Tales for a Stormy Night

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  It remains to be said of Winthrop—or perhaps of Maiden’s End—that since he had built Woodside, a neo-Tudor mansion that dwarfed the sedate, more modest houses, some of which were historically significant, no one in the community had ever asked him if he was related to other Winthrops of their acquaintance.

  On the afternoon of what became known as the last Winthrop party, Jan Swift stopped by the Adams house to see what Nancy was going to wear. Jan, a plump, self-conscious woman, didn’t like parties, but she went to them. She’d have liked it less not to be asked, and if you didn’t go to one, you might not be asked to the next. Or so Jan feared. What it amounted to was that when the invitation came she was so relieved to have been asked—for Fred’s sake mostly, she told herself—that there was never any doubt of their accepting.

  “Hello?” she called up the stairs. The Adamses still left their door unlocked in the daytime. “Nancy, it’s me.”

  “Hello, you,” Nancy called down, a greeting that always gave Jan pleasure, something about the intimacy of it. Jan had never heard her say it to anyone else. “Come up if you like. Or I’ll be down in a minute. I’m doing a bed in the guest room.”

  Jan climbed the stairs, a little aware of her weight, and wondered what she could wear and be comfortable to dance in that wouldn’t look like a tent. She loved to dance when she got high enough and someone besides Fred asked her. Fred danced much as he did most things, determined to succeed. She stood at the guest-room door and watched Nancy turn down one of the twin beds.

  “A comforter should do him,” Nancy said. It was going to be one of those warm summer nights when people would want to go swimming after the party. Or sailing on the river.

  Jan thought about the word comforter, the coziness of it. “Who’s coming?”

  “Eddie Dorfman. He was Dick’s roommate in college. He shows up now and then on his way somewhere—generally broke, but with great expectations. Is it hot in here? I was going to put him in Ellen’s room, but I don’t like to do that.” Ellen was the oldest of the Adamses’ three daughters.

  “It’ll cool off by bedtime,” Jan said. She was thinking how nice it was for Nancy, the girls of an age to take care of themselves. Her own two had to be picked up at the Swim Club anytime now. Nancy was ten years older than Jan, well up in her forties, but with a finely boned face and dark, deepset eyes that made her look more striking the older she got. She played tennis and swam and wrote poetry that Jan did her best to understand. Jan nodded at the open bed. “Is he a bachelor?”

  “To all intents and purposes. He’s a charming rogue, if you want to know.”

  “I don’t particularly. What are you going to wear tonight?”

  “Oh, God. Something I won’t have to hang up afterward. She gave a last look around the room. Following her eyes, Jan noticed the published volume of Nancy’s poems on the bedside table. Nancy gave Jan a nudge into the hall ahead of her. “Eddie tried to seduce me the night Dick and I announced our engagement. Whenever I see him, he pretends regrets at not having succeeded.” She hooked her arm through Jan’s. “Don’t hold it against him, you puritan. He thinks he’s being trés galant.”

  Eddie was still at it, Jan judged, by the way he danced with Nancy, cheek to cheek, abdomen to abdomen. Furthermore, Nancy was enjoying it…“Moonlight Serenade,” “Elmer’s Tune,” “Black Moonlight”…They drew away from one another, took a long look into each other’s eyes, laughed, and sailed away to the far end of the deck.

  It was pretty much the older crowd that turned on to the music of the Big Bands, and you couldn’t say the deck was jammed. The noise would start at midnight with the arrival of a rock group. Jan thought of another drink, which she didn’t need but wanted. She didn’t even want it. What in hell did she want? Fred and Dick were probably shooting pool in the basement. Billiards: a fine distinction. She did not like Eddie Dorfman. Or did she? Maybe that was the trouble. Baby blue eyes and black hair with a streak of gray, a whispery lower lip. The women kept asking Jan who he was, as though she was Nancy’s keeper. It wasn’t hard to guess the speculation. Maiden’s End (named after a family called Maiden) was by no means famous for marital stability. Jan thought of the switched couples at the party—the Eckstroms and the Bellows. What a mix-up for the kids. And there were at least three grass widows, as her mother called them. She’d have been willing to bet that Liz Tooney would make a play for Eddie Dorfman before the night was over. She emptied her glass and thought of shifting to champagne rather than having to go back to the bar again alone.

