Nina tipped her head back and groaned. “So don’t sit down,” she said. “Dance on tabletops. Start a riot!” She leaned forward and clinked her glass to Emily’s. “To rabble-rousers, rousing rabble!”
“When I was your age, dear heart, I danced on my share of tabletops. But these days an ensemble that doesn’t bind is the ideal.” The Zeppelin clapped her hands together. “Everyone! I have decided. ‘Clairvoyant’ it is. As a matter of fact”—she gathered up a double handful of the fringed paisley cloth covering the library table—“I think this would be the sort of thing a fortune-teller would wear as a shawl.” Looking terrifically pleased with herself, Zep snatched the tablecloth the way she’d seen Sam do it.
My tray of cocktails took a direct hit from a crystal snow globe that turned cannonball when the table flipped and everything on it went flying.
The Zeppelin clutched the cloth to her chest. “But Sam made it look so easy! I was so sure I—he made it look so easy!”
Nina jumped from the chair, her diaphanous dress splattered with champagne. “Who saw that coming?” she exclaimed, then ran to the window where the light was better and dabbed at the fabric with a napkin. The next time I looked at her she had buried her face in the drapes, her shoulders shaking with what I had to think was laughter.
Margaret pried the cloth from the Zeppelin’s hands and said, “It’s all right, shh, now, don’t worry. Ward will have this cleaned up in no time and look, you’re absolutely right, it does make the perfect shawl.” She wrapped the fringed spread around Zep’s shoulders and steered her to the favored armchair. The Zeppelin slumped in it, utterly deflated. For the first time ever I thought she looked as ancient as Nina pretended she was. What’s funny to think about is that Zep was probably a good twenty years younger than I am now.
I set the table to rights and swept up all the broken glass, retrieved the books that had been on top of it, wiped down and replaced them, and returned the still-intact reading lamp to its place alongside the stack. Finally I spotted the snow globe over by the window, close to Nina’s feet. When I went to scoop it up, she let go of the drapes, cast one forlorn look in my direction, and fled into the hall. I realized then that the table wasn’t the only thing the Zeppelin had upended. Nina’s face was streaked with tears.
I didn’t think anybody else had noticed until I saw Emily staring after Nina, her lips parted in surprise. I caught her eye, touched a finger to my cheek, and trailed it halfway down. Emily nodded, got up, and followed Nina into the hall.
I picked up the snow globe, shook it, and watched the snow inside settle on the Eiffel Tower. Then I handed it to Zep. “This can be your crystal ball,” I said. “When you tell people you’re seeing Paris in it, you won’t be lying.”
“I’ve been to Paris several times,” Mary Louise said. “It’s in France.”
Max smoothed his vest and shot his cuffs. “Well,” he said. “Let’s start this party over, shall we? Ward, can you fetch us another bottle of bubbly?”
I was grateful for an excuse to go find out what had become of Nina and Emily. I stopped by the kitchen first for the champagne. Sam was getting out dishes for the dinner service. As I put on a clean apron I outlined the ruckus in the library.
“She ought to of asked me how first,” he said. “It don’t work on a cloth with a fancy edge. The embellishment is what done her in.”
“Bring this to Max, then tell her that,” I said, taking a bottle from the refrigerator and shoving it into his hands. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear it.”
I filled a tumbler with water and went looking for Nina and Emily. I found them sitting on the floor of the coat closet under the stairs, their knees drawn up to their chins and the hems of their dresses tucked demurely around their ankles. Nina had her hands over her face and her head half-buried in the lower reaches of somebody’s lovely black winter coat, one that had been abandoned there a while ago.
I’d fingered that coat’s fabric from time to time—cashmere—and checked its tag for some clue of who it once belonged to. House of Worth, the label sewn on its neck said, a French couturier I remember one of our clients gassing on about the winter before, so that coat had probably been hers. But if that designer-name-dropping matron couldn’t be bothered to get in touch with us to ask after her missing coat, I couldn’t be bothered to send it to her. I had about decided that, if a year passed and it was still unclaimed, I’d send it to my mother. Miss Pam hated wearing hand-me-downs when she was a girl, but now that she was poor all over again she might feel differently. I imagined she’d be pleased to have a decent overcoat again, whether she’d heard of the House of Worth or not. As for the woman who’d left that elegant wrap behind, I’d almost convinced myself she’d abandoned it on purpose. I pegged her as the type who’d rather die than be caught wearing last year’s couture.
