In the Land of Dreamy Dreams Read online

  “Tom doesn’t want to find out. He says we’ll just be opening a can of worms. He gets embarrassed even talking about Helen’s problem.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Zander, crossing his short legs and settling his steel-rimmed glasses on his nose like a tiny bicycle stuck on a hill, “let’s start her on Dexedrine.”

  So Letty and Dr. Zander and Dr. Mullins and Dr. Pickett and Dr. Smith decided to try an experiment. They decided to give Helen five milligrams of Dexedrine every day for twenty days each month, taking her off the drug for ten days in between.

  “Children with dyslexia react to drugs strangely,” Dr. Zander said. “If you give them tranquilizers it peps them up, but if you give them Ritalin or Dexedrine it calms them down and makes them able to think straight.”

  “You may have to keep her home and have her tutored on the days she is off the drug,” he continued, “but the rest of the time she should be easier to live with.” And he reached over and patted Letty on the leg and for a moment she thought it might all turn out all right after all.

  Helen stood by herself on the playground of the beautiful old pink-brick convent with its drooping wrought-iron balconies covered with ficus. She was watching the girl she liked talking with some other girls who were playing jacks. All the little girls wore blue-and-red-plaid skirts and navy blazers or sweaters. They looked like a disorderly marching band. Helen was waiting for the girl, whose name was Lisa, to decide if she wanted to go home with her after school and spend the afternoon. Lisa’s mother was divorced and worked downtown in a department store, so Lisa rode the streetcar back and forth from school and could go anywhere she liked until 5:30 in the afternoon. Sometimes she went home with Helen so she wouldn’t have to ride the streetcar. Then Helen would be so excited the hours until school let out would seem to last forever.

  Sometimes Lisa liked her and wanted to go home with her and other times she didn’t, but she was always nice to Helen and let her stand next to her in lines.

  Helen watched Lisa walking toward her. Lisa’s skirt was two inches shorter than those of any of the other girls, and she wore high white socks that made her look like a skater. She wore a silver identification bracelet and Revlon nail polish.

  “I’ll go home with you if you get your mother to take us to get an Icee,” Lisa said. “I was going last night but my mother’s boyfriend didn’t show up until after the place closed so I was going to walk to Manny’s after school. Is that O.K.?”

  “I think she will,” Helen said, her eyes shining. “I’ll go call her up and see.”

  “Naw, let’s just go swing. We can ask her when she comes.” Then Helen walked with her friend over to the swings and tried to be patient waiting for her turn.

  The Dexedrine helped Helen concentrate and it helped her get along better with other people, but it seemed to have an unusual side effect. Helen was chubby and Dr. Zander had led the Wilsons to believe the drug would help her lose weight, but instead she grew even fatter. The Wilsons were afraid to force her to stop eating for fear they would make her nervous, so they tried to reason with her.

  “Why can’t I have any ice cream?” she would say. “Daddy is fat and he eats all the ice cream he wants.” She was leaning up against Letty, stroking her arm and petting the baby with her other hand. They were in an upstairs sitting room with the afternoon sun streaming in through the French windows. Everything in the room was decorated with different shades of blue, and the curtains were white with old-fashioned blue-and-white-checked ruffles.

  “You can have ice cream this evening after dinner,” Letty said, “I just want you to wait a few hours before you have it. Won’t you do that for me?”

  “Can I hold the baby for a while?” Helen asked, and Letty allowed her to sit in the rocker and hold the baby and rock it furiously back and forth crooning to it.

  “Is Jennifer beautiful, Mother?” Helen asked.

  “She’s O.K., but she doesn’t have curly black hair like you. She just has plain brown hair. Don’t you see, Helen, that’s why we want you to stop eating between meals, because you’re so pretty and we don’t want you to get too fat. Why don’t you go outside and play with Tim and not try to think about ice cream so much?”

  “I don’t care,” Helen said, “I’m only nine years old and I’m hungry. I want you to tell the maids to give me some ice cream now,” and she handed the baby to her mother and ran out of the room.

