A Cup Of Tea

by Amy Ephron

  He stared at her. After a moment, he said, “It is you, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

  He teased her. “Afraid of me?” he said.

  Uncomfortable with the familiarity, she didn’t answer him. She shook her head. Then felt the need to put a proper amount of distance between them. “Let me get you your—Miss Fell’s hats.”

  “It’s such a surprise to see you here,” he called out to the back room, but it was Dora who’d returned from lunch who came out of the back room bearing the many hat boxes.

  “Oh—” said Philip, catching himself, as Dora started to gush at him. “You’ve come for the wedding hats. It’s been such a rush.”

  “Yes, of course it has,” he said.

  “The war…I don’t think we’ve ever worked this quickly,” said Dora making an odd face. “Although, if you ask me,” she added, “it’s about time we went over there.”

  “Yes, ma’am, of course it is,” said Philip.

  “And then she kept adding things—”

  Philip laughed. “She always does that. That’s why I wouldn’t let her come today. I was afraid she would change something else. Do I owe you something?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” said Dora, shaking her head, “I’ve put it on her account.”

  Eleanor walked back into the shop from the workroom carrying even more hat boxes. She said, as she would to anyone who had come into the shop, “I can help you with these to the car.” And then, aware of Dora’s watchful gaze, she straightened and added, “There are certainly too many for you to carry.”

  Dora opened the shop door for them, and looked after them curiously as they walked to the car.

  “How are you?” asked Philip as they walked to his car.

  Eleanor, suddenly shy, didn’t answer.

  “I can see how you are,” he said. “You’re fine.”

  She smiled at this.

  “Better than the last time I saw you, anyway,” said Philip.

  “Certainly better than that,” she said.

  Eleanor and Philip approached his car, juggling the many hat boxes. “I’d hoped that she was coming in,” said Eleanor. “I wanted to—”

  Philip interrupted, “Thank her?”

  “No, I wanted her to see me. I should thank her.”

  She helped him load the hat boxes into the back of the car. One of the boxes she was carrying flew from off of the top of the others. She leaned over to catch it as Philip did the same and caught it just before it hit the ground. The effect of it was the two of them were pressed together. She set the hat boxes down on the pavement and took a breath.

  “I wanted to see you,” he said very softly. Her face was framed in reflection in the back window of the car. She was so very pretty. Her clothes were simple, almost elegant. She looked a long way from the street.

  Dora, who was sitting at the front table doing paperwork, looked out the window and thought she saw him lean down and whisper something in Eleanor’s ear.

  It was almost dark out when they closed up for the night. Eleanor seemed in a hurry but stayed and helped as Dora fluttered fitfully about the shop methodically and meticulously removing the hats from the hatstands and putting them away in drawers as she did each evening.

  “I can never sleep when I’ve finished a job like this,” said Dora. ‘You’d think it would be during. That I’d be so nervous how they’d turn out that I couldn’t sleep. But for me, it’s after. I’ve given them the hats and…” She gestured with her hand. “They never invite us to the wedding, you know.”

  Dora tucked another hat in a drawer after wrapping it carefully in tissue paper and closed the drawer more forcefully than necessary. “Not that I think much of her,” she said, “or her hats for that matter. As Henry James once said about one of his characters”—she gave a little bit of a laugh—“‘Her imagination is bounded on the East by Madison Avenue.’ And she doesn’t think anyone else can have an opinion.” Dora placed another hat in a drawer. “I’m off to my sister’s,” she said. And then in a completely different tone of voice added, “You open tomorrow. We should do well. It’s spring. Not that it matters. We’ve done well enough this spring, thanks to the war. I wonder, if it were in our backyard, if we would be so festive.”

  There was a carriage parked on the corner of the street. If Dora had not chosen to go out the back door she probably would have seen Eleanor arrive at the corner and Philip Alsop reach from inside the car and open the passenger side door.

  It had simply been his intention to offer her a ride home. He did not intend to take her for a drink. He did not think he was going to kiss her. There was something about her that made him want to take care of her a little. Eleanor was shy, hesitant, at first, that she ought not to accept a ride with him but he insisted. She stepped into the carriage. Her face was lit softly from the streetlight. He took her gloved hand in his to help her in and all the other things occurred to him. He did not immediately let go of her hand.

  Had she had too many glasses of champagne so that time seemed almost frozen, slower than usual, sound oddly amplified, as men on the other side of the room whispered about liaisons and stock prices and whatever men whispered about in a room like this. The cigarette girl paused in front of her. Rosemary declined. She was feeling too light-headed to smoke. The restaurant was dimly lit and on a very high story of the building, with large windows so that the city was visible outside, the skyline etched in shadow, almost minimalist, jaggedly beautiful, with the row of brownstones and the river visible just beyond. She was acutely aware of a woman on the other side of the room laughing, surrounded by three admiring men, punctuated by the black piano player, Charlie Miles, whom she’d known since she was a child, crooning a song about love. It wasn’t like Philip to be late. She felt strangely unguarded as though a layer had been stripped away and one look at her face would reveal the anxiousness she felt. She forced a smile and walked over to the piano. She set her champagne glass down on the top of the piano, and Charlie broke into an instrumental and began to speak to her about the other people in the room, specifically a couple dancing on the dance floor.

