I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia (10 page)

“And her daughter?” I asked. “Patsy?”

Martha shook her head. “Gets weak and can’t breathe soon as she goes near the door. Thank goodness she has her mother right there, don’t you think?”

An agoraphobe. “Is Patsy married?”

“How could she be?” Martha lowered her voice. “Never had a date. Been inside that house since day after high school graduation. Thirteen years ago. And the oddest thing is, all she does is read about explorers and watch those educational specials on the far corners of the world.”

I remembered sorting books about camping the South Pole and trekking Borneo. I’d imagined a rugged outdoorsy traveler. I felt sorry for Patsy, but doubtful that a husbandless, housebound agoraphobe living with a wheelchair-bound mother was my woman. “And Ardis?” I asked apprehensively.

“Oh, her.” Martha sounded almost snappish. “I know they don’t use the term anymore, and I don’t mean to sound uncharitable, but Ardis is an old maid. Certainly not a bachelor woman or a swinging single or whatever they call them now. Ardis doesn’t like anybody—not men, not women. Told me she was one of ten children, and has wanted to be all by herself ever since.”

So Ardis could be the underliner only if she were a schizophrenic beating herself, and I wasn’t ready to tackle that.

“You look sad, child.”

“I don’t think the woman I’m looking for is Patsy or Ardis. Somebody else is in trouble.”

“Trouble, eh?” Martha raised her eyebrows. “Is it a matter for the police?” She sounded halfhearted.

I thought of Mackenzie’s reaction to the story of the book and turned it into concentrated police-force strength disdain. “It’s not their kind of thing.”

She folded her hands and looked extremely depressed, but she brightened when I requested a last soft-shoe demonstration before I made my farewells. I drove home slowly, sad to have failed so thoroughly, but also, definitely, unburdened. There is a certain dry joy in running out of resources and being unable to do anything.

* * *

That not unpleasant mix of emotions lasted until I was home, belatedly reading the morning’s
Inquirer.
First the comics, then hard news. My city was in even worse economic shape than I, being temporarily bailed out by the public school teachers’ pension fund. You knew a government was in trouble when it had to borrow from its most underpaid workers.

Pages later, among the lesser stories, I stumbled over a familiar headline: man kills wife and self. Usually, I skim accounts like that, but tonight I gentled Macavity off that part of the paper and read.

“…a history of domestic violence, according to neighbors…”

I felt breathless, as if I’d been running for a long time.

“…many calls to the police…”

Philip and Caroline Abbott were their names. He was a pastry chef. She was a kindergarten aide. They lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Caroline Abbott was not the woman who’d written in my book. That didn’t make me feel markedly better.

I tried to concentrate on other articles. The advantage of reading stale news is that you realize how little of it actually matters. There will be new stories in a few hours.

Mrs. Abbott’s last domestic argument was a one-day wonder.

Except that somebody in editorial had decided that Caroline Abbott deserved remembering. There was an earnest condemnation of violence against women.

Nice words. Yatata, yatata. Platitudes and tsk-tsks. Except for a statistic he included. “Every day four women in the United States of America are beaten to death by their husbands or boyfriends.”

I stared at the line until it was imbedded on my lenses. There’d been three other dead Mrs. Abbotts today. There’d be a new quartet of battered corpses tomorrow. I wouldn’t save a one of them. No longer did I feel the slightest relief at having lost the lady in the book, even less so acknowledging that there was nothing to be done about it.

Eight

“BEEN READING THIS BOOK I GOT FOR THE TERM PAPER. SO COLLEEN’S WITH Ronny, like always, and says some nothing thing, and he goes watch it bitch, you’re out of line. And he like pinches her, you know? Hard. And she goes ‘ouch!’ and he tells her she has a big mouth and somebody better teach her a lesson, but soon.

“So I go, chill out, Ronny, you’re an
abuser.
And he looks like I’m talking some foreign language. So I say listen up, creep. You don’t hurt women. Period. Got it? And he did, if you want to know the truth. He looked ashamed.

“And the best thing is, next time he starts up, Colleen goes, ‘Lay a hand on me again and you’re history.’
Way to go Colleen!
”
The housefly on Rita’s cheek and her black lipstick kept her from appearing as jubilant as she obviously was. The nose ring was also a deterrent.

