Miss Withers Regrets

by Stuart Palmer

  “You’d better stop,” he told her.

  “Why should I stop, for heaven’s sake? I didn’t actually hit him, did I? And if you think I’m going to pick up every hitchhiker on the road …” Adele’s wide, thin-lipped mouth tightened under its generous layer of geranium lipstick, and she tossed her fluffy brown hair like an annoyed horse. “Probably just another discharged veteran thinking he’s entitled to free transportation.”

  They swung around another corner and came out on the crest of the hill, leaving the elm trees and their shade behind. Spread out before them was a vast panorama of water and sky, with white fleecy clouds scudding along and a great thunderhead moving north towards Connecticut. Two sailboats, under light canvas, were beating their way around the point.

  “I only suggested stopping back there because I thought I recognized that fellow you almost hit,” Midge said slowly.

  His wife stared at him. “You mean somebody from the field?”

  “No, my love. I thought he looked a lot like old Pat Montague.”

  Adele’s mouth opened wide. “Pat? But he’s overseas in Germany or Austria or somewhere.”

  “It may come as a great surprise to you,” Midge told her, “but they are even letting lieutenants out of the Army now.”

  Adele thought about that, biting her lower lip with very white but somewhat prominent front teeth. “You’re probably just imagining things, darling. And if by some fantastic trick of fate it was really Pat, I’m certainly glad we didn’t stop. Do you think I’d want to appear at Helen Cairns’s housewarming with her old heart-throb in tow? That would be just a little too-too!”

  Midge pointed out reasonably that he hadn’t wanted to appear at all. “If we really have to get drunk, why can’t we do it quietly at home?”

  “Don’t be stuffy, darling,” Adele snapped. “Nowadays you can still dislike a man and drink his liquor. Otherwise our social life would be pretty limited, wouldn’t it? You’re certainly not jealous of Huntley, after all these years! Besides, he has a lot of connections, and he could help in getting you a different job.”

  “There’s too much night work, working in the black market!”

  “Oh, stop repeating gossip! Just because a man manages to get materials to build a new house and happens to get a new car before the rest of us …” Adele smiled. “Besides, Huntley is in some sort of public-relations work. Anyway, I was at Miss Prescott’s with Helen, and she’s a dear girl if you like that sleepy, almost bovine type. I couldn’t resist a chance to see her new house, could I? Helen always had no taste at all in decoration. I remember her room at school was just a hodgepodge of family pictures and sentimental souvenirs. I can’t wait to see the inside of the place.”

  The outside of the place, salmon-pink and imposing, suddenly presented itself around a turn in the drive, and Adele hit the brakes sharply before turning in through the gateway. “Now, darling,” she begged, “for the love of heaven, don’t go shooting off your mouth as soon as we get inside. I mean about your wild idea that you saw Pat Montague. It probably wasn’t him at all but just somebody who looked like him.”

  Midge promised. He was forcibly reminded of that promise a few minutes later, when as he was still nursing his first martini he heard his wife’s clear, brittle voice from the other end of the long, bare, functional-moderne drawing room. She was trilling at their hostess: “Helen, my dear! Just guess if you can who Midge thought he saw today right here in Shoreham! Give up? It was Pat, Helen, Pat Montague!”

  Helen took it without even batting her wide, sleepy aquamarine eyes. Her beautiful, almost too-tranquil face blossomed into a smile, the little-girl smile that always started with a twist of her mouth. “Really? Dear old Pat. How was he looking? Was he still in uniform or—”

  Then, without waiting for an answer, Helen picked up the martini mixer and refilled somebody’s glass, which really didn’t need it at all. With the greatest of poise she proceeded to set the massive crystal cylinder down on thin air about six inches from the edge of the blond-mahogany coffee table.

  After the deluge it was of course Adele who sounded off with the first “Ohs” of sympathy. Across the room her husband looked at her dispassionately and wondered how it would feel to take that thin white neck in his hands and twist it. Just because of things like this.

  But somehow the moment passed. The party wasn’t well under way as yet, and Adele and Midge were the only people here who had known Helen when she was Helen Abbott, the only ones who realized how Pat had once fitted into the picture.

