Pretty Leslie by R. V. Cassill

why? It wasn’t a question of the bed. She’d listened with gusto and interest to Leslie’s brag about how often the husband “needed” it. That sort of thing always warmed the belly to hear, but it didn’t explain much. Some did it lots, some did it little, some well, some like unwilling cripples, she supposed, and neither love nor personal satisfaction seemed to be among the gains or losses of the romp. A lot of people told you about their sex life—to throw you off the track and hide the smell of what was really hurting.
    She drifted like a fat old flower in a whirlpool through the crowd at Leslie’s party—booming, whispering, giggling, playing the courtly widow dontyaknow, taking the stiffer guests by surprise with shafts of bawdy, being utterly too thrilled to listen to shop-talk about a goiter (Ugh!) from an ass with a huge Adam’s apple himself who gave out that he was, more properly speaking, a colleague of Dr. Daniels than a family friend, though he greatly admired the Manhattans that Mrs. Daniels stirred for him with her pinkie. For reasons best known to himself he divulged to her that he had made “over forty-eight thousand dollars” last year, before taxes, and had recently been threatened, with pistol, by a loony whose daughter had died while he was operating.
    From Rockefeller and his goiters she drifted to a real and true friend of Leslie’s, Martha Lloyd, who’d certainly heard of Dolores (who’d heard of her; Leslie was thorough) and they said wasn’t it just like Leslie to be living two lives, and Martha opined that it must be for psychological reasons that Leslie failed to get pregnant, because her temperature chart—had Dolores seen it?—was perfectly even for five months running and there was certainly nothing wrong with Ben Daniels so what else could it be? The mind had literally uncanny powers of subverting the body. Was it fear of admitting her womanhood, springing from Leslie’s well-known happiness as a child? Would a daughter fracture the image of the self?
    â€œI never believed in the germ theory,” Dolores said. “Cy did his duty and God sent the children when He needed them.”
    To which Martha blinked just once and said, “Oh yes, of course.” Leslie had made this one out smarter than she was.
    Then a nice boy who said he’d graduated from Montana before he went to med school danced with her in the little clear space before the bar and they talked about elk hunting and skiing. She said he must not be too shy to look up some friends of hers if he ever got back in the Northwest at Sun Valley, just tell them Cy Calfert’s wife had told him to, and mention that Dolores still thought the days in Cuba were as good as any in her ancient life.
    The boy said it would be a great pleasure and honor to do this and he’d always been a great admirer and he’d certainly like to talk to her more about her friends, what was her phone number?
    A bald-headed man cut in and said, “If you and I can’t Charleston, nobody in this basement can. Shall we ask Leslie for some suitable music?” But Dolores was out of breath and preferred to sit down with drinks and talk to him about the time Cy shut out the Dodgers when the Dodgers looked like a cinch for the pennant. And that very game had been one of the first games this bald-headed boy had been allowed to go into town to see, and he still had somewhere a ball Cy had autographed after the ’24 Series and if he could find it, just for the hell of it would she autograph it too? He was a “bone man” whose hands looked as if he could snap most parts of the human skeleton like crisp celery, and he said that Ben Daniels was one of the nicest new young men practicing in Sardis. He didn’t seem to avoid or insist on estimating Ben’s brilliance as a practitioner.
    Then there were several others, dancing up or ambling up to where she