Dear Doctor Lily (14 page)

When he went off to buy hot dogs and beer and Lionel was busy among the boots and exercise jackets, Lily talked up the Tack Rack to anyone who paused while walking by, or even turned their eyes sideways.

‘Have you seen our newest product? An adjustable modular racking system for your tack, just on the market, and it will revolutionize your barn.' She had learned not to call it a stable. ‘You buy it in units, like this, you see. You can assemble it in any way to fit any wall space. A place for everything, no space wasted, and you can adapt or expand it any way you want. It comes in your choice of four colours, red, green, brown and our Turnbull gold. As well as the basic set you see here, you can add to it with all kinds of extras. Hooks for pails.' She had learned not to say buckets. ‘A rail for your horses' blankets. Have you seen our weatherproof blanket, by the way? Slots on the rack here, see for their names.'

‘You're British.' A knowing smile from a man in tight breeches and skinny boots and a clinging polo-neck that gave him bosoms.

Sales conscious, Lily discarded, ‘Thanks for telling me, I'd never have known,' in favour of, ‘Yes,' and one of her breathy smiles, outdoorsy, made up bright and shiny, with no powder and a lot of glossy lipstick.

‘They sell so much English stuff, I guess they got you over to go with it.'

Lily was torn between, ‘That's right,' which would look good for Turnbull's, and ‘I'm married to an American,' which sounded good to her.

She chose that, but the man leered his smile up at one side and leaned towards her on the narrow balls of his boots. ‘So would you personally bring the kit out to the customer and set it up?'

Lily had never been the type for leers and propositions. The speculative eyes of sales reps and middle-aged desperadoes with brown finger nails had passed on to her smaller and saucier friends. But in America it seemed she was more desirable, because Paul desired her; or else there were more men here on the make.

‘You place your order,' she said. ‘We'll see.'

The man said, ‘That thing costs a hell of a lot of money.'

‘Isn't it worth it, for your horse?'

‘I don't have a horse, sweetheart.'

By the time Paul returned in his gold sweater with the motif of an Ayrshire bull's head and his brown corduroys with the Turnbull belt and buckle, Lily was dealing seriously with a woman who owned a big riding school in White Plains, New York, and wanted to revolutionize her barn.

Paul had brought back a friend from his old horse days, when Barbara used to ride in some of the shows.

‘Harry wouldn't believe how marvellous you were,' he told Lily when the riding-school woman had gone to fetch her husband. ‘Now he can see for himself. I think you made a sale, darling. She'll place a big order.'

‘Good for you, Lily.' Harry was admiring and impressed.

‘Oh, I don't really know anything about it.' Lily was trying to teach herself to say, ‘Thank you,' to a compliment, but the old blush-and-scrape-your-toe instinct died hard.

They ate hot dogs behind the hanging blankets, and then Harry took Lily to see a jumping class. He was a thoughtful, dark-skinned man with slightly mongolian eyes, attractive and attentive, the sort of man to have an affair with if you had married the wrong person.

‘I'm glad about you and Paul,' he said.

‘But you were Barbara's friend too, weren't you?'

‘Still am, but I'm still glad about you and Paul. He deserves you.'

‘What a nice thing to say.'

‘You're okay, Lily.'

‘So are you.' She laughed, going up the steps of the stand. ‘I love it in this country, being able to make instant friends. It takes longer in England, walking round each other, like dogs.'

She leaned forwards and watched the horses closely.

‘You like it, don't you?'

She was aware of Harry watching her.

‘I don't know much about it.'

‘You will. Get Paul back on a horse again,' Harry said. ‘When Barbara quit, he had to quit, because she had the money.'

‘Wish
I
did. I'm going to get a job, though, when I – oh, look at that beautiful white horse.'

‘Grey.'

‘Grey. I love this. I'll watch a bit, and then go down to the stand so Paul can come up.'

She had seen horse shows and the Olympics on British television, but now she watched with a more personal interest. Through Paul, she was beginning to be drawn to the sounds and smells and the powerful animal beauty, not detracted from by the rider, as she used to think when she saw the hard-bitten faces close up on screen, but guided into controlled grace, an amazing communion of flying horse and earthbound man that she wanted to share.

