Pretty Leslie Read online

  Jesus God, what kind of a doctor? He got a good deep breath into his lungs and answered: A very good one. Good enough to wade through the most vicious tricks his own psyche had to play on him. Good enough to save this child. If more than that was asked of him.… It seemed that no more was asked.

  He felt a tremor in the baby’s leg against his rubber-sheathed thumb, but he forbade himself to believe it was anything more than the involuntary tremor of muscles responding to the mechanical thrust of the fluid. It could even have been a spasm of release from the control of the higher nerve centers. And yet he knew that she was alive.

  She cried presently, a terrible, fretful, tiny wail of petulance, suffering—even dismay or hatred. She had robbed him (of something, what was it? Already the impression was fading like a harshly forbidden dream) and hated him for permitting the theft.

  “Ah,” Jaeger said. You could see his eyes change. You could believe there was some commonplace thanksgiving in heart and mind, though it would never come from his lips except in the disciplined slang of the profession. He knew the uncomplicated joy of beating death against the odds. You saw that whatever image death might take on in the private anterooms of his mind—whether it was a ghoul or some cadaver hauled out of the formaldehyde or just empty blackness—that image had been mocked and imprisoned again. In spite of his reticence, you knew his happiness was pure as a boy’s when he has won a game. “She’ll make it now,” Jaeger said.

  Jaeger knew that and it was enough for him. Useless as the knowledge might be, Ben knew something else. He knew the needle would not have found the vein unless there had been something like a miracle, and he felt himself disastrously indebted to a power he could not quite name—something in himself, no doubt, but something that would not be charitable in demanding repayment. The last several minutes had been as unnerving as a brush with spooks. He had felt, quite literally, a mystic union of flesh with the child. Now which of them was running off with the spoil like a bitch with a bone?

  For another dumb few minutes he stood there telling himself that he should have let her go. Once a respected teacher had told him, “You can’t save them all, Daniels. If you bear down too hard you’ll only ruin your nerve and judgment.” And he—had he answered like the all-American interne, “But, sir, my duty …”? He had not. He had taken the advice deeply to heart, not as if it were a general maxim, but a very shrewd appraisal of his personal limitations. He had made it a principle, just now violated it—and spookily felt that somewhere, somehow, someone would have to pay for the violation.

  When the baby whimpered again he turned away from her. “I think we’ve got her,” he said to Jaeger. “I’ll stick around awhile just in case. Her mother’s here, I think. Has she been told?”

  Jaeger said, “Not really. She knew something was serious when we took the kid out of the room. You’d better give her the news.”

  “Are we sure the kid will make it?”

  “I’m sure. You ought to be.”

  Perhaps he was. But the sense of hovering menace that had brought him to the hospital was exactly as intense as before. Before he went to speak with June Tabor he stopped in the toilet. When he meant to urinate, he found that his penis was so shriveled it had almost disappeared in his pubic hair. This revolted him excessively. He could not produce urine in spite of his furious resolve to master his nerves. He spat dry cotton into the urinal.

  He was lethargic and irritable when he returned to the clinic after an hour, but his mind was working as if stimulated by benzedrine. It seemed positively odd to him that he had not previously been able to diagnose the Negro boy.

  That diagnosis, as he would recall later to Leslie, was exotic, brilliant, and of no practical use whatever. The slight delay in arriving at the diagnosis proved to be of no importance, either, for the sleepy little dark boy had lead poisoning. He had been eating old paint and plaster from the walls of the apartment in which he lived.

  “Caught him at it a lot of times and never thought nothing of it except it was funny,” his mother said when Ben made the admission possible for her. “What make a child want eat that stuff?”

  The child’s brain was full of microscopic particles of lead. There was not the slightest chance that the toxic process could be reversed. It was conceivable, even likely, that the lead had some anesthetic effect. The good-hearted nurses who would attend him at the last could assure his mother that the boy had seemed to feel little pain.

