The very restrictions that forbade a continuance of their companionship in any form, once they said goodbye, acted as an urge to enjoy their freedom to the full. They didn’t consider deserting their home barracks. They had been born with similar traditions, disciplined in similar schools of ethics. Each spelled Duty with a capital D, even though they did fight against its pricks.
Before the six days were over, doubts and fears recurred to Charlotte. The bugaboos returned, but for short periods only—J.D. was so constantly with her. The present was all-consuming. J.D.’s arguments all-convincing. Again and again he reminder her that the number of days together was fixed and unalterable. Repeatedly he assured her that nothing but memories would follow their adventure in intimacy. It was simply a beautiful idyl, injurious to no one, ephemeral, fleeting. Like footprints in the snow, leaving no trace when the snow melts. Like the flowering of a night-blooming cereus, he told her on their last night together, unfolding but once. What a pity to prevent a single petal of so short-lived, so rare and exotic a flower from opening to its full capacity.
When the last day together arrived finally, and the hourglass held only a pitiful pinch more of time together, J.D.’s light touch forsook him. As the end approached, it was Charlotte who attempted gayety to avoid a tragic parting. But it wasn’t successful. J.D. wouldn’t respond.
They ate their last meal at a shabby restaurant on a low spit of land sticking out into the Bay of Naples several miles north of the city. Somebody had told J.D. the restaurant had a charming location and a lot of atmosphere. The last statement was certainly true. It smelled strongly of a combination of stale tobacco and sour wine.
They talked very little as they sat opposite each other, struggling with their food and a last bottle of wine. But conversation would have been difficult—two powerful baritones with greasy faces and sorrowful expressions, dressed in frayed dresssuits and wilted collars, stood in one corner and split the air with reverberating sound-waves, rendering tragic love-songs, to judge from the sheep’s-eyes they made, with voices that throbbed and pulsated.
It wasn’t until Jerry performed the simple act of lighting her cigarette when they were sipping their bitter black coffee, that Charlotte lost control of her tears for a moment. It was Jerry’s last attempt to perform one of their playful little rituals, trivial in itself, consisting merely in lighting both their cigarettes from one match and then exchanging cigarettes, a ceremony practised, Charlotte had no doubt, by many another pair experimenting with untried intimacies. Or was it one of Jerry’s original ideas? She had never read of it in a novel. As Jerry held the flame to the tip of the shaft between her lips she thought, It’s for the last time in our lives, and the tears had sprung to her eyes, and her throat had been so constricted that it was difficult to draw in enough air to keep the glow of her cigarette alive so as to pass it lit to Jerry.
CHARLOTTE’S BOAT SAILED in the late afternoon. She didn’t want Jerry on the dock to watch her pull away. It had been decided that after lunch she would return to Naples by taxicab, and he would proceed to Rome in the car. Before lunch Jerry had visited Charlotte’s boat, inspected her stateroom and established her scanty baggage in it. He had also presented her with his last gift—two branches of camellias, at least 18 inches in length and covered with crimson blooms. He had bought them from a vendor on the dock.
“For the Lady of Camellias from Armand,” he had said with a crooked smile. Had she ever seen so many blossoms on one branch? Camellias lasted a long while. “I’ll be with you even in Egypt!” The lighting of their cigarettes was Jerry’s last playful speech. To Charlotte, last acts, last words, last moments, became indelibly imprinted on her consciousness.
Their last embrace took place in the dirty hallway outside the restaurant. It was a bare carpetless corridor with a ground-glass window at one end, and two doors with ground-glass panels at the other end. When Jerry’s arms were around her a man had burst out of one of the doors, then had quickly withdrawn again. They were so unmistakably a pair of lovers! Charlotte had stiffened. Jerry had dropped his arms. They had stepped apart quickly, their last kiss crudely interrupted—spoiled, unfinished. Afterward they walked out to their waiting cars. Jerry escorted Charlotte to the door of her taxicab. She got in. He slammed the door. They shook hands stiffly through the open window.
