A Dangerous Woman

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Martha had no idea what he was talking about. Julia turned, her leg outstretched as if for flight. In the yellow glow of the evening, his shoulders sparkled with dandruff flakes, and the white tufts of hair in his ears seemed to shine.

  “There is this mighty force,” he was saying, “this life-urging impetus. Like a throb in the dark of things …”

  She listened. It had become a lovely evening. Mr. Weilman was the only person she had ever known to care so much about such strange things. Bits of conversations carried up to her, and she stared in the direction of the brightly lit pool water, and now, quite clearly over all the other voices, for the band had suddenly stopped playing, she heard Mack say to Anita Bell, “You ever hear an old song and think, Gee, I wonder what ever happened to so-and-so? You think, Maybe he died. Must’ve, he was so good, and now you never hear anything about him. Well, I know where they all are. Every single one of them—movie stars, TV stars, poets, singers, writers, old game-show hosts.” His voice rose bitterly. People glanced his way. Anita Bell nodded intently.

  “It’s the most incredible underground of geniuses out there.”

  Nearby, people turned, briefly curious, amused.

  “All gray-haired and paunchy, hanging out in bars, thumbing rides, passing each other back and forth on the highways, always leeching off a sister or a mother, because after a while, you know, they’re the only ones left. The only ones who care. The movement’s just too big to support all of us. There’s just too many of us.” He laughed. “Soon there’ll be more of us than them!”

  Seeing the long line forming at the buffet table, Mr. Weilman rose with tremulous alarm, anxious to take his place. Mack led Anita Bell toward Martha and Julia. He walked with great care, and when he leaned onto the table one hand shifted, causing him to stagger sideways. He caught himself, but had obviously twisted his hand. Wincing, he rubbed his blunted wrist.

  Julia stared up at Anita until Mack finally reached the end of his elaborate introduction of the three women. “We’ve all met,” Julia said. “Naturally.”

  His face tightened. “‘Naturally’?” What do you mean, ‘naturally’?” he said, bending close. “What the hell’s that mean, ‘naturally’!”

  “Well, we’ve known each other for years.” She looked up and smiled.

  “You have?” He looked back at Anita, whose pinched expression had not changed all evening. “You mean, you’re all close personal friends and I’m an asshole for not knowing that.”

  “She didn’t mean that,” Martha said quickly.

  “What’d she mean, then?” Mack asked.

  Nervously she tried to swallow, instead began to choke.

  Julia grabbed her hand. “Why don’t you just stop it right now,” she said, glaring up at him.

  “Please,” Anita Bell said in a small voice.

  Mack smiled. “Martha thinks I’m an asshole.” He looked back at Julia and winked. “She’s very perceptive.”

  “It’s getting late,” Anita said, turning from the table. “I’d only planned to drop in.”

  “Don’t you be silly!” Mack insisted as he gestured to the bartender with his empty tumbler.

  “He makes my skin crawl,” Julia muttered, watching him go.

  The woman in blue stopped him. Martha stared in disbelief as he took the woman’s hand and led her onto the deck, where they danced together. Mr. Weilman had returned, his plate mounded with food, but after eating a little potato salad, he said he was full.

  The band began to play a limbo, and the dance floor cleared, except for Mack. Two women held the pool-net pole, lowering it each time Mack passed under. A crowd formed, clapping the beat. Now, with the pole at its lowest point and his back almost horizontal with the deck, he balanced his drink on his forehead, and had just inched his knees under the pole when he collapsed. Everyone gasped with laughter as he crawled away on his hands and knees.

  After the party, Dawn moved along the deserted patio, emptying ashtrays into a tin bucket. In the kitchen, Frances was arguing loudly with the caterer. She complained that the potatoes in the salad had been partially raw and the salmon pâté had a sweet mealy taste.

  “A sweet mealy taste!” the caterer cried.

  “As if there was relish in it,” she said.

  “Relish!”

  Mack dozed in a chaise longue by the pool, his chin on his chest, strands of hair over his eyes. From time to time, his head bobbed with a crooked smile.

