by Unknown
Mike sold a story to a small magazine that year, and he had enough money to travel home for Christmas. On his first afternoon in the town, he borrowed his father’s old car and drove it through the massive gates of the Miller place. A Negro butler opened the door and led him to the library, where Phyllis greeted him.
The room was staid, and Phyllis’s black dress and pale hair, worn in a knot, seemed part of the dignified atmosphere.
Phyllis gave Mike her cold hand. They talked for a while about his work and his ambitions, and then he asked about her plans.
“I’m taking a secretarial course.”
“What! You said in your letter that you wanted to come to New York and study dramatic art. I’ve looked up some schools for you.”
She dismissed the notion with a weary gesture. “Uncle Ulie’s had enough of my mother’s family.”
“He’s got plenty of money.”
“I can’t take any more.” Her hands were like carved ivory hands clasping the oaken apples carved into the arm of the chair.
The telephone rang. Phyllis answered it, and when she had learned who was calling, her voice betrayed her. What she said, however, was quite casual: “She’s not here. . . . I think she went to have some fittings, lingerie and things. . . . I don’t know when she’ll be back. . . . Oh, do! . . . Yes, Yes!”
She hung up the receiver and, without a word of excuse, hurried out of the room.
When she returned, Mike saw that she had rouged her lips and combed her hair. The smell of burning coal and the flat odor of steam were drowned by her perfume. She kneeled on the cushioned window seat that overlooked the drive. Wheels sounded on the gravel. A car door slammed; the bell rang; the butler walked slowly down the hall. Phyllis’s cheeks had become rosy and her eyes were dancing.
Johnnie Elder came in. “Hello —” He tossed the greeting at Phyllis smoothly. His big fist crushed Mike’s hand. The enthusiasm of his greeting was all out of proportion to his regard for Mike. While they talked of colleges and football teams, Johnnie’s eyes were fixed on Phyllis. Mike felt like a man who has wandered by mistake into a peep show. He muttered something about having to leave. Just as Johnnie was crushing his hand for a second time, the door opened, and there was Nancy.
“Sorry to be late, dear. I didn’t know you were coming over.” She offered Johnnie her cheek.
“It’s good to see you again, Mike.” Nancy’s face was flushed and wet with snow, and snowflakes glistened in her dark hair. She had grown slimmer, but she was still a big girl. “You can’t leave now, Mike. Stay and have a drink with us.”
The butler wheeled in a cart filled with glasses and bottles. Johnnie made Martinis, and Mike proposed a toast to the engaged couple. Phyllis merely touched her lips to the glass.
“Will you do me a favor, Mike?” Nancy asked.
“Anything I can.”
“You’ve always had a lot of influence with Phyllis. Make her come to my New Year’s Eve party.”
“But I don’t think I’d want to,” Phyllis said. “After all, it’s not two months since my mother . . .”
“Don’t be so old-fashioned. Mourning’s an obsolete custom.”
“I knew your mother well, Phyllis.” This was Mike’s contribution to the argument, and later, when he saw the results, he was sorry he hadn’t kept his opinion to himself. “There was nothing she liked better than your having a good time. She wouldn’t want you to sit and mope on New Year’s Eve.”
“Do you really think so?” Phyllis brightened.
Because Mike felt sorry for her he embroidered on the idea.
Presently Phyllis said, “If you really think Mother would want me to, Mike . . .”
“Attaboy, Mike!” Nancy clapped him on the shoulder. To Phyllis she said, “I’ll call Fred tonight.”
Phyllis frowned. “So that’s why you were so anxious?”
“Who’s Fred?” Mike asked.
“Nancy’s cousin on the other side, Fred Miller. Maybe you don’t remember him, Mike; he was out of school before we got in. He went with an older crowd.”
“They’re in insurance,” Johnnie said.
“I wouldn’t have used my influence quite so freely if I’d known I was fixing it up for another fellow,” Mike said.
“Don’t worry, Mike. You’re invited to my party, too, and we’ll all dance with you,” Nancy promised.
