' Adam would be scratching anxiously at the back door, his lamb's tail, which he never wagged, between his legs, and Maggie sitting on the bottom step with her back to the house, as if she were starting out rather than coming home.

Buddy had been scared, when he brought the dog from the bar, that Ida would be angry with him and throw it out. He was pleased to find himself a success. He had done something for the kids. He was a good father. He and Ida told anecdotes about Adam at the Enlisted Men's Club. For a while there, they were kind of a happy family. It was cute to see Bernie out back with his friends and their dogs, throwing sticks for them, and taking them off into the woods to look for squirrels.

Ida showed Maggie how to write the dog's name, ADAM, and told her some bits of natural history: how dogs were once wild, like wolves, and how they lived by their noses. When Adam went smelling from tree to tree and checked the fire hydrants and the wheels of parked cars to find out which other dogs had been around, ‘He's reading the paper,' Ida told Maggie, ‘to see what the local news is.'

Buddy either screamed ferociously at Adam or worked him up to excitement, or fed him chocolate, the way he did with the powerful unruly dogs at Leggeland. Bernie had a special tender face for Adam, his bright eyes softened with love. When his father forgot to give him his allowance and then gave him too much, he put some of it away for his old age, and bought dog biscuits with the rest, instead of candy.

Ida made up stories about the brown dog, which had become the central focus of the family, pulling them together.

‘Adam used to be a queen's lap-dog; he wore a jewelled collar. Adam was a spy in his former life. That's why he grew a beard and patched out one eye. When it snowed in Moscow, he wore a fur coat and ski boots, four of them.'

‘You're crazy, Ah-eye-da.' Buddy enjoyed it too.

‘He had an electric tail warmer, he says. Once it shorted. That's why he only has half a tail.'

‘Adam says' was a way to get Maggie's attention. ‘Adam says to go back upstairs and make yourself decent. You brush his hair, he says, so why can't you brush yours?'

Maybe Lily was right. Maybe Ida might go back to some kind of work one day. She could be a teacher.

Adam still searched uneasily in empty corners, and spent a lot of time poking about in the cellar, as if he had buried bones there.

One Saturday morning, he suddenly rushed through the kitchen, slipping on Ida's waxed floor, and sat by the door with his head on one side, white patch up, one ear cocked, one dangling.

‘Adda!' Maggie shouted at him.

‘He wants to go out. Let him out, honey.'

Maggie opened the door and went out with the dog.

Half an hour later, they had not come back. Almost an hour. No frenzied scratching at the door, as if wild beasts were after him. Ida went outside and called the dog, and whistled her special whistle for Maggie, the first three notes of ‘There was I, Waiting at the Church'.

‘Don't pee your pants,' Buddy said. ‘She'll turn up, she always does.'

‘Adam will bring her home,' Bernie said.

‘She went out without her jacket.'

‘So what, it's warm, and she's got her sweater on, ain't she?'

‘She'll be tired.'

‘Nah.' Buddy was doing his push-ups on the living-room floor, with Bernie beside him, thin arms collapsing. ‘She's like me.'

Maggie was solid and rubbery. Bernie was slight, like Ida had been, and light on his feet as she still was, as if her extra bulk was air.

Buddy let himself down and lay prone. Bernie jumped on his back. ‘Let's you and I go fish in the pond.'

‘I'm too busy.'

‘Puppa. I wanna go fishing, Puppa.' The infantile whine was obnoxious at ten years old, but it still worked with his father. They went off to buy worms at the bait shop.

Ida walked along to the baseball field, where some fathers were chucking balls for sons to catch in the enormous leather mitts which still made Ida smile, although she was so Americanized. When she used to go with Jackson to the county ground, naked hands were all that grabbed the hurtling cricket ball out of the air.

No one had seen Maggie. Ida walked down the path that crossed empty land to the Commissary. It was closed now. Nothing in the parking lot. No Maggie. She'll be home, time I get back, wondering where I am.

No Maggie on the step, too lazy or too oblivious to open the door.

