by Joan Hess
Theo decided to enter the conversation at his own risk. “What exactly worries you, Dorrie? The fact that Judith will fall behind in her studies, or the fact that she wishes to live in Israel on a kibbutz? It is not a sign of dementia.” Miriam had done so.
Dorrie chewed her bottom lip as if from a concerted attempt at self-analysis, but Theo was not impressed. Caldicotts did not second-guess themselves, or display doubt. She was, he suspected, merely stalling for effect.
“Well,” she said at last, “I suppose I’m worried that Judith might get hurt if she stays here. After all, people do set off bombs, shoot each other, and steal jewelry. I don’t want to be tacky about it, but it could be dangerous.”
Theo found himself in agreement, although he could not have explained the vague and undelineated feeling. From Judith’s scowl, he could see that she did not agree. He rather wished she did.
13
After further futile arguments that failed to alleviate the problem, Judith invited Theo and Dorrie to join her in the communal dining hall for dinner that evening. Theo accepted with alacrity, Dorrie with an offhanded nod. Judith left in a flurry of frustrated mutters that included allusions to mules and their progenitors.
Theo gazed at the problem, which was preoccupied with an insect bite on its arm. “Let’s talk about the locket,” he suggested amiably.
“Oh, Uncle Theo, it’s all so boring. The day you arrived—and the last day Essie cleaned my room—I had on the locket. It was so incredibly romantic of Biff to buy it for me. I happened to spot a similar one in the Tiffany catalogue and almost fell over dead when I saw the price. Which is not to say he shouldn’t have spent the money; he could hardly give me a hideous knickknack made out of plastic.” She paused for a shudder, then continued. “Anyway, I try to remember to wear it when it goes with my outfit, and I did have it on because I was wearing a darling cornflower-blue sundress that matches my eyes.”
“Did you wear the locket all day and to bed at night?”
“Don’t be silly. It would have cut my neck to ribbons and I would have been forced to spend the rest of my life in turtlenecks. I distinctly remember putting everything in my jewelry box before I performed an emergency pedicure and went to bed.” She held out her foot in mute proof.
Theo closed his eyes and forced himself to recall the scene in the restaurant. “You were not wearing a blue sundress at dinner,” he said, tugging thoughtfully at the tip of his beard. “You were wearing a T-shirt and shorts.”
“I had to change for dinner, didn’t I? It’s one of the highlights of my day, and let me tell you, they’re few and far between. But how totally unlike me to forget what I was wearing. You’re right about the T-shirt, Uncle Theo. I wonder what happened to my locket?” She wrinkled her nose at him.
“Let’s continue to think about the day of my arrival. What did you do from when you awoke to when you saw me in the restaurant?”
“To be brutal, this place is not the Cape in July. I washed out a few things, then studied Vogue until lunch time. I’m afraid to say it, but the new fall colors are drab beyond description. Later in the afternoon Judith and I went for a swim with her wonderful new friends, who discussed jeeps and turkey crates the entire time. I felt as if I were trapped at one of Mother’s insufferable bridge parties.”
“But Essie did clean your room?”
“To the best of her ability—which is limited to straightening the bedspread and dumping towels on the floor. I tried to be nice, but she was too spooky for words. I told you how she implied that I was cheap! There was nothing I could do but hide out in the bathroom with Vogue until she was gone. I wore the sundress and the locket to lunch, so Essie couldn’t have taken it that morning.”
“The next morning we did not have breakfast together,” Theo said, trying to reconstruct days glazed by jet lag. “I went on a tour of the kibbutz with Miriam, and I presumed you were asleep. Could someone have entered your room while you were sleeping?”
Dorrie shook her head. “I did take a long shower when I got up, Uncle Theo, but the door was locked. You’re the only person who’s been in my room, except for Judith—who looks much better in white gold. The other calls attention to her sallow tinge. Isn’t that criminal?”
“No one else has entered your room?” Theo persisted, refusing to be sidetracked into a discussion of the finer, if felonious, implications of Judith’s skin coloring.
