A Dangerous Woman

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “I don’t think you understand the position we were in. And how much more of a nightmare a rape trial would have been for her,” she said, annoyed that he was bringing it up again.

  “But she hadn’t been raped.”

  “No, but everyone thought she had been. I told you, that was the rumor.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “She said they touched her and poured beer on her, and that’s what they said too. But they said she let them, that she wanted them to.”

  “Wanted them to poke her with sticks and spray beer on her? That’s bizarre!”

  “The point is, people believed it, which is understandable. Don’t forget, Martha can be rather bizarre.”

  He had been staring at her. “Do you believe it?”

  “No.” She looked away. “Part of it. I don’t know.” She waved her hand. “I couldn’t deal with it. Floyd and I, we just wanted it over. There wasn’t a thing to be gained by pressing charges, except more humiliation for her.”

  “You’re probably right,” he sighed.

  Probably right, she thought. Why was she even discussing this with him, of all people? She reached past him and opened the door.

  “Still, it’s a shame she’s had to endure the rumors all these years.”

  “If they are rumors,” she snapped.

  “If?” he said.

  “If!”

  “Of course they’re rumors. I mean, you should know better than anybody.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem. That I do know better than anyone.” She smiled wearily. “Good night,” she said, closing the door.

  Every time Martha got nervous, she closed her eyes and held her breath and counted to twenty-five. She wore one of her new dresses and her new canvas shoes, but the laces wouldn’t stay up, so she had to keep untying them and crisscrossing them around her ankles. She had put on her new makeup, but then she felt so self-conscious that she had washed it off before coming down to the party. Traces of blue still smudged her eyelids, making her look heavy-eyed and tired.

  Frances’s insistence that she didn’t have to come tonight only made her more determined to show Mack that she could talk to people and act as normal as everyone else here. It was only nine o’clock, but the starry night seemed ready to burst with heat and the band’s frantic rendition of “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” as the trumpets squealed over the din of expectant voices. The guest of honor was fifteen minutes late.

  Inside the softly lit house, the fans turned in lazy crosscurrents of sultry air. From the doorway, she scanned the crowd for Mack. The band played a slow song now, and the few couples dancing appeared to be gliding over ice as the pale-gray decking shimmered under the glowing torchlights. She moved her feet, trying to recall the steps Mack had shown her. “One, two, three, one, two, three,” she counted under her breath, turning slightly, then more, until her back was to the deck. “One, two, three.” That was it!

  “Excuse me.”

  She turned, embarrassed to find a young man with slicked-back blonde hair waiting to get by. She moved aside, and he opened the door.

  “May I?” He grinned, lifting his hands.

  “No!” She stepped back and folded her arms tightly. “I don’t want to dance with you!”

  He blinked. “Hey, no problem! Noooo problem at all.” He hurried past her.

  She came outside and sat alone at a table below the deck. She watched the women, in their pale dresses or long skirts with loose slouchy blouses, sipping their drinks and laughing brightly while their quick eyes alighted on everyone.

  From down the road, a horn sounded three long toots, the signal for Steve’s arrival with the Pierces, who had told him Frances was having a small dinner party for him. The long white convertible rolled into the driveway and the band began to play “Happy Birthday” with all the guests on their feet, singing. Steve just sat in the front seat, stunned and shaking his head. And now, to applause and raucous whistling, he got out and embraced Frances in a long tender kiss. A few women dabbed at their eyes as the couple climbed arm in arm onto the deck, smiling at each other.

  “Speech! Speech!” called various voices. Steve held his hand over his eyes and peered out at everyone. “Bob!” he called, laughing. “Sandy,” he laughed, pointing, and turned to say something to Frances. “I don’t believe this!” he said, scratching the back of his head. “Golly!” He stood in silence for a moment on the edge of the deck, clutching Frances’s hand. When he began to speak, his hoarse voice trembled. “I’m the luckiest guy I know and the happiest, to have all this. All my friends, all my good, good friends …” His voice broke and it took him a moment to begin again.