  All night long, the ice sculpture had dripped over the raw bar, until the arms of the scales of justice had melted to dull stems. Martha watched the caterer fly from the house, slam the door, and speed down the road in his jeep.

  Steve had returned from driving Anita home. Before he went into the house, he paused on the deck steps, looking down at the pool, where Japanese beetles and parrot-green cocktail napkins and a clear plastic tumbler floated on the floodlit surface.

  “It’s late,” he said to Martha. “Why don’t you come in now and go to bed?”

  “I will,” she said. She was hoping Mack would wake up soon.

  Inside the house, a door slammed. Then came a thud. Something had fallen.

  “Damn it!” Frances cried. “Goddamn it!”

  In the rainy week that followed, a gray coldness clutched the house, and there seemed to be no way to get warm. The phone rang often, each caller anxious to assure Frances that it had been a spectacular party.

  “Thank you,” she would reply. “That’s so kind of you … so good of you.… It was fun … He was surprised, wasn’t he? … He was so pleased … so happy.…”

  Actually, they wanted to hear firsthand Frances’s opinion of Anita Bell’s startling appearance, but she would discuss it only with Mack. Martha was loading the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. At the table, Mack and Frances were on their third cups of coffee. She had angled herself so she could see Mack each time she looked up from the dishwasher. It pleased her that he was wearing an old plaid shirt of her father’s.

  “Apparently they were in on it. The two girls. They put her up to it. No!” Frances suddenly corrected herself. “Not put her up to it! They … they managed it. They staged it—that’s the word I want. ‘Staged’!” She shook her head. “To hurt me. To humiliate me, that’s why! You have no idea how good I’ve been to those girls over the years, how kind. On their birthdays it would be me who’d remind their father. Me who’d spend days shopping for just the right gift, the perfect card. She’d be off on one of her binges somewhere, and it would be time for back-to-school clothes or Christmas presents, and who do you think always took right over? Never say a word, just do what had to be done. And I never expected a thank you back. Never! But this! I mean, this just tears me apart.” She shook her head, then looked away as if to hide tears.

  Mack set down his coffee cup. “What did you expect? You must have expected something,” he said.

  “Well, I didn’t. I cared about Steve, and so I cared about his daughters, and it was that simple,” she said, her voice cracking. “I never wanted anything back.”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” Mack said. “I mean, you must have known they resented you.”

  “Me!” She touched the napkin to her eyes. “What did I ever do? It was never my fault!”

  “They’ve probably blamed you all these years for their mother’s misery, for her drinking.”

  Frances stared at him, her mouth caught in a stunned smile. “You don’t understand. That woman was a hopeless drunk before I even knew Steve. I’m more a wife to him than she’s ever been.” Mack leaned forward as if he were going to say something, but all he did was nod.

  Seventeen

  In the weeks since the party, Frances had only seen Steve once. Tonight he hadn’t gotten here until eleven—too late to go anywhere, so they had ended up in the study. With the only light the candles flickering on the paneled walls and ceiling and the dark leather furniture, the room closed over them. She was determined not to say a word about the party. Before long i
t would be just another joke they would vie to tell year after year. Actually, it was funny. It really was. She couldn’t wait for Steve to see Mack’s imitation of the bandleader, his rolling eyes and syrupy voice crooning into the microphone. She and Steve had been through too much together to let Anita’s inappropriate behavior come between them.

  Sipping her vodka and tonic, she felt uneasy being the only one drinking. Steve had just wanted seltzer water. She could tell he had lost weight. Well, that was one benefit of not having been out to dinner in weeks. She, on the other hand, had gained weight, now that she was cooking dinner every night for Mack and herself. Martha would sit down and eat with them, but she always made a point of preparing her own food. Sometimes it almost seemed as if there were some competition going on, as if Martha were trying to show she was the better cook. Her moods were becoming more erratic. She hung on Mack’s every word, one minute laughing too hard, the next relentlessly pressing some abysmal point. And then there were nights, when hunched over her plate, she would eat in bitter silence, refusing to say what had offended her. She made Mack nervous, but his patience with her and his kindness surprised Frances. He was a man of greater depth than she would have ever guessed.