  And that, too, Ben had to suppose, was exactly as much and no more of a miracle than his saving the Tabors’ child. He could not help thinking of the two cases, as if they were paired in significance. But still, comparing them gave him neither comfort nor wisdom.

  chapter 2

  THE WAITING ROOM at Beiman’s Studio was a fraud of indirect lighting, plywood paneling varnished to the dark sheen of walnut, and paintings on the wall which merely lacked the lettering they bore when they had showed up as the advertisements for beer, a nationally famous shampoo bottled locally, and the specialties of the South Side packing plant. Only one of the paintings had been done for any but commercial purposes. That was a large, long landscape with harvesters in a grainfield dotting the foreground, and it had been painted in dead noncommercial earnest by Jarvis (“Daddy”) Bieman, owner of the studio, but painted so very many years ago that the style superficially resembled that of the other pictures.

  In the center of the room, under a haloing light, a blonde sat behind a structure like a nightclub organ which was, in reality, a switchboard designed by the layout man Ozzie Carter, graduate of Pratt Institute. The blonde, who was flanked by two rubber plants when she sat at the combination switchboard and reception desk, was something of a fraud, too. Her hair was peroxided like a showgirl’s. Her hands sparkled with the kind of rings bestowed by oil barons on the doxies of the twenties, and she smiled on every visitor as if she recognized him to be a lascivious big spender. But peroxided Dolores Calfert was past sixty. She was the chaste widow of a big-league ballplayer and, insofar as her intentions went, was Mama to the world.

  She had not even worked at Bieman’s as long as Leslie. But she knew more than Leslie would ever know about the management and employees (why shouldn’t she, since she could eavesdrop on all conversations coming and going?) and cheerfully meant to make all their screwed-up lives turn out O.K.

  She was counseling a girl named Dolly Sellers (who had, among others, a parent problem) one morning when Leslie sailed through the waiting room on her way home.

  Dolly shut up the minute Leslie appeared. Dolly also took her problems (boyfriends, deodorant, and whether to put her money in Postal Savings or the bank) to Leslie, and it might seem like ingratitude to be caught taking another’s advice.

  “If I were rich …” Dolores called after Leslie.

  Leslie stuck out her tongue. “You rabble don’t bother me with your envy. I get more done in my three hours than the shop can keep up with. No joke. I’m going to start wearing a hat to my desk and be treated like an executive.”

  Dolly loved such talk. It was what made her job worth while, being around people who had been somewhere.

  “Now, if I could go with you on such a nice day, we’d go get a massage,” Dolores said. She closed her eyes and rippled her fat shoulders in anticipation of delight.

  “But I’ve got a lunch date,” Leslie said. She wavered a moment, felt the flattery of Dolly’s silent adulation and the old woman’s envy—admitted her duty to be their proxy to the world. She did not expect Martha Lloyd to be delighted with an hour’s detour, more or less, before they got their lunch. But the bare suggestion from two women who counted on her had suddenly sketched the role of a woman who would, cost what it might, interrupt all schedules. Would pay June its homage by having her vegetative nervous system and her muscles toned. The role seemed more like Leslie than the person who had just been pounding out church promotion copy for Our Lady of the Novena building committee.

  “So yes,” she said. “Why don’
t I get a massage?”

  In twenty minutes the realer Leslie (always someone’s idea, the real female servant of the envious, stay-at-home people, of older women and pimpled girls) lay on a table being sweetly pummeled by a mute Swedish oak with hands like truncheons. (Dolores had supplied the address, like a penciled assignment passed to a call girl.) The people’s servant, relaxing in her skin, did not forget her obligation to make it all up to Martha for dragging her along to this rite. Martha doted on Ben. She deserved to hear his latest adventure.

  “‘Constantly,’” Leslie said, into the damp crook of forearm that supported her face. “Ben was upset, or not really upset but just amused—or not even amused but ever so little shocked that this woman—” (She was a strict adherent of the Hippocratic oath and supposed it came a little more natural for women than for men not to tell the whole truth and give away names and such.) “—this woman should need to have it explained to her what constantly meant, as for instance whether it meant she could leave the baby long enough to put clothes in the drier or go turn on the sprinklers in the lawn—she wanting him to take over her whole life, like letting go of a steering wheel in the middle of traffic and assuming that someone else, merely because it’s his profession, will grab it. It’s the little things that exasperate him when he’s exasperated.…”

  “He’s so patient,” Martha said, planting the tiniest of barbs in that flawless but by no means delicate rump on the massage table.

