by Jane Haddam
Actually, Magda Hale had always known quite well what kind of person she was destined to be. She knew everything there was to know about destiny by the time she was five, because her mother was addicted to the idea. Susan Burnham Hale was a True Believer without a True Religion to anchor her. She drifted from spiritualism to mesmerism to Theosophy to astrology the way the other women on their block drifted from one brand to another of dishwashing detergent. This was back in 1942, in Kettleman, New York, where Magda grew up. The men were all away in the War and the women and children were wedded to their radio sets, hoping for a scrap of cheerleading or news. Susan Hale had been a Seeker long before this. She had worn a little net sack around her neck under her wedding dress, containing two slivers of garlic, a sprig of rosemary, and a half-drowned nettle plant. She had attended the christening of her own daughter with a juju bag stuffed inside her purse. She had bought the juju bag from a lady she had gone to in New York, who claimed to be a gypsy fortune-teller and a voodoo expert as well. If Susan had known anything at all about voodoo, she would have known that the woman had to be lying. Magda didn’t think her mother would really have cared. What mattered to Susan was not the efficacy of the magic. Susan didn’t believe that anything was truly effective against Fate. What mattered to Susan was the rigid, unyielding nature of the universe itself. Everything was set in eternity and in advance. No amount of effort or talent or will or hope or prayer had any effect at all against the blind force of the universal will. If Susan had been a Christian, she would have been a Calvinist. She would have believed that God destines the great majority of people to hell before they are ever born and that nothing on earth was strong enough to thwart His omnipotent destructiveness.
Magda Hale’s universe was not rigid, or unyielding, or controlled by destiny. It was a very fluid place where actions very seldom had consequences and no deed was so irreversible that it could not be undone. Magda Hale had a horror of all things final. The idea of death made her sick to her stomach—not because it meant the end of consciousness, but because there didn’t seem to be any way to escape from it. Escape, to Magda, was the key. Life and death, good and evil, health and disease, none of it mattered in itself to Magda. All that mattered was the extent to which any part of it was inevitable.
“You’re going to be a plain woman when you grow up,” Susan Hale had told her daughter. “You’re just going to have to learn to live with it.”
Standing in the middle of this large room with its formal bar on one side and its collection of mock-French empire chairs on the other, Magda didn’t think there was anyone left on earth who would have called her plain. She was a small woman, but she was very slender and very delicate. She looked, her husband Simon Roveter sometimes said, like a high-fashion line drawing from the 1920s come to life. In spite of the fact that she didn’t have the stature, she had the composition. Everything about her was elongated and tapering. Even her face was long and thin. Magda made it look longer and thinner by wearing her hair piled on top of her head. She made her eyes look wider and bluer by ringing them with eyeliner and highlighting them with pastel powders. She made her lips look fuller by painting them past their natural outlines. She left nothing to chance, and because she didn’t, she never had to bend to the will of her mother’s all-powerful nature.
Until now. The room Magda Hale was standing in was the formal living room of a house on Edge Hill Road in New Haven, Connecticut. The house belonged to one of the minor investors in the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio, whose wife had decided to give a supper party for no good reason Magda could tell. Magda Hale was not a party animal. She did not entertain or allow herself to be entertained unless there was a business reason for it. She didn’t understand why so many people wanted to waste their time standing around in stuffy rooms drinking bad wine with people who bored them. She only knew that people did want to, and that sometimes she had to keep them company to keep them from getting unhappy.
She had been standing in this same place in this same room for almost half an hour when it started, a pain in her left leg that felt like a needle traveling jaggedly through a vein. She was holding onto a glass of mineral water that she had barely touched. She was talking to three middle-aged women—two lawyers and an academic in Yale’s English department—who looked frumpy and big bottomed and definitely annoyed at her. All three of these women had once been members of the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio. All three of them had quit the Studio and stopped working out at least a year before. All three of them looked it. That’s what happens when you let yourself go, Magda told herself, shifting from one leg to the other to try to get rid of the pain. That’s what happens when you let nature take its course. Even the clothes these women were wearing had been affected. The lawyers were wearing beige evening suits that looked like they could have come off the rack at K-mart. The academic was wearing one of those drop-waisted dresses that were supposed to disguise oversize hips, but never did.
“What I can’t understand,” the academic was saying, “is why you don’t realize what effect institutions like Fountain of Youth have on the lives of women in America.”
“I don’t think Fountain of Youth has that kind of effect yet,” Magda said pleasantly, shifting legs again. The pain was getting worse instead of better. “Maybe after this new campaign, when we go aggressively national—”
“Magda thinks the effect Fountain of Youth has on the women of America is positive,” one of the lawyers said.
“I don’t see what’s supposed to be positive about being told we’re supposed to look seventeen for the rest of our lives,” the other lawyer said. “And all those bean sprouts and steamed vegetables on rice. I don’t see what’s so wonderful about making six figures a year and eating like a graduate student.”
