Leave Well Enough Alone (3 page)

Dorothy felt a little queasy about the whole subject of children. She had smiled with relief when Mrs. Hoade informed her that she herself would take care of the new baby.

“I can see you’re sorry not to have charge of the little one, too,” she’d said with such stunning inaccuracy that Dorothy immediately stopped smiling, “but you’ll be able to hold her, or him, from time to time, if you like. I do hope it’s a boy. John so much wants a boy after two girls.”

The last time Dorothy had held an infant, she’d lifted Bridget gingerly from her bassinette, only to have Bridget throw up all over her shoulder. Dorothy had nearly tossed the baby back to Maureen and had made a beeline for the bathroom, where she’d gotten sick herself. She’d left her blouse, a new one, in Maureen’s wastebasket. It was too bad, but she knew she’d never be able to look at that blouse again without thinking of Bridget and that ghastly smell.

After checking the signs, Dorothy alighted at the main station. She lugged her suitcase onto the platform and set it down with a thud, sending a large run down the length of her left stocking. Oh, no, she thought, I don’t dare take the time to find a ladies’ room in case I miss my train. I wonder if they have ladies’ rooms on little local trains? Maybe I’ll just buy a newspaper and spread it over my knees. That way I can take the stockings off underneath it and no one will see.

A porter stepped solemnly up to her suitcase, lifted it onto his dolly, and broke the handle. “What have you got in that thing? Rocks?” he asked.

Dorothy had not expected a porter. “I think I can manage it, thank you,” she said.

“Not with no handle, you can’t,” said the porter defiantly. He turned around and trundled off down the platform with it.

Dorothy ran after him. “Can I ask you how much you charge?” she said miserably to the shiny twill back. “Because I have only ten dollars left and...

“That should do it,” said the porter, not looking back at her. “Where to? Cab? Hotel?”

“Llewellyn. I’m to make a connection for Llewellyn.” Dorothy stopped at a newsstand. She was determined not to ask the porter for change of a five-dollar bill in case he didn’t have any change and became angry and either kept the five dollars or hurled her suitcase onto the tracks.

“A pack of cigarettes, please, and this paper,” she asked the mustachioed proprietress. The woman turned a pair of sightless blue eyes on Dorothy.

“What kind?” she asked.

Was it against the law in Pennsylvania for a minor to buy cigarettes? Dorothy asked herself. Thank heaven the woman was blind. “Camels, please,” she said, lowering her voice an octave. “Here’s a five-dollar bill. I’m sorry I have nothing smaller.”

The woman fingered the money. How can she tell the difference? Dorothy wondered, as the silver and four ones appeared before her in a little wooden tray. Camels were what Kathleen’s father smoked and what she and Kate had sneaked, two at a time, out of his pack to puff on down in the cellar. Kate was also well supplied with Sen-Sen.

“And a package of Sen-Sen, please,” said Dorothy, handing over another dollar.

“I jes’ give you two quarters,” said the woman.

“I’m sorry, but I need that for the porter,” said Dorothy, with panicky certainty that she’d never see the porter or her suitcase again. The woman spat on the floor but gave Dorothy change all the same.

“Thank you,” Dorothy shouted as if the woman had been deaf as well and she clattered down the platform as fast as she could, as much to escape the woman’s unseeing eyes as to catch up with her belongings.

“Dorothy is
very
bright,” Sister Elizabeth Macintosh’s last term report rang in her ears, as she flew down a dirty set of stairs after the porter’s disappearing back. “But she lacks
discipline
,
organization
, and
concentration.
Let’s hope for an improvement next year!” Usually, Sister quoted Shakespeare or Sir Walter Scott, underscoring words freely so that the point would not escape a student, and giving, if possible, the source of the quote down to the year it was written. “I wish, Dorothy,” Sister had remarked in one of her many marginal notes on a composition paper, “that you had the
stoicism
of your sister Maureen, the
application
of your brother Terrance, and the
humility
of your brother Kevin, because your brain is better and your
potential superior
to any of them.
Please stop dropping participles!
‘He will guide the mild in judgment: He will teach the
meek
His ways!’ Psalm 24, v.9.”

The porter set the suitcase down and held out his hand. Dorothy placed two quarters in it. The fingers curled over the money, but the hand did not drop. Dorothy gave him two more quarters. “Is this the local, the local-express, or the express?” she asked as mildly as she could.

