Road to Folly. Leslie Ford
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one, and smiled too brightly at people as they moved back and forth.
“You know Rusty, Diane.”
Phyllis released Mrs. Reid’s arm and took hold of her husband’s.
“Hullo! How did you get down here?”
Rusty Lattimer grinned and held out his hand. It was like taking hold of a piece of iron wrapped in coarse sandpaper.
“It’s funny, Phyllis was talking about you last night . . . wondering if you’d given us all the go-by.”
A flicker of anxiety went through his wife’s face. For an instant I think she wasn’t so sure I wasn’t going to let her down with a thud, She had it coming, I thought; but there was something in Rusty Lattimer’s face now that I saw it closer that would have stopped me even if I’d been the gal to do it—which I wasn’t, and which Phyllis, of course, knew very well. I had the instant feeling that Rusty Lattimer needed all the faith he had in his wife . . . even needed it bolstered as much as possible. There was a kind of profound disillusionment in the back of his grey eyes and in the sun lines at the corners of them, and in the almost grim set of his big mouth, that even his welcoming grin didn’t manage to wipe out.
Just then, as I’d said, “Oh, I’m apt to turn up practically anywhere,” the darnedest thing happened. There was one of those instants of silence that sometimes fall on a room full of chattering, laughing people, and a warm soft voice fell across it like sunlight through a glass of rich burgundy.
“Don’t be silly!”
I don’t know why particularly—because people can be silly about a lot of things—but the whole quality of it, the warmth, the laughing banter, a kind of rejection and at the same time invitation, with complete mastery of the situation, indicated as plain as day that a man was making love to a girl. And just as instantly every one in the group I was interested in stiffened like so much frozen meat. Because I was facing the wall I couldn’t see the girl, but I saw the rest of them: Mrs. Reid’s sudden panic of alarm, her son Colleton’s eyes flashing dark fire. I saw the girl beside him give him a quick frightened glance as her eyes moved from him to his mother, and then to her brother.
And it was Rusty Lattimer’s face that really stopped me. If anybody could translate visually, in anybody else’s face, the kind of instant and gone but perfectly tormenting pain that shoots through a tooth you’d thought was perfectly sound, that would be the nearest approach to what I saw there. Rusty Lattimer was in love with this girl . . . and I knew she must be Jennifer Reid. I knew he was—instantly, clearly and definitely. I knew too that it was a destroying kind of love, and utterly hopeless, because Rusty was the kind of man who being married to another woman could do nothing about it.
I was literally stunned. It was the only thing I hadn’t thought of coming down on the plane. It just simply had never occurred to me that a man Phyllis wanted could be in love with anybody else. I glanced at her, and stopped again. She was still smiling . . . untouched and completely confident, looking at her husband with an amused, almost mocking smile, it seemed to me. In fact she looked precisely like a prize cat that had not only won the blue ribbon but had got a saucer of thick yellow cream thrown in.
Then every one started talking again. It hadn’t taken, all of it, more than a split second . . . but it was all there, a situation perched neatly on as large a keg of dynamite as I’ve ever seen in a public place,
I glanced around. A girl and a man were standing beside a tub of blush-pink camellias, beside the stone column under the long tiled stoop over the foyer doors. The girl, apparently unconscious of anything unusual, was laughing up at the man whose back was turned toward us. She was dark, with short cropped curly black hair, blue silvery black in the white moonlight. Her face and bare arms, and throat above her black net dress, were as warm as her voice and as cool as the camellias in the tree beside her, her eyes were blue and dancing. But it wasn’t them, or her face or her skin, as much as some quality over and above all of them that made her electric just then.
Then the man turned, and if it had been a simple enough problem in dynamite before, I realized now that it was anything but. It was Phyllis’s divorced husband, Bradley Porter. I looked at Phyllis. She gave me a quick almost imperceptible wink, and I felt my face flush angrily. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t decent. I was ashamed of Brad even more than of her, to let himself be part of her scheme to defeat anything so young and lovely, with such a proud little head and clear untarnished eyes.
And I looked at Rusty. Did he know, I wondered? Was that part of the disillusionment and racking pain behind his own clear eyes? I think I could have killed Phyllis just then. And I could see she knew very easily what I was thinking. She laughed suddenly.
“—Brad, darling!”
Her voice, warm and a little mocking, made him turn toward us. I saw the old charming light kindle in his eyes. It had kindled for all women, but quicker for Phyllis. I saw now that it still did, and I saw that Phyllis knew it did . . . and that she would use it when she needed it, let the chips fall where they might.
“Come here, Brad—here’s Diane!” she called.
Brad Porter dislodged himself from against the stone column.
“Well, for God’s sake!”
He piloted the girl across the flagged court, his hand out. I was watching her. The smile had gone out of her face the way the moon can go behind a fleece of white clouds, taking all the shimmering luminous glow out of the world.
“Phyllis was talking about you yesterday. I bet she knew you were coming, the rat.”
“Brad, you beast!” Phyllis cried.
“I’ll even bet she sent for you—didn’t she?”
I laughed and shook my head.
“Watch out for dirty work at the crossroads,” he said cheerfully. “Whenever Phyl’s got a hot chestnut to pull out, she drags Diane in for front.”
He pulled the girl closer to the group.
“This is Jennifer Reid . . . Diane Baker. Or have you met?”
Jennifer Reid didn’t hold out her hand. She stood there in the very thick of us, and yet she gave, in some way that I couldn’t put my finger on, the most extraordinary sense of being completely isolated from all of us, as if she were in the center of an empty stage. She didn’t look at Rusty. She didn’t even know, I thought, that he had turned away to keep from looking at her.
I glanced at her mother. She’d moved too, and was bowing formally to a man who’d been talking to another man near the open door of the foyer. He was bowing to her. My mother’s friend caught my eye and went through an elaborate pantomime that I gathered meant I was to look at him carefully. When I did, I thought he seemed rather nice but not particularly exciting. He was large and heavy-set, with grey hair and a reserved strong-featured face, around sixty, I imagine, and not unattractive in a quiet self-contained sort of way.
Just then Mrs. Reid turned back to us, or rather to her daughter who’d moved over toward her. She kissed her cheek perfunctorily.
“We didn’t know you were coming in, Jennifer,” she said. The anxiety in her eyes touched her voice, and apparently asked another question without stating it. Jennifer said,
“Rachel is with Aunt Caroline. She said it was all right for me to come.”
It seemed to me there was something a little rebellious in the girl’s voice, and I thought defensive too. There certainly didn’t appear to be any great warmth between mother and daughter. I thought of what Phyllis had said—that Jennifer was guarding all her aunt’s property for herself, and wondered. Her mother seemed in some curious way annoyed that she was here.
Brad Porter, whose life has had a large piece of it devoted to getting around women of all ages, spoke up quickly.
“I hope you don’t mind, Mrs. Reid.” He turned on the well-known charm. “It’s all my fault. I persuaded her to come.”