Love Comes Calling

by Siri Mitchell

  I put a foot to the stairs.

  “And we’re having that poor Phillips boy over for supper tonight.”

  Poor Phillips boy. I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. My mother must be the only person in the world to think Griff might be poor in any sense of the word. The Phillipses had plenty of money, and Griff was rich as Midas in the adulation of the entire population of the city. The only thing he lacked was a mother. She’d died in the influenza epidemic during the war. “Do we have to?”

  “Ellis! You really ought to start treating him like the man he is. You’re not a child any longer and—”

  I ran on up to the landing, held on to the newel post, and spun myself around the corner and headed up to my room.

  “Honestly, Ellis! . . . Don’t be late for supper.”

  I hadn’t meant to be.

  It’s just that I found an old copy of Movie Weekly as I was unpacking my trunk. It had a full-color spread of Antonio Moreno’s new mansion, which was exactly the kind I was going to buy when I became a movie star. It was one of those Mediterranean-style houses with a sun-splashed courtyard, rounded, red-tile roofed towers, and balconies outlined with iron grillwork. It had a bathroom inside the master bedroom, plenty of space, and lots of light. In fact, it was the exact opposite of our old red brick Bulfinch with its boring wood-paneled walls, long dark halls, and wavy glass windowpanes. The magazines said it never got cold in Hollywood and it never rained! I’d be able to leave all my coats and sweaters behind, which would make it that much easier to go. There wasn’t anything at all I would miss about Boston.

  Except . . . except for Griff.

  No matter how much I told myself I wouldn’t, I knew that I would. I wished I were different. I wish God had made me better or smarter or something that would make me deserving of Griff’s attention. Something that would let me feel right about accepting his pin. Sometimes, though it wasn’t too terribly often, I almost wondered what it might be like to be married to him, even though I knew I couldn’t. Shouldn’t. I mean, I could marry him; it would be as easy as accepting his fraternity pin, and then accepting his marriage proposal, and then actually getting married . . . but the point of it all was that I shouldn’t because I wouldn’t be any good for him. My, but it was hard to do the right thing!

  I was halfway through an article on Nita Naldi’s latest movie when I realized the house had gone silent. There was no creaking from my sister’s old room and there was no thumping up in the attic where Mother still kept the nursery for my nephews. I pushed away from my pillow and tiptoed to the door. As I opened it, I heard a murmur of voices from downstairs amidst the clatter of silverware scraping against plates.

  Oysters and clambakes!

  What to do? I chewed on a fingernail. I could go downstairs and endure the scowls of my mother, the reprimand of my father, and the smirks of my brother and sister or . . . I could stay in my room and starve to death.

  It wasn’t much of a choice, so I determined to make the best of it. At least Griff was down there. They wouldn’t yell at me in front of him.

  I slipped from my skirt and blouse and into a flounced orange georgette dress and then exchanged my old T-straps for my satin pumps. Taking up a hand mirror for a peek at my hair, I pulled a face at myself.

  Although I wore my pumps down the Oriental-carpeted hall, I pulled them off when I reached the front stair. Holding them in one hand, I sat on the banister and slid to the landing. Touching down with one foot, I slipped past the newel post and then slid down the final flight. I froze mid-slide as one of my nephews glanced over.

  His brows rose, and his mouth fell open.

  Griff reached over and stuffed a piece of roll into it.

  After slipping my shoes on, I took a deep breath and walked into the dining room as if I expected everyone to be delighted to see me. In my experience, it never hurt to hope. But Mother followed my progress to the empty chair beside Griff with narrowed eyes.

  At least Father waited until I was seated before he spoke. His mustache was twitching and his eyes were glaring at me from behind his old-fashioned wire-rimmed eyeglasses. “So glad you decided to join us, Ellis. Are we to feel honored?”

  Across from me, my little brother, Lawrence, snickered. I kicked him—hard—under the table. He choked on his lamb chop.

