False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  She jammed her hat on the back of her head and dashed out, slamming the front door.

  I sat there for a moment. Then I got up and pushed the little paper bag she’d brought her sacrifice in into the fire. As it flared up in a yellow flame I wondered if it wasn’t her heart that she’d really thrown out there on the snow. And it was then that I began thinking about Karen Lunt and the young man holding the car door open for her, and Roger Doyle . . . though oddly enough still not of Philander Doyle, Judge Candler’s oldest friend and one-time law partner.

  2

  If it hadn’t been for all that, I doubt if I should have accepted an invitation to a party at Karen Lunt’s house the night of February 3rd, the next morning when she called me up.

  “I’m having a few friends in to supper, Mrs. Latham,” she said over the phone. “I hope you don’t mind my calling you one. The Candlers’ friends have always been mine too. Jerry simply adores you! A quarter to eight. You know my place, don’t you? The Candlers’ sweet old carriage house in Chatham Street?”

  I said I’d come and put down the phone; and all that day and evening, everywhere I went, Karen Lunt’s name kept popping up. It was exactly like a new word that keeps appearing in everything you read when once you’ve looked it up in the dictionary or missed it dismally in a parlor game. I’d met Karen, once in a while, always, it seemed to me, the center of a little knot—ranging from two to a dozen—of men ranging from eighteen to eighty. But this day she was everywhere, or at least her name was.

  At lunch the wife of a new senator from the West said, “I wonder if you know a girl named Karen Lunt.”

  I said, “Yes. Do you know her?”

  “No, but my brother wanted me to look her up. He was at the party the night her father drove her mother and himself off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. The coroner said it was accidental, but I dare say it was one of those accidents a lot of people had during Prohibition.”

  A girl on my right who’d been a reporter before she married said, “Somebody told me there wasn’t a trace of alcohol in his brain. He was just stone broke, and she was suing for divorce, and he was mad about her and just couldn’t stick it.”

  “I don’t know about that,” somebody else said, “but he couldn’t have been very stone broke—Karen kept on at Briar Hill, and that costs two thousand a year, not counting clothes and extras.”

  “She can’t have much left,” a little woman across from me remarked from behind an enormous silver bowl of yellow roses. “I understand the poor child is living in the old carriage house on Judge Candler’s place.”

  The former newspaper girl laughed. “Yes—decorated by Paravinci of 59th Street. I’d a lot rather live there than in the Candlers’ old place, where your breath hangs in icicles.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s wonderful, the way that gal’s got Judge Candler buffaloed. It’s a gift. He’s her guardian, you know, and she’s a blue-eyed orphan child. Her father was his best friend, the sworn brothers sort of thing. Philander Doyle made sort of a third wheel. They all started in old Colonel Candler’s law office in Fairfax Street. Then Mr. Lunt came into a lot of money, and Philander Doyle moved to New York and—made his name.”

  Her eyebrows lifted a little.

  “It’s funny how they all come back to the old home town, isn’t it.—Then Mr. Lunt married a girl he met on a boat. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t you think?”

  “It might very easily,” I said, not having the faintest notion that anything had to be explained, or how that explained it.

  “She’s running around now with Geoffrey McClure,” she went on. “He’s a ninety-second secretary at some legation. They say he’s a nice chap but has a definitely European view of marriage. Money first—love will follow.—What do you think of the new batch on the Hill? I think her husband’s a lamb.”

  She nodded across the table at the new senator’s wife and went on from there, and Karen Lunt’s name dropped out.

  It dropped out of my mind too, until I was coming back around six from a tea at the Belhaven Country Club on the other side of Alexandria. As I got to the light at the end of Washington Street it occurred to me that I might stop by and see Jeremy Candler, and find out how formal these little suppers in Karen’s transmogrified carriage house were. And it wasn’t very long before I was wishing very much that I’d had a flat tire instead.

