Dear Doctor Lily (38 page)

She was quick and efficient and she had made a lot of invisible friends, but every week she vowed that she would look for something more enterprising. On a Monday in November, when she went into work determined to tell Gloria that she must leave,
Gloria was one jump ahead of her with an offer to manage the new branch that she was opening in Newton Centre. More money and responsibility. Less travel time.

Lily surprised Gloria by not accepting at once. The decision to move on, which she had talked about interminably to Paul over the weekend, had made her feel lighter. Jobless, but light and free. Gloria's offer was a good one. She would have eight or ten people under her, and the chance of supervising several branches later on. But the lightness was escaping. It felt like being dragged back, not pushed ahead.

‘Let me think about it.' She would talk to Paul.

‘I'll give you a week, but I want you to take it,' Gloria said. ‘This business is growing, and the new branches will have to function a hundred per cent reliably. I really need you.'

Those magic words almost seduced Lily into accepting on the spot. But thank God she didn't, because something exciting and marvellous happened before the week was out.

Since Paul was always willing to look after the children, Lily was filling in at work one night when someone was sick. Mauro and Roger went home at eleven, and by one o'clock, the lines had quieted down. Then out of the silence a call exploded which shocked Lily wide awake from a doze in the armchair, with the lights set to ‘ring' and her feet on the broad woolly back of Arthur, whom Paul had sent along to guard her.

‘Dr Reed?' The woman's voice was breathless with anxiety.

‘I'm afraid he's not on call tonight. This is the answering service. Can I –' Instead of finishing, ‘take a message?', Lily instinctively asked, ‘Can I help you?'

‘Oh God, I hope so. Yes – help me! I don't know what to do.'

Lily was supposed to ask for the caller's number, so that whoever was covering the psychiatrist could contact her, but the woman was crying now, desperate, strangling sobs, and when she suddenly dragged in a great gasping breath and started to talk in a muddled rush, it would have been heartless to interrupt, and impossible anyway, since the tumble of anguished words never stopped.

Lily listened, and paraded her eyes across the long switchboard, forbidding any of the other lines to light up. It was three o'clock;
the time for drunken calls from people who had forgotten that it was not business hours, the time that Theodora Benz called on the office line just to hear a voice when she could not sleep, the time that calls sometimes came in from Europe, where it was early morning. Nora was up with the kettle on. Jamspoon was in bed with the radio, cursing politicans.

The switchboard, braided with plugs and wires, was dark and mute. There was only Lily and Louise, who was going to kill herself while her son slept.

She had sleeping pills and vodka. Her husband had left her two years ago after she tried to hang herself. Her parents were in Canada and she would not see or talk to them. She wanted to take all the pills, but she did not want to be dead. She knew she must kill herself, because she had known all her life that she must, and she was on the floor with the pills and the bottle, crouched between her bed and the wall, shivering in a cotton nightgown, terrified to die and terrified to go on living.

Her son – Damon?

‘His father will take him. He's been trying to get him for months. I won't let him. But I must. I've got to make myself disappear. He'll be better off without me.'

‘Why tonight?'

‘I must.' The whisper was very faint.

‘Talk to me instead. Remember, you did call your doctor. Doesn't that mean you were looking for help?'

‘It means I was going to tell him I'd broken my contract with him. I was through.'

‘And then he would have called the police and they'd have broken into your apartment.'

‘But he can't because he's not there. He wouldn't talk to me because he doesn't care.'

‘Dr Rosen is on call for him. Why not speak to her?'

‘No!' Louise came to angry life. ‘She's a hard bitch.'

‘Talk to me, then.'

‘I can't.' But she did, and the switchboard, benign tyrant, stayed quiet. Lily got Louise to go and put on a sweater, and then she got her to say what she might do tonight if she didn't kill herself.

‘I can't sleep. I'm not going back to bed. It has nightmares in it.'

‘What else could you do, then?'

‘It's Damon's birthday tomorrow. He's having some friends in. I could make the spaghetti sauce, I suppose.'

‘Do it.'

