Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 151, Nos. 1 & 2. Whole Nos. 916 & 917, January/February 2018

White Tights and Mary Janes by Edwin Hill

Edwin Hill is vice president and editorial director for Bedford/St. Martin’s, a division of Macmillan. In September 2018, his debut novel, Little Comfort, will be published by Kensington Books. This first short story (his first fiction to see print) began life as a chapter from an earlier draft of that book. Its inspiration was, in part, a short stint the author once did at a for-profit college.

Shoot commercial

“That’s not us!” Amanda Burton says into the camera as her chestnut-colored hair unravels. “You got it, baby,” the director says.

What is his name again? Reuben or Monte or Hoagie? Maxine Pawlikowski can’t remember, but she does know it’s some useless sandwich. “Another take,” she says from the last row of the classroom.

Hoagie sighs and then strides up the aisle two steps at a time, pushing up those black-rimmed glasses he wears to keep the tortured-artist thing going. He wants to be imposing, or at least he acts as though he does, but the man needs a sandwich himself. Maxine could break him in two over her thick, fifty-seven-year-old Polish knee.

“What is it you want?” he whispers.

“Haven’t a clue,” Maxine says, silently daring him to say one more word. A minute later, they’re back to work.

“That’s not us!” Amanda says.

“Close, but not quite,” Maxine says.

At six one in flats, Amanda towers over Hoagie, though instead of a thirty-two-year-old woman, Maxine can only see the toddler who stumbled toward her all those years ago, the one who ran in circles and called her Aunt Maxie. The one who did belly flops into that damned above-ground pool. Those images help Maxine overlook the badly chosen boyfriends (yes, you, Hoagie), and that Amanda, as the board-appointed president of Burton University, a position she took over from her father, drew a bonus of six million last year (six point three million to be exact), all due to the long hours Maxine spent running the school.

“That’s not us!” Amanda says.

This time her eyes are wide and her dark hair swarms in an unsettling mass. She looks crazy. Super crazy. Lunatic-in-the-attic crazy. Later, Hoagie will shoot on-the-street interviews asking random people what they think when they hear “Burton University,” and most people will say things like, “Can’t you buy those diplomas online?” or “I heard they sell visas to international students,” or, Maxine’s favorite, “They offer degrees in lifelong debt.”

But That’s Not Us. Right?

Or at least that’s what Amanda says when Hoagie edits her into the shot.

Maxine had meant these ads to be a public-relations ploy — she’d come up with the slogan while lying in bed one night wondering how she could stem the tide of students dropping out of the school and suing for tuition reimbursement — but somehow the first ad had hit YouTube, gone viral, and become the latest Snuggielike sensation. Now, strangers stop Amanda on the street and beg her to say the line. And the publicity has helped with enrollments. They’re flat. For the moment, at least.

“Perfect!” Maxine says, tucking her to-do list into her bag. As she gathers her things to leave, she hears Amanda talking to the director. “Hero.” (That’s his name!) “See you at the party tonight?”

The party. Jennifer’s awful holiday benefit. Maxine had managed to forget it for a few blissful moments.

Check flowers

Burton University is housed in a repurposed South Boston sugar factory that provides six stories of high-ceilinged rooms with exposed beams and windows overlooking the Boston skyline. The school offers a film department with the latest equipment, instructors trained in coding languages, and a nursing-assistant program with internships at the best hospitals in the world. In the thirty years Maxine has worked here, the school has grown from two campuses to over fifty sites located all over the country. And if you can’t manage an on-the-ground program, if you want to take your classes at two a.m. after tucking your kids in bed, you can take them online practically anywhere in the world. Who wouldn’t want to pay top dollar for that kind of convenience?

Maxine shakes the thought away as she leaves the school, stepping into the bracing cold. She screeches out of the icy parking lot in her gold Trans Am while punching at her phone. “Tell me exactly what’s in the arrangements,” she says when a timid-sounding woman answers.

“Evergreens, roses, holly, pine cones, lilies...”

“No lilies!” Maxine says.

It isn’t her job to order flowers. It’s that useless Kathy O’Brien’s job. Maxine has told Kathy a hundred times not to order lilies because lilies make Amanda’s mother Jennifer think about drowned babies and funerals and grave sites, and tonight of all nights is not one where Maxine wants to cajole Jennifer out of her bedroom and into an evening gown. She hangs up (oh, how she misses being able to slam down the receiver) and careens through the narrow streets of downtown Boston and then up Beacon Hill, where she slides into her parking spot by the Burtons’ mansion and yanks the hand brake into place.

