by Alice Adams
“My mother’s not in the Presidente.”
She grins, showing small, white, even teeth. “Well, you’re right. I did stay there. But it is a very nice hotel.”
“Very nice,” he agrees, not looking at her.
His mother is not the doctor’s only reason for going to Oaxaca. His interests are actually in almost adjacent Chiapas, where he oversees and has largely funded two large free clinics—hence his fame, and his nickname, Dr. Do-Good (to Benito, an epithet replete with irony, and one that he much dislikes).
They have now emerged from the dark, tall, covering woods, the groves of redwood, eucalyptus, occasional laurel, and they are circling down the western slope as the two-lane road forms wide arcs. Ahead of them is the sea, the white curve of beach, and strung-out Stinson, the strange, small coastal town of rich retirees; weekenders, also rich; and a core population of former hippies, now just plain poor, middle-aged people with too many children. In his palmier days, his early, successful years, Dr. Zamora often came to Stinson from San Francisco on Sundays for lunch parties, first as a semi-sought-after bachelor (“But would you want your daughter actually to marry …?” Benito thought he felt this question), and later, less often, with his bride, the fairest of them all, his wife, his lovely blond. His white soul. Elizabeth.
After Elizabeth died, now some five months ago, in April, friends and colleagues were predictably kind—many invitations, too many solicitous phone calls. And then, just as predictably (he had seen this happen with relatives of patients), all the attention fell off, and he was often alone. And at a time impossible for trips to Mexico: rains made most of the roads in Chiapas impassable, and he feared that he was now too old for the summer heat. Besides, these days the clinics actually ran quite well without him; he imagined that all they really needed was the money that came regularly from his banks. (Had that always been the case? he wondered. Were all those trips to Chiapas unnecessary, ultimately self-serving?) And his mother, in her tiny stucco villa, near Oaxaca, hardly recognized her oldest living son.
Too much time alone, then, and although he had always known that would happen, was even in a sense prepared, the doctor is sometimes angry: Why must they leave him now, when he is so vulnerable? Is no one able to imagine the daily lack, the loss with which he lives?
And then this girl, this Carla, whom the doctor had met at a dinner a month or so before, called and asked him to the lunch, at Stinson Beach. “I hope you don’t mind a sort of last-minute invitation,” she said, “but I really loved our talk, and I wanted to see you again, and this seemed a good excuse.” He gratefully accepted, although he remembered very little of her, really, except for her hair, which was very long and silky-looking, streaked all shades of brown, with yellow. He remembered her hair, and that she seemed nice, a little shy; she was quiet, and so he had talked too much. (“Not too unusual, my darling,” Elizabeth might have said.) He thinks she said she worked for a newspaper; it now seems too late to ask. He believes she is intelligent, and serious. Curious about his clinics.
But in the short interval between her call and this drive a host of fantasies has crowded old Benito’s imagination. She looked about thirty, this girl did, but these days most women look young; she could be forty-two. Still a long way from his own age, but such things did happen. One read of them.
Or was it possible that Carla meant to write about him for her paper? The doctor had refused most interviews for years; had refused until he noticed that no one had asked, not for years.
“What did you say the name of our hostess was?” he thinks to ask her as they round the last curve and approach the first buildings of the town.
“Posey Pendergast. You’ve never met her?”
“I don’t think so, but the name—something goes off in my head.”
“Everyone knows Posey; I really thought you would. She’s quite marvelous.”
“Quite marvelous” is a phrase that Benito (Elizabeth used to agree) finds cautionary; those marvelous people are almost as bad as “characters.” All those groups he is sure not to like, how they do proliferate, thinks old Benito sourly, aware of the cruel absence of Elizabeth, with her light laugh, agreeing.
“I’m sure you’ll know some of her friends,” adds Carla.
Posey Pendergast is a skinny old wreck of a woman, in a tattered straw sun hat and a red, Persian-looking outfit. She breathes heavily. Emphysema and some problems with her heart, the doctor thinks, automatically noting the pink-white skin, faintly bluish mouth, and arthritic hands—hugely blue-veined, rings buried in finger flesh. “I’ve been hearing of you for years,” she tells Benito in her raspy, classy voice. Is she English? No, more like Boston, or somewhere back there, the doctor decides. She goes on. “I can’t believe we’ve never met. I’m so glad Carla brought you.”