  Frances smiled, her long black hair and tanned strong body vivid against her white linen dress. Just an hour ago, she had been in tears because the ice sculpture had started to melt and the caterer was short two waitresses (she had called Dawn and her girlfriend to fill in).

  At the bar Mack was ordering a Scotch. Next to him was a muscular woman in a pale-blue sundress, her frosted blonde hair cut as short as a boy’s. Steve was thanking them all for their “loyalty and kindness all these years and above all …” Again his voice faltered, and he hung his head. “For your … your understanding,” he said, dislodging the words with a vigorous nod before turning away. Frances’s face locked in a dark smile as everyone cheered and clapped and called up to him. Martha knew Frances had been offended by his appreciation of everyone’s “understanding,” clearly a reference to their relationship.

  Mack laughed while the woman in blue dug through her purse. She took out a pen and paper and wrote something down, which she read back to him. Grinning, he nodded. His yellow shirt was buttoned at the collar, and one leg of his wrinkled chinos was spattered with stiff coins of white paint.

  His wet hair was fastened in a stub at the nape of his neck. One, two, three. Her feet practiced the steps while she sat watching him. Maybe, when the music started, they would dance together.

  “Hello, Martha!” a woman said. She looked up to see Lisa Brown, an old friend of Frances’s. Lisa was originally from Mississippi. She and Frances had been inseparable for a few years, until some displeasure of Frances’s, some imagined or exaggerated slight, had caused a breach. Lisa’s first husband had been a close friend of Steve Bell’s, and the two couples had often traveled together. Lisa’s second husband was from Burlington, she was explaining now to Martha, who was staring at the blonde woman in blue silk. Every time Mack laughed the woman did too, with an almost imperceptible shimmy of her shoulders. Mack gestured and the woman lifted a locket from her neck and opened it. He bent close to see it, his face inches from hers. He said something and she smiled.

  “Are you still living here? I heard about your father.… I’m so sorry. I felt terrible. When I heard, I kept remembering all those times here when Frannie and I’d make such messes in his … Martha?” She put her hand on Martha’s arm and gave it a quick squeeze. “Honey, you’re rocking,” she drawled softly at Martha’s ear.

  She caught herself and sat perfectly still. Mack had wandered away from the bar and stood by himself at the edge of the patio, looking at the gleaming black Cadillac that was pulling into the driveway. The back door opened and out slid a small woman in a bright-green dress and white shoes that seemed too wide, too substantial at the ends of her birdlike legs.

  “Oh my God,” Lisa Brown crooned. “It’s Anita Bell.”

  Steve’s wife leaned down into the car to speak to the driver, then stood a moment, facing the pageant of stunned faces. She took a deep breath, folded her arms, and stepped off to the side, blinking nervously.

  “I don’t believe she is doing this,” Lisa hissed through a smile, the same fixed smile of the other incredulous women. “I haven’t seen her in years. My God, how she has aged. Poor thing just shriveled all up into an old lady. She looks like the oldest woman here, and I know for a fact she is not.” Lisa shook her head. “She must be awful drunk to do this.”

 
Anita Bell was sober, but shaky, weak-looking, ravaged by a lifetime’s illness that had not only damaged cells and organs, but had invaded her spirit, leaving her tentative and pathologically shy. She lifted her head with a deep breath before approaching the nearest group of women. Startled, they seemed, without ever moving, to have reassembled themselves, their positions, their attitudes, and they quickly smiled, raised a hand, bent to brush the little woman’s rouged cheek with theirs. Still, though, she held herself back just enough to signal some difference between her presence here and theirs.

  “Poor Steve,” Lisa Brown murmured, leaning forward as he came out of the house. With the long dragging step of a man wading through water, he made his way to his wife’s side. People reached out and patted his arm as he passed. His hand at Anita’s elbow, he steered her away from the astonished women. At the edge of the driveway, he stood talking to her, his head bent low and his shoulders hunched, for she was a diminutive woman. With Anita, he looked tall, while next to Frances, who was his height, he had always seemed short and slight, almost insignificant. Steve’s face was close to Anita’s, obviously to smell her breath and determine either her sobriety or the degree of her drunkenness. She spoke for what seemed like a long time. Head bent, he listened, nodding.