“Well, goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” Charlotte kept her hand out of the window, steadily waving, and her eyes steadily upon him as he stood there with bared head and upraised arm until her car turned a corner and he was lost to view.
When she reached her stateroom she sent for a deeper vase for the camellia branches. The next morning the first thing her eyes sought were their crimson blooms. At the sight that met her eyes she sat up straight, and stared. Every one of the blossoms was hanging down, limp and shriveled! She got out of bed and examined them closely. Jerry had been deceived. The flowers hadn’t bloomed on the branches. Each one had been pierced through the calyx by a wire and skillfully attached. Poor Jerry! She was glad he didn’t know. And need never know. She removed all the flowers, drew out the wires, twisted them together, and put the coil into her jewel box.
14
WELCOME HOME!
When Charlotte rejoined the cruise ship at Alexandria, she found herself very much in the limelight. Such a shame for her to have missed Egypt! Had her car really gone down the bank at one of those awful hairpin turns? Hadn’t she been injured at all? And where was that nice Mr. Durrance? In Milan, Rome, or Genoa, she thought. She didn’t appear to know definitely. The mistake about her name simply added an element of interest. The captain wrote her a personal note, and asked her to fill a vacancy at his table.
Mack and Deb had introduced her to some friends of theirs, who had boarded the cruise ship at Nice—the Devereaux and the Montagues. They asked her to join them for cocktails the first night after she joined the ship. Such a shame she was sitting at the captain’s table! The captain’s table was such a bore usually. They’d love to have had her at their table. She could have made an even six. At Shepheard’s they’d run across Hamilton Hunneker. They hadn’t planned to return to New York on a cruise ship, but its remaining itinerary was so unique—Crete, Sicily, two days at Algiers, and a week at Casablanca—that they had decided to endure the disadvantages. Of course they made all the land trips independently, and took no part in any of the ship’s social activities. She probably never traveled on a cruise ship before, or she wouldn’t have signed up for the bridge tournament tonight.
“Oh, yes, I would. Mrs. Littlejohn’s husband doesn’t play, and she asked me to be her partner. I started from New York with the cruise,” she added, as if proud of the fact. “I came over on the Mayflower, you see.”
“Who’s Mrs. Littlejohn?”
“Somebody else who came over on the Mayflower!”
The fact was that the kindness extended by the Littlejohns warmed Charlotte’s heart just as much as that from Mack and Deb’s friends. In fact, she was more eager to respond to a smile or to any gesture of friendliness from someone whose appearance or bearing recalled her own feelings of self-consciousness or inferiority.
By the time the cruise ship started on its last lap across the Atlantic, it was no novelty to Charlotte to be sought by various groups and individuals. Everybody felt kindly toward her, from the Ricketts and the Littlejohns to the Devereaux, the Montagues, and Hamilton Hunneker.
Hamilton Hunneker was an ex-polo player, an ex-steeplechaser, and ex-husband three times over. He was a well-known figure, not only at all the notable rendezvous of gentlemen-sportsmen in his own country, but all the similarly notable hotels all over the world—Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Taj Mahal in Bombay, the Ritz in Paris, Claridge’s in London. Sunken-cheeked, droop-lidded, lopsided, stiff-kneed in one leg since he’d taken a header two years ago, still he was good-looking in his own way—virile, magnetic, and as used to homage as to the air he breathed.
Charlotte did not make a propitious start with
Hamilton Hunneker. Her first few caustic remarks made him jump like a horse dug by a spur. When he told her that the Vales of Boston were well known to him, in fact that he was a member of the same club at Harvard to which her brothers belonged, she had shrugged and said, “What a pity!”
“How’s that?” It was a very executive club.
“I know the mold so well. It doesn’t interest me.” She had turned her back square on him.
From that moment Hamilton Hunneker laid himself out to prove that he could be of interest to this female, who scoffed at all established institutions, no doubt, and disagreed with all popular opinions simply because they were established and popular. They did it to sound original and cause a sensation. It never occurred to him that the caustic remarks and turned back were due to shyness and fear.
