“Not quite sure who you are?”
“No. But don’t be alarmed. I’m quite harmless.”
A waiter approached with two tiny glasses on a tray. The glasses were filled with liquid clear as dewdrops. Her companion raised his glass high, and looking straight into her eyes, exclaimed, “Well, here’s how, Stranger.”
She was not accustomed to these little playful ceremonies. But she could at least do as he did. She raised her glass to the same level as his and repeated his words, “Well, here’s how, Stranger.”
“By the way,” he remarked, twirling the slender stem of his empty liqueur glass between his thumb and forefinger, “don’t you think I ought to know your name before the day is over?”
“But I don’t know yours!”
“You don’t! How stupid of me to think you got it when no one ever listens to names. My name is Durrance.” He spelled it. “On the passenger list I’m J. D. Durrance, New York City. Now it’s your turn.”
“My name is Vale.” She also spelled it. “If I’m ever on the passenger list, I’ll be ‘C. Vale, Boston, Mass.’”
“I’ve heard of Boston.” He smiled. “And the name Vale, like Bunker Hill, rings a familiar bell. Are you one of the Vales of Boston?”
“One of the lesser ones.”
“Well, which? I don’t know yet whether it’s Miss or Mrs.”
“It’s Aunt. I’m the proverbial spinster aunt. Most families have one, you know.” Her mouth fell into the lines of the least resistance—a downward curve, with the corners lifted into an ironical smile.
“But aunt what?”
She couldn’t keep up the persiflage any longer. “My name is Charlotte Vale,” she announced flatly, as if she resented the fact. “Miss Charlotte Vale.”
It was several hours later when they were seated in the tender crossing the harbor to the waiting ocean liner that he produced a small package from his overcoat pocket. It was wrapped in bright pink paper, tied with fine string, strong as dental floss, with a loop so one could carry it dangling on one’s finger. He held it up before her by the loop.
“I hope you’ll accept a slight offering for being my guide today. I don’t know the first thing about perfumery, but the clerk said this was all right. It’s a mixture of several kinds of flowers. It’s called Quelques Fleurs. I thought that would be safe, as I don’t know your preference in flowers.” He dropped the little package in her lap.
She was glad it was dusk, for she could feel the color mounting to her cheeks. Ridiculous! At her age! But she couldn’t remember that any man had ever gone into a shop and bought a present for her. Except her father. He used to. Her companion mustn’t know she didn’t use perfumery. Her mother had brought her up to believe it was bad taste. She lifted the little package.
“Thank you ever so much,” was all she could manage to say at first. But later she added, “I’ll put some on my handkerchief tonight.”
“Will you? Good! And let’s meet for a cocktail in the bar at a quarter of eight.”
2
LIKE CINDERELLA
When Charlotte reached her stateroom she switched on the lights, bolted the door, took off her hat and coat and sat down before the triple-mirrored dressing-table. Glancing into one of the side panels she gazed at her profile in another mirror across the room. The profile was looking away from her, which gave her the odd sensation of gazing at someone else. So that was how she looked! For years she had avoided all such painful speculation and shunned mirrors, schooling herself never to study her reflection in order to see herself as others saw her.
But today, although her companion had not remarked upon her appearance, several times she had caught that peculiar expression of approving appraisal which she had observed in other men’s eyes directed toward other women. Her borrowed clothes alone couldn’t draw forth such a look. Today she had been borrowing more than Lisa’s clothes—her manner, posture, many of her gestures. The fact was she had seen Lisa one day last summer dressed in this very same costume, all but the furs, seated at a small iron table on a terrace at her country house, knees crossed, elbows lightly placed upon the tabletop, with Barry Firth opposite looking at her, his eyes filled with far more than approval. Lisa was her sister-in-law, the widow of her oldest brother, Rupert, who had died six months ago. For years Charlotte had been observing Lisa enter rooms, preside at tea tables, rise, sit down, light a cigarette, toss away a match—speculating, with a dull pain of envy, what was the secret of her attraction. She had never attempted to imitate her. Even today her performance had been more the result of absorption than conscious imitation.
