Leave Well Enough Alone

by Rosemary Wells

  “You read it differently this time, Dorothy,” Reverend Mother commented evenly. “The first time you said, ‘Meet me.’ The second time you said, ‘I’ll meet you.’ Perhaps you’d better let me see the note.”

  Reverend Mother plucked the miserable, damp piece of notebook paper from Dorothy’s hands. She indicated Dorothy should stand down, and adjusting her steel-rimmed bifocals, she glanced at the door at the end of the auditorium, as if she were about to announce a pep rally, and read out, “Cicero or Caesar, question mark.” Then she looked over at Dorothy. “To what does this refer, Dorothy?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure, Reverend Mother.” Reverend Mother’s tongue slipped out between her perfect, dull white teeth. Teeth Dorothy’d never had the stomach to look at because they were false and occasionally lost their position in Reverend Mother’s mouth. Reverend Mother waited for Dorothy’s reply.

  “It refers to the Latin final, I guess,” said Dorothy at last, her eyes avoiding everything in the room.

  “The examination you just took?”

  “Yes, Reverend Mother.”

  “The same examination Freshman Latin section two is to take sixth period this afternoon?”

  “Yes, Reverend Mother.”

  “I see.” More silence. No one giggled now. Dorothy had once turned to look at the audience behind her in the middle of the scariest part of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The expressions in front of her were similar to those. “And who do you think sent you this note, Dorothy?”

  “I’m not sure, Reverend Mother.”

  “It looks like Stanley Inglewasser’s handwriting to me.”

  “Yes. Yes, well it probably was...him.”

  “He.”

  “He.”

  “Stanley is to take that examination sixth period, I believe. Had you intended to reply to his question?”

  “No, Reverend Mother.”

  “I see.”

  “Reverend Mother, it wasn’t my fault. I never...

  “You and Stanley will see me after Assembly. You may take your seat. We shall continue the program. I believe your brother Terrance is the first to be honored.”

  Reverend Mother’s interview was painful enough. She announced at the conclusion that Dorothy’s and Stanley’s mothers had been asked to come in at three o’clock.

  Reverend Mother kept Dorothy and Stanley waiting in the foyer of her office for exactly fifteen minutes while she spoke first with Mrs. Inglewasser and then with Dorothy’s mother. Dorothy did not once look at Stanley. She tried to hear what Reverend Mother was saying, but Reverend Mother’s door was too thick. Dorothy sat in as stiff and prim a posture as she could manage, as if to ward off the rays of terrible power that seemed to emanate from Reverend Mother’s office. Stanley, on the other hand, kept one ankle cocked over his knee, showing a dirty white cotton sock. He slouched, and needed only a cigarette between his fingers to appear as if he were simply waiting for a bus.

  Dorothy’s mother said nothing when she emerged from the office. She nodded to Mrs. Inglewasser, who for some reason was still in the foyer, standing between Dorothy and Stanley as if she didn’t quite know what to do. Since Reverend Mother had closed the door without coming out again, Mrs. Inglewasser did sigh as if something had been completed, and the four of them walked down the darkened corridor to the big double doors that led to daylight at the end. No one said a word. Four pairs of shoes echoed hideously on the shiny waxed floor.

  Her own mother’s humiliation and disappointment were unbearable to Dorothy, but it had been Maureen who’d made her feel like a criminal.

  Plain Maureen with her baby, her migraines, her dandruff shampoo, her Jergens Lotion and her Nair for the upper lip. Maureen was twenty and she was already married and had corns. Corns! And special shoes! That evening, when Dorothy’s family gathered for what turned out to be a rather glum celebration of Terrance’s success, Maureen had observed airily that she supposed Dorothy would no longer be taking her fancy-pants job in Pennsylvania. Maureen thought that would be an excellent penance.

  Dorothy’s eyes had filled with tears. She watched her father’s and mother’s faces across the table, under the dim kitchen ceiling light. Maureen thought Dorothy ought to take a job as a volunteer candy striper in the Veteran’s Hospital. After all, hadn’t Reverend Mother suggested some sort of penance? It was the four hundred dollars that had saved Dorothy in the end. Maureen couldn’t argue with money. “You’ve disgraced your family,” she insisted. “With Daddy on the force and Arthur on the force and Terrance winning the medal! It’s a disgrace. Worse, it’s a mortal sin.”

  Dorothy’s father was a sergeant on the Newburgh police force. Maureen’s husband, Arthur, was a patrolman. Arthur didn’t look terribly disgraced to Dorothy. His mouth was too full of meatloaf. Her father just appeared puzzled.

  “That doesn’t mean I have to give up four hundred dollars which I intend to use for my college education,” Dorothy had shot back. Her father’s wiry gray eyebrows had lifted at this and he’d exchanged glances with Dorothy’s mother.

