“My mother's big present was a subscription to Seventeen magazine. Like I haven't been buying it since I was twelve. Now I read Glamour. But I guess I should be happy she noticed I am seventeen now. Mostly she doesn't notice anything about me except how much she wants me to get into Julliard and leave.
“She's already ordered replacements for me and Cady—two little Korean refugees who play violins. She's fixing the attic room for them, but I know as soon as I'm gone, they'll be down here in a flash.
“October 24
“They're here. And they are so-o-o-o cute. Excuse me while I throw up. Mother calls them Kay and May, but when they say their own names, they say a lot more syllables than that. They are supposed to be 11 and 12, but if they are, they are midgets. And of course they don't speak any English like they were supposed to. But boy, can they play the hell out of those teeny tiny violins.
“People are not puppies. You can't just get a new one. I don't know why Mother thinks these little doll people are going to make up for the fact that Cady's gone and she doesn't even write any more. I guess she's too busy learning to be an Ivy League snot.
“November 3
“I had the dream again. I woke up totally sweaty and freezing. It always starts with my mother pushing me out onto a big stage where there's a grand piano. I walk out and start to play the Liszt I'm doing for my Julliard audition. I watch my hands playing on the keyboard, but they are not my hands. They're all pudgy and fat, with hideous, sausage-y fingers. My arms are flabby and puffy, too. I feel a pain around my waist and the button pops off the waistband of my skirt. Then when I look down, I see my blouse isn't buttoned at all, and these humongous, squishy boobs are squeezing over the top of my bra.
“The audience starts hooting and stomping and a man in the front row begins to boo. He's wearing a Nazi uniform, with one of those helmets. The whole audience is Nazi soldiers and they laugh and hoot louder and louder…
“I want to stop playing, but my mother is behind me with her hand on my shoulder. It's cold and heavy, like something dead. She keeps telling me I have to keep playing, 'You must not stop playing,' she says in this awful whisper. 'It is the only thing that keeps them from killing us.'
“That's when I wake up.
“It's horrible. I tried to talk to Mother about it, but she said it's because of my audition and everybody gets nervous about auditions and I should just practice more.
“November 12
“It's 4 a.m. I woke up from that stupid dream again. I want to talk to Cady, but Mother says long distance phone calls cost too much and now Cady isn't even coming home for Thanksgiving because she's going to visit her real mother in whatever slummy place she lives in Boston.
“Her real mother's getting married, if you can imagine—to some boyfriend she's been living in sin with for ten years. Cady says she couldn't marry him before because of the Welfare, but now they have a business of their own, so they've got some money and they're spending it all on a big wedding. As Arthur says, there's a reason why these people stay poor.”
“Little racist.” Athena gave a yank to Cady's scalp.
“She's venting anger at me,” Cady said. “It sounds as if she felt abandoned after I left. I guess I did get pretty caught up in my new life at school. And I'd forgotten the Korean girls arrived when she was still there. Astrid was trying so hard to do good, taking in gifted foster children, that I'm sure it never occurred to her that Regina might feel neglected. I know she thought having other young people around was good for Regina, too.”
“Funny how people never ask kids how they feel about these things,” said Athena. “They just say, 'shut up and I'll tell you what you want.' Kinda like the government.”
“So are we gonna read or talk politics?” Fatima said. “Regina is about to go to this damn audition. Am I the only one who wants to find out what happened?”
“Read, child.” Cady was feeling more tender toward Fatima. Was it because she knew the girl was plump?
“Now some of this is written real big,” Fatima said. “You know, like all capital letters; so that's why I'm shouting, okay?”
“November 19
“WHAT AM I GOING TO DO? How The HELL Do I Tell Her?
“I'm on the stupid, smelly train, and I have to go home to my mother and perfect little Kay and May—because there's no place else to go, and I can't kill myself.
“I just tried.
“I stood beside the tracks at Grand Central Station and watched the train come in and looked at the tracks and I wanted to be down there, squished and dead. I could see myself there, in little bloody pieces, like I was looking into the future, but then I couldn't move. It was like some invisible person was holding onto me and not letting me jump.
