by Edna Ferber
“Pooh! These piazza millionaires they cheat and rob and kill people, even. You’ve said so yourself.”
“That’s different. If you steal five millions and a railroad, that’s high finance. But if you cheat on a horse race, that’s worse than murder.”
“I just thought you’d like to win. And you said Alamo wasn’t very good yet. Why did you have him sent up here then?”
“Because. A hundred reasons. God A’mighty, women are the most immoral people there is. Don’t seem to know right from wrong.”
“Such a fuss about a horse race.”
“Look, Clio, be like you were in New Orleans that first month, will you?”
“But how is that possible, Clint? I am at least ten years older since then.”
“Let’s be young again, just for now. Let’s quit figuring and contriving. Here it is, midday, middle of the summer. Look at that pretty little race track! Even if you had you your million right now what could you get with it you haven’t got this minute?”
Half-past eleven in the morning. Saratoga managed somehow to assemble its sporting blood at this matutinal hour. Even rakish New Yorkers whose lives were adjusted to a schedule in which night ended at noon were certain to appear at the Saratoga track by eleven, haggard perhaps, and not quite free of last night’s fumes, but bravely armed with field-glasses, pencil, and strong black cigars. Even those imported flowers of the frailer species arrived in wilted clusters, buttressed by their stout black-satin madams and looking slightly ocherous in spite of the layers of rouge and rice powder.
Against the background of elms and pungent pines, richly green, the little track lay like a prim nosegay with its pinks and blues and heliotropes and scarlet of parasols and millinery.
Descended from their gaudy coach, Clint and Clio prepared to take their places, but not before a stroll in the paddock so that Clint could inspect the horses and the feminine world could inspect Clio’s Paris poult-de-soie glowing under the rosy shade of the scarlet embroidered parasol.
Smiling, exquisite, seeming to glance neither to right nor left, Clio saw everything, everyone. “Who’s that?” she said again and again, low-voiced, and she pinched Clint’s arm a sharp little tweak to take his attention from the horses. “Who’s that? Who’s that? Why are they standing around that stout, homely litde peasant? There, with the red face.”
“Because that’s Willie Vanderbilt, that’s why.”
“That! Dieu! That clod is a millionaire!”
“Only about a hundred and fifty million, that’s all.”
“But he looks wretched!”
“Sure does. They call him Public-Be-Damned Vanderbilt on account of what he said. They hate him. He’s scared of his life. I bet he wishes he could have stayed there on Staten Island, farming, and hauling scows full of manure across the bay from the old Commodore’s stables. He and Gould, they’re dead enemies. In Texas they’d be shooting it out. Here they just try to steal each other’s railroads.”
“I’m almost sorry that I must marry a millionaire. They are so unattractive.”
“You can’t have everything, honey. Little Van Steed isn’t so bad looking,” he observed, with irritating tolerance. “Get him to grow a beard, now, hide that place where his chin ought to be, why—”
She pinched his arm now, in sheer spitefulness. Leisurely, they strolled toward the grandstand. Suddenly there was a tug at Clio’s skirt. She turned quickly, but she knew even before she turned that she would see the goggle-eyed Cupide looking up at her. His voice was a whisper.
“Ma’m’selle, bet on Mavourneen in the third. Everything. Fixed. Mais soyez sur de là. Tell to Monsieur Clint.”
“Heh! What the hell you doing away from those horses! Who—”
But the little man had darted off, was lost in the crowd.
“It’s all right,” Clio assured him placidly. “He would not neglect them. He has someone watching them, be sure of that. He has found valuable information, little Cupide. How much money have you? Here is my purse. In the third—Mavourneen—everything. He has ways of knowing, that diablotin. He has just now found out.”
Together they walked to their places, a thousand eyes followed them. Curiously enough, aside from Clio the most distinguished feminine figure to be peered at by the crowd was not that of the beflowered Mrs. Porcelain or the overdramatic Guilia Forosini but the stout black-clad Mrs. Coventry Bellop, whose rollicking laugh boomed out as she chatted and joked with her three attendant swains.
