House Party (16 page)

"She can go," Elly said. "Don't worry."

"Well, then," Mrs. Ames concluded weakly, "couldn't we just call a halt to this, this family gathering?"

"Suits me," Elly said.

"Well, now that
everything's
all settled," Uncle Ned said, rising and turning his back pointedly upon Paul, "I shall return to my memoirs.
Zut!
So much to do! My writing, my bath,
my
massage, dressing, my missal! How you people find the time to . . ."

"Excuse me, Uncle Ned," Paul said, rising. He looked very white and his lip trembled. "But as long as we're all here—all except poor Kathy—just let me say that Claire and I want to get married and we want to get married right away."

"That magnificent creature married to
you?"
Uncle Ned gasped.

"Does anybody mind if I take
another
bath?" Elly asked. She rose and strode out of the room.

As Achilles sulked in his tent, so did Manning Stone sulk in his tub. Going, going, gone. The suit was gone—fifty guineas' worth of Mrs. Louise Frith Stickney Tanner's travelers' checks, straight into the horse's mouth. A good deal of Manning's dignity was gone too.

He got out of the tub, threw a towel over his shoulders and looked at his face in the mirror. Nothing had changed. The pores were the same velvety consistency, the nose a romanesque arch, the lips as ripe and full, the teeth as white—including that pivot tooth—the eyes as lustrous, the lashes as thick. True, there was a stray hair or two in the eyebrows, but that was a problem to be solved in a minute. "I've got to bring her around," Manning said to his reflection, as he stood holding the tweezers. "I've
got
to."

Joe Sullivan was not entirely without vanity. He'd gone through this last foray without disgracing himself. Nope, the Ames family could take full credit for Kathy. He thought tenderly of Kathy. All competitive spirit was gone. She'd got the drunkest and shown it first. His hat was off to her. No, Joe had come home in the Hotchkiss with Aunt Violet's bird of paradise tickling his ear every inch of the way. And he'd been a little gent. Even Mom would have been almost proud.

He was still drunk enough to want to go in and lay a bunch of flowers at Kathy's feet; still drunk enough to want to tell Elly to go fly a kite, or go fly a general, or . . . No, skip that brilliant play on words. Anyhow, he was still drunk enough to want another drink. He opened the bottle of bourbon—the bottle for lovable old Ma—poured quite a lot into his bathroom glass. "Here's how," he said hollowly into the mirror. He looked at his freckled face with those God-damned true-blue eyes and wondered how it would be to look like Manning Stone. Then he decided he wouldn't
really
want to look like that at all.

He threw off his coat and loosened his belt. "Zip," he sang, undoing his trousers, "if I'll write I'll be a writer alone. Zip! Who the hell is Manning Stone?" Joe considered that extremely clever and thought of doing a whole set of lyrics for it. Then he felt his balance going and toppled back onto the bed. That awful Elly Ames. That terrible, mean, selfish, quasi-democratic Elly Ames!

"John! I hoped you'd be down early," Felicia said, "Shouldn't you and I have a drink all by ourselves? It seems that we're the only ones who still are able to." Felicia smiled at him and moved beautifully toward the bell-pull in the library, not unmindful of the perfection of her back, rising firm and brown above her long magenta evening dress. "Of course Bryan is quite all right and . . ." Felicia let her sentence die.

"So is Elly," John said hotly and wondered why he had.

"Oh, Elly. Yes. But she's only a
child."

"She seems smart enough."

"Smart? Well, I guess so. Of course she had opportunities
I
never had."

"How so?"

"Well, I mean she had a chance to go to college, while I was virtually snatched out of the cradle to get married and start having babies and . . ."

"Yes. She said that she was slated to be a flower girl. She would have been about nine at the time."

"Nine?
Heavens, John, she would have been fifteen or sixteen. I was only nineteen."

"And now she's twenty-two and . . "

"Oh, Jonas, here you are," Felicia said quickly. "What would you like, darling?"

This scene, somehow, wasn't going exactly as Felicia had planned it. Here they were, just the two of them. Just as they had been so many times in her smart little drawing room in Grade Square. Yet the spontaneity was gone. Something was wrong. Her remarks which had always been so terribly, terribly witty were falling flat. Perhaps this was the time to try the serious tone. Felicia looked at him over her glass. She saw the square face, the square jaw, the square shoulders on the square body.

"John, darling, I can't begin to apologize," she said.

"Apologize? Apologize for what?"

"Oh, you know. For this house and these people and . . . Well, you know."

"No, I don't
know,
Felicia. I like the house and I like the people. I think they're real nice." Then he caught himself in a Southernism and said "very nice."

