The Social Climber of Davenport Heights

by Pamela Morsi

  “I can’t sleep,” I answered.

  “Maybe you should get the doctor to give you something,” he said. “Or maybe you should not sleep so much during the day.”

  I resented his words. He only wanted me to get back to normal so that he could get back to normal. He’d been at home every night since the accident. Mikki must miss him. In the evenings he spent hours in his den on the phone.

  Friday, a full week after the wreck, his parents showed up, ostensibly to take us out to dinner. I didn’t want to go, but David absolutely insisted, and his mother never took no for an answer. I dressed and put on makeup as they whispered together in the living room.

  I leaned close to the mirror and applied a thin streak of ripe plum liner at the edge of my collagen-enhanced lips. I pulled back and surveyed the result, then was caught up short by my reflection. I looked just exactly as I had looked before. There was no line or mark on my face as lingering evidence of what had occurred on that night on the highway.

  “Because nothing happened to you,” I reminded myself.

  But something had happened.

  Determinedly I put that thought behind me and hurried to join David, Edith and W.D.

  “Here she is,” David announced at my entrance.

  They were all looking at me hopefully. I smiled.

  “I’m ready when you are,” I assured them.

  “We’d better take two cars,” W.D. said. “Then Mommy and I can go home directly from the restaurant.”

  I could never understand how David’s father could call Edith, Mommy. She was not at all the type for it. Even her only son called her by her first name. And it was my impression that she didn’t really care for the appellation herself. Why she never said so is open to question.

  “Sure,” David agreed as we walked toward the front door. “You two go in your car, and Jane and I will take her car.”

  “My car?”

  He opened the door. Parked in the circular driveway, directly in front of our house, was a brand-new blue BMW convertible. The new Roadster Z3 model was a luxury two-seater that looked more like a 1960s race car than new-millennium town transportation.

  I glanced at the people around me. David was looking puffed up and proud. W.D. and Edith were both grinning like fools.

  “Now, if you don’t like it,” David said in a tone that could hardly hazard the possibility, “we can take it back and get you whatever you want.”

  It was a great car. It was sporty and expensive and a real attention getter. It was exactly the kind of car that I had always admired. I was sure that I still did. But I couldn’t quite dredge up the proper enthusiasm. I did try.

  “Thank you, David,” I said, giving him a quick kiss. “It’s a great car.”

  “It is absolutely you,” Edith said.

  “Yes,” I agreed, feeling vaguely uneasy with the comparison.

  “Come on, let’s get a look at you behind the wheel,” David said.

  I hadn’t driven since the accident and I was hesitant to do so, but once I started, I realized I wasn’t really afraid. With David in the passenger seat, I drove the quick and powerful Z3. It handled beautifully.

  We went to my most favorite eating establishment in the city, Le Parapluie. The veal they prepared was inevitably perfect. The bread was to die for. And once, I’d spotted Tommy Lee Jones there having lunch. But, of course, the real reason for my preference had always been the chic and trendy clientele that frequented the place.

  As soon as we walked in, the maître d’ hurried to the kitchen to announce that we were there. Frederic, the owner and head chef, came out to the front and kissed my hand, welcoming me in lovely round tones. “It is wonderful to see you looking just the same.” His accent was more likely the French of Cambodia or Vietnam than Paris, but his customers were all provincial enough to be dazzled anyway.

  “This terrible automobile accident has been the talk for days,” he assured me in a whisper.

  It was a snippet meant to please me. Being the object of gossip and speculation is only unpleasant when it’s negative. Becoming the talk of the town was better than having your picture in the society column. If you were in the paper, everybody knew the details and nobody bothered to talk about them anymore.

  Amazingly, I was not as buoyed by the knowledge as I should have been. I thanked him anyway. He’d been a loyal and well-positioned ally for years. We had a kind of unspoken kinship—we were both outsiders who had managed to make a place for ourselves in this social stratum. He had created an in-demand business. I had married into the right family.

  Single file, with Frederic leading the way, we made sporadic progress toward our table. My in-laws, my husband and I all have different circles of friends and associates. As we moved through the eclectically decorated restaurant, crowded with cloth-covered tables, somebody would hail W.D. And then Edith would greet one of her friends. David would acknowledge one of his golfing buddies.

  And every person that I had ever been introduced to in my life took the opportunity to quiz me about the accident. Their interest was only transitory. The concerned questions were barely voiced before the subject was turned to more salacious topics. I listened. I smiled. I quipped. In short, I put on a perfect imitation of my usual self, but my heart was not in it. It was as though I was standing beside myself, watching my own interaction, and found the show to be dismally boring.

  By the time we were seated, I felt as if I had run a social gauntlet, and I made the mistake of saying so out loud.

  “What on earth is wrong with you?” Edith demanded. “You’re annoyed by the concern of your friends? David says you’re not working. You just hang around the house, all moody and listless. Are you menopausal? Oprah had Dr. Phil on this week talking about the symptoms.”

  I was saved from answering by the arrival of the waiter, who came for our drink orders. For the brief moments he was present at the table, Edith was charming, David was amenable and W.D. carried off just the right balance of congeniality and condescension.

