Love & Mrs. Sargent Page 23

  “But I mean Dicky must have some kind of split personality. There must be a very exciting, turbulent side to him that we don’t see here at home. Why, he was a perfect firebrand in school. Just look at his record: North Shore Country Day, Lake Forest, St. Elmo’s, Yale, He was in hot water at every one of them. He must.. . .”

  “Darling, will you stop trying to romanticize that poor boy into Tom Sawyer and Harold Teen and Peck’s Bad Boy? If you can’t remember those hours of interviews with school psychiatrists—all hatty and suity and motherly—I certainly can. Every last man-jack of them said the exact same thing: ‘Moody, broody, detached and antisocial.’ “

  “But so many geniuses are. . . .”

  “Whoa, Nellie! Let’s face the facts. Dicky’s grades in every subject were absolutely dead center. Passing but unexceptional. His I.Q. is a bit above average and a good bit below Allison’s, for that matter. His aptitude tests showed. . . .”

  “But those cut and dried formulas simply don’t apply to a writer. A writer is. . . .”

  “I wonder if Dicky really is a writer, darling. The critics would seem to disagree.”

  “Oh, but Dicky should write. Look at his father. It’s something I’ve wanted so desperately. For him to be like. . . .”

  “Well, darling, I’ll admit that there you’ve got me. I’ve wanted it badly, too—so badly that I confess to letting some pretty grim pages get by just because I was so thankful that he’d finished another chapter.”

  “If he’d only apply himself a little. . .”

  “This is one area where I can’t be of much help. I’m just as guilty as you are because I’ve wanted Dicky to be a famous author just as much as you have. But we did pull some awful boners. I mean hiding those bad reviews. Buying out bookstores on the sly. Thank God we paid cash at Chandler’s and the Chestnut Court. It was morally wrong and very amateurishly handled. Real bungling doting mother stuff.”

  “I only wanted to encourage him and save his pride.”

  “Me, too. And look what happened. But the real question at hand is why did Dicky get plastered all of a sudden. . . .”

  “To be absolutely frank—and painfully so—I’ve suspected for some time that Dicky was drinking a little more than was good for him. Nothing definite to go on, of course, but. . . .”

  “I’ve known it But you’re right. He disguised it pretty well. Now, howsomever, it’s out in the open. Let’s say that we gave him a damned good excuse to go on a toot, but why—and think carefully about this, darling—why do you suppose he wanted to join the army?”

  “Could it be b-because. . . . No, it just couldn’t.”

  “I think you’re getting warm, darling, keep on going.”

  “Well, it’s not very pleasant for a mother to admit.”

  “Lots of things are the sheerest hell for a mother to admit, hut they have to be faced eventually. Now get it off your chest.”

  “I—I suppose that Dicky really wanted to get away from me. And I can’t hear it.”

  “Darling, I’m sorry. Truly I am. But I’m afraid you’re right.”

  “Well, he’s not going to! I’ll do everything in my power to. . .”

  “But what can you do to keep a grown man cooped up in that chi-chi tool shed? You know he. . . . What was that noise?”

  Abruptly the session had ended. Sheila had got to her feet, gone to the window and peered cautiously through the blinds.

  Below her she had heard a garage door close with a soft, muted rumble. Then she had seen a man making his way quietly across the wet gravel. Peter!

  In a flash she had been in bed, her hair becomingly fluffed, her peignoir in showy disarray, a book open on her lap. Lying back against the pillows she had listened tensely for the night noises she knew by heart—the sound of the front door being closed and locked, the snap of the light switch, the mounting of the stairs, the creak of the seventh step, the hollow, ringing echo of footsteps in the upstairs hall. Last night all the noises had been heard, but with a difference. They had been muffled, furtive, stealthy—the unavoidable sounds made by someone who doesn’t want to be heard.

  “P. . .” Sheila had started to call out and then stopped. Nothing too eager. Nothing indiscreet. Anyhow, he would come to her, come to her and find her decorously reading in bed. She had giggled to discover A Passage to India upside down in her hands. Righting it, she had begun to read:

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Lady Mellanby, wife to the Lieutenant-Governor of the

  “Naturally Peter wouldn’t come barging right in here. He’d wait to see if the coast is clear. In spite of Allison he still has some discretion.”