"That's sweet of you, darling," Felicia said, kissing his brow. "But what with that dreadful party and silly old Kathy making such a fool of herself and . . ."

"I like Kathy," he said, more forcefully than he had meant to. "She's a nice girl. She's an entertaining girl—when she's not putting on any side. I liked her."

"Oh, she's a darling," Felicia said. "She's my favorite cousin in all the world—really she is. But some of us have known about this problem for a long, long time—even before I was married to Michael. In fact, being Kathy's cousin helped me to understand poor Michael's—um—
difficulty."

"What difficulty was that?" John asked.

"What difficulty do you suppose, darling? The bottle. What else?"

"Why didn't you tell me that? Why didn't you say so when you wanted to get your divorce? We could have done it a whole lot easier in Nevada or Wyoming. You should have told me."

Felicia didn't like the skeptical look in his eyes. "Well, what's done is done, darling. Let me fix you another drink."

"Maybe you'd better not," John said.

Kathy stirred on the pillow. She felt like hell and she knew she looked like hell. "Elly," she called. Her voice sounded terribly funny. "Elly," she called again.

"Now what?" Elly growled.

"Oh, Elly. How did I ever get here? How . . ."

"Well, you're asking the right person. I
put
you there."

"Oh, Elly, I'm so ashamed of myself. But Elly, help me get dressed. Please do. Help me into my dress and I'll let you wear my pearls—my real ones."

"Okay with me. I was going to offer, anyhow. What did you plan for tonight, cloth of gold with your navel showing?"

"Oh, Elly,
please."

At last Violet felt that she was really dressed. The rose tulle over the blue tulle over the purple tulle over the pink slip made her feel like a fire opal. The cabochon sapphires didn't hurt the effect either. Gaily, she splashed just a bit more scent onto her throat, fluffed her bangs and snatched up her ermine spencer. In the rose-shaded lamplight of her room she was unable to see the heaviness beneath her eyes, her chin, her arms. Humming a melody she
identified vaguely with a George M. Cohan musical comedy, she went blithely down the hall. The door of her grandchildren's room was ajar and she peeped in. "Are you asleep, darlings?" she crooned.

"Yes," Emily said,

"No," said Robin.

"Very well, then, babies, Granny will just have a very short
prayer with you, then
off
you go to slumberland!" Violet went in and knelt on the floor between the two beds. "All right, now, say along with Granny: Now I lay me down to sleep . . ."

"Now I lay me down to sleep," the children echoed.

"I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

"I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

"If I should die before I wake."

"If I should die before I wake.”

"That's right, darlings, I pray the Lord my soul to take.'"

"I pray the Lord my soul to take."

"That's divine, dears. Now: God bless Mummy, and Daddy and Granny, and Aunt Lily and all the Ameses and Fraulein and Nanny and us."

"God bless Mummy, and Daddy and Granny and Aunt Lily and all the Ameses and Fraulein and Nanny and us."

"Lovely,
darlings. Now kiss Granny. Nighty-night." Violet tripped prettily down the stairs, feeling like a debutante again. "Felicia," she called, "Felicia, darling. Make your mother a cocktail."

"Really, darling," Felicia said to John, "didn't you ever wish your parents would simply drop
dead?'”

"No," John said flatly. "I never did wish that, because they did."

Betty Cannon just had time, after helping clean up from her father's birthday party, to arrange her hair in the complicated new style. Now she wished she hadn't bothered. As the car turned into the North Shore Bath and Tennis Club, one last breeze wrought the final havoc to her coiffure.

She had asked the general to have the top put up on their raddled old Packard phaeton, but naturally he had refused. It was the general's custom to sit in the back of an open car with ramrod dignity as though he were parading triumphally up Fifth Avenue, or reviewing native troops at some far off overseas post.

It's all those MacArthur newsreels he's been watching, Betty thought miserably, pushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. I suppose he thinks of himself as a proud old eagle, when instead, he looks like a drunken old vulture! Betty blushed furiously at this outburst of disloyalty, but she was mad at Daddy tonight, good and mad. The party had been awful, worse than any of the terrible parties they'd given before and the general had been solely responsible for making it so.

"Well, here we are, Little Soldier," the general said as Sergeant Timberline stopped the car at the porte-cochere of the club. Timberline opened the car door and saluted smartly as the general stepped down. "Come back around midnight and wait," the general said.

"Yes, sir."

The general marched smartly into the club, followed at a respectful distance by his daughter.

“I'd like to comb my hair, Daddy."

"I'll be in the bar."

"But, Daddy, we're not members here."