  “He thinks she’s in love with him,” Charlie said to her under his breath, “but if you could have seen her last night with Freddy Bagley…”

  “Yes,” Rosemary laughed, “but she has no reputation to protect.” He still hadn’t arrived. Should she take a seat at a table and order herself dinner and pretend that he’d told her he was going to be delayed? She took a sip of champagne and started to feel a little less at sea. And then a man’s hand was on her back.

  “I’m sorry I’m so late.” It was Philip. “I got your hats. I was”—he hesitated, “at the War Office…” Rosemary looked at him questioningly. “At least I haven’t missed dinner,” he said. “And you, I trust”—he looked gratefully at Charlie Miles—“have been well entertained.” He put his arm casually on her shoulder.

  Did she expect him to remark on her dress or the line of kohl under her eyes that made her eyelashes look longer than usual? Did she expect him to be knocked out by her when he walked into the room. Am I pretty, Philip?

  It was a few days later that Rosemary was sitting at her desk opening her mail with the silver letter opener that she’d purchased from Mr. Rhenquist. Philip was lying on his back on the couch with his feet up on the arm of the sofa. “I should go to the Foundling Hospital’s annual tea,” she said opening yet another invitation. “Will you go with me?”

  “Oh, Rose, do I have to?”

  She didn’t answer him because she had immediately opened another letter and was distracted by its contents. A sort of florid card, one you would buy at a dimestore, not the usual engraved stationery. She opened the card which had a note written on it and some money stuffed inside it.

  “I hate it when you don’t answer me,” he said. “Is this what I have to look forward to—years and years as a neglected…husband?”

  Rosemary interrupted him. “Philip, she�
�s sent me back my money.”

  He knew instantly who she meant.

  “I never expected her to repay me,” Rosemary said. “Do you remember that girl I picked up?”

  “Who?” he said, appearing to still be distracted.

  “You know. Miss Smith. The one I picked up that day in the rain and brought home for tea. Do you think maybe I helped her?” Rosemary looked very pleased with herself.

  On the couch, Philip has shut his eyes.

  The shops were closing for the night. The streets were crowded with taxis, carriages, people on their way home on foot or running to catch the streetcar, women with children hanging on their skirts making hurried stops in food-stores and the apothecary shop on the corner which closed conveniently a half-hour after everyone else.

  The street lamps were just coming on as Eleanor came out of the hat shop and found Philip’s carriage parked on the corner. He’d let his driver go and was holding the reins of the two chestnut mares himself, a driver’s cap pulled down over his forehead. Despite it, she recognized him at once. He’d rolled the window down as if he were waiting for her. “Did we have an appointment?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said, “I wanted to see you.” He smiled at her and she remembered again how charming he was but it didn’t deter her.

  “Oh. And I’m here whenever you want to see me. In between the other things?” She started to walk away from him down the crowded street.

  Did he think she was going to be easy? No, if he’d thought that, he wouldn’t have been interested in her.

  He started to follow her in the carriage. “You’re making a scene,” he said, casually, as if he were amused by her.

  “I’m making a scene?”

  He smiled again.

  “Don’t you care?” she asked him, surprised that he would take a chance like this.

  “I just thought we could have dinner,” he said as politely as he could.

  “Actually have dinner. I actually have other plans.”

  “Another time, then,” he said. He closed the window and the carriage took off down the street. And then as abruptly as this began, it ended. It wasn’t clear who’d won this exchange.

  He didn’t feel like going to his club where there would certainly be talk of war. He directed his driver instead to take him to Jane Howard’s.

  Jane Howard and Philip Alsop had been friends since they were children, since before Philip’s father died. She remembered when he lived in the big house on the corner of 9th Street and Fifth Avenue, when he wore short pants and had a pony of his own, when his mother was still beautiful before the hardships of her life ravaged her once unlined face.

  He had always confided in her, never questioned her loyalty to him and with good reason, as Jane had always been the person in his (and Rosemary’s) life whom they told their darkest secrets to, and she, in turn, had incited them to do things she would never have done herself. They had the kind of comfort with each other that cousins had, a mischievous conspiratorial streak from too many unchaperoned hours when they were children and the grown-ups were busy doing whatever grown-ups did on idle summer afternoons and evenings.

  Jane was standing at the mantel with her back to the room smoking a cigarette. Philip was lying on the couch. She had offered him wine which he declined preferring something stronger, whiskey neat, and was on his second glass.

  “It’s like an addiction,” he said with some excitement and a small degree of distress.

  Jane turned to him and took a long draw on her cigarette. “She has that effect. Certainly on me.”

  Philip looked at her as though they had a mutual understanding.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “But I was compelled to follow her that night. She looked as if no one had ever taken care of her. I—sent her to Dora.”