  Tom Winthrop came up and took the glass from her hand and dropped it over the deck. “Come on, Jan. They’re playing our song.”

  Our song indeed. Neither in nor out of step, he took her with him on a cruise of his guests, wanting to know if everyone was happy and assuming she was, just to be in on the trip. Not a word did he say to her, or she to him, for that matter. When they came alongside Nancy and Dorfman, Jan broke away from Tom and said, “May we cut in?” You could almost say she plucked Eddie out of Nancy’s arms.

  “What fun!” Dorfman cried, though he cast Nancy a wistful glance. After that he gave Jan his complete attention. He even hummed “Sentimental Journey” in her ear. She had never felt lighter on her feet. He was a good dancer.

  “I wonder,” she said breathlessly between tunes, “if they have ‘Flatfoot Floogie with the Floy Floy.’”

  “If they do, I hope it’s not contagious.”

  She laughed too loudly and explained, “My mother used to play all her old records for me on a rainy day and we’d dance up in the attic.”

  “What fun,” he said again. “No wonder you dance so well.”

  “I do with the right partner.” She tossed her head and sang, a bit off tune, but urgently, “‘He danced divinely and I loved him so, but there I go…’ That was another of my mother’s favorites.”

  The music started again, another set of records. “Glenn Miller,” Jan said, “oh, boy.”

  “‘I saw those harbor lights,’” he crooned, and held her close. He said after a few bars, “I’ll be in London this time tomorrow.”

  “Will you? I wish I were.”

  He drew back and looked at her.

  “I mean just that I love to travel.”

  He held her close again. “Perhaps we’ll meet in some exotic port some day,” he said. His cheek, soft, freshly shaven, was scented with lavender. A tango then. They dipped and glided a backward dip for Jan, something she had never risked before in her life, and then a waltz that dissolved into a seductive whine.

  “Salomé,” her partner said.

  “I forgot my veils,” Jan said; she tried to repress the impulse to lead.

  “Let’s pretend.” He disengaged himself and with provocative little gestures coaxed her into letting go. Jan shed veil after imaginary veil, clownish at first, but with a growing feeling that she was actually graceful. Eddie posed as a macho Herod; he demanded more and more letting go. For a few seconds Jan danced with utter abandon, every pound of her a quiver.

  “Help!” she cried finally, and collapsed in self-conscious laughter, sinking to the floor.

  Eddie mimed the removal of his own head and brought it to her in cupped hands, which rather thoroughly distorted the story line, to say nothing of de-sanctifying John the Baptist.

  Everyone, having given Jan space, now applauded, laughed, and slipped away into the next dance.

  She blushed and got to her feet. “I need a drink,” she said.

  “I’ll get it for you.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said and caught his hand. Then: “I’ll meet you at the bar. I’ve got to make some repairs first.”

  Nancy was waiting for her when she came out of the bathroom, a look of pure disgust on her face.

  “Hey,” Jan said, “What’s the matter?”

  “It wasn’t funny, kiddo.”

  “I thought it was fun.”

  “It was pretty undignified, if you want the truth.”

  If
it was the truth, it was the last thing she wanted. “That wasn’t exactly a minuet the two of you were dancing when I pulled you apart,” she said. “You wouldn’t be jealous, would you?”

  “Jan, I care about you and I don’t like to see you make a fool of yourself.”

  “Okay. I get the message.” The worst of it was that deep down it hadn’t been fun; the make-believe that she had almost bought herself now fell apart.

  “Don’t sulk over it. For heaven’s sake, you’re not a little girl anymore.”

  “I never was a little girl.”

  “Just don’t drink so much.”

  “It’s none of your damned business how much I drink. Okay, keep your Don Juan. I’m going to find Fred.”