She had remained after class to share the moment with me, and I concentrated on the message and not the medium. Hearing I’d been successful somewhere on the brutality front was particularly heartening today.

“You know what I read?” Rita continued. She erased the side board as she spoke. We had bonded. “That in England, long time ago, villagers used to clang pots and pans to shame a violent man. They called it
rough music.
It’s a shame we don’t do it no more. Nobody does nothing. So I decided that I will. I am.”

Me, too, I wished I could say. We walked down the broad staircase together.

“Do you think it’s maybe the same with men like with dogs?” she asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“We have a Doberman, you know? And like when we got it, the trainer goes the first time that mother growls at you, smash him with a chair. Honest! He said just once and he’ll never do it again.”

I didn’t ask if they’d smashed the Doberman. I merely said that I thought there were differences between dogs and men.

“Yeah, but I bet Ronny doesn’t push Colleen around so much anymore,” Rita said. “You have to stand up for your rights, you know?”

I agreed, completely. “You have to with any bully, and men who pick on women are bullies. But maybe not with a chair.” Then I watched Rita rush off to locate and terrorize other potential abusers. I wondered if Shakespeare would be proud of what he’d wrought or if he’d consider the newly sensitized Rita a shrew.

And what would he say about her creative use of language? Now if I could convert her to standard English as well…

I stopped at the office. Halfway through the semester, we were required to light a little dynamite under our most resistant students. “Failure warning forms,” I told Helga, the office witch. “Please.”

“How many?”

“Seven.” Helga is a dictator with a frustratingly small power base. She is mistress of red pencils, chalk, the key to the copy machine, and our principal’s ear. She makes the most of it. And she makes the faculty miserable.

As now. “Seven,” she scowled. Her chin pushed out, her brow lowered until she looked like somebody trying to taste her own forehead. “Seven,” she repeated, waiting for me to tug my forelock and grovel. I couldn’t tell whether she considered seven goof-offs too many or too few. With heavy, reluctant steps she went to the appropriate stack and counted forms as if I might embezzle and sell extras on the failure-warning black market.

There was a brand new and expensive state of the art computer on her desk, gift of a parent in the business. One of his stipulations had been that faculty also have access to it. Hence the recent tutorials. Knowing how difficult it was to extract failure notices from Helga, I wondered what teacher would ever dare to request time at the woman’s machine.

She presented me with my forms and a While You Were Out memo.

I hadn’t been out. I’d been upstairs teaching when Martha Thornton called, two hours earlier. The message was simply the one word
important.
“Helga, you interrupted my class yesterday about missing
cheese
!
Why didn’t you—” My agitation was giving her pleasure. I settled for what I hoped was a seething glare and flounced out. The phones in the main office were in the Helga zone, so teachers tended to buy privacy at the pay phone meant for student use.

At the moment, it was occupied by Neil Quigley, looking pasty and agitated. If it hadn’t seemed crucial to find out the reason for Martha’s call, I would have left the tortured man in peace, but he hung up right then, and I thought it was as good a time as any to ease his worries about my involvement with TLC.

“Neil,” I said. “Wait a second. I have to make a call, but I want to talk to you about TLC.”

He looked startled, although I’d been standing two feet away. He also looked as ready to cry as an unweepy man is likely to.

“Please,” I said. “I’ll be a second.” He nodded, like a lost child deciding to trust the helpful stranger.

I went into the booth and dialed, fingers crossed once they weren’t pushing buttons, hoping she was still at home.

She was. As soon as I identified myself, she whispered, “Dearest? I feel dreadful. Ashamed of myself, as well I might because, oh my…I lied.”

“About what?” I asked softly, although of course, there was only one topic available for lying.

“About your question. You know.”

Euphemism heaven was where I had landed. Why couldn’t any of us say what this was about? I thought of Sasha’s bruised relative and the silence surrounding her, the bad taste of mentioning reality, and decided that not much had changed. We spoke in code, averting our eyes. “I’m listening,” I prompted.

“Not now,” she whispered. “Oliver’s in his study and I’m here in the hallway. It’s so complicated and humiliating. Please, could we meet? Somewhere else?”