“I didn't go to the audition. I missed it.
“Yesterday, when the train got into Grand Central an hour late, and I just about had time to make it up to Julliard, I get in a cab and this old woman pushes right in with me and says, 'Penn Station, and step on it.' And after about two minutes of insane driving, there we are, and the old lady is paying the cab driver for both of us, and she's grabbing a porter and yelling, 'Run, dear, we've got a train to catch,' and before I can say one word, I'm following my suitcase onto a train and the conductor is closing the door and saying, 'bo-o-ard!'
“There I am, on my way to stupid Philadelphia. The lady sits on the train with me, and she's going on about Bryn Mawr College, and finally I realize she saw this diary sticking out of my tote bag and so she figured Bryn Mawr is where I'm going. Finally I get her to understand my sister gave it to me, but she just keeps talking.
“I guess she went to the college back in the nineteen twenties, but she never graduated because she got married and had a bunch of kids who all neglect her now. So I go along with her fantasy that I'm on my way to visit Cady and I don't have the heart to tell her about the audition.
“I guess I sort of make my mind numb so every time I think of Julliard, I kind of skitter fast over the thought—like when you run barefoot over hot sand.
“By the time we get to 30th Street station, I almost believe I've been planning to visit Cady all along. When we get off the train, the lady says, 'Take the Paoli Local. You get off after Haverford. Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynwood Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr. Those are the stops. You know how you remember that?—Old Maids Never Wed And Have Babies.' She pushed me toward the tracks saying, 'Old Maids Never Wed And Have Babies' over and over.
“At first I think she's some kind of a mental case, but I find the train that says 'Paoli' and, sure enough those are the stops: after Haverford—'have', is Bryn Mawr—'babies'. I get off and follow three girls who look like students. They turn out to live in Cardigan Hall, the same dorm as Cady, so I walk with them like everything is completely normal and Cady's expecting me and I'm not missing my Julliard audition and totally wrecking my life.
“Everything's feeling dreamy and crazy. The girls are friendly, because I guess Cady's pretty popular since she organized the college delegation to the March on Washington. But what's weird is they all talk the same and have long straight hair parted in the middle and the same wheat-colored jeans and even the same name, which is Sybil.
“Really. They're Sybil Pinkerton, called 'Pinky'; Sybil Freeman, called 'Freebie'; and Sybil Diaz-Dreyfuss, who everybody calls 'Sybil D-D'. They start calling me 'Gina' like I'm some Italian movie star.
“Cardigan Hall looks like a combination of a church and Count Dracula's castle; dark gray stone with those battlements on top that look like big teeth. Inside it's more cheerful, but there's a tall curving staircase and a mahogany banister carved with weird owls.
“Cady isn't around when we get there, but the Sybils show me to a room called 'the Smoker' where I can wait. They say Cady's probably at the Lantern Night rehearsal. I already knew about Lantern Night from the lady on the train. It's an annual College tradition, when all the students dress in black robes and parade around with lanterns singing hymns to the Greek
goddess Athena.”
Fatima stopped and gave a snort. “Is that right, Athena? Are you some kind of a goddess in Greece?”
Athena gave one of her laughs. “I am some kind of a goddess right here in this bedroom, sweetie.” She paused in her braiding. “And don't you forget it. I think you better learn you some of them hymns.”
There was a moment of odd, charged silence.
“I think you had better learn you some manners, goddess or no goddess.” Fatima spoke in a tense, throaty voice. “Sorry Reverend. Let's get back to the story here.”
Cady decided she didn't have the energy to worry about whatever tension was going on between the two women.
Besides, Fatima was reading again:
“So I sit in the smoking room for a while, staring at this carved wooden owl. It has these weird eyes that stare at me no matter which way I look, and it seems to know what a phony I'm being and how I've blown my chance at getting into college anywhere. I'm about to find a phone and call Julliard and say I've been kidnapped or something, but then Cady shows up.
