Road to Folly. Leslie Ford
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pale luminous face flushed, her eyes darkened. Just then, fortunately, the curtain bell rang, and men and women dropped their cigarettes on the flags or buried them in the camellia tubs, and moved back into the theatre. I didn’t hear much of the second half of the performance. I was thinking about too many other things, and chiefly about the quick glance I’d seen pass between Phyllis Lattimer and her ex-husband Bradley Porter. Hers had been a question; he’d shaken his head, almost imperceptibly. Whatever she had wanted him to do, it was plain he’d not done it . . . not yet. And I was worried. What chance had Jennifer Reid with those two against her?
“Did you see the man Mrs. Reid was talking to?” my mother’s friend asked avidly, as soon as her chauffeur had picked us up and started down Church Street toward the Battery. “Well, my dear, that’s John Michener. Her husband was his first cousin. They both courted her. She was supposed to be in love with John, but Atwell Reid had the property and her mother was a bitter determined old woman.”
We turned down East Bay.
“Well, my dear, John Michener and a party of men were just leaving the plantation after a deer hunt when they heard the shot, and they all went back and found Atwell Reid dead. Of course they hushed it all up, said he’d been putting up his gun. They sent Colleton north to school, you know, for a long time. Everybody thought they’d marry—John and Elsie Reid—as soon as it blew over. But they never have. Colleton loathes him, and Mrs. Reid’s afraid of Colleton, and just as spineless now as when she let her mother dominate her. Everybody thinks if Colleton marries Anne Lattimer, then he won’t care so much about his mother. Jennifer’s charming, don’t you think? They say she’s responsible for old Miss Caroline staying out at Strawberry Hill, so she’ll get all the lovely furniture some day. The house is full of it. They say she’s the one that keeps the place shut up like a prison.”
We drew up in front of the brilliant white-porticoed grandeur of the Villa.
“However, my dear,” my mother’s friend sighed, “you can see her mother doesn’t want her going around with that attractive Brad Porter. I think it’s ridiculous, myself, but you know how they are down here. They don’t have divorce in South Carolina—it’s the only state in the Union where they don’t. And old Charlestonians don’t approve of their daughters marrying divorced men. Especially divorced men who’re dependent on their divorced wives’ pocketbooks. And the Reids are as old Charleston as St. Michael’s Well.—Thank you for going with me, dear. I hope you were amused.”
As I undressed for bed it seemed to me that “amused” was someway not quite the word for it.
3
I’d forgot that people still make formal calls, in Charleston, and also that they do it in the morning. That’s why I was a little surprised, and with my carry-over from the night before, a little dismayed, coming into the gold drawing room and finding Mrs. Atwell Reid and her daughter Jennifer sitting there. Mrs. Reid held out her hand cordially. Jennifer Reid’s blue eyes met mine so coolly that I wondered why she’d bothered to come at all. Moreover, she didn’t open her mouth while her mother and I went through the elaborate ritual of Charleston.—It was a beautiful city. The gardens were lovely, the food divine. It was snowing in New York, and rather colder in Charleston than it normally was at this time of year. How long was I staying, and had I been to the antique show at St. Philip’s Rectory?
That over, Mrs. Atwell Reid glanced a little anxiously at her daughter, who sat in a gold-brocaded chair, her motionless face even lovelier in the brilliant daylight than it had been in the moonlight the night before. She had on a blue checked jacket and powder blue sweater and a little blue felt hat worn back from her high camellia-textured forehead, and if I hadn’t known she was twenty-two I’d have thought she was about sixteen.
She didn’t move now, but I knew she’d caught her mother’s glance. The shuttered look in her eyes as she glanced down at her hands, folded primly in her lap, showed that plainly. And showed further that she was being forced into something definitely against her will. There was an awkward silence. I saw the corners of her red lips tremble. She looked up at me.
“I told Aunt Caroline you were here,” she said quietly. There was still the warm soft note in her voice that Southern women have if their voices aren’t high-pitched the way most of them are. “She would like you to come out to see her.”
For a moment our eyes met . . . hers clear and young, and . . . not so much resentful, I thought, as challenging. Then her mother broke in.
“My aunt doesn’t receive many people. She’s quite old . . . she was eighty in December. She’s almost blind on account of a cataract she stubbornly refuses to have operated on. But her mind is as clear as it ever was.”
She said it rapidly, almost like a cataract herself.
“And that’s very clear,” Jennifer said coolly, still looking at me.
“Of course it is, Jennifer,” her mother said hastily. “I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t. I’m sure Mrs. Baker didn’t think I did.”
I looked at Jennifer. I had the uneasy feeling that I knew perfectly what she meant, even if her mother didn’t. Had what Brad Porter said about my being Phyllis’s front when there was dirty work at the crossroad meant more to her than any one had thought the night before?
“You will go out and see her, won’t you, my dear?” Mrs. Atwell Reid said nervously.
I saw the shutters go down in Jennifer’s eyes again, and I made up my mind permanently this time. This was one of Phyllis Lattimer’s chestnuts that I was going to let religiously alone. I turned to Mrs. Atwell Reid.
“I’m so sorry! I’d have loved to.” I said. “I’m awfully afraid I’m taking the afternoon plane home. I really just flew down to have a look at the Antique Show at St. Philip’s, and I have to be back almost immediately.”
The very mention of antiques was an awful mistake. Jennifer’s face shut like a steel trap. She didn’t look at her mother. So, I thought; she knows exactly what Phyllis Lattimer wants, and probably why she sent for me to come down. Knowing Phyllis, and hearing Brad the night before, even if he hadn’t said anything to her later, she could easily have put two and two together. She obviously had, I thought . . . and had got a lot more than the traditional four.
She got up quickly. Her manner had changed abruptly to an easy rather than uneasy aloofness.
“Perhaps when you come again . . .”
But her mother hadn’t risen. She was sitting erect and graceful, her face suddenly worn and tired as her daughter’s freshened. She got up then, slowly, not looking—oh, definitely not looking—at Jennifer.
“Couldn’t you take the late plane, Mrs. Baker? My aunt is really very anxious indeed to see you,” she said, with a kind of gentle persistence that was very embarrassing. “You see, some one told her you might be down this winter. She’s set her heart on seeing you.”
“But, mother! If Mrs. Baker has to go home, it’s unkind of you to put her in this position.”
Jennifer Reid’s voice was still warm velvet, but under it was something else. It wasn’t just determination, either. It was fear, just plain paralyzing fear. I sensed it with the kind of intuitive clarity that makes rational processes slow and plodding. And I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want to. It was her mother I was concerned with. Why was she so insistent that I go to see old Miss Caroline at Strawberry Hill . . . so insistent in the face of her daughter’s desperate—it seemed to me now—determination that I should not that she was allowing a formal morning call on a complete stranger to become practically an emotional scene?
Just then a girl I didn’t know wandered into the card room.
“Jennifer Reid! How perfectly swell! I was going to look you up . . . I’ve got a husband, I want you to see him! Jim!!—Where has he got to?”
And in the gay confusion I felt Mrs. Atwell Reid’s hand on my arm, and heard