I handed Emily the glass of water I’d brought for Nina and asked, “Is Stilts all right?”
Nina took her hands away from her face long enough to say, “Stilts is fine. Stilts also speaks English, as well as French and a little Italian. Which she learned from a little Italian.” She used the tail of the coat to wipe her face, leaving behind slug trails of mucus. Then she took the tumbler from Emily and raised it to me. “Unhappy 1938!” she said.
I raised my eyebrows and looked at Emily.
“Why don’t you step inside and close the door,” Emily said.
“It’ll get pretty dark in there with the door closed,” I said.
“It’s pretty dark in here already,” Nina said. “Come on in.”
It was a big closet, I’ll grant you, big enough that the previous owners of the house had hung hams in it to cure. But still, it was no Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. I wedged my toes in between their feet and pulled the closet door almost to behind myself. I left it cracked because I wasn’t sure the door could be opened from the inside and I didn’t like the idea of trying to explain myself to Margaret if the three of us got trapped inside.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Tonight’s the night,” Nina said.
I started sweating. Whether it was from the lack of air circulation in the closet or the enigmatic nature of her statement or the whiff of the mortality of long-dead porkers, I wasn’t entirely sure. “The night for what?”
“We weep. Or I do, anyway. Don’t feel like you have to join in, if you aren’t in the mood.”
Emily’s voice floated up from the darkness. “Nina lets herself cry once a year. Once and only once.”
“The truth is I want to cry all day long, most days,” Nina said. “But I fight it. Usually I do a pretty good job of beating back despair, but hearing Zep say her dancing-on-tables days are over set me off. The hell of it is that we’ll be too old for it, too, someday, just like she said. We’ll all wind up as tottery as she is.”
“Zep isn’t what I’d call tottery,” I said. “Or particularly old. Even so, my understanding of that situation is that it doesn’t happen all at once. You get to ease into it over the course of many years.”
“I know, I know,” Nina said. “But the tablecloth business! That’s the stuff that really breaks my heart. Being so sure you can do anything you put your mind to, then one day realizing you can’t anymore.”
“If it’s any comfort to you,” I said, “the tablecloth business didn’t go south on Zep because she’s old. Sam said the fringe is what done her in. Did her in. The trick doesn’t work if the tablecloth has an edge.”
“Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me,” Nina said. “I have an edge.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Emily said. “Aside from being tallish for a woman. It’s getting stuffy in here,” she added, and kicked the door open.
The Zeppelin’s voice, as buoyant as ever, drifted in from the library. “I keep getting older,” she said, “but my husbands don’t!”
Emily took Nina’s hands from her face and wiped her cheeks with the tail of the black cashmere coat. “Get up, Stilts. The p
hotographer will be here any minute, and Margaret will come looking for us.”
The two of them scrambled to their feet, brushed off their seats, and straightened their dresses. “How do I look?” Nina asked.
Emily plucked an errant maraschino cherry from Nina’s hair and held it out to her by its stem. “Like a million bucks,” she said. “With a cherry on top.”
“A million? Is that all? Try five. Although every time I marry I end up with a little less.” She took the cherry from Emily, pulled the fruit from the stem, chewed and swallowed it, and handed the stem back to Emily. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
“Happy birthday to me,” Emily said, and dropped the stem down the front of Nina’s dress.
Nina squealed and jumped. “Emily! How old are you?”
“Not as old as I’m going to be.”
The three of us strolled back to the library after that, Nina leading the way. Emily grabbed my hand and held me back a little. “Let her go first, then me,” she whispered, “so they won’t think we’ve all been up to something.” She gave my hand a little squeeze before she let it go.