Johnnie, Nancy, and Mike drank another round of cocktails. Phyllis sat on the window seat, self-contained and aloof from their banter and their plans. Johnnie and Nancy chattered about the wedding, the ushers, the honeymoon, the bicycling in Bermuda, and tackle for deep-sea fishing. They seemed less like lovers than a pair of kids planning a holiday. Later Mike’s father told him that the elder Elder had lost almost everything during the depression, and that a union with the Ulysses Miller interests would probably save him from bankruptcy. . . .
Nancy’s party was, as usual, lavish. She wore a dress of some stiff gold material which made her look rather like a statue of Civic Virtue. Phyllis had left off her mourning, but showed, by fastening those same pearl buttons in her ears, that her mother had not been forgotten.
Whenever he looked at her, Fred Miller panted. He was the most unprepossessing man Mike had ever seen in tails and white tie. Sandy hair parted in the center tended to elongate his narrow head. He had a heavy cold, and every five minutes, or so it seemed to Mike Jordan, he drew out a miraculously clean handkerchief (he must have had dozens of them in his pockets) and blew a trumpeting note. “Sorry,” he’d say each time.
Johnnie Elder tried to make Phyllis drink champagne.
“You know I never drink.”
“You will tonight.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Don’t be a fool.” Nancy’s voice was rough. Their persiflage, commonplace as it was, annoyed her. “After all this is New Year’s Eve and you’ve been feeling sort of low lately. Champagne’s just what you need. Tell her, Mike; you’ve got a lot of influence.”
“If she doesn’t want to drink, you can’t make her.” This was Johnnie Elder, suddenly belligerent.
Nancy sniffed. “Who was just trying to make her drink, Mr. Elder?”
“I can manage my women without your help,” Johnnie snapped.
Evidently he had been celebrating with a few early cocktails, otherwise he could not have been so careless. The lids dropped over Nancy’s dark eyes and her mouth was a narrow line.
Phyllis asked for a taste of the champagne. “If my refusing to drink makes people quarrel, I’d better have one.”
Johnnie watched her from under his long lashes.
She sipped it, cried, “Why, it’s not bad at all,” and drained her glass.
“Phyllis can take it,” Johnnie boasted.
“She’s remarkable,” Nancy said coldly.
Mike took her arm. “Come on, Nancy, let’s dance.”
Nancy and Mike were better partners than they had been at the other party, for Nancy had learned to follow a man. But there was no life in her dancing. She tried not to stare too obviously through the arched doorway that led to the bar, but whenever they approached that end of the ballroom, her eyes were drawn to the table where Fred Miller and Johnnie were competing for Phyllis’s attention.
When the dance was over, Mike said, “Let’s go up to the balcony and have a cigarette.”
By the time he finished the sentence Nancy was at the bar. Johnnie pulled out a chair for her, the waiter brought another bottle of champagne, and Phyllis said, “The orchestra’s good, isn’t it?”
“Have a drink and catch up with Phyllis,” Johnnie said. “She’s going to town tonight. Here’s to a girl who can take her liquor.”
“I’m glad Phyllis is having such a good time.”
Phyllis smiled. Her decorum was like a thin curtain before a flame. When the music
began again she was off like a streak of lightning with Johnnie. Nancy danced dutifully with Fred Miller.
At midnight bells rang, the dancers flung serpentines and filled the air with the multi-colored rain of confetti. They sang, drank toasts, kissed their friends. Mike felt the heat of Nancy’s bruised mouth against his cheek and the sweet quivering of Phyllis’s lips.
When she came to Johnnie Elder, Phyllis flung herself into his arms, buried her mouth in his lips, then cried, “Let’s have a happy year. Please let it be a good one, Johnnie, please!”
Dance music started again. The party grew wilder. Only a conventional crowd can become so thoroughly abandoned.
Phyllis caught the fever. Unless he had seen her that night Mike would never have believed that a girl so decorous as she could so completely abandon herself to a mood and a man. She and Johnnie danced like a pair of Siamese twins, joined for life.
Evidently the electrician had taken one too many, for in the middle of a fox trot the lights went out. Nobody cared. Lights from the bar and balconies fell in stripes across sections of the writhing crowd. The music was hot, slow, and sensual, with a rolling savage beat. Mike had gone up to the balcony for a cigarette. There he found Nancy bent over the rail, squinting down into the darkness.
