Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  Perhaps he was different from most of the others, but he wanted to live to see the future. Nevertheless, he’d never been able to turn his back finally on Hollywood, and although he no longer did stunts, he built a stable of vintage planes, hard-to-come-by antiques, much-repaired 220 Spads and German Fokker D.VII’s and English Camels, which he rented to the movie studios to supplement the uncertain earnings of his school. McGuire’s ability to plan and organize simulations of wartime dogfighting kept him in demand from film companies making war movies. But he couldn’t deny that he missed the old days, the dangerous days, the bad, great old days.

  Swede Castelli, like Mac, had been a stunt pilot himself before he retired, but unlike Mac, Freddy thought, he’d taken on the settled look of an executive, and an overly well fed one at that. Mac looked so young next to this man in a business suit who must be as old as he was.… Mac looked as if he belonged to another generation entirely, closer to hers than to Castelli’s.

  In fact, she didn’t think that Mac had changed a hair since she’d first laid eyes on him, when she was eleven and a half, five years ago. She’d asked him how old he was after her mother had brought the question up, and he’d told her that he was forty, and explained how it was that he was much younger than her father, although they’d both fought in the same war. She’d been emboldened to ask if he was married, and he’d answered that all smart stunt pilots made it a point to stay single and unattached, and that once he’d passed the marrying age he’d been too much of a bachelor to change his ways. “End of inquisition, kid?”

  That was as personal a question as she’d ever asked him, she realized, looking at him plotting out a six-plane dogfight, and yet he was her best friend in the world. Funny to have someone you consider your best friend who certainly doesn’t think of you that way, Freddy told herself. Yet that was the way it was.

  Freddy watched McGuire carefully, seizing a rare opportunity to observe her instructor. In his presence, during a lesson, she was too busy concentrating to actually see him, no matter how closely she listened to his words. He became simply part of the ship. Once they were back at the school, with her time so tight, she almost never had more than a few minutes to rehash the lesson before she had to drag herself away from the airport and head for home. As he spoke now, she could easily visualize the flight paths of each of the six planes he was flying through the air around his desk, so vivid and precise were his gestures.

  Terence McGuire was Scots-Irish, as anybody would know by looking at his thick thatch of light brown hair with a ginger gleam in it, and his light green eyes fringed by unexpectedly long lashes. He had a charmingly good-natured face, on which the tan never quite covered the freckles. He was lean and fit, not quite six feet tall, with a gymnast’s muscles. Freddy saw that his life had left a mark on him that would also tell anyone who was interested that this man had spent far more waking time in the air than on the ground. There was something so … so free about the springy way he moved and carried himself, a man ready for any challenge, something so free about the directness of his regard and the quickness and totalness of his smile. To Freddy, Mac’s smile had always meant a promise that together they would turn their attention to the thing she loved best, and now that she considered it, he had never broken that promise. In spite of his open, easy manner he was a tough-minded man of self-discipline and self-control. She wondered if she’d ever meet another man with a smile like Mac’s, a smile to which she could trust her life.

  “Freddy, be a good kid and give us some more coffee?” Mac pointed to the pot that he kept going on a gas ring on the filing cabinet.

  She brought the pot over to his desk. “O.K. if I have some too?” she asked.

  “No, you’re too young,” he answered automatically.

  “My mother lets me drink it,” she protested.

  “I don’t.”

  Damn, Freddy thought, what am I, a two-year-old? I’m almost seventeen and I’ve been drinking café au lait for breakfast since I was in high school, and this creep treats me like a kid. In fact he keeps calling me “kid” and I don’t like it.

  Sulking, but silent, she listened to the conversation that had ceased to interest her. In the month that she’d been concentrating on aerobatics, she’d realized that all spectacular and complicated stunt maneuvers were based on a mere five simple basics—banks, rolls, loops, stalls and spins—combined in various ways.

