Leave Well Enough Alone

by Rosemary Wells

  Dorothy looked at the bottom of the page; all that remained was a reassertion of the good Christian, and good nurse, and a plea that the heilige Jungfrau, holy young lady? no, Blessed Virgin, forgive her if she’d done wrong.

  Without all the little words, the pronouns, the conjunctions, and connectives, Dorothy couldn’t be exactly sure of her translation. It would take forever to look them up. This much was clear to her. The baby had been kept in the cottage against Mrs. Hoade’s will. Mr. Hoade had come down—herüber was apparently the German for “come hereover”—and had yelling fits for some reason, and Miss Borg had felt so sorry for the poor little thing that she’d allowed her to die peacefully. If the Hoades had a German dictionary up at the house, perhaps she’d be able to look up some of the little words and make more sense of the paper. Es, sie, wenn. Es, she made a note, after finding it, meant it and also there is. Capitalized it meant the musical E flat. Impossible! Dorothy said to herself. Sie meant they, you, she...did it mean if, as well? No, that was the French si. At least Latin made some sense in its consistency. At least in French there were recognizable words. The Germans seemed to string all manner of words together to make single big words. Like Anschreien. A noun meaning shrieking-at in English. Still, Dorothy had to admit it had a ring to it. Shrieking at a girl baby, a sick one at that. What an appropriate word for Mr. Hoade’s way of speaking. The quiet voice that, when it didn’t get what it wanted, became too quickly a yell, like a shove.

  “I don’t understand all of this now,” she said to Miss Borg. She took up the dictionary again. “Not...nicht verstehen ... She looked up everything in the English half. “Alles. But...mais...no, that’s French. I won’t say a word!” She put her finger to her lips, and crossed her heart with her other hand.

  “Ja?” asked Miss Borg, color coming back into her face for the first time in half an hour.

  “Guten...” What is it? “Abend. Guten Abend,” said Dorothy.

  “Gute Nacht, danke schön,” said Miss Borg, and she took Dorothy’s hand in hers and, smiling over whatever German she decided not to say, pressed it with great warmth.

  There was no German dictionary in the library upstairs. The girls were in bed, sleeping in two little hunched-up bundles of sheets. Dorothy waited a moment in their doorway to make sure they were all right. Jenny moved and sighed. Lisa’s thumb was thrust securely in her mouth. Dorothy closed the door.

  The Hoades had gone to bed early too, it appeared from the snoring in the bedroom. She wandered around the empty living room looking at the bookshelves. No German dictionary. She’d have to wait and finish her translation at the Newburgh Public Library. In the meantime, Miss Borg’s paper and her translation were safely squirreled away in the spine of her Ivanhoe upstairs. The Hoades did have a complete set of Shakespeare, however, bound in blue morocco leather. Courage mounteth with occasion, she said to herself and pulled out King John. This ought to put me to sleep in a hurry, Dorothy decided, collapsing full length on the sofa. She yawned at the characters in order of appearance.

  The family photographs on the long mahogany table in back of the sofa all faced her. They gave the appearance of intruding. Dorothy tried to read King John. “Went down over Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor bombing,” she murmured to herself, looking uncomfortably into the eyes of Mrs. Hoade’s father. What a minimal way to explain having your plane shot out of the sky. This was a better picture of Mr. Krasilovsky than the one in Mrs. Hoade’s locket. Well, he was younger. This was taken before the war and the other was taken in 1948.

  Wait a minute. The war had been concluded in 1945. Yet Dorothy was sure of the date in the locket. She’d counted back eight years. A voice mewed in her head to get reading, to concentrate on King John. Mrs. Hoade’s father never lived to see 1948, Dorothy told herself calmly. And that probably wasn’t his name at all, because that obviously wasn’t a date. It was... She tried to remember the other numbers, but only the 48 had stuck in her mind. It was a combination to a Krasilovsky safe.

  The lamplight played brilliantly through the cut-glass angles at the throat of each decanter on the silver liquor tray in the corner. It penetrated deeply into the various liquors. Some were dark like the port, labeled in script on a thin silver collar. Some were light like the vermouth, as yellow as a cat’s eye.

