Janie’s shoulders collapsed, and she began to wail.
“Oh! I’m so, so sorry.” It must be true if Janie was that upset about it. I sat down beside her, put an arm about her, and let her have a good cry on my shoulder.
Eventually she stopped crying and dabbed at her eyes instead. I went to get her a glass of water and, when I came back, she told me there was to be a funeral up in Maine, where Mrs. Winslow had been born.
While she was telling me about it, I spied a lid on my dresser and tried to remember what it belonged to. It was broad and flat, so it had to be from a jar of cream, didn’t it? It looked like it was from a jar of cream. But then you’d think there ought to be a jar of cream without a lid around somewhere if that were the case, but I hadn’t come across one in my packing.
“ . . . so what do you think, Ellis? I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you do it? For me?”
“What? I’m sorry. I was just . . .”
She looked at me for one long moment, then her face crumpled and her shoulders folded. “I shouldn’t have come.” She was shaking her head as tears streaked down her cheeks once more. “And I’m sorry to have asked. Never mind.” She got up and started toward the door.
“Wait. I’m sorry. I’m truly terribly sorry. Here you are, you’ve lost your mother, and of course I’ll do it.” I went to her and took up her hand between both of mine, clasping it to my bosom and looking her in the eyes. “I will. I’ll do it. I promise.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “Truly.”
“Oh, Ellis, thank you so much.” She embraced me before having another good cry for rather a long while as I looked around for my hats before realizing I didn’t have any—which was a big relief because it was one thing less to pack. Or three things, actually. I’d brought three hats to school with me in the fall. That first one I’d left behind at some fraternity dance. The second had blown right off my head in a storm we’d had in February, and the third one . . . the third one had been snatched away by that goose at the beginning of the week. But I hadn’t really liked that one anyway. It had been a wide-brimmed straw with a bunch of cream-colored bows, and I’d always thought it made my head look as if it were topped by a big pastry puff.
Janie sniffed a good, long sniff. “Are you sure, Ellis?”
I patted her on the shoulder. “Of course I’m sure.”
“It would only be for two weeks.”
“That’s fine. I want to do whatever I can to help.” Janie had always been nice to me, and Mrs. Winslow had worked for us for practically forever. Helping her daughter was the least I could do. I surveyed the room once more as I stood there. It seemed like there should be more things to put into the trunk. Hadn’t I come to school with more things?
“I’ll have to tell you how it all works. Maybe I could come over this weekend . . .”
“Come over anytime. I’ll be back at the house this afternoon.”
“How about seven tomorrow morning?”
“Seven!”
“It might take a while to tell you everything.”
“Let’s at least be reasonable about it then. Come at ten.”
“Ten. Tomorrow. And you’ll be there?”
“I’ll be there. I promise I will. And then you’ll tell me how I can help?” Because she hadn’t really said, had she? I didn’t think she had. At least . . . it didn’t seem like she had.
I was late to lunch. All the rolls were gone by the time I arrived and most of the slaw as well. Louise left her place at one of the other tables and came to sit beside me.
I glanced up toward her. “You’re already finished?”
She shrugged. “My hips are too big, and all those new dress styles might as well have been made for boys, so I’m on a diet.”
“Which one? That Hay diet?” I could never remember how it went, whether you were supposed to eat meat with potatoes or without and whether or not you could eat cheese. It was beyond me how anyone could starve themselves to death on purpose.
“That one didn’t work. I’m on the grapefruit one now. You can eat anything you want as long as you eat grapefruit with it.” Louise glanced up as Mary joined us. “Only . . . I don’t really care for grapefruit.”
“Shouldn’t take long to start working, then.”
Mary elbowed Louise. “Did you hear Irene telling us girls about the cigarette diet?”
I nearly retched. “Cigarette diet! People eat cigarettes?”
Irene must have heard her name, for she sat down at the table as if gracing us with her presence. “No. You smoke them instead of eating dessert.”
