by Peter Straub
“I’m sure it is,” said Stella, the faintest of smiles tipping the edges of her mouth.
“Coats in the consulting room here, drinks upstairs. I’d be happy to get you one while you and your husband take care of your coats.”
Stella looked at his blazer, his plaid trousers, his floppy velvet bow tie, his absurdly eager face. “That won’t be necessary, I’m sure, Mr. Robinson.”
She and Ricky dodged into the consulting room, where coats were flung everywhere.
“Good God,” said Stella. “What does that young man do for a living?”
“I think he sells insurance.”
“I should have known. Take me upstairs, Ricky.”
Holding her cool hand, Ricky led her out of the consulting room and through the lower fringe of the party to the stairs. A record player on a table thumped out disco music; young people strutted, wriggled before it. “John’s had a brainstorm,” Ricky muttered. “If not sunstroke,” Stella said behind him.
“Hiya, Mr. Hawthorne.” This was from a tall boy in his late teens, a client’s son.
“Hello, Peter. It’s too noisy for us down here. I’m looking for the Glenn Miller wing.”
Peter Barnes’s clear blue eyes regarded him expressionlessly. Did he seem that foreign to young people? “Hey, what do you know about Cornell? I think that’s where I want to go to college. I might be able to get early admission. Hiya, Mrs. Hawthorne.”
“It’s a good school. I hope you make it,” said Ricky. Stella poked him smartly in the back.
“No sweat. I know I’ll get in. I got seven-hundreds on my trial boards. Dad’s upstairs. Do you know what?”
“No.” Stella prodded him again. “What?”
“All of us were invited because we’re about the same age as Ann-Veronica Moore, but they just took her upstairs as soon as she and Mr. Wanderley got here. We never even got to talk to her.” He gestured around at the couples doing the hustle in the small downstairs room. “Jim Hardie kissed her hand, though. He’s always doing things like that. He really grosses everybody out.”
Ricky saw Eleanor Hardie’s son doing a series of ritualistic dance steps with a girl whose black hair flowed down to the small of her back—it was Penny Draeger, the daughter of a druggist who was a client. She twitched away, spun, lifted a foot, and then placed her behind squarely on Hardie’s crotch. “He sounds like a promising boy,” Stella purred. “Peter, would you do me a favor?”
“Uh, sure,” the boy gulped. “What?”
“Clear a space so that my husband and I can go upstairs.”
“Sure, yeah. But you know what? We were just invited to meet Ann-Veronica Moore, and then we were supposed to go home. Mrs. Sheehan said we can’t even go upstairs. I guess they thought she’d like to dance with us or something, but they didn’t even give her a chance. And at ten o’clock, Mrs. Sheehan said she was going to throw us all out. Except for him, I suppose.” He nodded at Freddy Robinson, who had one arm around the shoulders of a giggling high-school girl.
“Terribly unfair,” Stella said. “Now be a good boy and carve a way through the undergrowth.”
“Oh yeah.” He took them across the crowded room to the staircase as if he were reluctantly leading an outing from the local asylum. When they were safely on the stairs and Stella had already begun to go regally up, he bent forward and whispered in Ricky’s ear. “Will you do something for me, Mr. Hawthorne?” Ricky nodded. “Say hello to her for me, will you? She’s a real piece.”
Ricky laughed aloud, causing Stella to turn her head and look at him quizzically. “Nothing, darling,” he said, and went up the stairs to the quieter regions of the house.