A roll of drums announced supper. Nancy ran down the stairs, holding her golden skirt high above her ankles. The brilliant lights of the dining-room, after the dusk of the ball-room, was like a cold shock. At flower-decked tables men and women in paper caps blew horns and whirled steel-tongued clappers. A man blew a whistle in Nancy’s ear and another tickled her with a feather-tipped wand.
She neither heard nor saw these antic attempts to capture her attention. Friends invited her to eat at their tables. She was as deaf to kindness as to jests.
“Drunk,” someone said, “drunk as a lady.”
She was unhappily sober.
To Mike Jordan the party had become unendurable. He knew then that he hated the town and its smug best people. Since Fred Miller was there to look out for Nancy, he left. As he walked down the ash-strewn icy path, he saw the glint of a gold gown among the automobiles. There was Nancy, her shoulders bare, peeking into parked cars.
He hurried after her, begged her to go in, warned her of the danger of catching cold. He even offered her his coat, thinking, as he peeled it off, of Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth. All he got for his gallantry was a sullen glance.
The next day he felt it was his duty to telephone Nick Scarpas, and order flowers to be sent with a note of thanks to Miss Miller. At ten o’clock that night his father and mother took Mike to the railroad station. He was not displeased at leaving the town and did not think he would soon return.
The train whistled and rushed through darkness. The sleeping car was quiet, berths made up, passengers hidden behind swaying green curtains. The porter, groaning aloud, carried heavy bags toward the drawing-room at the end of the car. As Mike came from the men’s room, drawing his flannel robe tight about him and clutching at his leather toilet case, he saw the conductor and the Pullman man tap at the drawing-room door. It opened, and for a moment, in the greenish sleeping-car light, he caught a glimpse of Nancy Miller’s sullen face and her dark, fierce eyes. . . .
• • •
The telephone rang with that insistent clamor which announces a long-distance call. Mike went to answer it, and I sat on the retaining wall, watching a parade of army trucks on the highway. In a few minutes Mike came out again. The operator had reported an hour’s delay in his New York call.
“Your story doesn’t sound like a mystery,” I said. “It sounds like something that might have happened in my own crowd at college. I can’t believe that people of their sort, girls like Phyllis and Nancy, could commit murder.”
“I daresay any crime story, if you told it biographically, would sound normal. Except in cases of insanity and early criminal tendencies.”
“Did Phyllis marry Johnnie Elder?”
Mike Jordan settled himself in the canopied chair, polished his dark glasses, and went on in his own deliberate way with the story. . . .
• • •
It was impossible for Phyllis to go on living with her aunt and uncle. Even her grandmother’s efforts could not win back their affection. The poor girl sat patiently on the window seat, waiting for Johnnie Elder’s car to roll through the iron gates. But Johnnie was in no position to marry a penniless girl.
For Phyllis there was only one refuge. She had not been trained to earn a living. In spite of her own sorry experience, Cinderella’s mother had gone to her death believing that marriage is a girl’s only way of security. For a girl with Phyllis’s beauty a good marriage seemed almost guaranteed. But Phyllis was not able to wait. She had to get out of that gloomy castle.
She and Fred Miller eloped.
Mike Jordan found the news distasteful. Fred was only eight years older than Phyllis, but he seemed of another generation and was as dull as an insurance policy. He worked in his father’s office on Main Street.
Theirs was a Sunday-dinner household — grapefruit before the soup, two kinds of dessert, and everybody falling asleep afterward. They furnished Phyllis’s house in solid walnut, hung drapes of satin damask at her windows, and covered her bed with filet lace.
Once a week, when Phyllis’s grandmother was driven to their house by Ulysses S. Miller’s chauffeur, they heard about Nancy, who had gone to live in France. Her grandmother’s reports were catalogs of glamour, lush with descriptions of Paris openings, week-end parties at historic châteaux, holidays at Biarritz and Monte Carlo.
Black, jet eyes peered at Fred Miller from under a scowling forehead thick with rice powder. “That’s the life Phyllis ought to be having. She’s wasted in this town.”