She and Lisa didn’t look alike. Lisa was fair, with faint, delicately penciled eyebrows, grey eyes, and fawn-colored hair. While she was dark. Spanish blood might have run in her veins. Her skin was dusky where the shadows fell; sallow was her own adjective for it. Her brows were black and had always been heavy and straight, nearly touching in the middle. Her hair, too, had always been heavy and straight, and dull and lusterless except on the first day after washing. Now, as she gazed, it was as glossy as a charred log with a wavy grain shining in the sun.
Up to six months ago her figure had been as unlike Lisa’s as her coloring—blocky, bulky, uncontrolled by a restricting diet. Her mother disapproved of skinny women, especially of those who starved themselves to keep so. Her mother disapproved of short hair, too. She had never allowed her daughter to cut it. As a child Charlotte had worn it in one long, heavy braid. Later she was taught to wind it into a bun, fastened at the back of her head with sturdy hairpins. Her bun was so heavy it dragged her hair back in an unbecoming fashion, slipping down until it looked as if it were resting on her shoulders, bound in place by cords. But now the cords had been cut. As she gazed at her long neck and the modeled contour of her head, that sensation of detachment from her own personality increased.
She turned away from her profile and, adjusting one of the side mirrors, studied the back of her head. The French coiffeur, into whose hands Lisa had delivered her a few hours before he boat sailed, had made some comments which she had remembered ever since. While busily snipping at the back of her head, after the heaviest locks were cut off, he had exclaimed, “Oh, Mademoiselle, I discover something very valuable, like a nugget of gold buried beneath much earth! A widow’s peak behind! So nice a border will it make upon the neck, Mademoiselle must have her hair cut very short, n’est-ce pas?”
She had no opinion to offer. Lisa was absent, attending to last minute details about her wardrobe. Lisa had told her to leave everything to Monsieur Henri. She was glad to do so. She felt little interest in a proceeding which she had consented to simply because she lacked sufficient spirit to combat it. Even during the ordeal of permanent-waving she had made no protest. Physical pain had the advantage of putting mental despair in the background for the time being.
After Monsieur Henri had finished with her that day, she had been transferred to another room, and laid out prone in a lowslung, streamlined dentist’s chair. Sheets had been spread over her body. Pads had been placed over her eyes. Steaming hot compresses and ice cold had been applied to her face. Afterward, her face underwent such a process of kneading, molding, slapping, rotating, vibrating, and she knew not what else, that it became numb to the various treatments applied. What did she care? Even before her illness her motto for years had been, Follow the line of least resistance.
It had been Lisa who had been at the bottom of the plot of her banishment from home to Cascade. Banishment? No, escape rather, as it turned out. Three months of blessed surcease from her mother’s taunts that her illness was only imagination. The diagnosis of her “nervous breakdown” had filled her mother with scorn. Charlotte no more had a nervous breakdown than a moulting canary! No one in the Vale family had ever had a nervous breakdown! As to Lisa’s proposal that Charlotte go to that place called Cascade, no one in the Vale family had ever been an inmate in a sanatorium or asylum, either!
Her mother was lunching at Lisa’s on the
day Doctor Warburton, the family doctor, took her in his own car to the train bound for Cascade, and settled her in a drawing-room with a trained nurse. It was the first time she had taken a railroad journey without her mother since her father had died when she was at boarding school. Each time she had mustered enough courage to attempt to run down to New York, or to run anywhere for a day or two without her mother, it had ended in defeat. If she persisted in any such plan, her mother always had a heart attack, and a daughter cannot abandon a mother in physical distress.
Her mother had been well on in her forties when she had been born. Three boys had preceded her. “The child of my old age,” she had often heard herself described when she was small. It had always filled her with a vague sense of shame, as if her existence required an explanation. Or was it that her appearance required an explanation? Several times her mother had laughingly referred to her as “my ugly duckling.” She used to wonder if all “children of old age” were ugly ducklings—branded with marks of the advanced years of their parents. Her brothers were all handsome specimens. “An old-fashioned little thing,” was another phrase often applied to her when she was a child. She had always felt not only apologetic to her mother, but under deep obligation to make amends for her undesired arrival.
