A Dangerous Woman

by Mary McGarry Morris

  She went straight up to the little apartment and stayed there. She knew exactly how it would go: Getso would blame her. To keep from being fired he would have to; this new truck replaced the one he had totaled. John would call Frances. And, of course, Birdy would become even more inaccessible.

  Now he was out there sawing and hammering and Frances would say that was also her fault. It wasn’t fair the way such simple things, fig squares for Birdy, or a man showing up on the wrong day for a job, or buying a few groceries, could run so amok for her and never for anyone else. She stood in the window with the sun on her face, stood absolutely still, and closed her eyes. She could almost feel it, that huge blank echoing space where nothing, not even the beat of a heart, could regulate all the turmoil that found its way inside. She pulled down the shades and closed the curtains. With the pillow over her head, she dreamed that she huddled on a child’s small wooden chair in the middle of a dark empty room of a house that was being constructed around her.

  The black-shaded brass lamps on Mr. Prowse’s desk and conference table diffused the light at eye level, so that it was difficult to look away from the accounting printouts and all the other documents without constantly refocusing one’s vision to the layered dimness of the elegant office. Blinking, now Frances could make out the intricate ring pattern in this red-and-blue Oriental carpet she had first seen twenty-seven years ago, when Horace had first brought her here to meet his accountant and old friend, Thomas Prowse. Little had changed. Mr. Prowse, who had seemed like an old man then, still looked much the same, except that he grew smaller each year. The pads in his gray suit jacket sagged over his shoulders, and his collar curled away from his stemlike neck. At least his white hair was still as thick and unruly as ever.

  Mr. Prowse sat so small behind his massive burled-ash desk that she was sure they probably had to swivel his chair higher and higher each year. She wondered if his feet even touched the floor anymore. He was reminiscing about a long-ago land swap between himself and Horace. Each man thought he had finally bested the other, only to discover both parcels were worthless. “He wouldn’t admit it,” Prowse recalled gleefully, his upper plate shifting with a clack. He pushed it into place with his tongue, giving his speech a lisping thickness that was starting to turn her stomach. “To the point where he even drove pilings into the muck and put up this tin warehouse. It started to sink that very first spring,” he lisped, the wet corners of his mouth gleaming.

  His gums must be shrinking, she thought. Even his eyes looked smaller in their sockets as he described the property he had received in the swap. If Horace were still alive, he’d be like that, she thought, recoiling; her husband, a shriveling, drooling old man telling pointless stories.

  Beside her, Steve’s polished black shoe jerked up and down impatiently. He looked at his watch and raised his eyebrows. Irritated, she looked away. God, when she thought of all the interminably dull legal conversations she had endured for his sake over the years …

  Her business had been over for at least a half hour. While Mr. Prowse dozed on and off, the tax increase had been explained by one of the firm’s junior accountants, a somber young man who had excused himself right after his presentation. He obviously had not wanted to get caught in the old man’s stream of consciousness, which was meandering further and further now from any logical connection to Horace.

  Steve cleared his throat. He slid his leather portfolio from the desk onto his knees, grunting her name.

  What was the harm, she thought, avoiding his stare. She drew in her breath and smiled at Mr. Prowse, lost in a rapt description of the best chicken pie he had ever eaten. An old stonecutter’s wife in Barre had baked it for him. It was during the Depression, and the stonecutter could not pay his bill. “He offered to carve me a tombstone, whatever I wanted on it. And the old stonecutter did beautiful work. But what does a hungry young man want with his own tombstone?”

  “Frannie!” Steve nudged her.

  “And just coming out of the oven was the biggest, juiciest chicken pie I’d ever seen or smelled.” Mr. Prowse clasped his thin, spotted hands and laughed.

