John Casey - Compass Rose

Mary answered, “Sawtooth kitchen.”

“It’s Elsie. I’m in Jack’s office and I found Dick’s tax return. Jack shouldn’t have it; it’s part of the scholarship file.”

“Elsie, I don’t—”

“Just remember. Dick’s tax return. In the Pierce Creek file.”

Jack’s secretary called through the open door—“Mr. Aldrich? I’m back from lunch.”

Elsie hung up.

The secretary said again, “Mr. Aldrich?”

Elsie thought of saying something in a gruff voice, maybe “Close the door, please, Miss Swift.” No. Grade B. She called out, “I’m waiting for him. It’s me, Elsie.”

Miss Swift poked her head in. “Does he know you’re here? He didn’t say … I thought he was going to play tennis.” She looked out the front window. “Yes. There he is.” She looked at the open file drawer. “I’ll go get him.”

“Thank you.”

Miss Swift hesitated. Thought better of whatever she was going to say. Left.

Elsie took a breath. Leave the file drawer open? Yes. And she had the tax return in her hand. Let him come in and figure it out. Better yet, lay the tax return on his desk. She’d stand up and stab it with her finger.

Jack came in wearing his tennis whites, his face and knees pink.

“I’ve just got a minute. Or I might say that you’ve just got a minute. Miss Swift tells me … Never mind. What are you here for?”

She braced herself to feel as if she was in uniform again. “That paper on your desk.” She took a step toward it to stab it with her accusatory finger, but he beat her to it. He picked it up. “Is this from in there?” He pointed his own accusatory finger at the file drawer.

“Yes. And it shouldn’t be. The scholarship files … That’s supposed to be for the scholarship, the confidential scholarship meeting. You’re using it illegally.”

Jack sat down. He said, “ ‘Illegally.’ ” He wasn’t indignant, just musing. He said, “Miss Swift, could you come in here for a second?”

Miss Swift practically stood at attention.

“Could you find the Sawtooth S and L file? And then go down and tell them I’ll be along in just another minute.”

He riffled through the file and pulled out a copy of Dick’s tax return. He held it out to her. “As the mortgage holder in due course, we acquire all the information Dick submitted to the bank: the appraisal, outstanding debts, and, of course, tax returns. So it’s in the S and L file and cross-filed under Pierce Creek. And there we are. Anything else? Well, yes. We should remember nursery rules. I won’t go into your room and play with the toys in your toybox if you won’t play with mine.” He got up. “I’ll see you out.”

I should have said, I should have said, I should have said … Nothing. Just as well she’d said nothing.

By the time she drove out the Sawtooth gate the heat in her face was gone. Cold. Cold to her core.

She got home. Too incompetent to do anything but slump onto the sofa and curl up. Everything that came into her head was in miniature. Tiny scenes on a one-inch screen. Jack laughing, saying to someone outside the frame, “I caught Elsie snooping through my files.” He laughed, and everyone joined in. He said, “No, no. Just sent her home.”

In all the years she’d known him she hadn’t ever lost an argument to Jack. Oh, he’d got his way, there was Sawtooth Point turned into his gated domain. But she’d been right, and now she was wrong — wrong and nakedly foolish.

It wasn’t fair that this one time, this one technicality, should undo her.

It wasn’t fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping —pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.

It wasn’t fair that she knew South County, had hiked and waded and paddled all through it, knew the animals, the insects, the trees, the rocks, and the ponds, and Jack shuffled papers and owned it. He put on his wizard lawyer’s hat, pulled out his magic papers and wrote his magic words, and — presto change-o — they cast a spell. Okay, Jack was bad, but maybe she wasn’t good enough. She’d served her time in the woods and marshes, and used up that goodness in taking Dick to bed. No sudden accident — she’d wanted him, wanted to have their child. And then? She’d been good again, good with Miss Perry, as good as a dutiful daughter — Captain Teixeira said so. And she’d absorbed the stinging side of Rose and let May and Mary have their share of Rose’s affection. Of course, there was another way of weighing that — what single mother wouldn’t be grateful for help? All right, all right — but here she was now, fighting to save May’s house … so May would say to Dick, “Go do your laundry in Elsie’s washing machine”? She knew what that meant — she was sure she knew what that meant. But twenty minutes ago, she’d been just as sure she had Jack dead to rights. Could it be that May only meant for Dick to visit her the way Tom visited Rose? Elsie had sifted Dick’s report of that do-your-laundry remark and his dumb male puzzlement, stuck in the literal. She herself had sifted it into finer and finer grains. She’d imagined May’s coming to a grim indifference — he could go do his laundry the same way he went to sea. Over the horizon. She’d imagined May settling on the phrase “Do your laundry” as willed blindness. Elsie had also imagined a barb of disdain—“Go do your dirty laundry.” Take it up there — all that smell of rotten bait, of diesel fuel, of overspiced food your Vietnamese and Portuguese crew cook up for you, and your captain’s swagger. Then go get cleaned up and come back home and make yourself useful.

This wasn’t some silky French arrangement, two sets of books for the business, two sets of books for la vie conjugale . This was Yankee stoicism. Less said the better.

It sounded right. The problem was that she couldn’t be certain. She couldn’t march up to May and say, “I’ve been meaning to ask you — do you not want to know?” She vaguely remembered from college physics something about uncertainty, about indeterminacy. The very observation is an intrusion by the observer that ruins the experiment … Was that Heisenberg, or was it Schrödinger and his cat?

Since when did she worry about certainty? She used to thrive on taking chances. She used to be good at keeping her balance. Now she was sprawling again. She’d been wrong about Dick’s files, fallen out of a tree, got poked in the face with a stick. Fainted dead away in Captain Teixeira’s radio room. Losing her footing right and left. And no skipping over that she’d opened the window to Walt, lost her grip. Falling was when she stood still as he unpeeled her bicycle suit; falling was when she was nothing but breath, so weightless that he hoisted her up and swung her onto the bed, nothing to it.

A trickle of heat in her. Immediately chilled. If anyone found out. Him and his “This is like a dream come true.” Ripe for telling. A Deirdre O’Malley story.

She shook it away, back into the pile of her other mistakes — all in a clump all since … when? Since Rose’s play. Her headlong charge at Rose. Her tin ear. No, worse than a tin ear. Something was wrong with her inner sense, whatever part of the brain it was that gave her a moment of insulation between her first impulse and rushing ahead. But how could she have known about the Sawtooth S&L’s holding Dick’s mortgage? Stupid girl! Mr. Salviatti told her.

Never mind if she wasn’t good enough — what if she didn’t know what was really going on? She used to be pleased by how alert she was. But now, if she was sleepwalking, how would she find her way?