Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  Night after night Freddy sat at home, once Annie was in bed, obsessively putting herself on trial, acting as prosecutor and defender, judge and jury, accusing herself and excusing herself, going back and forth over the last fifteen years of her life. Mac would never have run away from her if she hadn’t been so transparently manipulative. If he’d believed that she would listen to reason, he would never have gone to Canada and never have died there. As for Tony, why couldn’t she have been content to live at Longbridge Grange? It was a life so many women would have loved to lead. Why couldn’t she be more adaptable? More feminine? More like Penelope and Jane and Delphine and her mother? They put their husbands first; their children weren’t touched by divorce, and they had good, full, satisfying lives.

  But, damn it, didn’t she have her own rights too? Weren’t her dreams and her passions valid? What was wrong with wanting things if you were willing to go out and work for them? Only within the walls of her house could Freddy approach, at times, a kind of exhausted truce in which shame and fury balanced each other out for a time. At least in the world outside, no one could guess at the facts of her divorce, at the disgraceful truth of how Tony had cast her aside, of the mistress she hadn’t even dreamed he had. She’d lost all faith in herself, all self-confidence. However, Freddy realized, none of this was the kind of excuse you can make for not going to a party.

  And then there had been Annie. Jock, the sneaky bastard, had actually said, “Annie, wouldn’t you like to see Mommy go out and have a good time? Wouldn’t it be good for Mommy to get all dressed up and go out with me for one night?” How had he coached an eight-year-old to look as wistful and hopeful and hungry as Oliver Twist? Had he trained her to say, “Oh, you’ve got to go, Mommy! I can do my homework by myself and I love to eat in the kitchen with Helga. You haven’t had any fun at all in such a long time,” with a catch in her voice that made Freddy realize that it might not be such a good idea for Annie to think that her mother was an object of pity.

  No, Freddy told herself grimly, she’d been forced into it. Jock Hampton had seen to that. She checked her image in the mirror. Everything seemed to be in order. The exquisitely made black silk dress, high-necked and long-sleeved, fit too loosely, as did all her other clothes. She’d lost her appetite after Tony had left her, and she could only force herself to eat a decent dinner by telling herself that she had to set Annie a good example.

  Freddy added a wide black belt that pulled the expensive silk in severely at the waist. It was utterly appropriate: inconspicuous, not aggressive in any way, the kind of dress in which a woman melted into the crowd. Only its price, which no one would recognize, set the dress apart from what the other women would be wearing. She’d had her hair done that afternoon and it looked suitably disciplined. For once, thank heaven, it had decided to behave. She put on a touch of lipstick, but no mascara or eyeshadow. The wives of the former pilots were bound to be a bunch of busy, happy souls who spent their energies in having happy babies and making their homes into happy places for happy husbands—more than likely they wouldn’t use eye makeup, even if American fashion magazines were just beginning to show it for the average woman. She certainly didn’t want to look too Hollywood. A small pair of earrings and black pumps finished her ensemble.

  When Jock arrived, Freddy had been dressed for a half hour. However, she couldn’t seem to make up her mind to leave her room. She hung about, hanging things up and checking out her handbag for the fifth time. Jock and Annie were having a lively conversation. She could hear them all the way upstairs. Why hadn’t he invited Annie to his stupid reunion? Now it was too late to suggest that solution. Finally she forced herself to go downstairs, listening to them laughing together. She entered the living room and their voices stopped abruptly.

  “Mommy!” Annie wailed.

  “Freddy, we’re not going to a funeral!” Jock said. “What the hell have you got on? Go change to something else right away. We’re going to be late anyway, a few more minutes won’t matter.”

  “Oh, Mommy, you look terrible!” Annie cried.

  “Black is always appropriate, always chic—what do you two know about clothes? This happens to be a Jacques Fath.”

  “I don’t care what the hell it is, put on something pretty—and not black,” Jock roared.

