And in a few more years, when he’d begin to fall in love with girls, he would probably bring far too much emotional intensity to every new attachment. He’d be the kind of boy who could frighten a girl with unwarranted possessiveness, the kind of boy who would say things like “How do you know you don’t love me?” And if no girl could bear him very long he might slip down among less and less desirable girls until he’d settle for some dim little girl of the wrong kind and possibly the wrong class as well; then he might easily spend his life as one of those slack, amiable, underdeveloped men that everyone feels sorry for.
Well, but even so, the drifting pattern of the way he was could scarcely be resolved in this one insecure afternoon: his next important lesson in manliness would have to wait.
“Oh, well, dear,” she said at last, “if it really means that much to you, of course we’ll go together. Why don’t you tell Ralph to have the car ready at four thirty, then.”
Charles’s phone call hadn’t given Gloria enough time to do very much about straightening up the living room, so she’d chosen to attend to her clothes and her hair instead. Then from a window, peering through hanging foliage that gave her only a partial view of the driveway, she saw the Shepards’ cab arrive. She saw Charles get out and turn back to help a slow, surprisingly bulky woman settle one foot and then the other on the ground. When they began walking toward the house together, bending under low branches, Gloria couldn’t suppress a tremor of satisfaction at how fat Grace was, but at closer range the afternoon light came to play on Grace’s face and it was lovely. Anyone could see now where Evan’s good looks had come from.
“Well, at last,” Gloria said. “How awfully nice to meet you at last, Grace.” She wondered if she ought to reach out and give her a kiss—wouldn’t that be appropriate, under the circumstances?—but an almost imperceptible flinching in Grace’s smile held her back, so she moved to the liquor table and busied herself there, talking steadily.
“… And I’m afraid everything’s sort of disorderly here today; we’ve been trying to rearrange the furniture in different ways but we haven’t decided on anything definite yet, as you can see.…”
But at least Phil was here, being polite in his best private-school manner, making a good impression, and Rachel would be coming downstairs at any minute. It was always gratifying for Gloria, in times of social tension, to know that her children were presentable; she was reminded now of that first day in New York when she might have talked herself weak and sick in her fascination with the Shepard men, trying and trying to hold their interest, if the children hadn’t come home just in time to save her.
“… Oh, Costello’s, of course,” Grace was saying. “And the old Island Palace, a little farther out. Do you know the Palace?”
“No, I’m afraid I—”
Then Rachel came in, seeming to parade her pregnancy in a fresh maternity dress, and said “Oh, Grace!” with an enthusiasm that struck Gloria as excessive until she realized Rachel had probably come to be on affectionate terms with her during the leisurely weekends of her engagement.
“You look wonderful, dear,” Grace said. “You look like the very picture of a healthy, happy, child-carrying girl.”
“Well, thank you—and I hope I’m healthy; I know I’ve never been happier.”
It seemed to Gloria that she’d never heard quite such a silly claim to personal well-being except in Academy Award ceremonies on the radio, and it made her sullen with envy and malice. It reminded her of Curtis Drake at his most vapid; but then, Rachel had always been her father’s child.
“Oh, that’s so good,” Grace was saying, and she turned to Charles for confirmation. “Isn’t it good when a wife can say a thing like that?”
He agreed that it was, and he even said it was enough to make any husband proud, but he was watching her closely now with special attention to the brilliance of her eyes. This was the high-hearted, keyed-up, “delightful” phase of her drunkenness: it would begin to dwindle soon, but there’d still be time to get her out of here and home before she sank.
“Do you know, Rachel,” Grace went on, “from the moment Evan brought you out to the house that first time I knew you were the right girl for him. You’ll always be the right girl.”
And Rachel might have let that compliment stand, but this was evidently a day for extravagant feelings. “Well,” she said, “I certainly hope you know how much I’ve come to love you both.”