“There you are!” we heard Mary Louise exclaim when Nina sailed into the room. “So what are you going to wear to the masquerade ball, Nina?”
“I’d rather be shot than dress up in a costume and go to that,” Nina said.
That night I dreamed someone was trapped inside the hall closet, knocking, hoping a passerby would come along and free her. I opened the door, and there was Emily, nestled among the coats, as naked as a jaybird. She reached out, grabbed my hand, and gave it a little squeeze.
Even though I did my best to stay asleep, the knocking continued until finally I rolled out of my bunk and stumbled over to open the door. Nobody there, though the rapping grew more insistent. I realized it was coming from behind me, and when I turned I saw Emily’s face at my window. She gestured urgently. Sleeves, I noted. Guess I wasn’t still dreaming.
When I opened the window and leaned out, Emily was dressed in pajamas much like the ones I slept in. Although hers were probably boys’ instead of men’s, since she was small and they fit her pretty well. She was holding something lumpy bagged inside a pillowcase.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“So you do sleep in pajamas,” she said.
“So do you.”
“Yes. I prefer men’s pjs. I feel ridiculous sleeping in negligees.”
“So do I,” I said.
“Ha ha,” she said, mirthlessly, and shoved the pillowcase into my hands.
“What’s this?” I asked, and peeked inside. It didn’t take a whole lot of moonlight to realize I was looking at Nina’s gun. “Are you kidding? She’ll skin you for taking this.”
“She asked me to take it. Don’t worry, it’s unloaded. Hide it, will you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to understand. You just have to hide it.”
“Shouldn’t Margaret be the one to—”
Emily made an impatient gesture. “No, Nina doesn’t want to worry her. Nina told me to give it to you. ‘Cashmere isn’t a snitch,’ she said. ‘We can count on him.’”
“I don’t know—” I said.
“I do know,” Emily said. “Listen, Archer’s father shot himself when Archer was a kid. He’d been a friend of my father’s since college. Archer’s dad had been struggling for years and my father felt like he should have seen that coming. Papa didn’t think another man’s troubles were any of his business, though, and then it was too late. I’m not making the same mistake. Take this. Hide it.” She squeezed my hand again, said, “Thanks,” and beat it back across the barnyard to the house.
After she was gone I turned on my reading light and checked the revolver’s chambers to make sure they were empty. Then I stuffed the pillowcase under my bed. Tomorrow I could figure out a better place to hide it.
I was just drifting off to sleep again when I heard the engine of the Pierce-Arrow. I got out of bed, went to my window, and watched it creep down the driveway. Once it was too far from the house to wake anybody up, the limousine’s headlights flickered on.
Chapter Nine
Emily and Nina didn’t turn up at breakfast the next morning, so I assumed they were sleeping in. I knew they’d made it back from another of their late-night jaunts because on my way to the barn that morning I’d checked the shed to be sure the Pierce-Arrow was inside. I couldn’t help wondering where that pair had gone every night for two weeks when they crept away from the ranch. None of our other night owls ever mentioned bumping into them in Reno in the usual hot spots.
If nothing else, ranch work taught me about the gap between who a person pretended to be and who she really was. I’d gotten a lesson in that early on from an older guest who proclaimed herself a teetotaler and carried around a glass of tap water to sip on throughout the day because, she explained, the desert air made her feel exceedingly dry. The first time I gathered her into my arms to dance, however, she’d reeked so of gin that it made my eyes water. When I mentioned as much to Sam, he’d said, “That old girl ain’t been dry since Jesus turned water into wine. Reckon He turns her tap water into gin as a special favor because of they been friends since grade school.”
When Emily and Nina didn’t show for lunch, I asked Margaret if somebody ought to knock on Coyote’s door to make sure they were all right.
“All right?” Margaret asked. “Why wouldn’t they be?”
I thought about the gun in the pillowcase still under my bed. “No reason,” I said. “It’s just that Nina isn’t one for missing meals. And they’ve got to be around here someplace. Emily’s automobile is in the shed by the stagecoach, all the horses are in their stalls, and the ranch station wagon is parked out back.”