  Above the tray hung the portrait. Dorothy looked down at her wrist, still slightly scarred from Lisa’s bite, the evening she had crashed into it. She put King John on the sofa. The painting had not moved from the wall, as a painting ought to do if it was normally hung up on a normal nail.

  She touched the frame lightly, then a little less delicately. She slipped her fingers around the back of the right side. A catch gave and it swung away from the wall like a door.

  The safe had been papered over, years ago, it seemed, for the wallpaper behind the painting was unfaded. Under a group of medieval musicians in the pattern Dorothy felt the recessed knob of the dial. She would have thought it was only a blank wall if she hadn’t run her fingers carefully over it several times. Forty-eight, she thought. The rest of it is written on the back of that tiny picture, and Mrs. Hoade doesn’t even know.

  “I’ll never know either,” she whispered as she closed the painting. “Mrs. Hoade wears that locket every day.”

  The steady gaze of the woman above looked very nearly alive. The flowing dress, its sleeves eternally furled in a forgotten wind, the long fingers resting forever on the greyhound’s head seemed about to move, but the longer Dorothy stared at it, the more solid it became, as if the woman in the picture had decided at the last moment not to say anything.

  “Who are you?” Dorothy asked aloud. “Are you Katherine Hoade? Where are you now?”

  Coburg, Abel; Coburg, Gerald; Coburg, M.—“Llewellyn three oh five eight four,” Dorothy said to the operator.

  Busy signal. Well, that’s that, Dorothy told herself. There are Coburgs. Katherine Hoade wouldn’t be buried in that grave. Neither would her great-granddaughter. Dorothy gave the number one more time to the operator.

  “Miss?” asked the operator.

  “Yes?” said Dorothy.

  “You are calling a wrong number. I suggest you look up your party’s correct listing in the telephone directory.”

  “But I did,” said Dorothy, her index finger resting on the number before her. “Maybe the telephone book misprinted it.”

  The operator paused. Then she said, “The telephone book has no misprints, Miss. You are calling your own number.”

  Chapter Nine

  “I WISH YOU HADN’T asked the kids to come with us,” whispered Dorothy, rebuckling the strap of her left stirrup.

  “Oh, but they’ll have fun,” Baldy answered. “Look at Lisa now, she’s trotting so prettily. It isn’t fair to just make them ride in the ring. They should be rewarded for how well they’ve both learned with a nice ride through the woods.”

  “But I wanted to talk to you.”

  “What about?” Baldy asked warily, leaning over from Gabriel’s back and helping Dorothy find the right notch.

  “I got the combination. Last night Mrs. Hoade called me into the bathroom while she was taking a shower. The locket was lying right there.”

  “Dorothy,” said Baldy, straightening up in her saddle, “I don’t want to hear about it. Lisa!” she shouted. “Don’t go over that log. Your mom says no jumping yet. Go ahead now, Jenny. Your turn. Walk and trot three times around, then we’ll go up the hill.” Jenny guided her pony, Texas, in a slow circle in the open pasture. “Lisa!” Baldy called. “Hold your horse right there. I want to see you rein him in. He shouldn’t follow Texas unless you want him to.” Amazing, Dorothy thought, they do everything Baldy asks them to.

  “It’s a cinch the silly safe is empty if it’s been papered over, anyway,” said Baldy. “Dorothy, this is your last day. Won’t you just enjoy it and forget that other business?”

  Charley stamped in the powdery brown earth. Dorothy pulled him back and lowered her voice so the girls c
ouldn’t hear. “All I want to know,” she said, “is why this Miriam Coburg, who died around the same time as the Hoades’ baby, lived in the Hoades’ cottage. She must have been the person I saw in the window that night. Who was she?”

  Baldy rolled her eyes and looked heavenward. “This is the very last thing I’m going to say on that subject,” she announced. “Then we’ll drop it.” She inhaled deeply. “Supposing, as you said, the kid was never in the little house at all. Supposing the kid is the Katherine Hoade in—where is it? Crestview? Okay. Supposing the nurse was taking care of his grandmother the whole time. For some reason they just didn’t want you and Lisa and Jenny to be around a sick old lady. Maybe she was crazy. I don’t know. People have reasons for things. That doesn’t mean there was a crime or anything.”