  The Wilsons were rich in maids, and that was a good thing because there were all those children to be taken care of and cooked for and cleaned up after. The maids didn’t mind taking care of the Wilson children all day. The Wilsons’ house was much more comfortable than the ones they lived in, and no one cared whether they worked very hard or not as long as they showed up on time so Letty could get to her meetings. The maids left their own children with relatives or at home watching television, and when they went home at night they liked them much better than if they had spent the whole day with them.

  The Wilson house had a wide white porch across the front and down both sides. It was shaded by enormous oak trees and furnished with swings and wicker rockers. In the afternoons the maids would sit on the porch and other maids from around the neighborhood would come up pushing prams and strollers and the children would all play together on the porch and in the yard. Sometimes the maids fixed lemonade and the children would sell it to passersby from a little stand.

  The maids hated Helen. They didn’t care whether she had dyslexia or not. All they knew was that she was a lot of trouble to take care of. One minute she would be as sweet as pie and cuddle up to them and say she loved them and the next minute she wouldn’t do anything they told her.

  “You’re a nigger, nigger, nigger, and my mother said I could cross St. Charles Avenue if I wanted to,” Helen would say, and the maids would hold their lips together and look into each other’s eyes.

  One afternoon the Wilson children and their maids were sitting on the porch after school with some of the neighbors’ children and maids. The baby was on the porch in a bassinet on wheels and a new maid was looking out for her. Helen was in the biggest swing and was swinging as high as she could go so that none of the other children could get in the swing with her.

  “Helen,” the new maid said, “it’s Tim’s turn in the swing. You been swinging for fifteen minutes while Tim’s been waiting. You be a good girl now and let Tim have a turn. You too big to act like that.”

  “You’re just a high yeller nigger,” Helen called, “and you can’t make me do anything.” And she swung up higher and higher.

  This maid had never had Helen call her names before and she had a quick temper and didn’t put up with children calling her a nigger. She walked over to the swing and grabbed the chain and stopped it from moving.

  “You say you’re sorry for that, little fat honky white girl,” she said, and made as if to grab Helen by the arms, but Helen got away and started running, calling over her shoulder, “Nigger, can’t make me do anything.”

  She was running and looking over her shoulder and she hit the bassinet and it went rolling down the brick stairs so fast none of the maids or children could stop it. It rolled down the stairs and threw the baby onto the sidewalk and the blood from the baby’s head began to move all over the concrete like a little ruby lake.

  The Wilsons’ house was on Philip Street, a street so rich it even had its own drugstore. Not some tacky chain drugstore with everything on special all the time, but a cute drugstore made out of a frame bungalow with gingerbread trim. Everything inside cost twice as much as it did in a regular drugstore, and the grown people could order any kind of drugs they needed and a green Mazda pickup would bring them right over. The children had to get their drugs from a fourteen-year-old pusher in Audubon Park named Leroi, but they could get all the ice cream and candy and chewing gum they wanted from the drugstore and charge it to their parents.

  No white adults were at home in the houses where the maids worked so they sent the children runn
ing to the drugstore to bring the druggist to help with the baby. They called the hospital and ordered an ambulance and they called several doctors and they called Tom’s bank. All the children who were old enough ran to the drugstore except Helen. Helen sat on the porch steps staring down at the baby with the maids hovering over it like swans, and she was crying and screaming and beating her hands against her head. She was in one of the periods when she couldn’t have Dexedrine. She screamed and screamed, but none of the maids had time to help her. They were too busy with the baby.

  “Shut up, Helen,” one of the maids called. “Shut up that goddamn screaming. This baby is about to die.”

  A police car and the local patrol service drove up. An ambulance arrived and the yard filled with people. The druggist and one of the maids rode off in the ambulance with the baby. The crowd in the yard swarmed and milled and swam before Helen’s eyes like a parade.

