by Zenith Brown
When she opened her eyes the pupils were so expanded there was no gray left, and when they’d contracted slowly they were still much larger than most people’s. They had a starry liquid quality of depth that made them very soft and completely fascinating—even to women who’d rather have had them sharp as pin points. That’s what her tongue could be when she chose, thought actually it seldom was. She was too intelligent, except where Molly was concerned.
She sat up and lighted another cigarette.
“It’s not only myself I’m thinking about. It’s him. He had everything. All he needed was the right kind of a wife, and nothing could have stopped him. And to think, just think—that guy sits on the floor and plays a game of checkers, and lets a little dope bat a pair of yellow eyes at him, and marry him, and take him down to a dump on Beall Street to live. I mean, if she was even pretty, or rich, or well connected!”
“But she’s an awfully sweet kid, Courtney,” I said.
“Oh, of course! So were dozens of others who bored the pants off him. So did Molly—till I was fool enough to make him pay some attention to her!”
“Well, Courtney,” I said again. “If you were in love with him, why didn’t you marry him yourself. You had time enough to make up your mind, heaven knows.”
We’d always got to this point and she’d always sidestepped it. I expected she would again, but she didn’t.
“That’s what kills me.”
She spoke quietly, but so bitterly that I was a little startled.
“We talked about it, and about his career, and that I was the kind of woman he ought to marry. We both knew it. But he needed to have money. I knew that. Then the war came along, and he was going off on these long treks in the wilderness, hunting the materials we lost when the Japs got Burma and Malay. He said he was glad he wasn’t married, because it wasn’t fair to a girl to be alone and he might easily not get back some trip. I thought he meant it. Then Durbin came along, and it all seemed so simple.”
“Courtney!” I said. “Are you saying . . .”
I stopped, not sure at all.
“That’s the way it was,” she went on. “D. J. isn’t in love with me. That has nothing to do with it, Grace. He knew I was in love with Cass and Cass with me. It was his idea, not mine. He needed what I could give him, in the way of contacts, and I needed what he could give me. It was a . . . a marriage of convenience, without the marriage, really.”
I sat staring at her, trying to understand what in heaven’s name she was talking about.
“Oh, don’t be naive and lower-class, Grace! I wasn’t bartering my fair white body—that didn’t come into it. It’s purely a business arrangement. My God, you’re acting the way Horace Blodgett acted. I wanted him to draw up the settlement, so I’d be sure I wasn’t getting into anything I couldn’t get out of. And Horace! It was defiling the sacred precincts of the law. I couldn’t do it. He was furious. He drove me out like the money-changers in the temple. And he’s never put his foot in my house. He doesn’t speak to me unless he can help it. Horace Blodgett . . . who’d turn a legal noose around the throat of a widow or orphan without batting an eye.”
“Well, I’m afraid I agree with him, Courtney,” I said.
“I don’t see that it’s anybody’s damn business,” she said curtly. “If it’s agreeable to D. J. and me, I don’t see that it hurts anybody. At least there’s no pretense to it, and there are lots of duration marriages you can’t say that for. I don’t believe being level-headed is indecent and being hysterical is romantic. I’ll admit I figured the war would be over sooner than it looks like it’s going to be.”
“And . . . then you were going to marry Cass?”
She nodded slowly.
“Everything would have been wonderful, then.”
“—And Cass went back on the bargain.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment.
“No. He didn’t know. I was a fool not to tell him. I was going to, and then I didn’t like to, some way. Then when Horace Blodgett took on the way he did—and I don’t know anybody who has more respect for money—I thought I was wise not to. And . . . I thought Cass knew. When I told him I was going to marry D. J. he didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and then he said, ‘How long do you think it’s going to last?’ He was being sardonic, I knew, but I thought the way he looked at me that he knew, underneath. When he said, ‘Well, I guess you’ve got what you want,’ I thought he couldn’t think that, not really. Not as well as he knew me.”
It sounded rather like straining at a gnat, I thought. The camel still gagged me.