It was this sophisticated type of man before whom Charlotte always was dumb. Mrs. Devereaux had already mentioned his several divorces and his many other affaires with ladies. Such a man would be too keen a judge of women’s charms and devices not to see how utterly lacking she was in both. The quicker the painful period of inspection was over the better.
The back Charlotte had turned on Hamilton Hunneker tweaked his memory. It was covered by a yellow velvet cape with brown markings and silver splotches. It looked like one of those hand-painted things from Taormina. He’d bought one of them once himself—a negligee for Bernice, his second wife. Paid $250 for it. She’d wheedled it out of him, the little golddigger, after she’d already made up her own mind to get a divorce.
Later in the evening, after he’d had a whiskey and soda or two, he confided to Charlotte he’d once known a lady extremely well, with whose same brown streaks and silver splotches on her yellow velvet negligee, and his drooping lids drooped more. It was the sort of remark, accompanied by the sort of look, which filled her with panic. Not because her sense of propriety was offended, but because suggestive language was often just an attempt of the sophisticated to “shock” her. If she didn’t get rid of this man he’d simply ruin the rest of the trip.
“Did the yellow negligee you refer to belong to one of your wives?” she inquired witheringly, “or to one of those who decided not to go as far as the altar?”
It sounded worse than she thought it would. She immediately regretted the speech. Especially as Hamilton Hunneker didn’t strike back with a parry equally insulting.
Instead, winking very fast, the color mounting to his face, he murmured, “Gad!” Then, leaning toward her so that his face was very close, “Why is it you’ve got it in for me?”
There was something about him that reminded her of J.D.! The mounting color? That surprised, hurt look? Or was it simply the close proximity of his masculinity that made her feel kindly disposed? Charlotte had yet to discover that loving one man intimately, or one child, as a matter of fact, any creature, results in kindly feelings toward the species, individually and as a whole.
“I haven’t it in for you! It was a horrid thing to say! I was trying to be funny.”
“I see. Just a bit of pretty wit,” he said, and he gave a forced haw-haw.
She caught a whiff of the familiar smell of stale tobacco on his breath, which J.D., who loved his pipe, occasionally had, too, though he never knew it. How alike men probably were! No doubt they were all just J.D.’s, just Jerrys, with slightly different physiognomies, and slightly different developed characteristics. Now that was a discovery! If she could just remember it, then she need never feel panicky with one of the sex again. All this flashed over her as Hunneker leaned toward her, blinking, a little sorry for himself, and a little intoxicated!
She patted him lightly on the arm, as she would have Jerry. “Forget it, please. I’m sorry.”
After that Ham Hunneker became her devoted slave. Whatever land trip she decided to take, he decided to take, too, whether the rest of the sextette (as they called themselves) came or not. He followed her down the gangplank in the morning, hovered in her vicinity all day, followed her up the gangplank at night close in her wake. During the long days at sea he sat on the footrest of her steamer chair much of the time, and covered many miles walking with her on the deck.
LISA WAS ON THE PIER to meet Charlotte when she returned from her cruise. So also was June. Even Lisa was unprepared for so great a change in Charlotte, and June was struck too dumb for the first half hour to make a single quip. June had accompanied her mother to the pier from a generous instinct. Her mother was always urging all the children to be nice to Aunt Charlotte. June knew Aunt Charlotte had lost pounds of weight and that she’d had her hair cut just before sailing, so her mother’s hatbands would fit. But she hadn’t tried to think what she would look like.
Neither Lisa nor June caught a single glimpse of her on the decks before the passengers began streaming out. Charlotte saw them, however. Lisa was standing beside a gray cement pillar, tall, quiet, pale, dressed in black. June was flashing from spot to spot. Never still, cherry-cheeked, cherry-lipped, dressed in red. How unchanged they both were!
