He advanced to the armchair as he spoke and kissed Cicily's pink cheek, a trifle absent-mindedly.
*Where are the kids?'
'Eating supper,' said Cicily. 'We're dining out.'
Jane rose. She felt incredibly depressed by this little conjugal colloquy. As she walked slowly home over the suburban sidewalks, past rows and rows of httle brick and wood and stucco houses, temples of domesticity enshrined, this loveliest, leafy season of the year, in flowering lilacs and apple trees in bloom, she reflected stoically that marriage was, of course, like that. The first fine careless rapture was bound to go. Something else came — something else took its place — something you held as your most priceless possession by the time you were fifty. Nevertheless, it was disconcerting to have seen it so clearly happening to the next generation. It was disconcerting to know, vithout peradventure of a doubt, that, to cheerfully smiling, subconsciously philosophic Jack, Cicily had come to look only like Cicily.
m
'Muriel,' said Isabel, 'looked amazingly young.* 'She certainly did,' said Jane.
'And wasn't she wonderful with Pearl and Gertie?' 'My heart rather warmed to Gertie,' said Jane. 'She was crying all through the ceremony.'
'It's enough to make anybody cry,* said Isabel, 'to sec a sixty-year-old father making a fool of himself
They were sitting on the old brown sofa in the Pine Street library. An hour before they had seen Muriel depart in a shower of rice for her trip around the world with Ed Brown. The rice had been Albert's eleventh-hour inspiration. He had foraged for it in the kitchen and thrust it, hilariously, into the hands of the younger generation. His three litde daughters had thrown it, delightedly, at their grandmother. The rice, Jane thought, had rather disconcerted Muriel.
The entire family were taking supper with Mrs. Ward. The children and grandchildren were making merry in the yellow drawing-room across the hall. Belle was strumming out Gershwin on the old Steinway upright. The throbbing notes of the jazz melody vibrated incongruously in the httle brown library. The Bard of Avon looked a bit bewildered, Jane thought. His wide mahogany eyes stared blankly over the heads of the two sisters.
Mrs. Ward was in the dining-room with Minnie. It was a long time since Mrs. Ward had given so large a dinner-party — fifteen people, not counting Robin Redbreast and Belle's youngest daughter, who had had their puffed rice in the pantry and were now supposedly asleep in the guest-room upstairs. All family, of course. Still, Mrs. Ward had brought out the cut-glass goblets and the Royal Worcester china and her very best long damask tablecloth. She had had the silver loving-cup pohshed and had filled it with roses for the centre of the table. Jack had brought her some gin and vermouth and Isabel had lent her her cocktail glasses. Mrs. Ward was just making sure that the nut and candy dishes were placed straight with the candlesticks. Since Minnie had been promoted from the pantry to the role of companion, Mrs. Ward's confidence in a waitress's eye for symmetry had wavered.
*Albert was very funny,* said Isabel suddenly, 'with that rice*
*Albert is fiinny,' said Jane. Tunny and nice, too. He was sweet with Ed Brown, but yet you could see he didn't miss a trick. He was touched and amused and amusing, all at once. He treats his mother just like a contemporary.'
'Live and let live is always Albert's poUcy,' said Isabel. 'Belle finds it rather trying. Belle's like me — she always has an opinion. A completely tolerant husband can be very irritating.'
*I like him,' said Jane. *I like him very much.' She hesitated for a moment toying with the thought of telling Isabel that she found Albert greatly improved, then abandoning it. You could not tell your sister that you found her son-in-law greatly improved, without tacitly implying that you had previously felt that there was room for great improvement.
Jane had never quite been able to overcome her prejudice against Albert because he was his father's son. Jane's distrustful dislike for Bert Lancaster was rooted deep in the hidden instincts of her childhood. She had subconsciously transferred it to his boy. That was unfair, Jane reflected honestly. Albert had sowed some wild oats in college. He had been a dangerously beautiful young man. Muriel had adored and spoiled him. But he had married BeUe and gone to Oxford and entered the diplomatic sei-vice and had done very well for himself, until the lack of a great fortune had hampered his further advancement. He had given it up, temporarily, and come home to enter the aeroplane industry, to make, he had said laughingly, a miUion dollars. 'I've rented my soul to Manmaon' had been his phrase.