“Hello, darling!” Jennifer Burton says a moment later.

She perches on the salmon-colored chaise longue in the second-story salon, where a fire blazes in the fireplace. Maxine kisses her cheek while Harry brings in coffee — cream, no sugar.

“Sit with me,” Jennifer says, patting the upholstery beside her. “We’re having roast beef sandwiches for lunch!”

“No mayonnaise!” Maxine shouts after Harry.

“He knows that, dear,” Jennifer says.

“I like things done right,” Maxine says.

“He knows that too.”

Maxine slumps into a chair.

“I don’t believe Tucker will join us today,” Jennifer says. “He’s at the chiropractor. The things people are saying about the school!” She pulls her cardigan closed as if to ward off a chill in the overheated room. “It has him very stressed out.”

“It has us all stressed out,” Maxine says, wondering what, exactly, Jennifer’s husband found stressful about playing golf and squash all day. “But you know what? Screw ’em.”

“Oh, Maxine!” Jennifer says, smiling.

Jennifer has long, once-blond hair that’s gone white and the features of a bird. She drifts through the rooms of this huge house like ephemera, wearing gauzy, flowing dresses and laughing in a way that often makes Maxine wonder if she’s actually there. “I’m going over my to-do list,” Jennifer says. “The benefit will be such fun tonight! It’s my favorite day of the year!”

“Oh, mine too,” Maxine says.

Harry carries in a tray of sandwiches. Like most days, Jennifer proposes eating “right here, by the fire,” and like most days, Maxine spends the next hour listening to Jennifer’s plans for the afternoon. Today, Jennifer wants to visit the Gardner Museum, and then find Christmas gifts in “the little shops along Newbury.” Tucker is easy to buy for. “The man only wants coffee. He’s obsessed. Aromatics, acidity, finish. Insufferable, really. But I have not one clue what to get Amanda. And I must be back by five o’clock to write my toast.”

Maxine barely listens, but makes a mental note to draft out a toast for Jennifer to use.

“Kathy, darling!” Jennifer says.

Maxine turns to see the Burtons’ personal assistant Kathy O’Brien waddle into the room, her red hair tied in an odd ponytail on the side of her head.

“Join us for lunch!”

Even though the girl looks like she wants to do anything but stay — she knows about those flowers, Maxine tells herself; she knows she messed up, that she’s made it onto the wrong list again — Kathy shimmies those hips between the arms of an antique Chippendale chair and takes not one, but two sandwiches, then eats them in huge, wet mouthfuls while Jennifer asks her to recommend a gift for Amanda. Kathy sits with her mouth open, her tongue coated in unswallowed breadcrumbs. She starts to say something, but stops.

“Tell us dear,” Jennifer says. “You always have such good ideas!”

“Yes, dear. Tell us,” Maxine says.

“A putter,” Kathy says, betraying her Dorchester roots (“a puddah”).

Jennifer claps her hands together. “A wonderful idea!”

Maxine gave Amanda a new putter for her birthday, but she silently fumes while Kathy finishes her sandwiches and leaves.

“Such a lovely girl,” Jennifer says, watching Kathy lumber down the marble staircase. “Though I suppose she’s no longer a girl. She’s practically middle aged! I don’t know what I’d have done without her all these years.”

“She’s a dear.”

The doorbell rings.

“The flowers!” Maxine says. “Let me deal with the delivery. Run and grab the dress you’re wearing tonight so I can be sure we don’t look like twins.”

“We could never be twins,” Jennifer says. And this time her laugh has a rare edge to it, but she does what she’s told while Maxine hurries down the staircase. Below, the deliveryman carries bouquets into the ballroom. Maxine runs her hands through the flowers, breathing in the sweet smell of roses till she finds a single overlooked lily hiding among some holly. She crushes it in her hand.

“Surely you remember this,” Jennifer says, sailing into the room with a black-velvet gown draped over her arm. “I wear it every year. Tucker loves it. Thirty-four years of marriage and he still tells me I look like a fashion model!”

“I remember it,” Maxine says, touching the soft fabric. The dress is old-fashioned, almost dowdy, one that only someone as slender and stunning as Jennifer could get away with wearing. “It’s beautiful. You’ll be beautiful. And now I have to run.”

“The list calls?”

“Always.”