  Frances had finally emerged from the house. Flanked by a cadre of friends, she stood on the deck, her shoulders so squared that all the bones in her long slender back strained against the taut skin. Bill Pierce held out a drink, which she took with an exaggerated sweep of her head and a bright, blurred smile.

  Martha stared, remembering her conversation with Patsy Bell. Was this her fault? She could tell that Frances was struggling to appear unfazed. Anita shook her head, her gaze up at Steve steady and resolute.

  He obviously wanted her to leave, and she was just as obviously refusing.

  Up on the deck, the band played a slow, raspy jazz piece that Martha vaguely recognized. With his saxophone resting on his belly, the bandleader, a heavyset white-haired man, glanced down at the crumpled note he had just taken from his breast pocket. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began.

  Stricken-faced, Frances took a step, but it was too late.

  “The first song of the night is for,” he read, “my darling, for my best friend, Steve, from Frances. ‘Melancholy Baby’.” He brought the saxophone to his mouth and began to play the first sad, sweet notes.

  Steve nodded cordially at the bandleader. Beside him, Anita blinked nervously, staring off into the floodlit trees. And on the deck, Frances’s hand was pressed to her mouth.

  “Come on, now,” the bandleader said, gesturing down at Steve. “Let’s you and the little lady take the first dance of the evening together now. Come on, now,” he coaxed with a wave of the saxophone, “do us the honor.” He began to play, and when Steve still had not moved, he stepped up to the colored spotlights and focused the smoky blue glow onto them. Anita mechanically lifted her arms to her husband, and there, on the edge of the driveway, they danced in the tight, measured steps of a couple on a crowded dance floor, each staring dismally into the distance. The spotlight caught the pinkness of Anita’s scalp through her sparse dyed hair.

  “That’s just so sad,” whispered a young woman who had just knelt down by Lisa.

  “Isn’t it, though?” Lisa whispered, staring at the stiffly moving couple.

  “Frances Beecham ought to be so ashamed,” the young woman said. “Look at that poor thing, her whole life’s gone by and what’s she got to …”

  “Shut up,” Martha growled, turning to glare at the young woman, who shrank back. “What’re … who …” the young woman sputtered.

  “Martha, honey, you just calm down,” Lisa hissed. “You hear me, just …”

  “Martha!” Mack said, bending in front of her so that he was all she could see. His breath cooled her face. “Let’s take a walk.”

  They walked around the pool, across the gently sloping lawn, all the way up to the stone wall that divided the house grounds from the dark overgrown orchards beyond.

  When she told him what had happened, he laughed. “I’m sure Frances is used to that kind of talk,” he said, starting to lean back against the wall.

  “Don’t!” She grabbed his arm and he froze, his eyes widening on her. “That’s all poison ivy,” she said of the dark shiny leaves cascading over the stones. She took her hand away.

  “Danger, everywhere I turn,” he laughed uneasily, looking around. He was snapping a twig into small pieces. Below them the band was playing “Pretty Woman,” with Bill Pierce at the microphone singing in a wobbly, self-conscious baritone as he looked between Steve’s two women, Frances and Anita, fixed at polar ends of the party.

  Mack cleared his throat. “You look very nice.” He shook his head. “I feel guilty about your glasses, though.”

  “Here,” she said, slipping them off and handing them to him. She waited while he twisted and bent them. Without her glasses, not only was the distant party a blur of lights, but all the voices and music were so muted, they seemed to be coming from far away. She moved her feet in those three little steps. One two three. One two three. It occurred to her that this might be the only thing she did not need glasses for. “We can dance if you want,” she said, stepping back, one, two, three.

  “Here you go,” he said, returning the glasses. He watched her put them on. “Still the same, though.”

  “Oh no,” she told him, insisting they were straighter. “I can tell.” He stood so close that she ached to touch him. “I’ve been practicing, so, if you want to dance …”

  “I hate to dance.” He picked up another twig.

