With One Stone

by Frances Lockridge

  The waiter returned quickly, and shook his head sorrowfully.

  The migration of pompano also had begun. Broiled shrimps scampi remained—tautologically, but nevertheless admirably.

  II

  There isn’t, Dinah Bedlow told herself, anything I can do about it, whether I decide I want to do anything about it or not. She can crook a little finger and that will do it—most beautifully crook a little finger, as she does everything so beautifully; as now she walks so beautifully down a flight of stairs, although only I am watching. She would walk so, with the same grace, the same poise, if there were no one watching. Give her that, Dinah told herself. Snap out of it, Dinah told herself.

  She was sitting by a window, with a book—sitting close to the window, since it was still cloudy, although the snow with which the day had begun was long over and the rain which had briefly followed it had ended too. Only the sky now was watery—the sky and, it was to be presumed, the grass and walks and drives around the big house. From where she sat, Dinah could see, through the wide archway, the staircase from second floor to foyer, and her father’s wife descending it. She had only to put her book down. She put her book down.

  And, involuntarily, she raised a hand to her short dark hair, smoothing it. Consciousness of what she had done came only as correcting fingers touched the hair and, with consciousness, that flicker of disappointment in herself, of lack of respect for herself, which had, during the past week or so, become familiar. Be what you are, Dinah told herself. Be rumpled, if you are rumpled. Don’t feel inadequate, worry about hair misplaced. Or, if you must—if you’re such an unshaped thing—don’t show you know it. Don’t apologize by—

  “All alone?” Ann Bedlow said, stopping on the second step from the bottom of the flight—stopping with the fingers of her left hand just touching the rail, standing somehow as if still, gracefully, she moved.

  Yet it was not posed. Give her that, too, Dinah Bedlow thought, as she smiled and nodded and then said, meaninglessly, “All alone.” It could not be said that her father’s wife posed. It was not a pose, nothing so obvious as a pose. It was a way of being Ann Bedlow.

  Ann came down the last two steps and a little way toward the arch between foyer and living room—an arch so wide that there was only a token separation between the rooms. She stood for a moment, smiling at the younger woman and, in that moment, a shaft of sunlight came through the glass of the front door and touched silvery hair, perfectly arranged (no need ever for a hand to smooth that hair) with a darker streak sweeping, in triumph, from right temple to crown. Even the sun comes on cue for her, Dinah thought, and smiled at her stepmother. (What a term for Ann Bedlowl)

  “Dad’s where he always is, I suppose,” Dinah said, and the older—ten years older? Eight?—woman shook her head, sharing knowledge of James Bedlow’s predictability; sharing affection for a man so set in his ways.

  It lacked a few minutes of five on the afternoon of Thursday, March thirty-first. Until five, James Bedlow would be in the office wing.

  “Catching up,” his wife said, now, again sharing understanding with the dark-haired girl by the window. “As if he weren’t always caught up. Even in Florida—”

  Mrs. James Bedlow moved her shoulders in the immaculate suggestion of a shrug, letting the motion say what did not need saying.

  “Ann,” Dinah said, “can’t you persuade him to begin letting up a little? After all, he’s not—”

  But Ann, and now her smile was rueful, was shaking her head. She said, “Not I. Not anybody, I’m afraid.” Her smile vanished. “Don’t,” she said, “think I haven’t tried, my dear. But, he goes his own way, your father. He—”

  She stopped, this time in acknowledgment of, at the same time to emphasize, the sound of a car starting in the turnaround outside. She moved to the door and looked out through its wide glass panel.

  “Miss Winters is leaving,” she said. “So I suppose the day is about to be called.”

  “Until Norman gets here,” Dinah said. “Then it’ll start all over again. I—” A movement of her shoulders gave it up. “You’re going out in this?” she said.

  The question was more or less rhetorical. Ann Bedlow was dressed for going out—for going out in the country on a chilly afternoon in early spring. She wore slacks. (And can she wear slacks! her stepdaughter thought.) She wore heavy outdoor shoes, and a woolen shirt and a jacket over it. Rough outdoor clothing. From Abercrombie? Or the Tailored Woman?

