Pretty Leslie (29 page)

At once he got a sufficient explanation. Almost before the escalator had carried them up to the main corridor of the terminal, Leslie was fumbling bluntly into the terrible news she had to greet him with. “… that day we all went out to Bieman's farm. A riot. I misunderstood everything. She'd been cautioned, apparently, from what the neighbors told me, about the condition of her heart.…” It seemed then odd to him (and in time would seem the oddest thing of all, and finally an enormity not odd at all but merely incomprehensible, absurd) that she was well into her account before he understood her to be telling him that Dolores Calfert was dead.

When he understood this, the bob of his head was merely a professional agreement, a concurrence in the easy prognosis for a woman of Dolores' age and weight.”Oh my,” he said. “Oh my.”

It was Leslie's responsibility to confess and she was not shirking it. “My grand stupidity was in not guessing, when she was sick in the bathroom. Out there. I simply can't forgive myself for not guessing what was going to happen.”

“Maybe it couldn't have been prevented,” Ben said.

Leslie tossed her head as if he missed the point altogether (as in fact and from sympathy he had intended to do). “I talked to Jack Whitelaw. He said
that
. I meant that if I had guessed, I might have stayed with her. I'm feeling sorry for myself.”

“Like the Catholics,” Martha said. “They claim they weep for the living and all that bullshit.” She had heard Leslie's formula of remorse on the telephone yesterday morning (Monday) and now had her answer fully formed. “If it hadn't been that day it would have been another. You just happened to be with her immediately before the seizure. You
can't
imagine you killed her.” On the phone yesterday morning that was exactly what Leslie had accused herself of, and she was not going to get away with it here. Leslie tried to claim everything for herself. But marriage did not entitle her to such sweeping melodrama any more than friendship did, Martha thought. In her role as deflater Martha felt her one justification for being with the two of them this morning.

“Oh my, oh my,” Ben said. Magnitudes of bewilderment were in his mild protest. Someone seemed to be trying to tell him there was a reason for the old woman's death. He could not quite get it straight what the reason was. It did not occur to him that she had died because he needed her. It was not entirely clear to him that he did. But he sensed the greatness of the gulf of death, demonstrated by her taking off the way the common spaces of life are demonstrated to a child in its high chair by a spoon or cup shoved off the tray. He said nothing stronger than “Oh my.” But at the moment when the news impacted, he was grateful both that he was a doctor and that he had not been Dolores Calfert's.

Still—it came like the shadows that dogged them as they passed window after window in the long corridor from the flight line to the heart of the terminal—not to have been her physician was to have been nothing to her. It left him with no formalities of termination, so to speak, with no way to bury someone who had been mysteriously important to him. In his life he had had enough problems with the unburiable dead.

Two weeks ago he had expected something to come from his new friendship, was content to wait and see what it could be. Now nothing, ever, except the grim itch of wondering what it might have been and if it might have saved him and Leslie.

He caught Leslie squinting at him to measure how he was taking her news. Her concern prompted him to think—but not to feel—that it was somehow worse than he could yet grasp. He wanted to mourn. Something held him back, a sense that it was improper to cry for someone whose relation to you was ambiguous. The impounded tears, the ache in his throat that could not be either a wail or a speech, sickened him a little, and he felt that something irksome as a lie was anesthetizing him to his loss. He shivered as if with disgust.

“I practically
made
her run uphill when the rain started,” Leslie said.

“My relatives,” Martha began. “
My
relatives—”

“Nonsense,” Ben said, more grumpily than he intended.

“She'd been loafing in a sling chair. I'm sure she was all right
until.
… She was in no shape to run. But she tried.”

“—I have two uncles who can afford it, and every time they overeat they're on the phone pleading with doctors. Someday one of them will go out—”

“I should at least have
guessed
what indigestion meant.”

“Coronary. Bing. Then he'll have the great satisfaction of having been right that once. The doctors just won't come any more. It happens at least every Christmas and every Thanksgiving. No joke.”

