A Cup Of Tea

by Amy Ephron

  “Is she, Rose?” asked Philip.

  “Well, she doesn’t have anyone except her mother and who knows how long that will last.” She got up and sat beside Philip on the bed. “If something happened to Papa,” she said, “I don’t know what I’d do.” She looked at him waiting for some response. “Of course, I have my own family now.” She put a hand lightly on his forehead. “If something were to happen to you…”

  “You?” said Philip. “You’d be fine.”

  “Would I, Philip? You just think I’d be fine.” Did she want him to reassure her? Did she want him to tell her that he’d never leave her…She leaned in and kissed him as if in that moment she could shut out the world.

  Eleanor was sitting on the grass in Central Park, a Victorian picture of sorts, her long skirt spread about her, all her attention focussed on Tess, who was lying on a blanket, playing with an ivory and silver teething toy in the shape of a bell.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor, “that’s good grabbing.” She reached her hand in and helped Tess shake the bell. “See, if you shake it like this,” she said, “it makes a sound.”

  The baby’s face broke into a smile as Eleanor reached in and turned her over on her back and began to tickle her. The noonday sun felt warm on her back. And then she was aware of a shadow on the grass, a woman’s form.

  Rosemary had shown up first thing that morning at Jane Howard’s door. Jane was still in her dressing gown having stayed up much too late the night before drinking wine. She offered Rose coffee, which she refused. “No, I won’t come in,” she said. “You’re giving me Eleanor Smith’s address.” And Jane complied, writing it on a piece of note-paper from a tawdry midtown hotel where she had recently spent an afternoon with a young woman she had met at the make-up counter at Best & Co.

  “I can’t tell you to be gentle with her,” said Jane as she handed her the address, “because I don’t think that’s what she deserves.”

  Secretly, she was pleased because she’d expected Rose to fight for this.

  Eleanor wasn’t at the apartment. Rosemary was told by Josie Kennedy who answered the door that she had gone to the park. The park. Of course. That’s where you went with a baby. Philip’s baby lying on the quilt.

  And then she was aware of a shadow on the grass, a woman’s form.

  She looked up and saw Rosemary looking down at her.

  “Did I do something to you?” asked Rosemary. “I’m trying to understand this. I brought you home for tea. I gave you money. It was an act of kindness. I thought—it was an act of kindness.”

  Eleanor was too startled to answer her.

  And then as suddenly as she was there, she was gone, and the shadow on the grass had become sunlight again. Eleanor sat there for a moment alone on the quilt with her baby.

  When she got back to the lobby of her building, there was a man standing, leaning against one of the marble pillars. She recognized him at once. She braced herself and pushed the baby’s carriage toward the elevator.

  “What is it,” she asked as she passed him, “family day? I just saw your wife.” Philip barely reacted as he was trying to register what he hadn’t known before, that he had a child.

  “Is it?” he asked looking at Tess.

  “Your baby?” she said immediately. “I don’t know. With girls like me you never can be sure. Of course, it’s your baby.” She was almost crying.

  Philip stepped into her. He started to kiss her face and smooth away her tears with the palm of his hand.

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “Believe me when I tell you that I didn’t know.” He realized he respected her more because she’d never told him, that she would never ask him for anything, that any decision he would make would have to be his own.

  He lifted her hair softly and kissed her on the nape of the neck. “Believe me,” he said again, softly, “when I tell you that I didn’t know. Shh. I’m here now.” He kissed her on the cheek and then the mouth. “And I’m not going to leave you.”

  Before he left, he promised her that he would come back to her that night. He could no longer live with Rosemary…but he had to tell her. Had to make her understand that she would be better off without him, better off with someone who was much more like her kind. In time, he reasoned, she would forgive him. She would find someone else. But how was he to tell her….

  He reached in and picked up the baby, his baby, from the carriage and held her to him and then leaned in and kissed Eleanor again.

  It was dark when he came home. The steps to the house looked steep, ominous, as though there were more of them than there had been before. There was no easy way to do this, no good time to do this. He stood on the street for a long time considering how he would tell her. And then let himself into the house.

  He practically walked into Gertrude who was carrying a silver tray of hors d’oeuvres into the living room. “Damn!” He’d forgotten they were having a dinner party. He went to the living room and poured himself a drink. Charlie Miles, the piano player from the club, had been hired for the evening and was sitting on the bench at the piano. He was dressed in a tuxedo with a ruffled shirt and a 2-cent carnation in his lapel and his arms fairly hung below the seat of the piano bench as he sat there as relaxed as if he were a rag doll.