  This was all part of the ritual, benediction in this ceremony of acceptance that had begun, to everyone’s shock and disgust (especially Mr. Prowse’s), when Horace had taken a girl as his bride. Every year she dreaded sitting through this examination of the books, because it always seemed like an annual review of HER. But now that Horace’s venerable friend and business adviser had once again judged her worthy of the Beecham name and money, she could relax and look forward to an ice-cold martini at the Sugar House in Burlington, where she and Steve would be meeting their old friends Bob and Enid Fowler.

  A gash of light cut into the office as the door opened. The secretary, a trim gray-haired woman with an English accent, leaned over Mr. Prowse’s shoulder and whispered, “See the red light flashing on the console, sir?”

  “Oh my, yes,” Mr. Prowse said, squinting at the console of buttons before him.

  “There’s been a call from Attorney Bell’s office. Um, an emergency, it seems,” she said, pointedly addressing only Mr. Prowse.

  They hurried down the granite steps into the parking lot. The morning nurse had found Anita unconscious in the shower. An ambulance had taken her to Atkinson Hospital. Steve fumbled his keys from his pocket. “Damn it!” he groaned when they flew from his hands. He knelt down and groped under the car for them.

  She didn’t see the need for all this panic. He had already talked to his office. He knew what the situation was at home. Even the dark circle of sweat staining the back of his jacket annoyed her.

  His hand shook as he unlocked her door.

  “Well, that’s a relief, now that she’s finally in a hospital,” she said. “At least we can take our time getting back.” What he obviously needed now was to hear a calm and clear-thinking voice. She smiled. “You can relax.”

  He looked at her, startled.

  “Now that she’s in good hands,” she added, patting his arm. She realized how insensitive that had almost sounded. Her tongue prickled with the thought of that martini. All of a sudden she was starving. Poor Steve, she would let him drink as much as he wanted tonight, and then she would drive home. “As soon as we get to the Sugar House, you could have Bob call the hospital and get an update for you.” Bob Fowler was an internist. She frowned. “Do you know who admitted her? I hope it’s someone we know and not that fool Kessel she saw last …”

  “We’re not going to the Sugar House,” he said, opening his door.

  “But we always go there.” For a moment she thought he had somewhere else in mind.

  “Frannie, Anita tried to kill herself,” he said, looking at her over the roof of the car.

  So what else is new, she thought. “How?” she forced herself to ask.

  “I don’t even know,” he sighed. “Apparently Jan wasn’t making much sense when she called.” He closed his eyes and tapped his keys on the roof. His voice broke. “She said for them to tell ‘the son of a bitch’ to get back as fast as he could.”

  “My God, after all you’ve put up with! After all you’ve done for them and for her, to treat you like this! You don’t want to hear it, but they’re manipulating you, Steve. They’re using you.”

  He slid down into the car and sat staring over the wheel. “I never should have come up here today. I could tell when I got up this morning, she was in a deep depression.” He looked over at her. “It was even worse than a depression. It was this terrible sadness, this overwhelming and deadening sadness. And I couldn’t stand the sight of it or the feel of it. She came down the stairs and it was like this cloud, this darkness that moved with her.…” He put his face in his hands, and for a moment the only sound in the car was a strangled wheeze. “She was doing so well yesterday. It was like the old Anita. I almost called you last night and then again this morning to say I couldn’t go, that I knew you’d be fine alone. And then she came down those stairs and her eyes were just filled with so much pa
in”—he winced, his voice hoarsening to a whisper—“that I couldn’t stand it. I kissed the top of her head and I got out of there as fast as I could.” Tears rolled down his flushed cheeks.

  “Do yourself a favor, Steve, and don’t say another goddamn word to me.”