I stabbed at my fish with a fork. “Sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me.”
“Only because you can’t stand the smoke. Bet you wish you could.”
She already knew I wished I could. We’d talked about it when we’d roomed together, how our fondest daydreams included walking around in a glamorous, smoke-colored haze. Only now she was the one actually doing it.
“Don’t worry.” Irene bent close as she got up. “There’s a new tapeworm diet. All you’d have to do is swallow a pill that has a tapeworm egg in it and before you know it, all your unstylish curves will be gone!” She smiled as she left.
Mary scowled at her. “With friends like that . . . ! What’d you ever do to her?”
“Nothing.” I’d done nothing at all. I put my fork down. I wasn’t hungry anymore.
Louise inched her chair closer. “So, I never had the chance to ask you. Did he?”
“Did who what?” I was still thinking about Irene. We’d been the best of friends at the beginning of the year, and now all of a sudden, she was . . . mean.
“Did Prince ever pin you?”
“First of all, his name is Griffin. Second of all, no. And third of all, he’s not going to. He’s never even asked me on a date.”
“He might as well have. You’re the only girl he ever talks to.”
I was? Really? “Well . . .” Well. That was something I hadn’t really noticed before.
Louise patted my hand. “Don’t worry. He’s going to. I promise you he’s going to.”
“But I don’t—”
“What you need to do is take your mind off it. Why don’t we go to Billings & Stover for a soda in an hour, after we’ve finished packing.”
An hour wasn’t quite enough time for me to finish. I’d thrown the contents of my desk drawers into the trunk and found that jar of cream that belonged to the lid, but I hadn’t even started emptying my closet. I figured I could do it once I got back. As I took one last look over the room, I realized there were some big puffy dirt-colored balls of goodness-knew-what in the corners. I used the toe of my shoe to scrape them out and hurry them along into the hallway where Mrs. Smith was going to have someone come along later and sweep up behind us. I took one last look again and noticed a whole bunch of dust on the windowsill. I’d already packed my handkerchiefs and didn’t have anything to wipe it off with anymore, so I picked up the hem of my skirt to do it and found it wouldn’t reach. No one was around to do any looking, so I just sat down on the sill and wiggled along the length of it. As I left the room brushing my bottom off, I realized I’d marked up the tips of my shoes with the dust balls and wasn’t that just perfect because it was one more thing my mother would be able to scold me about.
I was debating whether to try to find something to wipe them off with or hope that I could just sneak up the back stairs once I got home when I saw Irene come out of her room balancing a stack of hatboxes with one hand as she tried to close her door with the other.
I almost turned around and went back into my room, but she’d already seen me by then.
“Ellis! Could you—would you mind helping me?”
Well, yes, in fact, I did mind! “Are you planning on insulting me again? Or abandoning me in expectation that I’ll just fill in for you?” My goodness! When I was mad I sounded just like my mother.
Her face flushed. “Listen, Ellis. I’m really sorry for the o
ther night at your play. I told Floyd not to come for me until after it was over, but he forgot and then, once he was there . . . well . . . he hates waiting for me, and it put him in a bad mood.” She looked over at me. “Trust me, you don’t want to be around him when he’s in a bad mood!”
I took two of the boxes off the top of her stack. “Is he the one who gave you the black eye?”
Her eyes darted from mine. “He didn’t mean it. He really didn’t. I’d made him mad, but he was so apologetic. He promised it would never happen again.” She tried hard to smile, but her lips were wobbling.
“Isn’t he . . . I mean . . . I’ve never actually met him, I’ve only seen him from a very long way off, but isn’t he a little old for you?”
“We can’t all date the captain of the Harvard football team, can we?” She grabbed the boxes from me and tried to put them on top of hers, only she lost her grip and the stack of them cascaded to the floor.