  Charlie Miles started to play a melody with a bass-line that was early speakeasy, haunting, Victorian, but with a hint of blues to come.

  Rosemary was upstairs dressing; that is, she had spread four dresses out on the bed and was trying to figure out which one to wear, as if she could reinvent herself and it would all be fine.

  She sat down at the vanity. She started to put kohl under her eyes but she was too nervous to sit. She walked back to the bed and picked up a pale blue taffeta dress that was off the shoulder. She was holding it up to herself in the mirror when Philip walked into the room. “Hi, I was—getting worried about you,” she said. “You’re so late. You need to change. You’ll be late for dinner. The Portervilles are coming and the Fergusons…”

  “Rosemary,” said Philip trying in vain to stop her going on.

  “They have a new baby,” she said. “A boy. I told them not to bring him. I can’t stand it when everyone stands around goo goo over a new baby. It just stops a dinner party cold. And Jane’s coming, I think.”

  Philip just stood there looking at her. “Rose, I have something to tell you…” he said.

  “Which dress do you like better, dear?” she asked him holding up a beige silk gown that was cut on the bias.

  “Rose, stop!” he said more forcefully than he meant to. “Shall we discuss where to put the chair or which necklace you should wear? Or better yet where I should sit? Or where you should place me like that porcelain box over there.”

  She put the dress down. “I don’t think of you as a fixture, Philip,” she said. “Sit down, dear,” and then she stopped realizing she’d just directed him again. “I’m sorry.”

  He stood there looking at her. “I think you are the one who ought to sit down, Rose,” he said finally. They both continued to stand.

  She knew what he was going to tell her.

  “I can’t—I can’t live here anymore, Rose,” he said.

  “What do you think of New Orleans?” she asked immediately. “I hear it’s a nice—” But she realized this wasn’t going to play, it wasn’t the city he was referring to. “It isn’t true, Philip.” She turned on him. She knew she sounded hysterical. “It isn’t true, Philip.” She took a deep breath. “We—we ought to have gone away when you got back. We needed some time away. We never had a honeymoon.” She knew she sounded desperate but it didn’t matter to her.

  “Don’t do this, Rose,” he said. “It isn’t you. Since I’ve been back I’ve—your life is perfect, Rose. It’s me that doesn’t fit into it.”

  “Did I do something…?” she asked almost as if she hadn’t heard anything he’d said to her. “I—can change. I can be anything you want me to be. It—isn’t true, Philip.”

  “Since I’
ve been back, I’ve tried,” he said. “Maybe I haven’t tried as hard as I should have…”

  He reached out to touch her hair and somehow the softness of the act infuriated her, as though it were evidence to her that he did love her. “It isn’t true,” she said again.

  But he went on. “But your life—our life would never have made either of us happy.”

  She walked away from him. She walked over to the vanity and looked at herself in the mirror. Her voice got deeper. “I know I can be cold,” she said. “Sometimes I’m so involved in—I’ll be better, Philip.”

  “It isn’t any use, Rose,” he said. “There isn’t anything you can do. I’ve fallen in love with someone else.”

  “You just think you have,” she said and the sound of her own voice frightened her. She hardly heard the next few things he said to her.

  “I know it isn’t fair…”

  “I know you think I can take care of myself,” she interrupted him.

  “I know I made a vow to you,” he said.

  She spoke on top of him. “I know you think I don’t need anything. But it isn’t true. When I thought you were—” She was hysterical now, “but I knew you were never. I knew you were coming back to me.” And then she was almost screaming. “What makes you think that she can make you happy? She can’t make you happy. Because she needs you to take care of her?”

  She’d gone too far for Philip. He turned to go.

  And she went after him. “What makes her think that she can have what’s mine!” Her left hand closed over the handle of the letter opener on the vanity. “She can’t have what’s mine.”

  She touched him on the shoulder and when he turned, in one swift motion, in a mixture of rage and anger so precise that her aim and movement were unavoidable as he raised his arm to defend himself a moment too late, she stabbed him in the throat.

  He gasped as his hand went to his throat and then fell to the floor.

  From downstairs, she heard the sound of the front door closing as the first of the guests arrived. And the beginning strains of piano music from the party below.

