“You’re very different,” he said.
“How?”
“Beats me.”
“Is it being English?”
“You’re just different. Not like other girls.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Bad, very. Honora, you’re up the creek unless you manage to find some pervert with a taste for classy females who are hopelessly altruistic—and have dark, velvety eyes with little lights behind them.”
Warm with delight, she made her honest, routine disclaimer. “Crystal has the looks in our family.”
“She’s stunning all right,” he said. “Me, I go for tall brunettes.”
“Like Imogene Burdetts?” The overly candid question jumped from her lips.
“Jealous?” The candlelight shone on his mocking grin.
“Why should I be?”
“Come on, Honora, we both know you’re mad about me.”
In her inviolable security, she laughed. “True, true,” she said. “It’s your turn again. Are you ready to confess about those terrible rumors?” A frivolous question.
His smile faded. “No truth at all,” he said. “I do assure you on the best authority that I am not the illegitimate scion of my boss.”
Gideon? Curt? She knew her mouth had opened in surprise.
“You hadn’t heard that bilgewater?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“I jumped in unnecessarily, didn’t I? It’s hardly a tale that a veddy, veddy proper Englishman takes home to his nubile fold.”
She realized then that envy brewed ugly explanations for Curt’s success at Talbott’s and that this malice was as painful to him as her job was to her. The revelation that they shared similar mortal weaknesses brought a peculiar ache to her heart, and she reached out in consolation. When she touched the warm, hard flesh of the back of his hand, her fingers trembled. She withdrew hastily.
He said, “First of all, Mr. Talbott—”
“Why don’t you call him Gideon, like we do?”
“He hasn’t made the request. I am not family. Repeat. I—am—not—family. Mr. Talbott is a man of rare and unique carnal rectitude—as opposed to me, Honora dear. To my knowledge he never cheated on that dreary woman, your aunt.”
“You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Curt said, crushing out his cigarette. “I ought to be.”
“Why?”
He stared at her somberly. “You should be very fond of him, too. There’s not many employers in this republic who’d put up with your father’s pathetic ritual snobbery.”
She realized he was paying her back for what he considered prying, but how could she let the insult pass unanswered? “Daddy’s a wonderful editor,” she said with quiet intensity. “He’s not a snob. Not at all. He’s a gentleman.”
“Gentleman? Is that a synonym for a guy who gets his back up at every little remark that hits him the wrong way?”
Loyalty to her father stung her into opinions that sober she might have kept to herself. “And why do you think Gideon’s so wonderful? Being faithful to his wife? Decent men are. He’s pompous and conceited, he lords it over people, bossing them around. Good? Do you consider it good or generous or kind to leave your family out in the cold?”
“I gather what you’re saying incoherently is that it isn’t enough for Mr. Talbott to employ your father, who though a wonderful editor and etcetera, has a tendency to take off an extra hour for lunch and then show up smelling of booze. You believe that it’s Mr. Talbott’s duty to shower the lovely Sylvander sisters with all the luxuries their father cannot provide.”
His vehemence had blown out the candle. While he struck a match to relight it, Honora stared down at her glass.
Curt said quietly, “Now we each know where our loyalties lie, don’t we?”
“I suppose,” she said listlessly.
“Make you a deal. You lay off Mr. Talbott and I won’t attack your father, who incidentally doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.” He raised his hand again for the waiter. “What we need is another drink.”
The third drink restored her. Now they were no longer bantering, but gazing at each other. His mouth had an unfamiliar softness; she wanted to ever so lightly trace his lips, a tactile urge so strong that she reached for her pearls instead—Crystal, selecting the strand at Woolworth’s, had taken ages to find the deepest luster.
All at once the heat and noise engulfed her like a bone-crushing demon, spinning her amid the crowded tables. A sourness rose in her throat. She stumbled to her feet, peering around. “Curt, will you excuse me . . .”
Curt was standing too. “The restrooms are back there,” he said, giving her a gentle push.