“Oh! I’m sorry.” I stooped to retrieve them. “Let me help. I didn’t really mean to—”
“You never mean anything, and you’re always so nice about it. But not everything can be fixed by being sorry!”
“I never said it could be.”
“I’m not like you and I never will be. No matter how hard I try, it just won’t work. And I want to be somebody someday, don’t you understand?”
Of course I understood. I wanted to be someone too. Someone different than I already was. “Irene, I—”
“And sometimes you have to take risks and—and overcome your inhibitions in order to make things happen!”
“If you say so.”
She took a deep breath and tried on a smile, but I could tell she wasn’t really happy. “Anyway, I have to go now. Floyd’s waiting for me.”
Louise and Mary were waiting for me, but I let Irene go on down the stairs by herself before I followed her.
Mary, Louise, and I were halfway to Billings & Stover when I realized what day it was. “It’s Friday!”
Mary was looking at me as if I’d gone mad. “Sure. And yesterday was Thursday.”
“No! It’s Friday.” Good grief! “The Chilton Club. Symphony! I have to go.” Last time I’d completely forgotten about something really important, I’d asked my father to get me one of those clever little books he always carried around in his coat pocket so that I could transcribe everything I was supposed to remember into it, things like symphony. But I suppose it only worked if I actually remembered to take it out of my desk and look at it once in a while. And now it was probably buried at the bottom of my trunk. I ran down the sidewalk, shoes flapping beneath me. As I rounded the corner to the dormitory, I saw the car already waiting. Oysters and clambakes!
I rapped on the window. The driver got out. Bowed.
“Just—five minutes.”
“Yes, Miss Eton, but—”
“Five.”
I bolted up the stairs and down the hall. Martha was standing outside my door, wringing her hands. “Something’s happened.”
Something was always happening to Martha. There was always some strange noise in the hall or some odd shadow in her room. “Where?”
She nodded toward my door as she chewed on her lip. “In there.”
“In . . . my room?”
She nodded again.
“Are you sure?”
“There was . . . well, there was a . . . it sounded like . . . a boom.”
“A boom! When?”
“About . . .” She consulted the watch that was pinned to the bosom of her blouse, turning it nearly upside down and twisting the material in the process. “Four minutes ago.”
In my room? I put the key in the lock and turned it. Opened the door slowly. Stuck my head inside. My room wasn’t very big, and most of my things were already packed, so it didn’t take long to determine there was no one there inside.
I pushed the door wide and stepped in. “There’s nothing—” But . . . there was something. There was a smell. A very strong, very yeasty, stench. Like . . . a moldy loaf of bread. Or . . . overripe grape juice.
Irene!
I pulled my closet door open and nearly gagged. Or cried. I couldn’t decide which to do. Irene’s jug of grape juice had exploded, spewing the wine all over my clothes. Most of my dresses and all of my skirts were dripping with it. And now I had . . . “What time is it?”
She cocked her head and screwed her blouse around again. “One thirteen.”
I only had two minutes to figure it all out.
Her nose was twitching like a rabbit’s. “What’s that smell? It’s revolting!”
“Irene’s wine.”
“Wine!” Martha’s brows rose alarmingly. “But you can’t have wine in your room. It’s against the—”
“Yes, I know! But what am I supposed to do about it now?” And what was I supposed to wear to symphony?
I rifled through my dresses and found all of them soaked but for one. And even that had been stained along the hem, but since it was already red, maybe no one would notice. I’d seen the dress back in October and knew I had to have it for the Christmas ball, so I’d used up the allowance money I’d been saving for Hollywood to buy it. But I’d come down with a head cold, and not even a teakettle’s worth of lemon and honey water had been able to cure me in time for the dance.
I had never worn it, but I was going to now. There was no help for it. I couldn’t go to symphony in my vest blouse, and the red dress was the only thing left.
Martha stood there blinking as I shed my blouse and skirt and pulled the dress on over my head.