  Lady Mellanby, wife to the Lieutenant-Governor of the

  No sign of Peter. “But it takes time for him to undress, hang up his clothes. Put on his robe.”

  Lady Mellanby, wife to the Lieutenant-Governor of the

  “And then he’ll want to shower and brush his teeth and do a lot of things like that. For a rough diamond, he’s awfully fastidious. I like that, of course, but it takes such a lot of time.”

  Lady Mellanby, wife to the Lieutenant-Governor of the

  “Damn Lady Mellanby anyway! It’s a perfectly fascinating book. One of my all-time favorites. But I do think that sometimes Lady Mellanby. . . . He couldn’t be sick, could he? Perhaps he drank too much and got violently ill and needs me—needs someone—to be in there looking after him. I’ll wait just eight more minutes—just until the clock strikes two—and then I’ll simply march down the hall and tap at his door and say—oh, as casually as all get-out—Are you all right?’ and then. . . .”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Lady Mellanby, wife to the . . .

  On the first stroke of two, Sheila had tossed aside her book and bounded out of bed. A glance at the mirror and then she had been tiptoeing along the hall. “Sick, poor darling. That’s it. This Hal or Hank on the Trib or the Sun-Times—Peter doesn’t have my memory for names—obviously made him drink far more than he’s. . . .” Reaching his dark door, her fingers raised for a gentle tapping, she had paused and listened and she had heard only the sound of Peter’s gentle, even snoring.

  Back in her room a moment later she had closed the door and leaned back against it, exhausted. “My God,” she had said aloud, “what have I done? Everybody in this whole house is against me. They hate me! It’s like being the only sane person in a lunatic asylum with all the inmates craftily trying to destroy me. What have I done to make them turn on me this way?”

  “Want some suggestions, darling?” Sheila the Inquisitor had whispered. “It’s only two o’clock. We can go on for hours and hours and. . . .”

  “You shut up! I’m sick of you and your bloody truth games. From now on I’m going to do the talking around here. If there’s one thing I know it’s people and. . . .”

  “But are you so sure you know Sheila Sargent, dar. . . .”

  “Out!”

  The rest of the night had been spent in a frenzy of action. Sheila had flown to her desk, got out her best French writing paper and begun composing four short notes. Each had taken the better part of an hour—written and rewritten, phrases shifted, sentences weighed, words added and deleted, whole sheets of paper crumpled and tossed away. She had finished at six o’clock, her wastebasket overflowing. Even now she considered that each note was a little masterpiece—short, charming, endearing and perfectly Sheila.

  She picked up the new leopard coat and stroked it. It was the most beautiful coat she had ever owned and by far the most expensive—dearer even than her broadtail or her mink. It had been flown to Chicago from Ritter Brothers with a wholesale price tag of eight thousand dollars, and Sheila never bought anything wholesale.

  Pulling on her antelope gloves she went noiselessly down the back stairs and out to her car. At last she was away. “There,” she said to the dashboard, “let them miss me. Let them all sit around stewing together wondering where I am. Give them a little taste of getting along without me—just long enough to. .
. .”

  She stopped in the middle of her sentence. It hadn’t occurred to her before that she was going to have a lot of time on her hands, quite alone, before she chose to return to the house.

  “Oh, well,” she said, “I’ll manage very nicely. It might even be fun.” She turned off Sheridan Road and shot out west. Fifteen minutes later she slowed down at a roadside diner and parked her car expertly between two mammoth trailer trucks. She studied her face in the rear view mirror and adjusted the angle of her hat. Then with a fine show of splendid legs she got out of the car and strode smartly into the diner. Framed in the doorway, she said in a husky, vibrant voice, “Am I too early for a cup of coffee?”

  “C’mawn in, miss. It’s fresh made and. . .” The counter girl’s jaw dropped. “Ssssssay, wherja get that gawjus coat?”