  Since many pilots crashed as a result of not being able to control spins and stalls, the hard and monotonous practice that she was getting was, no question about it, making her a far safer pilot. The practice was also increasing her ability to fly by the seat of her pants, since, once into a maneuver, mere precision couldn’t substitute for a nearly inexplicable ability to capture and go with the “feel” of the plane. And, Freddy thought grimly, if that wasn’t enough, there was a different ideal speed at which the Ryan would do each and every maneuver. For a single snap-roll she had to hold it down to ninety miles per hour, and for a double, increase the speed to one hundred and eighteen miles per hour. A vertical snap-roll was best done at one hundred and forty miles per hour.

  So much for being a wild child on a swing in the sky! Freddy felt like slamming out of the office, leaving Mac and Swede Castelli to their fussing, and jumping into the first ship she saw and flying away. She ached, she longed, she yearned to take off for somewhere, anywhere, without worrying about navigation, precision, winds aloft, checkpoints, or any other thing that could get between her and the ecstasy, the wonderment that she remembered from her solo, when the evening star had called to her and Capricorn had beckoned. She knew that she couldn’t just take off today, not realistically, but she would, damn it, yes she would, oh, and how she would!—if she only had her own plane.

  “Wake up, Eve, wake up,” Paul urged in alarm after he had answered the telephone at four in the morning.

  “What …? What time is it? What’s wrong?” she asked sleepily, her eyes screwed up protestingly against the light of the bedside lamp.

  “It’s Delphine. She telephoned from the police station downtown—I didn’t understand half of what she said, but I’m going there now to get her out. I’ll bring her back as soon as I can, but I didn’t want to leave you here alone to find me gone.”

  “The police station? Was there an accident?… She’s not hurt, is she?” Eve asked, terrified.

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that. She didn’t make much sense. She said she was only playing chuck-a-luck, whatever that is. But, darling, she sounded hysterical and something else …”

  “Something else?”

  “Drunk,” he said grimly.

  More than two hours later Paul returned with Delphine, now scared sober, her pitiful, unprotected face wiped as clean of makeup as she had been able to manage, but still dressed in the expensive black and white printed crepe evening gown and the matching, fur trimmed bolero in which she had been arrested on board the gambling ship, a luxuriously reconditioned freighter called the Rex.

  She walked into the house with as much dignity as she could summon, but when she saw Eve, she burst into tears and sat down with a thump on a sofa in the living room, where Eve had been waiting for them.

  Eve stared questioningly at Paul, but he just shook his head, disbelief and a deep sadness shadowing his eyes. Eve moved so that she could sit next to Delphine, putting her hands on each side of her daughter’s desolate face, and holding her tightly. “Come on, come on, whatever it is, it can’t be that bad,” she said distractedly. To see Delphine, always so controlled and so self-confident, yet, to her mother’s eyes, still so vulnerable and so fragile, in such a state, made her think of nothing but comforting her daughter.

  “I’m afraid it is, my dear,” Paul said quietly, and he made a gesture with his head that meant that he had to talk to her alone.

  “Delphine, darling, go on upstairs and put on one of your old bathrobes, and when you’re ready, come down to the kitchen. I’ll make some breakfast,” Eve said, pushin
g Delphine gently toward the staircase. She turned to Paul as soon as she heard the door close in Delphine’s old room.

  “What is this about, dear God?”

  “There was a police raid on one of those gambling ships—Delphine and Margie were being held in a big cell with dozens of other women. All of them were dressed to the teeth, like her, and many of them were drunk as well. Some of them had passed out cold. The men were in another cell. It was a madhouse—lawyers, publicity men from the studios, photographers, reporters … If I hadn’t been a diplomat I could never have obtained her release so quickly.”

  “But who could possibly have made her go to a place like that!”

  “She told me the man’s name. It didn’t mean anything to me. I managed to get Margie out too. I had to take her home—there was nothing else to do. I doubt that she’ll be sober before tomorrow. She kept assuring me that it was a really ‘swell place’—roulette, it would appear, as well as dice, keno, faro, blackjack, and three hundred slot machines. Better than Tijuana, no less. She sounded like an expert. She insisted that there was nothing to worry about because the ship had hundreds of lifeboats, so it was perfectly ‘safe.’ ” He tried to smile and failed.