  “But the name, Baldy. Her name was Coburg, not Hoade.”

  “Well, it could be his mother’s mother, couldn’t it? Then the name would have had to be different.”

  “I never thought of that,” Dorothy admitted.

  “All I’ve heard so far,” said Baldy, “is that you were told a convenient lie. It’s their business, Dorothy. It isn’t yours. Now promise me something.”

  “Depends what it is.”

  “Promise me you’ll go out to dinner with the Hoades tonight and then take the train, everything as planned. Promise me you won’t go looking around in that wall.”

  “Baldy...

  “Mrs. Hoade asked you to come back next year, right?”

  “Well, that’s what she said. Unless the girls go to camp.”

  “And you’re going to jeopardize that by being...well, by poking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “But Baldy, I...

  “Oh, Dorothy... I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t know how to say this, but I don’t have many friends. Everybody at school thinks I’m fat and stupid. I promised Uncle I’d be here again next summer, because I thought—well, I was looking forward to riding with you again. It’s so lonely otherwise.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dorothy.

  “Then you promise?”

  “Okay.”

  “Three times! Jenny,” she shouted across the field. “At a trot. That’s it. A little faster now, kick him. Make him do what you want, not what he wants to do!” Baldy looked with satisfaction at Jenny for a moment, then she turned to Dorothy. “I don’t know how to say this,” she began, “without sounding—what’s the word? I can never remember. You know, looking down on someone as if I’m so great and all?”

  “Patronizing?” Dorothy asked.

  “That’s it. Anyway, Dorothy, if you ask me, I mean there’s nothing at all wrong with not being able to ride or not having any...much...a whole bunch of money and everything, but you’ve said how much you liked spending the summer here. You’ve said how different it is from anything you’ve done before, and I just think you should plan on Mrs. Hoade asking you back and not worry about silly invented things.”

  “Gee, you sound just like my sister, Maureen,” said Dorothy.

  “Well, I don’t mean to. But first of all, as you’ve told me, you want to find a way someday not to have to be poor?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it seems to me you can start by meeting people and doing things and getting used to things that aren’t...that are, you know, what you want, someday. And the other thing is, everybody has some awful events happening in their family. It isn’t your business—whatever’s gone on here. I mean you haven’t exactly watched someone chop someone else up with a hatchet like Lizzie Borden, have you?”

  “No,” Dorothy admitted.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake leave well enough alone, then.”

  “I said I would,” Dorothy answered.

  Baldy urged Gabriel up the path. “I’m really very fond of you, Dorothy,” she said mildly, over her shoulder. “Please come back next summer.”

  “Come on!” yelled Lisa to Jenny. “Let’s go! You’re slow as molasses.”

  “I’ll take her,” said Dorothy, grabbing Jenny’s lead line. “Jenny and I will walk. You go trot and catch up with Baldy.”

  Maureen’s voice insinuated itself in Dorothy’s ear, through the rustling leaves and the clop-clop of the four horses’ hooves. “Got yourself fired on the last day, eh?” it snipped. “Well you won’t be going back there again, will you? You won’t get your working papers ʼtil the year after next so I guess you’ll have to spend next summer at the Veterans’ Hospital.” Oh, shut up, Dorothy mouthed to the air. “Serve you right,” Maureen went on. “You can’t even be grateful to people who are nice to you. Have to go prying into their stuff. I told you over the phone not to do that. I told you years ago not to go through my drawers, but I guess you didn’t listen.”

  Here and there a tree or bush had begun to turn from bright green to soft yellow. The beginning of fall, of course, Dorothy thought. It’ll be so lovely here. Not that I won’t see trees turn all over Newburgh, and Sundays we go for a drive in the country sometimes, when Dad has off. Jenny and Dorothy plodded on in silence, the lead line dragging between them.

  The goldenrod now filled almost every meadow they passed. Dorothy wished she would be able to see autumn here, to smell it and ride through it. I’ll probably never have a chance to ride again, she thought sadly, unless next summer... Listen to Baldy, she told herself. For once listen to someone older and more sensible than you.