* * *
They saw John Jaffrey standing in the hallway, rubbing his hands together. Soft piano music drifted from the living rooms. “Stella! Ricky! Isn’t this wonderful?” He gestured expansively toward the rooms. They were as crowded as those downstairs, but with middle-aged men and women—the parents of the teenagers, Jaffrey’s neighbors and acquaintances. Ricky saw two or three of the prosperous farmers from outside town, Rollo Draeger, the druggist, Louis Price, a commodity broker who had given him one or two good ideas, Harlan Bautz, his dentist, who already seem tipsy, some men he didn’t know but who he thought were probably from the university—Milly Sheehan had a nephew who taught there, he remembered—Clark Mulligan, who ran the town’s movie theater, Walter Barnes and Edward Venuti from the bank, each in a snowy turtleneck, Ned Rowles who edited the local paper. Eleanor Hardie, both hands on a tall glass held at the level of her breasts, was tilting her high-browed face toward Lewis Benedikt. Sears was leaning against a bookcase, looking out of sorts. Then the crowd parted, and Ricky saw why. Irmengard Draeger, the druggist’s wife, was blathering in his ear, and Ricky knew what she was saying. I went to Skidmore, well I had three years before I met Rollo, don’t you think I deserve something better than this one-horse town? Honestly, if it wasn’t for Penny, I’d pack up and leave this minute. It was the melody, if not exactly the lyric, and Irmengard had set the past ten years of her life to it.
“I don’t know why I never did it before,” John said, his face gleaming. “I feel younger tonight than I have in a decade.”
“How wonderful, John,” Stella said, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. “What does Milly think of it?”
“Not much.” He looked bemused. “She couldn’t figure out why I wanted to have a party in the first place. he he couldn’t understand why I wanted to have Miss Moore here at all.”
Milly herself came into view at that moment, holding a tray of canapés before Barnes and Venuti, the two bankers, and from the determined look on Milly’s plump face, Ricky saw that she had opposed the idea from the first. “Why did you want to?”
“Excuse me, John, I’m going to mill,” said Stella. Don’t worry about getting me a drink, Ricky, I’ll take one from someone who isn’t using his.” She went through the doorway in the direction of Ned Rowles. Lou Price, gangsterish in a double-breasted pinstriped Suit, took her hand and pecked her on the cheek.
“She’s a wonderful gal,” John Jaffrey said, and the two men watched Stella deflect Lou Price with a phrase and continue toward Ned Rowles. “I wish there were a million like her.” Rowles was turning around to watch Stella approach him, his face lighting up with pleasure. In his corduroy jacket, with his sandy hair and earnest face, Ned Rowles resembled a journalism student more than an editor. He too kissed Stella, but on the mouth, and held both her hands as he did so. “Why did I want to?” John cocked his head, and four deep wrinkles divided the side of his neck. “I don’t know, exactly. Edward’s so entranced with this girl that I wanted to meet her.”
“Is he? Entranced?”
“Oh, absolutely. You wait. You’ll see. And then, you know, I only ever see my patients and Milly and the Chowder Society. I thought it was time to bust out a little. Have a little fun before I dropped dead.”
This was very giddy for John Jaffrey, and Ricky glanced at his friend, taking his eyes from his wife, who was still holding hands with Ned Rowles.
“And do you know what I can’t get over? One of the most famous actresses in America is upstairs in my house, right this minute.”
“Is Edward with her?”
“He said she had to take a few minutes before she joined us. I guess he’s helping her with her coat or something.” Jaffrey’s ravaged face simply gleamed with pride.
“I don’t think she’s quite yet one of the most famous actresses in America, John.” Stella had moved on, and Ned Rowles was saying something vehement to Ed Venuti.
“Well, she will be. Edward thinks so, and he’s always right about things like that. Ricky!” Jaffrey gripped his upper arms. “Did you see the kids dancing downstairs? Isn’t that fantastic? Kids having a good time in my house? I thought they’d enjoy meeting her. It’s a fantastic honor, you know. She can only be here a few more
days. Edward’s got the taping nearly done, and she has to get back to New York to rejoin the play. And here she is, in my house! By God, Ricky.”
Ricky felt almost as though he should press a cold cloth to Jaffrey’s forehead.
“Did you know that she just came out of nowhere? That she was the most promising student in her drama class, and the next week she got her part in Everybody Saw the Sun Shine?”
“No, John.”
“Just now I had a wonderful idea. It was about having her here in the house. I was standing here, listening to the kids’ disco music from downstairs, and hearing bits and pieces of the George Shearing record from in there, and I thought—downstairs is the raw, animal life, kids jumping around to that beat, on this floor we’ve got the mental life, doctors and lawyers, all middle-class respectability, and upstairs is grace, talent, beauty—the spirit. You see? It’s like evolution. She’s the most ethereal thing you’ve ever seen. And she’s only eighteen.”