Ida went to the clearing in the straggly woods behind her house and asked some of the children who were playing there on the bike bumps and in the tottering forts. She went to all the nearby houses, including that of the Englishwoman who had hung out the Union Jack on Independence Day.

‘Worried?' Cora asked.

‘Not really. She always comes home.'

‘I'd be worried sick,' Cora said unhelpfully. ‘Here, I'll help.' She drove Ida around the streets in her car, making wider and wider circles.

‘Let's go back,' Ida said. ‘I know she'll be there.'

Buddy and Bernie were there. They had not been able to buy bait. At noon, Buddy called the base police. Two men in white helmets and leggings came round in a jeep and talked to them calmly in deep voices, as if their anxiety were the only problem. After lunch – Buddy could always eat – Adam turned up, dusty-pawed and drooping as if he were tired, or guilty.

‘Where have you been? Where's Maggie?' They took him out on a leash, and encouraged him: ‘Come on, Adam, find Maggie. Good dog, take us to Maggie. Maggie! Maggie!'

Ida's lips were dry from repeating the sad little whistle.

Adam would go along with them, but he would not lead ahead in any direction.

‘Useless mutt.' Buddy aimed a kick at him.

‘Don't, Puppa.' Bernie went down on his knees to put his arms round the dog.

‘He leads her off somewhere and then comes crawling back with his belly on the ground. I'd never oughta brought him home.'

‘It's not your fault.' Ida was making herself stay calm.

‘Who says it is? Goddam dog.' Buddy jerked the leash, and the dog choked and coughed up foam.

Adam did not find the glasses. Bernie did. At the corner of their street, Maggie's bright pink glasses lay in a crack in the sidewalk.

‘She don't see so good without them,' Ida told the police when they came back. ‘I guess she's lost.'

Dusk fell. Night crept in to separate Maggie from her like a wall. Dozens of people were out with flashlights. The military police drove around in jeeps and trucks with spotlight beams. Walkie-talkies appeared. The alarm was out to the town police and the cruiser cars, in case Maggie had wandered off the base, although she never went that far.

The search was stopped briefly after midnight, and started again at dawn.

For some reason, Lily called Ida early on Sunday morning to see how she was. When Ida heard her voice, she began to cry noisily, like a howl. Gasping and sobbing, she trembled out the words of crisis, and Lily felt a void open up within her, transposing Isobel or Cathy for Maggie.

‘There's people come from all around, Lil. Hundreds of them, out searching.'

‘I'm coming,' Lily said.

‘No, you can't.'

‘I'll be there.'

Lily left the children with their grandmother Muriel, and she
and Paul drove north. Along the road from the main gate of Watkins to the housing area, they saw groups of people, some with dogs, some men in uniform, going in and out of the trees and bushes, beating at the brushwood with long sticks, and calling. There was a crowd round Ida's duplex. She was inside with some of the women, getting soup and coffee ready. A brown dog was tied to an outside drainpipe. It sat leaning against the wall of the house, as if it were eavesdropping.

As Lily got out of the car, she saw Buddy coming down the road with his son, tired, with a black moustache and a sooty stubble of beard. He walked on without looking at her.

‘I'm Ida's friend Lily.' She went to them and put an arm round Bernie's shoulders.

‘Oh, yeah.'

‘This is my husband, Paul Stephens.'

‘Yeah? Well, you come at a bad time.'

‘That's why I've come.'

‘You shouldn't have,' Buddy muttered, meaning, ‘I don't want you,' not, ‘How nice of you.'

‘I couldn't stay away. I'm so sorry, I –'

‘Come on, son.' Buddy took Bernie's arm and pulled him away from Lily. ‘Let's go get us something to eat.'

‘He's a pig.' Lily made a face at his back, as he went through the people outside the house, paying no attention to anyone.

‘He's going through hell.'

‘He's a pig anyway. Do we dare go in?'

Ida saw them in the road and rushed out, short and wide and frenzied in jeans and a black jersey top that were too tight. She clung to Lily, and then Paul put his arms round her and kissed her. He had kissed her goodbye that last morning on the plane from Iceland, and called her Ida No, because she was so uncertain about her marriage.