“This is some house,” he says solemnly (using what Elizabeth called his innocent-Indian pose, which is one of his tricks).
It is some house, and the doctor now remembers walking past it, with Elizabeth, marveling at its size and opulence. It was right out there on the beach, not farther along in Seadrift, with the other big, expensive houses, but out in public—a huge house built up on pilings, all enormous beams, and steel and glass, and diagonal boards.
“My son designed it for me,” Posey Pendergast is saying. “Carla’s friend,” she adds, just as some remote flash is going off in the doctor’s mind: he used to hear a lot about this Posey, he recalls, something odd and somewhat scandalous, but from whom? Not Elizabeth, he is sure of that, although she was fond of gossip and used to lament his refusal to talk about patients. Did he hear of Posey from some patient? Some old friend?
This large room facing the sea is now fairly full of people. Women in short, silk, flowered dresses or pastel pants, men in linen or cashmere coats. Rich old gringos is Benito’s instant assessment. He notes what seems an unusual number of hearing aids.
He and Carla are introduced around by Posey, although Carla seems already to know a number of the guests. People extend their hands; they all say how nice it is to meet the doctor; several people say that they have heard so much about him. And then, from that roster of Anglo-Saxon names, all sounding somewhat alike, from those voices, nasal Eastern to neutral Californian, Benito hears a familiar sound: “Oh.” (It is the drawn-out “Oh” that he recognizes.) “Oh, but I’ve known Dr. Zamora very well, for a very long time.”
He is confronted by an immense (she must weigh two hundred pounds) short woman, with a huge puff of orange hair, green eyeshadow, and the pinkish spots that skin cancer leaves marking her pale, lined forehead. It is Dolores. Originally Dolores Gutierrez—then Osborne, then Graham, and then he lost track. But here she is before him, her doughy face tightened into a mask, behind which he can indistinctly see the beauty that she was.
“Benito Zamora. Benny Zamora. What an absolutely awful name, my darling. So spic,” said Dolores, almost fifty years ago.
“How about Dolores Gutierrez?”
“I can marry out of it, and I certainly plan to. Why else would I even think of Boy Osborne, or for that matter Whitney Satterfield? But you, you simply have to change yours. How about Benjamin Orland? That keeps some of the sound, you see? I really don’t like names to begin with ‘Z.’ ”
“This is an extremely ugly room,” he told her.
She laughed. “I know, but poor dear Norman thinks it’s the cat’s pajamas, and it’s costing him a fortune.”
“When you laugh I feel ice on my back.” He shivered.
“Pull the sheet up. There. My, you are a gorgeous young man. You really are. Too bad about your name. You don’t look so terribly spic.”
They were in the pink-and-gold suite of a lesser Nob Hill hotel, definitely not the Mark or the Fairmont, but still no doubt costing poor Norman a lot. Heavy, gold-threaded, rose-colored draperies, barely parted, yielded a narrow blue view of the San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge, a white slice of Oakland. The bedspread, a darker rose, also gold-threaded, lay in a heavy
, crumpled mass on the floor. The sheets were pink, and the shallow buttocks of Dolores Gutierrez were ivory—cool and smooth. Her hair, even then, was false gold.
“You know what I’d really like you to do? Do you want to know?” Her voice was like scented oil, the young doctor thought, light and insidious and finally dirty, making stains.
“I do want to know,” he told her.
“Well, this is really perverse. Really. It may be a little too much for you.” She was suddenly almost breathless with wanting to tell him what she really wanted, what was so terrifically exciting.
“Tell me.” His breath caught, too, although in a rational way he believed that they had surely done everything. He stroked her smooth, cool bottom.
“I want you to pay me,” she said. “I know you don’t have much money, so that will make it all the more exciting. I want you to pay me a lot. And I might give it back to you, but then again I might not.”
After several minutes, during which he took back his hand, Benito told her, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t think it would be fun.”