“I didn’t eat like that when I was a graduate student,” the academic said. “I drank twelve cups of coffee and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day.”
“I slept with a lot of people I didn’t like very much,” the first lawyer said. “I thought I was supposed to.”
The pain in Magda’s leg had settled in, a long thin line of it that seemed to be bolted to Magda’s ankle, knee and hip, like a crepe paper banner held to a wall by carefully spaced thumbtacks. Magda put all her weight on her other leg and lifted the one that hurt off the ground.
“It’s the attitude I’m interested in,” Magda said, thinking that these three women were all at least fifteen years younger than she was, and that they all looked older. “You can go about your life just accepting things as they come, or you can take charge of yourself. I prefer to take charge of myself.”
“But you can’t take charge of everything,” the second lawyer objected. “We all have limitations. There isn’t anything any of us can do about getting old.”
“I think there is,” Magda said.
“Magda has very good genes.” The first lawyer made a face. “Most of us get wrinkles in our forties. Magda just sails on through.”
“That may be all well and good for Magda,” the academic said sharply, “but what do you think happens to all those women out there who are trying to be just like her? They probably don’t have very good genes. The only way they’re going to save themselves from having wrinkles in their forties is to resort to surgery.”
“I have never advocated resorting to surgery,” Magda said. “You know that.”
“I know that women are never really going to be equal until they are allowed to get old just like men,” the academic said. “I know that every organization like Fountain of Youth that is successful enough to ‘go national,’ as you put it, puts equality back another twenty years.”
“It makes all the young women feel they were right about us all along,” the first lawyer said. “We’re old and over the hill. They don’t have to listen to us.”
“But you don’t have to be old and over the hill,” Magda said. “That’s the whole point of Fountain of Youth. You don’t have to be old unless you want to be.”
“I think you ought to consider the implications of the fact that all the people who belong to Fountain of Youth are female,” the academic said. “I think you ought to spend at least some time examining your responsibility, your personal responsibility, for the epidemic of eating disorders that is sweeping this nation.”
Magda was having a hard time accepting personal responsibility for standing upright. The pain was now so bad, she wanted to cry. The three women were looking at her expectantly. They expected her to come up with an argument they could counter with sociological studies or statistics. She couldn’t think past the point of finding some place to sit down. But what good would sitting down do? If taking the weight off her leg didn’t help when she was standing, why should it help when she was sitting?
“Excuse me,” she told the women. “I think I need to find the ladies room.”
The three women looked at each other, and then at her. Magda thought they thought she was probably having a hot flash. At any other time, Magda would have countered this assumption. She had never had a hot flash in her life. She didn’t think she was close to menopause, in spite of the fact that she was nearly sixty years old. Everything she had ever told these women about the Fountain of Youth Work-Out was true. It really did keep you young. It really did mean you didn’t have to get old unless you wanted to.
With her leg feeling the way it did, Magda couldn’t move very quickly. She had a hard time moving at all without limping, and she didn’t want to limp. Simon was standing with a group of men at the bar. Magda caught his eye and gestured toward the wall of French doors that led out to the terrace. It had to be wretchedly cold out there, but people had been making the trip all evening. Maybe there was a winter garden or a Christmas light display or something else that was supposed to be beautiful to look at.
Magda found the door in the wall of French doors that was open. She slipped through it and found herself looking at a dead black sky over a dead black yard, all the graceless-ness of winter without snow. She limped over to the low balustrade and sat down on it, glad that nobody could see her as she hobbled. The balustrade was even colder than she had expected it to be. She winced.
“Are you all right?” Simon asked as he came through the door.
Magda waved her left leg in the air. “I’ve got a pain in my leg,” she said. “I haven’t got the faintest idea what it’s from. It’s really incredible.”
Simon frowned. In his white dinner jacket, Magda thought he looked like a character in a novel by W. Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene. Even his hair, which was gray and thinning, was thinning in just the right way.
“What kind of a pain is it?” he asked her. “The kind of a pain you get when you bruise yourself? The kind you get when you break a bone? What?”
“I’ve never broken a bone,” Magda said. “It’s not the kind of pain you get when you bruise yourself. I don’t know what it is, Simon. Maybe I pulled a muscle.”
“Is that the kind of a pain it is?”
Magda shrugged. “If it hasn’t gone away by tomorrow morning, maybe I’ll see a doctor. That’ll make you feel better. But I think I’m all right, Simon, I really do. I think I was just standing around in one place for too long.”
“I think you’ve got a tour to do in just a couple of weeks.” Simon was still frowning. “And the television appearances. And the ad campaign. We can’t afford to have you out of commission right this minute.”
“I know that, Simon. I’m not out of commission.”
“We can’t afford to have you out of commission permanently, either. Maybe you ought to see a doctor tomorrow even if your leg doesn’t hurt.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Magda stood up and leaned against the leg again. It felt a little better, except when she put all her weight on it. Then the pain started up all over again. She sat back down on the balustrade and tried to do some calf flexes. Those hurt, too.