  They—and Thurlow Abbott, of course. But her father didn’t count; he hadn’t counted very much since the days when bootleg gin had done something to his vocal cords, ending his career as a matinee-idol tenor in musical comedy. At this moment he was down on his creaky though well-tailored knees, trying to be helpful and mopping at his daughter’s lime-green hostess gown with a napkin coyly printed in silver “Helen and Huntley.”

  Adele moved away, and Midge came up quickly behind her. “That was a nice fox pass,” he said in a low voice. “All I can say, it’s a good thing Cairns isn’t here yet.”

  “I found out, anyway,” Adele murmured, half to herself. But she wouldn’t tell him what.

  Somebody at the canapé table said that their host had been kept late at the office and would be out on the five-o’clock. Meanwhile, with Helen swiftly disappearing upstairs to do something about another gown and some different eyeshadow, the guests rearranged themselves, scattering through the vastness of the lower floor and the paved patio outside. Midge stood aloof for a few minutes, like a man on a springboard looking down dubiously into troubled waters.

  A handsome, coffee-colored youth in a white jacket went by, and he hailed him. “Martinis?”

  “Yassuh! With olive or without olive?”

  “Nope, no olives. Can’t stand ’em. I want mine without onion.”

  The boy laughed politely.

  “That wasn’t so very funny,” Midge said.

  “Nossuh,” agreed the boy. He moved away, but Midge managed to grab a glass.

  “And to think that I used to enjoy these rat races,” he said to himself. Then his eyes brightened as he saw a pair of incredibly luscious twins across the room, duplicate pinup girls come alive. Probably models, Midge thought. If he went over and paid court to them Adele would froth at the mouth for a week. Besides, they were a couple of inches taller than Midge was. It would also, he thought, be quite a job to get them separated.

  Adele herself had clamped her hooks on to Harry Radebaugh, the dark-eyed, prematurely gray young surgeon who’d opened his own clinic in the village and had made so much money the first two years that he’d bought the old Bailey house and remodeled it. She was probably, Midge decided, entertaining him with an account of her insomnia. But she had eyes in the back of her head; he knew that from bitter experience. The twins wouldn’t be worth it.

  He went over to the table again and made a Dagwood special for himself out of caviar, cream cheese with chives, sausage, and an oyster. It would probably be all the dinner he would get.

  Then he looked up to see his host, Huntley Cairns, come hurrying into the room through the front doors. He was apologizing right and left, which was typical. Cairns was the sort of man who was always begging you to forgive him for shaking your hand while wearing a glove, or because the big car was laid up and he had to take you to the village in the station wagon, or because there wasn’t any cognac, there was only Scotch and bourbon.

  “Sorry I’m so late, but better late than never,” Cairns was saying. “Been working like a dog all day and I’m dirty as a pig. Drink up, everybody, and I’ll be back as soon as I get cleaned up.”

  He was a little man, broad in the beam, with the breast pocket of his neat pinstripe blue suit crammed with gold pens and pencils. “Bet he comes down togged out in something sharp and two-toned, probably with suede shoes,” Midge said to himself.

  He must have said it aloud, for someone beside him asked, “W
hat’s that?”

  It was Bill Harcourt, a large cheery man who was apt to tell hairy-dog stories on the third drink and pass out on the fourth. He lived, so far as any one could tell, on the food and drink he picked up at parties, which he could scent ten miles off, and on memories of his family’s pre-1929 money.

  “Hi,” Midge said. “Just talking to myself.”

  Harcourt nodded blankly. “How’s it by you? Still grounded?”

  “They let me go up in elevators now,” Midge confided, and looked towards the stairs. Huntley Cairns was turning to the right at the landing. It must be true, then, that he and Helen had separate bedrooms—separate suites, even, for she had turned to the left when she rushed up to change.

  Midge felt suddenly sorry for his host. Money wouldn’t buy everything, at that. Of course it would buy more than pants buttons would, which was about all he would have if the plant finally closed down. Test pilots rarely saved a good deal of money, especially test pilots with nothing to test and given a courtesy job fiddling around with blueprints and T squares.

