Three Bright Pebbles. Leslie Ford
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and that all the pretty frilly things made for baby girls made Mara look rather like an Armenian refugee, and act worse. When the boys were brought in and proudly exhibited, little Mara was always left in the nursery. I could still hear Irene’s gay careless voice: “Mara? Oh my dear, she’s quite unpresentable . . . such an odd little creature . . . but I’m sure she’ll be awfully interesting when she grows up!”
I looked again at the small pointed face and great somber eyes reflected under the flowers in the candle-lit Empire plateau. There might be something in it, I thought, but next to the lovely golden oval of the face of the girl sitting next to her, her long lashes brushing her flushed cheek, it didn’t seem very like it.
I glanced down the table at Rick Winthrop, as big as Dan and with the same blond hair, with broad square shoulders that looked even broader in his perfectly tailored white dinner jacket. He’d always been far handsomer than Dan, I realized with a kind of minor shock that he wasn’t now. The thing in Dan’s face that made him so attractive and engaging wasn’t visible in Rick’s; his cheeks were heavy, his dark eyes brooding and sullen and the flesh around them puffy, his full mouth sagged at the corners. The contours that had made him so much better looking than Dan were coarsened and blurred. He had wasted what nature had given him, and wasted it in a short time, I thought. Three years before, when I’d seen the most of him, he hadn’t gone quite so much to the fleshpots. I glanced back at Cheryl, wondering vaguely what could have happened to him. He hadn’t, obviously, gone completely off, or he’d never have married this girl. Heaven knows there was nothing of the fleshpots about her. She was more like a willow branch tipped with gold in the spring than like the glamour girls one heard vaguely that Rick trained with around 52nd Street. I found myself wondering how it could have happened, this marriage, and what they were thinking now, the two of them, their eyes fixed steadily throughout dinner on the delicate juicy soft crab and water cress, the tender broiled chicken and young asparagus and spiced sweet potato balls, and the tipsy squire pudding that had been a specialty at Romney when General Washington dined there, that old Yarborough’s white-gloved hands successively placed in front of them and removed barely touched. Through it all Irene’s light chatter rippled, like threaded rose and silver through a dark woof, or sunflecked froth on a portentous sea.
4
When Yarborough had brought coffee and closed the pantry doors, Irene put her bare elbows on the polished table and leaned forward, her smooth chin resting on the back of her clasped jeweled fingers. A hush fell over the table, and in the mirror of the Empire plateau I saw the corners of Mara Winthrop’s mouth droop and the sides of her nostrils as sensitive as harp strings quiver, and her whole dark little body grow suddenly perfectly still. She had been waiting for this. So had all the rest of them—even the girl next to her. I looked at her, and our eyes met for the first time, just as Irene said, in her most charming voice:
“Grace dear, you must tell us everything you’ve been doing, you look too fit, really you do! What have you been up to? And Dan, I know you’re simply dying to talk Paris! How was the trip over? Was it awful?”
A quick smile flickered for an instant behind Cheryl Winthrop’s long gold-tipped lashes and was gone, as Irene, without waiting for Dan to speak—and heaven knows he looked less like a man dying to talk Paris than anyone I’d ever seen—went rippling along.
“I did want all of you together tonight! Because Sidney—” she held out one lovely hand to the man at her side—“Sidney has finally persuaded me there’s no use of our waiting any longer. We’re going to get married!”
She paused brightly and looked around. Good seeds, I’m afraid, never fell on thornier ground. That they had all known it for several weeks didn’t seem entirely to account for it. Even Natalie Lane, who tried to look pleased and interested, didn’t succeed particularly well. Irene, if she noticed it, didn’t mind, and neither, apparently, did Major Tillyard. He looked affectionately pleased, and really quite nice.
“Of course, the real point is that this is a sort of . . . well, a sort of council of war,” Irene said.
Dan’s eyes caught mine. I looked away quickly, and across at Mara, staring with unseeing eyes into the bottom of her green Worcester coffee cup.
“You see,” Irene said—she looked earnestly about at her small brood—“your father was so anxious for you all to have the benefit of the money he worked so hard to make—”
There was a sudden violent motion at the end of the table as Rick Winthrop pushed his chair back and got to his feet so abruptly—and unsteadily—that his chair went crashing to the floor behind him. He turned, smashed his foot violently into it and swung back to us, facing his mother over the candles. I saw that up to that point I hadn’t at all realized how definitely he was under the influence—as my grandmother used to put it in the days when no gentleman was ever intoxicated.
“Then why don’t you divide it between us, and cut out all this harping about what father wanted!” he said bitterly. “Why don’t you let us get the benefit of it, instead of keeping us tied to your apron strings, having to grovel for every penny we get! Then marry Tillyard, if you want to, and the rest of us’ll clear out! Then—”
“Oh, shut up, Rick.”
It was Dan’s voice, quietly matter-of-fact, that interrupted that extraordinary tirade. The rest of us sat, too stunned to do anything but stare at him open-mouthed . . . even Irene, so much more used to Rick’s unbridled furies than the rest of us.
Rick turned, his dark eyes bloodshot, his mouth trembling.
“It’s all right for you to talk. You don’t have to take it—you never have had to. You’ve always had a way of getting whatever you wanted without the trouble of paying for it.”
I still don’t know how it was that everybody at that table knew instantly what it was that Rick meant. He didn’t look at Cheryl . . . but we did know, just as surely as if he’d said it. Maybe it was because he stopped short himself, as if he too was shocked by it. But there it was, as ugly and revolting as if he’d taken a whip and lashed it across her face.
Dan got slowly to his feet, white with rage, his jaw set like a steel trap. He stood motionless for an instant, turned and walked over to the door.
“Would you mind stepping outside?” he said, his voice so dreadfully quiet that gooseflesh stood suddenly on my arms.
Rick Winthrop moved around the long table.
“We’ll settle it right here!” he shouted.
Irene’s voice was a low terrible moan. “Boys, please! Oh, please!” If I’d ever thought her incapable of a very deep emotion—and I had—I’d been wrong. She leaned her head back against her chair, her face white as death. “Please, please!”
Cheryl got instantly to her feet, her face pale and set.
“Don’t be a fool, Rick,” she said quietly. “And please, Dan, come back. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He . . . he isn’t himself.”
She turned quickly to her mother-in-law. “If you’ll excuse me, please, Irene—I’d like to go to my room.”
Irene nodded without opening her eyes. Major Tillyard, who’d got up as Rick left his place, stood there looking down at her, his face hard and angry. Then he said, controlling his voice with an effort. “Perhaps if I left too, Irene, this might be a little less . . . difficult.”
She held out her hand.
“No, no, Sidney—please stay. Natalie, you go with Cheryl. The rest of you stay here. Come back, Dan. Sit down, Rick.”
For a moment no one moved except Natalie Lane, who got up and out like a streak of lightning. Dan closed the door and came back to his place. Rick picked up his chair and sat down, his face mottled, his eyes fixed on the lace mat in front of him. And all the time Mara sat there, motionless, her short thick black lashes shading her dark eyes, two hot dull spots burning in her cheeks, her brown sensitive little hands folded quiescent