“You’re groggy, Gramma dear, and talking perfect nonsense. Nobody’s listening.” She winked one eye at Charlotte, and nodded toward the door.
CHARLOTTE WAITED UNTIL the third day after her return before telling her mother about Lisa’s marriage to Barry. It became necessary then because the news was to be announced in the papers that evening. Lisa had thoughtfully arranged that the announcement should be delayed for several days after Charlotte’s return, so that Mother Vale would be spared two shocks at once.
Her mother took the news about Lisa calmly, but Dora explained it. “It’s just another example of the effect of a counter irritant. You’re like a mustard plaster on the poor dear’s feelings, burning her so she can’t feel much of anything else.”
Of course her mother denounced Lisa and in no uncertain terms. She accused her of bad taste, lack of respect for Rupert’s memory, and lack of consideration for the name her children bore. “But it’s of no great importance to me what Lisa does, now. Rupert’s gone. She hasn’t even any of the Vale money since Rupert lost all his share. And now she won’t get any! So let her go her own way! She’s no longer one of us. But,” she added, “I should think it might make you feel humiliated to have Barry Firth snap her up the first minute she’s free, while all these years you’ve been available, and right under his nose.”
Once such a remark would have made Charlotte smart for hours, but now, like a bird shot that has missed its goal, it fell harmlessly. “Lisa is welcome to Barry!” she retorted gaily.
This scene took place in her mother’s bedroom. It was a bower of flowers. There was also a plate of hothouse grapes, a bottle of old Madeira, two boxes of her favorite candy, and two new bed jackets still in their tissue-paper-lined boxes. Every adult member of the Vale family had sent Grandmother Vale some sort of tribute. It was very unusual for her to be confined to her room. She had always assumed the Spartan attitude of not giving in to her feelings, however badly she felt. She had always considered bed a concession to weakness. But now it was with difficulty that Dora Pickford got her out of bed.
It was Dan Regan who actually accomplished the feat, slipping his arms under her knees and around her body, remarking casually, “Can’t afford to let you get pneumonia! Hang on to my neck tight.”
She had taken a fancy to Dan Regan the first time he had picked her up from the floor at the foot of the stairs and laid her on her bed. When Doctor Warburton dropped in the next morning, she had refused to see him, announcing that Dan Regan was to continue with her case. “George Warburton is getting deaf and short-breathed,” she scoffed. “That old man couldn’t carry me around to save his life—or my life either. Why, the very muscles of that young giant’s neck gave me a feeling of confidence in him.”
She basked in all the attentions showered upon her by the family, and gloried in the impression which her ankle made on those privileged to see it. She was very proud of the shapeless, shiny mass of angry-colored flesh—black, blue, catawba red, with lurid blotches of yellow. She enjoyed the obvious authenticity of her affliction as much as that of her diamonds. More, in fact, because her diamonds brought out only admiration, while her ankle elicited sympathy. And gradually, concern and consultation. It appeared that the cause of the swelling might be more serious than a torn ligament.
At the end of the fifth day Dan Regan again picked up the little old lady’s 105 pounds, carried her down two flights of stairs, out her front door into Doctor Warburton’s, to a rear room where there was an X-ray apparatus.
The developed film of Grandmother Vale’s skeleton ankle revealed a blurred streak where there shouldn’t be one. Buried way down underneath the colorful mass of water-filled flesh there was a tiny crack in one of the brittle bones. Grandmother Vale had broken her ankle!
19
A GIRLHOOD FRIEND
Her mother’s confinement to the house, and to one room in the house until she acquired her wheelchair, spared Charlotte many a diatribe, and side stepped many a conflict and dead-end issue. Once beyond her mother’s threshold, she was free as that summer years ago when her mother had been confined to her stateroom. Moreover, her mother’s dependence on Dora Pickford and preference for Dora’s skilful ministrations saved Charlotte from that sense of failure and inadequate devotion which any ailment of her mother’s always aroused.
Dora became a fixture in the household. The broken ankle took on as much importance as a newborn infant. In fact, Dora referred to it as “our baby.” “Time for his bath!” she’d sing out. “Time to dress him and make him look pretty!” “My, he’s a naughty boy to keep his mumsie awake all night.”
