by Marlowe Benn
The light vanished in a wash of cool air. Glennis resettled her fingers in Julia’s palm. “Now we’re cooking,” she said under her breath. “Make it a good wow, Madame Sosostris.”
That preposterous name again. A snigger from across the table suggested at least one other person got the joke, if that was what it was. Perhaps Madame had read Mr. Eliot’s thrilling poem herself, though more likely someone had suggested the name’s susurrant riches to her. No matter—it added a fresh tweak to the routine. Occult thrill making must be hard work, and anyone plucky enough to tread those waters deserved a bit of indulgence. Julia gave Glennis’s thumb a squeeze and resolved to see the silliness through.
Madame began to make low cooing sounds. “I see a child,” she said. “A tiny child. He seems to be searching for his mama. Has anyone here lost a little one?”
A woman’s fingers twitched in Julia’s left hand. In a rattle of bracelets, she jerked it toward her bosom. Julia twisted to ease the angle of her elbow, pulled painfully toward a gullible nest of grief and crepe de chine. The woman began to cry.
“It’s your sweet little cherub, Tillie,” murmured Mrs. Winterjay. “What does he say to his mama, Madame Sosostris?”
Was she daft? Others shifted uneasily too. Only the most hardened cynics or willful innocents might wish to hear more; the poor mother clearly believed her child’s spirit was near, and the silliness had turned excruciating. Julia’s chin sank in dread of what must come next.
“He says nothing. Only silence, the silence of a small heart no longer beating.”
In the appalled quiet that followed, Tillie bounced Julia’s hand down onto the table. There was the creak of her chair, a stumble, a smothered sob.
“Poor old girl.”
“Lousy luck.”
Indignant voices barely bothered to whisper. The hapless séance seemed about to end, but Mrs. Winterjay’s sharp indrawn breath signaled her resolve to continue. Someone slid into the vacant space beside Julia and groped to resume the circle. A man’s fingers gave hers a friendly swipe.
“But he’s with Jesus, dear. I’m sure he’s happy,” Mrs. Winterjay said as she tried again, inquiring whether anyone else had a loved one on the other side they’d like to summon.
Silence. Julia cringed. No London hostess would dare to utter such a heartless question. Even in America, didn’t they all have someone dead in the poppy fields of France or Belgium or any of a thousand freshly swollen graveyards? She resented the sting of Gerald’s face, so needlessly summoned. Its features were fading now but still dear, as only a first lover’s could be. Did Glennis have someone? A brother, a lover, a friend? She must. They all had someone.
“Anyone?”
Julia heard the soft clack of Mrs. Winterjay’s pendant earrings and imagined her head moving from side to side, desperate to stir something, anything, out of the sullen darkness that had become her party.
Madame’s breathing shifted to a pulse of shallow grunts. Another chair scraped across the carpet—was someone about to leave? Julia unkinked her legs and prepared for an unpleasant end to the failed séance. She tried to recall where Glennis had suggested they might go next. She’d rattled off possibilities into her compact mirror in the taxicab between blots of Cherry Kiss, but Julia could remember only the Metamora, on West Forty-Fourth, and the Lido-Venice, closer by on East Fifty-Third. One place was as promising as any other in Julia’s blurred sense of clubs and cafés and cabarets. She too had been born in New York, but Manhattan had become almost unrecognizable to her after five years abroad, its landmarks distorted in the hot shimmer of new energy. Her mother would have reveled in the city’s youthful plunge into recklessness after the war; her father would have retreated deeper into his walnut-paneled midtown clubs.
“Wait.” Mrs. Winterjay stilled the squirming. “I believe she has someone.”
Madame gave a breathy gust. “So sad, so sad. I see a woman. A lonely woman, lonely and sad. She’s weeping, weeping.”
“Swell. Sounds like loads of fun,” a low voice interrupted. “How about an Indian princess or one of those Egyptian—”
“She must be lost, poor lamb. She’s departed this world but cannot find her way to the next. Who could she be? Someone’s wife? Daughter? Sister? Friend?” Madame paused to weigh the group’s returned attention like a ripe melon. “I see her now. Lovely eyes, orbs of sapphire they are, bright with—”
Pain shot up Julia’s wrist as Glennis crushed her hand. “Naomi!”