  The piano music was sedate, a little bit romantic. None of the guests thought that it was odd that neither Philip or Rosemary had come down, they were often late for their own engagements. Teddy was in a fabulous mood. He had a new suit on and he couldn’t keep his feet from dancing. He turned to his wife, Sarah, and said, “I can’t believe you don’t know the Castle Walk.” He gestured to the piano player to start it up and set his champagne glass on the mantel and demonstrated a few steps, then took Sarah by the waist and started to “walk” her about the room. Always game, she picked it up at once. Everyone was laughing. The music got a little louder. And then Rosemary opened the door to the parlor. Teddy and Sarah stopped dancing almost as if they were frozen in their spot. There was blood on Rosemary’s dress and where her hand touched the wall, was a stain of blood, as well. She stood there framed in the doorway. “Mr. Alsop,” she said, “Philip, will not be joining us for dinner.”

  It was Jane who went upstairs and found his body lying on the floor.

  Teddy had the presence of mind to telephone the authorities. The police came. There was an ambulance outside. They carried Philip down the stairs on a stretcher his face and body covered with a sheet. The police car or the ambulance car’s light was flashing making circles of red in the entranceway.

  And then they took Rosemary away, as well. Jane insisted that they let her change her dress. She’d put her hair up. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back. There was a policeman on either side of her. She didn’t say a word, just went along with them as though she were an actor acting out a final scene.

  Eleanor gave Tess a bath and put her in a velvet dress. She spent a long time brushing her own hair, put on a dress she’d never worn before, gray silk, a little low in front with lots of buttons. She made a simple dinner and set the table with what good china they had and lit two ivory tapers.

  Josie had agreed to spend the night at a friend’s. She poured herself a glass of white wine and told Tess a lot of silly things about the way she thought their life would be. And when it got late, she thought a number of other things, that she was a fool for believing him. Of course, he’d never leave for her. That he just hadn’t known how to tell Rosemary and tomorrow it would all be fine. It would be fine, wouldn’t it? In the distance, she heard the sound of a siren. She couldn’t bring herself to eat.

  She put Tess in a nightgown and put her in her crib. She was cold. She looked at the clock. It was after ten. She took the silk shawl Philip had bought for her from a drawer and wrapped it around her shoulders. Outside, she heard a carriage. She ran to the window but it continued on. She shut the curtains to the room. She walked back to the baby’s crib and sang to her—

  Hush little baby, don’t say a word.

  Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

  And if that mockingbird don’t sing,

  Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring…

  She realized that he wasn’t coming. It was only when she saw the papers two days later that she knew the reason why.

  About the Author

  AMY EPHRON is a novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of One Sunday Morning, White Rose: Una Rosa Blanca, Cool Shades, Bruised Fruit, and Biodegradable Soap, and lives with her family in Los Angeles.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise for A Cup of Tea

  “With deceptive simplicity and appealingly uncluttered prose, Ephron weaves a morality tale that moves inexorably from mannered start to jarring finish.”

  —People

  “A jewel…. This novel will plunge you into New York City in the turbulent year of 1917 and will keep you enthralled…. A page-turner from start to finish, Ms. Ephron’s spare novel has classic proportions.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  “A fine book.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Compelling in its tightness but never lacking proper development, this is a sterling novel.”

  —Booklist

  “Ephron excels in re-creating the aura of an era…. [A] careful evocation of the period.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “A graceful writer with a good eye for period detail.”

  —Arizona Daily Star

  “Ephron tells this sentimental tale simply and directly, with an old-fashioned touch that anchors it firmly in its time frame.”

  —Anniston Star

  “This book most assuredly will be any woman’s cup of tea.”

  —Oklahoma City Oklahoman

  “All of the period detail is correct right down to the last streetlamp…. Ephron gives us a rich situation and a carefully drawn setting.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A little trinket of a story…with pretty period details and an appealing spareness to her prose.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Ephron weaves a solid tale of love and betrayal.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “This book is smooth and seamlessly written with a screenwriter’s sure hand for manipulation in short spaces.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  Also by Amy Ephron

  One Sunday Morning

  White Rose: Una Rosa Blanca

  Biodegradable Soap

  Bruised Fruit

  Cool Shades

  Copyright

  Suggested by the short story “A Cup of Tea” by Katherine Mansfield, © 1950 J. Middleton Murry.

  A CUP OF TEA. Copyright © 1997 by Amy Ephron. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by a
ny means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition June 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195758-1

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page