“Well, that same morning Sarah came by to see if I could fill in for a sick teacher, but I was more than a little horrified at the idea of wiping snotty noses and changing icky diapers. It will be different with my own children.” Her expression made it clear that future little Caldicotts would not need assistance with their noses, since that portion of their anatomy would be at all times impeccable and quite adorable.
“Was Sarah alone in your room at any time?”
“I could hardly stand around dripping at her, although she deserved far worse. But she certainly did not have the opportunity to search my room for stray bits of jewelry. Oh, and Gideon came by to ripple his biceps at me. Egotistical men can be so juvenile. If I wanted to watch undulating flesh, I’d order tomato aspic and poke it with a salad fork. I let him know in no uncertain terms that I was less than impressed.”
“Surely he did more than—ah, ripple at you, Dorrie.”
“It was bizarre. First he told me about the bombing in Hebron, as if I cared. Then he said that his mother had sent him to see if Essie had been there, but he was rippling away a hundred miles an hour and flashing boyish smiles like Mr. Macho Incarnate. I said that she hadn’t and politely suggested he have an internist run a test for degenerative muscle diseases—since his seemed to have gone amok. After a teensy moment of tension, he asked if Essie had said anything the day before about not coming again.”
“And you said …?” Theo said, struggling not to wince at Dorrie’s guileless narrative.
“I said she hadn’t. I dutifully repeated Essie’s comments and he agreed that they made no sense whatsoever, but he didn’t look pleased when I told him that I really needed to get back to more vital matters, such as shaving my legs. He stomped away without a single word of thanks.” She tossed her hair back with a practiced hand and returned her attention to the microscopic red bump on her arm. “Do they have scorpions or tarantulas in Israel?”
“I shall make inquiries,” he said. “Let us concern ourselves with the morning in question. Everyone finally left so that you could dress. Did you wear the locket that day?”
Dorrie stared at him. “Not with the silver buttons on my blouse, Uncle Theo! I wore adorable silver stud earrings and a matching chain that Daddy bought me for my birthday. This place may not be the Cape, but it’s not some primitive outpost in Zambia.”
Theo was forced to agree.
That evening he, Judith, and Dorrie met near the front door of the dining hall. They entered the stream of kibbutzniks that flowed past a steamtable and a second table covered with pitchers and coffee pots. When they had filled their trays, Judith followed a zigzag path to a table where Hershel and Gideon sat.
After a round of mumbled greetings, they all began to eat. Theo found the food palatable, and better than that which was served to tourists in the restaurant. The silence, as cheerful as a sky dark with storm clouds, was less palatable. He decided to attempt a round of pleasantries, beginning with Gideon.
“I didn’t know spaghetti was kosher,” he commented.
“Why not?”
Theo straightened his napkin and moved on to Hershel. “I understand that you and Judith met in Athens. Were you there to visit the archaeological sites out of professional curiosity?”
Hershel’s thin shoulders curled as if Theo had squeezed his ribcage. “It wasn’t professional. I went with Gideon,” he answered through a mouthful of spaghetti. He gave his companion a panicked look, as if Theo now held his lungs in a tight grasp.
Gideon twirled a mass of strands around his fork until it resembled a fist of blood-
drenched worms. “Yeah, that’s right.” He shoved the fork in his mouth.
Not yet prepared to accept defeat, Theo waited until Gideon put down his fork. “Was your trip sponsored by the kibbutz?”
“No. Unlike some people, we don’t have money tucked away in trunks in the attic so that we can drive around Europe in an air-conditioned bus. Hershel and I saved our military allotment for a postgraduation trip. Do you find all this pertinent, Mr. Bloomer?”
Defeat loomed in the immediate future, but Theo bravely persisted. “I understood from your mother that each kibbutznik is entitled to travel if he wishes. Won’t you receive some sort of travel allowance every year?”
The reference to his mother seemed to stir up some distant social training. Gideon managed a grim smile. “After two or three years, we’ll be able to do more traveling. Right now all we can afford is Athens. In fact, we may be going back in a few weeks. Isn’t that right, Hershel?” He jabbed his companion with a well-aimed elbow. “Don’t you want to go back to Athens?”