Never in his life had Ricky heard John Jaffrey express such a fanciful concept. He was beginning to worry about the doctor’s blood pressure. Then both men heard a door close up on the next landing, followed by Edward’s deep voice saying something that had the sly intonation of a joke.
“I thought Stella said she was nineteen,” Ricky said.
“Shhh.”
A beautiful little girl was coming toward them down the stairs. Her dress was simple and green, her hair was a cloud. After a second Ricky saw that her eyes matched the dress. Moving with a kind of rhythmic idle precision, she gave them the tiniest of smiles—still it was brilliant—and went by, patting Dr. Jaffrey’s chest with her fingertips as she passed them. Ricky watched her go, amused and touched. He had seen nothing like it since Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box.
Then he looked at Edward Wanderley and saw at once that John Jaffrey was right. Edward’s feathers were shining. He had obviously been stirred up by the girl, and it was equally obvious that it was difficult for him to leave her alone long enough to greet his friends. All three men began to move into the crowded living room. “Ricky, you look great,” Edward told him, putting an arm easily around Ricky’s shoulders. Edward was half a foot taller, and when Edward began to propel him into the room, Ricky could smell an expensive cologne. “Just great. But isn’t it time you stopped wearing bow ties? The Arthur Schlesinger era is dead and gone.”
“That was the era right after mine,” Ricky said.
“No, listen, nobody’s older than he feels. I stopped wearing neckties altogether. In ten years, eighty per cent of the men in this country will wear ties only to weddings and funerals. Barnes and Venuti over there will be wearing that getup to the bank.” He scanned the room. “Where the hell did she go?” Ricky, in whom new ties evoked a desire to wear them even to bed, looked at Edward’s unfettered neck as his friend surveyed the crowded room, saw that it was even more corded than John Jaffrey’s, and decided not to change his habits. “I’ve spent three weeks with that girl, and she’s the most fantastic subject I ever had. Even if she makes the stuff up, and maybe she does, it’ll be the best book I’ll ever do. She’s had a horrible life, horrible. It makes you weep just to hear it—I sit there and cry. I tell you, she’s wasted in that piece of Broadway fluff, wasted. She’ll be a great tragic actress. Once she’s out of her teens.” Red-faced, Edward guffawed at his own preposterousness. Like John, he too was in flight.
“You two seem to have caught that girl like a virus,” Ricky said.
John giggled, and Edward said, “The whole world will, Ricky. She’s really got that gift.”
“Oh,” Ricky said, remembering something. “Your nephew Donald seems to be having a great success with his new book. Congratulations.”
“It’s nice to know I’m not the only talented bastard in the family. And it should help him get over his brother’s death. That was an odd story, a very odd story—they both seem to have been engaged to the same woman. But we don’t want to think about anything macabre tonight. We’re going to have fun.”
John Jaffrey nodded in happy agreement.
4
“I saw your son downstairs, Walt,” Ricky said to Walter Barnes, the older of the two bankers. “He told me his decision. I hope he makes it.”
“Yeah, Pete’s decided on Cornell. I always hoped he’d at least apply to Yale—my old school. I still think he’d make it.” A heavy-set man with a stubborn face like his son’s, Barnes was disinclined to accept Ricky’s congratulations. “The kid isn’t even interested anymore. He says Cornell’s good enough for him. ‘Good enough.’ His generation’s even more conservative than mine. Cornell’s the kind of rinky-dink place where they still have food fights. Nine or ten years ago, I used to be worried that Pete would grow up to be a radical with a beard and a bomb—now I’m afraid he’ll settle for less than he could get.”
Ricky made vague noises of sympathy.
“How are your kids doing? They both still out on the West Coast?”
“Yes. Robert’s teaching English in a high school. Jane’s husband just got a vice-presidency.”
“Vice-president in charge of what?”
“Safety.”
“Oh, well.” They both sipped at their drinks, refraining from trying to invent comment on what a promotion to vice-president in charge of safety might mean in an insurance company. “They planning to get back here for Christmas?”