  “I should have taken the job with Howard Hughes when I had a chance,” Midge decided “Then when production slacked off I could go out and help put up three-sheets of movie stars’ bosoms.” He laughed, and realized that he was laughing all by himself. Looking over the crowd, he decided he would just as soon stay by himself. He could see Ava Bennington trying to catch his eye, but he was allergic to Navy wives, especially when their husbands were ashore. Besides, whenever he was near her he found it difficult to resist the temptation to ask her if the old tradition was true—about call-house madams saving up their profits so they could retire and marry Annapolis men.

  Midge deftly managed to avoid her and then nearly ran into mountainous old Mame Boad, who owned half the village, including the house he rented. She sported a string of yellow pearls as large as .38 bullets around her wattled neck, and the reddish-brown dress she wore made her look exactly like a turkey. Her daughter Trudy, long in the tooth and very freckled, was close behind her. According to rumor, she was not allowed to smoke or drink yet, though she must be nearly thirty. This, Midge felt, called for a strategic withdrawal.

  He withdrew, heading out on to the patio, but there was a sprinkle of rain and he came back, to become involved in the little circle around Colonel Wyatt, a fierce old eagle of a man who had guessed wrong about the military ability of both the Japanese and the Russians, and whose life had become embittered thereby.

  Midge ricocheted off the edge of this gathering and finally found a haven in the library, a long narrow room lined almost to the ceiling with books. There was a desk at one end and a large fireplace faced by a divan at the other. The cushions were stuffed with real down, and Midge Beale sank into them with a deep gratefulness of spirit.

  There had been absolutely no intention on his part to doze off, as he swore later. He intended only to close his eyes for a few moments to rest them from the glare and the smoke. But he jerked wide awake some time later, to hear voices nearby. It took a minute or two for him to orient himself—and then he stiffened, keeping down well behind the back of the divan.

  “… and it could be a blind,” said somebody in a hushed, male voice. “Cairns is foxier than he looks.”

  “Nonsense. Look, here’s The Dark Gentleman, Beautiful Joe, and two Terhune’s collie stories. “That was a voice Midge recognized, that of Jed Nicolet, a hotshot lawyer with offices in the Empire State, who always spent his summers out here in a big house half a mile down the road that hadn’t been changed in thirty years.

  For some reason the two men were cataloguing Cairns’s library. Midge wished they would go away and let him sleep.

  “He could have let somebody else pick ’em out. Not his wife—I don’t think Helen ever reads anything except maybe the ads in Vogue. But her sister—”

  “I can speak for her,” Nicolet said. “Lawn Abbott doesn’t read anything except modern poetry. By the way I wish she’d show up. There’s a girl who—” He stopped short. “Say, look here, Bennington! Listen to this—the book just fell open!”

  Bennington. That would be Ava’s husband, Commander Sam Bennington, who’d retired from the Navy six months ago to sit on his big behind and help spend Ava’s money. He was still talking. “Or he could have ordered his books by the linear foot, to match the color scheme.”

  “Sam, I said look here!” There was something in Jed Nicolet’s voice so compelling that Midge couldn’t resist poking his head up above the back of the divan. Both men were eagerly bent over a slender red volume which Nicolet had taken from a case near where he stood at the far end of the room. The young lawyer’s fox face was alight with eagerness. “Listen to this!”

  “Wait!” Bennington suddenly said. He turned and started towards the divan. Behind him Jed Nicolet hastily whipped the book back into the shelves again. Then he, too, converged on Midge.

  “Spying on us, eh?” Bennington growled unpleasantly. “Get up!”

  Midge started to rise and then sank quickly back again. “Oh, no,” he retorted. “I don’t bite on that one.”

  “You sneaking little eavesdropper—”

  “How do you make that out? I was here first.”

  “Take it easy, Sam,” Jed Nicolet put in. “Look, Beale, this is a little awkward. We didn’t know you were here.”

  “That goes double. I didn’t even expect to see you at this party, not after the trouble you had with Cairns.”