“She looks thin and hip and beautiful in tight jeans like the Sybils' and her hair is all frizzed out like a halo. At first she doesn't recognize me—maybe because I've gained even more weight than she's lost—but then she screams my name and gives me this big huge hug.
“She asks how the audition was and I almost tell her, but because of the Sybils, I kind of smile and say since I came as far as New York I thought I might as well hit Philadelphia. She asks if Mother knows I changed my plans and if I've talked to her since the audition—I let her kind of assume I decided to come after it was over—and I keep smiling and not saying much, so she calls home and somehow makes it okay with Mother.
“We find out tickets to Lantern Night are sold out, but I'm not devastated because there's this big party afterward at somebody's estate in Chestnut Hill that I am going to get to go to, even though they're worried for a while about getting me a ride. Darius is coming from Princeton in his MG, which only seats two.
“But the Sybils solve everything by getting me a date. A date. Me. Of course I don't let them know I'm barely seventeen and never had a date in my life except with Artie, who's never even kissed me. What happened is there's this guy Mick who's coming up from Washington DC, a friend of Sybil D-D's date. Freebie's supposed to go with him but a Haverford guy she likes asked her out at the last minute, so everybody's ecstatic that I'm willing to go on her blind date. I guess Sybil D-D's date is some kind of international playboy and nobody knows much about this guy Mick except he's a foreign exchange student.
“So I'm about to go on my first date ever—the kind you read about in Glamour magazine—so who cares about Julliard?”
“So that was it.” Cady sighed. “Not such a big mystery. She skipped her Julliard audition because it didn't matter. That was another age; 'Why bother with a career? Someday my prince will come'.”
“So what?” Fatima said. “For this girl, the prince did come, remember?”
“But not that night,” Cady said. “Regina did not meet herself any princes that night.”
Chapter 29—Cady: Wise and Foolish Virgins
“So this guy Mick didn't turn out to be Prince Max?” Fatima flipped diary pages. “When do we get to the Cinderella part?”
“Not for a while,” Cady said. “She didn't meet Max until years later, after she was famous. But come to think of it, Freebie told me Regina's real date; Mikhail, his name was, did show up the next day, carrying one of Regina's purple Capezio flats. I don't suppose I ever bothered to tell her. We never found the other shoe, so there wasn't much point.”
Cady felt a stab of guilt and tried to remember why she had been so cavalier about the whole thing. There had been so much going on.
“That was the weekend of the big fire in town—one of the big mansions went up in flames. Two former Princeton students were found dead inside; too drunk to get themselves out. It upset Darius a lot.”
She only half-recalled the events of that long ago Lantern Night. What she remembered most was that it was the weekend she made the decision to start sleeping with Darius; when she started on the Pill. Now the image of Lantern Night was always connected in her mind with the parable of the wise and foolish virgins; the wise virgins who kept their spiritual lanterns burning for the bridegroom to come, and the foolish ones who let their lights go out.
For some reason a light had gone out in Regina that night. Cady had never known why.
Fatima began to read —
“I'm so excited to be going out on a real date that I hardly mind that Darius shows up right away and takes Cady out to dinner and leaves me alone with the Sybils.
“Sybil D-D is a junior, I think, and Pinky and Freebie are sophomores. I have no idea what any of them is majoring in, because all they do is play cards and talk sex. They say the word 'virgin' like it's a disease or something.
“Sybil D-D even has one boyfriend who's a married man. He's a foreign diplomat or something, and he once picked her up by landing a helicopter on the roof of Cardigan Hall. Pinky has had to go to Puerto Rico twice for abortions, and Freebie once did it with three different Whiffenpoofs in the same night after a Yale mixer. So I'm staying pretty quiet except to drop Arthur's name and say he's at art school in New York.
“Luckily they decide to dress me, because the clothes I brought are too unhip for words. Sybil D-D sets my hair on huge rollers so it's stick-straight, and Freebie makes up my eyes so they look Jean-Shrimpton huge. Pinky lets me wear a purple velvet baby-doll dress she bought on Carnaby Street in London, and some fishnet tights.
