Leave Well Enough Alone

by Rosemary Wells

  “Love and discipline” indeed, Dorothy thought as she sorted the money and the property cards. “Patient and firm” indeed. Dorothy glanced over at the pool house. In there was someone who was never going to change, at least not because of anything she, Dorothy, did or didn’t do. Dorothy longed for some company other than the girls and Mrs. Hoade. Matthew might have been someone to talk to, if he could hear, which, of course, he couldn’t. Dorothy liked the old man’s rugged features and quiet ways. Given a beard he would have been a dead ringer for Abraham Lincoln, he was so tall and wraithlike. He looked wise, too. Someone to sit and listen to some sense from. But of course that wasn’t possible. Miss Borg might have some good advice on the subject of children—after all, she was a baby nurse—but Miss Borg spoke no English and understood none. Nice Miss Borg. Sweet Miss Borg with the clear gray eyes and scrubbed pink cheeks. Dorothy and Miss Borg had become acquainted, after a fashion.

  Several times, when Mrs. Hoade went to “check on the little one,” as she put it, or on weekends when Mr. Hoade went down there, Dorothy had seen Miss Borg emerge from the cottage down the way and walk into a neighboring field to pick wild flowers. Dorothy had parked the girls in front of the television, from which they never moved in the evenings, and had followed the floating white uniform out into the meadow full of sweet peas and cornflowers and black-eyed Susans. These few minutes on occasional evenings had been pleasant, and although she could only smile and help Miss Borg carry her flowers, she felt for the short time that a headache had stopped awhile, that a noise had ceased. “Whatever language the woman speaks, Dorothy,” Sister Elizabeth goaded in Dorothy’s mind, “learn it! Learn it and give her your own God-given English in return.” Dorothy had learned to say “Guten Abend” and with the help of Miss Borg’s small German dictionary had tackled the names of a few flowers and weeds, which she promptly forgot. However, Guten Abend, good evening, was an improvement upon Achtung!, the only word of German she’d known before. Dorothy hoped that her company gave Miss Borg some satisfaction, but she couldn’t read into the sad gray eyes, and the smile lines around the old woman’s mouth seemed to belong to a once-happier person.

  “Lisa, come out of there. Now!” Dorothy shouted.

  “She won’t,” said Jenny. “Your turn.”

  “I better get her.”

  “Oh, leave her alone and let her cool off. It serves her right.”

  Dorothy sighed. “Never let the girls out of your sight.” Those were Mrs. Hoade’s instructions. “The place is full of rusty nails, old foundations, and other things I don’t want them to get into, particularly Lisa, since she is allergic to tetanus shots and very impressionable. There are snakes down by the pond, rotting timbers near the baby’s cottage. I want them in sight at all times.”

  “I promised your mother to keep you in sight all the time,” Dorothy said.

  “Well, she can’t go far in that place. Let her stew. Do you want to buy Virginia Avenue?”

  Jenny held her money fanned out like a bridge hand rather than in denominatory piles, as everyone else who played Monopoly always did. She also had extraordinary luck, and after making several advantageous deals with Dorothy managed to accumulate most of the important properties on the board. “What was Mom so happy about at lunch that she brought out wine?” Jenny asked.

  “Oh, her book, I guess. It’s going well. I guess it’s fun doing all that cooking.”

  “With Dinna to clean up,” said Jenny.

  Dorothy laughed. Jenny was a perceptive one. “I think it’s exciting. She’s asked me to help her with her index cards at night. Community Chest. You inherit a hundred dollars.”

  “You like that?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Ecch,” said Jenny. “I bet you’re thinking your name will go on the book somewhere.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that at all,” said Dorothy. Jenny was too smart for her own good. Dorothy had hoped secretly not only that her name would be at least acknowledged in print, but that she might get to visit a television studio if Mrs. Hoade were to be on television once the book was published. From there Dorothy had hardly dared think, except... “I enjoy helping your mother. I’m good in English and we have to know how to organize notes for school and everything, so it’s not hard,” she said. “The other thing your mother was happy about was something to do with your father. Some new thing that might happen? Your turn.”

  “N?”

