The ashtray

I've been to see the doctor again. Myra drove me there: in view of the black ice caused by a thaw followed by a freeze, it was too slippery for me to walk, she said.

The doctor tapped my ribs and eavesdropped on my heart, and frowned and then cancelled his frown, and then-having already made up his mind about it-asked me how I was feeling. I believe he has done something to his hair; surely he used to be thinner on top. Has he been indulging in the glueing on of strands across his scalp? Or worse, transplantation? Aha, I thought. Despite your jogging and the hairiness of your legs, the shoe of aging is beginning to pinch. Soon you'll regret all that sun-tanning. Your face will look like a testicle.

Nonetheless he was offensively jocular. At least he doesn't say, How are we today? He never calls mewe, the way some of them do: he does understand the importance of the first person singular.

"I can't sleep," I told him. "I dream too much."

"Then if you're dreaming, you must be sleeping," he said, intending a witticism.

"You know what I mean," I said sharply. "It's not the same. The dreams wake me up."

"You've been drinking coffee?"

"No," I lied.

"Must be a bad conscience." He was writing out a prescription, no doubt for sugar pills. He chuckled to himself: he thought he'd been quite funny. After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others. What the doctor sees when he looks at me is an ineffectual and therefore blameless old biddy.

Myra sat reading out-of-date magazines in the waiting room while I was in the inner sanctum. She tore out an article on coping with stress, and another one on the beneficial effects of raw cabbage. These were for me, she said, pleased with her helpfultrouvailles. She is always diagnosing me. My corporeal health is of almost as much interest to her as my spiritual health: she is especially proprietary about my bowels.

I told her I could hardly be said to suffer from stress, as there was no stress in a vacuum. As for raw cabbage, it bloated me up like a dead cow, so I would skip the beneficial effects. I said I had no wish to go through life, or what remained of it, stinking like a barrel of sauerkraut and sounding like a truck horn.

Crude references to bodily functions usually put a stop to Myra. She drove the rest of the way home in silence, with a smile hardening on her face like plaster of Paris.

Sometimes I am ashamed of myself.

To the task at hand. At hand is appropriate: sometimes it seems to me that it's only my hand writing, not the rest of me; that my hand has taken on a life of its own, and will keep on going even if severed from the rest of me, like some embalmed, enchanted Egyptian fetish or the dried rabbit claws men used to suspend from their car mirrors for luck. Despite the arthritis in my fingers, this hand of mine has been displaying an unusual amount of friskiness lately, as if tossing restraint to the dogs. Certainly it's been writing down a number of things it wouldn't be allowed to if subject to my better judgment.

Turn the pages, turn the pages. Where was I? April 1936.

In April we got a call from the headmistress of St. Cecilia's, where Laura was attending school. It concerned Laura's behaviour, she said. It was not a matter that could best be discussed over the telephone.

Richard was tied up with business affairs. He proposed Winifred as my escort, but I said I was sure it was nothing; I myself would handle things, and would let him know if there was anything of importance. I made an appointment to see the headmistress, whose name I have forgotten. I dressed in a manner I hoped would intimidate her, or at least remind her of Richard's standing and influence: I believe I wore a cashmere coat trimmed with wolverine-warm for the season, but impressive-and a hat with a dead pheasant on it, or parts of one. The wings, the tail, and the head, which was fitted with beady little red glass eyes.

The headmistress was a greying female shaped like a wooden clothes rack-brittle bones with damp-looking textiles draped on them. She was sitting in her office, barricaded behind her oak desk, her shoulders up to her ears with terror. A year earlier I would have been as frightened of her as she was of me, or rather of what I represented: a big wad of money. Now however I had gained assurance. I had watched Winifred in action, I had practised. Now I could raise one eyebrow at a time.

She smiled nervously, displaying plump yellow teeth like the kernels on a half-eaten cob of corn. I wondered what Laura had been doing: it must have been something, to have worked her up to the point of confrontation with absent Richard and his unseen power. "I'm afraid we can't really continue with Laura," she said. "We have done our best, and we are aware that there are mitigating circumstances, but considering everything we do have to think of our other pupils, and I am afraid Laura is simply too disruptive an influence."

I had learned, by then, the value of making other people explain themselves. "I'm sorry, but I don't know what you are talking about," I said, barely moving my lips. "What mitigating circumstances? What disruptive influence?" I kept my hands still in my lap, my head high and slightly tilted, the best angle for the pheasant hat. I hoped she would feel stared at by four eyes and not just by two. Though I had the benefit of wealth, hers was her age and position. It was hot in the office. I'd slung my coat over the back of the chair, but even so I was sweating like a stevedore.