It seemed to Gloria now that these three strangers were trying to cut her off and shut her out; they wanted to make her feel alone in the world, and they might as well have been trying to kill her. But she could still fight for her life in the only way she knew: she started talking again.
“Grace?” she said, but the babble of their self-congratulating voices was so solid a barrier that she had to say it twice before she could break in. “Grace? Has Charles ever told you how we all met, back in the city? And the funny, wonderful way we—”
“Oh, the car breaking down,” Grace Shepard said. “Yes, that’s a marvelous story. It’s funny, though, you know; people talk about ‘chance meetings’ but there’s really no such thing because every meeting is a matter of chance, isn’t that true? Especially between a boy and a girl? Even the most carefully planned, carefully arranged meeting you can imagine—the way Charles and I met, for example. I was great friends then with another girl who told me I would absolutely have to come out to a dance at Fort Devens because there was a boy there she knew I was going to love. So I went—not even wanting to go, especially, because I was practically engaged to another boy at the time—and there he was, this perfect dream of a young lieutenant, and I loved him at once and I’ve never been sorry in all these years.”
“Yes, well, that’s—lovely,” Gloria said. “That’s really wonderful.” But all she knew for certain, looking into this glowing, aging face, was that she wished Grace Shepard were dead.
“What’s this?” Rachel cried. “There’s this big—this big limousine kind of car in the driveway.”
Phil went quickly to the window and then turned on his mother. “Did you invite them today?”
“No, I didn’t,” she said in all innocence, as though he ought to know she wouldn’t do a thing like that without consulting him, but then she said “Still, I think it’s nice to have the kind of house where people feel free to drop in any time, don’t you?” And she felt a little frightened but essentially glad. Nobody in this family group would make mistakes of the kind that Harriet Talmage might take to heart; and if Harriet Talmage was surprised at first to find herself in this shabby room, with its insulation-board walls, it wouldn’t be long before she discovered what superior people they all were.
“Well, Harriet Talmage,” she said in the doorway. “How very nice to see you. And Flash. Do come and join us. I can’t offer you tea, I’m afraid, because we’ve all been having a drink. This is my daughter Rachel; this is her mother-in-law, Mrs. Shepard, and Captain Shepard.”
“Well, we were passing by,” Harriet explained, “and Gerard suggested we might drop in for a few minutes.… Oh, yes, thanks so much; a little scotch, if you have it.”
Phil sprang to pluck the cat and a newspaper out of the chair she was about to sit down in, but that was the only awkward moment of the visit so far: Mrs. Talmage seemed accustomed to finding her ease almost anywhere.
“So how’ve you been, Phil?” Flash said quietly.
“Oh, not bad. How about you?”
“Good.”
It couldn’t have been easy for Ferris to arrange this reunion, and it was just like Ferris to assume that bringing the old lady along would give it more weight. Was Phil now supposed to say “Show you my room” and take Ferris upstairs? What kind of horseshit was this?
“Working hard?” Flash asked him.
“Well, putting in the hours, anyway. And the money’s been nice.”
“Good. Except I don’t see any—”
“Don’t see any what?”
�
�Well, never mind.”
It seemed to Phil that he would never understand how he’d come to be standing here with one of the worst outcasts of the Irving School, each of them nursing a bottle of Coke, while an ill-assorted company of grownups pretended to enjoy themselves.
“How long were you in the navy, Captain?” Mrs. Talmage inquired.
And Charles’s blushing, blinking embarrassment lasted only a second before he said “Well, no, I’m afraid that’s a misunderstanding on Mrs. Drake’s part. I was in the army, you see, and I’ve never—cultivated the term ‘captain’ in civilian life.”
“Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, most of the men in my family were naval officers. My father and grandfather were both rear admirals, and my husband retired as a full commander. He was on active duty for twenty-five years—much to my displeasure, I’m afraid. I can remember telling people he cared more about the navy than he cared about me, though even now I’d prefer to believe that was only a joke. Mostly a joke, in any case.”