  “A monster of tolerance,” Leslie agreed, “but like getting parents to bring their kids in when they’re sick instead of expecting him to go on house calls. He’s lazy, too, and that’s a virtue. That is, you see, it can be in the long run. There’s principle involved too.”

  Martha asked, “When you come right down to it, what does constantly mean?”

  Wouldn’t she though? Wouldn’t it be Martha who would practically go off her chair at the opportunity of a semantic hassle? Leslie had a sense that she was betrayed by an inopportune shift of listeners. Dolores Calfert and Dolly Sellers would have had too much tact to quibble.

  “That is, if Dave complains about constant demands I make on—”

  Oh crap, oh dear. Leslie closed her eyes and refused the messages coming in her ears. Knock, knock, not home. Still knocking, Martha? Wait until I change my personality, put on my collegiate horn rims, dahling. Yet, in the concentration on herself (quite like concentrating on the mirror while she got her makeup just right), she admitted that repeating what Ben told her did make her sound trivial.

  No doubt Martha’s third ear (which might be visible if you shaved her dowdy hair) had been registering this triviality all along and would hold it against poor, innocent and nowise trivial Ben unless she was lured off the scent. Better give her the image of a real flip to divert her.

  “Ben dreamed my parakeet got loose and flew over the stove,” she said. She peered out through the red-brown, limp strands of her hair (getting to be a nuisance length though Ben thought it “womanly”) to see whether Martha’s neck had stretched at the mention of dreams. Martha read a lot of Erich Fromm, and would as soon interpret a dream invented on the spot as the icky ones that no sensible person would ever tell her.

  “The stove?” Martha said. “Great God.”

  Stove must mean something special in Fromm, Leslie thought. Not …? Could it …? Stove …? Mine? Not mine. Hers maybe, and if so, poor David. No wonder he went around with such exaggerated lines between his brows.

  “Not only over the stove,” Leslie said grandly, closing her eyes and submitting to the rhythm of heavy hands beating her shoulders, “but right over the flame—” (Flame? Could that mean …? Never mind. Let Martha think as nasty as she liked.) “—so poor old Bill singed himself like a chicken. I’ve never singed a chicken, have you? I wonder how I know how a chicken is singed. From a childhood trauma? It looked so naked over the fire, huh? That kind of jazz? Anyway Bill was just a mess from his adventure. And Ben picked him up, with rubber gloves, and the point of the dream was that Ben wasn’t concerned about the bird.”

  “That may have been the point of the dream,” Martha said significantly.

  “Or may not, huh? Well, you know how deep Ben can be. Levels under levels under levels. But he said it was the point—you know, that he was more concerned about how I’d take it than what happened to the creature. He wondered how he could ever tell me. Wasn’t that sweet of him?”

  “That is sweet,” Martha said. She was evidently doing a Frommian sum in her head. She’ll think she’s really got an old insight on me now, Leslie thought. I don’t care if she has. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but insights run off like cold (?) water off a duck’s back. “Oh, what are you putting on me?”

  “Oil,” the masseuse said.

  Martha’s calculating eyes were fixed on the masseuse, so much like a towering matron in her kitchen, kneading the dough for a loaf of bread or maybe a sugar cake.

  “No, it’s appalling,” Leslie said drowsily. “For one thing it’s so horribly true to character. Poor, took-advantage-of Ben Daniels, devoted in word, thought, and deed. Still … I can’t see anything really wrong with a devoted husband. Is it a bad sign, Martha? Do you know, Martha, we haven’t spent more than a night or two apart since we got married? Four years, and I’m a doctor’s wife. That’s batting almost a thousand, I guess. But appalling the way it suggests I dominate him emotionally.” There, Leslie thought, that’s exactly the insight dear Martha was going to have about me, and now she knows I have it too. “I don’t care about the damn bird. He’s just, you know, costume. I pretend I’m one of these silly frigid bitches that focus their emotions on some pet. That is, now and then I pretend that. Not very often. But I’d make a pâté alouette out of Bill without batting my pretty eyelashes. Ben knows this. I think the appalling thing is that in his dream Ben would think I cared, when he knows consciously I truly wouldn’t. Don’t you?”