  “Oh, this?” Sheila said, as she slid onto a stool not too far from the truck drivers to engage in some sprightly badinage if so invited. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” Pause for effect. “I shot it.”

  “G’wan!” the girl said. Even the truck drivers showed interest then.

  “Yes,” Sheila said, with her sincere look. “In Somaliland last year. I bagged a dozen, but of course I only used the best skins for my coat.”

  “No kiddin’, miss?”

  “Oh, I’m not much of a shot. Nothing like my husband. In fact I wasn’t able to use the nicest leopard of the whole bunch because I got him through the side inside of through the head. So unless you can turn the bullet hole into a buttonhole, it’s no use at all.” She laughed gaily.

  Now the truck drivers had swiveled on their stools to look at her. They were all ears. “You really shot them leopards, lady?”

  “Oh, yes,” Sheila said modestly, glancing down at her coffee, worldly but shy, “The reason I’m up at this ungodly hour is that I’m on my way to the airport. Tigers this time. My husband’s already there.”

  In the space of a minute Sheila had become the center of attention, the charming woman of means and mystery and myriad accomplishments. Half an hour later she had to plead with her audience to let her go—”Please, or I’ll miss my plane.” She paid for her coffee with a dollar and told the waitress to keep the change. Then she got into her car and drove as far as the next diner.

  II.

  Mrs. Flood unplugged her portable television set, wrapped its cord insecurely around it and dragged it to the corner where the rest of her worldly possessions were waiting. Her luggage—two suitcases and a fitted toilet case—was the last tangible evidence of her palmier days and, through carefully preserved travel stickers, it proclaimed that Mrs. Flood had once been a guest of the Savoy in London, the Meurice in Paris, the Adlon in Berlin, the Grand in Rome and had sailed first class on the Cite de Paris. In recent years her bags had been lugged in and out of far less elegant hotels. Now they were being moved again. Her traveling gear would still have looked very dashing but for the addition of two grocery cartons—Heinz 57 Varieties and Tropicana Orange Juice—begged from the kitchen to accommodate the blouses and sweaters and shoes acquired over the last four years. Mrs. Flood checked her empty dresser drawers, her yawning medicine cabinet for anything left behind. Nothing remained. She mopped her eyes with a damp wad of Kleenex and rang for Taylor. Then she got out her Baby Face Creme Foundation compact and swabbed her nose and cheeks once again. For good measure she added some more lipstick, some more rouge and some more eye shadow. She had put on so much make-up so many times today that she looked for all the world like a down and out old madam, but it would never do for the servants to see that she had been crying.

  Down in the pantry Taylor glanced at the bell box and was surprised to see that it was Mrs. Flood who was ringing. In all the years she had been here she had never once summoned a servant to her room. But everything was crazy today—Miz Sargent out at dawn, the breakfast trays sent back untouched, old Miz Flood asking for cardboard cartons, nobody showing up for lunch, the champagne gone flat and poured down the sink and Bertha rumbling like a thunderhead because her lobster mousse had been wasted. With a sigh, Taylor buttoned his jacket and trudged up the back stairs.

  Sheila’s car roared into the driveway and stopped just short of crashing into Mrs. Flood’s little Anglia. “I’ll have to ask her not to leave that roller skate in the drive,” Sheila said. “There’s plenty of space in the garage. The old ass!” But Sheila wasn’t angry. She was elated. After her triumph as a huntress in the first diner this morning, she had driven to another and captivated a waitress and a short order cook by telling them that she was Dame Margot Forsythe, a famous English actress on her way to Hollywood. She had been very gracious about giving autographs. At the next place she brought down the house as a distinguished anthropologist and in the place after that a truck driver propositioned her after she had announced that she-was a traveling saleswoman in brassieres. She had told him just where and when to meet her in Milwaukee that night, even to giving him a hotel room number.

  By then the game had begun to pall and so, assured of her personal magnetism, Sheila had gone to a totally strange hair-dressing establishment and ordered the works—hair, hands, feet, facial and massage. From there she’d driven to a big tearoomy country restaurant where a large luncheon party of frumpishly middle-class women was in full screech. One of the girls—they spoke of one another as Girls, their median age being fifty—had recognized Sheila and she had graciously joined them. By the time she left, the girls had barely been able to speak, both from the impact of Sheila’s charm and from the two rounds of stingers she had bought. She was in top form today and no mistake about it.