She tottered dizzily past the piano bar. Mercifully the toilet was free. She crouched over the bowl, throwing up stringy, pinkish liquid. The great heaves reminded her of this morning’s weeping. What a day, she thought, leaning back on her heels, wiping her hand over her cold, sweaty forehead.
When she emerged, a woman was repainting her mouth at the rococo mirror. Honora could see their two reflections, her own apparently raised from a crypt.
“Had one too many?” the woman asked nonjudgmentally. She fished through her beaded bag for a half-finished round of Life Savers. “Here, this’ll take the taste away.”
Honora thanked her, washing her face and cupping handfuls of water to her mouth before she chewed the candy.
At the table a cup of black coffee waited. Unable to look Curt in the eye, she stared down at the steaming liquid, her hands circling the thick, hot china. “I didn’t have dinner,” she said. “Do you suppose that was my trouble?”
“Christ, why didn’t you tell me? I’d never have let you have three. I shouldn’t have, anyway. We’ll get you a burger.”
“Just fresh air, please,” she said.
She could not resist a professional glance at the tip he dropped. It was outrageously large.
Fog had rolled in, and the lighted windows of the closed Italian food stores shimmered hazily and there were no hard-edged shapes, no distances. Headlights and an occasional pedestrian came out of nowhere. She took deep, restorative breaths of the moisture-laden air. Curt didn’t speak, but after they had climbed a hilly block he took her hand. He pressed his hard, warm palm against hers, and their fingers clasped. In the touch of their bare flesh there was a sense of preordained intimacy.
In the entry tunnel to her building, he turned her toward him, holding her loosely with his hands linked behind her waist. “Better?”
“Yes,” she whispered. It was very dark in here and the usual smell of urine was overcome by his after-shave, his cigarette, a very faint odor of masculine sweat, the whiskey on his warm breath. She blessed the woman who had given her the Lifesavers that had taken the horrible sourness from her mouth.
“Sure?” He was whispering, too.
Nodding, she leaned forward, touching her lips to his—later she would wonder at her audacity, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
His arms tightened around her and she pressed against the solid warmth she had conjured up so often in her dreams. His mouth was softer than she had imagined, and she touched it with her tongue. When her dates had French-kissed her, she had fought the lingual intrusion, but now she was initiating it, and Curt’s tongue roused exquisite sensations throughout her body. Her nipples had always been sensitive, and the tissue seemed to expand to cover her breasts. His quivering arms were lifting her high above the dark, mist-drenched city, and if she let go she would plummet to earth, so she clung to him with all her strength, arching her pelvis against that coiled strength in his trousers.
The kiss ended and he pressed his cheek against hers. “I’d made up my mind not to do that,” he said, his breath filling her ear.
“I kissed you . . . .”
“You’re too damn trusting and tender. You don’t know the first thing about me, who I am, where I came from, where I intend going.”
<
br /> “I love you.”
He moved his head back to look at her. In the dim light that seeped into the entry tunnel, she could see that his eyes had a puffiness under them, as if he’d just awoken, and his mouth, dark with her lipstick, was soft, sensual, vulnerable.
“You shouldn’t say that.”
Her metabolism altered and she felt heavy, despairing, gauche. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she mumbled.
“Look, Honora, by now you’ve realized I’m an ambitious bastard, driven to succeed and red-hot for the big money, haven’t you?”
“There’s a lot more to you than that.”
“Yes, I’m a helluva fine engineer. That’s where the ambition fits. I have it in me to plan and build miracles never before seen on this earth.” His voice rumbled with seriousness.
“Is that the attraction to Imogene?”
“You’re asking if I use her? So I come across as that much of an SOB, do I?”
“No, but . . .”
“Honora, I like her. She’s a good time, a kick.”
“And Mr. Burdetts could help you.”
“Sure. I’d get my pick of projects if I married her.”
Married her. The words reverberated inside Honora’s head, and she tried to pull away.
His palms remained stationed firmly above and below the small of her back. “I told you I haven’t been in charge of projects at Talbott’s. And I won’t be until I’m forty. Honora, even though it hurts you, I am not Sir Galahad.”