“She is good company, that one,” Clio observed to Clint, very low. She was shutting her rosy parasol and adjusting her draperies as she looked about her languidly. “I’ve seen her sort in France, she is like one of those fat, mustached old women who sell fruit in the Paris market—tough and gay and impudent and full of good bread and soup. I like her, that one.”
The first race was about to start. Suddenly, above the buzz of voices in the grandstand there could be heard the booming chest tones of Mrs. Bellop calling, “Countess! Countess!”
“She means you, Clio,” said Clint out of the corner of his mouth. “The old trollop!”
“Countess!”
Clio turned her head ever so slightly. Sophie Bellop’s ugly, broad face was grinning cheerily down at her. “Are you betting, Countess? You look to me like somebody who’d be lucky at picking winners.”
“I am,” said Clio, very quietly, just forming the words with her lips. Smiled her slow, sad smile for the benefit of the crowd and turned back to Maroon. “I think she means me well, that cow. I feel her friendly.”
“I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickel for any of ‘em,” Clint observed, morosely.
“Oh, come now, chéri. How could she harm me, that one?”
“She runs this place, I tell you.”
“All the more reason, then. She took care to call me Countess though she surely knows—”
“She’s after something. When an old coyote comes prowling around the chicken roost it ain’t because she’s friendly to the hens.”
“Clint, Clint! You are suspicious of everyone. You probably are suspicious of me, even.”
“No, sugar, I’m not suspicious of you. I’m dead sure of you. I know you’re crooked, so I don’t have to worry none.”
Her lovely leisurely laugh rang out.
It was just after the second race that she said, “Your pencil,” as Clint was leaving to place his bet and hers. “I want to write a note.”
“Don’t be foolish,” he said.
“Wait a moment. I will go with you. Look, there is Van Steed arriving. How hot and cross he looks. There, the little Porcelain is happy; see how she grows all pink, like a milkmaid; and the one you tell me is the Forosini she shows all her teeth with happy hunger. Let us place our bet and go.”
“Now!”
“After this race. Let us watch it from the carriage, standing. This grows a little tiresome, don’t you think? After all, I know that one horse can run faster than another.”
She scrawled one word in her childish hand on a scrap of paper, she folded it tight and cocked one corner. As they rose to leave she tossed it swiftly and accurately into Sophie Bellop’s capacious lap. As that surprised face looked up at her, Clio put a finger to her lips, the ageless gesture of caution and secrecy. They had scarcely regained the carriage when they saw the stout black-clad figure rushing toward the window.
“Did you tell her Mavourneen?”
“Yes.”
“Kind of foolish, weren’t you? It’s all right us throwing away a few hundred dollars on a chance. But what does that litde imp know!”
“He doesn’t always know. Only sometimes. But when he says he knows, like today, then you can be sure. He has ways, that little one.”
“What kind of ways?”
“Never mind. You will see Mavourneen come in. And we shall leave here, and the Bellop will tell everyone she has won. There will be great réclame. And we will have—how much will we have in our pockets?”
“Thous
and, maybe. I don’t know’s I like it, myself. I—there they are. Wait a minute. Here, take the glasses. That one. Seven. Green and white.”
“M’m. Seven is lucky for me. And I adore green. But I think I must be like this Mr. Gould and even that litde stubborn Van Steed. I would find it more exciting to gamble with railroads and millions and people and the law than with horses running. You see, I am by nature mercenary. How lucky for you that we are not serious, you and I.”
“Yeh,” said Maroon. “I’d just as soon take up steady with a rattlesnake.” But his tone was hollow.
XII
By the end of that first week the women had their knives out. A prick here, a prick there, the ladies of Saratoga’s summer society were intent on drawing blood from their thrusts at the spectacular, the unpredictable Mrs. De Chanfret. But as yet they had been no match for her. She parried every thrust, she disarmed them by her sheer audacity. She was having a superb time, she was squired by the two most dashing bachelors in Saratoga. If she went to the races with Clint Maroon in the morning, then she drove to the lake with Van Steed in the afternoon. Occasionally she vanished for twenty-four hours. Resting. Madame is resting, Kakaracou said, barring the cottage suite doorway with her neat black silk, her stony white-fichued bosom, her basilisk eye. Bart Van Steed stood at the door; he actually found himself arguing with the woman.