“I don’t think so. They both have pretty active lives.” In fact, neither of their children had written to Ricky and Stella for several months. They had been happy infants, sullen adolescents, and now, both of them nearly forty, were unsatisfied adults—in many ways, still adolescent. Robert’s few letters were barely concealed pleas for money; Jane’s were superficially bright, but Ricky read desperation in them. (“I’m really getting to like myself now”: a statement which to Ricky meant its opposite. Its glibness made him wince.) Ricky’s children, the former darlings of his heart, were now like distant planets. Their letters were painful; seeing them was worse. “No,” he said, “I don’t think they’ll be able to make it this time.”
“Jane’s a pretty girl,” Walter Barnes said.
“Her mother’s daughter.”
Ricky automatically began to look around the room to catch a glimpse of Stella, and saw Milly Sheehan introducing his wife to a tall man with stooping shoulders and thick lips. The academic nephew.
Barnes asked, “Have you seen Edward’s actress?”
“She’s here somewhere. I saw her come down.”
“John Jaffrey seems very excited about her.”
“She is really sort of unnervingly pretty,” Ricky said, and laughed. “Edward’s been unnerved too.”
“Pete read in a magazine that she’s only seventeen years old.”
“In that case, she’s a public menace.”
* * *
When Ricky left Barnes to join his wife and Milly Sheehan, he caught sight of the little actress. She was dancing with Freddy Robinson to a Count Basie record, and she moved like a delicate bit of machine tooling, her eyes shining greenly; his arms about her, Freddy Robinson looked stupefied with happiness. Yes, the girl’s eyes were shining, Ricky saw, but was it with pleasure or mockery? The girl turned her head, her eyes sent a current of emotion across the room to him, and Ricky saw in her the person his daughter Jane, now overweight and discontented, had always wanted to be. As he watched her dance with foolish Freddy Robinson, he understood that there before him was a person who would never have cause to utter the damning phrase that she was really getting to like herself: she was a little flag of self-possession.
* * *
“Hello, Milly,” he said. “You’re working hard.”
“Oh poof, when I’m too old to work I’ll lay down and die. Did you have anything to eat?”
“Not yet. This must be your nephew.”
“Oh, please forgive me. You ha
ven’t met.” She touched the arm of the tall man beside her. “This is the brainy one in my family, Harold Sims. He’s a professor at the college and we’ve just been having a nice talk with your wife. Harold, this is Frederick Hawthorne, one of the doctor’s closest friends.” Sims smiled down at him. “Mr. Hawthorne’s a charter member of the Chowder Society,” Milly concluded.
“I was just hearing about the Chowder Society,” Harold Sims said. His voice was very deep. “It sounds interesting.”
“I’m afraid it’s anything but.”
“I’m speaking from the anthropological point of view. I’ve been studying the behavior of male chronologically-related interaction groups. The ritual content is always very strong. Do you, uh, members of the Chowder Society actually wear dinner jackets when you meet?”
“Yes, I’m afraid we do.” Ricky looked to Stella for help, but she had mentally abstracted herself, and was gazing coolly at both men.
“Why is that, exactly?”
Ricky felt that the man was about to pull a notebook from his pocket. “It seemed like a good idea a hundred years ago. Milly, why did John invite half the town if he’s going to let Freddy Robinson monopolize Miss Moore?”
Before Milly could answer, Sims asked, “Are you familiar with the work of Lionel Tiger?”
“I’m afraid I’m abysmally ignorant,” Ricky said.
“I’d be interested in observing one of your meetings. I suppose that could be arranged?”
Stella laughed at last, and gave him a look which meant, get out of that.
“I suppose differently,” Ricky said, “but I could probably get you into the next Kiwanis meeting.”
Sims reared back, and Ricky saw that he was too unsure of his dignity to take jokes well. “We’re just five old coots who enjoy getting together,” he quickly said. “Anthropologically, we’re a washout. We’re of no interest to anyone.”
“You’re of interest to me,” said Stella. “Why don’t you invite Mr. Sims and your wife to the next meeting?”