  “It just doesn’t seem fair,” Steve mused, squeezing the wedge of lime into the fizzing water. He licked his fingers.

  “What’s that?” she asked, laying her head back on his shoulder. God, she had missed him. She laid her hand on his thigh and felt such a sudden surge of desire that her face burned. She was having a stroke, and only love could save her. Only Steve. She began to unbutton his shirt.

  As if it were the paw of some annoying pet, he removed her hand from his chest and set it on the sofa. “I don’t know.… Seeing the girls so happy, it … it tears me apart. I think of how much they’ve missed.…”

  She forced her eyes onto the shelf of books, all red leather, gold lettering, hand-tooled. Horace’s Kipling. Mack had wondered if Horace had ever read them. She doubted it. Maybe that’s what she should do. One by one, she would read them. The gaps on the shelves marked what Mack had borrowed. She would ask him where to start. Reading bored her, even the best-sellers her friends raved about. She needed action, throwing herself so completely, so fully into the task at hand that nothing else mattered.

  “… yesterday they went to a movie together.” He shook his head and sighed. “A matinee. And then they came by the office. I watched them get out of the car, and they were laughing so hard, the three of them, they could hardly stand up. It just … it just tore me apart.”

  “Why?” she said, sitting up. She looked at him.

  “All those years. They could have had all that with their mother. SHE could have had all that.” He shook his head and sighed. “All that time …” He turned, and she was startled by the rawness of his eyes and the bitter set of his jaw. “Time! It’s like a chunk of me is gone. I can’t even stand to see them so happy. I keep thinking of all that TIME, all those years. They laugh and they talk and I can’t even join in. There’s no place for me. That part of me’s dead. I keep wondering why she waited so long. And it tears me apart. It really does, Frannie.” He put his hands over his face. “I’m afraid I have no feelings left,” he gasped.

  “Why should you?”

  “She’s my wife. They’re my children.”

  She looked at him, containing herself so that she would not blink or flinch. Calmly, softly, she said, “Steve, why are you doing this to yourself?” She bit her lip to keep from adding “to us.”

  “It’s the strangest thing. I’ve had this horrible emptiness, this sadness. I go to bed with it and I wake up with it. Some mornings I can barely lift my head off the pillow.…”

  She held his hand. She had felt the same way these last weeks. Without him, she had felt so incomplete. Even as a young woman, she had been his strength, and he, hers. “Poor Steve, you’re depressed, that’s all.”

  “She says it’s”—and here he gave a wry, bitter smile—“bereavement. Like grief, as if someone had actually died. She said she’s seen it before, that I’ve lost the old Anita and I don’t know how to deal with Anita the way she is now, so I’m filled with mourning.”

  “She? Who said that? Anita?”

  “The therapist.”

  “That’s bullshit!” She jerked her hand away.

  “I don’t know.” He looked at her. “But that’s just what it feels like.”

  She pointed, and his sudden cringing sickened her. She could just see them all cowing him, his daughters, Anita, the therapist. “You’d better not be discussing me in your … your sessions!” Her finger stabbed the air with each word. Of course he did. They all did. His bleak silence confirmed it.

  How could he? Especially after what they had done to her. Maybe he didn’t know that party had cost as much as a wedding and taken almost a year to plan. Maybe he didn’t realize what a laughingstock she had become, what a fool she felt like with all their friends, the entire town. And now he dared discuss her with THEM.

  No, no, he tried to tell her. She didn’t understand. She didn’t know what had happened.

  “I know what happened! And so does every single person who was here that night!” she said. She started to reach for her drink, then drew stiffly back for fear she might throw it in his face or dump it in his lap.