“Why did you pick me up at Stroud’s?”
“Seeing you there threw me for a loop,” he said. “You were so out of place with those other tough-looking broads. There’s a fairy-tale quality about you, and I had this overwhelming urge to be Sir Galahad, to gallop up on my white horse to rescue you.”
“You truly felt like that?”
“Why not? A guy could drown in your eyes.” He kissed her eyelids, then her lips.
8
When the phone rang at ten in the morning, Honora was dreamily rinsing breakfast dishes: she straightened with an instantaneous flash of hope that it was Curt. Last night when he had climbed the stairs with her, he had made no mention of another date. Twisting off the faucet, she reached for the dishcloth to dry her hands.
Crystal had already darted from the bathroom, blond ringlets streaming on her luminous, bare shoulders, the towel she was wrapping sarong style around her shapely torso transforming her into the ultimate movie-style seductive South Sea Islander. “I’ll get it!” she cried. Lowering her voice, which she knew tended toward the higher soprano register, she cooed, “Hello?”
“Crystal? Gideon here,” said the familiar gravelly notes. “I’d like you and your family to come for dinner tonight.”
Crystal’s eyes were a vivid, shining blue. This was Gideon’s first important overture since the engraved Open House invitation. How she had chafed through those Saturday afternoons with the old fogies, waiting, hoping against hope that some young man other than Curt would show up! Crystal’s strong sense of family loyalty precluded making a play for a man her sister liked, and besides she didn’t go for Curt’s caustic sense of humor—however, had he been the sole property of Imogene she wouldn’t have let that stop her. The phone call, a move toward a Sylvander-Talbott entente, would substantially advance her toward the kind of life she had in mind.
Already dreaming up an excuse for Bobby Dupre, who thought he was taking her to see The Bells of St. Mary’s with Bing Crosby tonight, she said, “How nice of you, Gideon. It sounds lovely.” Der Bingle wasn’t one of her favorites anyway.
“I’m expecting your father, too, Crystal.”
“Of course, Gideon. Daddy’ll be delighted.”
“My car’ll be there at seven.” He hung up.
Crystal stared down at the buzzing instrument in her hand. “You’ll never guess who that was.”
“Wouldn’t I just!” Joscelyn, at the kitchen table, raised her head from a special geometry project for summer school. “Gideon has a loud voice.”
“Gideon?” A soapy cup slithered dangerously in Honora’s grasp.
“He’s invited all of us to dinner.”
“To dinner? Why?”
“Stop tying everything in the world to your date last night,” said Crystal with mock severity.
“Oh, who can work with all of this going on?” Joscelyn demanded.
Crystal ignored the remark. “Finally he’s acting like a real uncle. I’ll bet he’ll see to it that we’re launched. Of course he couldn’t before now, because of Aunt Matilda, but now he’s coming out of deep mourning—”
“I never noticed him dissolved in the depths,” Joscelyn interjected.
“—and he’ll be able to give parties for us to meet the right people. Honora, it’s a bit late for you, but he could give me a debut. Imogene told me that Mrs. Burdetts hired somebody called Mrs. Ekberg when she had hers. They had three hundred people, including the Hearsts and the Knowlands. Governor Warren showed up with Honeybear, and she was asked back to ‘the most divinely wild parties where everyone got absolutely smashed on French bubbly.’” Crystal mimicked Imogene’s exaggerated intonations.
During this effusion, Joscelyn’s face had become pinched and sullen. If Gideon were entertaining for Honora and Crystal, he’d do the same for her. Parties terrified Joscelyn—not that she had been invited to many, either here or in England. Her old crepe de chine party dress made her look even more spidery, and out of sickish anxiety she invariably spilled something down it. If she could have one of Crystal’s attributes she would not choose the obvious, beauty, but Crystal’s ability to glide through every function.
“Didn’t I hear Gideon include Daddy in the invitation?” Joscelyn asked.