“Express,” said the porter and vanished down the platform at an astonishing clip.

Dorothy struggled to lift her now handleless suitcase into the train. She did not attempt to get it into the overhead rack, and hoped the conductor wouldn’t object to its being in the aisle. Underneath her clothes, the suitcase was filled with books she was supposed to have finished by the end of the summer. Sister Elizabeth taught all four years of Section 1 English at Sacred Heart Academy. She admonished her students to “turn lazy hours in the sun into golden ones” by filling the minutes with Dickens or Twain or her favorite—and Dorothy’s least favorite—Sir Walter Scott. Dorothy spread the paper over her knees. No one had yet entered the train. She removed both stockings quickly but didn’t dare try and take off her garter belt in case someone did come in and had her arrested for indecent exposure. She tapped a Camel out of the pack and slipped a copy of
The Case of the Complacent Corpse
out of her pocketbook. She knew she wouldn’t read
Nicholas Nickelby
by Labor Day.

Just you wait! She told invisible Sister Elizabeth. Someday you’ll see. Dorothy pictured that on just such an occasion as this, when she was alone in a train and no one could overhear, a man in a trench coat or a woman in a blue serge suit would come up and whisper that Scotland Yard or the CIA or perhaps even the French Sureté had been scouting her for years and wanted to recruit her. Whatever agency it was, her talents would be recognized and she would be sent on dangerous missions in East Germany. Perhaps she would come back to Newburgh one day and meet Sister Elizabeth on the street. “Dorothy!” Sister would exclaim. “It’s been so many years! I expect you’re married now with a family, just like Maureen!” “No,” Dorothy would say, taking a Players Oval from a steel cigarette case. “As a matter of fact, I’ve just gotten back from Berlin. Can’t talk about it, of course. It’s all hush-hush. If I meet with an accident, give my best to Reverend Mother.” And Dorothy would slip off into the fog leaving Sister with her mouth open, her eyes agog, and her Walter Scott waiting to be said.

“Little lady, where are you going?” a kindly white-haired conductor asked, peering in the door of the train.

“Llewellyn, I think,” said Dorothy stamping out the cigarette hastily.

“Well, you’d better get in the train opposite then,” he instructed, looking sadly at the dangling handle on her suitcase. “This one’s going to Atlanta in a few hours.” He lifted the suitcase with both arms and grunted, “We don’t want you winding up in Atlanta, do we?”

“Oh, please,” Dorothy protested, “I can carry it, I really can.”

“What have you got in here, rocks?” he asked, setting it down again with a thud.

“Books,” said Dorothy miserably.

“Books!” said the conductor gasping. “Well, I guess you’re not a juvenile delinquent then, eh? I hope you read them after all this. Those yours?” he added, pointing to the stockings, which Dorothy had dropped on the floor like hated things.

“No,” said Dorothy.

Twenty pairs of eyes followed Dorothy and the conductor down the aisle of the new train. He put the suitcase in an overhead rack and Dorothy handed him a crumpled dollar bill. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, rather too loudly for her comfort. “Hope it’s all clean books,” he added, with a leer at the lurid cover of
The Case of the Complacent Corpse.

“It’s really Dickens and Twain and Scott,” said Dorothy, but the conductor was no longer listening. “All aboard!” he shouted in the middle of her word Twain.

Dorothy took a seat. To her dismay, one of her discarded stockings had somehow attached itself to the hinge of her suitcase. The conductor had set the suitcase down for a second after his first attempt to lift it. No doubt he’d set it down on one of the stockings. Now it had freed itself and hung down from the overhead rack like some dreadful nylon boa. She would have to do something. She stood up and yanked it off and jammed it angrily into her pocket. Everyone in the train watched. Get organized now! she scolded herself under her breath. She looked again at the instructions Mrs. Hoade had given her.

“Llewellyn, I guess,” she said when the conductor came back to take her ticket.

“Now make up your mind, honey. Is someone going to meet you at the station?”

“No, I’m to phone them,” said Dorothy. “Llewellyn, then.”

The train made stops at Wayne and Bryn Mawr. This can’t be the express, she told herself, but I’d better get off at Llewellyn anyway since I’ve paid for it and he’ll think I’m hopeless if I change my mind.

To Dorothy’s surprise, she saw Mrs. Hoade waiting for her at the Llewellyn station as the train pulled in. The conductor followed Dorothy to the door of the train and helped her once again with her suitcase. He gave her a smile and pat on the arm. “Dropped something,” he said as she descended to the platform. It was the stocking.