"She is calling God into question," she said, "in the Religious Knowledge class, which I have to say is the only subject in which she appears to take any interest whatsoever. She went so far as to produce an essay entitled, ‘Does God Lie?' It was very unsettling to the entire class."

"And what answer did she arrive at?" I asked. "About God?" I was surprised, though I didn't show it: I'd thought Laura had been slackening off on the God question, but apparently not.

"An affirmative one." She looked down at her desk, where Laura's essay was spread out in front of her. "She cites-it's right here-First Kings, chapter twenty-two-the passage in which God deceives King Ahab. ‘Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets.' Laura goes on to say that if God did this once, how do we know he didn't do it more than once, and how can we tell the false prophecies apart from the true ones?"

"Well, that's a logical conclusion, at any rate," I said. "Laura knows her Bible."

"I dare say," said the headmistress, exasperated. "The Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. She does proceed to remark that although God lies, he doesn't cheat-he always sends a true prophet as well, but people don't listen. In her opinion God is like a radio broadcaster and we are faulty radios, a comparison I find disrespectful, to say the least."

"Laura doesn't mean to be disrespectful," I said. "Not about God, at any rate."

The headmistress ignored this. "It's not so much the specious arguments she makes, as the fact that she saw fit to pose the question in the first place."

"Laura likes to have answers," I said. "She likes to have answers on important matters. I am sure you'll agree that God is an important matter. I don't see why that should be considered disruptive."

"The other students find it so. They believe she's-well, showing off. Challenging established authority."

"As Christ did," I said, "or so some people thought at the time."

She did not make the obvious point that such things may have been all very well for Christ but they were not appropriate in a sixteen-year-old girl. "You don't quite understand," she said. She actually wrung her hands, an operation I studied with interest, having never seen it before. "The others think she's-they think she's beingfunny. Or Some of them do. Others think she's a Bolshevik. The rest just consider her odd. In any case, she attracts the wrong kind of attention."

I began to see her point. "I don't expect Laura intends to be funny," I said.

"But it's so hard to tell!" We looked across her desk at each other for a moment of silence. "She has quite a following, you know," said the headmistress, with a touch of envy. She waited for me to absorb this, then went on. "It's also a question of her absences. I understand there are health problems, but…"

"What health problems?" I said. "There's nothing wrong with Laura's health."

"Well, I assumed, considering all of the doctor's appointments…"

"What doctor's appointments?"

"You didn't authorise them?" She produced a sheaf of letters. I recognised the notepaper, which was mine. I looked through them: I hadn't written them, but they were signed with my name.

"I see," I said, gathering up my wolverine coat and my handbag. "I will have to speak to Laura. Thank you for your time." I shook the ends of her fingers. It went without saying, now, that Laura would have to be withdrawn from the school.

"We did try our best," said the poor woman. She was practically weeping. Another Miss Violence, this one. A hired drudge, well-meaning but ineffectual. No match for Laura.

That evening, when Richard asked how my interview had gone, I told him about Laura's disruptive effect on her classmates. Instead of being angry he seemed amused, and close to admiring. He said Laura had backbone. He said a certain amount of rebelliousness showed getup-and-go. He himself had disliked school and had made life difficult for the teachers, he said. I didn't think this had been Laura's motive, but I didn't say so.

I didn't mention the false doctor notes to him: that would have set the cat among the pigeons. Bothering teachers was one thing, playing hookey would have been quite another. It smacked of delinquency.

"You shouldn't have forged my handwriting," I said to Laura privately.

"I couldn't forge Richard's. It's too different from ours. Yours was a lot easier."

"Handwriting is a personal thing. It's like stealing."

She did look chagrined, for a moment. "I'm sorry. I was only borrowing. I didn't think you'd mind."

"I suppose there's no point in wondering why you did it?"

"I never asked to be sent to that school," said Laura. "They didn't like me any more than I liked them. They didn't take me seriously. They aren't serious people. If I'd had to be there all the time, I really would have got sick."

"What were you doing," I said, "when you weren't at school? Where did you go?" I was worried that she might have been meeting someone-meeting a man. She was getting to be the age for it.

"Oh, here and there," said Laura. "I went downtown, or I sat in parks and things. Or I just walked around. I saw you, a couple of times, but you didn't see me. I guess you were going shopping." I felt a surge of blood to the heart, then a constriction: panic, like a hand squeezing me shut. I must have gone pale.