“But Mrs. De Chanfret was going to have dinner with me at Moon’s Lake House. I’ve ordered the dinner, exactly as she wanted it. Lobster shipped down specially from Maine.” As though the mention of this dish could somehow bring her out of her retirement.
“Madame is very sorry.” Kaka was being very grand. “Madame Le Com—Madame De Chanfret is fatigued. She asked me to tell you she is désolée she cannot go. Madame De Chanfret is resting today.”
No one had ever before done a thing like this to the most eligible bachelor in New York—in the Western Hemisphere. He was piqued, bewildered, angered, bewitched.
When later he reproached her she said, “You are angry. Vous avez raison. You will never again ask me to dine with you.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“After all, why should you bother about a poor weary widow about whom you know nothing? I may be an adventuress for all you know. And there are such lovely creatures just longing for a word with you—that pretty little Porcelain, and that big handsome Forosini with the rolling dark eyes, and those really sweet little McAllister sisters. And Mr. Maroon tells me that there has come to town a new litde beauty, Nellie Leonard. He says she is escorted by a person called Diamond Jim Brady. What a freshness of language you have here in America! But surely a man like that would have no chance if you happened to fancy this pretty little Leonard.”
“Thank you.” He was stammering with rage. The amber eyes were like a cat’s, the pink cheeks were curiously white. “I am quite capable of selecting my own company. You needn’t dictate to me the company I may or may not keep. It’s bad enough that my mother——” He stopped, horrified at what he had almost said.
Instinct told her the right thing to do. As though to hide her hurt, she lowered her eyelids a moment in silence; the long lashes were dewy when she raised them.
“Why will you misunderstand me! You are so strong and powerful. I have known such unhappiness in my marriage—I mean, you have been from the first so kind when you rescued me at the station—I only want you to be happy. Forgive me if I seemed presumptuous and managing. Women are like that, you know, with men they—they admire and respect. Especially women who have known misfortune, perhaps, in—in love.”
Mollified, bewildered, but still sulky, he floundered deeper in confusion. “But suppose I don’t like the kind of women you keep throwing at my head! You and my mother.”
“Do you think of me as of your mother, dear Mr. Van Steed! Oh, that is sweet of you. But though I have seen so much of the world I am, after all, young and sympathetic and at least I hope—” She faltered, stopped.
In desperation he almost shouted, “I always seem to say the wrong thing to you.”
“But no, no. It is I who am clumsy—sans savoir faire. You must help me to do and say the right thing. Will you?”
He sent flowers, remorsefully. Mounds of them.
Kaka, divesting these chaste offerings of their tissue-paper wrappings, surveyed them with a jaundiced eye. “Flowers! Posies!” Her tone should have withered them on their stems. “That’s a Northerner for you! Your mama, gendemen just see her riding out in her carriage would send her jewelry. You say he got money—this litde pink man?”
“Millions. Millions and millions and millions!”
“Why’n’t he send you jewelry gifts, then? Diamonds and big stone necklace and ruby rings like your mama got.”
“Because I’m a respectable widow, that’s why. To take jewelry from a man who isn’t your husband, that is not convenable.’’’’
“Your aunt Belle was a widow. She never had a husband no more than you. But she got jewelry. She never had to put up with no flowers.”
Clio regaled Clint with this bit of conversation; she gave a superb imitation of the black woman’s disdain for mere roses; she enjoyed her performance as much as he. The two conspirators, at ease with one another, went into gales of laughter.
He said, ruefully, “You haven’t had any jewelry off of me, either. I sure would like to load you with it, honey. You can have my diamond stud, and welcome, if you’ll take it.”
“Clint! I’m ashamed of you. Where is your loyalty! You know that diamond is for the ring when you marry the litde blonde Texas beauty—the finest little woman in the world.”
Morosely he retorted, “Some day you’ll be play-acting yourself right out of Saratoga if you don’t watch out.”