“People don’t know D. J. really,” she said, after a moment. “His accident makes him shy and reserved. The bones didn’t knit properly after he broke his hip. People say he’s ruthless, but he’s been charming to me.”
“It would be nice,” I said, “if you’d fall in love with him, and really marry him, darling.”
She shook her head quickly. “He has a cruel streak too. I see that with other people. That little Achille, who’d have cut off his right hand for him.”
She got up, went to the window and stood looking out for an instant.
“The only thing that worries me a little is that he . . . might fall in love with me,” she said. “That terrifies me. As Horace said, there’s no court that would uphold the kind of contract we have. I ought to have been more business-like, not less.”
She gave a violent start suddenly, her face turning as pale as her dress. It was nothing but Sheila, banging open the door from the basement and bursting into the room.
“Sorry!” she said.
She was trembling a little even then.
“I’m jittery. Make me an old-fashioned, will you? I’ve got to have something to steady my nerves before I go back. I’m really a mess. I just don’t know what to do, Grace! I’m so frightened I’m beside myself. It’s everything . . . everything in my life has gone to hell!”
She stood there trying to get hold of herself while I made the old-fashioned.
“Here you are,” I said.
Her hands were shaking as she took it, and she lowered her eyes to keep from meeting mine.
“What’s really the matter, Courtney?” I asked. “Besides Cass.”
She started to say something and changed her mind.
“Not knowing about little Achille,” she said then, slowly. “I don’t know whether somebody thought they could get at D. J. through him, or whether. . . . Oh, I just don’t know. I don’t dare think about it.”
She closed her eyes for an instant.
“I don’t dare,” she repeated. “—Some queer people come to see D. J. I’ve wondered if they and all the others that come know he has a recording system so everything they say is down in their own voices. He keeps the records locked. He doesn’t trust a secretary to take them off. He doesn’t trust anybody. Oh, well . . .”
She put her glass down.
“I feel better. I’d better go . . . Colonel Primrose was talking to him, and they ought to be through by now. Oh, Grace, you don’t know how I wish I’d never got mixed up with any of it! I guess Horace Blodgett was right.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said.
10
The only surprising thing, in fact, was that she would have gone to him about it originally, I thought as I went up to take a shower and dress. It showed the same blind spot in her makeup that thinking Cass Crane would accept the cold crumbs from D. J. Durbin’s table showed, and her failure to see that Molly Crane had something she definitely lacked. Still, it was bitter bread she was eating . . . too bitter to go on swallowing for long, now that the only thing that had made it palatable in the first place was gone.
I’ve never been able to decide whether Courtney Durbin was extraordinarily complex or just a simple child of nature, and I still wasn’t able to. She could be a perfect fiend, as she’d been to Molly at the Abbotts’ the night before, or as warm and generous as I knew she’d been to Julie Ross. I’d seen her in a ki
nd of anguish talking about Cass Crane, and cold-bloodedly mercenary as indicated by her arrangements with Mr. Durbin. Which was her dominant self I simply couldn’t say. And above all why she went to Horace Blodgett with any such bizarre and opportunist scheme—to call it the least offensive names I can think of—I had no idea. Sitting next to him at his dinner table two hours later I was still more astonished that she should have so mis-estimated him.
But before that a very curious thing happened. At least it seemed curious to me, happening when it did and where it did.
I came downstairs to go out to get a bus over to the Blodgetts’. I wasn’t sure whether it was going to come actually under the head of pleasure-driving or not. Colonel Primrose hadn’t phoned, and Horace Blodgett expects his guests to be on time. Like many other Washingtonians I’ve never had time entirely to figure out the bus system’s riddle, and I’d rather walk than transfer to some uncharted line from the one I knew. The streets are less crowded too.
As I started out Lilac came out of the sitting room.
“Mis’ Courtney mus’ lef’ this,” she said. “I don’ know if it’s gold but we ain’ want nobody say it was stole in our house.”
She handed me a chamois skin case. In it was a gold cigarette box with a quite lovely and elaborate clasp of baguette diamonds and emeralds. I put it back in the case and put it in my bag.