“I’m going to take her abroad some day,” Fred promised. “Just as soon as we’ve put away a little money, we’re going to take that trip.”
Phyllis took no part in these conversations. While her grandmother insulted her husband and poor Fred tried to defend himself, she was wrapped in a dream of glory wherein celebrated heads turned and noble hearts beat swiftly as Lady Phyllis, in a Paris creation which had been photographed for the fifty-cent fashion magazines, entered The Casino. . . .
• • •
Mike finished college and went to New York, where he worked as copywriter in an advertising agency until he was able to get a job at half the salary on a morning newspaper. Then he became assistant dramatic critic on the Globe-Telegram.
His boss had chronic indigestion and when he was laid up Mike covered the openings. On a first night while he was gossiping in the lobby during intermission, he was confronted by a stranger who called him by his first name.
“So you don’t remember me, Mike?”
Mike was puzzled. He had met a great many people in New York, but he remembered names and faces, and it seemed unlikely that he should have forgotten this vivid, cadaverous girl.
“The last time you saw me I was hunting bones in a graveyard. You were gallant and offered me your coat.” Even her voice had changed The finishing-school shrillness had been replaced by a pleasant huskiness.
A gong announced the rising of the curtain. The crowd pushed them back into the theater. “Come up for cocktails,” she called across several heads and shoulders. “I’ll leave my phone number at your office.”
Her place was magnificent, two penthouses made into a single apartment with a four-way view of Manhattan. It was modern in the best sense, simple, and without excess decoration.
It was a warm evening. They sat on the terrace, Nancy perched on the ledge, her back against the iron rail. The scene had the quality of an Italian primitive, in which foreground figures are large and solid, and in the background every minute object sharply outlined. Nancy had become so thin that her bones showed. This was not unbecoming, for she was well constructed and her face cut into inte
resting planes. She wore blue trousers and a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up, and on her right hand an enormous star sapphire.
“How handsome you are,” Mike said.
Nancy’s smile was cynical. “Don’t kid me.”
“Who’s kidding? You’re a handsome wench.”
She flipped her cigarette stub over the iron rail. “I don’t kid myself, Mike. I’ve survived so far without being beautiful and I guess I can get along for the rest of my life.” He was about to remonstrate, when she said, “Have you seen Phyllis lately?”
There was a sudden crash of thunder.
“She’s all right,” Mike said. “Happily married to your cousin.”
“Grandma thinks she’s wasting her life. Fred isn’t half good enough for her, Grandma says. He’s a stick, according to Grandma.”
“I disapprove of your grandmother,” Mike said.
“She’s always been mad about Phyllis. When I was a little girl, a horrid, fat child with bushy eyebrows, I’d get dressed up in a starched dress and sash, and Grandma would look at me and say, ‘You’ll have to be good, Nancy; you’ll never be beautiful.’ Mamma bought me the most exquisite things, handmade, imported, designed by children’s couturiers, but Grandma would never forgive me for having these things while Phyllis, who was so lovely, was poor. Even when we were tiny children she made Phyllis hate me.”
“Phyllis hate you?” Mike remembered how Phyllis’s face had been scarred by the catalpa tree’s shadow.
“I don’t blame her. It was Grandma’s fault; she instigated it and kept it alive. Even today she’s resentful because Phyl’s beauty deserves the luxury and I, who am homely and unworthy, get it all. I do think Phyllis hates me so much that she’s often wished me dead.”
Nancy walked to the opposite end of the terrace and stared down at the toy boats and bridges on the East River.
Thunder rolled above their heads and a bright arrow of lightning pierced the sky.
“Don’t you hate Phyllis?” Mike asked.
Nancy wheeled around. “Why should I? She’s always seemed a poor pathetic little thing. If she didn’t hate me so horribly, I’d be fond of her. But she’s always been so resentful, I could feel her bitterness. She’d look at me with those big, soft eyes as if I were a monstrosity. Once at a party — it was my first big party and I had a beautiful silver dress, but whenever Phyllis looked at me, I felt like a big, ugly pig and my dress seemed hideous, and the evening was ruined.”