  “She was so drunk that she didn’t realize who I was. She kept ranting on about the fact that she and Delphine had been a couple of thousand dollars ahead when the raid started and that the police stole their money. She insisted, all the way to her front door, that I must try to get it back. She wanted to kick the cops.” Paul’s disgust made his voice dry and expressionless.

  “But … it’s unbelievable, Paul, isn’t it … isn’t it?” Eve mumbled in utter confusion. “These college boys—going out gambling at their age—making the girls drink so much? What kind of house mother is Mrs. Robinson if she lets them go out with boys like that?”

  “You don’t quite understand, darling. But then you haven’t had the advantage of listening to Margie rave on. Unless everything she said was a lie—and since she was much too drunk and far too angry to lie, I believe her—she and Delphine are members in good standing of the very highest nightlife of Hollywood, used to being treated with courtesy, as befits their position. They go only to the best clubs, which are protected from such indignities as a police raid. She couldn’t believe that anyone had actually dared to arrest them.”

  “Nightlife? Nightclubs?”

  “Gambling clubs, the most exclusive ones. To which college boys would most certainly not be admitted. They go with men, adult men, God knows who, men who give them money with which to gamble.”

  “Oh, Paul, not Delphine! Margie, maybe, but not Delphine.”

  “Yes, darling, the two of them. I’m afraid that there’s no question about it. It’s been going on all year, that much was very clear. Whatever has happened, they’ve been in it together.”

  “I don’t believe her! Until I’ve spoken to Delphine I refuse to believe that girl. I’ve never trusted Margie, and I should have known better than to listen to the nuns.” Eve resisted his account with a heart that had already begun to tremble with knowledge.

  “We should have some breakfast first,” Paul said, shrugging his shoulders wearily. “We can bring Delphine a tray in her room when we’re finished. I don’t want the servants to hear about this.”

  “I have to go and talk to Delphine now. I couldn’t eat breakfast.”

  Eve found that her daughter had finished drying her hair on a towel, after a shower. She put on an old bathrobe of white chenille, and she sat in front of her dressing table, carefully parting her hair in the center so that now it fell, as always, in waves from her widow’s peak to her small chin. Her face was paler than usual, but she looked restored to normal, for her gray eyes were as clear and calm as ever. There were no traces of tears.

  “Darling, your father told me … Margie … he thinks …”

  “I was in the car, Mother, and I know what Margie said,” Delphine said quietly. There was a quality of apartness in her voice, as if she had removed herself from the reality of the situation.

  “But, darling, it’s not … you didn’t …”

  “Mother, I really think that you and Father are making far too much of this … If I’d had any other way to get out of jail than to call you, believe me, I would have taken it. There’s one chance in a million of the police raid, and tonight we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all. We were trapped as soon as the police came on board. At least a thousand other people got away scot free. It’s so unfair.”

  “Unfair?” Eve was incredulous.

  “Most of Hollywood could have been arrested tonight. The heads of the studios were there, all the biggest stars, everybody who is anybody. Margie and I just had bad luck. The raid may be in the papers, but no names will be mentioned. They never are, so you can count on that. I was frightened, I admit that, and naturally I was upset actually to be thrown in jail, but it’s not the sort of thing that I’d ever expect to happen again.” She bent her head to examine a jagged fingernail, took up an emery board, and started to smooth it over.

  “Stop that, Delphine, and look at me! Do you think anything you’ve been saying is what I want to talk about? What were you doing in a place like that? Are you a gambler? Who were the men who took you there? Where did you get that dress and jacket? What, for God’s sake, is going on in your life, Delphine?”

  “You make it sound so sinister, Mother. Margie and I know a lot of nice, amusing men who like to go out at night. They’re boyfriends, nothing more,” Delphine said dismissively. “It’s all good fun … gambling is just as much a part of going out as having dinner or dancing or watching a floor show. Everybody does it. I simply can’t see what harm it does—it’s not as if we’ve lost money we can’t afford. In fact, I’ve made enough to supplement my clothes allowance. And you know it hasn’t hurt my schoolwork because you get my report cards.”