“I’ll take it by to her,” I said. It was a rather more valuable bauble than I liked lying loose around the house, even though I’m not as suspicious of people as Lilac is. I had to go past the Durbins’ to get to the Blodgetts’ anyway.
I got off the bus at 21st Street and walked over to Massachusetts Avenue. The Durbins have a large and imposing mansion with a high wrought-iron fence around it above 24th Street. A messenger boy was just leaning his bicycle against the fence as I got there. He took a box out of the wire basket on the handlebars and yanked at the gate, not knowing that it was kept locked and he had to pull the bell at the side.
“There’s a bell,” I said. I came up and pointed to it.
He pulled it and we stood there waiting until the mechanism clicked. We went in. The butler opened the front door about as automatically as we reached the top step.
“Is Mrs. Durbin in?” I asked.
“Yes, Madam. Madam is on the terrace. If Madam will excuse me, please . . .”
He turned to the messenger boy to take the box.
“—Ah ah!” the boy said. “It’s for Mr. D. J. Durbin. It’s valuable. I got to put it in his own hands personally.—Gripes, limber up. It ain’t a bomb. Where’s the ol’ massa himself? I got my instructions straight from the Ambassador.”
He winked at me.
“Always gets ’em—try it some time,” he whispered as we followed Flowers . . . which, believe it or not, really was the Durbins’ colored butler’s name. I’d known him when he called people Miss and Ma’am, before he learned how the other half lives.
Courtney and D. J. Durbin were on the terrace outside the library windows. I saw them before I saw they had guests, and also before I saw the guests were Mr. Sondauer-Skagerlund and his friend, the cool and sharp-eyed Mr. Austin. And brief as the space from the French windows down to the flagstones was, I caught the sharp interchange of glances that took place. Mr. Durbin’s angry accusing flash at Courtney, the two men’s, surprised, at each other, both of them questioningly at their host. Even Courtney looked a little amazed. I gathered that it was an extremely private party, and that Flowers had been as deceived by my dinner dress as by the messenger boy’s Ambassador. It shot through my mind to tell the boy to try that some time.
“Darling!”
Courtney came forward, her hand out.
“—It’s to-morrow, not to-night,” she whispered quickly.
“I just dropped in to return this, angel,” I said, and handed her the cigarette case.
Then my heart took a sudden nose-dive down to my stomach. She’d gone as white as the painted iron table behind her. Mr. Durbin’s liquid dark eyes were instantly alert and alive as burning coals. I’d made a mistake. I knew that, without any idea of anything I could say to try to cover it up. It would have been worse, no doubt, if I’d tried, because he’d already seen her hand tremble as she reached out to take it.
“Thanks,” she said.
I never heard the word said with greater irony, in effect if not in sound.
It happened very quickly, the surface was as quickly smooth. Mr. Durbin bowed to me and smiled.
“Have you met our friends? Mr. Skagerlund, Mrs. Latham. And Mr. Austin.”
He couldn’t have spoken more pleasantly. And this was funny too . . . for neither Mr. Skagerlund nor Mr. Austin wanted D. J. Durbin to know we’d met, or at least where we’d met. If they’d written it in scarlet letters on the side of the house they couldn’t have got it across to me with more clarity. It was in every drop of his essential juices standing like dewy pearls on Mr. Sondauer-Skagerlund’s brow. And a few were on Mr. Austin’s.
“Yes, we’ve met,” I said, smiling as sweet as honey from the honeycomb. “At Cass Crane’s, Wednesday night. You don’t remember me, I’m afraid.”
If they could all make Courtney uncomfortable, I thought, it seemed only reasonable for them to do a little intensive perspiring themselves. Which they were indeed doing. I saw D. J. Durbin’s eyes narrow like a cat’s for just an instant, before he turned to Courtney. She’d put her hand lightly on the messenger boy’s shoulder and was waiting for her husband to turn around.
“This lad has a package for you, D. J.,” she said. “Do you want me to sign for it?”