  Mrs. Hoade looks just like a dog waiting for its master. Dorothy did not want to think that thought. She cleared her throat, announcing her presence. Mrs. Hoade had been seated on the living-room window seat, as usual, waiting for Mr. Hoade’s rented Rolls to turn into the driveway. She was crying quietly.

  “Excuse me,” said Dorothy guiltily.

  “Oh, dear. Did you have a nice ride?”

  “Yes, beautiful.”

  “And the girls?”

  “They loved it. Even Jenny. Lisa’s in the tub. She was very dirty. Jenny’s watching Mr. Wizard,” Dorothy said. “I’ll go.”

  “No, don’t, dear. I want you to see this. I’m afraid there won’t be too much of a celebration dinner tonight.” Mrs. Hoade held out the crumpled package. Several recipe cards fell on the carpet at her feet. Dorothy read the letter from the publisher.

  Dear Mrs. Hoage,

  Mr. George Kebab is on vacation in Europe at this time. As you are no doubt aware, the Doubleday list is limited to a few hundred quality books a season. We find at this time that The Amish Country Cookbook does not meet our present needs. Another publisher may disagree however and we encourage you to try elsewhere. Thank you for sending us your manuscript, which we are returning herewith.

  Sincerely,

  Rhoda Gripper

  Editorial Assistant

  “Well,” Dorothy gulped, “it isn’t all that bad, Mrs. Hoade.”

  “Look at the way they spelled my name!”

  “Well,” said Dorothy, sitting down heavily and picking up the pages that had fallen. Mrs. Hoade lit a cigarette and took a large swallow of her drink. “I think we could fix it,” said Dorothy.

  “Fix what?” Mrs. Hoade asked.

  “For instance here. I think this is wrong. On the spoonbread recipe.” Dorothy didn’t dare say This is one of yours, not mine.

  “Where, dear?”

  “Well, it says half flour, half milk, half eggs.”

  “But that’s exactly what Dinna put in.”

  “I don’t think you can have three halves,” said Dorothy.

  “Why not? It’s a delicious recipe. I saw her make it and I wrote down just exactly how she did it.”

  “Well, I think there are only two halves in a whole.”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” said Mrs. Hoade. “Perhaps if we... Well, you won’t be here, but if I change those things and then when Mr. Kebab himself comes home instead of this stupid Gripper girl—it’s probably just a big mistake. She can’t even spell!”

  Dorothy felt that somehow it wasn’t a mistake, but she didn�
�t want to say so. She nodded and smiled instead. Poor Mrs. Hoade. Poor Baldy, too. For an instant she looked over at the portrait. Twelve-six-forty-eight ran through her mind. “Mr. Hoade will be home any minute. Why don’t you go up and get dressed? There he is,” she said with evident pleasure. The Rolls crunched in the driveway and came to a halt. The door slammed. Dorothy watched Mr. Hoade for a moment. He did not acknowledge his wife’s cheerful wave.

  “I...uh...wanted to tell you I don’t feel so hot,” said Dorothy. “I thought I’d lie down. Can you and Mr. Hoade go?”

  “You probably think it’ll be a dreary evening, dear. I don’t blame you.”

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Hoade.” The front door opened. Mr. Hoade threw his briefcase on the sofa and loosened his tie. “Haven’t you gotten dressed yet?” he asked. “We have reservations in an hour, I thought. I drove like crazy to get here.”

  Courage mounteth with occasion, said Dorothy to herself. “Mr. Hoade, I wasn’t feeling too well and...

  “Does this mean it’s off?” he asked. “Because I have work to do.”

  “I could make us some chicken,” said Mrs. Hoade.

  “No,” said Mr. Hoade. “No. But if she isn’t coming there’s no sense going to the Carriage House in Bryn Mawr. We’ll just go down the road to...that place, whatever it’s called.” He poured himself a drink and stood with it in his hand until Dorothy left the room. “What’s wrong with her?” Dorothy heard him ask when she’d reached the upstairs hall.