She saw herself on that horse which snorted ardently with each reach and thud of his oiled feet, leaning forwards with an intensely set jaw, her hands up behind the keen curved ears of the great bay as he sailed over the wall. Paul was going to teach her to ride. One day they would have a horse. Horses. Ponies for all the children. A barn with a de luxe custom-made Tack Rack, cornflower blue, their lucky colour.

While she was waiting for the Government's green card, coveted talisman, which would make her a resident alien, almost as unattractive a word as immigrant, Lily took up a series of under-the-counter jobs. She looked after an unruly child for a woman in one of the other apartments. She worked the cash register at one of the small local markets, getting the drawer stuck and panicking over the change if there were people waiting in line. She distributed leaflets and samples of soap powder door to door. She did some typing. She stood with a clipboard on a windy corner of Copley Square, taking a survey for a tourist bureau. She made telephone calls to resentful strangers, asking them to vote for a local politician.

She got that job through a girl from the college across the avenue from the apartment. One morning, between baby-sitting and cashiering, temporarily with no immediate purpose in life, Lily was looking out of the window over the plants which flourished with casual attention from Paul, but hesitated and dropped leaves when Lily sloshed water over them. Students were going up and down the stone steps, hurrying because it was cold, tops bundled up and bottom halves exposed in shrunken jeans. One
girl had been standing at the edge of the street for quite a long time. She stood with her arm round a street light, her head hanging forwards as if she were going to be sick. Then she would throw back her head and put her hair behind her ear in that age-old gesture of young women with long thin straight hair. Then she leaned her cheek against the cold metal post. Then she dropped her head again and kicked the heel of her boot against the edge of the kerb.

She was not waiting for a street car, because they stopped in the middle of the road. Lily watched to see if a boyfriend would come ambling along at last with his coat flapping open, or whether he would be in a car, leaning over to open the passenger door, or whether someone would run down the college steps and claim this forlorn figure.

Nobody came, so Lily went down in the elevator and crossed to the middle of the road, over the street-car lines and across the heavy traffic going into Boston. The girl was wearing a dark loden coat, worn threadbare in places like a family carpet. She was in one of her head-down phases, the hood of the coat bundled on top of her shoulders.

Lily plunged in. ‘I saw you from my window up there. It's cold and you've waited so long.'

‘Any law against it?' The girl lifted her head. She did look wretched, grey and tense and shivering.

‘Are you waiting for someone?'

She shook her head.

‘Then why …?'

‘I came out here to throw myself under a truck.' She turned her head to see how Lily would take this. ‘Better than a street car, because they go too slow. Crunch. Crunch. I don't want to die by inches.'

‘Why die at all?' Lily put out a hand, but the girl stepped away, still on the edge of the kerb with trucks and vans and commuting cars roaring past, too close. Lily wanted to grab her, but that was probably wrong, so she put her hands in her coat pockets.

‘It's not why at this point,' the girl said flatly. ‘It's how. I thought it would be kind of elegant to do it outside the college, so they'd all know. I didn't know it would be so difficult.'

Lily took her up to the apartment to get warm. Anna had two mugs of coffee and a stale Danish pastry, and after a nap on the sofa-bed, put her hair behind her ear and took Lily to the politician's office to make ‘Hi there' calls, because they needed extra help.

Two dollars an hour. ‘Hi there! I'm calling from the headquarters of Sloane Donahue?' Voice up like a New Zealander, implying, ‘You've heard of him, surely?' ‘Just want to make sure you're planning to get to the polls next week and give him your vote. You know what he's done for this city, I'm sure, and we want to be able to count on your support. Sloane Donahue's the name to rely on, for a cleaner, crime-free Boston. Family values, a fair deal for the small businessman … Well, wait a minute. Look at the alternatives. Do you want to see property taxes go sky high?'

If they argued, Lily argued back at them. If they hung up, she hung up and dialled the next number.