  Alexandria is a small place rather like Georgetown, except that it’s eight miles along the Potomac from Washington instead of just next door. Unlike most towns, it didn’t just grow. It was laid out at the end of the Rolling Road so the planters in the Northern Neck of Virginia would have a waterway to the sea and England for their tobacco, and a place where warehouses and wharves could be built. To make it completely urban, no man was allowed to buy more than two adjoining half-acre lots, at the original auction, and if he didn’t build a suitable dwelling or place of business within a given period his lots were resold. And where once ships came laden with stuffs and manufactured goods from the mother country, and went back with sweet tobacco and cotton and furs from a new young land, where the tax policy that led to the Revolution was first discussed and the Bill of Rights was written, where Washington had a town house and Robert E. Lee spent his childhood, is now a sleepy town of mellow Georgian brick and new white paint, inhabited mostly by people who work by day in the capital and come back by the Memorial Highway along the Potomac to another world.

  There are still old Alexandrians, of course, in spite of the Foreign Legion, living in the houses their pre-Revolutionary ancestors lived in. Chatham Street, where the Candlers have an old Georgian house with hipped roof and dormer windows, belonged, all of it, to Judge Candler’s father. It’s just below Lee Street, overlooking the dingy factories and wharves along the Potomac. The house across the street, however, where Philander Doyle and his sister and his son now live, is the old Candler place. It was confiscated by the Northern troops during the Civil War, and when the Judge’s grandfather and father returned, it wasn’t, which is how the Candlers came to live in the less imposing house across the street, where Peyton Candler was born, and Sandy and Jerry and Billy. The two chestnut trees covered with wisteria were already there then, and the crape myrtles that made an arbor to the old carriage house where Karen lived. In fact very little must have changed since then, I thought as I went up the steps . . . not even the old darkey who opened the big green door and peered out through the gloom of the two old gas lamps burning in their wrought-iron standards at the corners of the iron handrail.

  “Come in, Miz’ Latham. Set down in th’ parlor, Mis’ Jerry she in th’ liberry.—Ah reckon you two ladies knows each othah?”

  Sitting in the crepuscular dimness of the Candler drawing room was a lady I didn’t recognize for a moment . . . she seemed, like the room, so of another period altogether. Not Georgian, however, but old Edwardian, with her black velvet hat and purple feather boa around her thin shoulders. Even then I could see she’d been lovely once . . . a sort of lass with a delicate air. She rose and held out her black-gloved hand.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Latham?”

  “Oh, Miss Doyle—I didn’t recognize you.”

  “No, I’ve been ill.”

  She pronounced the “been” as “bean.”

  “But I’m quite recovered, now,” she said, with a kind of vague graciousness. “I’ve been sitting in this chair literally hours, waiting to see Judge Candler. He’s closeted with the young people. I’m afraid he hasn’t much time for an old woman, now he’s becoming so famous.”

  She didn’t say it with the least rancour, but rather charmingly, as if she were more amused than put out.

  “So I really must be going. I have several things to see to. Really, my dear, I wonder one ever gets as many things done as one does. My brother laughs at me—he says I’m just a potterer. Goodbye, my dear, remember you’re going to have tea with me one day s
oon. Goodbye! Make it real soon, won’t you? My dear brother was speaking of you just last night at dinner. He’d be charmed to see you!”

  Miss Isabel Doyle went on out, and since Philander Doyle doesn’t know me from Adam, and Miss Isabel Doyle is known never to receive the people she asks to tea, I skipped that and sat down in the leather upholstered Chippendale chair she’d vacated. And I started—not violently, but definitely. That chair was cold as ice. Wherever Miss Doyle had been sitting, it was not there. And then—because I’m a natural-born busybody, I suppose—I found myself wondering why she’d bothered to say she’d been sitting in that chair literally for hours; wondering if, perhaps, it was just another patch out of the whole cloth of fantasy she always weaves.

  I looked around the old room, lovely with age in spite of its dinginess. Its blue walls and white cornice and window trim and chair rail, carved but indistinct from a hundred coats of paint, and the horsehair carpet with its faded roses, all fitted so perfectly with the old furniture that generations of darkey hands had rubbed to a velvety satin patina. I doubted, some way, that Miss Doyle would have been just looking at any of this, or at the dark portraits on the wall. Then I heard the low confused murmur of voices through the closed door with the carved pineapple set in its broken pediment. It struck me instantly that that was where Miss Doyle had been: by that door, listening, deliberately, at the keyhole. That would account for the fib about the chair and her hasty departure under that barrage of nonsense about her dear brother.