  “Then why did you teach me?”

  He laughed. “Must have been some other tall dark handsome stranger.”

  “It was you,” she said coldly, not finding him the least bit funny.

  He looked at her for a moment, and the neat scar shone in all the night lights, the stars and moon and blazing torches and floodlights, like another mouth, like a thin smile on his face.

  They both watched a woman in a short twirly white dress and a man in bermuda shorts and a red sport jacket strolling arm in arm toward them. They smiled and nodded, both the man and the woman, regarding her with curious eyes. Finally the woman greeted Martha by name. Looking down at the ground, she pretended not to have heard.

  Mack asked who they were. Friends of Frances’s, she told him. “They used to come in the Cleaners,” she added, lifting her head now that they were walking toward the party.

  “And did you use to ignore them at the Cleaners too?”

  “No. We used to talk about their dog, Brunilda. Every time they came in, that’s what we talked about.”

  “So why didn’t you just say hi now and something like, ‘How’s Brunilda doing?’”

  “I don’t know,” she said, watching them stop at the bar. “It’s different here.”

  “How’s it different? You know them. They’re the same people here as they are in the Cleaners.”

  “It’s different.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just is.”

  “You just think it’s different, that’s all.”

  “It is different. At the Cleaners I learned all the rules, what day in meant what day out, and blue-bags—laundry, red-bags—cleaning.” She laughed a little. “When I was there, I could make everything be right. I can’t do that here.”

  He looked at her, his mouth so pinched she thought he was angry with her. “It’s tough without the rules,” he said, tossing the broken twigs over the wall.

  An hour had passed. The bandleader, to compensate for his gaffe, had not once stopped playing. The night had become a frenzy of music. One song led wildly into the next. The waitresses were still passing hors d’oeuvres on round silver trays. The covered chafing dishes were being set up on the buffet table. Anita Bell was ensconced in a small circle of women, all her contemporaries. She said little, but gave her complete attention to whoever spoke. Steve stood near Frances, but they had barely spoken t
o one another.

  Mack had been drinking steadily all night. Martha watched him turn from the bar with another drink just as Dawn came by with a newly filled tray. He put his arm around her and accompanied her from guest to guest. Blushing, she giggled so helplessly that Mack had to speak for her.

  “Excuse me,” he said loudly to the two couples who were talking to Mr. Weilman, “would anyone care for some pâté?”

  Julia was sitting with Martha now. Mack had promised to dance one dance with her, and she was still waiting.

  “It would seem that Mr. Mackey has had the course,” Julia said.

  “He’s just fooling around,” Martha said, annoyed with Julia’s tone.

  “He’s also manic,” Julia said, her sharp eyes trailing his continuing skit with Dawn, who doubled over in laughter. Mack had taken her tray and held it overhead on three fingers now as he minced through the crowd. He kept licking his lips and winking at people, especially men.

  “He’s very nice,” Martha said, and Julia managed a weak smile.

  “I’m sure he is,” she said, and patted Martha’s knee.

  Mack had struck up a conversation with Anita Bell. They had already walked twice around the pool, and now they stood near Martha and Julia and Mr. Weilman, who had turned Julia’s remark about loving orchids into a passionate dissertation on self-propagation.

  “There are even some that nature has construed to look so much like female insects that male insects continually and, of course, quite futilely attempt to copulate with them.” Mr. Weilman’s cheeks burned a feverish red.

  Julia leaned against Martha’s shoulder and said behind her hand, “I’ll hold the ladder while you jump.”

  Martha looked at her blankly. Ladder? She had no idea …

  Julia nodded at Mr. Weilman, and then Martha got it.

  He paused, trying to remember the name of one that resembled an insect, then, unable to recall it, went quickly on to describe the various ways some insects communicate with one another. With butterflies it was sight; with cicadas it was sound. Gypsy moths emitted pheromones. “And ants and bees as well!” he said, narrowing his watery, bright eyes.