  “You look like a widow!” Annie added, her enchanting face woebegone.

  “All right, all right.” Freddy shot a glance of fury at Jock. With all those Brendas of his, she could imagine the kind of flashy, bad-taste, sexpot dressing he was accustomed to. And that peacock had never told her that he was going to wear his uniform. The male ego! She dashed up to her bedroom and reviewed her dresses, sliding them past her on their hangers in a rage.

  “Something pretty”—that shithead! Pretty. That just went to show his idea of what a woman should look like. Pretty—a word she’d always hated. A namby-pamby word, a girly-girly word, a ruffled and beribboned word, a trifling toy word, a gewgaw bibelot of a word than which the only worse thing was cute. At least nobody’d ever accused her of being cute.

  She snatched a hanger from the rack and held the dress up against her. It had been too tight when she brought it home, just before Tony had left her, a dress she’d intended for the housewarming that had never taken place. She’d never bothered to take it back to have it fitted properly. But it was the only thing in the closet that wasn’t in a dark color, and by now it would fit. She stripped off her black silk and stepped into the dress. It zipped up perfectly. But she’d have to change her shoes to the shoes that matched the dress, and she’d have to use another bag and different, brighter, bigger earrings. And she’d have to wear more makeup or the dress would overpower her. And she’d have to do something about her hair because it looked too tight, too school-teacherish to go with the dress. Shit on a stick!

  In a flurry, Freddy attacked her makeup with a deftness she’d almost forgotten. She went at her hair, brushing it out with great whacks of her hairbrush until everything that had been done to it was undone and it balanced, in its audacious, cocksure, ungovernable turmoil, the dress she had chosen, the strapless bright red chiffon dress with a closely fitted, almost nonexistent bodice and an outrageously full skirt, a dress made for dancing all night, and seducing the moon, and luring the stars down out of the sky. She paused in front of the mirror, completely transformed. She didn’t look exactly pretty. She looked … well … better was probably as good a word as anything else.

  But there was still something missing. Freddy went to her jewel box and opened one of its drawers and took out her ATA wings. If Jock was all done up in his uniform, his full colonel’s dress uniform no less, with every ribbon he’d ever won, she guessed she could wear these. Fortunately the bodice of the dress was so securely attached to its built-in underpinnings that the wings could be pinned on and not drag the dress down over her naked breast. Yes, that splendid black and gold spread, those two wide wings of heavy gilt bullion framed in black, with the oval in the center bearing the ATA insignia, gave the dress just the finishing touch it needed.

  Freddy tromped downstairs, as indignantly as any woman can tromp in a thin pair of high-heeled sandals.

  “I hope you two are satisfied,” she announced belligerently.

  Jock and Annie jumped up from their chairs and gaped.

  “This is as good as it gets,” Freddy snapped.

  “Oh Jesus, Freddy!”

  “You’re so—oh, wow—so beautiful” Annie breathed.

  “Thank you, Annie darling. I’ll be home early but promise me you’ll go to bed on time. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

  “Oh, wow, Mommy, oh, the way you look! How old do I have to be before I get to wear a dress like that?”

  “Old, very, very old, Annie,” Freddy said.

  “Thirty-one, Annie, like your Mommy,” Jock said. “Very, very young. Come on, gorgeous. Let’s not be the last ones there.”

  “Jock, don’t, and I mean DO NOT call me ‘gorgeous’ in that
cocksure tone of voice or I’m not setting foot out of this house. I’m not your date, I’m your wingman, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Yes, sir!” He threw her a salute. “No excuse, sir. Deeply sorry, sir.”

  “That’s more like it,” Freddy said testily. Jock wrapped her in her new mink jacket and offered his arm. She raised her eyebrows at his unnecessary gesture.

  “I think I can manage by myself, thank you,” she said as she stepped quickly toward the front door, swaggering ever so slightly.

  Freddy stopped transfixed, unable to put one foot in front of the other, outside the room from which she heard the strains of “The White Cliffs of Dover.”