  I conquered an instant impulse to creep over to the door myself and find out, and it’s just as well I did; for at about the time I would have got there, and probably had my ear bent down to the polished brass keyhole, the door swung open, and Karen Lunt flashed out. She wasn’t in mink this time. She had on a simple black wool dress with enormous filigree silver buttons that set off her white skin and corn-colored hair as nothing else under heaven would have done. But it wasn’t the dress or the hair, or even what I’d heard at lunch, that brought me to a sharp focus. It was the look on her face, perhaps in the smile on her soft red mouth, perhaps in those two wide-set eyes, as blue as lakes and almost as big. Whatever it was, it was culminated perfectly in the quick little dance step she took toward the door, flicking her open palms together at the same time as if she were washing her hands, in the most complete and triumphant satisfaction, of a matter that was in the finished business basket. She hadn’t so much as seen me sitting between the two front windows in the high-backed leather chair, and I’m not small, nor is my gold wool number from Muriel King any more unobtrusive than Miss Doyle’s purple feather boa. Obviously Karen Lunt was so pleased with herself and whatever she’d accomplished behind the closed doors of Judge Candler’s study that she hadn’t eyes for anything else. Moreover, she hadn’t bothered to close the door behind her, entirely, and the next instant I heard Jeremy’s voice, throbbing passionately.

  “I won’t, Dad—do you hear? I won’t! It’s blackmail, I tell you! It’s nothing else in the world!”

  And Judge Candler’s voice, quiet and slow but oh so terribly firm:

  “I’m disappointed in you, Jeremy. I never thought a child of mine would be selfish and grasping.”

  I heard Jeremy’s voice break in a hard dry sob.

  “I’d never have dreamed you would turn on Karen this way. I thought you were fond of her.”

  “Fond of her?” Jeremy cried. “Fond of her? I hate her. I’ve always hated her—when she was going to Briar Hill and Sandy and I were wearing our cousins’ made-over clothes and going to the cheapest schools in Virginia, and you working like a dog to pay for that even. I’ve got a right to hate her! You’ve always loved her better than you did us—when you were sick it was her future you were worried about, not Sandy’s and Billy’s and mine! Ours was accidental—you didn’t know that old stock was going to be worth anything. You thought it was all right for me to get a job, but the idea of Karen getting one was unthinkable.”

  “I thought you wanted to get a job.”

  “I did!” Jeremy cried. “I wanted it so we could fix up the house a little, and Billy could ride, and do things other kids do, and so you wouldn’t have to bother about my clothes, and his—but I didn’t know you were still giving Karen her allowance every month. I didn’t mind giving up the rent we got from the carriage house. I didn’t mind your taking care of her when she was left without anything. But I do mind now! I won’t give that stock back. It isn’t hers, it’s Billy’s and mine, and we’ve got a right to it. She can’t have everything that belongs to us! She’d never have dared ask for it if——”

  “Jeremy!” Judge Candler’s voice came down like the Chief Justice’s gavel in a babbling court room. “That will do. I’m asking you to turn back Karen’s stock. I expect you to do it. The papers will be ready tomorrow.”

  There was a long stunned silence. Out of it at last I heard Jeremy’s voice, strangled but deadly calm.

  “You’re asking something I can’t do, Father. It isn’t right—and if it were anybody else but——”

  “I said that will do, Jeremy. The papers will be ready tomorrow.”

  For a moment I heard nothing. Then the door into the hall closed, and I heard sharp light feet on the wide pine boards and saw Jerry’s plaid skirt flash by, and heard the front door slam, and in a moment the engine of a car cough violently a couple of times and start. In the next room I heard the creak of a swivel chair as Judge Candler settled down at the desk. Then, like Miss Isabel Doyle, I gathered up my bag and gloves and hurried out as quietly as I could.