And now this new Dolores, whose laugh is deeper, tells him, “This is a classic situation, isn’t it, my angel? Famous man runs into an old lady friend, who’s run to fat?” She laughs, and, as before, Benito shivers. “But wherever did you meet my darling old Posey?”
“Just now, actually. I never saw her before.”
“The love of my life,” Dolores declaims, as the doctor reflects that this could well be true, for he has just remembered a few more lines from their past. “I really don’t like men at all,” Dolores confided back then. “I only need them, although I’m terrified of them. And now I’ve fallen in love with this beautiful girl, who is very rich, of course. Even thinner than I am. With the most delicious name. Posey Pendergast. You must meet her one day. She would like you, too.”
Wishing no more of this, and wishing no more of Dolores, ever, Benito turns in search of Carla, who seems to have vanished or hidden herself in the crowd that now populates this oversized room, milling around the long bar table and spilling out onto the broad deck that faces the sea. As he catches sight of the deck, the doctor instinctively moves toward it, even as Dolores is saying, “You must come back and tell me how you made all that money, Dr. Do-Good.”
“Excuse me,” he mutters stiffly, making for the door. He is not at all graceful in the usual way of Latins; Elizabeth said that from time to time.
From the deck San Francisco is still invisible; it lurks there behind the great cliffs of land, across the surging, dark-streaked sea. The tall, pale city, lovely and unreal. Benito thinks of his amazement at that city, years back, when he roamed its streets as an almost indigent medical student—at Stanford, in those days a city medical school, at Clay and Webster Streets, in Pacific Heights. How lonely he used to feel as he walked across those hills and stared at massive apartment houses, at enormous family houses—how isolated and full of greed. He wanted the city, both to possess and to immerse himself in it. It is hardly surprising, he now thinks—with a small, wry, private smile—that he ended up in bed with Dolores Gutierrez, and that a few years later he found himself the owner of many sleazy blocks of hotels in the Tenderloin.
But that is not how he ended up, the doctor tells himself, in a fierce interior whisper. He ended up with Elizabeth, who was both beautiful and good, a serious woman, with whom he lived harmoniously, if sometimes sadly (they had no children, and Elizabeth was given to depression), near St. Francis Wood, in a house with a view of everything—the city and the sea, the Farallon Islands.
Nor is that life with Elizabeth how he ended up, actually. The actual is now, of course, and he has ended up alone. Childless and without Elizabeth.
The doctor takes deep breaths, inhaling the cool, fresh wind, and exhaling, he hopes and believes, the germs of self-pity that sometimes enter and threaten to invade his system. He looks back to the great Marin headlands, those steep, sweeping hills of green. Far out at sea he sees two small, hopeful white boats, sails bobbing against the dark horizon.
Looking back inside the house, he sees Carla in intimate-seeming conversation with withered old Posey. Fresh from the intimations of Dolores, he shudders: Posey must be even older than he is, and quite unwell. But before he has time for speculation along those lines, he is jolted by a face, suddenly glimpsed behind the glass doors: bright-eyed and buck-toothed, thinner and grayer but otherwise not much aged, in a starched white embroidered shirt (Why on earth? Does he want to look Mexican?), that lawyer, Herman Tolliver.
“Well, of course they should be condemned; half this town should be condemned, are you crazy?” Tolliver grinned sideways, hiding his teeth. “The point is, they’re not going to be condemned. Somebody’s going to make a bundle off them. And from where I’m sitting it looks like you could be the guy. Along with me.” Another grin, which was then extinguished as Tolliver tended to the lighting of a new cigar.
In that long-ago time (about forty years back) the doctor had just opened his own office and begun his cardiology practice. And had just met a young woman, with straw-blond hair, clear, dark-blue eyes, and a sexy overbite—Carole Lombard with a Gene Tierney mouth. A young woman of class and style, none of which he could ever afford. Elizabeth Montague: her very name was defeating. Whoever would exchange Montague for Zamora?
None of which excused Benito’s acquiescence in Tolliver’s scheme. (Certain details as to the precise use of Tolliver’s “hotels” Benito arranged not quite to know, but he had, of course, his suspicions.) It ended in making the doctor and his wife, Elizabeth Montague Zamora, very rich. And in funding the clinics for the indigent of Chiapas.