"What's wrong?" said Laura. "Don't you feel well?"

That May we crossed to England on the Berengeria, then returned to New York on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary. The Queen was the largest and most luxurious ocean liner ever built, or that's what was written in all the brochures. It was an epoch-making event, said Richard.

Winifred came with us. Also Laura. Such a voyage would do her a lot of good, said Richard: she'd been looking pinched and weedy, she'd been at loose ends ever since her abrupt departure from school. The trip would be an education for her, of the kind a girl like her could really use. Anyway, we could scarcely leave her behind.

The public couldn't get enough of the Queen Mary. It was described and photographed within an inch of its life, and decorated that way too, with strip lighting and plastic laminates and fluted columns and maple burr-costly veneers everywhere. But it wallowed like a pig, and the second-class deck overlooked the first-class one, so you couldn't walk about there without a railing-full of impecunious gawkers checking you over.

I was seasick the first day out, but after that I was fine. There was a lot of dancing. I knew how to dance by then; well enough, but not too well. (Never do anything too well, said Winifred, it shows you're trying.) I danced with men other than Richard-men he knew through his business, men he'd introduce me to. Take care of Iris for me, he would say to these men, smiling, patting them on the arm. Sometimes he would dance with other women, the wives of the men he knew. Sometimes he would go out to have a cigarette or take a turn around the deck, or that's what he'd say he was doing. I thought instead that he was sulking, or brooding. I'd lose track of him for an hour at a time. Then he'd be back, sitting at our table, watching me dance well enough, and I'd wonder how long he'd been there.

He was disgruntled, I decided, because this trip wasn't working out for him the way he'd planned. He couldn't get dinner reservations he wanted at the Verandah Grill, he wasn't meeting the people he'd wanted to meet. He was a big potato on his own stomping ground, but on the Queen Mary he was a very small potato indeed. Winifred was a small potato too: her sprightliness was wasted. More than once I saw her cut dead, by women she'd sidled up to. Then she'd slink back to what she called "our crowd," hoping no one had noticed.

Laura did not dance. She didn't know how, she had no interest in it; anyway she was too young. After dinner she'd shut herself up in her cabin; she said she was reading. On the third day of the voyage, at breakfast, her eyes were swollen and red.

At mid-morning I went looking for her. I found her in a deck chair with a plaid rug pulled up to her neck, listlessly watching a game of quoits. I sat down next to her. A brawny young woman strode by with seven dogs, each on its own leash; she was wearing shorts despite the chilliness of the weather, and had tanned brown legs.

"I could get a job like that," said Laura.

"A job like what?"

"Walking dogs," she said. "Other people's dogs. I like dogs."

"You wouldn't like the owners."

"I wouldn't be walking the owners." She had her sunglasses on, but was shivering.

"Is anything the matter?" I said.

"No."

"You look cold. I think you're coming down with something."

"There's nothing wrong with me. Don't fuss."

"Naturally I'm concerned."

"You don't have to be. I'm sixteen. I can tell if I'm ill."

"I promised Father I'd take care of you," I said stiffly. "And Mother too."

"Stupid of you."

"No doubt. But I was young, I didn't know any better. That's what young is."

Laura took off her sunglasses, but she didn't look at me. "Other people's promises aren't my fault," she said. "Father fobbed me off on you. He never did know what to do with me-with us. But he's dead now, they're both dead, so it's all right. I absolve you. You're off the hook."

"Laura, whatis it?"

"Nothing," she said. "But every time I just want to think-to sort things out-you decide I'm sick and start nagging at me. It drives me nuts."

"That's hardly fair," I said. "I've tried and tried, I've always given you the benefit of the doubt, I've given you the utmost…"

"Let's leave it alone," she said. "Look, what a silly game! I wonder why they call them quoits?"

I put all this down to old grief-to mourning, for Avilion and all that had happened there. Or could she still be mooning over Alex Thomas? I should have asked her more, I should have insisted, but I doubt that even then she would have told me what was really bothering her.

The thing I recall most clearly from the voyage, apart from Laura, was the looting that went on, all over the ship, on the day we sailed into port. Everything with the Queen Mary name or monogram on it went into a handbag or a suitcase-writing paper, silverware, towels, soap dishes, the works-anything not chained to the floor. Some people even unscrewed the faucet handles, and the smaller mirrors, and doorknobs. The first-class passengers were worse than the others; but then, the rich have always been kleptomaniacs.

What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomesthen even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

I myself made off with an ashtray.