  Finally they stopped looking like people and just looked like spots of color on the yard. Helen ran up the stairs and climbed under her cherry four-poster bed and pulled her pillows and her eiderdown comforter under it with her. There were cereal boxes and an empty ice cream carton and half a tin of English cookies under the headboard. Helen was soaked with sweat and her little Lily playsuit was tight under the arms and cut into her flesh. Helen rolled up in the comforter and began to dream the dream of the heavy clouds. She dreamed she was praying, but the beads of the rosary slipped through her fingers so quickly she couldn’t catch them and it was cold in the church and beautiful and fragrant, then dark, then light, and Helen was rolling in the heavy clouds that rolled her like biscuit dough. Just as she was about to suffocate they rolled her face up to the blue air above the clouds. Then Helen was a pink kite floating above the houses at evening. In the yards children were playing and fathers were driving up and baseball games were beginning and the sky turned gray and closed upon the city like a lid.

  And now the baby is alone with Helen in her room and the door is locked and Helen ties the baby to the table so it won’t fall off.

  “Hold still, Baby, this will just be a little shot. This won’t hurt much. This won’t take a minute.” And the baby is still and Helen begins to work on it.

  Letty knelt down beside the bed. “Helen, please come out from under there. No one is mad at you. Please come out and help me, Helen. I need you to help me.”

  Helen held on tighter to the slats of the bed and squeezed her eyes shut and refused to look at Letty.

  Letty climbed under the bed to touch the child. Letty was crying and her heart had an anchor in it that kept digging in and sinking deeper and deeper.

  Dr. Zander came into the bedroom and knelt beside the bed and began to talk to Helen. Finally he gave up being reasonable and wiggled his small gray-suited body under the bed and Helen was lost in the area of arms that tried to hold her.

  Tom was sitting in the bank president’s office trying not to let Mr. Saunders know how much he despised him or how much it hurt and mattered to him to be listening to a lecture. Tom thought he was too old to have to listen to lectures. He was tired and he wanted a drink and he wanted to punch the bastard in the face.

  “I know, I know,” he answered, “I can take care of it. Just give me a month or two. You’re right. I’ll take care of it.”

  And he smoothed the pants of his cord suit and waited for the rest of the lecture.

  A man came into the room without knocking. Tom’s secretary was behind him.

  “Tom, I think your baby has had an accident. I don’t know any details. Look, I’ve called for a car. Let me go with you.”

  Tom ran up the steps of his house and into the hallway full of neighbors and relatives. A girl in a tennis dress touched him on the arm, someone handed him a drink. He ran up the winding stairs to Helen’s room. He stood in the doorway. He could see Letty’s shoes sticking out from under the bed. He could hear Dr. Zander talking. He couldn’t go near them.

  “Letty,” he called, “Letty, come here, my god, come out from there.”

  No one came to the funeral but the family. Letty wore a plain dress she would wear any day and the children all wore their school clothes.

  The funeral was terrible for the Wilsons, but afterward they went home and all the people from the Garden District and from all over town started coming over to cheer them up. It looked like the biggest cocktail party ever held in New Orleans. It took four rented butlers just to serve the drinks. Everyone wanted to get in on the Wilsons’ tragedy.

  In the months that followed the funeral Tom began to have sinus headaches for the first time in years. He was drinking a lot and smoking again. He was allergic to whiskey, and when he woke up in the morning his nose and head were so full of phlegm he had to vomit before he could think straight.

  He began to have trouble with his vision.

  One November day the high yellow windows of the Shell Oil Building all turned their eyes upon him as he stopped at the corner of Poydras and Carondelet to wait for a streetlight, and he had to pull the car over to a curb and talk to himself for several minutes before he could drive on.

  He got back all the keys to his apartment so he could go there and be alone and think. One afternoon he left work at two o’clock and drove around Jefferson Parish all afternoon drinking Scotch and eating potato chips.