Glennis’s scream walloped Julia’s heart and unleashed an answering chorus of cries and bellows. Julia may have contributed to the mayhem herself. She’d never heard a real scream before. Corkers from the stage, of course, and squeals at parties and regattas and the like but never a genuine shriek of terror and never at such close range. It launched knees into table parts and sent liquor splashing over skin and silk. Profane oaths escaped left and right, high and low. From crashes and thuds in the blackness around her, Julia guessed more than one guest had swooned dead away.
Above it all rose Mrs. Winterjay’s voice, calling for Mary to get the lights. A murky rectangle appeared as the maid swatted through the bunting and punched at the wall switch. She stood astonished, a pink gingham oven mitt over her left hand, the aroma of hot cheese straws floating in from the kitchen behind her.
The partiers scrambled to repair the damage. Women’s hands swarmed, straightening straps, righting twisted jewelry, and adjusting skewed hats. Men brushed at their jackets and trousers to blot the gin and whiskey deposited there, shaking olives and lemon curls out of their cuffs. Those at the table had fared marginally better in that none had actually fallen to the floor, though some would sport ugly bruises from the table legs, sharp and faceted as Greek columns.
Julia checked her right knee, fearing a gash and ladder in her stocking. The bump was red and sure to swell, but the silk had held. Thank goodness for French quality. The puddle of brandy in her lap was a disaster, however, even if her neighbor’s handkerchief helped a bit. The dress was likely ruined. At least it wasn’t one of her better frocks. Quel dommage!
Amid the commotion Madame Sosostris stood blinking. This time nothing could corral the guests back into their seats. Her portion of the evening’s entertainment cut short, albeit with a satisfying thrill, she looked pleased and not a little startled. With a nod to their hostess invoking balance of payment—well earned, her glance crowed—she gathered up the voluminous gray tablecloth, stiff and crumpled as an elephant’s hide, and disappeared through the kitchen door. The cloth trailed out behind her, tiny mirrors winking like dolls’ eyes.
Mrs. Winterjay bent toward her sister. “For pity’s sake, Glennis. It’s a party.”
Black streaks wicked out across Glennis’s cheeks. She ground a knuckle against her lip as Mrs. Winterjay apologized for the outburst, explaining that their sister, Naomi, was alive and well. She’d seen her herself that very morning. She urged everyone to return to the living room, where ham biscuits would soon be served. And more music, please. She took hold of a fellow’s arm and nudged him in the intended direction.
A handful of guests obediently moved off to start up the phonograph, but others exchanged glances and slipped away toward the hall and an artful exit. The chap whose fingers had met Julia’s and whose handkerchief she still held caught her eye, one brow flexed in mute query. Care to come along? She’d have liked to reply with an eyebrow of her own and to whisk her handbag, shawl, and overwrought friend out the door with him, but Glennis’s face told her they couldn’t leave yet, and Julia gestured as much. With that he was borne away by a sinewy female in ecru chiffon. Perhaps they’d see him later at the Metamora or Lido, but Julia feared not.
Mrs. Winterjay eyed the exodus, reaffixed her smile, and hurried after her guests, one arm calming the mound at her waist.
“All that stuff about blue eyes. I swear I saw her.” Glennis’s own eyes were the color of an August sky, immense with agitation. She had pushed aside guests’ wraps to si
t on the Winterjays’ bed and wait for her brother, Chester, to return her call. Naomi lived, it seemed, in a basement apartment beneath the family home. Chester had made a frightful stink about going downstairs to check on her, Glennis said, but it couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t bear another moment of not knowing. Her headpiece, a beaded bandeau of jet and crystal, listed over one ear, flattening her sparse bob like a fallen egg custard. She rocked a thumbnail in the gap between her front teeth. “Queer old Naomi. I hardly know her; that’s the rummy thing.”
Julia had witnessed such tumult before. Glennis was what their teachers had called excitable. Her mind leaped to fantastical conclusions, often on the skimpiest of evidence. She relished drama, especially with herself at center stage. At school Julia had soothed over many of her friend’s outlandish notions—which soon had dissolved into good-natured shrugs once common sense prevailed.