  Nicolet hesitated. “Sure, why not? After all, Helen is—well, she’s Helen. And Lawn is a very good friend of mine. After all, why hold a grudge? The vet did pull Wotan through. He limps a little on one leg, that’s all. Spoils him for show. But I thought it over and I realized that Cairns may not have seen him after all—a black Dane on a dark night. I decided this is too small a town to hold a grudge in.”

  Commander Bennington snorted. “I still say a man should know if he ran his car smack into a two-hundred-pound dog. But never mind that. Look, Beale. About what we were talking about—”

  “I didn’t hear a thing,” Midge hastily assured them. And then the tension was broken by the booming voice of Mame Boad as she swept in upon them through the doorway.

  “Well, what did you find?” she demanded breathlessly. “I’m so impatient that I—” She stopped short as she saw their expressions.

  “We were just talking about things,” Nicolet admitted.

  “And that reminds me,” Mrs. Boad cried. “This is a charming house Huntley Cairns has thrown together, all full of gadgets and cute as a bug’s ear. I like it, even if I do miss the nice old-fashioned place that used to stand here. But what this house needs is the patter of little feet, and I mean paws. Next litter of pups my bitch has, I’m going to make Huntley buy one for Helen.” Here she cocked a quizzical eye. “Or doesn’t our host like dogs?”

  “The question before the court,” Jed Nicolet told her, “is how young Beale feels about them.”

  Mame Boad blinked. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Don’t mind him. He looks to me like a man who’s just crazy about dogs.”

  They all looked at Midge. “Well, in a way I am,” he admitted. “Only the doctors said that my asthma was caused by dog hairs, so I—” He gulped. “What’s everybody so serious for, anyway? Will it be okay if I buy a Mexican hairless?”

  Bennington’s face, weathered by years of salt winds and alcohol fumes, was redder than usual now. “Look here, Beale, since you know this much you might as well—”

  It was Helen’s cool, sweet voice which interrupted them this time. “So here you all are! My very nicest guests, hiding out from the party!” Jed Nicolet moved forward, but she patted his shoulder in passing and took Midge’s arm in hers. “Come with me, young man. Don’t be so elusive—Leilani Linton is just dying to dance with you, and we’ve got a lot of new rumba and samba records.” She was smiling, but there was something strange and set in her smile, as if she had turned it on and couldn’t find the switch to turn it off.

&nb
sp; So Midge gladly suffered himself to be led along. Nor was he very surprised to find that neither Leilani nor Aloha Linton happened to be anywhere in sight and that it was Helen herself who wanted to dance with him. She even kicked off her shoes so that she was on his level.

  But instead of taking the position for the rumba, she came breathtakingly close into his arms, the lush perfection of her body and the scent in her hair making his knees suddenly turn to rubber. Her lovely face was flushed, and he would have thought her a bit tight except that he hadn’t seen her take even one drink.

  Helen didn’t want to dance either. She simply wanted to ask him something. It took them one turn around the room before he could guess, because she barely hinted at the thing that was on her mind.

  “Oh!” Midge said. “Well, of course I’m not at all sure that it was Pat. He looked a little taller and straighter, but that could be the Army. I just had a quick glimpse of his face as we came past. You know how Adele drives.”

  “You—you came past?” she breathed in his ear.

  “Oh, yes,” he admitted. “About halfway up the hill. Pat, or whoever it was, seemed headed this way.”

  For a moment she stiffened, and then sagged so that he held almost all her weight in his arms. “Look, Helen,” he whispered. “Is anything wrong? I mean is there anything I can do?”

  “You can get me a drink,” she said, but when he came back with a double martini in each hand she was gone. He looked for her vainly in the drawing room, in the playroom, in the dining room and hall, and finally downed both drinks, for economy’s sake. A pleasantly pink fog began to close in upon him at that point. He had memories later of trying to play ping-pong with Trudy Boad and of losing the ball somewhere and of looking for Adele and not being able to find her either.

  When the fog lifted again he was somehow in the kitchen, that wonderful Flash Gordon kitchen with the automatic everything and the glass-walled stove and refrigerator, drinking milk out of a quart bottle and singing with Bill Harcourt, Doc Radebaugh, and the houseboy, whose name was Jeff and who had a fine deep contrabass.