  “That was it. What does N stand for?”

  “That’s a campaign of some kind. Move your piece back three spaces.”

  “Is your father in politics? There was a senator here last Friday night at the party but I...

  “Shake dice and pay owner four times the amount shown. No, he works for a drug company. At least he did. Now he does something called public relations. They’ve been talking about this for weeks. N probably stands for No-Drip or New Armpit. But it could be anything. Forty-four dollars, please. Thank you. You know what Dad did all that time in South America?”

  “No, what?”

  “He sold zillions of tubes of that stuff that sticks false teeth to the roof of your mouth to the South Americans. It was all rigged. Our government passed some kind of foreign-aid bill. When the South Americans got the money, one of the things they did was pass out thousands of sets of false teeth to all the beggars and peasants and things. Then Dad’s company got into the act and sold all the false-teeth owners Suradent. My Dad’s company wanted that foreign-aid bill badly. They even sent cases of Scotch to all the senators who voted for it. Saint Charles Place with two houses. A hundred and fifty, please.”

  “Jenny, you’re making that up! Two hundred dollars for passing Go. You’re making that up!”

  “I’m not,” said Jenny. “It’s perfectly true. I always find out the facts. Just like Sergeant Friday.”

  “But that’s against the law. Look at that nice senator your parents had here last weekend. Don’t tell me he knows about that!”

  “Him? You mean Rogers?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s only in the state legislature. No, but you gotta believe me, Dorothy. You know one of my Dad’s best friends, his golfing partner or whatever they call them, down in Buenos Aires, he had the account for Coke. He and Dad used to laugh because the more Coke this guy’s company would sell, the more false teeth people would need and the more Suradent Dad would sell.”

  “They laughed about that? Go to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect... They laughed about that?”

  “Oh, yeah. Get Out of Jail Free card.”

  “People never really say what they mean. Like for instance, Mother. She wants us to think that kid out there has a cold. I bet you anything it’s one of those what-do-you-call-its.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because she doesn’t want Lisa to see it. She’s afraid Lisa will have nightmares for a year. Why doesn’t she just tell us? We don’t want to see it anyway. Especially me. I hate all babies. Do you want to buy the Reading Railroad?”

  Dorothy bit down on her lower lip. She thought how impressed she’d been to meet a person who actually was in the government. Jenny, who was only a kid, was not only unimpressed by a man who’d run for office, whose name had been in the paper, Jenny was positively blasé about a whole bunch of senators in Washington. “What’s the matter? You look sad,” Jenny asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Is it really one of those, you know... Did Mom tell you?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s called a mongoloid.”

  “Do you want to buy that railroad? See?”

  “See what?”

  “See, I was right. I’m glad they keep it out there. I don’t want any stinky crying babies around the house.”

  Dorothy laughed. She spent her last two hundred dollars on the Reading Railroad and promptly landed on Jenny’s Boardwalk hotel. “That’s the end of the game, Jenny. I can’t pay.” She began sorting the mo
ney out again. “I guess I don’t care for babies so much either. I guess that’s an awful thing to admit.”

  “Do you have babies at your house?”

  “No. My sister has one, though. A girl. I mean she’s a really cute baby. Everyone says so and my sister loves her and all, but I don’t see how anyone can stand going goo-goo, ga-ga all day without going out of their minds. Besides, most of the time babies smell awful, unless they’ve just been washed, and then before you know it they smell hideous again. I don’t know. I suppose it would be good for me to learn to like them since I’ll probably have to have them someday.”

  “Not me,” said Jenny stretching out like a contented cat on the warm, sun-speckled tiles. “Not me, oh, boy.”