“I wonder what it is,” she said absently. And then she laughed. “Maybe those awful women put a hex on me. Maybe that’s the only thing that’s wrong with me. They kept saying they thought I ought to quit.”
“Do you think you ought to quit?” Simon asked her.
Magda was surprised. “Of course I don’t,” she said. “I’d never want to quit. You’re never going to have to worry about that with me.”
Simon didn’t look like he was worrying about her. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking away from the house and into the cold black sky. Magda swung her painful leg in the air and stared at the back of his neck, at that place where the barber’s razor had cut too close and left the skin looking raw and red.
Funny, Magda thought. You’d almost think he wanted to get rid of me.
Why would he want to get rid of her when they were so close to getting everything they wanted, to going national, to being really important in the field? They had been together for over thirty years. Ideas like that simply made no sense at all.
Funny, Magda thought again, and then she found herself forcing herself to get up, to stand straight, to move without limping. For some reason she couldn’t fully understand, it now seemed more important to walk without limping in front of Simon than it had to walk that way in front of all those strangers at the party.
In all the years they had been together, Magda had never seen Simon as dangerous to her, or as a threat, or as someone she needed to protect herself from. Suddenly, he was all those things, and she didn’t think he would ever go back to being anything else. He still looked like a character out of W. Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene, but now he looked like the wrong one, the one that would be played by Sidney Greenstreet in the movie.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked her, turning away from his contemplation of the sky.
Magda gave him a big grin and told him she most definitely was.
3
BY THE TIME DESSA Carter was able to leave work, it was so late she almost forgot about stopping in at Fountain of Youth to pick up the material she needed. If her way home had been in the other direction, she would have forgotten about it. She came out into the parking lot with her head pounding. Even after she was safely behind the wheel of her car, she could feel the grunt and whine of the machines from her neck to her ankles, like a pulse. Her car was a Pontiac Grand Prix that had been old on the day she bought it. Lately, it had developed radiator problems that kicked in whenever the heat or the air-conditioning was on. Dessa put her big cloth bag into the passenger bucket to her left and her forehead down on the steering wheel. She had started work at eight o’clock that morning and gone straight through, except for half an hour for lunch, all day. She had racked up enough overtime to pay for another week of having Mrs. O’Reilly in and a full-scale shop at the grocery store. She had started on the needle assembly line and ended up with stamping, because stamping didn’t take any skill and could be done when you were tired. Her shoulders ached and her fingers were raw and bloody. It was going to take three days just like this one to pay for what she wanted at Fountain of Youth.
I ought to give it up and just forget about it, Dessa told herself as she eased her car out of the lot and onto the darkened access road. Everybody always said there ought to be more lights on this road, but nobody ever did anything about it. There was a big sign at the entrance to the parking lot that said, “The Braxton Corporation—Better Medicine for a Better Future,” making it sound as if Braxton were a pharmaceuticals company, which it wasn’t. Braxton made “medical supplies,” like hypodermic needles and blood pressure cuffs. Dessa spent her life sitting in a small chair at a small table, wea
ring a surgical mask and surgical gloves and a surgical hair cap, trying to be sterile for $6.10 an hour.
The access road could take you straight to the Wilbur Cross Highway, or into New Haven itself. Dessa shifted her bulk nervously in the bucket seat and made her choice. She had been listening to the ads for a month now, on the radio and sometimes on very late night TV. “A New You for the New Year,” some of them said—or maybe it was “A New Body for the New Year.” Dessa never listened to radio or television with her full attention anymore. Whatever the ads said, they made her happy. Sometimes, in the still early hours of Sunday morning, when her father was tucked safely away in bed with the bedroom door locked and she had eaten her way through two pounds of Lay’s potato chips and eleven cans of Old El Paso guacamole dip, the ads almost made her feel as if she could do something to change her life.
In New Haven, Dessa drove carefully from stoplight to stoplight. She looked at the big Victorian houses on one street and the triple-deckers on the other and the gothic stone piles that belonged to Yale. Then she pulled into the driveway at Fountain of Youth and felt nothing.
Nothing.
Dessa cut her engine and got out of the car. She stood under the hot light of the security lamp that hung over the side door. She looked through the small window there and saw a tall young woman sitting at a tiny desk, typing something into a computer. The exercise rooms at Fountain of Youth were open to members every weeknight until eleven o’clock. That was in the ads Dessa had been listening to, too. That was how she knew it would be safe to stop in after work. I ought to learn to use a computer, Dessa told herself. And then she giggled. Learning to use a computer would get her just as much as learning to type had gotten her. Dessa could type very well, over ninety words a minute, but no one would hire her to do it. No one hired five-foot-six-inch, 340-pound women to do anything if they could help it, but especially not to sit in an office. The only reason Dessa had the job at Braxton was that her mother had had a job there before her. When Dessa had graduated from high school, her mother had gotten her right in.