“Oh, that’s charming,” Grace Shepard said, with a fuzziness in her voice that suggested she was beginning to fade. Charles risked another look at her eyes, and there was the proof of it: they were still bright but were losing their life; she could still recognize a charming remark but in a few more minutes she wouldn’t hear a shout. One good thing, though, was that she was seated in a deep old armchair with her head against the back of it: she might subside and pass out in all that upholstery without anyone’s having to notice until the time came to rouse her for the taxi ride home—and by then, with luck, Mrs. Talmage would be gone.
“Philly?” Gloria called. “Why don’t you take Flash out in the yard?” And she explained to Mrs. Talmage that the yard was really the nicest thing about this funny old damp house.
Phil had felt all summer that even if the yard could be purged of its rocks and humps and thistles, there would still be far too many years’ worth of dead leaves in all directions for it ever to be nice. He had made a few stabs at cleaning up parts of it with the landlord’s rake and lawnmower, but the tines of the rake kept getting ensnared in long, wet, weak strands of grass that made the sliding lawnmower almost useless.
Still, Flash Ferris apparently found it a good-enough setting for a conversational stroll. He seemed to know just what he wanted to say, and if the words were a little more nervous-sounding than he’d planned, their substance was clear and straightforward.
He said he didn’t see any reason why Phil couldn’t quit the parking lot and come on out for bike rides again. Wouldn’t it be a shame to waste the last few weeks of their vacation? “And frankly,” he concluded, “I haven’t even been getting out of the house much any more. I mean it isn’t any fun any more to go for rides alone.”
Phil knew at once how easy it would be to demolish the argument with a quiet little snort of disdainful laughter, but that was the trouble: it would be too easy, considering how openly Flash had asked for it—and considering too that the poor bastard had so little time left to brace himself, with companionship, for his new start at Deerfield. Plainly, the better thing would be to reply with a carefully reasoned argument of his own.
“Well, but the point is I can’t do that, Flash,” he began, “because I’ll need all the money I can make between now and September. I’ve got to buy a new tweed jacket—those things cost more than you might think, if you go to a decent store. And I need a lot of other stuff too: new pants, new shirts, new shoes …”
He was lying about all this—earlier in the summer his father had agreed to buy him the jacket and at least one new pair of flannel pants, if the shirts and shoes could wait until Christmas vacation—but the lies seemed well worth telling for Flash Ferris’s sake. “And then if there’s anything left over,” he went on, “I’ll need it for spending money. Last year I think I must’ve been the only kid in school that didn’t have an allowance from home.”
There was such a long silence then, as they paced the ruined yard, that Phil began to hope he’d said enough; but he hadn’t.
“Okay,” Flash said at last, “so how about this: I’ll ask my grandmother to let you have two hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars.”
And Phil was disgusted. The hell with trying to be nice. “Ah, Ferris,” he said, “you’re hopeless. Look, I’m gonna forget you said that, okay? Because it’s just so dumb it’s enough to make me puke. But I wanna tell ya something: if you go around propositioning people that way, at Deerfield or anywhere else, God help your ass.”
“Okay,” Flash said in a wretchedly quiet voice. “Okay; okay.”
Phil was a little sorry for his outburst, if not quite sorry enough to take more than a glance at Flash’s mortified face. He said curtly that he’d better go back inside and get ready for work now, and that was another lie because he still had hours to kill. But then, just before they reached the house, he gave Flash a qualified smile and a slow cuff on the shoulder, rubbing the knuckles in hard to acknowledge how foolish the quarrel had been, and Flash looked grateful and forgiving.