“Isn’t that a bit . . . formal? I don’t know if you want to—”
“Just . . . don’t say anything.” I pulled my squirrel-collared coat from the back of my closet and pulled it on, fastening it tight around the dress.
“You can’t wear that! It must be eighty degrees outside.”
But I couldn’t wear a red satin evening dress with beaded trim to symphony by itself, either. “Do you have a hat I can borrow?”
5
Of course Martha’s hat was an old-style toque, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. At some point the driver came up to my room in the dormitory. I suppose it was all right since most of the other girls had gone home. I threw the rest of my closet into the trunk, and he latched the lid, lifted it to his shoulder, and started off down the hall.
By the time we reached the colonnaded symphony hall, I was truly and officially late. Though the orchestra was not yet playing, everyone had already abandoned the lobby for the concert hall. I slipped into the seat next to Mother’s. She was reading the program, but she glanced up as I sat down. “Why on earth are you wearing—?” She studied me with a worried frown and then put out a hand to touch my forehead. “Are you ill?”
I dodged her hand. “I’ll be fine.”
The orchestra struck up the beginning strains of an opus from Brahms’ Academic Overture. I settled into my seat, determined not to fidget, not to start humming, not to do any of the things I normally did.
Mother glanced in my direction, her nose wrinkling. “What is that smell?”
I dipped my chin and sniffed at the dress beneath my coat. Oh crumb!
“Ellis? Have you been drinking?”
Before I knew it, she’d grabbed hold of me by the ear and was dragging me through the hall, out into the lobby.
“I don’t have the words—! I’ve known you to disobey me and disregard me and to—to—be an utter disaster! But I’ve never known you to break the law!” She stepped closer as an usher came out from the hall. “You’re an Eton. You have a reputation to uphold. You have our reputation to uphold! And that doesn’t have anything to do with becoming mixed up in . . . in . . . illegal alcohol!”
“I didn’t—”
“This is unbelievable.”
“It wasn’t—”
“This really is the last straw!”
“It wasn’t my fault!”
“Oh? Someone dragged you into one of those . . . t
hose . . . what do they call them?”
“Speakeasies?”
“Speakeasies!” Mother threw up her hands. “And forced you to take a drink? Is that what happened? Really, Ellis, I just don’t know what to do with you anymore.”
“It wasn’t like that at all! Someone put a jug of grape juice in my closet and—”
“And now you’re making bathtub gin?”
“In my closet, not my bathtub. I don’t have a bathtub. At least not one of my own. Not at the dormitory. And I’m not making anything at all. It wasn’t mine.”
Her eyes had grown round in horror. “The dormitory? You did this at the dormitory?”
“I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.” It was Irene.
She pressed her lips into a firm, straight line. “This really is the end. With your inattention to basic proprieties and your propensity to scandalize the entire city, you’ve left me with no choice. I’m going to have to send you to Granny.”
I heard myself gasp. Granny lived way out in the woods, miles from nowhere. She was a hundred years old, and the only reason her heart kept beating was because she was too stubborn to let it stop. She was a bent, sour-mouthed widow who didn’t have time for foolishness and had never liked me at all. If my mother made me go to Granny’s, all hope of Hollywood, all hope of life in general, was gone. “Please don’t. I promise . . . anything! I’ll promise you anything! Please don’t make me go!”
She looked at me, her eyes swimming in pools of sudden tears. “I just don’t know how I failed you, but I must have. If I’d done the right things, then you wouldn’t be this way . . . would you?”
So now I was all her fault?
“Just . . . go wait over there in that chair.”
When we got home, my mother told me I’d have to speak to my father about the wine after supper and that my sister was there for the weekend with my nephews. At least she’d warned me. It’s not that I minded the boys, but I did resent how quick Julia always was to assume I’d watch them for her.
“I’ll expect you to be on your best behavior. It’s time you learned how to set a proper example for the younger generation.”
Love Comes Calling Page 4