“So lovely to see you, dear,” Mrs. Hoade said, grappling with Dorothy’s suitcase. “What happened to the handle?”

“It...came off,” said Dorothy.

“Dear, where are the girls?” Mrs. Hoade added immediately as the train pulled out. “Where are the girls?”

“The girls?”

“Didn’t I tell you to look for them on the train? They were on the same train with you. Didn’t I tell you to look for them? Let me see my instructions.”

Dorothy handed over the register tape, praying the instructions to look for Mrs. Hoade’s daughters had not magically appeared since she had looked at it last. Mrs. Hoade’s lips moved as she read her own handwriting. “You’re right,” she said. “No matter...the school promised to put large tags on them with hard-to-open diaper pins. Besides, Jenny knows to get off at Monastery if she by any chance missed you. I talked to the headmistress last night. We’ll have to rush to catch up with the train. No dear, don’t use that door. It hasn’t opened for months. Get in my side.”

Dorothy crawled across the seat of the very dirty old black Ford. Mrs. Hoade jumped in after managing to get Dorothy’s suitcase into the trunk. She pumped the accelerator vigorously. “This hasn’t worked properly in months, either,” she said. “There’s something about getting a car fixed that I can’t stand.” She ground the gears horribly and lurched through a ditch onto the road. Mrs. Hoade ran her fingers through her hair nervously, like a man, Dorothy thought. Her old linen skirt was creased, and despite the heat she wore a sleeveless woolen pullover. It had been put on inside out. Without her pregnant stomach, Mrs. Hoade was still squarish in shape; Dorothy decided Mrs. Hoade might have been pretty enough if she could lose fifty pounds and do something about her hair and clothes.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m wearing this sweater inside out,” said Mrs. Hoade, taking note of Dorothy’s eyes, which had fastened on the stray threads along her shoulder. “It’s a long story.” The speedometer hit forty and then fifty. Her face broke into a grin as she steered the car over the wildly rutted road. There were no houses here, Dorothy noticed, at least none she could see behind the hedges and stone entrance gates that occasionally appeared by the roadside. All that was visible to her were woods and meadows full of daisies and black-eyed Susans. The parched sandy gulleys on either side of the road were overgrown with intimidating-looking thistles.

“Excuse me,” said Dorothy. “But shouldn’t we follow that other road along the tracks if we want to catch the train?”

“This is a shortcut,” said Mrs. Hoade.

“You were saying about...inside out?”

“Oh, yes. I knitted this thing from a complicated pattern in the
Vogue
book, you know,” Mrs. Hoade went on, “and I didn’t see until I was almost finished that I’d knitted the initials in the book instead of my own. Can you imagine? But it was too late. I can’t very well go around in a sweater that says
PEN
instead of
MCH
, so I wear it inside out.” The Ford hit a particularly deep pothole. “Are you uncomfortable, dear?” asked Mrs. Hoade speeding up again as soon as the rear axle had dislodged itself from the macadam.

“No, I’m fine,” said Dorothy. The catch on her loose garter belt was biting into her leg.

“I’ll teach you to drive this summer, dear, if you like,” said Mrs. Hoade kindly.

“But I’m only...fifteen. I won’t be able to have even a learner’s permit until I’m...

“Never mind. The police never pick up anybody on these roads. I learned when I was eleven. Went right through the hedge the first time. The car stuck in the middle of the hedge and I couldn’t go backward or forward!” Dorothy gave what she hoped was an appropriate gasp of horror. “Never laughed so much in my life,” said Mrs. Hoade. “But I’m a good driver. Fast but good. I’ll teach you how to shift gears. Then you’ll find one of those automatics a breeze.”

“I couldn’t,” said Dorothy. “If my father found out he’d absolutely die.”

“Why, dear?”

“Well, he’s a policeman.”

“A policeman!” said Mrs. Hoade in a particularly explosive voice. The left wheels spun hideously around a right curve. Then she added, “Well, of course. You are Irish.”

“I know. And I have the map of Ireland on my face,” said Dorothy more resentfully than she’d intended.

“Oh, dear. I didn’t mean it that way. I think it’s wonderful that he’s a policeman. It’s just that you hadn’t mentioned it and it took me by surprise and I have a habit of blurting out whatever’s on my mind at the moment. I’m terribly sorry!”