“… Well, this was back when we lived in Pelham,” Gloria was saying in one of her long, drink-thickened monologues. “Personally I would never’ve dreamed of moving to a barren little middle-class town like Pelham and I’ve had nightmares about it ever since, but the children’s father happened to find a house for us there that year, you see, when we had nowhere else to go, so there we were. And I don’t think Rachel really minded it—she’s always been the most adaptable member of the family—but Phil seemed to hate the environment there as much as I did. I mean for one thing I was the only divorced woman for miles around and the neighbors were very ‘kind’ to me about it, if you can imagine anything worse, and Phil could sense all that …”
It was an anecdote Phil had often heard before, intended to show what a precocious little fellow he’d been at eight or nine, but he was fairly sure he could sidle around the party and get upstairs before she came to the climax of it.
“Anyway, I’ll never forget our Phil at that immaculate Pelham dinner table. He looked up at our host and said ‘Is insurance all you ever talk about, Mr. Blanding?’ ”
But whatever hesitant chuckles she had won around the room were drowned in the deep and heavy rhythms of her own laughter.
Harriet Talmage was aware that Gerard had come to hover near the arm of her chair as a way of saying he was ready to go home, and she wished he were still small enough to be shooed away. She didn’t feel at all like leaving yet, and probably wouldn’t for quite a while, so it was a relief when he found a chair for himself against the wall.
She had taken a liking to this melancholy army man, with his quiet wit and his furtive glances of hoping she hadn’t yet noticed how stiff with alcohol his wife had grown. If it weren’t for the wife—and perhaps the wife wasn’t always this way—Harriet felt sure he would fit in admirably with her own small circle of friends.
“Where were you stationed in the service?” she asked him. “Were you overseas?”
“Well, only for a few minutes, so to speak, and that was very long ago. No, I spent most of my army years here in the States, and mostly in very boring—”
Rachel Shepard was suddenly up and striding for the kitchen, almost ready to cry, and she didn’t care if everyone thought she was rude.
She had always despised her mother’s Pelham stories because Pelham was where she’d met the only two dear friends of her life, Susan Blanding and Debbie Shields. They’d been as close as any three girls can be—sharing all each other’s secrets, often “staying over” at one another’s houses to try new hair styles, to talk far into the night and giggle helplessly about boys.
When Rachel left Pelham they all agreed it wasn’t necessarily a tragedy, because they could write eagerly awaited letters of many pages apiece, and for a while they all kept that promise. Still, nothing as fragile as a three-way friendship can survive long spaces of time and absence, and Rachel hadn’t heard from Susan or Debbie in years. She couldn’t say what had beco
me of them now, except that they’d both probably gone away to college somewhere.
Last winter she had written careful letters to each of them, addressed to their parents’ homes, saying she was married to a wonderful man and expecting her first child; but she hadn’t really expected either girl to reply, and neither of them did.
She had meant only to hide in the kitchen now until her mother’s awful little gathering was over, but soon, impelled by a stronger and purer sense of rebellion than she’d ever known before, she left the house and started walking firmly toward the road.
She thought she had never seen an uglier, more brutal-looking man than the chauffeur who rested his rump against one fender of Mrs. Talmage’s limousine. He watched her approach as if this were the first time he’d ever seen a pregnant woman; worse, his lewd stare seemed to be calculating how it might be to have her for himself. In order to keep her footing secure on the driveway, rather than risk a slip in the masses of dead leaves, she had to turn sideways and edge past him that way, facing him—this was horrible—before she could turn toward the road again and keep walking. She glanced back once to see if he was still watching her, and he was, and she trembled as if from a narrow escape. Down at the roadside she took cover behind a clump of evergreen bushes where the big tin mailbox stood (it was hardly ever used except for bills, because nobody could be expected to write letters to any member of this false, crazy family), but she didn’t have to wait there more than a minute or two before Evan’s car came along and slowed down for the turn. She took several clumsy steps into the road and waved him urgently to a stop with both hands, and he looked puzzled.
“Darling, I came to get you here because I can’t bear to let you go into the house tonight, and I’m not going back there either. Listen—” The rest of her message was so rushed and jumbled she was afraid he’d tell her she wasn’t making sense, but all he said was “Get in.”
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