  “Jock,” she said, imploringly, “that music …”

  Jock, immeasurably pleased with himself, didn’t hear her. He’d organized the whole reunion himself, auditioned the orchestra, given them the list of the music he’d chosen, hired the small ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire, planned the dinner menu, and hunted up all the pilots of the Eagle Squadron. Those who didn’t live near Los Angeles had all been flown in with their wives, courtesy of Eagles, and each couple had been put up at the Beverly Wilshire, again courtesy of Eagles. It had been Jock who decided that they should wear their uniforms. He’d figured that the six weeks’ notice he’d given the guys was fair warning to let them diet off any pounds they might have put on since the end of the war … he hadn’t gained an ounce himself.

  If anything had been left out that would make Freddy able to resist this invitation, he complimented himself that he’d anticipated it. Funny that, try as he would, he hadn’t been able to think up any other way to take her out, short of asking her to this particular do. Somehow, Freddy and he, for all the years he’d known her, didn’t seem to be on the kind of comfortably casual terms that would permit him to invite her to dinner alone for no special reason. There was an unspoken barrier that he was damned if he could understand, which prevented him from feeling free and easy with her. Without Annie as a reason, he’d never dare to drop in on her at home from time to time, and he was always careful to phone first. If he didn’t know better, he’d almost have to think he felt a little shy with Freddy. Could you know somebody so well that it became counterproductive?

  “That music,” Freddy repeated, “it’s so—”

  “Great, isn’t it?” Jock beamed.

  “Awful!” Freddy exclaimed. “I loathe wallowing in all that manufactured nostalgia.”

  “Can I help it if the guys make requests?” Jock asked, gripping her under her elbow and moving her relentlessly along.

  “Bathos! Maudlin!”

  “Sickening stuff. You’re right. But we can’t just stand here. You’re a real sport, Freddy, I appreciate this. Remember, when they start in about their sisters, you say, Jock has a very lovely steady girlfriend but she couldn’t make it tonight.’ ”

  “That’s utterly impossible to say with a straight face.”

  “So laugh, crack up, it won’t matter if you just get the words out—emphasize the ‘steady’ part.”

  The music had changed to “Waltzing Matilda,” which was too bouncy to be sentimental, and it was on those rousing strains that Freddy let him push her into the ballroom, where they were immediately surrounded by uniformed men pummeling Jock and hugging Freddy, and pummeling Freddy and hugging Jock.

  They must, Freddy decided, have started this party yesterday. It was noisy and crowded and confusing and high-spirited, and all the wives were as dressed up as she was. This wouldn’t be as bad as she’d thought. By the time Jock grabbed her and dragged her out on the dance floor, with the band playing “Long Ago and Far Away,” she’d cheered up enough not to reflect on the last time she’d danced with Tony to this song, or the next one, “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.” She realized that she’d forgotten what a good dancer Jock was. She was almost having a good time. The music changed to “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”

  “Will you stop singing in my ear?” she hissed at him.

  “I know all the words,” he objected.

  “That’s no excuse. You’re no Bing Crosby.”

  Blessedly, old friends started cutting in, and for the next hour Freddy was whirled from one eager pair of arms to another, with Jock unable to keep her to himself for more than a few steps at a time. Maybe this wasn’t going to be the ideal setting for a little chat with her about her rotten attitude, he realized, his cockiness diminishing. She was the belle of the blasted ball, an exquisitely footloose devil, kicking up her heels in a killer dress he should never have let her leave the house in, a demolition expert who was about to cause a few major fights between husbands and wives when the party was over. And who had told her she could wear her wings? They made all the other women look so … underdone.