'Here come the boys,' said Isabel suddenly. The robust sound of masculine laughter was heard in the hall. Robin and
Stephen entered the library, carrying Jack's cocktail and Isabel's glasses on Mrs. Ward's silver tray.
'Mamma!' called Jane.
'Children!' called Isabel.
The throb of the Gershwin stopped abruptly in the yellow drawing-room.
'Drinks!' rang out CicHy's voice above the talk and laughter.
Mrs, Ward entered the room. She looked a very pretty old lady in the new black silk dress she had bought for the wedding. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement over the nut and candy dishes.
'I hope that ice was cracked right for you, Robin,' she said anxiously. 'We don't know much about cocktails in this house. Your father never served them,' she added in superfluous explanation to Jane and Isabel. 'Just wine and a highball for the gentlemen. Was the ice right, Robin?'
'Perfect!' responded Robin with a twinkle. 'I never saw ice more expertly cracked!'
But Mrs. Ward did not smile.
'I'm very glad,' she said earnestly.
Just then the children trooped in from the hall. Jane looked up at them with a proud, proprietary smile. They were nice children. They made a pretty picture, in the modem manner, to be sure, as they clustered about the tray of cocktails. Jenny, slim, blonde, and boyish, in the tailor-made sport suit she affected at even a June wedding, sipping the amber liquid that was just the colour of her short, shining hair. Steve, a little flushed with nuptial champagne, singing a reminiscent fragment of the Gershwin as he shook the silver shaker. Belle and Cicily arm in arm on the hearthrug. Pretty Belle, who still looked Uke an apple blossom, a shghtly paler, rather more full-blown apple blossom, clad in the flattering, fluttering pink panels of her French frock, and
Cicdly smiling beside her, her flower-like head rising proudly from a sheaf of pale green chiffon. Pleasant, snub-nosed Jack coming up with a cocktail in either hand for his wife and his sister. Albert in the doorway, dark and distinguished, not very tall, lithe and slim-waisted, with something of the Greek athlete about him in spite of his cutaway, smiling, over the heads of the brown-eyed twins and his own two dark-haired daughters, at the young women on the hearthrug. Steve approached him with the silver shaker. Albert accepted his glass.
*I give you a toast,' he said suddenly. 'To Muriel and the reconstructed life!'
They all drank it riotously. Albert was sweet about his mother, thought Jane. So many sons would have resented that ridiculous misalliance. Did Albert, in his heart? Isabel, of course, voiced the thought.
'How do you really feel about it, Albert?' she inquired curiously.
'Me?' said Albert innocently, extending his empty glass toward Steve. 'Why, I believe in reconstruction. Mother's had a pretty thin time the last fifteen years. It's never too late to mend. We all learned that in our copy-books. Another cocktail, Cicily?'
Cool and aloof and flower-like, Cicily accepted the glass. She flashed a brief, bright smile up into Albert's admiring eyes.
*I adore cocktails,' she said.
Suddenly across Jane's mind shot the picture of a very different Cicily. A mutinous, moody Cicily, turning in the sunshine of her little French window to declare, 'Jack's just as bored with suburban gin as I am!' This was Jack's gin, but the child did not look bored at all. Of course she was happy. She had not meant those perilous words that had troubled
Jane so profoundly. She was still smiling up at Albert Lancaster over the rim of her li
ttle crystal goblet.
'It's fire and ice,' she said, with a little thirsty gasp. 'Exciting. Like love and hate. Like life, as it ought to be.*
'Like you, as you are,' said Albert gallantly. His eyes were bent admiringly on her cool, blonde radiance. His gallantry, Jane thought, was a bit professional. A technique in handling women, very alien to Lakewood. But he had hit the nail on the head. 'Fire and ice' was rather like Cicily in her high moments. She did not seem at all impressed, however, with the accuracy of the description.
'He's irresistible, isn't he. Belle?' she was saying calmly.
The waitress appeared on the threshold. Jane caught a glimpse of Minnie's plump figure, hoering officiously in the hall beyond. Minnie was going to see that dinner, on this important occasion, was announced correctly.