“I take it Naomi is another sister?” Julia asked. She’d long ago forgotten whatever she once knew about Glennis’s family, except that she too was a tardy caboose born half a generation behind her siblings. Until last week’s chance meeting on the Majestic’s promenade deck not an hour out of Southampton, Julia had neither seen nor thought much of Glennis Rankin since the year they had both been gangly girls marooned at that stuffy school in Vermont. She recognized little things about Glennis that once annoyed her—the two-second delay before she laughed at a joke, her tendency to blurt first and blush second, her fondness for finishing other people’s cake—but now those qualities seemed amusing, even endearing. And through six transatlantic days and now several long Manhattan evenings of Glennis’s chatter mostly about fiancés, in hand and prospective, they’d discovered a new affliction in common: a difficult older brother. Julia righted the crooked headpiece and dabbed her friend’s face with a wet cloth, though there was little to be done beyond plenty of fresh powder.
Glennis crushed out her cigarette and dropped both hands into her lap to pester her rings. “She’s ancient, Julia—forty, I think, more like an old maid aunt or something. But when I was engaged before, the first time, and I needed a, a thing—” Her eyes jumped to Julia’s. “You know?”
Julia nodded. A dutch cap, to prevent babies. She’d forgotten how girls in America could speak boldly about many things, swearing like sailors over a spilled cocktail or early curfew, yet fumble so shyly about matters of sex. Puritanical roots ran deep here. As if in illustration, she noticed several copies of a magazine called the Woman Patriot stacked beside the Winterjays’ bed. The top issue promised shocking details on rampant moral perfidy among New York’s unmarried women—who had sex, it seemed. Shocking indeed.
“Naomi helped me get one,” Glennis went on. “Can you believe it? Queer old Naomi, who hasn’t even had a boyfriend in donkey’s years. She said it’s better to be modern than rich, and when I told Archie, he said, ‘What’s better than both?’ I couldn’t believe it. Archie a card? Still and all.”
Despite endless dithering about Russell or Warren or whether to make do with her English fiancé, Archie Allthorp—dull as mud but obscurely titled—if nothing better came along soon, Glennis could say the most remarkable things. As her company was Julia’s best hope of diversion during her stay in New York, this occasional drollery was a welcome discovery.
Glennis’s grin faded. Twenty minutes had passed since she’d roused her brother with a tearful demand that he check on their sister’s safety. Music and occasional laughter drifted down the hall as the remaining partiers gamely carried on. She grumbled another lament about the apocryphal Russell and lit another cigarette. They smoked in fitful silence, watching the telephone beside the bed.
Julia’s thoughts veered to her legal appointment on Monday morning. Philip’s quibbles were so ludicrous they hardly deserved attention, but even so they began to chew at the usual spot beneath her ribs. She wrenched her mind forward to more pleasant prospects for that afternoon.
If the meeting went well, as by rights it must, she might pay a visit to the Twelfth Street book dealers. Before she’d left London, her beau had asked her to track down a copy of Bruce Rogers’s latest typographic bonbon, The Pierrot of the Minute. Not for himself—fortunately, David’s taste ran to more robust material—but for one of his clients. She could telephone the august Grolier Club about it if necessary, but she preferred to get the little book from a dealer to avoid mustering the admiration its publishers would naturally expect. Beyond that, she’d snap up any French pochoir editions she might see, though there her hopes were slight. American bibliophiles were said to be insular in their tastes, not to mention prudish. No matter how exquisite those finely stenciled illustrations, their mildly risqué subject matter likely rendered them taboo.
She felt an urge to sashay into the hushed quarters of the all-male Grolier—past the doorman’s alarmed “Members only, miss! No ladies!”—and waggle a proof of her new Capriole pressmark under their noses. They’d no doubt start at Eric Gill’s engraving of a young she-goat au naturel (Julia herself!), then sniff and turn her away, but she’d have issued her warning salvo that at least one woman intended to storm (someday) that most distinguished bastion of book collectors. What better way to announce her publishing ambitions to the book-loving world?
The telephone rang. Glennis seized it.