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘this,’ dear,” Ann said. “The sun’s almost out and—I need air.”

  To demonstrate, she breathed deeply. Perfect breasts rose, not conspicuously, with the body movement. Too bad I’m not a man, Dinah thought. Too bad I’m a spiteful little— Too bad I’m not Norm Curtis. Just a jealous little—

  And for no reason, she thought; for no reason whatever, no reason conceivable. An imaginary burr in my mind, my mind also probably imaginary.

  “I won’t be long,” Ann said, and opened the big door. “I won’t miss the hour.” She turned back. “Believe me,” she said, and the smile was bright on her delightful face.

  The cool dampness of early spring came through the door, as Ann Bedlow went out through it. It drifted to Dinah and her nostrils twitched to it. Perhaps, she thought, it would be fun to go out and taste air. Perhaps I should have— On the other hand, I wasn’t asked.

  She almost snorted at her own thought. As if she needed an invitation, an invitation from anyone, to walk the paths of her own father’s land, to go where she chose in this considerable area of Putnam County, State of New York, set aside for, walled around by, James Bedlow, owner and publisher, and editor too, come to that, of the New York Chronicle. She needed no invitation from this exquisite woman, this almost-contemporary, whom her father had married three years ago—married, and by marrying proved the excellence of his taste. In, Dinah Bedlow told herself, sternly, all respects. So far as I know. And what’s come over me?

  “Hi,” Dinah heard and, looking up again from her book, putting it in her lap again, said, “Hi yourself,” to her sister, coming in turn down the wide staircase.

  Mary Bedlow Parsons looked thirty, and was thirty, and had the same dark hair Dinah had—and weighed twenty pounds more, which still wasn’t much—a hundred and thirty, say—but, Dinah thought (and now I’m making comparisons again), a few pounds more than she’s built for. The outdoors type.

  Why, she thought, am I, all of a sudden, looking at people—people I’ve known long, a sister I’ve known all my life—as if I were seeing them for the first time? A year—almost a year—away. That is the obvious thing, the simple explanation. A year in Europe with Aunt Grace, and before that so much time at school.

  “That husband of mine,” Mary Parsons said, coming down the stairs (and not stopping on the second from the bottom or on any other) and into the living room. “That Russ.”

  “Not coming up?”

  “Oh,” Mary said. “Coming. But not till tomorrow, or perhaps even Saturday. A new client—maybe. To be saddled and bridled and shown the jumps.”

  Mary Parsons thought, often, in terms of horses. Before she married she had been, now and again, spoken of as a “prominent horsewoman.”

  “What’re you reading?” Mary said, closing one subject with an audible snap.

  Dinah showed her. Mary said, “tsk, tsk,” or thereabouts. She said, “O’Hara. And you a maiden.” She looked at her younger sister—at a dark girl made delicately. “I suppose?”

  “That,” Dinah said, “is none of your business, sister.”

  And was, pleasantly, laughed at. Was told that, innocently, she gave her innocence away.

  “You!” Dinah said.

  “In spite of Europe,” Mary said. “Which probably was bursting with opportunities. Museums? Châteaux?”

  “No comment.”

  “You say. Where’s Mama?” She accented the second syllable. “On her usual walk?”

  “Yes.”

  “An
d Norman?”

  It was coincidence; only coincidence. It did not mean that Mary, too, had—had wondered.

  “On his way up, I suppose,” Dinah said. “I know Dad’s expecting him.”

  Mary walked to a window; looked through it. She said, “It looks wet to me.” She turned. “Dad keeps a tight rein on him, doesn’t he?” she said. “On Mr. Norman Curtis? If I were an executive editor I’d like to—execute. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Put away the knife,” Dinah said.

  Mary shook her head.

  “No knife,” she said. “Russ pulled a boner. And—it turned out to be the best thing ever happened to him. Oh, at the time— But not now. Anyway, it probably was as much Dad’s doing as Norm’s. The hand on the wheel.”

  Mary Bedlow Parsons also sailed boats.

  “Well,” Dinah said, “it’s his wheel, Mary.”

  “And how!”

