“Brady,” Caroline said. “In New York. And—coming up. This afternoon. Borrowing a car and—”
“Darling,” Dorcas said and then, “It’s wonderful” and then, “I’m so glad,” and took the hands Caroline held out to her. And then, rather absurdly, very delightedly, the two girls did a little circling dance on the terrace, in the sunlight.
There was, however, more to it. Lieutenant Commander Brady Wilkins was in New York, was coming up. However—
When he would get there depended on things which he could not entirely control; on, it appeared—and, as always, appeared in the murk of security—a man he had to see in regard to something he wasn’t supposed to mention. (And wouldn’t mention, even to a wife; even to a wife who was also Caroline.) If he and this man could finish with what they had to discuss early enough, Brady Wilkins would be in time for the party. To “drop in on the party.”
“I don’t,” Caroline said, “think he’ll want to stay long. Or—that either of us will.”
“I should think not,” Dorcas said.
“So much to—that is, to talk about,” Caroline said.
“I,” Dorcas said, and spoke gravely, while laughter, and delight, flickered in her eyes, “would think there might be.”
To which Caroline said, of course, “You!”
It was four-thirty, and Dorcas was under a shower, changing for the party when, faintly over the sound of beating water, she heard the telephone ring again. She shut the water off and was wrapping herself in a towel robe, but then the telephone was stopped in the middle of its ringing, so she wriggled in the robe to dry her body and stood on first one foot and then the other to dry brown feet and legs. She was, she decided, getting a good start; was well along to browning, although it still was June. That was because they had “the place”—the place they had found early the previous autumn, too late in the year to do much good, but a place which had been wonderful, now, since mid-May.
It was a sheltered place—a kind of cup of sunlight, some distance from the house, with the house, and a dip of ground, and many trees and bushes between it and the road. It was smooth grass, shielded alike from breeze and from alien observation, and a wonderful place for sun-bathing. It might have been planned for that—dry tinder the robe, walking along the hallway from her bedroom toward the much larger “master” bedroom, so commonly without any “master”—Dorcas wondered if it had. She said, “Hi?” tentatively, into the large bedroom.
“Brady,” Caroline said, and turned on the padded bench in front of her dressing table. Caroline was brown too; browner, if anything, thanks to their “solarium.” “He’s just leaving.”
“Oh,” Dorcas said, and the tone was a little flat.
“Yes,” Caroline said. “And—two hours, with weekend traffic. At least two hours.”
To which Dorcas again said, “Oh.”
“So,” Caroline said, “you go along when you want to and we’ll come when we can. Sevenish, probably.”
“You will?” She looked at the brown-all-over of “the beautiful one” and thought of Brady Wilkins and was, somewhat, inclined to doubt it.
“You,” Caroline said. “Of course we will. For a quick one, anyway. We promised the lamb.”
So, at a little after five—there was no use twiddling thumbs about it—Dorcas Cameron called, “Be seeing you,” upstairs to her cousin, and went across the terrace toward the garage—went the long way around, by path, because grass will, when one least expects it, stain white shoes. She wore a green linen dress and went hatless. It was not until she was turning into the Brinkley driveway in the little commuting Ford that it occurred to her that this might be one of those at which people wore hats. And, it was even conceivable, white gloves.
Nonsense, Dorcas Cameron decided and said, “Hello, Ben,” to the elderly colored man in white jacket who had said, “Afternoon, Miss Cameron,” and waited to do something with her car. “Treat her gently, Ben,” Dorcas said, “she’s pretty feeble,” and Ben laughed at that—what gaiety there is in their laughter, Dorcas thought—and said, “Sho will, Miss Cameron.” And then she went to the door, at which the lamb—the lamb himself—waited.
“My dear,” William Brinkley said, as if he meant it, and then, “No cousin?”
She explained. Looking into the big, cool living room, she said, “I guess I’m early, Mr. Brinkley.” She had heard about the professor part—that it was an appellation for the campus. “Of course not,” he said, “come and meet the Misses Monroe.”