Julia was prepared for another wail—whether of relief or indignation, she suspected it would sound the same—but instead Glennis gave a kind of moan, a muted cry more aghast than astonished, the panicked wilt of a flower thrust through the oven door. This was a sound Julia had heard before, the first flinch from death’s indifferent touch. More articulate than any sob, it chilled her scalp. She froze, a rabbit beneath the hawk’s shadow.
By the time Mrs. Winterjay arrived, Glennis could speak only in spurts. Bobbing her head up and down from Julia’s lap, she choked out that their sister, Naomi, was, in fact, shockingly, impossibly, dead. “Dead for hours!”
Mrs. Winterjay stared at the mucus-smeared face keening in Julia’s arms. One hand caressed the swell at her waist as the other muzzled her jaw. Fragments of prayer leaked through her fingers, begging mercy for the poor soul, the poor, innocent soul. With a shudder Mrs. Winterjay wiped her eyes and murmured that the family needed to go there at once. She looked lost, bewildered about how to proceed, as if grief and instinct could take her no further. She brushed past Julia, unseeing, wondering if someone should summon her husband.
Julia had no answer, and none was expected. What could anyone say? The séance had been a game, an interlude of party nonsense. Surely Glennis knew better than to believe the tired old hokum, yet how readily her imagination had leaped from that ridiculously rumbled “orbs of sapphire” to her sister’s face. And now—an unspeakably cruel coincidence. Julia shivered. Spirit lights jerked about by secret wires signified nothing, but death was very real.
Glennis’s mouth fell open, strung with saliva. Powder clung to the fine hairs below her ear, over the sheen of perfume dabbed there hours ago. Her childish gaze darkened, aged with something new: fear. Julia had thought she knew all there was to know of simple Glennis, but she was wrong. Even Glennis’s voice was different, low and bitter. “He killed her.”
Another cold finger slid down Julia’s spine. She had no idea what Glennis meant or who he could be. This was shock speaking, not reason. Six years since death’s long romp across Europe, and still young people everywhere were caught short by its caprice. All that carnage and still they whimpered about fairness, about meaning. They told themselves the war had finally trounced their parents’ palaver about good and evil, called its bluff, spat in its eye, but in truth they were like children under the bed, with their endless cocktails and games and parties, singing hoarsely with eyes squeezed shut. When death found and pulled them out, as of course it did, as they knew it would, it still helped to call it—or some nameless him—evil.
Mrs. Winterjay’s guests hurried to be gone. One after another they came to the bedroom for their wraps, murmuring averted sy
mpathies into gloves and sleeves and compact sponges. Julia hastened to join the exodus, resigned to returning to Philip’s guest quarters at this early hour. She slipped away to fetch her shawl and handbag.
The maid was collecting cocktails abandoned on the mantel. Julia bent to retrieve her bag from the foot of the bookcase where she’d stashed it, beside an appalling gilded buckram set of sermons. With the idle carelessness of one who thinks herself alone, the maid stretched a yawn into a groan, glanced into the hall, and drank the dregs of an abandoned highball. She lifted another glass to examine its red-stained rim and floating cigarette. To no one but the night, she muttered, “Ain’t the first party that wicked Naomi Rankin’s made a pig of, is it?”
CHAPTER 3
Two days later Julia stood beneath an ornate iron arch over the drive to the Rankin residence, Glennis’s note tucked into her handbag. Its fragrance of violets had overwhelmed Philip’s vestibule yesterday as it waited for Julia to return from the Pryor, where the new Matisse watercolors were, she begrudgingly agreed, quite wonderful. In a large looping hand, Glennis had begged Julia to come to a memorial service for her sister. It’s beastly, she scrawled. They can’t wait to bury her, as if they’re glad she’s dead!! You must come and help me bear it!! Julia silently forgave the several exclamation points, fat as teardrops.
She strolled through an alley of crimson maples, their leaves beginning to smolder, and wondered again at the Rankins’ strange haste. From what she’d gathered Friday evening, Naomi’s death was at least untimely. She couldn’t have been very old and apparently hadn’t been ill enough to notice. Wouldn’t they need time to accept the shock, perhaps grapple with its mystery? They did seem in an undue hurry to usher her along to her grave. Hardly the actions of a loving family, Julia thought. But then what would Philip do at news of her death? Or she at his, to be honest. As one who knew precious little about loving families, Julia was hardly one to judge the Rankins.