  3

  It had started to snow again as I drove slowly back home along the Memorial Highway. Across the dark stretches of the Potomac, Washington lay like a star-spangled city in fairyland. The white dome of the Capitol and the tall shaft of the Monument with its red cyclops eye shone through the flurrying snow, fabulous beacons of light. I crossed the river under the shadow of Arlington, drove around the Lincoln Memorial with the dim heroic figure of the great emancipator seated in the lighted sanctuary, and turned down the river again toward Georgetown.

  I was too troubled to notice the dirty sidings and belching smokestacks that always strike me after I leave the parkway and turn up 30th Street toward home. I couldn’t get Karen’s smile, and that victorious so-that’s-that gesture with her open palms, and the passionate justice of Jeremy’s voice, out of my mind. I unlocked the door and let myself in, and went along toward the sitting room. Downstairs I could hear Lilac banging pots and pans, and wondered what had happened now—the sounds of the kitchen being the perfect barometer of the state of our small nation. And in the living room door I stopped abruptly.

  Jeremy Candler was sitting hunched together on the ottoman in front of the fire, her little pointed face as pale as old ivory under her mop of burnished hair.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello. I hope you don’t mind my barging in this way. Lilac says you’re not having anybody in tonight.”

  She turned quickly to the fire and started poking it, but not before I saw the trembling collapse around her red mouth, and the blinding flash of tears in her autumn-streaked eyes.

  “I think it’s swell,” I said. “Let me put my things up. I’ll be down directly.”

  I knew she wouldn’t want me to see her cry, so I changed into a house coat and pottered about, as Miss Doyle said, for a few minutes. When I came down she was still pale and still hunched together on the ottoman, but quite composed.

  “It’s snowing again,” I remarked.

  “That’s why I didn’t want to drive out to Alexandria,” she said. “My tires are frightfully smooth. I thought maybe you’d lend me some pajamas and let me stay all night. I’ve got to be at the office early in the morning.”

  It was far from me to say “My lamb, you’re telling the most frightful story.” I said:

  “I’m delighted. I can even give you a toothbrush I got at a one-cent sale yesterday.”

  “You really don’t mind?” />
  “Really.”

  “Then I’ll call up . . . home.”

  She got up unsteadily, sat down in the end of the sofa and picked up the phone. After a moment she said, “William—this is me. Tell . . . my father I’m staying all night with a friend in Washington. Oh, I’m fine. Be sure to lock the side door, won’t you? Goodbye.”

  She sat there staring into the fire. I picked up the paper and looked through it. Finally, as if she recognized that neither of us was acting quite normally, she said, “I’ve got sort of . . . of a headache, so don’t mind if I’m . . . I’m stupid, will you?”

  “You’d probably like to go to bed early,” I said. “You’ll find some non-lethal sleeping pills in the bathroom, if you’d like one.”

  Just then the phone on the low table at the end of the sofa rang. I picked it up. A man’s voice that I didn’t recognize said, “Is Miss Candler there, please?”

  I glanced at Jerry. The quick fear that leaped into her eyes and the sharp panicky shake of her head really alarmed me, but I said in a quite normal voice, “Sorry. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “No, thanks,” the voice said. I put the phone down.

  “Was it . . . my father?” Jeremy whispered.

  I felt the sting of perfectly reflex tears in my own eyes—she so obviously hoped it was. I shook my head. “I’d have recognized his voice,” I said, and added my younger son’s “And how!” to myself. I don’t think I could mistake that firm utterly impersonal tone in a thousand years.

  “Maybe it was Sandy,” she said tentatively.

  “You do want one of them to care where you’ve got to, you poor baby,” I thought.

  “But you’d know his voice too, wouldn’t you?”

  She was trying desperately to sound as if it didn’t matter, and fortunately just then Lilac’s black moonflower countenance appeared in the dining room door.

  “Dinner’s served, madam,” she announced. She always goes slightly formal after she’s lighted my great-aunt Deborah’s Georgian candelabra, and she always drops it as instantly as she did now.