  As soon as he left, all three faces were turned in my direction. Edith repeated her question.

  “What is wrong with you?”

  They were expecting some kind of explanation. I didn’t have one to give.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “When I was trapped in the car, I thought I was going to die.”

  “So?” W.D. said. “You’ve had a little scare. You’re fine now.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I’m fine now, but…” I hesitated.

  “Don’t worry,” David assured his parents. “Jane will be back to her usual self in no time.”

  The three of them smiled at me, soothed.

  Hours later, as I lay alone in my bed, I wondered if getting back to my usual self was really such a worthwhile goal.

  The house was empty. David had left when we got home, making a lame excuse about running an errand. I knew he was going to be with Mikki. I couldn’t really fault him, I suppose. I didn’t need him to be in the house with me. Life was back to normal. I was back to normal, or mostly so.

  Sleeping was still a problem. I had taken two little blue aspirin before going to bed. As on previous nights, I’d slept for about three hours and then awakened in a cold sweat. I didn’t dream specifically about the accident. My brain did the more usual kind of mental ramblings. But throughout the normal strangeness of nocturnal wandering, fear pervaded everything. Now I was wide-awake and the memories of those frightening few moments returned with total clarity.

  I walked through my darkened house, my footsteps nearly soundless on the floor. I was purposefully quiet, as much by habit as any need for peace. The night lured me outside. It was cool and crisp and had the faint scent of fall rain in the air. I went through the French doors to the comfortably decorated seating area of the deck. It was vibrant, blooming with flowers and lush with potted plants. This was my favorite retreat, but tonight it wasn’t welcoming. The eight-foot distressed-brick walls around the backyard enclosed more than t
he pool, the patios and the gardens. They enclosed me. Shuddering, I went back inside and to the front of the house.

  I stepped out onto the long, Italianate porch with its faux Doric columns and skirting steps. There was no chair or swing or bench. It would not have been consistent with the design. And David and I were not the kind of people to spend time sitting in open view on a public street. Or I wasn’t anyway. I don’t suppose I’d ever asked David one way or the other.

  I seated myself on the steps. I just sat there. Staring, in turn, at each direction of the wide suburban street. My shiny new car, casually left in the circular driveway, was brilliant in the moonlight. I could hear the click of crickets and the noise of traffic in the distance. I allowed the night to seep inside of me, into that emptiness. But the peace that I craved was elusive. In memory I heard my own voice pleading.

  “I don’t want to die. Get me out of here. Get me out of here and I’ll be a better person. I’ll change my life. I’ll do good. I promise I’ll do good.”

  I shivered. It must be post-traumatic stress or something.

  I tried to laugh at my own desperation. It’s a good thing that I hadn’t told anyone about it. I could only imagine what Tookie or Teddy or Lexi would think about my ravings. Brynn would have offered me a seat beside her on the therapist’s couch. David would have insisted I get medication.

  People always talk like that when they are scared. They always try to make deals with God. What was that old wartime adage? There are no atheists in foxholes. That’s all my “prayer” had been. Some kind of midbrain survival superstition. It was a normal human stress reaction to a life-and-death situation. Anyone in the same place would have said pretty much the same thing.

  And my words certainly had nothing to do with my being rescued. If all it took to get out of trouble were some heavenward mutterings, nobody would ever get hurt or die.

  I had been saved by sheer chance and dumb luck. A man, awakened by the sound of the wreck, had acted spontaneously to help a stranger. I was fortunate that he’d come to my aid. That he’d happened to grab a knife first was coincidence.

  No higher power had intervened. That idea was silly.

  I believed in God, of course. David and I were members of one of the oldest, most influential churches in the city. But I would never be one of those over-made-up, fanatic women crying on TV-preacher talk shows about a miracle that had happened in their life.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt me to do something good.

  I approached the idea almost as if I were sticking a pin in a voodoo doll. It felt strange, superstitious, out of my control. I didn’t like those kinds of feelings. I wasn’t comfortable with them.

  But I was glad to be alive. There was no harm in making a gesture of appreciation for that. The man from the retirement home had helped me. It wasn’t a bad idea to pass that on, to help somebody else.

  I got up and walked back into the house.

  In my office, I flipped on the light and sat down at my desk. From the top left-hand drawer I took out my checkbook. Using a four-hundred-dollar Mont Blanc pen, I filled in the date. I stared for a long moment at the Pay to the order of.

  When David came in the next morning, he found me still sitting there, tired, sleepless but somehow rejuvenated.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me.

  “Writing checks.”

  He raised a startled eyebrow, looking puzzled. “The bills are all paid up.”

  “I’m not paying bills,” I told him. “I’m making donations.”

  That surprised him even more.

  “The Westin Gala or the Republican National Committee?” he asked.

  “Neither.”

  Truthfully I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t even want to examine my feelings. But David was my husband. We kept our finances jointly, so I owed him some sort of justification.

  “I just feel so lucky to be alive,” I said, “I guess I just want to sort of celebrate that. I’m giving some money to…to some worthy causes.”