The Misses Monroe did wear hats—little white hats, with flowers. They were not identical white hats, but they were very sisterly white hats. Each Miss Monroe wore a white glove on her left hand, and cuddled another white glove within it. The Misses Monroe were much of a size, which was small, and they had faces which reminded Dorcas of soft pink tissue paper, ever so tenderly crumpled. They wore silk dresses, and one of the dresses was gray with a print of very tiny yellow flowers and the other was pale blue with very tiny white flowers. One of the Misses Monroe was Miss Elvina and the other was Miss Martha.
“Such a pretty little neighbor, Walter,” Miss Elvina said, when Brinkley had introduced them. “So pretty,” Miss Martha said. But already, Dorcas was not entirely sure which was Miss Elvina and which Miss Martha. “We’re always the first,” Miss Martha (or Elvina) said and Miss Elvina (Miss Martha?) said, “Always. I can’t think why. But we always are, aren’t we, Walter?”
“So much the better, Martha,” Walter Brinkley said, and moved a chair needlessly, but indicatively, for Dorcas and, when she was in it, sat on the sofa beside the Misses Monroe. He sat on the edge of the sofa, prepared to bounce.
“The old Adams house,” Miss Elvina (it had to be Elvina) said, and Dorcas smiled and looked at her, and had not the faintest idea what she was talking about.
“Where you and Caroline live,” Walter Brinkley said. “The last time an Adams lived in it was fifty years ago.”
“Walter,” Miss Martha said, as if about to tap him with a fan. “You’re making fun again.”
“And it’s not,” Miss Elvina said, unexpectedly, “as if you were a spring chicken, Walter.”
“It’s his having been away so much,” Miss Martha said. “In New York.” She spoke, Dorcas thought, as if New York, fifty-odd miles down the Harlem Division of the New York Central were some place incredibly remote.
“And London,” Miss Elvina said. It was odd, Dorcas thought, how much nearer, for some reason, London sounded in the gentle, aging voice. They both looked at her; then they looked at each other.
“So nice young people are coming back,” Miss Martha said, and Miss Elvina said, “So very nice.” “You know,” Miss Martha said, “somehow she reminds me of dear Gertrude. When we were all girls. The hair?”
“Gertrude had brown hair,” Miss Elvina said. “But I see what you mean, dear. There comes Jerry Hopkins, Walter.” Miss Elvina was, Dorcas realized, sitting so that she could look through a window toward the driveway. “In that funny little red car.”
“Matches his complexion,” Miss Martha said, but without malice.
Walter Brinkley stood up, then. A pretty, dark-brown girl in a green uniform went to the front door. And Harry Washington came with a tray with a frosty glass on it, and said, “A daiquiri, Miss Cameron? Seems like I remembers.” He did.
“And,” Miss Elvina said, “those new people from the old Mansfield place.”
“The new people, Elvina,” Walter Brinkley said, “have lived in the Mansfield place for over a dozen years.”
“You’re making fun again,” Miss Martha said. “Don’t mind him, Miss Cameron. Your cousin’s Navy, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Dorcas said. “She’s—”
“Mr. Hopkins,” Walter Brinkley said. “Jerry Hopkins. This is Miss Cameron, Jerry.”
“The old Adams place,” Jerry Hopkins said. He was short and wide and, as promised, red of face; he spoke somewhat hoarsely, but with vigor. He said, “Elvina. Martha.” He said, �
��Short scotch, Harry.”
“The Adamses were Navy people,” Miss Elvina said.
“Army,” Miss Martha said.
“I’m almost sure, Navy,” Miss Elvina said. “But, it really comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
“Well—” Dorcas said, and then Walter Brinkley touched her gently on the shoulder and said, “Some people’d like to meet you.” She stood up and smiled at the Misses Monroe, and, guided, moved with him a little way into the room—the room which, very rapidly, had begun to fill.
“They’re sweet,” she said.
“Yes,” Walter Brinkley said. “There’s never been anything to sour them, of course.” He had been guiding her toward the bar, toward, she supposed, introductions to those now clustered at the bar. (There was, Dorcas decided, a time to come to the party; a time everybody—except the Misses Monroe; herself—came.) Brinkley stopped and she stopped with him. He said, “Of course. Indiana.” She smiled and shook her head, not in negation, but to show herself for the moment lost. “Say something,” he told her. She raised eyebrows. “Anything,” he said. “Say, ‘What am I doing here among all these old people?’”