“If you see Tucker,” Jennifer says. “Tell him I’m very busy, but that he should telephone if he needs anything.”

Maxine cups Jennifer’s cheek and kisses her gently. “I will,” she says.

Jennifer hasn’t stepped outside in twenty-nine years, not since the other baby, Rachel, drowned. She won’t go anywhere today either.

Meet Tucker

Tucker groans. Maxine wants to shush him. She’s naked, standing on the cold tile floor in her kitchen, staring out the huge, floor-to-ceiling windows that line her South End loft, and praying — praying — that no one in the neighboring buildings looks this way.

Tucker turns her abruptly and hauls her onto the polished concrete counter with all the grace of a sixty-six-year-old man. Maxine closes her eyes and thinks about the first time she ever saw him, at St. Catherine College in Illinois, a dying Catholic school where she’d earned her BA and then worked her way up to dean of the college. Tucker swept into her office one day — six four and so present in a Western shirt and cowboy boots, that she actually gasped.

“I’m buying this dump,” he said, and Maxine didn’t think twice about signing on for the ride. She transformed St. Catherine’s into Burton University’s first satellite campus. Three years later, her mother, who’d met Tucker and seen the way Maxine looked at him, cautioned her against moving to Boston. “Is this all you want?”

“It’s what I want now,” Maxine said.

Back then, Jennifer and Tucker lived in Quincy, in a postwar Cape with a swing set and that aboveground pool. Maxine moved to town without a single friend. She went to their house whenever they asked, where Amanda and the other baby, Rachel, with their pink dresses and curls, with their white tights and tiny Mary Janes, would take her by the hand and invite her to tea, where the only choice, the only challenge, was saltines or graham crackers.

Tucker kisses Maxine. “You’re off somewhere,” he says.

She runs her fingers through his thick white hair and feels that affection for him all over again. She’s happy with her choices. He’s good and oddly faithful for a married man.

“Worried about the school?” he asks.

“They don’t realize who they’re messing with.”

“You’ve always been a sly fox.”

“I haven’t had any other choice.”

Of course, there had been plenty of choices. Maxine could have stayed in Illinois and grown old like her mother. She could have married that boy she used to bring to the house in Quincy, the one who taught biology and finally gave up and moved to Vermont. She could have said no to an exhausted Tucker, who appeared at her Somerville apartment with Amanda the night Rachel drowned.

“Only for a few days,” Tucker had said. “Watch her. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

And Maxine could have said no a few nights later when Tucker returned. Instead, she stood by the door in her pajamas till his banging woke up her neighbors, her fingers on the latch, her cheek pressed to the cool, smooth molding. She’d waited till his voice softened before opening the door.

One option she hasn’t considered is regret. Surely Jennifer knows more than she lets on. She’s probably relieved to be free of the burden.

“Let’s skip the benefit,” Tucker whispers. “Let’s stay in bed for a week.”

“I can’t.”

“Please.”

Maxine nestles into the crook of his arm, her one safe place, while he fumbles with the bottle of blue pills.

“You’re a pervert,” she says.

“That I am.”

Write ESL department

Maxine reads through the e-mail three times for typos. Only after she hits Send does she realize that the message went out with her standard signature:

An army of decorators hangs wreaths, garlands, lights, and baubles in every room of the Burtons’ house. Maxine heads straight for the ballroom, where she has to concede that Kathy’s done a competent job setting up the silent auction. She bids $100 on a pair of sapphire earrings to get things going. “When does the string quartet arrive?” she hollers through the cellar door.

Kathy waddles to the foot of the stairs, and then climbs to where Maxine waits. “Six,” she says between gasps.

The girl has a smear of chocolate on the side of her mouth that Maxine dabs at with a hand wipe. “Make sure the ice sculptures are in the courtyard,” she says. “I don’t want them to melt this year.”

Upstairs, she finds Jennifer sitting at her vanity reapplying makeup.

“You don’t need that,” Maxine says, stashing away the compact before Jennifer gives herself a rash. “Lipstick and mascara and you’ll be good to go.” She fumbles through Jennifer’s jewelry box till she finds the ruby earrings Tucker bought for their twenty-fifth anniversary. “And these. Very Christmasy, don’t you think?”

Jennifer grips Maxine’s wrist with her icy fingers. “I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can,” Maxine says, digging in her purse for the speech she wrote. “Here. Read this.”