  Dorothy had almost forgotten about Lisa. She lay back on the comfortable cushions of her deck lounge and played with a wild grape vine that hung from a trellis overhead. She thought of Maureen. Maureen wheeling the baby carriage with its crinoline fly netting and its tremendous springs that were better by far than the springs in Maureen’s and Arthur’s Chevy. She began to picture Maureen’s dumpy little house on Seale Street. Practically all the girls in Maureen’s class in high school who had not gone on to college or become nuns had babies now. There had been wedding showers and then weddings and then baby showers. The minute Terrance graduated from Holy Cross, he said, he was going to marry Angela, his steady. He and Angela would probably have a baby soon after, too. They would move into an apartment with ugly old furniture that never wore out, or ugly new furniture that fell apart in a year. Once, when Maureen had been down with the flu, Dorothy had wheeled Bridget’s carriage up the sleepy Wednesday-afternoon street. A street she knew to be inhabited at that hour only by housewives and children. She’d felt like an invalid herself. “This is the loveliest place in the world,” she found herself saying to Jenny.

  “It’s nice,” Jenny agreed. “I don’t really remember it from before. I was too little. I don’t think Lisa was even born then. Mom’s talked about coming back here before but she’s never yet had the courage to leave Daddy. She was trying to get him to spend more than two nights a week here but he’s too busy in the city. She’s been away from him all during the time she was...pregnant. I hate that word. She was down here and he was mostly in Buenos Aires and we had to go to boarding school. I hate boarding school. Anyway, if you ever catch Mom crying it’s because she misses Daddy. Are you poor?”

  “What?” asked Dorothy.

  “Are you from a poor family? Does your father have to have a job in a factory and everything?”

  “My father’s a policeman,” said Dorothy. “He certainly doesn’t work in a factory and we certainly are not poor.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with poorness,” said Jenny.

  “Poverty,” Dorothy corrected.

  “My daddy wastes money,” Jenny went on conspiratorially. “Least Mom says he does. He goes to Las Vegas and he’s always talking about making more money. I hear through their door. Once he told her he needed her love and support and she said she tried to be a good wife but he was asking too much and gonna ruin everything. Lisa heard that too. Mom was crying. That made Lisa cry and she got sick and I had to sleep with her in bed all night so she wouldn’t cry. So she shouldn’t push me into pools, I’ll say.”

  “Jenny, you shouldn’t tell people about your parents like that. It isn’t respectful.”

  “You wanna know what Mom said once to Daddy about the money that...

  A shadow fell over the top of the Monopoly box. “Hi!” said a voice.

  Dorothy looked up, squinting in the afternoon sun. “Yes?” she said, rising to her feet.

  “I’m Carol Baldinger. You can call me Baldy.” A nice solid hand was extended. Dorothy shook it. Its owner looked to be not much older than she. Baldy was chunky and muscular, and very curly-haired. She was not pretty. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and smiled a very big smile.

  “I’m Dorothy Coughlin and this is Jenny,” said Dorothy, wondering suddenly if this person had been asked to replace her because she’d done so badly with the girls that Mrs. Hoade had given up. “You’re not...going to take care of the girls, are you?” Dorothy asked.

  “No. I answered an ad for riding instructor. I’m to drive the girls to the stable starting next week. You can come too. Mrs. Hoag said it would be okay. I came down to say hello,” said Baldy.

  “Well, hello,” said Dorothy, noticing at that moment the beautifully cut riding pants and the soft brown leather boots on Baldy’s feet. They were not cowboy boots. They were something much much nicer. “It’s Hoade, by the way, not Hoag,” she added.

  “Oh. I’m so bad at names. I don’t know anyone here, much. My uncle’s away buying stock in France and Ireland. I’m taking care of his stable. It’s just a few miles away. I’m glad there’ll be someone around to talk to,” Baldy said with another big smile. “It’s lonely here.”

  “Stock?” asked Dorothy.

  “Horses. Race horses. He goes every summer. Where’s the other little girl? I thought there were two.”

  “She just ran out,” Jenny said calmly. “While you were talking.”

  “Lisa!” Dorothy yelled. No answer. “Please watch Jenny for a sec? Please, would you?” she asked Baldy, and without waiting for her reply, she charged off across the lawn.

  She didn’t want to call too loudly for fear of Mrs. Hoade overhearing. Mrs. Hoade was busy with Dinna on one of the interminable “secret” recipes, known only to Dinna and her Pennsylvania Dutch family, that was going to be in Pennsylvania Surprise!, which was the title of Mrs. Hoade’s book.