'Come, children,' said Mrs. Ward.
Robin offered her his arm. Stephen appropriated Isabel. Steve turned up at Belle's elbow. Jenny clapped Jack familiarly on the shoulder.
'You're elected, old top!' she said.
Albert and Cicily were left alone on the hearthrug. She turned from him abruptly to place her empty glass on the mantel-shelf.
'Cicily,' smiled Albert, 'do you know what you've done while my back was turned? You've grown up into a damned dangerous woman!'
Cicily met his eyes with a fi"osty litde twinkle of complete composure. Girls were wonderful, thought Jane. You would think, to look at her, that Cicily had been talked to like that for years.
'Then watch your step!* laughed Cicily. * Don't get burned or frost-bitten.*
Jane followed them from the room, hand in hand with her grand-twins. Belle's dark-haired daughters trooped at her side. Their frizzy black curls recalled the Muriel of Miss Milgrim's School. It was fun, this reunion — it was lovely to have all this big family under one roof again.
Standing behind her chair, Jane looked down the long white damask expanse of the candlelit table, across tlie cut-glass goblets and the Royal Worcester china and the loving-cup of roses, to the frail httle matriarch in a new black silk dress who was the head of the clan, then turned, instinctively, to her father's chair. Her brown-eyed grandson was going to occupy it — litde John Ward Bridges, aged eight.
*I hope I live long enough,' she thought suddenly, 'to see m^ great-grandchildren,' Steve, on her other hand, was pulling out her chair. She sat down in the gay staccato confusion of talk and laughter. *I hope I live long enough,' she thought solemnly, *to see what happens to every one. To know they're safe '
Just then John Ward upset his glass of water in the nearest nut dish. In meeting the emergency of the moment, Jane forgot to be solemn. Later, she watched Cicily rather closely across the prattling queries and vast gastronomical silences of her grandson's table manners. Cicily never looked happier — never looked prettier—never seemed to take more trouble to be charming and gay. Jane felt she had been a very foolish mother. There was no need to be profoundly troubled.
CHAPTER IV
I
Jane sat at the wheel of her motor, absent-mindedly threading her way through the congested traffic of Sheridan Road. She had just returned to the West from her so-called holiday at Gull Rocks and was running into town to take tea with Isabel at her mother's.
Jane loved to drive a car and she loved the sense of relief, of escape, of expansion that she always experienced when she had left Gull Rocks behind her. The summer had been difficult. Jane was reviewing it in thought as she rolled down the boulevard. She was thinking of the old, old Carvers, now both over eighty; and of sacrificed Silly, who, a wiry sixty, never left home for an hour; and of Alden, who was such a stuffed shirt, a cartoon of a banker; and of the complications presented by the month in which Robin Redbreast and the twins had been with them, and of how Cicily had not realized when she sent them East with just Molly, the nurse, what it did to an old couple of eighty-odd to shelter three roistering great-grandchildren under their roof for thirty-one days; and of how Stephen still incredibly loved the place, and young Steve, too, and of how they had won seven races together and had been presented with a silver cup at the annual yacht club dinner, and of how delighted old Mr. Carver had been! Like a child, Mr. Carver was, and Stephen, too, and young Steve, over that silver cup! It was absurd of them, but it was very endearing. The summer had had its better moments. Nevertheless, Jane was glad to be home again.
It was a lovely late September afternoon. The lake still held its shade of summer blue. Its little curving waves, so un-
like the ocean ones, were breaking and rippling along its yellow beaches. Jane could see them out of the comer of her eye, across the well-kept lawns of the squat, square brick and terra-cotta houses that lined the water-front. The geometric, skyscraping angles of the Edgewater Beach Hotel loomed up before her.
Curious to think that she had known this water-front when it was a waste of little yellow sand dunes and scrub-oak groves. Not a house in sight. Just stunted oaks and a few stone pines and sand — sandy roads along which you had to push your bicycle. Your bicycle — your Columbia Safety! It wasn't very far from here, just south of the old white limestone Marine Hospital, that she had picnicked with Andr^ and his father and mother the night that he had asked her to marry him. Asked her to marry him on the moonlit beach that had long since been gobbled up, filled in, and landscaped in the Lincoln Park extension. The very place had vanished, like the boy and girl, who had turned into Mrs. Stephen Carver of Lakewood and Andre Duroy, academician and distinguished sculptor.