It was as if the prolonged sonority of the motors that kept him partly deaf, now, to the appeals of the two women, were the anesthesia that kept him from quite absorbing what was being communicated. His head was still full of images of his morning's flight—the drive-in theaters like drab fans spread on the grass, the green, square-cut emeralds of suburban swimming pools, the delicate necklaces of traffic on the parkways, the dress-form shapes of towers that supported high-tension wires, the scabs of erosion mottling the cultivated fields, the clam-shell motion of the flaps beginning to open on the wing when the plane was ready to descend. Weren't all these things of equal importance with an old lady's death? No. Yes. Yes. No.

Irritably, smiling, he said to his wife, “I don't understand quite what it is you have to tell me.”

“About Dolores,” she said, shocked that his attention might have wandered from this overwhelming theme.

Then they both laughed together. “Yes,” Ben said. “I heard you say she'd died. I'm not that deafened.”

“Just my feelings,” Leslie said. “I'm sorry. I knew Daddy would come home and kiss and make it all well.”

The luggage had not yet come from the plane. They were not in a hurry—Maureen Connally was still covering Ben's practice through today and would have got a message to Leslie if any of his patients urgently required him. So they took most of an hour in the airport bar to sort out the clutter of other subjects they had, after six days, to exchange.

“Stamp out all that yellow fever?” Martha asked. “Can Theodore and me go ahead with the Canal now?”

With a smile like a custard pie smashed on his face, Ben answered that he had seen “a lot of lovely kids. Boy, a lot of them.”

Leslie, catching her breath, said, “Finally I had my showdown with Mrs. Bodeen. Friday afternoon I went to her study club with her, like I'd promised, being dutiful while you were away, dear—and I've finally cleaned the basement, and all the books are in order by subject and author. You know what Bodeen always said—‘There was a little old lady, blind and deaf, who was such an inspiration to us all.' There she was, blind and deaf all right, talking
all
the goddamn afternoon about
Please Don't Eat the Daisies!
” She decided she was sounding too consistently the victim of each episode she had to tell about, and she recognized the warning in that. He knew her so well that even the wrong tone might clue him in and … why not? Why not, just today, tell him everything, since it was, like an acute disease, over with now and done? As soon as they got rid of Martha.…

Ben said, “Awfully cute. Vital.”

“And here you are, back in the land of Mighty Mouse drinking his atomic milk,” Martha said. “I did some reading up on South America while you were gone, Ben. You ought to start a boy farm. You really like kids, don't you?”

“
I
am the wife,” Leslie said in haughty jest. “I didn't do any reading. What'd you do for your country?”

“I offered a statistical amendment,” Ben said, happily swinging into the familiar formula of banter. “The truth is that the conference might have succeeded without me. There were a lot of army wheels from the Institute of Tropical Medicine who even knew more about pediatrics than I. Actually,” he said with the straight-on, little-boy gravity that softened Leslie more than anything else about his company manners, “actually my trip was straight out of the pork barrel.”

“At least it got us away from each other for a while,” she said. “We were beginning to show the need for a vacation.” Their eyes met, wondering, as both of them weighed this observation for truth. They had said nothing like this before he left. Had they only been too enmeshed, now freed and healthy enough for belated frankness? Did it have something to do with Dave Lloyd and the night of their party?

He went on with his observation to Martha. “You've heard us talk about Dr. Carroll. I used to think I was at least one of his fair-haired boys in my time at Columbia. I've kept in touch, with some servility, you know. He pulled the strings to get me down there and I'm grateful he got me away from Les a few days. And I learned a lot, really. But I'm beginning to think I'm just one of his boys. Not so fair-haired. See, Martha, doctors are politicians, some of them, and they have to pass out patronage like any other would-be power figure. Surprised?”

“Not,” Martha said.

“You offered a statistical amendment,” Leslie prompted.