“All right,” she said, and said it. “But that isn’t the way I feel,” she added.
“Southern part of the state,” he said. “Not extreme south. But nearer Kentucky than the lake.”
“Oh,” she said. “Where I come from? Yes.”
There was a little puzzlement in her voice.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” Brinkley said, but did not at all speak sorrowfully; spoke rather as if he were pleased. “A wretched, intrusive habit of mine. I’ve fallen into bad hobbies.”
“Oh,” she said. “The way I speak. It’s so evident? But I went to school in the East.”
“Smith,” he told her, accurately. “You must forgive a puttering old man.” He blinked slightly. “Professor,” he added, with distaste. “Yes, Elvina and Martha are sweet old things. Their grandfathers—both of them—made a great deal of money. The Monroe house on Main Street has twenty-three rooms. For two little old ladies. Past presidents of the garden club, of course.”
“And,” she said, “arbiters?”
She pleased him. His pleasant pink face told her that. He chuckled to tell her that.
“Arbiters emeritus,” he said. “I’m afraid most of us are, in our various fashions. Emeritus, I mean. Let’s find you some of the younger ones. And a drink.”
Her glass was empty. There were younger ones. (The younger ones seemed to be, also, the later ones.) By six there were a good many people—in the room, on the terrace; younger ones and older ones and those in between. They had names that flickered into the mind and flickered out of it—out, at any rate, of hers. There were people called Sands and people called Farnley. There was a Mrs. Belsen, who was rather taller than six feet, and had a tiny voice—tiny and distant, so that Dorcas felt herself stand on tiptoe to listen. There were Thayers and Abernathys and some people named Craig. (Scotch-and-plain-water people, most of them.) The Craigs—she was much younger than he and a little, somehow, more urban—had, Dorcas gathered, been away for some time and were, in a sense, being greeted. Possibly, to a degree at any rate, the party was being given “for” them, although this was not ever specifically made clear. There was, as there always was, a young man with that Where-have-you-been-all-this-time? look in his eyes, although he said nothing so obvious, and he was pleasant. And, after a time, forgettable.
There was, in short, the uneventful, friendly blur of any cocktail party—the blur of people met and parted from; of conversations begun and almost at once ended, of words overheard and almost at once forgotten, of groups which formed only to dissolve and to re-form. Walter Brinkley, she realized, had, especially during the first half of the party—the time up to and including equilibrium: that moment when it was apparent that most of those who were coming had come and those who were leaving early had not yet begun to leave—unobtrusively kept the groupings fluid.
It was true that, along toward seven—by which time Dorcas had almost given up on Caroline and Brady Wilkins—a certain pattern did develop. The party tended to divide itself between terrace and living room, and it was, generally, true that the division was by age groups, with the younger—the “ranch-house set”—on the terrace and the older—the “emeritus set”—inside. But the Craigs were inside, and she, at any rate, was young. And Walter Brinkley was back and forth, and seemed adaptable to both groups although, Dorcas realized, professors do not retire before sixty-five or so. (Really, a woolly lamb, Dorcas thought.)
The Misses Monroe fluttered away, in the antique Rolls, almost precisely at seven. This was one of those meaningless things Dorcas remembered afterward, when she tried to remember things with meaning, although with no assurance that meaning lay in anything which had happened at Walter Brinkley’s party.
It was after the Misses Monroe had gone that, inside, near the bar, she found herself part of a group which included a middle-aged couple who looked only vaguely familiar, and turned out to be the Thayers, and Brinkley and a solid man with a square face—a face which appeared to have been carved from some dark wood.
“On my hobbyhorse again, my dear,” Walter Brinkley said, and held her arm lightly. “Oh—this is Captain Heimrich. He’s a cop.” The word “cop” sounded, just perceptibly, as if Brinkley’s mind put marks of quotation around it.