There was a Diana of Andre's now in the Art Institute. Jane often dropped in to look at it. Often? Come, now, old girl, thought Jane, challenging widi a smile her little mood of sentiment, how often? Twice a year, perhaps. She never found time for the Art Institute as often as she meant to. Still, she never went there without pausing for a moment before Andre's Diana.
Flora had never written much about him. More about his young wife, who seemed to be quite a girl. Quite a girl, in the discreet, sophisticated French manner that you read about in books and never quite believed in. Flora had a gift with the pen and Jane felt she knew a great deal about Cyprienne. Cyprienne was thirty-three. There was a lot of talk, Flora
had said, about her and a young attach^ in the British Embassy. His mother, a grand old dowager, was fearfully upset about it, for there was a name and a title and he was an only son. She was a Catholic, of course, and would never divorce. Andre was only fifty-two. It was hard on the young attache. It was even harder, Jane thought, with Victorian simplicity, on Andre. Flora had never attempted to describe his reactions. Jane knew, however, just what kind of a husband Andre would be. There was enough of American upbringing in Andre, enough of Victorian Pine Street, to make him loathe a situation like that. And yet be kind — like all good American husbands who put up with their restless wives.
Restless wives — Cicily. A little unconscious smile played over Jane's lips as she paused for tlie traffic light at the entrance of the park and thought of how silly she had been to worry so much about Cicily last spring. The child had written her such happy letters all summer, and the moment she had seen her face, two days ago, at the gate of the Twentieth Century in the La Salle Street Station, she had known that the trouble, whatever it was, had blown over. It was nice for Cicily that Belle had taken that little house in Lakewood. She was full of plans for the early autumn parties. She had bought some pretty clothes.
They would all have a pleasant winter together, reflected Jane, as she rolled through the southern entrance of the park and out onto the stream-Uke bend of the Lake Shore Drive. It was a lovely street, she thought, edging that great, empty plane of blue and sparkling water. One of the loveHest city streets in the world. If it were in Paris, you would cross the ocean to see it. If it were in London, you would have heard of it all your life. If it were in Venice, the walls of the world's art galleries would be hung with oils and water-colours and
etchings of its felicities of tint and line. But here, in Chicago, no one paid much attention to
it. The decorous row of Victorian houses, withdrawn in their lawns, were discreetly curtained against that dazzling wash of light and colour. Only the new, bare, skyscraping apartments, rising here and there flush from the pavement, seemed aware of the view. They cheapened it, they commercialized it, they exploited it, but at least they knew it was there.
The Oak Street Beach, as Jane rolled past it, looked like a SoroUa canvas in the mellow afternoon sunshine. The golden sands were streaked and slashed and spotted with brilliant splashes of colour. Bathers, in suits of every conceivable hue, were sunning themselves on the beach. Men, incredibly brown, were breasting the blue waves. Girls were shrieking with delight in the nearer breakers. Children were paddling in the shallows. Jane had known the end of Oak Street before the beach had been there. The curve of fiUed-in land to the south had created it. Oak Street used to end in a row of waterlogged pilings, held in place by blocks of white limestone. Pilings on which ragged fishermen had sat, with tin cans of bait and strings of little silver fish at their side. It seemed just a year or two to Jane since she had seen the end of Oak Street looking just like that.
'Chicago,' thought Jane solemnly, 'makes you believe in Genesis, It makes you believe that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth.'
Jane loved Chicago. They would all have a pleasant winter together.
*I want to talk to you,' Isabel had whispered. 'Don't say anything in front of Mamma.' She was handing Jane her teacup as she spoke, in the little
brown library, Mrs. Ward, preoccupied with misgivings on the consistency of the new cook's sponge cake, had not heard her. Jane had looked up, a little startled, into Isabel's plump, comfortable countenance. Her eyes looked rather worried.
Years of Grace Page 43