  “Whatever are they teaching at Radcliffe that they’ve neglected manners and common courtesy?” My sister, Julia, could always be counted on to be snide.

  “Latin and mathematics. Along with English literature. And the dissection of frogs.”

  She tried to smile and failed.

  Griffin was hiding a smile of his own beneath his napkin.

  “Are they green inside too?” My nephew Marshall looked as if he really wanted to know, but he was only five years old, so it was hard to tell.

  His younger brother, Henry, tried to talk around a mouthful of food. “I like frogs.”

  Mother cut in on him. “Griffin was just telling us about his plans for the summer.”

  Well, thank goodness, because I had no idea what the inside of a frog looked like! I’d fainted dead away the moment Louise had slit it open. I glanced over at Griff as I cut into my lamb chop. “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve agreed to intern for the Governor’s Finance Commission.”

  At least he sounded excited about it; it sounded rather boring to me. I gave him another glance.

  Mother was smiling. “The governor requested him. By name.”

  He waved a hand as if to dismiss my mother’s compliment. “It’s only because he’s my uncle.”

  Father was shaking his head. “Doesn’t mean he had to. He wouldn’t have requested you if he didn’t think you’d do a good job of it.”

  Mother was rapping Marshall on the elbow with the handle of her knife.

  Ow! I knew how that felt, and I couldn’t help but sympathize as I saw tears spring to his eyes.

  “If I wanted to see your elbows at the table, I would have set a place for them.”

  His chin trembled as he cradled his elbow in his hand.

  Griff leaned around behind me toward him. “Hey. Maybe after supper we could throw around the football. See if you’ve got what it takes to play for Harvard.”

  Marshall’s eyes brightened.

  “Can I come too? We could show them what a real play looks like.” Lawrence might have thought he sounded indifferent, and at the age of eighteen he was definitely practicing, but here he had misjudged. He was practically begging.

  “May I come too.” My mother pounced on the mistake like a cat.

  Marshall turned to her with a frown. “I don’t think you’d like it, Grandmother. You might get your dress dirty. Can Auntie Ellis come, though?”

  “No.” My mother answered before I could. “There are some things your grandfather and I need to discuss with her.”

  “You’re not going to yell at her, are you?”

  “I never raise my voice at anyone.”

  Griff gave my neck a squeeze at the back where no one else could see it.

  “How are your grades, Ellis? Got your finals back yet?” Lawrence was smirking.

  I shouldn’t have kicked him. I knew I shouldn’t have. “They’re fine.” Fine enough, considering I wasn’t planning to return to college in the fall.

  “And how are the plans for Cosmopolitan Club coming?” Now my sister was ganging up on me too!

  I shrugged. Mary had been sick the day I was supposed to put the announcement in the Radcliffe News, and I’d forgotten all about it while I’d walked with her over to the doctor’s and then waited with her while she’d been examined. I’d missed an economics exam that day, too, while I’d gone down to the pharmacy for her medicine—which was the reason my grade was so bad. I’d tried to explain my absence, but Professor Whitmore accused me of offering excuses and wouldn’t even listen. “How about you, Julia? How are your clubs coming?”

  She refused to answer, just like I knew she would. Since she’d gotten ma
rried, unlike the rest of her old college friends, she hadn’t gotten involved in anything at all. It was almost like she was trying to avoid everyone.

  Griff leaned in toward the table as he addressed my mother. “Ellis is always busy, every time I see her.”

  Mother put down her fork and gestured for the butler to collect the plates as she eyed me. “Yes. Ellis is very prolific. For every project she completes and cause she takes on, she seems to leave two unfinished.”

  She made it seem as if I didn’t even try! I wish she could be me for just one day so she’d see what a lot of trouble I went to in order to keep everything from turning out even worse. How would she like to wake up each morning knowing that as hard as she tried, no matter what she did, everything was likely doomed to failure before she even started? Sometimes I wondered if it was worth it to even get out of bed.