  The wind whipped her leopard coat dramatically out behind her as she strode to the front door. “Hel-lo!” she called gaily, letting herself into the house. Only silence answered her. ‘Taylor,” she called, “what are these ugly boxes doing in the front hall?”

  “They won’t be there much longer, Mrs. Sargent. I’m just going.”

  Sheila glanced up and saw Mrs. Flood coming down the stairway. She was carrying her toilet case and her shabby old seal coat. Taylor followed with her suitcases.

  “Floodie, what. . . .”

  “I think I’ve seen to everything, Mrs. Sargent. You know about the Mother of the Year Banquet tonight. Hilton Hotel. Seven o’clock sharp. Your calendar for next week is all laid out. I’ve called the Caroline Sauer Agency and talked to Miss Sauer herself. She’s sending out three crackerjack girls on Monday for you to interview. There’s one—a Miss Nadel, I think—who sounds perfect; shorthand, typing, comptometer, and she’s had literary experience. I’ve left my check for this week on your desk with an envelope. If you’ll just sign it and drop it in the. . . .”

  “Floodie! What is this? Didn’t you get my note this morning? Taylor, I gave you a note for. . . .”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Sargent. I got it. And thank you very much.”

  “But Floodie. Didn’t I say I was . . . I mean wasn’t it clear?”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Sargent. It was the loveliest letter I’ve ever read in my life! I’ll save it always.”

  “Well, then, you’re certainly not going to walk out on me now. We have a lot of work to do together, Floodie. I’m miles behind on the column. I want to start another book. There’ll be the television program beginning in January. And I want you to come to England with me next summer. I mean you know London like the back of your hand and I’m simply hopeless with pounds and pence and guineas and everybody driving on the wrong side of the street.”

  “Why, Mrs. Sargent! I’m sure you’ll manage splendidly. There isn’t anything you can’t do.”

  “Floodie, did my apology mean nothing to you?”

  “Why, it meant everything to me, Mrs. Sargent. I’ll cherish your letter forever. But there are some things you can’t apologize for.”

  “Floodie, I didn’t mean to strike you. I’d cut my arm off first. But I was almost beside myself with. . . .”

  “And there are some things you shouldn’t apologize f
or, Mrs. Sargent. Last night you called me an old fool. . . .”

  “Floodie, I swear I didn’t mean. . . .”

  Not even listening, Mrs. Flood went on in her high-pitched, rather sing-song, lady-like voice. “And a pretentious nincompoop. No one’s ever said that to me before.”

  “Floodie, if I could rip my tongue out by the roots. . .”

  “And someone should have, Mrs. Sargent, because it’s perfectly true. I am an old fool—older than you know. And I am pretentious. I pretend that I’ve always been richer than I ever really was. I pretend that my family was very fashionable when they were just respectable, well-off people. I pretend that Tom Flood was a wonderful man and a devoted husband when he was just a spoiled society boy—and not quite out of the top drawer at that—who married me for the little money my father left. I even pretend that this lovely, lovely house is my home.”

  “It is your home, Floodie, for just as long as you. . . .”

  “Ah, but you see it really isn’t. Oh, I know now, Mrs. Sargent, that I’ve never fooled anyone for a minute—anyone except myself, that is—with my silly, snobbish little game of make-believe. And living here with you, taking the crumbs from your table, your cast-off clothes, using your things, ordering your servants around as though they were my own. . . . Well, it makes it too easy to go right on pretending. Oh, I’ve loved living here with you and the children, working with you—not that I was ever very good at it—meeting your interesting friends. And you’ve given me some beautiful things, Mrs. Sargent. But there’s one that you could never give me. . . .”

  “I could try, Floodie.”

  “No. You could never give me dignity. It’s something I’ve never realized I didn’t have. Now I know. My friend Emily Porter has dignity. She hasn’t very much else but she has dignity. I’m going to try to have some too.”