Ever since she was a child she had worn glasses. Steelbowed spectacles when she went to kindergarten; later, hornbowed spectacles; rimless eyeglasses at her coming-out party. “You’ll never have another pair of eyes,” her mother always warned her before ordering her to put on her glasses, if she ever caught her without them. At Cascade Doctor Jaquith had sent her to an oculist, later announcing that glasses were no longer necessary and advising her to discard them entirely. She always felt undressed without her glasses, as if she’d left off her shoes or blouse.
Gazing now in the mirror straight at her unspectacled, unfamiliar face, apprehension about the outcome of this ridiculous camouflage returned to her. The very expression of her face had changed. Lisa herself had been shocked by her altered appearance when she returned to Henri’s that last day in New York. Charlotte had overhead her gently expostulating with Monsieur Henri. Why had he been so extreme, she had inquired. It was always safer to cut hair the first time a little too long than too short, didn’t he think? “But Mademoiselle say to me do as I wish, she do not care,” he had protested. “And so nice a shape head she has and two widows’ peaks. One in front and one behind.”
Lisa had also remonstrated with the young lady who had presided over the streamlined dentist’s chair, and less gently. “I said nothing about eyebrows, Célestine. You know very well I never allow you to pluck mine. How did you ever come to do such a thing?” “Because they were terra-ble, Madame. Not like yours. Verree thick and strong, like a man’s, and they meet in the middle and make her look always scowling. She say do anything I desire. It was no matter to her. Only in the middle did I pluck much. I make her look so beautiful, n’est-ce pas? She has nice skin.” “Well, well, it’s done,” Lisa had laughed. “It can’t be helped now. The eyebrows will grow again. So will her hair in time.”
When Lisa had rejoined her in the waiting room, “Have you looked at yourself?” she had asked. She hadn’t. She hadn’t had the courage yet. “Well, let’s wait till we’re safely on the boat. It sails in less than an hour. We must hurry. Here’s one of those fur-pieces that are simply indispensable on a cruise at this time of year,” and she had opened a pasteboard box bearing the name of a well-known Fifth Avenue furrier. “It cost something, I confess, but it’s worth it. I had it charged to Mother Vale.”
Mother Vale could well afford the fur piece. She was one of the wealthiest of the wealthy old ladies in Boston. Charlotte’s clothes were still charged to her mother. Charlotte still received the same monthly allowance for “spending money” as had been decided sufficient when she went to boarding school.
“But what will Mother say?” she had asked Lisa weakly, gazing dubiously at the furs. “You know very well she will think they are too showy for me. And they are! Why, if I should suddenly appear in these even the maids would be shocked. And they look horribly expensive.”
“You can rip them apart and wear only one skin when you come home. I’ll make my own peace with Grandmother Vale about the expense.” And she had placed the four limp skins, dripping with pointed tails, soft paws, and small sharp down-pointing noses, around Charlotte’s shoulders. “They simply make you, my dear!”
When Lisa had appeared at Cascade with her preposterous proposal about this cruise, Charlotte had protested, at first, but Lisa had an answer to every objection, a way around every obstacle. Moreover, Doctor Jaquith was in favor of it. It was futile to combat such a combination.
Several weeks before, Doctor Jaquith had pronounced her well enough to leave Cascade. He was anxious to have her try out her new technique alone, but strongly advised some other environment than home at first. Where she should go when she left Cascade had long been under discussion. Lisa had asked the advice of her friend Renée Beauchamp among others. Renée was widely traveled and well informed about pleasure resorts and retreats of various sorts. When Renée telegraphed Lisa that her plans had suddenly changed and her reservations on a cruise ship sailing four days hence were available, Lisa immediately got down her trunk and proceeded to pack it with an appropriate wardrobe for a Mediterranean cruise.