  There was no Lisa to be seen, either darting among the trees or running anywhere across the lawn. The grounds of the house and the woods beyond looked larger to Dorothy than they ever had before. Dorothy ran down toward the overgrown drive that led to the pond on one side and the cottage on the other.

  “Lisa! Lisa!” she yelled, now that she was out of range of the big house. No answer came from the surrounding brambles, scrubby oaks, and pine trees that lined the path.

  Dorothy discovered she was annoyed at Lisa for running away and just as much annoyed at Mrs. Hoade for making such an issue of watching the girls every minute. After all, when she, Dorothy, had been younger even than Lisa, she had been allowed to walk to and from school alone. There were certainly more dangers on Newburgh, New York, streets than on this quiet estate.

  On Dorothy’s right, a short walk through leg-searing grasses, was a pond. It seemed stagnant and didn’t appear to be deep. Lisa had told her a monster lived in it, just like the Loch Ness monster. Dorothy stared, out of breath now. The muddy green surface answered no shouts. “Lisa!” she called to the trees. There were so many places for a child to hide here. Matthew was not around. He wouldn’t have noticed Lisa anyway. Perhaps Miss Borg had seen her. Perhaps Dorothy could convey her question without too much trouble. It was worth a try.

  She stamped back through the brambles and poison ivy until she reached the grassy path again. Dorothy guessed Miss Borg might ask her in for a cup of tea. Nice, grandmotherly persons always did that. It was too bad she hadn’t time for it. She would have liked some of Miss Borg’s quiet company. Better not to, anyway. Had Mrs. Hoade told her not to go to the cottage or was it just the girls who were not supposed to go? Dorothy, for reasons she hadn’t puzzled out, had not told Mrs. Hoade about her walks with Miss Borg.

  The little house itself was certainly different from the main building. Dorothy could tell easily that it was fairly new and a cheap building at that. Instead of clapboard, it was built of inexpensive siding meant to look like clapboard, same as in all the developments around Maureen’s neighborhood. The roof was done out of unpleasant purplish shingle, so much in contrast to the curved red and brown tiles on the roof of the big house. She knocked a little timidly on the door.

  A chair scraped against the floor. Miss Borg’s pink face appeared between the curtains of the window for a moment. The door opened, allowing the odor of so
mething that reminded Dorothy of a Salvation Army store or her great-aunt Ruth’s parlor to emerge. Miss Borg shut the door firmly behind her and said, “Was?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Dorothy said, sensing that indeed she had bothered Miss Borg. “Have you seen Lisa? Lisa? The little girl, Lisa?” she asked very slowly, amplifying her words with gestures for see and little.

  “Was?” asked Miss Borg again in a no more obliging tone. Dorothy shook her head. Miss Borg’s word sounded like Vuss. It probably meant What-are-you-trying-to-say-you-idiot? “How’s the baby?” Dorothy asked conversationally.

  Miss Borg looked sharply at Dorothy’s broad, innocent smile and empty, cradling arms.

  “Sie ist in ihrem Bad,” said the nurse and immediately went back into the house, closing the door with a firm click. Dorothy stared stupidly for a minute at the closed door. I guess it’s just not my day, she thought. When is it going to be my day? She turned and walked back up the path. When I collect my four hundred George Washingtons on Labor Day. That’s when.

  “Dorothy,” said Mrs. Hoade. “I would like a word with you.” Dorothy sat down in the nearest chair, a straight-backed one in the hall. She folded her hands, swallowed hard, and looked up as sincerely as she could. If she hadn’t known she was going to be severely reprimanded she would have had a difficult time not laughing, for Mrs. Hoade was covered with much more than the usual amount of flour that coated her apron and clothing after one of her sessions in the kitchen with Dinna. This time there was flour in Mrs. Hoade’s hair, and she had evidently dropped an egg on or in her shoe. Her right hand had fought another unsuccessful battle with yet another leaky Esterbrook fountain pen.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” Mrs. Hoade began.

  “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Hoade,” Dorothy began.

  “Lisa, by the way, is upstairs or was upstairs watching Frankenstein on television. I understand she was out of your sight, that you had no idea where she was for over an hour while you played Monopoly with Jenny. Is that true?”