  “Why don’t we have dessert?” Father smiled as if everyone was in agreement, no one had taken offense, and everything was fine.

  As the sherry was poured, Griff asked after the telephone company. Telephones were my father’s favorite project. Though he was chairman of the board of the telephone company, his interest went well beyond the proprietary. He was enamored of receivers and handsets and ringing tones of all sorts. And he was always talking about the modern lunchrooms and bathrooms and working hours the hello girls down at the switchboards had been given.

  “Business is splendid! There are forty thousand telephones in the city and more being added every day. Next year I suppose we’ll have to put in an automatic dialer—just no other way around it.”

  Griff found my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze. “I’ve heard about those. You just pick up the handset and dial straight through. But . . . do you think people can really be depended on to dial by themselves, without an operator? I’d think it would be too confusing trying to remember a four-digit number.”

  “That’s what I told him.” Mother was looking at Griff with an approving eye. “How can anyone be expected to memorize a telephone number? And then dial it without making a mistake? If you let people do it for themselves, it’s just asking for trouble. Leave it to the professionals, that’s what I say.”

  After dessert had been cleared away, after Lawrence and Marshall had dragged Griff out the back, Mother sighed a long, heavy sigh as she glared at me from the foot of the table. “Would you like to explain yourself?”

  What was the use of an explanation? Wouldn’t it be better just to get to the point? “I’m sorry, I really am, but it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Nothing is ever your fault and still things keep happening! What you need, Ellis, is to focus and stop wasting all the chances life is giving you. You need to start . . .” She shook her head, but I knew what she wanted to say. I needed to start buckling down and applying myself. “You’re not just anybody. You’re an Eton. And if Etons just went around doing whatever they wanted, shirking their responsibilities, then what on earth would this world come to? Somebody, somewhere, has to step up and do for those who can’t. We are those somebodies, Ellis. And you are one of us.”

  Be somebody.

  That’s what I wanted. That’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted to be somebody different. I wanted to be somebody famous. The leading lady. The one people would gaze at in the darkness of a movie palace and dream of becoming. For once in my life, I wanted to be the one everyone else wanted to be.

  And being somebody is exactly what my mother wanted for me too. Although her Somebody wasn’t my Somebody, given enough time, I was sure I could make her proud of me. Who wouldn’t be proud of me when my name was up on a marquee, surrounded by blinking lights?

  My father was looking at us with a mystified expression. “But . . . you said you were sorry, Ellis.” He glanced up at my mother. “Didn’t she say she was sorry?”

  Mother nodded.

  “For . . . what? Exactly?”

  My mother told him about the wine.

  “But—! I don’t understand how—!”

  Mother’s lips had folded into a grim line. “Go on, Ellis. Explain yourself.”

  “I told one of the girls she could keep some grape juice in my closet. And being in the dark like that, I guess it started to . . . well . . .” It had done exactly what the label had warned it would do.

  My father sighed. “I can guess what happened. But I don’t understand why she would ask something like that of you. You do understand if anyone had found out about this, they might have thought the worst of you. Prohibition is the law in this land.”

  I didn’t see why they were so upset about it. It wasn’t mine; I hadn’t drunk any of it. And even if I had, I don’t know why they would have cared. “We still drink sherry here. And you still drink sherry at the club. . . .”

  “That’s different.”

  “But how?”

  “Well . . . you see, the law isn’t meant for people like us. It was meant for the poor, and all those immigrants, people who aren’t able to handle their alcohol like we are.”

  “So then why does it have to apply to me?” Not that I ever would drink alcohol myself. I couldn’t stand the smell. It reminded me too much of Granny’s cough tonic.

  “It applies to you because you’re an Eton. You have to set a good example. You might think we’re old-fashioned, but your mother and I know about college hijinks, so we’ve allowed for some latitude in our expectations. But I know I speak for both of us when I say we consider this incident beyond the pale. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying . . . I should do as you say.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And not as you do.”