“Of course you aren't. Leslie, we were talking about aid. For Venezuela and all of Latin America.”

“Deplorable,” Martha said. For a moment she poised on the rim of an occasion to express her feelings. She had read plenty about the exploitation of not-so-white peasants. But she checked herself by reflecting that the Danielses must be lightly submerging their feelings about Mrs. Calfert beneath this shallow foam of facts. She simply beamed quietly to show she knew what they were so bravely doing and approved.

“I was way out of my depth,” Ben said. “Unfortunately, Martha, it was our friends from south of the border—probably instructed, since they were nice guys; I liked them—who tried to get some highly questionable figures into the record before I spoke up.…”

And said we fucked all night two nights and part of a third, last night. Honesty, what jewel is like thee? And if he looks at me now, I
would
tell him except for his sake and Martha being here. Why should they suffer? “Honesty—you carried the torch of honesty,” Leslie said with thin, fond derision.

“At least I'd been doing my homework before I went. Reading,” he said.

“Homework,” Leslie laughed—and suddenly felt relieved, safe. This morning she had felt herself absolutely and entirely the victim of an involvement she had never wanted. She had seen, like a pillar of cloud, the enormity of what she had suffered, hoping for the best. Obsessed with her conviction, she had been afraid that literally she might utter the words which would tear the scaffold down. But she heard her real voice now and realized she was doing fine.

Ben hardly noticed her counterpointed comment. “Colonel Whearty—he was chairing this particular panel—just sat breathing hard while I clutched my notes in my hand and cited my figures. I think—as a matter of fact I'm sure—that he knew as well as I what was wrong with their submissions, but meant—or had also been instructed—to let it go in the name of higher strategy—let them screw us here so, higher up and where it counts, we can screw them.”

Momentarily his forehead wrinkled as if with pain—actually only with the memory of a long process of calculation which had brought him finally to accept a compromise of justice as the price of order and things going on as they were.

He had had nightmares in Caracas. They had been, actually, quite manageable nightmares, the sort that dissolve and relax their grip briskly in the morning light. As he understood them, they represented the simultaneous conjunction of several currents of experience. They were overdetermined—to use a Freudian word he had always liked.

First of all there was his absence from Leslie, a primary current of novelty and faint disturbance. It had been a long time since he slept in any bed without her. Not to hear her breathing beside him was more disturbing than he would have anticipated. Then,
sequitur
, to find his anticipations in error made him take a brand-new look at the marriage they had made.

The simple circumstance of going away gave him a perspective, as if he needed to get half the breadth of the North American continent in view—Kansas to New York and almost back to Kansas again—to see what Leslie and he had been doing.

They had been drugging each other, he concluded, until both relied on a reckless habit of dreaming. Take for instance his decision, reached just before he left, to tell Leslie all about the Billy Kirkland business. As soon as he put a few thousand miles between them, he saw that as wildly unwise. Only within range of her contagious lust for drama had confession seemed like a noble idea—or even seemed possible.

Among his uniformed and dignified colleagues in the mountain-girdled city, drinking, dining and talking shop in the streamlined buildings of the Bolivar center, and even alone in his hotel room, he found it hard to believe he had ever entertained such an idea. While he was caught up in talk that involved the health and destiny of millions still alive, it had seemed mere impudence to suppose that his old secret mattered. He could no more travel home to confess it than he could have carried home carrion from the Caracas gutters as a souvenir for his wife.

One morning there he took a walk through the cathedral with a Dr. Teresa Echeverría-Röhde, a vivid solemn girl from Argentina. She had struck him first as rather pedantic. She knew all kinds of things—political, cultural, medical—that seemed weightier than the matters he thought about habitually. And she gave out information endlessly. She had the annoying habit of finding fault with “you
norteamericanos
”—one heard it under thinner or thicker veils humming all around the fringes of the conference, though in the formal sessions great respect was paid to the U.S.A. He thought it a stuffy pose. Ungraceful.