Downstairs, through the courtyard and into the guesthouse, Maxine joins Amanda in her dressing room.

“White or black?” Amanda asks, holding up two dresses.

Maxine collapses into one of the gray, overstuffed chairs by Amanda’s dressing table. “White,” she says. “But call it winter white.”

Amanda tosses the rejected dress on the floor, and then shimmies into the white one. “What a day!” she says.

“You look pretty,” Maxine says, as she takes Amanda’s hand in hers.

“Want a drink?”

“Do I ever.”

At the stroke of 8 P.M., Jennifer hovers on the marble staircase with Tucker and Amanda anchoring her on each side. She reads the toast Maxine wrote and is resplendent in her Christmas velvet. After she finishes, the party guests applaud and disperse. Maxine piles half a dozen hors d’oeuvres onto a cocktail napkin. The caviar station is mobbed. So is the dessert buffet. In the kitchen, caterers work in an intense silence, and in the ballroom, Maxine checks the bidding. The sapphire earrings have already gone to eight hundred dollars. She adds another hundred bucks and promises to stop there. Out in the foyer, she stands against a wall and watches Amanda stride through the crowd with Hero in tow. Amanda’s hair is perched on top of her head in a terrifying ball that threatens to explode. Hero’s shown up to the formal event wearing a tight T-shirt and even tighter jeans. “He’s a brilliant filmmaker!” Amanda says to a random crowd.

Maxine retreats to the courtyard. Her breath freezes as she holds her fingertips under her arms. The ice sculptures of dolphins — Burton University’s logo — glimmer beneath a canopy of tiny white lights. Music from the string quartet filters into the night while two couples dance. If she waits long enough, will Tucker come find her? Will he bring her a Manhattan and drape his coat over her shoulders? She glances at her watch. Five more minutes. She’ll go inside in five minutes.

By the front door, Jennifer greets a few late arrivals with a frosty hand. Tucker stands at her side looking grand in a tuxedo. They are a handsome couple. Jennifer grips Maxine’s hand. “My favorite day of the year,” she whispers.

Jennifer couldn’t be more brittle had she been spun from sugar.

“Tucker,” Maxine says.

“Maxine,” he says, and then excuses himself without a single sign of affection. It’s how they’ve survived all these years. It’s how they’ve kept their secrets.

“I told him to bid, bid, bid,” Jennifer says. “And you must bid too. What do you have your eye on?”

“A pair of earrings,” Maxine says. “Most of the other items are out of my league.”

“Then we’ll be sure no one steals them from you,” Jennifer says, smiling to greet another guest. “Kathy did an amazing job with the auction. With everything.”

“You think?”

“Honestly, darling. All you do is pick on her. Really, you can be so unpleasant.”

The comment hurts more than it should. Maxine inhales too sharply, and then fumbles for a response, but before it forms, the front door opens on a little man in a green parka whom Maxine remembers from somewhere, but can’t place exactly where. Harry steps forward to take his coat, but the man brushes him aside.

“An e-mail?” the man says to Maxine.

That’s right. He teaches ESL at the school. Or at least he did till this afternoon. Maxine can’t remember his name. She puts a hand to her hair and runs a finger along her pearls. Everything in place. Behind her, the crowd grows quiet in a gentle wave. A swirl of frigid wind sweeps through the party, lifting skirts and hair, sending cocktail napkins flitting across the black-and-white marble floor.

The man lunges. Fist raised. And in that second, Maxine notices his wire-rimmed glasses and the dirty white sneakers that poke from beneath his coat. She imagines what a fist to the face might feel like, the sharp jab of pain, cracked bones and teeth, the explosion of tinny blood in her mouth. She wants to slap herself for flinching when the fist stops an inch before contact. The man stares at her. She wonders if anyone — Tucker, maybe? — will come to her defense.

“Have a safe and happy holiday season,” the man whispers. “Ho, ho, ho.”

Then he leaves, through the open front door and into the wintery night, where his sneakers are the last part of him to fade into the dark. Maxine stares at where the fist stopped. Her legs nearly buckle. Behind her, no one makes a sound. No one moves for what seems like hours.

“That’s not us!”

Amanda’s climbed onto one of the Chippendale chairs. Her hair has begun to unravel and her eyes are wide. She raises a glass of champagne, and with that, the spell breaks. Harry closes the door. The string quartet begins to play, and conversation rises to a dull roar.

“We should call the police,” Jennifer says. “That man is a menace!”

