June’s wit was often so pointed that it pierced deeper than she intended, but there was nothing malicious about June. Her object was simply amusement. No doubt the right way to take her was to treat her as one would a terrier keen for a romp, but Charlotte had always acted on the theory that terriers turn elsewhere for their sport if one appears indifferent to their advances. Ever since landing, she had been dreading this first opportunity for June’s comments and questions. She knew they were coming from that way she had of tilting her head on one side and looking at her closely.
“You could knock me over with a feather! Honestly! You look younger than Mona!” June had a nickname for everybody. Her mother’s was Mona.
“As it happens she is younger by several years,” Lisa remarked.
“Well, at the rate she’s going she’ll be back in the cradle in a few weeks! I don’t know when I’ve had such a shock.”
“Perhaps a cocktail might help you,” Charlotte suggested.
June’s jaw fell. Charlotte motioned to the waiter. She could feel the old familiar discomfort as June continued her penetrating gaze. But there was no reason to be afraid of June, she was a young, inexperienced chit of a girl. June had never been loved deeply. There had never been a Jerry in her life, to soften her and sober her. Jerry! In the same longitude now. Same latitude. Same time of day. Same temperature. Same weather. Same city. Sitting in a restaurant, probably, not many blocks away. “Oh, it’s simply wonderful to be here!” suddenly she burst out. “There’s no city in the world like New York! No country like the U.S.A.!” Such a wave of patriotism she had never felt before. She gazed around the restaurant. It was lined with mirrors. She caught reflections of herself from various angles. They were all extremely reassuring. She was still in costume! The stage was still set. She knew her lines too!
“Daiquiri for me, please, waiter. What do you want? This is my party, by the way.”
June had never seen Charlotte take even a glass of Dubonnet. Her eyes glittered like a champion’s when challenged.
“Old-fashioned for me!” she said, and produced a cigarette case from her bag, selected one, tapped it on the table, and passed the case to her mother. Lisa shook her head. Then to Charlotte. Charlotte took one. June struck a match and held it up. “They’ve got cork tips. Be sure you get the right end, Auntie.”
“Thanks for the instructions, Roly-Poly,” replied Charlotte. June had been a plump baby. The nickname, as well as the plumpness, had persisted so long that she’d finally refused to answer to Roly-Poly.
Lisa broke into a low, amused laugh. “Good for you, Charlotte!”
“I’ll say so too!” June agreed, as sporting was her reputation.
Charlotte felt a flash of liking for June, and June for Charlotte. Neither was aware that they had any characteristics in common. But the fact was that Charlotte’s sarcasm and ironic comments, and June’s wisecracks and teasing were both expressions of a similar tendency for perceiving the incongruous. Both possessed a keen eye for the foibles and frailties of human nature, a faculty which, when shared, is very conducive to companionship.
“In other words you think little Roly-Poly is disgustingly fat!” June demanded with a disarming sigh of despair.
“No just plump and juicy.”
“You’re right, I am too fat. Put on ten pounds since spring. What’s the use of dieting? If I ate nothing but cabbage I’d still be the shape of one. Tell us your secret. How have you lost all your pounds, Rawbones?”
Charlotte again motioned to the waiter. “The à-la-carte card, please,” she said, pushing aside the table-d’hôte menu as if beneath her notice. “I’ll keep your figure in mind when I order lunch, Roly-P—I mean June, dear.”
“Look here!” said June, “what’s happened to you, anyway? Have you been having monkey-gland injections on the quiet?”
“Not on the quiet. It’s become quite the thing in certain parts of the world. There’s a doctor in Fez who is very clever at it. Most of his patients are the wives of rich men with harems. It’s making a good deal of trouble among the younger wives.” She made this speech with a perfectly straight face.
“And where did you get your face lifted, Auntie, dear?” June inquired.
“Oh, I had that done in Naples, Roly, darling, by a surgeon known all over Europe for his success in that field.”
“I see! Mother told us you missed your cruise boat in Naples. But the truth will out! So that’s what you were up to!”
“That, among other things. The Naples surgeon was so skillful I wasn’t in the hospital long. Even so soon the scar is invisible to the naked eye.”