“No,” Brinkley said, “I don’t say I could do that. Not as well as he did.” He broke off, turned to include her. “We’re talking about a man on the radio,” he said. “Years ago. When you must have been in pigtails, or whatever the modem counterpart is. A man who could tell, most of the time, what part of the country people came from, sometimes down to quite special areas, by hearing them talk. A parlor trick, in a way, but he was good at it. I was just telling the captain here that the game wasn’t—fixed. Skeptical men, policemen.”
“Now Mr. Brinkley,” the man named Heimrich said, detached, pleasantly amused. He had very blue eyes.
“And,” Brinkley said, “that an especially acute ear is necessary. An ear more acute than mine. But that the differences are there, if one can hear them. Even when people try to hide them. Cover them up.”
“He,” Dorcas told the others, “spotted my home state. And the school I went to.”
“Only today,” he said. “After hearing you speak rather often. And, Indiana is quite easy. Even with an overlay. This radio man could do it in minutes.”
“I,” Mrs. Thayer said, “can’t tell that she speaks differently from anyone else. Probably, Walter, you were merely lucky.”
“Say ‘drawing,’” Brinkley told her.
“I certainly shall not,” Mrs. Thayer—she was gray-haired, had a golfer’s complexion, was firm of voice. “I shall do nothing to encourage you, Walter.”
“Say ‘It would be merry to marry Mary,’” he told her.
“What a ridiculous thing to say,” Mrs. Thayer said. “Pay no attention to him, Miss Cameron. He’s a phoneticist.”
“Emeritus,” Brinkley said. “You do make it sound bad, Hilda. I—”
He was interrupted. A tall, gray-haired man, a man with a long face—oh, of course, Mr. Craig—made the interrupting sound, a tentative clearing of the throat. He was standing beyond a slender black-haired woman who had her back to them—oh, yes, Mrs. Craig. Walter Brinkley, indicating that he was listening, listened.
“Walter,” Craig said, “I’m sorry—we’re both sorry. But—”
Brinkley, Dorcas thought, looked a little surprised, and then at once regretful, with a host’s regret.
“The fact is,” Craig said, “Margo’s come up with a headache. Thinks I’d better take her home.”
Brinkley said, “Oh,” and that he was sorry and moved out of the group to say something to Margo Craig which Dorcas—moving away herself, since the group was broken—could not hear. Mrs. Craig shook her head and then Brinkley went with the Craigs across the room toward the door.
; “A delightful party,” the solid man said, filling a pause, standing beside Dorcas. He was, she realized, taller than she had thought—his solidity somehow masked his height. The policeman, the “cop.” It was a little odd, she thought without really thinking about it at all, that Professor Brinkley should know a policeman. The policeman smiled down at her, not asking a reply to a remark obviously meaningless—a remark made to fill a pause. There was, however, something companionable about his smile. “Too bad to have a headache in the middle of it,” he said.
“The poor thing,” she said, and they both moved away from the bar, to let other people move to the bar.
They moved toward the front of the room, where the people were fewer—together, but not in any real sense, together.
“A—” Heimrich began and stopped, because the girl was not listening, was looking through the window—the wide window at the front of the living room. A Cadillac came up, and Ben got out of it and went around it and held the door open, and Mrs. Craig got in. Craig gave him something and Ben smiled and nodded and Craig got in on the other side and the big car moved off. But when it had completed half a turn, it stopped so that an open car could come through, and in behind it. Then the Cadillac pulled away.
“Oh,” Dorcas said. “They finally—” And then, in quite another tone, she said, “Oh!” again, and moved toward the door, forgetting Captain M. L. Heimrich. A pretty thing, Heimrich thought. And who does she see?
She saw, obviously, a young woman with honey-colored hair, in a white dress, and a tall, black-haired man in slacks and a sports jacket and another man—not so tall, wiry, with sandy hair. They were getting out of the open car. It was they—one of them, at any event—that the pretty little girl with red hair was hurrying to meet. A polite little girl, well brought up, in too much of a hurry to say goodbye.
The sandy-haired man was the one she hurried to, Heimrich saw. They look fine together, he thought.
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