  She did not look for Fred right away. She went out to the garden to cool off, to sort out anger from hurt, as though they were divisible at the moment. She took a glass of champagne with her, drank it too fast, and then took another from the tray one of the teenaged helpers was passing as though his night’s wage depended on the score in champagne corks. The feeling of humiliation began to set in, a replay of the exhibition she had made of herself. She did not know whom she disliked more, Nancy, Dorfman, or herself. Herself.

  She almost went directly home then, but Fred was always accusing her of disappearing at parties. She spent a lot of time in bathrooms, especially if there was a children’s bathroom where the ducks and frogs and floating pigs gave her surcease from the social tensions. Fred was not in the billiard room. No one was. She wandered through the gun room, and wondered vaguely if any of the blunderbusses in the glass cases were loaded. She looked up at the moosehead over the fireplace, its glassy eyes frozen in sadness. “You and me, baby.”

  THE DOUBLE ENTENDRE: the sign hung above the door. That’s me, she thought. I’m a double entendre. She wandered with fascinated distaste from one to another of Tom Winthrop’s pornographic objets d’art. He always set out a half-dozen or so for the titillation of his guests. For anyone who appreciated the sampling enough to tell him so, he would come down and show the really important things in the collection. Fred said he’d never seen anything like it. Fred, the connoisseur. It was a strange place to be alone, a strange place to be discovered if anyone came. That was all she needed. She remembered her mother opening the closet door on her, a precocious ten-year old with a flashlight looking at the illustrations in an anatomy book she had stolen from the locked bookcase. “Wicked girl.” There were no locked bookcases in Fred’s and her house. No anatomy books either.

  She picked up a picture—in what medium she could not tell—of a unicorn. No larger than three by four inches, in a silver frame, it was exquisite, and she could not imagine what was pornographic about it. Then, when she went to set it down, she saw the trick: a shutter effect where beauty in a different angle of light turned into obscenity. She set it down and turned to flee the room. Dorfman was standing in the doorway.

  “Here you are—in the naughty room. What fun!”

  She stopped herself from saying that she was looking for her husband. She pushed by him. “Please tell Nancy—if Fred’s looking for me, I’ve gone home.”

  “Don’t leave on my account.”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  She found Fred herself. He was in the library where he and Dick and Phil Eckstrom were deep in conversation. Local politics, she gathered. Eckstrom was on the town board. She did not interrupt. The bar wasn’t crowded, and she decided on one for the road. The bartender, who worked most parties at Maiden’s End, didn’t even ask her what she wanted. He knew: Scotch with a splash. Nancy, she observed, was dancing again. With Phil Eckstrom, senior.

  Jan finished her drink and went out by way of the garden. From there she cut down along the ravine path that crossed the creek and meandered up near the Adams house, beyond which lay her own. There was a three-quarter moon, but she knew the path from her own childhood. What did Nancy see in him, she wondered. Something. Or she would not have left her poems at his bedside. He certainly wasn’t going to understand them if Jan didn’t. She often wondered if Dick did, all that symbolism. Not that Nancy cared: It isn’t what they say, it’s what they show. Simply fireworks? Jan had to believe they were deeper than that. She often imagined Nancy making them up, quite removed, while Dick was telling one of the stories in which he was the hero. It wasn’t easy to be a hero in advertising, not and continue to make as much money as Dick did. Pure fantasy. To which all Nancy had to say, in effect, was “Yes, dear.” She’d been flying in a holding pattern for years. But then, who hadn’t? After the first child, Jan didn’t say, “Yes, dear,” to Fred. In Fred’s stories he was always the victim; most people found that funny. The trouble was, Fred’s stories were true. Nancy ought not to have spoken to her the way she had. She ought to have understood. Maybe she did. And that was worse, even more humiliating. The hall lights were on in the Adams house, upstairs and down. An unfamiliar car, which had to be Eddie’s, sat alongside Nancy’s battered V.W. in the driveway. They had taken Dick’s Buick. Jan always felt that hall lights made a house look more empty than, say, a light in the living room or an upstairs bedroom. She went round to the kitchen window and got the key from the bird feeder. She returned it after opening the door. There was something she had to know—if there was anything to know: She wanted to see how Nancy had inscribed the book for Eddie Dorfman. In Jan’s copy she had written, “Love, toujours.”