“Extraordinary!” murmured June.
Still neither betrayed by either voice or expression the slightest indication of levity. It was Lisa who broke the spell.
“What perfect nonsense! You two!” Inwardly, she was not only surprised but delighted that Charlotte could parry with June for even a brief period. Of course she couldn’t keep up her end long. She decided she’d better come to her help before it was necessary. “Come, let’s be sensible now. Your letters have been so vague, Charlotte. I’d like a few facts. When you cabled that you’d missed the cruise boat out of Naples, I was afraid you might take the next liner for home. I don’t know to this day what you did all the time you were waiting around for another boat. It must have been lonely.”
“Not so bad. I hired a car and chauffeur and took a little sidetrip on my own. You’ll find Fabia’s walking shoes in bad shape. But let’s see what we’ll have to eat.”
She became engrossed in the bill of fare. For the last few weeks she had been listening to Henry Montague ordering meals for the sextette in various restaurants and cafés.
Charlotte again motioned to the waiter. “No soup. Not for lunch,” she murmured, remembering Monty. “I’ll not forget about the calories, June,” she tucked in. “We’ll start with the flaked fresh crab meat waiter, à la Canaille. Then cuisses de grenouille Provencal, but please omit the garlic. Then, let’s see. How are the artichokes? Very well. Artichokes, with Hollandaise, for two. The young lady does not care for Hollandaise. Avocado and grapefruit salad for two. For the young lady, plain lettuce, no dressing, just a slice of lemon. And for dessert—well, what do you say, Lisa, you and I try their crêpes suzettes? Two crêpes suzettes, flambée, waiter. An orange ice for the young lady.” She laid down the menu card.
June reached across the table and gave Charlotte’s wrist a savage shake. “You heartless brute!” she hissed. No ill-feeling whatsoever. However, June was not yet defeated.
After June had scraped her frog’s legs as close as possible to the marrow, dipped the last blade of her artichoke into a glob of velvety Hollandaise on the side of her plate (nothing fattening in Hollandaise—just a little egg and lemon juice), she launched her next attack: “Tell us about your boyfriend, Auntie.”
“Which one, Roly?” asked Charlotte, wincing inwardly.
“Hamilton Hunneker. I recognized him instantly. His picture was in last month’s Spur. You know who he is, don’t you, Mona? Lives in a swell penthouse here in New York on top of a skyscraper he owns. Got a big estate in Aiken and a marvelous stable. And out in Far Hills something he calls a shack that looks to me, from the picture, more like a stone castle on the Rhine. Our Charlotte is stepping out some. Cavorting around with Hamilton Hunneker! What do you think, Mona? Doesn’t it look a little suspicious to you?”
There was as little foundation for June’s implication about Ham, as there had been for her similar innuendoes last fall about Barry. But no hot wave of embarrassment followed Charlotte’s first wince. Again Jerry came to her rescue. Jerry had found her desirable. She must never claim it, never speak of it, no one must ever know of it. But her own secret knowledge of the fact divested June’s insinuations of their sting. June often teased her mother in similar vein. Lisa always took such teasing with amused tolerance. Well, now that Jerry had brought Charlotte inside the pale, she too could be amused and tolerant.
&
nbsp; “Well, we’re waiting,” June pursued. “Do let us into your secret, you sly puss. We won’t tell.” Words, voice, manner, almost identical to those that had sent her stumbling out of the room in humiliating tears last October. “Am I going to have an Uncle Ham some day? Are you going to be Mrs. Hamilton Hunneker the fourth?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” Charlotte replied. “Ham has his points. Good-hearted. Kind to animals; and you’d simply love to ride his horses if you should visit us at Aiken. But he’s got that game leg, and is a little too old for me, I’m afraid.”
“I didn’t know you had this side in you!” June exclaimed. “Perhaps there really is something between you and Hamilton Hunneker. Why did they call you Camille?”
“I’m afraid you’re too young to be told. Your mamma has never allowed you to read the novel, Camille, I expect. Tell me about Fabia, Lisa,” she said, changing the subject.