Hershel gasped, then began to jerk his head back and forth in protest. “You said that we weren’t going back,” he said in a plaintive whine. “You said that the second—”
The elbow struck again. Laughing (very loudly, Theo thought), Gideon said, “Hershel didn’t like the primitive accommodations, but we couldn’t afford to stay in pricey hotels; we slept on the floor at a hostel. We had to cook our own food or eat sandwiches, and we hitchhiked around. Not exactly the grand tour. It was just coincidence that we met Dorrie and Judith.”
Judith gazed devotedly at Hershel. “Or as they say in the Middle East, sweet kismet.”
The object of her sibilance turned the color of the spaghetti sauce on his chin and ducked his head. “Yeah,” he said, “we were almost broke by then. We were planning to leave that day.”
Dorrie put down her fork to stare at Hershel. “While we were sitting at the café in Athens, I saw you and Gideon come out of an antiquities shop. If you were so occupied with survival, how could you possibly lose precious minutes shopping for souvenirs?”
Hershel gulped at Gideon, who said, “We weren’t shopping. Browsing is less expensive than sleeping in a hotel or sitting in a theater watching a play by Aristophanes. Of course you were on a cultural tour with your playmates from school.”
“The prices in those shops were higher than a week in the hotel, which was a haven for roaches,” Dorrie sniffed.
“But at least it had running water so you could shave your legs every thirty minutes.” Gideon’s eyes were glittering, and his lips clamped together tighter than a fiddle-head fern that had just popped up. “Doesn’t that make it preferable to a filthy floor in a hostel?”
“Barely!” Dorrie snapped. “At least the hotel maid in Athens didn’t slink around muttering about crypts and sex. You ought to stay there some time. If you have a fetish about hairy legs, I’m sure she’d be delighted to show you hers. If you plead, she might even give you a glimpse of her underarms.”
“We didn’t have the luxury of maid service at the hostel, so we didn’t have the opportunity to listen to cryptic remarks about sex or study anyone’s sweaty armpits,” Gideon snarled. Beside him, Hershel choked on a strand of spaghetti as he bobbled his head.
Dorrie winced at the crude anatomical reference, since Caldicotts did not acknowledge the existence of such things as glands or excessive moisture. “But you did buy something at the antiquities shop. I saw the package, and in fact Hershel asked Judith to smuggle it through customs for him! She wasn’t supposed to tell me—but she did.” The unspoken “So there!” echoed in the abrupt silence. Gideon turned the glare on Judith, who hunched her shoulders and slithered down in her chair as she blinked helplessly at her beloved.
After a moment of hasty mastication, Hershel said, “It was just a small present for one of my professors at the university, who’s keen on Hellenic pottery. I asked Judith to carry it so that I wouldn’t get tangled up in customs. It was a small favor, that’s all.” A long speech, the longest Theo had heard from him.
Dorrie responded with a sugary smile. “I fail to understand how you can be too broke to eat one minute, and be buying souvenirs the next. It must be difficult to keep your story straight.”
“Who said we didn’t eat?” Gideon said in a shrill yelp.
“You did,” she crowed in triumph. “Didn’t you hear those precise words earlier, Uncle Theo? How the poor, destitute boys had to sleep on the cold, hard floor and scavenge food from garbage cans? It almost moved me to tears.”
“The only thing that ever moved you was a Mercedes!”
“You are an arrogant toad, Gideon Adler. Someone ought to wipe that smirk off your face once and for all. If I could bear the sight of blood, I’d do it myself!”
“You and the Islamic Liberation Front?” he jeered. “You two little rich girls couldn’t kill a fly without a butler to hand you the fly swatter and sweep up afterward!”
“I am more than capable of flattening you,” Dorrie said, now composed and as icy as only a Caldicott could be in the face of unseemly behavior. “If a butler appears, you’d better cling to the ceiling and pray your sticky feet don’t fail you. Otherwise, splat!”
Gideon’s face paled. “Splat,” he hissed under his breath, his mouth forming each sound with ominous deliberation.
“That’s right.” The sugary smile widened.
Theo discovered that the spaghetti, by now somewhat congealed, was quite tasty. Dorrie and Gideon huffed at each other for a few more seconds, then snatched up their forks and began to eat. Judith and Hershel had finished, and were holding hands across the table with soulful expressions, her transgression apparently forgiven. Theo found it touching, if näive.