  “And the drinking?”

  “I think that someone must have slipped me something stronger than I asked for tonight. I should have been more careful. Margie too.” Delphine looked directly at Eve, her eyes, set below the wide, exquisite shield of her brow, as candid as ever.

  Eve stood up, unable to endure her knowledge that Delphine was lying, that this was not the first time that Delphine had been drunk, any more than it was the first time she had been gambling.

  “How old were the men you and Margie were with?” she demanded.

  “Jed and Bob? Somewhere in their twenties, I guess,” Delphine said casually, looking in her closet for something to put on.

  “And how well do you know them?” Eve insisted.

  “Pretty well. They’re great guys. I hope they’re out of jail by now,” Delphine said with a rueful little laugh, choosing a pink cotton dress and putting it on the bed. “It’s lucky I left so much of my old stuff here,” she said, smiling as serenely at Eve as if their discussion were over.

  “Delphine, I’m going to tell Mrs. Robinson that you no longer have our permission to sleep over at Margie’s. There will be no exceptions. We can’t stop you from being friendly with that girl, but I will not tolerate the kind of life you’ve been living. At least your father and I can make sure that you have to obey the sorority rules and get in at a decent hour at night.”

  “You can’t do that! You’ll ruin my life!” Delphine’s face was distorted with sudden rage.

  “You’re ruining your life all by yourself, as far as I can tell,” Eve said firmly, her mind made up. She walked toward the door of the bedroom and opened it. There was no use in further discussion. Delphine had to be brought under control.

  Delphine ran to the door and held it so that Eve couldn’t leave. She bent toward her and hissed, “And who are you to talk?”

  “What?” Eve said incredulously.

  “I have some questions, Mother, since you intend to treat me like a child. Just how old were you when you were living with a lover in Paris? Younger than I am now, weren’t you? And just how many years was that before you mar
ried Father? And how many lovers?”

  Eve apprehended the intention behind the words even before her brain was able to sort them out and try to make sense of them. No answer came to her lips, but she pushed the door shut with a quick gesture, so that no one would hear Delphine.

  Delphine’s lips took on a look of righteousness. “I learned all about it from Bruno, that summer we spent in France. What a hypocrite you are, Mother. Why don’t you lock me up in my room here at home while you’re at it? That way you could be absolutely certain that I won’t do what you did. I happen to be a virgin, for your information, and I intend to remain one, but telling Mrs. Robinson that I can’t sleep over at Margie’s won’t ensure that. Your parents couldn’t manage to keep you from doing what you pleased, could they?”

  How many lovers? thought Eve, appalled by the question. No matter what she said to Delphine, she could never make her understand the truth. The poison was in her mind, the harm was done. She forced herself to speak calmly.

  “Delphine, I don’t owe you any explanations about my life. I can’t stop you from listening to any gossip that’s still floating around, and believing what you want. It doesn’t change my responsibility toward you. I intend to call Mrs. Robinson immediately.”

  “Hypocrite! Hypocrite!” Delphine’s voice rose hysterically as Eve left the room.

  She could never tell Paul what Delphine had said, Eve realized as she went back down the stairs holding on to the bannister as if she were an old woman. He would be too angry, too saddened by Delphine’s suspicions. How many lovers? Delphine would never believe the truth—would Paul? There had been no one after Alain Marais until she met her husband, but it was a subject to which they had never returned after their first dinner at the Ritz. She had always thought that he had understood those careful, distant, unapproachable years. What if he had just been afraid to ask?

  At the Château de Valmont there were ten large guest rooms, and by the time Anette de Lancel received her daughter-in-law’s letter from California, most of them had been spoken for during every weekend of the summer. It was not a case of French hospitality, but of selling champagne, that caused the Lancels to entertain so often and so lavishly.