Dora didn’t confine these remarks to the sickroom. “Mother and child both doing well,” she would announce to Lloyd, much to his embarrassment, when he dropped in to inquire for his mother’s health. Dora felt no more in awe of Lloyd than of “Gramma” herself. The girl was utterly without respect, Lloyd said. But also without disrespect, all the family conceded. The family never had seen anyone quite like Dora before. She treated them as if they and she were on exactly the same level. It didn’t seem to occur to Dora that there was any reason for her to feel inferior to anybody in the world. Her good-humor flowed out unobstructed by envy or self-consciousness. To Charlotte, Dora was a living example of the kind of nature which Doctor Jaquith had been holding up to her as a desirable pattern.
Charlotte lived up to the impression she had made on the family the first night. The change in her appearance caused no such avalanche of comment and speculation as her mother predicted. The Vales’ affairs were not of as much concern to outsiders as they imagined she had suffered far more from self-consciousness and fear of ridicule during her first début in Boston than her second. For that was what the following fall and winter became, to Charlotte, a second début.
The first events started in June. A few days after her appearance at Rosa’s luncheon, Charlotte was asked to become a permanent member of the bridge club. At the next meeting one of the bridge-club members invited Charlotte to a dinner followed by bridge. At the dinner one of the guests inquired if anyone present could lend her a helping hand at a rummage sale. At the rummage sale one of the committee asked for a volunteer with a car to deliver what rummage was left to the Salvation Army.
Charlotte jumped at each chance, grasped every opportunity. I’m like somebody climbing up the face of a cliff, she wrote Doctor Jaquith, grabbing at every branch or twig I can get hold of to pull myself up out of the slough I was in. It’s pathetic, the thrill I feel over every single friendly gesture I get here in my native city.
Not so pathetic as not getting any friendly gestures in your native city, Doctor Jaquith replied. Keep on grabbing!
EVERY SUMMER IN MID-JUNE it was the custom of Charlotte and her mother to go to Maine and remain until September in the Vale cottage, situated on the coast overlooking a bay. The Vale cottage was a huge pseudo-Georgian mansion, painted yellow. It had some twenty-odd rooms, three porte-cocheres, and many spreading porches with railings topped with flower boxes filled with geraniums, ageratum and Vinca vines.
The twenty rooms were usually filled with Grandmother Vale’s visiting children and grandchildren, of late grandchildren chiefly, their parents preferring a holiday elsewhere. They were free from all anxiety as to the children’s safety, for Charlotte would be in charge. Charlotte could be counted on to act calmly and with intelligence in case of sickness or an emergency, and she never had any plans of her own cropping up inconveniently. What a wonderful opportunity it was for an unmarried woman no longer young to be a temporary mother to her nephews and nieces!
This year, to the family’s dismay, Charlotte calmly announced that she was spending a fortnight in July at some club on the shores of Lake Huron with some people named Devereaux; and casually referred to a possible cruise in August on Hamilton Hunneker’s yacht Spindrift. It necessitated sending no less than three of the clan’s children to summer camps.
Charlotte and her mother made the yearly migration to
Maine usually by automobile, stopping off at Rockland for a night en route, to break the trip. But this year the journey was made by train. The precarious transportation was much discussed and elaborately prepared for. All of which Mother Vale greatly enjoyed. The drawing-room in the Pullman was engaged days ahead, the bed made up with her own linen and blankets in advance of her arrival. She took keen delight in all the “carries” from house to automobile, automobile to wheelchair, and wheelchair to drawing room. She reveled in the distinction her wheelchair gave her. Conductors cleared the platform, porters leaped to offer helping hands, solicitous family members followed her with various comforts for the trip.
When she arrived at the steps of the Pullman, Dan Regan was waiting for her. She had insisted that he make the journey with her. He told the family it was quite unnecessary, but complied when they also insisted. Throughout the journey, while Dan and Dora played attendance upon the queen, Charlotte remained unsent for, unnecessary, but well content.