  The stairs creaked beneath her step. It was an old house with a curving banister that many a child’s behind had polished over the years. She did not hesitate in turning on the bedside lamp. Somehow it seemed her right to be there. She saw at once that the book had been removed. Dorfman’s one large piece of luggage was on the stand, the flap closed but not entirely zipped. So far as she could see, he had not unpacked at all: no hairbrushes or shaving kit, nothing on the dresser. She looked into the bathroom. Not even a toothbrush. And he had been freshly shaved. He reeked of after-shave cologne. The bathroom was still scented with it. It was as though, after dressing, he had repacked.

  She went to the suitcase and ran the zipper far enough to lift the flap. Tucked into the corner was Refraction, the poems of Nancy Eldridge Adams. There was no inscription. Which brought the shame thundering in her ears. It was more difficult to fit the book back than it had been to take it out and in doing so she disturbed the bathrobe and partially uncovered something in chamois.

  Now, Jan had given Nancy a chamois bag of several compartments two Christmases before. Nancy used it, when traveling, to carry such of her jewelry as she took along. She had several nice antique pieces and a valuable pearl necklace. Ordinarily they were kept in an ivory jewel box on Nancy’s dressing table. Jan lost no time in discovering that the bag was the same and contained the pearls, a diamond brooch and earrings, and the lovely jade pendant, the only piece of jewelry Jan had ever coveted. Nancy had promised to give it to her some day.

  The thought that Dorfman was a thief delighted her after the shock of discovery wore off. The question, however, was what to do about it without placing herself in even deeper disgrace. Her mind grew muddled with the sickening thought of how to explain the discovery: she also wondered then just when the theft had occurred. She had not met him until the party was well on. He could have stayed at the house on some pretext and come along later on his own. But surely he had to expect that Nancy would discover the theft when they came home? Jan understood then why the suitcase was packed: He expected to leave tonight, long before the Winthrop party was over. A rented car. London tomorrow…

  However humiliating it might be, Jan resolved to bare the truth to Nancy. Replacing everything, she drew the zipper. And changed her resolution even as she put out the light. What was a handful of jewels in comparison to her own pride? She would let the matter run its course and never let on she anticipated the story when Nancy told her of the theft. It did not occur to Jan to wonder why Eddie Dorfman had not put the suitcase in the car before he left for the party. Her main concern was
to get out of the house quickly.

  But Dorfman was coming up the stairs when she reached the hallway. He quickened his step when he saw her and came round the banister smiling with that nasty lower lip. “I had a feeling we’d meet again before I took off,” he said. “Something told me.”

  Jan gave a little moan of chagrin. She thought of accusing him outright. She had no subtlety, and she was able to defend herself only by striking out in anger. But at the moment she had no anger. Nor could she run: Dorfman stood between her and the stairs, one hand on the railing, the other on the wall.

  “Let me guess: You’ve brought me something. A flower? Something that blooms in the night? Come on, let’s have a look.” He nodded toward the door. “You’re not afraid of me, are you? I’m completely harmless unless stepped on.”

  Jan made a noise in her throat. No words came.

  “I thought that would amuse you,” he said. “Light the light and let’s see where we are.”

  Jan turned back into the room and lit the lamp. She would run when the chance came. Simply run.

  He leaned in the doorway, seeming to fill it, and looked all around the room before letting his eyes rest on her. “Nothing? Did you put something in my suitcase?”

  Jan shook her head.

  “I know: Nancy told you I was leaving and you wanted a few minutes alone with me first. If only I had more time…”

  “You’re making fun of me,” she said.

  “I don’t make fun of women, Salomé.” he said. He came in and closed the door. He drew the bolt across. There was no key.

  “Don’t! Leave the door open,” Jan said.

  He turned, smiling. “Then you shouldn’t flirt with a man of my reputation. Didn’t Nancy tell you?”

  “Just let me go,” she pleaded.

  “Go.” He stepped aside.