  “Which,” Dinah said, “is one reason for all this.” She moved a hand to indicate—to indicate a room and imply a house set in acres; to imply a year in Europe; to imply everything. “Which is what we are,” she said. “Both are. Because a tough man came up the tough way and held on to—”

  “All right,” Mary said. “All right and all right. And I’ve known him longer than you have. Out in the wild and woolly.”

  By which she meant Oklahoma, which had been neither in her time.

  She turned from the window.

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  Dinah shook her head, smiling faintly.

  “Lucky you,” her sister said, and went back into the foyer and out of sight through a passage beside the staircase; the passage which led to a door and, beyond it, the hallway to the kitchen. Dinah watched her go, and the smile lingered on her lips, and she did not pick the book up again. Mr. O’Hara’s play by play had, momentarily, palled. The schoolboy lingered in O’Hara, Dinah Bedlow thought, and thought, on the heels of that, Who am I to think that of him, when I am only a year or two away from a schoolgirl?

  No answer occurring—except that it is the privilege of anyone to think anything—Dinah found she was wondering what, really, her sister Mary and Russel Parsons had found in common when they married, and found now. None of her business, she told herself.

  Suddenly, she thought, I have become like a young and inquisitive kitten, peering into, smelling around, things before now taken for granted. Because I have been away, must rediscover? Or because, with one thing intangibly challenged, other accepted things have come in doubt?

  Different Mary and Russ certainly were, she thought, letting thought drift vaguely. A pause in the day’s occupations, she thought, which is known as the drifting hour. Brisk was, she supposed, a word for Mary—she moved briskly, her thoughts were, apparently, as brisk. Russel Parsons was more—more what? Uninvited, a word came into her mind. More obscure. She did not mean that, of course. More subtle. More subtle in mind and, come to that, in appearance—broad forehead and deep brown hair, worn just a little longer than some men wore their hair; eyes deepset under the broad forehead—altogether, a sensitive face, reflecting, to the last nuance, the intelligence of a mind.

  He had been, they said, very good on TV panel shows, asking penetrating questions of those the press panels interviewed and, what was perhaps as important, looking at once handsome and urbane as he asked them. The Chronicle had, she gathered, been proud of Russel Parsons, considered him an asset, a contributor of prestige. Few tabloids could boast of such a political analyst on their staffs; he was, in effect, a transplant from The New York Times.

  All of which she had merely gathered, absorbed, being for the most part away at school. When the previous June, a graduate cum laude, she had gone to Europe with her mother’s sister, her brother-in-law had been the pride of the Chronicle. When she returned in November, he had been Russel Parsons Associates, public relations counselors.

  She wondered now, sitting by the window as the light faded outside, whether it was really true that becoming a publicity man had turned out to be the “best thing that had ever happened” to Russel Parsons. She could not put a finger on the reason for her vague doubt that it had. And it was Mary’s business, hers and her husband’s. It was none of a sister’s business.

  There was yet no real need of lights. But, suddenly restless, Dinah Bedlow got up from her chair and went through the big room turning lights on—lamps beside chairs and sofas, in sconces above the fireplace. The sconces, she decided, rather overdid it, and she turned them off. Ann was, evidently, finding the out-of-doors enticing; conceivably, she was finding it pleasant to be alone, to wander alone. As I did an hour or so ago, Dinah thought while I was reading, but not quite reading, Mr. O’Hara, but really only being alone. Now—

  Now she could stand to have things start happening. Because, she thought, if it is possible for a girl to have the “vapors” in this day and age, I’ve been having the vapors. She stopped in front of the fireplace, where she could see herself—most of herself—in the mirror over it. You don’t, she thought, look like a girl with the vapors. And there isn’t a thing the matter with your hair. And—

  “Like what you see, kitten?” her father said, standing in the opening between foyer and living room. There was amusement in his deep voice; amusement and affection and, beyond either, more important than either, friendship. They would have been friends, Dinah was always certain, if they had not been father and daughter. That they were, in spite of that, was somewhat remarkable.

  “It’ll do,” she said, turning toward the tall man—a man still physically powerful—with white hair and ruddy face; the erect man who seemed to her, still, to be larger than other men. When she had been a child, he had seemed a giant.