Fabia was Lisa’s oldest daughter. She was in a New York hospital training to become a nurse. She had left home a year and a half ago, just before the news of her father’s financial ruin became public, ostensibly to take up nursing in order to become self-supporting. Only her mother and a few members of the family knew that her object was to escape from the vicinity of Dan Regan. Fabia was still engrossed by her nursing, Lisa told Charlotte, and seemed to be very happy. “She’s gotten over Dan entirely apparently.”
“All but the memory,” Charlotte said reflectively. “Fabia will never get over that. Dan will always be part of her. ‘We are what our memories are.’” She paused, taking a sip of her coffee. Jerry will always be a part of me, too, she thought, her face suffused with a softness of expression Lisa had never seen there before.
June had an early afternoon appointment and left her mother and Charlotte still sipping coffee. “I know you’re dying to have me go, Mona,” she said as she rose, “so you can set off your own little bomb without any witnesses.”
“What did she mean by that?” asked Charlotte.
Lisa pushed aside her coffee cup, folded her hands on the tabletop, and announced quietly, “Barry Firth and I are going to be married.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“We are going to be married tomorrow afternoon.”
“So soon?”
“Yes. We’ve cared for each other for years. Barry has waited for a long while. I know, according to convention, it is too soon for me to marry again. But you know my age. A younger woman can afford to consider convention. I can’t.” Her voice had become earnest, and, for Lisa, extremely tense. “You’re such a straight thinker, Charlotte, I thought I would tell you, and you can tell the rest of the family, that if Barry and I should have a child I should be very very happy.”
“I suppose,” said Charlotte, “having a child does make a woman very very happy.”
“In this case, yes. It would be a reward for waiting—for refusing to give Barry secretly what I couldn’t publicly.”
“Why did you refuse if you didn’t love Rupert, and, of course, it’s been clear to me you didn’t.”
“Barry’s wife was living at first. They weren’t suited, but it didn’t seem fair to her.”
Charlotte winced.
“And then, too, I had the children. My children were Vales, and I was a Vale then, too. I was brought up to believe one shouldn’t involve one’s children, and their family name as well, in anything that might cause shame, just because of a personal matter of one’s own. And then there was Rupert—so proud, and in many ways so fine. I want to tell you something, Charlotte, that Rupert did before he died, something that was very wonderful—very big. Ever since I’ve known about it, something of the same feeling I had for him before has come back to me.”
“Good Heavens, I can’t imagine what he did! He was always just a self-opinionated figurehead, according to my opinion, with very little of the milk of human kindness in his veins.”
“Sisters are a man’s severest critics sometimes.”
“Rupert never seemed like a brother to me. He was always ashamed of me. I never could understand what you saw in him. What in the world did he do that was so big and so wonderful?”
“He wrote a letter to Barry to be read after his death.”
“What did the letter say?”
“That he had known that Barry and I cared for each other ever since that first year when Barry came down from Canada to go into the Boston office with Rupert. He just waited. When he became convinced that I had no intention of disregarding my responsibilities to him, he decided never to refer to it. He wrote Barry he thought it was wiser to spare the relationship between us all the stain of such a discussion, and kinder to protect my pride and dignity by saying nothing about it.”
“Incidentally he was protecting his own pride and dignity, you realize,” Charlotte remarked with a flash of old irony.
“That’s not just to Rupert,” Lisa remonstrated. “For at the end of the letter he ignores his own pride completely. He tells Barry not only that he approves of our marriage after his death, but of our speedy marriage, and to allow no conventional notions as to proper respect to him to delay the step. Rupert’s financial losses changed him in many ways. He became gentler. And his illness brought out still more gentleness. Doctor Warburton once said he wouldn’t deprive any man or woman of the opportunities of a long-drawn-out last sickness. I know what he meant now. It was a second chance for us all—for me, for each of the children, and for Rupert too.”
“What does Mother think of the marriage?”
“I haven’t told her yet. I thought your return was enough for her to take at one time. But I’ve written her a letter which I’m going to ask you to give her when it’s wise.”
“And none of the rest of the family know about it either?”