  David was looking through the stack of sealed, stamped envelopes lined up neatly along the edge of in my out-box.

  He read the addressees aloud. “American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Kidney Foundation…”

  “They’re alphabetical,” I said.

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “Your favorite charities?”

  “I’m not sure I really have any favorites.”

  His brow furrowed.

  “I got them out of the Yellow Pages.”

  “What are you down to now?” He was glancing at my checkbook.

  “Special Olympics,” I answered.

  David and I never argued. It wasn’t that we agreed about things, it was simply that we didn’t disagree enough to make it worth the confrontation. I wasn’t concerned about his disapproval, I just honestly didn’t quite know how to explain.

  “I want to do something good,” I said. “I…I just want to do something good.”

  Chapter 3

  I WENT BACK to work that very day, even without having had any sleep. It was as if a burden had been lifted off my shoulders. I had promised to “do good” and I’d fulfilled my end of the deal. I’d given money to forty-seven of the two hundred and four charitable organizations listed in the Yellow Pages—all of the ones that I was familiar with. I’d given ten times the amount of money we’d spent on contributions the year before, and had pretty much blown my clothes and entertainment budget for the rest of the season. But I felt good about it.

  Millie and Frank were especially glad to see me. And I think it wasn’t just because I was their heavy hitter. Which, of course, I was. My first day back on the job I got a major deal brewing. I remembered Lexi saying at the club that Barbara Jarman had hired a full-time nurse for her mother-in-law. I called Barb and convinced her that that big old house—a two-story Victorian with double wraparound porches on four lots at the edge of Park Square—was just too much for an infirm old lady, and that the nurse was probably walking off with every antique that wasn’t bolted to the floor.

  The Victorian would have to go. The piece of ground it sat on was prime. With the help of my friends at the club, I knew I could get it rezoned as multifamily. There were at least a hundred developers who would be thrilled to turn that edge of the park into half-million-dollar condos. That would net me a small fortune. And I’d get my little commission for finding the old lady a nice two-bedroom garden home in a complex managed by a trendy seniors living center, as well.

  That was a pretty good day’s work for my first morning back. I returned phone calls, caught up on paperwork, and I even managed to leave a little early for a quick trip to Yesteryear Emporium. The narrow, thirties-style revolving door creaked and complained as I made my way through it.

  The owner was behind the sales counter, as usual, typing away on his pingy Underwood.

  “Look around all you want,” he said without even bothering to glance up.

  “I will,” I assured him.

  As I passed the mezzanine stairway with its oak steps and rails guarded only by a flimsy piece of cord bearing a sign that read Private Keep Out, I was secretly thinking it would serve the guy right if I went rifling through his apartment. I resisted the temptation only because I figured that as little as the man seemed to know about antiques, there wouldn’t be anything up there even remotely interesting to me.

  I wandered happily through the building for the better part of an hour. The store acquired new stock rather haphazardly and it was jumbled together in such a way that you simply had to happen upon things. It wasn’t a very good way to run a business, but it certainly did add a treasure-hunt aspect to shopping. I found a beautiful one-piece dry-sink cabinet. I absolutely loved it, but I’d have to renovate my kitchen to use it. If I hadn’t spent so much money on those charities, I would have done exactly that. But I had written those checks, so I rolled up my sleeves and moved a half-dozen scratched twenties-era machine-made bed frames
in front of it, hoping that no one would unearth the cabinet until my new condo deal panned out.

  I spend a lot of money buying antiques. But owning them is not a big thing for me. The fact that my house is stuffed to the seams appears to belie that statement. The truth is, I had always been drawn to them. They are like some attachment with history. Maybe because I had no family history I could speculate about, I transferred that curiosity to objects that people from the past held or touched or used.

  Whatever the reason, antiques were very special to me. And an afternoon just wandering among them could lift my spirits when they were low, soothe me when I was anxious and entertain me when things were going fine.

  In a big wooden bin full of miscellaneous metalwork, I found a very handsome set of silver casters, the three pieces wrapped together with a couple of rounds of masking tape. The price, written in black marker on the tape, was about what they were worth. I figured I could talk the owner down a few dollars and still get them at a bargain. Then I spotted a pair of modern silver-plate salt and pepper shakers. They were wrapped in the same tape and the price on them was less than half of what was on the casters.

  The masking tape came off fairly easily. I wadded the casters’ tape into a ball and stuck it into my pocket. I put the cheaper silver-plate price around the silver casters and went to the counter.

  The owner was still pounding determinedly upon his typewriter.

  “Excuse me!” I said in a high, haughty tone that was meant to convey the idea that I’m too important to be ignored.

  “One second,” the guy said without looking up. “Just let me finish this thought.”

  I was annoyed. It was just more evidence of the failings of the service economy when an owner couldn’t be hurried to take a customer’s money.

  Impatiently I began to tap my fingernails upon the counter. It was calculatedly rude, but I was not a woman accustomed to waiting.

  Then it suddenly struck me as funny that I was put out because this fellow wasn’t quicker to let me rob him.