  “And where is everybody?” James Bedlow said, and looked at the watch on his wrist. He shook his arm and looked at the watch again. Then he looked at Dinah and raised heavy eyebrows which had not whitened with his hair.

  Dinah looked at her own watch. It showed ten minutes of six. She must have spent more time than she had realized with the vapors.

  “Ann went out for her walk,” she said. “Mary’s in the kitch—”

  “Not any more,” Mary Parsons said, coming in briskly from the far end of the living room—between the double doors which, in ten minutes, Simpkins would pass between, pushing the cocktail cart. Mary held half a canapé in her fingers. She ate it. “Good canapés today,” she said. “Hi, Dad.”

  “On a day like—” James Bedlow began, but interrupted himself and said, “’Evening, Mary,” and then came into the living room. He looked around it as if he expected to find more people there.

  “Norman hasn’t showed up?” he said, confirming the obvious.

  Dinah shook her head.

  “And,” Mary Parsons said, “that husband of mine is working on a client, and won’t be here until tomorrow. Maybe not till Saturday.”

  To which James Bedlow said, “Oh,” with no special inflection. Then he said, “Sorry, always like to see Russ,” with (Dinah thought) somewhat diluted courtesy. There was nothing to indicate that Mary had observed the dilution. She went to the fireplace and opened a small cupboard in the side of the mantel and took out a foot-long box and said, “Shall I?”

  “By all means,” her father said, but went to a window and looked out of it. Mary took a foot-long match from the box, struck it, and touched paper under kindling.

  “Chilly day for a walk,” Bedlow said, and looked through the window. “Been gone long?”

  “Oh,” Dinah said, “only a few—” but stopped herself. Actually, Ann Bedlow had been walking, on wet paths certainly, in the chill of early spring, for at least three-quarters of an hour. “Half an hour or so,” Dinah said, and her father made a small noise which indicated he had heard her.

  There was the sound of a motor from the drive turnaround.

  “Here’s Curtis, anyway,” Bedlow said. “In that contraption of his.”

  The “contraption” was a Jaguar. Jame
s Bedlow had been trained to more commodious things.

  Dinah went to open the door for Norman Curtis. She went quickly.

  He was a lean man of a little over medium height; he wore a bluish-gray tweed suit, with a sweater under the jacket and no topcoat. His face was thin, but in the thin face the eyes—gray with, when certain lights caught them, flecks of gold against the iris gray—were set unexpectedly far apart. There was a dent in the bridge of his nose, where a hocky stick had hit it once. The brush of his hair was black. He said “Hi” to Dinah Bedlow, and reached out with his right hand to pat her shoulder. He came into the foyer and put an attaché case down on the parquet floor.

  He kept a hand lightly on the girl’s shoulder as they both turned into the living room. His eyes, Dinah thought, quested, and she moved enough so that the hand lightly on her shoulder slipped from it. He did not seem to notice this.

  “She’s out taking a walk,” Dinah said, her clear soft voice without inflection. He looked at her, then. He said, “Oh, you mean Ann? Chilly day for it. However—” He shrugged.

  “You didn’t see her?” James Bedlow said. “She sometimes walks down the drive to the road.”

  “No,” Norman Curtis said. “Not hide nor hair. Want I should—”

  “No,” Bedlow said. “She—do you suppose she could have come in without your seeing her, kitten? Be up changing?”

  Dinah did not think so. Of course, Ann might have gone in through the rear of the house, up the back stairs.

  “I’ll see,” Dinah said, and went to see—went quickly up the stairs, and to the suite her father and Ann shared; knocked first at a door and, unanswered, opened it and called. No Ann.

  She went down again and Simpkins had wheeled in the cocktail cart—wheeled it to a position near, not in front of, the fireplace, in which flames frisked brightly. He stood beside it, a man in a white jacket, a man with a long face and a peculiarly long jaw. He looked around and hesitated. Then he said, “Shall I, sir? Or is Mrs. Bedlow—”

  “We’ll wait for Mrs. Bedlow, Simpkins,” James Bedlow said. “You—we’ll take care of ourselves.”