“So you finally rinsed the wax out of your ears,” Crystal retorted.
“Crystal, Joss,” Honora soothed.
“Daddy won’t go,” Joscelyn said flatly.
“Of course he will,” Crystal said. “Gideon especially asked for him.”
“Either you’re more cretinous than I thought. Or blind. Haven’t you noticed that he always has an excuse for the Open House? I’ll bet anything he won’t go tonight.”
Crystal tightened the knot in her sarong towel. To her it was crucial that the entire Sylvander clan ingratiate itself with Gideon: she wanted the best of everything for all of them. “He’ll be there,” she snapped. Her sharp slam of the difficult bathroom door succeeded in shutting it.
“Oh, Joss,” Honora sighed. “Why must you go out of your way to upset her?”
“You’ve been washing that same cup for hours.” Joscelyn’s eye twitched. It cut like broken glass whenever Honora sided with Crystal. “Are you pretending it’s Curt Ivory’s feet?”
Reddening, Honora set the cup on the drainboard.
* * *
Joscelyn nearly won her bet.
Langley indeed attempted to squirm out of this dinner. “I have an engagement with a very important chap,” he said. “Somebody interested in starting a publishing house. With a snap of his fingers he could appoint me editor in chief.” (Langley retained an endearing perennial hopefulness that every stranger who proclaimed himself rich in some way would pilot the good ship Sylvander into safe harbor.)
Crystal retorted that he couldn’t let them down and shed a few becoming tears. But it was Honora, mindful of what Curt had told her the previous evening, who quietly pointed out that Gideon, after all his employer, might be offended if he didn’t show up. Langley, muttering something about delaying his arrangements with the possible patron, left the apartment at four, returning a few minutes after six with a sheepish little smile and a strong aroma of whiskey and peppermint breath mints.
It turned out that Curt was the only other guest.
Mrs. Wartobe stood at the heavy Gothic sideboard, ladling rich cream of vegetable soup. Then came a plump leg of lamb that Gideon carved, his broad red hands expertly wielding the long, flashing knife and two-pronged fork, jovially
going around the table to inquire of each of them which slice they preferred. Creamed potatoes, pearl onions, fresh peas glazed with butter, golden hot yeast biscuits completed the main course. At the Open Houses Juan never offered the girls sherry. Tonight he tilted the wine basket for Crystal and would have filled Honora’s goblet, too, but the vinous odors of burgundy brought a sour taste to her mouth, and she said hastily, “None for me, thank you.”
Curt raised an amused eyebrow.
Limp with desire, she forced herself not to look at him except when he spoke. Fortunately he and Gideon talked a lot, discussing a cost projection for a refinery project in Oxnard that they were bidding on. (The strong lines of affection between the two showed during this debate.) She found it near impossible to reconcile this forceful Curt and the man who had last night held her with shaking arms and covered her face with small, nibbling kisses.
Gideon was saying, “Sylvander, you know about the refinery. You’re writing up the proposal.”
“I suppose I am.” Langley’s words slurred together.
Honora emerged from her bemusement to turn to her father, who sat next to her. His nose was red at its narrow tip, the blue eyes bloodshot. He had been at the Crowned Head for two hours, and at Gideon’s table he had emptied glass after glass of the burgundy, then the dessert Château d’Yquem that came with the peach pie; she didn’t need her newfound knowledge of alcohol to know he was well in his cups.
Gideon noticed, too. “Mrs. Wartobe, we’re ready for the coffee,” he said.
After coffee was poured, the two servants retired with trayloads of dishes through the green baize door.
Gideon sat straighter in his chair, a portentous expression on his heavy features. He cleared his throat. “I wanted you girls here because what I have to say concerns the three of you as well as your father.” His gaze lingered on Crystal. “I’ve grown quite fond of you, and I hope the feeling is mutual.”
The three sisters replied quite honestly that it was.
“This house is very large, seven family bedrooms upstairs. What I have in mind is for you Sylvanders to move in with me.”
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