  They were nearing her turn onto Cuttle Road, both of them stiff and dry-mouthed now after the last hour’s reproachful silence. Shivering, Frances stared at the winding road ahead, her fiercely crossed arms mottled with goosebumps from the car’s frigid air conditioning. She had already closed the vents on her side, but his were still open and blasting away. She’d be damned if she’d give him the satisfaction of saying one word about how cold she was, which was exactly what he was waiting for, and then he’d be off and running. He’d go from this temperamental thermostat, to how pale and easily tired she had been lately, and, by the way, speaking of low blood, had she heard about Mimi Lukas’s father, Marion—the one who’d made a fortune importing acrylic baby-furniture. Well, acrylic furniture was perfect for cramped spaces, because of the dreamy ambience it gave a nursery, with the baby seeming to float in a kind of amniotic state; that is, if couples were actually even reproducing anymore; tell me, when was the last time someone you actually knew had a baby. Steve was a master at free-associating people from anger to conciliation, deftly sweeping them in and out of moods, anger, threats, probing questions; anything to avoid confrontation. She could picture him over the years doing it to Anita as well. He prided himself on settling most of his clients’ cases in the comfort of his office and not in the courtroom.

  He hunched over the wheel, his grim expression and constant sighing all for her benefit. He knew as well as she did that as soon as he got home he would find out that she had been right after all, that Anita was fine and Jan’s hysterical phone call had been another false alarm, calculated to spoil Frances’s day with her father.

  When he turned, the knot in her stomach tightened. He would be dropping her off, letting her out of his car, alone. Alone. She was almost forty-eight years old. Forty-nine then fifty. And after that, what? What would become of her?

  He pulled onto the gravel circle and she got out while he was still down-shifting. He raced back down the road. Turning, she was conscious of the first flowers blooming along the walks, limp with the late-afternoon sun. Her eyes froze on the dirty old car, deep in the shadows of the beech tree. She looked back at the house, startled to see this newly built section of posts and joists where the deck had been. At the sound of splashing, she spun around. A man in dark shorts was swimming the length of the pool, back and forth, his face submerged, his curved arms meeting the water with weary slaps.

  Halfway across, his face lifted and he saw her. He swam to the side and hoisted himself by his elbows onto the white coping near her. She remembered him from the other day, but she had forgotten his name.

  “I came by to see if you’d made up your mind,” he said, rubbing water from his eyes. “But you were already gone and …”

  “Where’s my niece?” she demanded, looking around with alarm. She stepped back. “Where’s Martha?”

  “Up there. In her apartment,” he said, gesturing at the garage. “She said it wasn’t Wednesday, but it didn’t seem to make any sense to wait around and not do anything and let two more days go by without anyone doing anything, so I figured I’d just …”

  She was on her way to the garage. She heard him climb out of the pool, the dripping water fizzing onto the hot concrete. She couldn’t swallow, she felt her shoulders tense, expecting him to come charging after her, his hands to tighten around her neck the way they had strangled Martha, and now the door at the top of the stairs opened and there was Martha. She was all right.

  They began to shout, their voices writhing in a high-pitched tangle.

  “What in God’s name …”

  “I told him to go …”

  “… were you thinking of, letting a perfect …”

  “But he wouldn’t listen and so …”

  “… stranger spend the day here …”

  “… what could I do, I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t make …”

  “You should’ve called the police, that’s what …”

  “… him go. I tried, but he wouldn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” Colin Mackey said. He stepped next to her. “It’s my fault. I just figured …”

  “You don’t just figure, Mr. Mackey,” she said. “Not here. Not on my property!” She walked toward the house.

  “Mack,” he said, catching up with her. “Call me Mack,” he said, his tone so sleek her eye went instinctively toward the ripple in the grass.

  “There’s no need to call you anything. You don’t understand. I want you out of here. And don’t come back!” She hesitated by the board to the kitchen door.

  For a moment he stood speechless, his hands clenched at the sides of his dripping shorts, his knuckles white. “I’ll be honest. I figured I’d do what I could and maybe you’d be desperate enough for a good carpenter to hire me.”

  “Desperation is not the way I do business.”

  His head drew back. “Of course not. I’m sorry. It was presumptuous of me.” He started for his car. “I’ll get my crowbar and rip this out of here.”

  “No!” she called, and he spun around with a grateful smile.

  “You don’t have to. You can leave it. It’s all right. You can go,” she said, her voice high and thin as she kept waving him toward his car. “Just go.” When he had driven out of sight, she took her first deep breath.