It was amazing how Louise could switch direction. ‘When you've tried to kill yourself as many times as I have,' she told Lily, fairly calmly now, ‘it's no big deal. You either do it, or you don't.'

Two jacks lit up. ‘I've got to answer a couple of calls. Don't go away. I'll come back to you.'

‘No, I'll be all right. Calm down, don't
worry,'
Louise said, as if Lily were the one in trouble, and hung up.

When the morning people came on at seven, Lily had her coat on to leave, when the office line rang for her. It was Martha Bradley, the director of the Crisis agency, with whom Lily had made friends in the days when Crisis still had to use the answering service at night. Louise, whom Crisis knew well, had called them after she had talked to Lily, to report that she had made a passable bolognese sauce, and would they please let Lily know, because she didn't want to bother her if the switchboard were busy.

‘How can she be at the end of her rope one minute, and thinking about something else the next?'

‘Oh, she can,' Martha said. ‘She's amazing. Thanks for taking care of her. I guess you did a pretty good job. She said, “That woman at the answering service was more use to me than any of you guys that are supposed to be so well trained,” which is a typical Louise remark.'

Lily wanted to get home before the girls left to catch their school bus on the corner. Arthur was whining and scratching to get out of the door, but she and Martha liked each other, so they exchanged brief news. Martha was in her normal state of chaos and frenzy.

‘Only more so at the moment. I'm in despair, I'm in a crisis, I'm going to call my own service. As well as never having enough volunteers, my assistant's leaving. I've interviewed a dozen people, and they're all either too clever and efficient for me, or
too stupid and slow, or too neurotic, or much too clinical. I wish I could find someone like you.'

Here it was. What she had been waiting for. Grab your chances, Dear Doctor Lily.

‘I'm leaving this job,' she said quickly. ‘Would you honestly ever think that I…'

‘Why not? You had quite a bit of experience in London. But it's not that so much. It's whether you're right for the work, and I could teach you the rest. Want to come and talk about it now?'

‘Let me just go home and get my children off to school and have a bath. Then I'll be there.'

Ida's good friend Shirley from Watkins Air Force Base had separated from her husband and gone to live in the old fishing town of New Bedford, south of Boston. She had found rooms for Ida there, when she left Lily's house, and when Shirley took over her Aunt Gertrude's house after the old lady went off to the Sacred Heart Rest home, Ida and the children moved in with her.

Buddy was far in the past now – a dream, a nightmare. She had not heard of him since he wrote to her four years ago to say he'd been kicked out of the service with a dishonourable discharge, and would she come to New Hampshire and help him get his life together?

Ida had written back, ‘No way, José,' and Buddy had disappeared out of her life. She had not given him her address, because she didn't want him coming after her. When she and Bernie wanted to talk nicely about him, they could say that this was the reason he never sent them any money.

Shirley was running a cleaning service – homes, offices, small motels – and Ida worked for her, on what they called the black economy, so she could still get her welfare cheque and family aid for the kids. She could pay her way in Aunt Gertrude's narrow green shingled house and run a car and get some things of her own together, to make up for what she had abandoned. Life was better than it had been for a long time.

Bernie was learning things at the high school which amazed Ida. He would go into computers and better himself so far beyond the Lotts in Staple Street and the Legges in New Hampshire and Ida herself, that it dazzled her to think what could happen to you in this country. She did not feel bitter about poor old Buddy, because that poisoned you, as Clara Lott had poisoned herself, and Ida could always remember that if it hadn't been for him getting hot and heavy at that drill hall dance, she never would be living in America.

Maggie was in special classes and learning to be of some small
use in the world. She sometimes went with Ida to a weekend cleaning job, for which Shirley gave her spending money. Fred was in kindergarten, with his hair like copper wire and his chunky little body that he would gladly hurl into any fight that was going.

‘Just like Puppa,' Bernie said, which made Ida laugh, because she was thinking, ‘Just like Jackson.'