After that first encounter with Herman Tolliver, the doctor almost managed never to see him again. They talked on the phone, or, in the later days of success and busyness, through secretaries. Benito was aware of Tolliver, aware that they were both making a great deal of money, but otherwise he was fairly successful in dismissing the man from his mind.
One morning, not long before Elizabeth died, she looked up from the paper at breakfast (Benito only scanned the New York Times, did not read local news at all) and said, “Didn’t you used to know this scandalous lawyer, this Tolliver?”
“We’ve met.” But how did Elizabeth know that? Benito, shaken, wondered, and then remembered: some time back there had been phone calls, a secretary saying that Mr. Tolliver wanted to get in touch (fortunately, nothing urgent). Just enough to fix the name in Elizabeth’s mind. “Is he scandalous?” Benito then asked his wife, very lightly.
“Well, some business with tax evasion. Goodness, do all lawyers do things like that these days?”
Aware of his own relief (he certainly did not want public scandals connected with Tolliver), Benito told her, “I very much doubt it, my darling.”
And that was the end of that, it seemed.
Carla is now talking to both old Posey and Herman Tolliver, but the doctor can see from her posture that she doesn’t really like Tolliver, does not really want to talk to him. She is barely giving him the time of day, holding her glass out in front of her like a shield, or a weapon. She keeps glancing about, not smiling, as Tolliver goes on talking.
Is she looking for him? the doctor wonders. Does she ask herself what has happened to old Benito? He smiles to himself at this notion—and then, almost at the same moment, is chilled with longing for Elizabeth.
A problem with death, the doctor has more than once thought, is its removal of all the merciful dross of memory: he no longer remembers any petty annoyances, ever, or even moments of boredom, irritation, or sad, failed acts of love. All that is erased, and he only recalls, with the most cruel, searing accuracy, the golden peaks of their time together. Beautiful days, long nights of love. He sees Elizabeth at their dining table, on a rare warm summer night. Her shoulders bare and white; a thin gold necklace that he has brought her from Oaxaca shines in the candlelight; she is bending toward their guest, old Dr. McPherson, from med-school days. Benito sees,
too, McPherson’s wife, and other colleague guests with their wives—all attractive, pale, and well dressed. But none so attractive as his own wife, his pale Elizabeth.
“Oh, there you are,” Carla says, coming up to him suddenly.
“You couldn’t see me out here? I could see you quite clearly,” he tells her, in his sober, mechanical voice.
“I was busy fending off that creep, Tolliver. Mr. Slime.” She tosses her hair, now gleaming in the sunlight. “I can’t imagine what Posey sees in him. Do you know him?”
“We’ve met,” the doctor admits. “But how do you know him?”
“I’m a reporter, remember? I meet everyone.”
“And Posey Pendergast? You know her because—”
But that question and its possible answer are interrupted, cut off by the enormous, puffing arrival of Dolores. “Oh, here’s where you’ve got to,” she tells Benito and Carla, as though she had not seen them from afar and headed directly to where they stand, leaning together against the balcony’s railing. “Carla, I’m absolutely in love with your hair,” says Dolores.
Carla giggles—out of character for her, the doctor thinks—and then, another surprise, she takes his arm for a moment and laughs as she asks him, “Why don’t you ever say such flattering things to me?”
Is she flirting with him, seriously flirting? Well, she could be. Such things do happen, the doctor reminds himself. And she seems a very honest young woman, and kind. She could brighten my life, he thinks, and lighten my home, all those rooms with their splendid views that seem to have darkened.
“Don’t you want some lunch?” she is asking. “Can I get you something?”
Before he can answer (and he had very much liked the idea of her bringing him food), Dolores, again interrupting, has stated, “He never eats. Can’t you tell? Dr. Abstemious, I used to call him.”
“Well, I’m really hungry, I’ll see you two later.” And with an uncertain smile (from shyness? annoyance? and if annoyance, at which of them?), Carla has left. She is pushing back into the room, through the crowds; she has vanished behind the glass.