“Pinky is the clown of the three, and while the other two are doing my hair and make-up, she reads out loud from this book called Sex and the Single Girl. She fakes this kindergarten-school teacher voice; 'I have yet to encounter a happy virgin. Quite the contrary, I feel she eventually finds social, religious and maternal approval quite inadequate compensation for not ever really belonging to anyone, and her state of purity becomes almost an embarrassing cross to bear. An affair represents a whole new set of problems, of course, but to my way of thinking, they're healthier.'
“Then Freebie says, 'Oh, please, please, let me get healthy tonight!'
“It all seems pretty funny. So I pretend everything's going to be fine and the biggest thing I let myself worry about is that this guy Mick might be short and I'll feel huge and gross.
“But then, when Lantern Night is over and Sybil D-D and Pinky are already gone to the party with their dates, I'm sitting in the smoker with Freebie, trying to learn how to smoke—she says I can lose twenty pounds like magic if I do—I start to worry I've been stood up. She's still waiting for the guy from Haverford and telling me blind date horror stories.
“Then this gorgeous guy walks in who looks like Dr. Zhivago—what a bod. I get all excited, and stand up, feeling kind of dizzy from the smoke and grinning like a moron, but Freebie pulls me back and says no blind date ever looked like that. Sure enough, he talks for a minute to the maid on bells and walks out again.
“Finally Freebie's date shows up—a scruffy, beatniky guy—and I'm getting pretty sure I'm going to have to spend the whole night sitting there smoking Larks and thinking about how I'd blew my chance at Julliard. But a few minutes later, a red-faced blond guy in a tuxedo saunters in. He studies the owls on the staircase like he's in a museum; humming some opera thing to himself. Then, he pretends he's just seen me and looks me up and down, like I'm in a museum, too.
“'Oh, I get it,' he says. 'Childishness, in juxtaposition with the trash of the net stockings. Terribly Carnaby Street.'
“'Are you Mick?' I say, praying he's not.
“He lights a cigarette. 'And you are?'
“'Gina. Regina, actually. Freebie—Sybil, that is, who was supposed to meet you, had something come up, so I hope you don't mind taking me to the party instead.' I don't know why I apologize. I'm not the one who's late. I guess I'm afraid he's as disappointed as I am.
&nbs
p; “'I don't suppose I mind,' he says, checking me out again. 'Although I shall miss seeing Freebie-Sybil.'
“'We'd better go. We're already really late for the party.' I need some fresh air, after the cigarettes.
“He follows me out, still humming. 'That's mine,' he says. He's pointing at an old Triumph—all wood, with running boards and everything. Maybe because it's so cool I don't think too hard about getting in. But he drives so fast my hair gets plastered against my face and I spend the whole time trying to keep what's left of my hairdo out of my eyes. Then he squeals the car through an iron gate, and we're bumping along a road marked 'private drive.'
“'That was quick!' I say.
“But he can't hear because he's singing the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhauser.
“They said Chestnut Hill was a ritzy place, but I'm not ready for this. It's like we're on the set for Cleopatra. We walk into an indoor pavilion with columns around a blue and gold swimming pool. It's dark except for lights under the water—all echo-y and weird. I'm freaking out until I hear music coming from the other end of the pavilion. I keep following, expecting to find the party there.
“But nobody's inside when we step down into a huge parlor, except a man in a tuxedo playing a Steinway grand. All the other furniture is covered up with white dust covers. The tuxedo-man is trying to play The Moonlight Sonata, but he sounds like one of my mother's second-year students.
“He stops playing and looks me up and down.
“'This is Gina-Regina,' says Mick.
“The piano guy keeps staring like I'm for dinner.
“'And you are?' I say. This guy is so rude.
“'Franz.' He gives me a stupid smirk. 'My name is Franz Liszt. And this is my friend little Freddy Chopin.'
“'Right,' I say, sarcastic. 'And this is a party.'
“'That's Freddy's fault,' says Franz. 'Why didn't you bring any others, cousin dear?'
Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries Page 91