“Oh yes, I told Lloyd and Hilary night before last. They are greatly upset. They like Barry, but they think the interval of only eight months is unpardonable—‘indecent’ was Lloyd’s word. And being married by a justice of the peace in a New York lawyer’s office—‘second rate’ and ‘sensational’ were Hilary’s adjectives. Lloyd said no member of a large and important family like the Vales has the right to act as irresponsibly as I’m doing.”
“Oh, isn’t that a typical Vale remark! Thank goodness you’ve got the guts to stand up to them. What is your own children’s attitude?”
“Typical of most children their age. They’ve all always liked Barry. But much prefer the relationship of family friend to stepfather, although they’re being very nice about it. However, even if they weren’t nice I’d marry Barry anyhow now. It won’t make any difference to my providing a home for the children. We’re going to open up the closed rooms, and the old house is going to come alive again. All four of the children are going to be here tomorrow afternoon. I want you, too. We’ll have a little celebration before Barry and I sail for Bermuda at midnight.”
“But won’t Mother expect me to come directly home?”
“Oh, I’ve paved the way for that. I told her that Doctor Jaquith wished to see you, which is true, here in his New York office, and I’ve made an appointment for day after tomorrow morning.”
“You’re simply wonderful! I cabled Doctor Jaquith myself in hopes he’d be in town, and could give me half an hour.”
“Also I made an appointment for you at Henri’s. But I can see that was unnecessary. You’re looking marvelous. I’ll cancel that.”
“No, you won’t. And if you’ve got any time to spare this afternoon you’ll go shopping with me. For I suppose you’ll be wanting what’s left of your wardrobe now.”
“No. I’m starting from scratch again. Barry wanted me to.”
“Oh, I can see, then, you’re far too busy to shop with me!”
“No, I’m not. My trunk is locked and ready to go to the boat this minute. I hoped you’d want me to shop with you. Mother Vale has asked all the clan for dinner day after tomorrow night, and you must have a lovely dress. My, but I’d give a lot to be there.”
A REMINDER OF JOY
Whenever Charlotte approached Boston after a long absence, she was conscious of a hollow sensation which increased as she drew nearer to the brownstone steps which mounted to the door of her birthplace in the long row of brick and brownstone façades on Marlborough Street. There was a portico over the door upheld by four brownstone pillars with Ionic capitals. When she was a little girl she could tell from across the street which tier of steps was hers by the clenched fists at the top of the pillars.
The hollow sensation could not be attributed to dread of returning to her mother’s domination, because her mother always accompanied her on a journey. It was due to the realization of her lack of friends and contacts in the city where she had been born and had always lived. She was indigenous to the soil, yet somehow her roots had failed to take hold in it.
Whenever she rumbled into any one of Boston’s railroad stations, she was bitterly aware that not a single one of the city’s seven hundred thousand odd was anticipating her return. Not one of its many organizations, institutions, clubs, or groups had as much as noted her absence. She used to feel a secret hatred for Boston. But it wasn’t the city’s fault. Even at boarding school, she had lived the same solitary, desultory existence.
This time the old hollow sensation was submerged by anxiety, and a disturbing sense of excitement. It wasn’t so much fear of her mother as fear of herself, which filled her with alarm. Would she prove worthy of Doctor Jaquith’s, “Well done! I’m proud of you,” and show her mettle in the important encounter awaiting her at home?
During the five-hour journey from New York, there had been little opportunity to dwell on the approaching encounter. June was with her, and kept up a lively conversation from 125th Street to the outskirts of Providence, when one of her many young men admirers discovered her and asked her into the club car for a drink. He asked Charlotte, too, but she refused, leaning back in her chair from sheer exhaustion.
There was no one besides William at the station to meet Charlotte. June asked to be left at the Ritz. The high, old-fashioned limousine stopped in front of the entrance opposite the Public Garden. The trees were in fresh young leaf now, the tulips in full glory. The round beds were like huge whirling pinwheels of color. The Public Garden had been Charlotte’s playground when she was a little girl. It was as familiar to her as if the raked paths, the clipped edges, and the glimpse of water in the distance were all part of her father’s private estate.
Now, Voyager Page 14