It had been discovered that, since Charlotte’s loss of 30 pounds, Lisa’s clothes fitted her perfectly. Lisa had already lent her a dress or two for use at Cascade till she was able to re-equip her wardrobe. Lisa was still wearing mourning for Rupert, therefore all her colorful dresses and accessories were useless to her for the time being. Not only her dresses, but even her shoes fitted Charlotte; also belts, gloves, collars—everything, in fact, except hatbands. There was not time enough to buy new hats, Lisa said, when Charlotte feebly suggested it, even if any could be found in the shops large enough to accommodate her heavy head of hair. Not was there time to make over the hatbands, even if it wouldn’t ruin the style of the hats. “So she calmly made over me!” a sardonic smile curved her lips. “It didn’t matter if my style was ruined!”
Everyone has a style of one’s own which is the result of adaptation to one’s physical appearance. Lisa had meant well, of course, but it is extremely unpleasant to be stripped suddenly of one’s physical appearance, however unattractive. She had learned to adjust not only her manner but her habits and behavior to it. Now her reflection offered a paradox which was bound to expose her to all sorts of humiliating experiences.
Moreover, what would be the effect of her transformation upon her mother? The plan was for her to go directly home after the cruise. She would be absent less than eight weeks. Her hair wouldn’t grow much in that time. Also what would be the effect of the news of this cruise upon her mother? Her mother had not been consulted about it. Disapproval often caused distress in her mother’s chest. Why, it might kill her mother! What putty she had been in the hands of Lisa and Doctor Jaquith! Putty, that was the word for her! Putty in the hands of her mother too! Irony deepened to self-contempt. She could feel the familiar pressure of depression closing on her like the jaws of a vise. And she’d got to meet that man for a cocktail at quarter of eight. “I’d rather be murdered,” she said out loud.
With a yank she pulled open the door to the small closet where the stewardess had hung her dresses. What had it to offer? That familiar red dinner gown of Lisa’s was as good as anything. Lisa had pinned a small paper on the shoulder of the dress which read: Silver Slippers and silver evening bag will be found in accessory drawer. Humph! Suppose Lisa thought I’d wear Oxfords and carry my shopping bag, thought Charlotte.
She dressed quickly. The red gown was the shade of a scarlet tanager, very plain, with a low square-cut neck in front. She produced the silver bag, selected a handkerchief, and gave it a shake. It puffed out like a spurt of steam. She was about to shove it into her bag when she remembered the perfumery. She opened the pink-wrapped package, unsealed
the stopper of the bottle within, and drew out the tiny crystal stiletto. It was dripping with moisture. She wiped it off on her handkerchief, refueled it twice, and thrust it, wet and icicle cold, behind each ear. Then again she searched the closet, this time for an evening wrap.
There was nothing of Lisa’s she recognized, but at the back of the closet she caught a glimpse of something else scarlet. It proved to be a long cape wrapped around its hanger, lining side out. Unfolding it she discovered a garment which she had never seen before. It was velvet the tawny yellow of French mustard, with a conventional design painted on it in various shades of brown, with shimmering silver spots here and there. She threw it quickly around her shoulders. It reached to below her knees. She glanced into the mirror for one last quick inspection, then stopped to gaze longer. The stranger who she saw reflected in the startling mustard cape would have made her look twice had she been seated as usual on a wall sofa beside her mother in the Grande Salon. She hadn’t been watching the gay galaxy go by all her life without having gained something of the keenness of a critic. This stranger in the mirror lacked something. Her lips should be as scarlet as the glimpse beneath her cape.
She knew how to apply the lipstick. She had never confessed it even to Doctor Jaquith, but occasionally, in the privacy of her own room, she had experimented with cosmetics. Oh, not only had she smoked cigarettes behind those closed doors!
According to Lisa’s request Célestine had given her a box equipped with various creams, lotions, and powders. She now took it down from the top shelf of the closet, opened it, discovered a small nickel cylinder within, and applied it to her lips quickly and skillfully.
It was not until she gave that last glance around the room, to be sure she had left nothing of value in sight, that she caught sight of two blue envelopes on the round table fastened to the floor in the middle of the room. She tore them open. The first read: Have told Mother Vale stop no bad effects stop see it through Lisa. The second: Now voyager sail forth stop play the game stop à bas New England conscience Jaquith.
Now, Voyager Page 2