  “Then how do you intend to atone for what you’ve done? Reverend Mother told Mom that she’d told you that you have to atone for what you’ve done,” said Maureen.

  “I have to take the Latin exam over again in September.”

  “That’s not enough. Stanley was failed and has to take the whole year of Latin again. Besides, Latin’s always been a cinch for you.”

  “Stanley sent the note, Maureen. I didn’t even answer it.”

  “You were going to, though. Weren’t you? If you hadn’t been caught red-handed. I know you have a picture of him in your wallet that Judy Dugan gave you. I know you go four blocks out of your way every afternoon after school on your bicycle just to see Stanley’s chest when he takes his shirt off when he mows his neighbors’ lawns. It’s indecent!”

  “That’s enough, Maureen,” Dorothy’s father had interrupted at that moment and Dorothy knew she’d won.

  “It isn’t fair!” Maureen had cried.

  “What isn’t fair?” Dorothy asked in a newly confident voice.

  This time Maureen’s eyes had filled. “It isn’t fair because she gets everything. She always has. She’s a spoiled brat. She gets away with murder.” Maureen threw down her napkin. “She’s going to wind up in jail someday. You wait!” Maureen left the room to tend Bridget, the baby, who was by this time howling.

  “Come visit me if I do!” Dorothy had trilled merrily after her sister. “And bring me a cake with a knife in it so I can escape and come home and baby-sit for you which is all you want.”

  “Shut up,” said Arthur. “You know she’s pregnant.” That was the first and only thing Arthur said all evening.

  “You shut up,” said Terrance. “Dorothy’s right.” Dorothy’s father observed that he didn’t like the word shut up.

  Thank heaven Stanley had had the brains to wash off Dorothy’s initials before they’d gone in to see Reverend Mother. When she’d seen them, tattooed to his hand in ballpoint pen, before the assembly, her heart or her stomach or whatever it was in her middle had turned over in ecstasy. Now, as her train pulled in to the Thirtieth Street Station, the one she was not supposed to disembark at, that same organ turned over again, but in a sad, stinging way. Dorothy had explained to Reverend Mother that she’d felt guilty about getting someone else into trouble and was therefore, by the dictates of her conscience, obliged to lie about the contents of the note for moral reasons. Reverend Mother could not recall a lie having been told for moral reasons under any conditions save those in wartime, but perhaps she had detected some ember of innocence behind Dorothy’s tearful words and so she was easier on her than she might have been. With Stanley, Reverend Mother had shown no mercy. Not only did he have to repeat a year’s work but she obliged him to clean and polish every inch of statuary in the church.

  Dorothy squeezed her eyes shut to make the evil feeling vanish. It was clear why Stanley, who’d never before given her the time of
day, had written her initials on his hand. He just wanted the answers to the exam. She’d lied to protect him because of it. She would try to atone. But she’d never tell anyone even if she did find a way. She opened her eyes again and fastened them on the sign that said “Thirtieth Street.” That’s where I don’t get off, she told herself as the sign began to pull behind the slowly moving train. Another sign beyond said Thirtieth Street again. A mistake not made, said Dorothy, trying to cheer herself up.

  Premeditated lying was, of course, a mortal sin, but supposing one lied in simple reaction without thinking? When Mrs. Hoade had asked her how old she was she’d answered right away, “Fifteen,” which was what she’d be in October, after all. She guessed the sin would not be wiped out in October. When Mrs. Hoade had asked her if she had brothers and sisters, Dorothy had said, “Oh, yes, two brothers and a sister,” which was quite true. However, she hadn’t mentioned that she was the youngest and had no experience whatever in taking care of children. Mrs. Hoade had simply replied that large families were nice, and that Dorothy looked older than fifteen. Dorothy had thanked Mrs. Hoade. Her own mother had been very dubious about an inexperienced fourteen-year-old taking a job in Pennsylvania, six hours from home, but Dorothy had worked on her father, who knew how much she dreaded a summer alone with Maureen. Her parents, Dorothy reasoned, probably felt a little guilty about going off to Ireland for the whole summer by themselves, the first time they’d been on vacation alone since their honeymoon in Atlantic City, twenty-five years before. They were going to visit Dorothy’s other brother, Kevin, who was studying for the priesthood somewhere in the west of Ireland. Mercifully, Dorothy’s mother had seemed to like Mrs. Hoade’s voice when Mrs. Hoade had called up to reaffirm her offer of a job, and to assure Mrs. Coughlin that Dorothy would be safe. Her mother had not volunteered the information that Dorothy was inexperienced with children—which was unusual, because Dorothy’s mother was so scrupulously honest that she put dimes back in vending machines and telephones that gave more change than they ought. “A telephone is not a slot machine,” she’d told a dismayed Dorothy on more than one occasion.

  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 tre
nch 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.