“No,” she said, “I was quite wonderful with Van Steed. Real tears. I must make him think he is strong and masterful. He must feel he is deciding everything. You know, it’s a great strain, this pretending. Mama never had to pretend. She was actually like that. Languid and lovely and sort of looking up at one with those eyes. I try to be like that—when I think of it.”
“You’re really a strong-minded female, honey. No use your soft-soaping and fluttering around. You wouldn’t fool any man.”
She flared at that. “I never bothered to try to fool you.”
“Yessir, Countess,” he drawled, “that’s right. I reckon I just wasn’t worth fretting about, that day in the French Market.”
“Touche,” she laughed, good-naturedly.
Sometimes even she found it difficult to tell when she was herself and when she was the mysterious Mrs. De Chanfret. Perhaps no one enjoyed her performance more than she. Frequently she actually convinced herself of her own assumed role. In a way she enjoyed everything—even the things she disliked.
She regarded the vast dining room with a mingling of amusement and horror; rarely entered it. The crowd, the clatter, the rush, the heavy smells of too-profuse food repelled her. When she did choose to dine there it always was late, when the hordes were almost finished. She kept her table, she selected special dishes ordered ahead by Kakaracou, she tipped well but not so lavishly as to cause the waiters to disrespect her judgment. She refused to countenance the heavy midday dinner.
“Barbaric! All that rich food in the middle of the day. I dine at night.”
Her cottage apartment was situated on the other side of the U-shaped wing. She frequently dined or lunched in her own sitting room. You saw the black waiters in stiffly starched white skimming across the garden, mounting the wooden steps, racing along the veranda toward her apartment, their laden trays miraculously balanced atop their heads. The dining-room meals were stupendous; the United States Hotel guests stuffed themselves with a dozen courses to the meal, for everything was included in the American plan. Clio fancied the specially prepared delicacies for which the outlying inns and restaurants were famous. There she grew ecstatic over savory American dishes, new to a palate trained to the French cuisine.
&nbs
p; “I never saw a woman enjoy her vitdes more than you do,” Clint Maroon said admiringly, as she started on her third ear of hot corn on the cob, cooked in the husk and now dripping with butter.
“Mama said always that the only decent food in America was to be found in New Orleans. Of course the food at the hotel is—you know—no imagination. And cooked in such quantities, as for an army. How can food be properly cooked that way! Naturally not. But here it’s delicious—all these American dishes, what a pity they don’t know of them in France. In France, they think Americans live on buffalo meat and flapjacks.”
Woodcock, reed birds, brook trout, black bass, red raspberries at Riley’s. Steak, corn on the cob, at Crum’s.
Maroon said, “I get to where I can’t look at all that fancy fodder at the hotel. I just want to wrassle with a good thick T-bone steak.” The two enjoyed food and understood it. They would taste a dish in silence, let the flavor send its message to the palate, then they would solemnly look at one another across the table and nod.
“Ma, coming from Virginia, she fancied her food. I reckon that’s how I came to be a kind of finicky feeder. Ma, she used to say she didn’t trust people who said they didn’t care about what they ate. Said there was something wrong with them. Texas, though, it isn’t a good-feeding state. Everything into the frying skillet.”
It was at Moon’s that Clio first tasted the famous Saratoga chips, said to have originated there, and it was she who first scandalized spa society by strolling along Broadway and about the paddock at the race track crunching the crisp circlets out of a paper sack as though they were candy or peanuts. She made it the fashion, and soon you saw all Saratoga dipping into cornucopias filled with golden-brown paper-thin potatoes; a gathered crowd was likely to create a sound like a scuffling through dried autumn leaves.
Concluding a dinner with Maroon, she was conscious of her tight stays. In contrast, dining with the dyspeptic Van Steed was definitely lacking in gusto. The De Chanfret veneer frequently cracked here and there so that Belle Piquery, Rita Dulaine and the hotblooded Nicolas showed through to the most casual observer. But in Saratoga it was, for the most part, put down to the forgivable idiosyncrasies of the titled and the foreign.