  “So, I have you to blame,” he said.

  Jane raised an eyebrow, amused, unmindful of the consequences all of it might have.

  It was late at night when Eleanor, certainly innocent that she’d been the object of any conversation, walked down the street with Josie Kennedy. The two of them had been at a late dinner after the theater and had a couple of drinks with a few friends of Josie’s, a fairly innocent night all in all. As they approached the dreaded Wetzel’s boarding house (as they sometimes called the dear woman behind her back), Philip was standing on the corner under a streetlight. He looked completely relaxed, as though he had nothing better to do than stand on the street corner enjoying the night air.

  Eleanor was annoyed because it was starting to feel like an intrusion. She had come out of the shop that afternoon and found Philip’s carriage parked on the corner—as though she should be there at his whim! He was engaged and she was beginning to feel like something he was toying with.

  Josie stood awkwardly a few feet away. Eleanor made no effort to introduce them.

  “I’ll see you at home, then,” Josie said after an awkward moment.

  Eleanor nodded at her and continued to look at Philip. She had some responsibility here. Yes, she had accepted a ride from him, stopped for a drink, and then, feeling the effects of the champagne, had kissed him goodbye but had meant it to be that, a kiss goodbye. It had been a mistake. Did he think she would be so flattered by the attentions of any man like him? That there was something more to this?

  “I didn’t think this was your neighborhood,” she said finally.

  “I don’t deserve that.”

  Eleanor wondered what he thought he did deserve or what right he thought he had to be on her corner. “Are you following me?” she asked him.

  “No, I was waiting for you.” He smiled at her again but there was something in the way he stood, a respectful distance from her, as though he were asking this time.

  “I wish I could do this the right way,” he said. “I don’t have time. I wish I did. If I had time, it—could be different. If I could make an appointment and take you to dinner next week. I don’t feel I have control of this, Eleanor…” His voice trailed off. “Any day I could get my orders. And leave for Europe.”

  “And I’d be here,” she said almost without inflection.

  He stepped in closer and put his hand on her hair. Her inclination was to fall into him. She stopped herself.

  He leaned in and kissed her and the only thing she could do was kiss him back. He led her by the hand to his carriage. But it was never clear with them who was doing the leading.

  The dining room table was elaborately set for one with long ivory candles burning in the imposing silver candelabra. Rosemary’s father, Henry Fell, was sitting alone at the head of the long table reading one of his many reference books and occasionally, absentmindedly taking a sip of consommé from a silver soupspoon, unmindful of the fact that it had grown cold many minutes before. The mahogany doors to the dining room slid open and his daughter glided dramatically into the room. “You’ll have to put your book away, Papa, if you want to eat with me,” she said and kissed him on the forehead. She sat down next to him at the table.

  “And what makes you think I prefer you to my present companion?” he asked teasing, then smiled at her and shut the book although he didn’t trust this sudden attention. “And why is my sweetheart home, tonight?”

  “Oh, I didn’t think we’d been spending enough time together, did you?”

  Henry Fell raised an eyebrow. “And where is Philip?”

  “Playing cards—I think.”

  Rosemary got up and helped herself to an empty soup bowl from the sideboard, a napkin, and a necessary selection of silver. She didn’t actually know where Philip was that night. Had they made plans? She couldn’t actually remember. She sat back down at the table and took the top off the soup tureen. “Is this all we’re having for dinner?” She made a face. “Dull, brown liquid?”

  “Oh, Rosemary. Don’t start with Gertrude.”

  “Oh, Papa, she likes it.” Rosemary smiled at him impishly. She picked up the silver bell on the table and rang for Gertrude to
come from the kitchen. And though she might not be able to control the rest of her life, it was clear she was going to have whatever she wanted for dinner.

  Not so many blocks away, the city was dark as the carriage flew towards Philip’s house. There was an antic, urgent quality to the night as though a collective insanity had gripped the city and all through-out it there were women in the company of men who they knew that they might never see again.

  Eleanor would remember every moment of that night as though it were etched in glass, indelibly. How many stairs there were to his front door, nine, that one light was on in the parlor by the leather chair where she imagined that he sometimes read, that the fifth stair on the staircase leading up to his rooms had a slight crack as though at some point it had suffered water damage…and the carpet was fairly worn at the landing, once a deep purple color that had faded to gray.

  That his bedroom was much less grand than she had imagined it to be. There were no words as he undid the many tiny buttons, of her blouse and then her corset in his bedroom. She looked completely trusting—as though her whole life had been about this moment. The room was barely lit by a gas sconce and the reflected light of a street lamp from outside as they lay fluid in each other’s arms, naked on the bed, as though they belonged together, and, for that moment at least, there was nothing else in the world.

  The next morning, Philip opened his eyes and barely focussed. The bedroom was flooded with sunlight. He put one hand over his eyes to shade them and with his other reached for Eleanor next to him in the bed. But she was already up, bathed, and dressing in the corner of the room with her back to him. He tried to convince her to come back to bed. But she insisted that she had to go to work.