  “I’m bored with dreams,” Martha said. She was watching the masseuse pour oil into her cupped palms in preparation for slapping it onto Leslie’s back. “What kind of oil is that?”

  “I mix it myself,” the woman said without a smile. “Good for the skin.”

  “No doubt,” Martha said, arching her eyebrows and grinning at the rebuff. She lit a cigarette and crossed her legs. She looked at the three-inch scar on Leslie’s back and wondered why it never showed at the beach. It would be hard to find a bathing suit cut high enough to cover it. “I suppose you and Ben are psychoanalytically oriented, and if you are, you are. Ben hates the lousy bird. So what? Does he have to dream to know that?”

  Leslie laughed and swung her long legs from the table. In three quick, shy strides she reached the dressing room where she had left her clothes. She left the door slightly ajar so she could talk to Martha while she dressed. She felt great, as she always did after a massage. She felt herself. How odd and wonderful it was to be reminded that the person who grumped to work in the mornings and caught cold so easily in the bad months, who went to pieces like an overworked mop on the first day of her periods and suffered annual hay fever, was not the real, the true Leslie Skinner Daniels. Along with everything else, she was hungry now, with a keen, clean appetite, and for a moment she supposed that the hunger would be visible on her face when she and Martha went out onto the street, a bonus of beauty that people passing would notice.

  In the dark cubby her underwear gleamed—reminiscent, oddly, of the incandescent color she loved on Bill’s wings and breast. She had never liked white underwear, nor bedclothing either. Too hospitally, she had always told Ben. So they slept on sheets striped brown and white or yellow and white, like Christmas candy. What if she were to buy—this afternoon, perhaps, since she and Martha had three hours free for shopping—some really gaudy underthings? A new costume for Ben to be devoted to. A girdle, say, in “parakeet green,” though she never wore girdles, owned only one. She would say to the salesladies, “What, you have nothing in parakeet green?” Then mauve, or orchid at
least. Something to make Ben laugh, part of the endless act they carried on. If she could costume herself recognizably like Bill and then, with dramatic silliness, undrape and say, “Look at who you really dreamed about. Poor Leslie.” Ah, she really wasn’t as silly as that, but all these little touches were fun. Were more of an asset to The Marriage, she supposed, than the makeweight job she worked at five mornings a week in Bieman’s Studio. That barely paid for her lunches and clothes. Still the massage today was on her own money, and she had enough left for lunch and drinks with Martha.

  “Where do we eat?” she called to Martha. She heard the pages of a magazine slap shut before Martha answered, and she could picture Martha’s eyes narrowed in calculation. Martha weighed every decision, no matter how small.

  “Depends on whether you want to see my husband or not,” she answered. “Since we’re late, we can catch him now.”

  “Goodness yes,” Leslie said. “Dave’s always so pleased to see me. Golly. Of course.”

  “Mmmmm. I was afraid of that. I told him we might meet him in the Oak Room. So he’ll be there. But it doesn’t matter. He only has to cross the street.” Martha’s husband was advertising manager for the Sardis Record. He was forty-five to Martha’s thirty-five to Leslie’s twenty-seven. He had cynical lines in his face, though his character—what one knew of it—was more complicated than that. And it was perfectly true that he was always glad to see Leslie anywhere and any time.

  On their way to the Oak Room—just after they had crossed Governor in a glorious noontime hiss and honk of traffic—they ran into Donald Patch. He was window-shopping in a sporting goods store, and from the way he turned just as they approached, Leslie supposed he must have recognized her—her walk or something—in the reflections on the glass. He turned, anyway, with a big-toothed grin that absolutely excluded Martha, seemed to blot her out of his field of vision as mechanically as if he had held one hand up over his left eye.