Pretty Leslie (19 page)

Fortunately or unfortunately, they met Dolly Sellers as soon as they sounded their footsteps on the floor of the verandah. And very probably she had come looking for Patch. He averted his face and twisted his shoulders away from her while she spoke to Leslie.

“What time's this shindig supposed to be over? The party, I mean,” Dolly asked.

Patch hummed through his teeth and watched the Negroes clearing off the buffet table.

“I don't know,” Leslie said, aware that she had been smelling furniture polish and floor wax in the passage, gratefully sniffing the hot moisture now detectable in the open air. A massing of blue-black clouds, densest in the west behind the neighboring farm, had brought a kind of artificial twilight. It must be past four o'clock, and it seemed later than it was. “When I was invited nobody said. How late did it last a year ago?” She knew at least that such parties were annual affairs, in summer symmetry with the Christmas party held in the Studio downtown.

“I was working for him last year but I didn't come,” Dolly said. “Do you know, Don?”

Perhaps he shook his head abruptly. Leslie didn't see. But he hummed again instead of answering aloud. Leslie heard a car stop in the gravel around by the garage. “Oh, I wouldn't think of leaving yet,” she said encouragingly to Dolly. “The party's still going strong. I think I heard some of them dancing in the parlor. And someone's just arrived.”

Patch laughed to himself.

Dolly had been grossly misunderstood. “I wasn't going to
leave
yet,” she said. She seemed almost shocked at such an idea—as if Leslie wanted her to go. “I have to call my mother is all, and tell her when I won't be home.”

Now it dawned on Leslie that the girl was trying to get an answer from Patch, was using her as a backboard for a question that only he could answer: when would he be ready to take Miss Dolly elsewhere and then home?

“Sure people are just coming,” Dolly said while she waited in vain. “I think it's the Bieman's
friends
who are beginning to pile in now. String's even got a bunch of them out in the dairy. And they don't
mix
much.”

“It will probably go on to the wee hours,” Patch said, refusing to give any comfort to Dolly's anxiety. And then Leslie realized that Dolly must think she was in the competition to leave with him.…

“Tell your mother not to wait up,” she said firmly to Dolly. “Excuse me.”

She almost ran down the verandah steps and down the lawn. She did not slacken her pace or lift her head to greet all her new and old friends until she had come to the sling chair where Dolores Calfert still sat beside the pool.

The older woman sat silent as someone asleep, like a dumpy monument against the mysterious shadow of the grass, turning blue and dark now under the blue of the approaching thunderstorm. She was no longer at the center of things. The flood of the party had long since moved away from its concentration around the pool, and she seemed not so much lonely as deserted. But what stunned Leslie most was the blaze of sunburn like paint sprayed from a single source on one side only of Dolores' head, arm's, and legs and across the broad neckline of her dress.

“Honey, you're cooked,” she said with a low moan of compassion.

Dolores raised the great curves of her eyelids. “Am I? I thought I was stewed.” She managed a chuckle that was only faintly mournful. “Boy, I've been dreaming I was on an ocean voyage, sitting in a deck chair, and the steward kept fillinerup, fillinerup. Maybe I did doze off. There were people here?”

“They're still here.”

“Maybe I'll see them again if I look hard.” She took Leslie's hand and squeezed.

“I shouldn't have left you,” Leslie said. “You probably wanted to go home hours ago. Shall we?”

“Who wants to go home when they's no man there?”

Leslie clucked. “I know. I know. But Ben's only away for three more days, goody.” But should she have said that? Was it, after all, a delicate enough way to express how she had grasped what Dolores was feeling? “Maybe he'll crash and drown,” she said with a grimace, wondering if Dolly Sellers could really be so asinine as to believe she had been with Don Patch by choice. “Then we'd both be widows; ah, Lucy, what if she were dead?”

“What?”

“A poem,” Leslie said. “Honey, I am worried about your sunburn and about your being a poor old widow and my being a poor young.… Let's go home now.”