She spoke to me in an undertone as she signed his name to the boy’s receipt. “—Wait, Grace . . . I’ll go to the door with you.”
I saw Mr. Durbin weighing the package in his mind as he put it on the table by the cocktail tray. It was about as big as a shoe box. In fact, it was a shoe box, and loosely wrapped, so that he pulled the cord off with a turn of his hand and brushed the paper aside. He flipped the lid off.
A tiny black kitten, so small its fur had not really grown yet, raised its head and mewed. And then the most dreadful thing happened. If that kitten had been a rattlesnake coiled to strike, or some unspeakably loathsome thing, the effect on D. J. Durbin could not have been so awful. He lurched back with a horrible cry, his face white and contorted with terror, and raised his stick and smashed it down on the table. The glasses crashed right and left, and the kitten, missed by inches, its instinct asserting itself without any knowledge of evil, sprang out of the box and off the table, its shaky legs hardly strong enough to carry it. Mr. Durbin whipped up his stick again, his face like a madman’s.
“Oh, don’t, don’t!” Courtney cried.
She darted forward and reached down for the kitten, and Durbin’s stick came down, before he could stop it, almost with full force, across her hands.
She managed to push the little beast over toward me.
“Get it, Grace! Get it and go, quickly!”
The two guests were standing there as if paralyzed. I was only conscious of one thing—that I wanted to be somewhere else, right away. I bent down, scooped up the kitten, and just ran.
The messenger boy ran with me, and we got through the house and outside the front door, and stood staring at each other. His face was a little white, and I know mine was more than a little.
“Well . . . jeez,” he said. He put his hand out and touched the kitten. “—I guess he don’t like cats.”
I got back part of my breath.
“It’s a black cat,” I said.
“Yeah, I know.” He shook his head. “I could take it,” he said, tentatively. “I got a kid sister, and my mother’s nuts about cats.”
I handed it to him quickly. “Take it, then . . . and get it away from here.”
As we got to the gate I glanced back.
“I wouldn’t go back there, lady,” he said seriously. “You and me weren’t very popular, if you noticed.”
“I
guess you’re right,” I said, trying to smile. “Well, goodbye, and take care of it, won’t you?”
We waved back at each other after I’d crossed the street, and I pulled myself together, or as much as I could, and hurried on to the Blodgetts’.
11
Corinne Blodgett came out into the hall to greet me. She was swathed in one of those indefinite things of hers that has no beginning or end, if a lot of middle, and while not, apparently, sewed together any place, has never to my knowledge come apart in public. This one was a lot of misty blue-rose-gray chiffon that made her look rather like an ambulatory cloud with a solid center.
“He didn’t mean to be unkind, dear,” she whispered, kissing my cheek. “He insisted on sending the check. But let’s not talk about it, shall we?”
The effect of the day’s strain was still visible on her face, however. It wasn’t as fresh and rosy-pink and white as it usually was, and her blue eyes weren’t as childlike and gay, or when they were there was effort behind them. It might, of course, have been the heat and the street car, I thought, as much as Horace. I learned later that actually it was the anniversary of her daughter’s death . . . which shows why no less a person than Sherlock Holmes once pointed out you can’t judge any woman by ordinary norms.
She raised her voice to its normal pitch.
“Come along, Grace. Horace has already looked at his watch twice, my dear.”
She led me through to where Horace Blodgett was at that moment looking at his watch for at least the third time. It seemed odd to be having cocktails in his library, but kind of him to allow it, as it’s air-conditioned and the rest of the house isn’t.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Horace,” I said.
I wasn’t sure, with the new picture I’d got of him as domestic ogre and disperser of the money-changers, whether he’d spring at me with a leather thong or just send me home dinnerless. But he was just the same as he’s always been—dry and unflurried, parchment—or was it papyrus—garbed in wool white linen, taking off his rimless pince nez with his thumb and forefinger and snapping the cord up under his lapel as he put them in his breast pocket, before he held out his hand to me.