  Mother and Father exchanged a glance. Father cleared his throat. “You’ve grown up living a sheltered life, so we know this can be difficult to understand. It’s a bit complicated, the way Prohibition works, but trust us when we say that as reasonable adults who practice self-discipline, we understand what we’re doing.”

  “But I don’t? Is that what you’re saying?” I didn’t mean to be testy, and honestly, I didn’t care, but it didn’t seem quite fair. I folded my napkin and put it on the table beside my plate. Then I stood.

  Mother held out her hand as I walked by.

  I put mine into it, and she drew me toward her, putting her other hand to my cheek. As I bent, she kissed me, squeezing my hand before letting it drop. “We just don’t want you to fall in with the wrong element.”

  “I won’t.” At least I didn’t plan on it, and I don’t think anyone would quite consider Irene the wrong element, and even if she was, I wasn’t falling in with her. I ought to have just left without saying anything else, but considering the circumstances, I didn’t have much choice. “About the closet . . . ?”

  That warm, rather maternal look in my mother’s eyes sharpened with suspicion. “Yes?”

  “When the grape juice exploded, you might say it got on most everything.”

  Her brow rose. “And by that you mean?”

  “The grape juice was really quite dark colored, and most of my spring and summer clothes were rather light colored and . . .” I’d done it again. I’d managed to extinguish every bit of lingering affection and replace it with disappointment and despair.

  “Oh, Ellis.”

  I started my summer off the next day at church, helping the Missionary Aid Society prepare some barrels to be shipped to a church in Manchuria. Mostly it involved sorting through huge piles of clothing that had been collected in spring and separating out girls’ clothing from boys’ and men’s from women’s.

  It made me wish I had some money of my own to donate, but I’d used it all on dresses and movies and ice cream sodas. And even if I hadn’t, I would have been saving it for a train ticket to Hollywood.

  Much of the clothing appeared to have been pulled from trunks in which they’d been stored for ten or twenty years along with camphor and tobacco snuff. It made me want to pinch my nose. I held up a dress. “Don’t you think . . . ?” It was so old-fashion
ed.

  My mother looked over at me. “What did you say, Ellis?”

  “It’s just that . . . I wondered . . . are these clothes for the missionaries or the Manchurians?”

  “I don’t know. Why? Does it matter?”

  I turned the dress round so she could see the high-collared, ruffled front yoke of it. “It might if those missionaries read Ladies’ Home Journal.”

  “I should think people who don’t have very much would be happy with whatever they’re given.”

  Maybe. I folded it up and placed it on the pile waiting to be put into a barrel marked For Ladies. “Maybe someone can make something from it. Like . . . some sort of cushion.” Or something. “Do you think any of them even have one of those old corsets to go with it?” Granny still wore those sorts of contraptions, and I had often wondered if they weren’t partly to blame for her chronic ill-temper.

  “It’s not how you look on the outside that’s important.”

  I knew that. I’d known that since forever. But wouldn’t you tend to behave better if your outsides looked nice as well? “But no one’s going to fit in any of these dresses if they don’t have a corset.”

  Mother was frowning. “You might be right. . . .”

  I took the dress from the pile and walked over to Mrs. Cooper, who’d been bossing everyone around all morning. As I was explaining about how the dress was so old-fashioned and how it probably needed a corset and wondering whether anyone in Manchuria would be able to wear it at all, I was struck with inspiration. “If you want to give them away, then we could use them down at Radcliffe.”

  “Radcliffe? For what?”

  “For the theater.”

  “The theater!” Her chins were quivering.

  “Sure. That coat over there would be terrific for a dastardly villain, and this dress could maybe be used for some consumptive old granny and the dress over there could be a costume for a medieval lady, maybe, if we do Shakespeare next year—”

  “These are meant for the missionaries!”

  “But that’s what I mean. Just because you send them doesn’t mean they’ll like them or even ever wear them, especially if they don’t have any place to stage theatrical events.”