“You did donate a book, didn’t you?” I said.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I did.”

We made a date for an hour later. A strictly kosher deli that didn’t seem a likely haunt of her fellow congregants. I hung up, so absorbed by the happy tap-dancing grandmother’s dark secrets that I almost forgot Neil, still waiting, still looking agonized, outside the booth.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Has something else happened?”

“What else could?” he asked. Our voices echoed off the marble floor and staircase into the acute emptiness of a studentless school. And into Helga’s waiting ears. I guided him past the office, into a room that was probably where bad servants had been sent back when this building was a private mansion. Now the cell was, ironically or not, the faculty lounge, although stretching, let alone lounging, was hardly possible in it.

Neil behaved as if my fingers on his elbow were a tugboat pulling him. He seemed to have no motor of his own. I suspected that if I hadn’t led him, he’d have stood in the foyer until students trampled him next morning.

“Ruined,” he said. “I’ll have a baby and debts and nothing else. Nothing. What am I going to do?”

He was still in shock about the fire, I realized. “Neil,” I reminded him, “they’re insured. They’ll rebuild the center and find a place for you meanwhile.”

“You don’t understand.”

I was getting sick and tired of people saying that to me.

“They can’t rebuild burned records. My proof.”

“Of what?”

“And Schmidt still insists I owed them money! It’s a scam. Tutoring legitimizes it, that’s all. They’re loan sharks. The whole thing is to get us to slow-own—that’s their word—a center. You ever look at your mortgage?”

“I rent,” I whispered. I thought he had gone mad, or was definitely about to.

“In the end, you pay two, three times what the house costs. Same goes for the center. Plus advertising and promotion and initial consultations and God knows what else, and try and find a profit when you’re doing that. Rebuilding makes it all okay for them, but not for me!”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

He looked around, took a while to notice the ragged sofa—a piece rejected by shoppers at a previous Not-a-Garage Sale—and then he more or less crumpled into its sprung coils.

“I’m sure—” I corked the reflex it’ll-be-okay noises ready to pour out. The man had problems. A sick wife with a difficult, high risk pregnancy, and money worries that put mine to shame. Situations did not automatically improve. It could be pretty dark indeed just before it became pitch-black.

Instead, I poured him a cup of faculty brew, chewable caffeine. There was a typed message above the machine, warning us, in Helga-language, that leaving the coffee machine on endangered the physical plant. Somebody had added an
e,
so that Mr. Coffee now endangered the planet. I flicked off the switch and took a cup of tar to Neil, who sat straighter, his jaw clenched.

“I’m not taking it,” he said.

“No problem. It is pretty sludgy,” I admitted.

“Not sitting down like this.” He made his point by standing up, and I grasped that he was not discussing my offering. “They think they have me with the fire, but I’ll show them.” He had the revelatory glaze of a fanatic.

“Neil? Neil, who are you talking about? The fire was arson. Neighborhood kids. Terrible, but—”

“You’re naive. But someday you’ll understand. I’ll see to that.” His voice lowered. “I’m going to get him, Mandy.”

With a few long strides he was at the door. “Trust me. Wynn Teller will never, ever, pull tricks on teachers again. Whatever it costs, I’m doing it. After all, what do I have to lose?”

The coffee sloshed over my hand as I ran after him, reminding him what he had to lose, like his wife and baby. But he was gone. I stood holding the cup until I accepted the idea that it was too late to stop Neil. I checked my watch. If I didn’t hurry, it’d be too late to meet Martha Thornton, too.

* * *

I had never before realized the trysting possibilities of Sammy’s Deli. Not only was eau de pickle an instant aphrodisiac, but the brown booths’ high wooden backs provided privacy as well. I had to search for Martha, who had arrived early and claimed the booth farthest from the door.

She sat over a soda, looking like any suburban granny. No makeup, no purple tap pants, no—it seemed—personality. When I sat down, she smiled nervously while she fiddled with a plate of sour tomatoes and pickles.

I suddenly panicked, wondering what I would do when she looked me in the eye and said, “He’s going to kill me. Help me.” Up until now, I had thought in macro-terms. I would save the woman in the book, period. I left the details of
how
to on-the-spot inspiration, and a hotline number I’d copied down.