Dolores brushed at her sunburn as if it were dust that could be fluttered away. “Not,” she said firmly, “at your hour of triumph.”

“Triumph!” Leslie said. She grimaced, more or less sincerely. She did not so much dispute the correctness of the word as lament it as a reminder that the reality was already gliding away. How silly that the waning of a modestly triumphant afternoon could so much resemble a girl's growing older. But four-thirty (or was it five now, already five?) brought the same emotional quandary as remembering she was twenty-seven now and that the best promises had already been defaulted. “Ah,” she said gloomily, “I was just a prelim. I'm told the party may run for hours yet.”

“We'll run with it.”

“We mustn't stay. You're tired and
awfully
sunburnt. Doesn't it hurt? Only when you laugh? Well, it will later. Ben will be angry at me for not taking better care of you. He's really fonder of you than you could think.”

“He likes me?”

“Mmmmm.” The impulse was strong in Leslie to pull out all the stops and gush. There must be times when gush, like other sorts of lies or fantasies, was a better way of coming at the truth than conventional reticence. And she had imagined that Ben, against all conventional likelihood, had fallen romantically in love—not exactly with the real Widow Calfert, but as one falls in love with a character in a book, whose faded lips he will never have to kiss. She thought they had known each other without the annoying limitation of an exact relationship like mother to son or lover to lover—something vague and therefore better than the common run of things.

“Dolores,” she said earnestly, “I'm sorry we—I—we haven't got your ring back to you yet.”

“I'm not exactly worried about it.”

“No. It's safe.” Leslie frowned, wondering if the diamond was quite safe. For several days it had been in her jewel box with her own things. She had tried it on. Too big. Probably she would not have worn it herself, but she had quite recognizable wishes to keep it for Ben. After all, it had been pledged in his cause—so she understood. If she could only figure out a way of keeping it for him. Or for his daughter? No end of moony, half-formed thoughts sparkled around that ring.

“Besides, I lost it fair and square,” Dolores said.

Leslie was hardly listening to
that
kind of reasoning. She was musing over her certainty about the relation between Ben and this woman—and certain she was, even to the point of a nameless kind of jealousy. He had not said much about Dolores. He had not even been eager to see more of her. “Sometimes it spoils things to see too much of people you've clicked with,” he said. “It's just good to know she's here in the world.”

His crush had no more romantic language than that. And couldn't have. As a reality it was unseizable. But Leslie had gladdened with the intuition that one of her gifts—and it wasn't too odd, was it? to think of Dolores as her gift to Ben, brought home from shopping the world for characters—had caught his fancy like fire on a fuse.

“I'll take you home and oil you and let you get to bed.”

“I'm oiled and I never go to bed this time of day,” Dolores said. “I'd get fired if I dragged you home now.”

“But it's over.” Leslie pouted.

“Don't be silly. I've been building up my strength. Not sleeping, whatever you thought.”

“But I haven't,” Leslie said. “I always burn out too fast. It's true. Gawd, I was some belle when I was in high school. What does it matter? That's over now. I'm burned out and the party's still going strong. Nobody told me it was supposed to be this
evening
too. Do you know I weighed over a hundred and forty-five pounds when I got married?”

“Mmmmm,” Dolores said—a woman in no hurry to find out what this apparently irrelevant information might signify.

“The things that started so, well,
adventurously
, where I could really respect my own courage, were the ones that always turned out worst.” Leslie sat down cross-legged beside Dolores' chair and stared in melancholy at the pool. A wind, running ahead of the storm, was raising a miniature chop of waves on its milky-green surface. She tried to guess whether Patch, the Abominable Snowman, might be somewhere laughing to himself about her mistake. It was so trivial really. What difference did it make that she had not known the party would go on? It was absolutely ridiculous of him to be amused that she had not known.

Like a bad gambler moved to want revenge for a small, unexpected loss, she began to plot her moves for Monday, when she was sure to see him at the office. It wasn't easy to see what could penetrate such insensitivity and convince him how ridiculous he was being.

“What?” she asked.