  Dinner passed in a bubbly hubbub of toasts and jokes and seat-switching, and tall tales of great deeds that had really taken place, and then the dancing began again. Freddy had been hearing the music for several hours, so that it had been defanged of its memories and turned into mere background melody. Even “When the Lights Go On Again” had lost its power to throw her backward in time. She felt as if she were out on a spree, deliciously mellow, yet at the same time more cheerful than she had remembered she could be, and the wine that the waiters never stopped pouring had its effect.

  The bandleader approached Jock and whispered to him. Jock hesitated, and then responded with a nod of his head. Jock climbed up on the bandstand, and with a fanfare to bring the crowd to silence, he made an announcement.

  “Guys—remember how we used to fall out of our kites and drop our chutes and race each other to the Blue Swan, and drink warm beer and sing till we fell down, to give us the strength to do it all over again the next day? Remember that sometimes a girl would be there who sang songs from World War I and taught them to us? Let’s all gather around and listen to her sing again. Freddy, where are you? Come on up here, First Officer de Lancel.”

  A great cheer went up, and Freddy heard a roomful of men calling out requests, and realized that she had been set up. Not one soul had said a word yet about introducing Jock to his sister, and Jock had not told her that she was expected to sing. She fixed him with the deadliest of her inventory of glances, but he just kept waving her up to the platform, where the band had already struck up the tune of “Hello Central! Get Me No Man’s Land,” music that they couldn’t possibly have had in their regular repertoire.

  Get it over with gracefully, Freddy told herself, and found herself all but passed from hand to hand to the bandstand, where she was helped up by Jock.

  “Cute,” she said to him.

  “I knew you’d want to do it for the guys.”

  She turned to the bandleader. “We’ve got all the music,” he assured her, “from Mr. Hampton. Been practicing for days. You just sing, we’ll follow right along.”

  Freddy shook her head. Trapped was trapped. Jock had even put a barstool on the stage for her. She climbed up, and when she looked out on the ballroom full of waiting men, her heart turned topsy-turvy with memory and she launched into “Tipperary,” her voice rusty for a moment before she and the musicians caught each other’s beat. Immediately, Freddy could feel an emotion collecting in the room that was different from the emotion that had been elicited by the songs of the last war. These old songs were soldiers’ songs, not the romantic longing ballads of separated lovers that they had all danced to in the forties, but the songs that frightened, brave men had sung to themselves in the trenches twenty years earlier. The pilots of the Eagle Squadron who hummed along with her words were joined by the music to another generation of warriors, their brothers-in-arms. She swung smoothly through “Tipperary” and then launched into “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag.”

  Freddy’s contralto voice, though untrained, was so much like Eve’s, tawny and irresistible, burnt-sugar sweet in the high notes, with a tough little tickle of wryness in the middle register, and an unhallowed lure hidden under its bottom octave. She lost
herself in the music, feeling power growing from verse to verse. She flew from “Keep the Home Fires Burning” to the “Blue Horizon Waltz”; she soared from “Good-Bye Broadway, Hello France!” and into the skylarking of “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” her head thrown back, as she sat flinging the songs down like valentines to the listening men. She became Maddy, in another red dress, singing by moonlight to wounded French soldiers and one officer, on a night that had been her destiny. She was herself, ten years younger, singing in a packed pub to men who knew—and dismissed the knowledge—that some of them would die in the air the next day, but who demanded a song tonight. Freddy was phosphorescent, not needing the spotlight to glow on her own, a self-luminous girl who sang the songs she’d learned from Eve when she was a child, as freshly as if she’d just invented them.

  Freddy came to the end of the great old songs, although the audience was bound together in a mood of entrancement, and she could have sung on for hours. She slipped off the barstool and she signaled to the bandleader to play something else while she looked for a way down from the bandstand. But Jock, who had stationed himself near her, started singing the one song she didn’t want to hear, because it meant too much to her. All the men in the room took Jock’s voice as a signal to join in. Freddy couldn’t even move her lips as the simple, unforgettable melody enfolded her.

  “Smile a while, you kiss me sad adieu,

  When the clouds roll by I’ll come to you