Ida had never got her figure back after Fred, but then she didn't have it before Fred. Men didn't seem to mind. She and Shirley both had guys off and on, in and out, come and go. Nothing serious. They were hard-working, independent women who had each been tied down to a bastard, and were never going to let themselves fall into the same trap again.

Mike was a bit different. He wasn't one of their fellas. In fact, he was a bit lacking in that department. He did not seem to have any girlfriends, and was too young for Ida or Shirley anyway.

He was a lonely guy who had been in the nut house, or it might have been gaol. Ida wasn't too sure. She told him about Jackson, so he would know it was all right with her if he'd been inside. But he stuck to his story of being in Bridgewater State hospital for some kind of breakdown. He said they had kept him there illegally, and his congressman had to fight to get him out.

Now he lived with his mother, and drove a taxi. He was a lovely young man really, with clean brown hair and brooding eyes and a pale romantic scar at the left side of his mouth to remind him of Bridgewater and the kitchen officer who didn't count the knives. Ida and Shirley had met him in a bar down by the wharf. He had gabbled to them for an hour, and then got so paralytic drunk that Shirley had to drive him home to Fairhaven in his own taxi.

His mother opened the door, wearing a wrapper, and he fell into the front hall. Could Ida and Shirley help? His mother shook her head and smiled at them politely. She moved to Mike's front end, dragged him forward by his arms until his feet were clear of the door, and then shut it.

After that, they kept seeing him around. He was quiet and pulled in to himself sometimes. Sometimes he couldn't get the words out fast enough. He pushed through the gate in the picket fence of Aunt Gertrude's house once in a while, and wanted food,
or coffee, or a glass of wine, as if he didn't already have a mother in Fairhaven, doing a full-time job for him, it seemed.

Lily invited Ida to come to Cape Cod on a July Sunday to see the house she and Paul were so excited about. Mike was there when Ida got the call, and he said, ‘I'll drive you and the kids down.'

‘You've not been invited, pet.'

‘Cab drivers don't get invited. They just drive.'

‘Mike, I can't pay –'

‘Don't insult me.'

‘I can drive myself to the Cape.'

‘In that heap?'

There was nothing wrong with Ida's Plymouth Horizon, but he wanted to drive her to the Cape, so she let him. He didn't look like a New Bedford cabbie. You could take him anywhere.

It was disappointing that he acted so strange at Lily's. He didn't want to go to the beach, or eat any of Lily's fine cold lunch, except some potato salad and most of the pickles. He wouldn't have a beer with Paul, or pay attention to any of the children, or even the friendly dog. He sat apart, wearing heavy boots that would give his mother stinking socks to wash, and would not take off his sweatshirt.

‘Bit of an awkward cuss,' Lily said on the beach. ‘Who is he, Eye? What are you up to, anyway?'

‘Nothing, for once. He's a friend of me and Shirley.'

Ida closed her eyes. On the New Bedford public beaches, she always wore a man's shirt over her bathing suit, but on this empty shore, she could lie spread-eagled in her old-lady's flowered suit with the draped skirt, which was the only thing she could get in her size.

A few boats went past, and some of the family who owned the beach were at the far end, well away from this sheltered place under the breakwater rocks. Maggie and Bernie were swimming, and old Fred was messing about on a rubber raft, with Cathy pulling him around, and tipping him off, so that he had to dog paddle in the shallow water until he could climb on the raft again, screaming abuse at Cathy.

All aggressive males had deep, hysterical fears, in Ida's vast
and wearying experience. Swimming was one of old Fred's.

‘Like it here?' Lily did not lift her head.

‘Uh-huh.'

‘It's our favourite place, mine and Paul's. I used to think no beaches should be private. Now that this is ours to use, that's different.'

‘Snob.'

‘Maybe.'

‘You got it made.'

‘I'm so lucky, Eye. Now that I've got this wonderful job in Boston, I've got everything.'

‘That's what you said when you got Paul, when you got a baby, when you got a house in the suburbs, when you got a place on the Cape. So now what? A lover would be chic' Ida pronounced it ‘chick', which she knew was wrong, to stress the difference between them.