“I only said everyone's moving up to the house.” Dolores started to hoist herself out of the chair, squinting over her shoulder at the black rain advancing on the hills behind them.

I can't even hold her, Leslie thought, sulking; I'm not even entertaining to her. While Dolores poised on the edge of her chair, she began to talk.

“Like one of the first times I took the family car out by myself. Daddy had been teaching me to drive and it was understood that after I passed my fifteenth birthday I would be allowed to go without him in the daytime. He praised me. I
thought
he made it clear I was a perfectly competent driver. So one day Mary Jo Anavelt was over and I suppose I'd been bragging to her, and anyway, without asking anyone's permission, she and I got in the car and I drove off, not even on the highway but on a country road after we got out of town. I was in
perfect
control. It was such a nice day. I wasn't even trying to
impress
Mary Jo and I thought, wasn't that saintly of me, that I could be not only so superior but so humble. If I'd been too proud or something, I could understand what happened then, but I wasn't. I started to turn around in a little branch lane east of Jamaica, and wouldn't you know, the rear bumper hooked on a stone culvert opposite the lane. It was Mary Jo who panicked. I knew we could get off somehow. Even if we had to call someone from a farmhouse, there was still time to get the car home before my folks appeared. But she insisted that if I would rock it a little, back and forth, she could lift the bumper just the inch or two it would take to clear and let us free. You know what happened.”

Dolores shook her head. She only knew that it wasn't as bad as Leslie was making out. She made too much of too little. That was good as well as bad. That was why everyone loved Leslie. She made more of them than they were. When she swung to depression she might make less, dragging her creation down with her into collapse and mire.

“She got her damn hand caught between the bumper and the stones,” Leslie said. “It wasn't even an accident, it was my
fault
. A better driver wouldn't have been so concentrated on driving. Shifting gears.” Her hand worked an invisible gear lever. “Then she screamed. I think her scream scared me. It scared me, so I
gunned
the motor. It just almost stripped the bone on one of her fingers.”

“She
lost
a finger?”

“No. All the way into town to the doctor's we kept reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. I mean, trying to remember how it went. I can't remember it now. Oh.…” The first immense splattering drops of rain swept the surface of the pool like miniature drumfire and splattered on her arms and dress.

Dolores made a move to leave her chair, heaved forward, and then settled back as Leslie said, “Funny we should have prayed. I was all over religion by that time. About twelve I wanted to be a saint and have stigmata. Mother and I had talked it all out by then and we decided, ‘It's all so simple'—life and death, that is, and where the soul goes.”

“I'm not your mother, honey, and I'm getting—”

“Perhaps it's not so simple,” Leslie said. She saw her soul like a pet bird abandoned at home while his mistress was enjoying herself in the country.

“—wet.”

“Oh.” She came out of her religious reverie to find that God had sent rain to mortify her flesh, and maybe not with the specific object of shaping Himself another saint. “It's raining,” she marveled as the water began trickling down her bosom.

Dolores grinned through a slop like tears on her face. “I've been trying to point out to you, baby.”

“Let's run,” Leslie said. They scampered up toward the house as the rain intensified suddenly. Halfway there they were soaked. Leslie slowed, waiting for Dolores, thinking, Now that we're wet we might as well relax and enjoy it. She heard the teakettle whistle of breath as the fat old legs strained to keep up with her.

“Waaakh … please …,” Dolores gasped. Leslie spun to take her arm and help. She still had the idea of going straight to the station wagon. But since they were soaked and breathless, perhaps they had better go to the house.

It was like being unexpectedly involved in a masquerade to put on one of Mother Bieman's dresses. When Leslie came into the kitchen wearing it, Daddy Bieman slipped his arm around her and pinched her breast, saying, “Mother, I want you to meet one of the slipperiest crooks in the wholesale drug game. Mother, I tell you …
Mother
.”

The slippery crook showed his false teeth right up to the gums when she got into the spirit of the horseplay and slapped Daddy's hand. “Daddy, you all have been too free with the guests today,” she said, “and have forfeited your
con
jugal rights.”