Margaret eyed me. “Come 1940, Ward, you could probably get a job working for the census bureau,” she said. “I saw you out there this morning, by the way, looking at Emily’s car. I’ve noticed you go out and look at it most mornings.”
“Just making sure Taffy and her kittens haven’t moved back in,” I said. “It’s such a beautiful car. I wouldn’t have minded being born in that back seat myself.”
Margaret patted me on the shoulder. “I know,” she said. “Don’t let it eat you up inside, sweetheart, people having but not caring much about something you want but can’t afford. It’s the hardest part about coming to grips with working here, being around folks who have more than they need and still aren’t happy. Give it enough time and you’ll appreciate having what you need and knowing it’s plenty. I don’t envy our guests anymore. I have what most of them want but haven’t found yet, and may not ever.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“My Max. There aren’t enough men like him to go around,” Margaret said. My favorite thing about Margaret and Max was that they still seemed so deeply in love after so many years together. It gave a person hope.
As it turned out, Emily and Nina had left the ranch before breakfast that morning. “Emily asked if you could drive them,” Margaret said, “because Nina has her thinking all Reno cabdrivers are gossip-column snitches. A few are, I guess.” She shrugged. “Any other day I might have let her take you, knowing how you feel about that car. But I couldn’t see having you gone all day and maybe half the night. I called a taxi for them.”
“All day and half the night? Where were they going?”
“Who knows? As long as they don’t leave the state, where they go and what they do is none of my business. But listen, the good news is you get to drive Emily’s car after all. I asked her if we could borrow it to ferry some of the ladies into Reno tonight so we wouldn’t all have to squeeze into the station wagon. She said that was fine by her, if we could find the keys. They aren’t hanging on the key rack in the kitchen where she thought she’d left them. Nina says you must have them.”
“Me? Why would I have Emily’s keys?”
“Because you were the last one who drove her car, when you and Nina took
Emily to see her lawyer.”
“I don’t have her keys,” I said. I was about to add that Nina and Emily took that automobile out more nights than they didn’t, but if Margaret had slept through all their nocturnal expeditions it wasn’t my place to tell her what she’d been missing. Like Nina said, I wasn’t a snitch. “I gave them to Emily as soon as we got back,” I said.
Margaret looked annoyed. “Then they’re probably swimming around in the bottom of her handbag, or forgotten in one of her pockets,” she said. “That’s the trouble with always having a staff do for you. You forget how to keep track of things for yourself.”
As it turned out, Nina knew where the keys were, and lied to Margaret. She knew where they were all along.
My mother always assumed I wrangled cattle on the ranch, not ladies, so when I wrote home about going to my first masquerade dance in Reno I said I’d gone with a buddy I worked with, Sam, and that we’d dressed as cowboys because we had the clothes already and that was what we were. Soon after that a parcel from home arrived at the Flying Leap for me. I was touched to get it, figuring it might be a lemon pound cake, since my birthday was coming up and my mother had mailed me one of those during my year away at college. All the time I’d worked at the Boulder Dam I hadn’t gotten a package with a cake inside, not once, so I took receiving her box that day as a sign that my mother’s spirits were improving.
I carried it back to the bunkhouse to open, not because I didn’t want to share but because I was worried seeing the lemon pound cake nestled in the box might choke me up. As it turns out, what was inside made me even sadder: a pair of saddle shoes and a crewneck sweater with a large Y emblazoned on its chest. A note in my mother’s handwriting was pinned to the sweater. It said, This is what you are.
The saddle shoes were mine, bought with my mother in Memphis before I got on the train to New Haven. The sweater wasn’t, though Miss Pam didn’t know that. It had come from the lost-and-found drawer in the then-new, faux–Oxford University Sterling Library at Yale, where I’d shelved books for pocket money. I’d taken that job not because I needed cash then, but because I was fantastically lonely. You know, some medical professionals dismiss as hypochondriacs physically healthy patients who come into their offices and list ad nauseam every runny nose and hangnail. Not me. I have been there. Loneliness is a sickness, too, same as any other.
Better Luck Next Time Page 8