  “But you don’t know why,” he said, whining the way he used to on the phone with his daughters when they wanted him home; when there had been another crisis; when Anita had passed out on the toilet or she had brought some blithering bar pal home to drink with her.

  “I know why! Because those two horses of yours wanted to rub my nose in it for everyone to see, that’s why!”

  “Frannie!”

  “After all I’ve done for them, after all I’ve been through! After all I’ve given up!”

  “It was Anita! The therapist, she made her. She said she had to face the thing head on. That she had to deal with the situation. She had to do something.”

  “So she told her to come here? To barge into my home? Into OUR party? That was her advice? Who is this idiot? What’s her name? I’m going to call her. I can’t imagine that kind of therapy. I mean it, Steve, I’m going to do something!” She could just see her, some dippy little know-it-all like Julia’s psychobabbling friends. These people were everywhere, on the radio and TV talk shows. Magazines, newspapers. Imagine going to some stranger with your problems. It was sickening. She had learned long ago with Martha what frauds they were. All their pills and talk, when nothing ever changed but the dates on the bills. Some things, some situations just had to be accepted. That was good mental health, to be able to recognize and come to grips with reality. That was strength.

  “No. No. She didn’t tell her to actually come here. What she told her, what she said, was that she had two choices, to either end the marriage or … or to confront the thing head on.”

  “Thing? What thing? Her drinking?”

  There was a silence. “Us, I guess. Our relationship.”

  “What?” she was incredulous. Anita’s problem was Anita. Everyone knew that. She listened in amazement as Steve explained that the therapist had told Anita that for years she had been the victim of their relationship. The therapist said it was an insidious situation because, while Anita had been victimized, she had also been the one who had allowed her husband’s affair all these years as a precondition, a rationalization, an excuse for her alcoholism.

  “What?” Frances kept saying. “What? This is bizarre! What are you saying?”

  He tried again to explain.

  “Wait! Wait!” she interrupted. “In other words, all these years, when everyone whispered how cruel this was to Anita, how unfair, we were the sad sacks, you and me—the two of us. WE were the victims … of her, of her weakness.” She laughed bitterly. “What you’re saying is, her drinking’s what’s kept us together all these years. That’s what you’re really saying.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “You’re twisting things.
”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe the therapist is right when you think of it, when you follow the logic of it. But, really, you were the one calling the shots all these years. You had it both ways, didn’t you?” She smiled and leaned close, whispering behind her fingertips, “Poor innocent Steve. His wife’s drunk and Frances Beecham’s had him in her clutches all these years. Poor trapped Steve …”

  His face reddened, and she could just picture all the groveling in the therapist’s office: Steve with his head bowed, awaiting their absolution. What would he do to earn it? How far would he go? What would he tell them? She had been a fool. She had wasted her youth. Her life was two-thirds over and she would die alone.

  From the hallway came the creak of the stairway. Martha. Of course, Martha. Always and forever and ever, Martha. Horace used to tell people there were ghosts in his huge house. Whose ghosts, a friend had once scoffed. The house wasn’t old enough for ghosts; having built it, Horace was its first and only occupant. To this, Horace had replied, “My ghosts, the ones I bought.” The truth in this suddenly sickened her.

  “You know something, Steve?” she said, her flesh cold in this heat. “It just occurred to me. Because of you, I have nothing. Nothing.”

  His head shot up, but whatever he had been going to say he sighed away. “This hardly looks like nothing, dear,” he said with a sweep of his arm.

  “You know what I mean. You know exactly what I mean.”

  Again his head cocked. His bitterness stunned her. His eyes narrowed, and sweat beaded on his upper lip. He clasped her hand in his. “If you have nothing, Frances, it’s because of who you’ve wanted to be all these years. You’ve always preferred the sanctuary of being Mrs. Horace Beecham.” As he leaned closer, his thin, almost leering smile frightened her. “Don’t you see, you’ve been married to a dead man all these years. A dead man!”

  She pulled her hand away and slapped him. Shocked, she remembered his saying once how Anita thought nothing of hitting him with her fists or brooms or vases.