As soon as he could politely excuse himself, he did so. As he left the table, he saw Naomi at the next table, her napkin propitiously positioned to muffle a giggle. Shel, the bartender and news commentator, shrugged in sympathy. He recognized other faces from the factory, all studiously blank. An amateur but promising ventriloquist produced a faint rendition of a fly meeting death. His ears as pink as petunia petals, Theo hurried across the room to join Miriam at a far table. She was hunched over a coffee cup. A plate of food had been pushed aside.
“I was invited to dine with Judith, but the atmosphere was—ah, on the turbulent side,” he said. “May I join you?”
She responded with a faint smile and a wave at the empty chair across the table. “Excuse me, Theo, I was in a another world—one where maids stand around pleading to scrub floors. I’m terribly sorry about Essie, but as Sarah said, she seems to be more trouble dead than she was alive. I think I’m going mad, and what’s worse, I think I prefer it. Did I see you and the girls at a table with Hershel and Gideon?”
“You did. Did you not also hear us?”
She made a wry face. “Everyone did, I’m afraid. Gideon and Dorrie were not exactly restrained. What on earth provoked all the shouting and foaming?”
“It had its origin the morning you so graciously offered to show me around the kibbutz. Gideon came by Dorrie’s room to look for Essie on your behalf, and to—ah, ripple at Dorrie, who responded as only a Caldicott can. I fear his male ego was wounded, and has not yet recovered.”
“No more,” she said weakly. “I can’t find a maid, I’ can’t control my son, and I can’t stand to think about any of the above. Lock me up and swallow the key, please.”
“Would it help to talk about it?”
“It would, but not here. I’d better have a word with Gideon, and then we can take a walk to the beach.”
She crossed the room and yanked Gideon aside for a terse conversation. In the interim, Theo carried his tray to a conveyor belt and watched as it was whisked into the mouth of an aluminum carnivore with a clattering digestive tract. He then joined Miriam at the door and they strolled down the sidewalk.
The stars hung dully above the thick blanket of heat, as if depressed by their inability to do better. The air was motio
nless. Theo daringly took off his jacket and draped it over one arm. When no retribution came, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. Again, lightning failed to strike.
They sat down on a bench under a spray of palm trees. Theo waited in silence, worried by Miriam’s lack of vitality and the absence of her customary smiles. She had returned to her bleak thoughts, if her sighs were indicative, and her shoulders drooped like unwatered roses.
“I hope you’re not distressed that you have not been able to find a replacement for Essie,” he said at last. “There are only two guests, Miriam. We can survive nicely without a maid.” He could, anyway. With any luck, Dorrie wouldn’t even notice.
“There are three as of this afternoon,” she said with a grimace. “A Mr. Sitermann from Dallas checked in for a week, and will be in the room next to yours. He explained in great detail that he would have preferred to stay at the kibbutz at Ein Gedi, but our prices were lower. Perhaps you two can swim together.”
Theo refused to be distracted. “Even with three guests, the guest house can do without a maid until you find someone. You really shouldn’t worry about it. You ate nothing at dinner, and—”
“Israel’s getting to you,” she interrupted lightly. “You’re the one who sounds like a Jewish mother. I solemnly promise to eat something later.”
Theo hoped the darkness would hide his flushed cheeks. He straightened his bifocals and cleared his throat before saying, “I did not intend to take a proprietory position in regard to your personal life, Miriam. I am—well, I will admit that I am concerned about you.”
“I’ll be fine once things have returned to normal and we’re rid of Gili. Every time I see him, I remember Essie’s face after the animals … found her. No one should be treated like that. I’m terrified that it will happen again—to someone as innocent as Essie. This has to stop, Theo.”
Theo watched in dismay as she buried her face in her hands. It wouldn’t do to pat her shoulder, or even offer a few words of comfort. They had met only a few days ago, and he could hardly think that she would welcome such brazen behavior on his part. However tempting it seemed. Instead, when she lifted her head, he told her what Dorrie had admitted about the locket.