  “I told him to go,” Martha said from behind, startling her. “I tried to make him leave.” Her hair stuck out in bushy clumps, and there were grease spots down the front of her shirt. It was sickening. She was such a mess, such a slob, careless about her appearance, about her own safety, her life.

  Martha followed her inside, her voice buzzing after Frances with the dull persistence of a gnat. She filled the kettle with water and set it on the stove for tea.

  “… So I got the groceries at the Superette and I was going to see Birdy. But then, when I came out, Getso was there.”

  Frances stood by the door, staring dismally out at the section Colin Mackey had framed. Steve’s birthday party was only a month away. Since Friday there had not been a single call about her ad, and now it had run out. Maybe she should hire him. What would be the harm? Let him do the deck, and then she would look for a permanent handyman later.

  “… and so he helped me pick up all the cans and stuff, but then …”

  Frances wheeled around. “Martha! Please.”

  She was all wound up, her eyes glowing behind her smudged glasses. God, it was like listening again to all her teenage ramblings about who had snubbed her and who had knocked the books out of her arms or thrown her clothes into the shower in the boys’ locker room. It would pour out of her, and then for days afterward she would hole up in the apartment, refusing to leave or talk to anyone.

  “I have so much on my mind. You have no idea,” Frances said, pressing both temples with her fingertips.

  “I just want to be sure you know it wasn’t my fault,” Martha said, striking her breast. Her mouth quivered.

  “I already said that. I told you that.” She turned off the stove and poured the sputtering water over the camomile tea. With the mug close to her face, she inhaled the fragrant mist.

  “But you’re not listening. You don’t understand. I mean the windshield he broke. The one on the laundry truck.”

  John called from the Cleaners early the next morning. Sheriff Stoner had arrested Colin Mackey for smashing the windshield of John’s brand-new delivery truck.

  She could tell Martha was on the extension in the apartment. They had both picked up at the same time.

  John claimed that whatever Martha had said to this Mackey character had triggered the whole incident.

  “It wasn’t me,” Martha broke in. “It was what Getso said Mr. Mackey should do to himself and then to me. And I think yo
u know what I mean.”

  “Who’s that?” John demanded. “Is that her?”

  “Yes, it’s me!” Martha snapped.

  “For Godssakes,” Frances groaned, and closed her eyes with a sudden image of herself and Martha as two old women in long dark coats, dragging their possessions around in shopping bags.

  “Listen, you, you better stop calling here! It’s driving everyone nuts.”

  “I don’t call there.”

  “Ten, fifteen, twenty times a day she calls. The phone rings and nobody’s there. She listens and she hangs up.”

  “It’s not me,” Martha said in a weak voice.

  “Jesus Christ, of course it’s you!” John hooted.

  “John? John, listen! I saw Getso steal that money from the cash drawer.” Her voice coiled small and tight in its dark corner. “You shouldn’t have fired me. I was your best worker. I was such a good worker I never even missed a coupon on the specials. Never. Not one. And I never stole anything from you. I would never do that. Never. I mean that.”

  “Frannie! Help me out here. I can’t take much more of this shit,” John implored. “You gotta keep her outta my life! Please!”

  “Martha, hang up. I said hang up! Now!” Frances demanded.

  The phone clicked.

  “This is getting totally outta hand, Frannie. Birdy Dusser had to get her number changed. My girls are all scared. They think she’s gonna go after them next.”

  “That’s ridiculous and you know it,” Frances exploded. She had had enough. For Martha’s sake, she had put up and paid out, but no more, damn it. “I have to go,” she said before he could reply. She hung up, then quickly dialed Steve’s office number. From now on she would have him deal with John. Gretchen, his secretary, said he was on another call; would she like to hold, or be called back?

  “Neither,” she said. “And no message.”

  “Anita’s regained consciousness, Mrs. Beecham,” Gretchen whispered. “He’s been up there all night, poor man. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look so bad.”