How unchanged everything was—the low New Jersey coast with glimpses of small farm houses; the distant strip of Staten Island with more houses, mere specks; the brawny Statue of Liberty, with her black-flamed torch; the first head-on view of New York’s famous skyline (which was never as impressive to her as she thought it ought to be); the dwarfed Aquarium; the lumbering ferryboats; the stolid docks fringing the Hudson River; the bullet-shaped top of the Empire State Building, everything just the same; as if time had been standing still since she had been away. Surely she could not have changed much either.
When she came down the gangplank, Hamilton Hunneker followed close behind her, carrying her suitcase, Lisa’s topcoat, his own overcoat, and a huge copper brazier she had picked up at Marakesch to give Rosa for a bird bath in her summer rosegarden. She herself coped with a gaudy-colored basket as large as a clothes hamper for Justine’s sunroom. No wonder neither Lisa nor June saw her till she stood in front of them.
“Well, here I am!” She lowered the hamper. “This is Mr. Hunneker. Two more Vales for you, Ham—Mrs. and Miss. How’s Mother?” She and Lisa kissed. “Hello, June!” And they kissed. “Yes, splendid crossing. I got your cable, ‘All’s well,’ yesterday. No bad news since, I hope!”
Before Lisa could reply, someone interrupted—Henry Montague—smooth-skinned, black-browed, every hair crisp and well-groomed. “Oh, here are you two beggars!” Montie exclaimed. “I’ve got to hurry along. Man waiting in the office. Leaving Iris to get through customs as best she can. Au revoir, Camille. Don’t forget about our reunion at Glen Cove weekend of the boat race. Be good, Ham. Say your prayers, Camille.” Charlotte introduced June. “Delighted! Camille—Miss Vale, that is—has been a great addition to our little group.” Before he got any further, there was another interruption—the Devereaux this time.
In fact there were a constant succession of interruptions around the clothes hamper. They continued even after Charlotte was standing in her proper section beneath a large printed V. It was here that the Littlejohns bade her goodbye. Also Mr. Thompson and Miss Demarest, the latter bursting out to June that there was no one on the cruise more popular than her sister! Close upon the departing heels of Miss Demarest, Mrs. Ricketts appeared, accompanied by a tall young man.
“I want you to meet our boy, Miss Vale—Jim, you know—the one I told you about. In Yale.”
Charlotte looked up into the smiling countenance of a veritable Adonis, and felt her extended hand gripped in a grasp that hurt. She introduced the Ricketts to Lisa and June.
“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Ricketts. “If you’ve made friends with somebody on a cruise it’s nice to meet their folks, I think. Well goodbye, Miss Vale. Be sure and look us up when you come to Sioux City.”
There were similar “be sures,” “look ups,” “goodbyes,” and “don’t forgets,” taking place beneath all the letters of the alphabet, while customs officers proceeded with their task. The majority of these passenger
s had been sharing the same fortunes for nearly two months. This last meeting before they scattered to the four winds was something like the last collation of a college graduating class.
If the scene had been prearranged for Charlotte, the lines and action written and rehearsed, the effect on Lisa and June could not have been more dramatic. Not only was June struck dumb temporarily, but it acted something like a sedative on her restlessness. She was held spellbound as she stared at Aunt Charlotte.
It was time for lunch by the time Charlotte’s baggage, also the hamper and brazier, were properly chalked by the customs officer. Hamilton Hunneker didn’t make his exit from the stage of her first performance in America in her new role till he’d put her in a taxicab and slammed the door upon her, shutting out Camille—shutting in Aunt Charlotte, it flashed over Charlotte with a sinking feeling as she watched Ham limping away in the distance. There went the last member of her supporting cast! It was over! One can’t go on acting a part all alone, with no stage, no scenery, and no one to give or answer cues. Or can one?
15
SPEAKING OF SECOND MARRIAGES
Charlotte, Lisa, and June lunched at a small dimly lit French restaurant somewhere in the East Sixties. Henry Montague had told Charlotte about the restaurant. Lisa and Charlotte sat side by side on a low-cushioned sofa seat upholstered in oyster-white leather piped in red. June sat opposite. By this time June had recovered her wits sufficiently to make a few remarks.
Now, Voyager Page 13
