People did usually look at her, some because she suggested the engaging young person at a party to whom you would like to be introduced, and others because they knew she was Grady McNeil, the daughter of an important man. There were a few whose eyes she held for a different reason: and it was because, in her aura of willful and privileged enchantment, they sensed she was a girl to whom something was going to happen.
“Can you guess who I saw last week? At Locke-Ober’s in Boston?” he said as soon as they were seated under the glare of a white cellophane tree. “You remember Locke-Ober’s, McNeil? I took you to dinner there once, and you liked it because out in the alley there was a man with a banjo and a hat of brass bells. Anyway, I ran into an old friend of ours, Steve Bolton.”
It wasn’t that he’d just remembered this encounter: rather, he’d selected to remember, intending it should recall for her the outcome of an old emotion which, regarded in retrospect, might give some doubt as to the merits of a current one: though what she may have once felt for Steve Bolton he merely suspected. “We had a drink together.”
Grady said, “Steve: Lord, it’s been years: or has it? No, I don’t suppose it has. But whatever was he doing in Boston?” and this expressed accurately the quality of her interest. The thought that she’d loved him did not lean with embarrassing weight, as Peter assumed it would; besides, she’d never been ashamed of that. But she’d not thought of him in months, and he seemed as uncontemporary as the songs everyone had sung that summer.
“Up there on some sort of business, I should imagine. Or a class reunion: he’s the type. I never liked him, you know, though I haven’t much reason now: he looked pretty drained-out, and not quite so Steve-ish. He said if I saw you to give you his best.”
“And Janet? How are Janet and the baby?”
Having discovered that Steve Bolton’s name did not set off any commotion, Peter was bored with the subject. But Grady, waiting to hear, found her interest in Janet genuine: Janet, unlike Steve, was not seen at the small end of a telescope, but sharply in the foreground, present and punishing; and she remembered the morning when she’d prolonged Janet’s agony (with a remorse never quite felt before). “Or didn’t he mention them?”
“Yes, of course he did. Said they were fine. There’s another one, a girl this time. You can be sure he showed me a picture: whatever makes people do that? All those glossy snapshots of gooey brats! Perverse. I hope you never have any children.”
“Why, for God’s sake? I’d like a little bowlegged baby: bathe it, you know, and hold it up in the light.”
Here was a wedge and he used it. “A bowlegged baby? And what, my dear, would he think of that?”
“Who?” said Grady.
“You’ll forgive me, I don’t know the gentleman’s name,” he said, serving a point. “I’ll venture to say, though, that it’s one fairly well-known (come now, isn’t this why you don’t tell me?), that he is some sort of intellectual and at least twenty years older: nervous girls of extensive sensibility always get goose-happy over daddy-types.”
Grady laughed, though laughter, she saw too late, authorized his making cartoons of her situation. She was willing to permit him this liberty, however: it was small payment for a service he’d done her this evening, one impossible to explain: it consisted simply in his now knowing Clyde Manzer existed; for his knowing it made Clyde dwindle to human size and exist, too. So long had she shrouded him in shadow and secret that he had come to loom greater than his actuality. To have another person know drained much of the mystery and lessened her fear of his dissolving: he was a substance at last, someone carried not just in her head, and mentally she floated toward him, ecstatic to embrace his reality.
Peter was pleased with himself. “You needn’t bother answering: but am I right?”
“I won’t tell you; if I did, then I shouldn’t have any more of your theories.”
“Do you want really to hear my theories?”
“No, as a matter of fact I don’t,” she said: as a matter of fact, she did: it gave back something of the excitement of having still a secret.
“Tell me one thing.” Peter speared his palm with a swizzle stick. “Are you going to marry him?”
She recognized the purposeful quality of his asking and, keyed to banter, was disconcerted by it. “I don’t know,” she said, with a resentful chop in her voice. “Does one always have to want to marry? I’m sure there are kinds of love in which that is hardly an issue.”
“Yes: but aren’t love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is—if it’s just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing. But seriously, dear?”
“Seriously, then (though obviously you’re the one not being serious): I have no answer to give, how could I when I’ve never really thought of it? We came here to dance, darling. Shall we?”
Awaiting them on their return was a photographer, surly with disinterest, and the Bamboo Club’s press agent, a sassy pouting man whose jeweled hands fluttered about the table arranging festive props: a champagne bucket, a vase of flowers, a monster-large ashtray on which the club’s name was brazenly photogenic. “That’s right, Miss McNeil, just a little picture, you don’t mind?
Now, now, mustn’t stare at the camera, that’s right, look at each other: sweet, absolutely darling, couldn’t be cuter! Artie, you’re taking a great picture, capturing young love, that’s what you’re doing. Ah, Miss McNeil, I know better—listen there, even your young man says I’m right! Don’t you, young man? And who are you, anyway? Wait now, I want to write it all down. But isn’t that someone awfully old or dead or famous or something, Walt Whitman? Oh, I see, you’re Walt Whitman the second; a grandson, are you? Well, isn’t that lovely. Thank you, Miss McNeil, and you, too, Mr. Whitman: you’ve both been sweet, absolutely darling.” He did not forget to take with him the flowers, the champagne, the ashtray.
Peter’s expense on whiskey had at last paid a dividend: which is to say, his sense of humor had reached a point that was without discrimination; and he was determined to push it even further: unfortunately, someone gave him an opportunity. It was a grey, inhibited little man who, goaded by his companion, a pink strawberry woman sipping brandy, leaned from the next table and gave Peter’s arm a diffident peck: “Pardon me,” he said, “but we wondered if you people are British royalty? My friend says because they took your picture you’re British royalty.”
“No,” said Peter, with a patient smile. “American royalty.”
Grady was persuaded they should leave: another minute and there would be a fight: it was with that expectation that Peter wanted to stay. He could at least be ashamed, he said, and got them as far as the dance-floor, but there he bogged down, insisting they dance and demanding the orchestra play his favorite tune: “Just One of Those Things.” She warned him to stop singing in her ear: “Just one of those fabulous flights”: so after a while she sang with him.
A marathon of scarlet stars blinked on a circle of ceiling, and Grady, sprinkled by their light, dizzy in their whirl, drifted in the refuge of this sky: a voice, far down upon the earth, carried up to her: can you hear? that I say you are royalty? Dreaming, she thought it was Clyde, though how like Peter it sounded! And turning in space, her hair swung like a victory. They danced until all at once and as one the music dimmed and the stars went dark.
Chapter 4
“The doorman gave me these,” said Clyde, almost a week later. He held out two telegrams, but Grady did not take them until she’d turned on the kitchen faucet and rinsed her hands of waffle-batter. “I’d like to take a poke at that guy: a real schnook! You ought to see the kind of looks he gives me. And that kid on the elevator, he’s a little fairy: I’ll hand him something to nibble on.” She had heard these complaints before, they needed no comment from her, so she said: “Where’s the butter, honey? And did you get the kind of syrup I wanted?” She was making a very late breakfast: they had not got up until after eleven. For the last few days the parking lot had been closed; the owner was having some trouble over his license.
And the day before, accompanied by Mink and his girlfriend, they’d driven up into the Catskills on a picnic. On the way back a tire had blown out, and it was two in the morning before they’d crossed the George Washington Bridge. “No soap on that syrup—so I got Log Cabin, O.K.?” he said, settling himself by the