There was no declared state of war between Charlotte and her mother. The amenities were observed, good-mornings exchanged, conversations carried on, none of the threats carried out. Charlotte’s allowance continued to arrive as always, on the first of each month, mailed by the bank. When new articles for her wardrobe became necessary, Charlotte charged her purchases to her mother’s account as usual. As far as she knew they were settled promptly.
The bills that Charlotte charged didn’t come directly to her mother’s notice. For years one of Lloyd’s secretaries had paid all the household expenses, rendering frequent reports to her mother, which she claimed she examined with care, but which were usually placed on file for a later time. Her mother loved the power which money gave her, but she disliked all the details of its care. A trust company managed her investments. However, the trust company could do nothing about reducing the old lady’s enormous income tax. She refused to consider any proposed scheme which required division of her property and therefore her power.
But, although Charlotte’s allowance continued, so also did her mother’s threats about it. And also her threats about her will. “Ignore them.” Doctor Jaquith advised. “It relieves your mother of a lot of emotional steam. I’ve found in my practice the patients who continually threaten suicide seldom commit it. However, there are exceptions. Don’t call her bluff. Be affable. Be diplomatic. In short, stick to your guns, but don’t shoot.”
This was exactly what Charlotte did. She pursued her own way all summer, casually and cheerfully. She carried out each day’s program without consulting her mother, continued the new habits she had acquired with no attempt at concealment, even smoking a cigarette occasionally in her mother’s presence, taking no notice of the hostility it kindled. Beneath her mother’s frowns and grumblings, it was apparent that she was keenly interested, curious to see the contents of every box that arrived, thoroughly enjoying the trying-on process, though her comments were always adverse and cryptic. She was also eager to be told about every invitation Charlotte received.
Charlotte’s skill at bridge had been soon discovered by the summer colony, also the fact that an invitation to Charlotte didn’t require including her mother, now confined to a wheelchair. Charlotte Vale became quite the fashion that summer. Her mother thrived on the new vitality that seeped into the house. And what’s more, she wrote Doctor Jaquith, I have a notion she is relishing a little spunk in her daughter.
Charlotte’s thoughts turned often to J.D. But the three camellias were followed by no other message from him. She had replied to the camellias. But so cautiously that her signal might have missed fire. Any message mailed to his office was out of the question because of Isobel’s cousin. She considered a telegram or a person-to-person telephone call, but for all she knew the cousin might be seated at J.D.’s elbow. For days she had searched for a signal sufficiently disguised.
One day, gazing into the window of an antique shop, her eyes had fallen on some old flower prints. Among them was a crimson camellia. She bought it. The thin parchment-like paper was yellowed with age, but the flower itself was brilliantly glowing.
She dared not mail the camellia to J.D. anonymously. It reeked with the romantic sentimentality of the age it had been printed. She was about to abandon her idea when she thought of Deb McIntyre. She had mailed frequent postcards all along the route of the cruise. She had written her at length about the overturned car, and told her how wonderful J.D. had been about engaging passage for her on another boat and acting the part of the good Samaritan generally. Before J.D. and she had separated, they had agreed on what story to tell Mack and Deb so as to tell the same one.
Charlotte cut the camellia print down to postcard size, slipped it into a government envelope addressed to Deb, and enclosed a note asking her please to give the enclosed to J.D. next time she saw him. In view of the absurd name he had christened her, she couldn’t resist sending him her photograph. How was J.D., anyway? She hadn’t received even a postcard from him since she last saw him in Naples. And how was she herself, and dear old Mack?
For several weeks she looked for some sort of response from J.D.—another anonymous flower, a picture postcard, a book, anything addressed by his pen. Nothing came. Well, probably it was better so. It was truer to their pact.
His lack of response did not make her feel bitter. She interpreted it as a firm resolve of J.D.’s to step out of her picture completely and spare her all future suffering. She had nursed the camellias till they drooped, then had pressed a few of their petals and laid them away with a coil of wire, an empty perfumery bottle, a letter signed Jerry, and a florist’s tag with her address on it—all she possessed in the way of material evidence that her path and J.D’s had ever met and become one.