When it was time to go home, dry of mouth and of enthusiasm for Sloane Donahue, she unfolded from her crouch over a desk to find that Anna had gone. She did not come back the next day, and Lily did not see her again on the other side of the avenue.

Oh, hell. Job only half done. Dear Doctor Lily falls down on follow-up. When she worried to Paul, he said, ‘She knows where you live. She'll find you if she wants you.'

‘What's it like to be so rational? I can't
be
like that. I keep thinking she might be dead.'

Lily asked one or two of the students, and even went into the college to leave a message. But Anna Heiderman was not known and not registered there.

Lily did not go back to Donahue headquarters, after another woman there told her about Gloria's answering service, which needed people to fill in at odd times.

‘Dr Madison's line. Allied Cleaning. 232-4968. No, Mrs Beggs, no messages. Concrete City. Capital Oil. I can take your order, but the trucks won't go out till tomorrow. I'm sorry, I don't know. This is the answering service. Day-Nite Answering Service. Okay, dear, I'll plug your jack. Let me know when you go for lunch.'

The switchboard and its jacks and plugs and crossed wires and blinking lights drove Lily insane at first. But the pay was the best she'd had yet, and the two students and the knitting woman and the man in the wheelchair handled the calls and messages quite easily, and they were not geniuses, so Lily hung on, and learned from them, and from Gloria when she was not off running one of her other businesses.

Phil in his motorized chair rescued her many times when she had lost a call, or got a message wrong or forgot to punch it into the time clock, or lost one of the endless slips of paper which crowded the pigeonholes – blue for messages in, pink for basic client info, green for new temporary info, yellow for ‘if calls: ‘If so-and-so wants me.' In return, Lily did shopping for him and fetched his laundry from the Washeteria.

Dr Madison was a hectic children's doctor, always out of breath when she called in for messages, as if her office was on the fifth floor with no elevator, always besieged by desperate mothers.

‘Mrs Hanney? Oh, my God, not again. How high is the child's temperature? … Well, please always ask. Three times she called? Help. Who else? Good (pant). Okay. Not good. Are you the new operator? Don't worry, I don't suppose she minded, but ask Phil about her for next time. I've got to go. If Nurse Baxter calls, I want you to tell her – no, forget it. Tell her I'll call. What's the time? Oh, my God.'

You could build up quite an acquaintance with the faceless voices. You knew their business. You knew who they wanted to talk to and who they didn't. You knew if they were lying when they said they were in Baltimore. ‘You must never tell anybody anything outside,' Gloria had said, but Lily told Paul, because he wasn't anybody, and he understood about monotone Miss Arnold who kept calling, calling, with less and less hope.

‘No messages from
anybody?
', when all she wanted was a word from Lootenant Connolly of the State Police, the rat.

Once when Paul was in Oklahoma buying Western saddles, which Turnbull's deigned to keep in stock in an amused, derogatory way, Lily had spent all night at the switchboard. An eye-opener about how many people called other people in the small hours, and were aggrieved when they did not answer themselves
–
‘Answering service?'
they repeated, as if it were an incomprehensible phrase – and how many people wanted to talk to an anonymous operator, rather than talk to nobody in the middle of the night.

Asleep in the defunct armchair, she was woken by the rich deep voice of Martha Mackenzie, who ran some kind of mental health agency. ‘Yes, yes, yes. He leave a number?' Martha was as brisk and on top of things as if she weren't in her kitchen at six-thirty a.m., in a new scarlet bathrobe, watching the street lights go out and the office lights go on, which she had told Lily she was. They had made friends after a bungled message, when Martha had yelled and Lily had blown up and yelled back, ‘I wasn't even here!'

‘If you stop shouting and call the man back,' Lily told Martha severely, ‘he might not have left for the bus station.'

‘Good idea.' Martha swooped down to earth through two octaves.

After several weeks of Dr Davidson and Miss Arnold and Concrete City and Martha Mackenzie, Gloria discovered that Lily was not legal, so she went back to Fidelio's Super Store and baby-sitting, and typing at home, and took a rich old lady from Beacon Hill to Filene's basement to pick over marked-down underwear with jewelled talons.