Maxine waves away the suggestion, but excuses herself anyway. She stumbles into the ballroom, where Tucker puts a hand in the crook of her arm. “You were so brave,” he whispers in her ear, and a moment later they’re upstairs in a bedroom while Tucker struggles to work a hand beneath her Spanx.

Maxine shoves him away. “I can’t,” she says, retreating to a bathroom.

She splashes water on her face and pinches her cheeks. She puts both hands on the sink and throws up. Stupid. Stop being stupid. Pull it together. Breathe. She wipes tears from her face with a balled-up fist. Someone knocks. “Hold your horses,” she shouts, rinsing bile from her mouth, and, a moment later, orders a Manhattan at the bar. She sucks it down. It burns. She fishes the cherry out of her glass and tastes the alcoholic sweetness. She surveys the room only to see the door to Kathy’s damp basement office swing open. Kathy, disheveled, lipstick smeared, red hair falling from her up-do, plods into the party. She pulls the back of her skirt from her underwear and grins. A moment later, Hero, smug, already lighting up a cigaret, follows.

Maxine has had enough. It’s time for the best night of the year to come to an end. She looks for Jennifer so that the two of them can retreat and sit up all night as Jennifer talks in breathy tones about the “wonderful” people who came to the party.

“Ready?” Maxine asks.

“Yes, dear.” Jennifer turns her head so that the sapphire earrings sparkle in the light from the Christmas tree. “From Tucker.”

“From Tucker?” Maxine says.

“Such a dear man. He won them in the auction!”

Oh, well.

“They’re beautiful,” Maxine says with a smile, taking her friend’s arm in hers as they walk up the grand staircase. On the landing, they stop for one last look at the evening. Down below, Amanda’s head bobs above the sea of party guests. She glances up as if sensing that the two older women are watching, and when she flicks them a grin, it stuns Maxine.

That tiny girl.

The one in white tights and Mary Janes.

She’s become this adult.

Could Maxine have loved her own child more? To Maxine, Amanda will always be delicate and precious and, like her sister Rachel should have been, worth any choice. “Do you ever...” Maxine begins.

“Do I ever what, dear?” Jennifer asks.

“Nothing.”

Maxine had nearly asked whether Jennifer thought Rachel would have grown to be tall like Amanda, but it was best not to speak of Rachel. Best not to remember.

“Watch her,” Tucker had said all those years ago, when he’d shoved Amanda at Maxine. “Don’t let her out of your sight.”

The stench of chlorine rose from Amanda’s damp hair, and the child’s arms were covered in bloody welts. Maxine remembered the call from earlier that day, Jennifer’s long, mournful wails. “I can’t do this,” Maxine had said after listening for what seemed like hours. “I can’t take care of you anymore.”

So, she didn’t ask herself whether driving the twenty minutes to Quincy would have mattered. She didn’t tell herself that she never could have imagined any of this. And she didn’t ask Tucker what Jennifer had done. It was too late anyway. Instead, Maxine clutched Amanda to her chest, where the tiny child sucked her thumb and closed her eyes. And ever since, Maxine had held Amanda as close as she dared. And watched her. Protected her. Kept her safe. Every day. And Amanda had grown.

“You’re quiet,” Jennifer says. “What are you thinking about?”

“Oh, the usual,” Maxine says. “Do you ever worry about the school? What if it shuts down? What will happen? To this house? To our lives?”

“Oh no, dear,” Jennifer says. “You’ll take care of us. You always have. You always do.”

“Even when I can be a little unpleasant?”

Jennifer turns down the sheets on her bed and smiles without meeting Maxine’s eyes. “Especially then.”

“Did you raise a lot of money tonight?”

“I suspect so!” Jennifer says. “Though Kathy will sort out the details in the morning.”

Meaning Maxine will need to check the math. That useless girl! As Maxine puts on her pajamas and climbs into bed beside Jennifer, she flashes forward a few days to when Kathy finally realizes that Hero won’t choose her. The girl has no sense. Doesn’t she know that love isn’t a tryst in a damp basement office? Doesn’t she know that she can’t compete against Amanda Burton, who has youth and money and confidence? “But I love Hero,” Kathy will sob, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

And even though Kathy screws up the tiniest of tasks, even though she made it onto the wrong list years ago, Maxine will sit with her till the sobbing subsides. “I know you do,” she’ll say.

She might even take that snotty little hand in hers and give it a gentle squeeze.