  Not as many people at the bank wanted to go out to lunch with him anymore. They were sick and tired of pretending his expensive mistakes were jokes.

  One night Tom was gambling at the Pickwick Club with a poker group and a man jokingly accused him of cheating. Tom jumped up from the table, grabbed the man and began hitting him with his fists. He hit the man in the mouth and knocked out his new gold inlays.

  “You dirty little goddamn bond peddler, you son of a bitch! I’ll kill you for that,” Tom yelled, and it took four waiters to hold him while the terrified man made his escape. The next morning Tom resigned from the club.

  He started riding the streetcar downtown to work so he wouldn’t have to worry about driving his car home if he got drunk. He was worrying about money and he was worrying about his gambling debts, but most of the time he was thinking about Helen. She looked so much like him that he believed people would think she was his illegitimate child. The more he tried to talk himself into believing the baby’s death was an accident, the more obstinate his mind became.

  The Wilson children were forbidden to take the Labs out of the kennels without permission. One afternoon Tom came home earlier than usual and found Helen sitting in the open door of one of the kennels playing with a half-grown litter of puppies. She was holding one of the puppies and the others were climbing all around her and spilling out onto the grass. She held the puppy by its forelegs, making it dance in the air, then letting it drop. Then she would gather it in her arms and hold it tight and sing to it.

  Tom walked over to the kennel and grabbed her by an arm and began to paddle her as hard as he could.

  “Goddamn you, what are you trying to do? You know you aren’t supposed to touch those dogs. What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Helen was too terrified to scream. The Wilsons never spanked their children for anything.

  “I didn’t do anything to it. I was playing with it,” she sobbed.

  Letty and the twins came running out of the house and when Tom saw Letty he stopped hitting Helen and walked in through the kitchen door and up the stairs to the bedroom. Letty gave the children to the cook and followed him.

  Tom stood by the bedroom window trying to think of something to say to Letty. He kept his back turned to her and he was making a nickel disappear with his left hand. He thought of himself at Tommie Keenen’s birthday party wearing his black coat and hat and doing his famous rope trick. Mr. Keenen had given him fifteen dollars. He remembered sticking the money in his billfold.

  “My god, Letty, I’m sorry. I don’t know what the shit’s going on. I thought she was hurting the dog. I know I shouldn’t have hit her and there’s something
I need to tell you about the bank. Kennington is getting sacked. I may be part of the housecleaning.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before? Can’t Daddy do anything?”

  “I don’t want him to do anything. Even if it happens it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s just bank politics. We’ll say I quit. I want to get out of there anyway. That fucking place is driving me crazy.”

  Tom put the nickel in his pocket and closed the bedroom door. He could hear the maid down the hall comforting Helen. He didn’t give a fuck if she cried all night. He walked over to Letty and put his arms around her. He smelled like he’d been drinking for a week. He reached under her dress and pulled down her pantyhose and her underpants and began kissing her face and hair while she stood awkwardly with the pants and hose around her feet like a halter. She was trying to cooperate.

  She forgot that Tom smelled like sweat and whiskey. She was thinking about the night they were married. Every time they made love Letty pretended it was that night. She had spent thousands of nights in a bridal suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York City.

  Letty lay on the walnut bed leaning into a pile of satin pillows and twisting a gold bracelet around her wrist. She could hear the children playing outside. She had a headache and her stomach was queasy, but she was afraid to take a Valium or an aspirin. She was waiting for the doctor to call her back and tell her if she was pregnant. She already knew what he was going to say.

  Tom came into the room and sat by her on the bed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Please don’t do that. I’m tired.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Tom, please leave me alone.”

  Tom walked out through the French windows and onto a little balcony that overlooked the play yard and the dog runs. Sunshine flooded Philip Street, covering the houses and trees and dogs and children with a million volts a minute. It flowed down to hide in the roots of trees, glistening on the cars, baking the street, and lighting Helen’s rumpled hair where she stooped over the puppy. She was singing a little song. She had made up the song she was singing.