It wasn’t until the following winter that Charlotte learned that J.D. never recognized her signal. Not for a full twelve months later did Deb find Charlotte’s unopened letter in its government envelope in the pocket of a discarded raincoat of Mack’s. Mack often stopped for the mail on his way out from town and sometimes forgot to deliver it.
It was September that Charlotte met Elliot Livingston again. She had met him first at dancing school years ago. Charlotte had come down from the cottage in Maine in advance of her mother and Dora to superintend the annual autumn unswathing of the Marlborough Street house. She was staying with Lisa and Barry.
Lisa called up Elliot Livingston on the morning of Charlotte’s arrival and asked him to drop in for dinner that night and to make a fourth at bridge afterward. Elliot was an old friend of Lisa’s, and a near one. His fifty acres bordered on the Vale’s twelve to which Rupert had brought Lisa as a bride. All Lisa’s children had been born in the big rambling country-clublike house built by Rupert’s father.
Lisa’s children were all there that night for cocktails except Fabia. June, lipsticked and enameled a raspberry red, awaiting the arrival of a brand new beau who was taking her dancing; Windy, weathered and burned after his summer as a counselor at a boys’ camp, in spite of his crutch; Murray, small and spectacled, pale as a toadstool in comparison, not saying much as he held his stemmed glass filled with orange juice, and nibbled an olive. A year and a half ago Windy had infantile paralysis, but now, leaning nonchalantly on his crutch, radiating good-nature and good-fellowship, he still outshone Murray, like the sun a candle-flame.
As Charlotte shook hands with Elliot, she thought, How little he’s changed! His hair was still black, still curly, though very close cropped to conceal the fact. He still wore it brushed straight back from his forehead.
“Funny we’ve never met before,” he said, after the first banalities.
“The world is a small place, but Boston is a big one!” Charlotte replied.
“That’s a remark to make one think twice,” said Barry.
“I think I see what you mean, Miss Vale. Take us—our families—the Livingstons and Vales are old friends, but I can’t remember ever seeing you. And if I had I’m sure I would remember it!”
Still the same char
m! Still the same instinctive courtliness, thought Charlotte, as she sipped a Martini.
She had been twelve years old and Elliot thirteen when she first met him. Though both had attended the same dancing-school, they were in different classes. Charlotte was in the Wednesdays; Elliot was in the Thursdays. The Wednesdays were having a cotillion and several of the boys in the other classes were invited to attend. Among these was Elliot Livingston. The dancing-master had announced the names of the guests to the girls en masse, explaining that now they were all introduced, and would the young gentlemen now select partners for the grand march.
Charlotte had been well concealed behind Elaine Lovell’s mass of spun-sugarlike hair. Elliot hadn’t as much as seen her. But later she had danced with him! Every little while the dancing master blew a shrill whistle and ordered a grand right and left. Everyone flocked to the center of the hall and formed a circle. Charlotte had weaved her way halfway around the circle when the music stopped, and Elliot was holding her hand!
Elliot was one of the best dancers in his class. Just the awareness of her partner’s skill always turned Charlotte’s body into wood. She had stumbled over Elliot’s feet once or twice.
“I don’t know how to Boston,” she had said, bearing down heavier on his blue serge-covered shoulder.
“This isn’t a waltz. It’s a two-step. Just limber up. You’re doing fine.” He had been very kind.
When the ordeal was over, he had offered her his arm, and gallantly conducted her across the shiny floor to the girls’ side of the hall. And after she had sat down, he had placed his hand on his chest and bowed, as all the boys had to do. But his bow had been different; not just a jerky duck of the head followed by a swift turn and hasty retreat. But slow and courtly. She might have been the prettiest girl there.
He hadn’t asked her to dance again, of course. And not for anything in the world would she have asked him, when it came to the girls’ turn to favor the boys. Whenever Charlotte had to ask a boy to dance, she always chose the most unattractive, thus avoiding the torture of that pained look which popular boys were so apt to show when she approached. As she had watched Elliot later making the same slow bow with which he had honored her, he became her idea of one of Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.
Now, Voyager Page 17