"Well, even so I should think Lily Ames would want me to have a drink. A woman with all that money! I’ll just sign her name to the check. She'll more'n likely be right along, anyways."

With a sigh, Betty went to the ladies' dressing room while her father moved grandly toward the bar.

It was only natural that the residents of Pruitt's Landing, each of whom had a splendid private beach, would have decided to construct and support a beach club, which featured a bad undertow, appalling food and perpetual labor difficulties. The North Shore Bath and Tennis Club, had been built at the turn of the century to be a simpler version of the Casino at Newport. It was simpler, all right. It had also been planned to be just as exclusive. In this it surpassed even its model and it was becoming more exclusive every year—largely because nobody wanted to join it. In vain had the Membership Committee offered cut-rate deals to juniors, to bachelors and to people who merely rented for the summer. Resignations fluttered in like gulls on the Sound and the club was supported only by people like the Ameses and the Bascoms and the Hemenways and the Heminways and the Hemingways and the Hemmingways, all of whom agreed that it had nothing to offer, but who stayed on out of loyalty or force of habit.

Where once, fifty years ago, the verandah had been peopled by girls in butterfly-bright dresses, sipping lemonade and calling gaily to beaux from Harvard and Yale, now it was peopled by the same girls in fusty black, sipping lemonade and calling querulously to grandsons from Harvard and Yale. And where once virile bucks cavorted upon the tennis lawns sending fast ones over the nets, the same bucks now sat in the shade—ever mindful of sunstroke, gout and heart attack—dyspeptically watching their grandchildren being taught an entirely different sort of game by a boozy pro whose days at Wimbledon were but a memory and who considered himself lucky to be kept in gin money by working summers at Pruitt's Landing and winters in St. Petersburg.

The beach itself, once the stony setting of many a damp wool romance, was now the dumping ground for the descendants of members—young wives with children who had been parked with grannies for the summer while their husbands sweltered in New York and trundled out, bored and pallid, to pass weekends and the last fortnight in August in the bosom of the family.

The North Shore Bath and Tennis Club had originally been a fashionable social center with dancing three nights a week. Its driveway had been thronged with victorias and phaetons—and later with rakish Marmons and Stutz Bearcats. The card room had been tense with daring plays at whist and auction. The dining room had buzzed with orders for terrapin and lobster. The men's dressing room had resounded with talk of deals in steel and jovial jibes at the bath attendant.

Three dances a summer—Memorial Day, chilly and badly attended; Independence Day, hot and well attended; and Labor Day, humid and fairly attended—were all the club could swing. No chauffeurs gossiped against the fenders of the Fords and Buicks which were driven there by the husbands and piloted home by soberer wives. The card room was now the bar and the only source of steady income the club could claim.

Terrapin and lobster were still on the menu, but hamburgers and sandwiches were all the cook was asked to supply. Except for an occasional moan about income taxes and medical deductions, the men's dressing room was silent, its attendant long departed to a lodge in the Catskills to towel bodies which would never have been permitted on this sacred beach.

But if any night could be called gala at the North Shore Bath and Tennis Club, this was it. This was the big weekend of the summer, when anybody who was anybody put his best foot forward, when the full membership turned out, when extra waiters were hired, when there was a ten-piece orchestra in the bandshell, when champagne was growing warm in the bar and
entrecôtes
growing cool in the kitchen. Already the colored lights were on, tablecloths waved pleasantly in the breeze and sand drifted across the open dance floor.

The convoy again rolled in from the old Pruitt Place. Once more the Hotchkiss led off with Uncle Ned, Lily and Violet aboard. Uncle Ned sat smartly in his trim mess jacket and scarlet cummerbund like some musical-comedy commodore of the Ziegfeld era blissfully unaware that the mess jacket had been discarded since 1936 by all but waiters and rumba musicians. Ned Pruitt chattered animatedly with Violet and once or twice tried to draw Lily into the web of his inanities.

But Mrs. Ames sat silently at his side, dreading this night at the club like a trip to the dentist—a simile she regretted, because the dentist had commenced writing "Please" on her bill. Mrs. Ames hoped that she had given her guests enough cocktails at home to preclude any preprandial drinking at the club. She also hoped that Bryan would not scrutinize the club's bulletin board closely enough to see the Ames name posted for non-payment of dues and that General Cannon wouldn't be too odious. These were wan hopes, she was certain.

Although she wouldn't have got herself up like Violet for a million dollars, she envied her sister once again. Mrs. Ames was sick of her ancient chinchilla cape that said "Snap, Crackle, Pop" every time she put it on. She decided that she hated this old lace evening dress which she and the Little Sewing Woman had refurbished. Lily never threw anything away; she kept an impressive inventory of old brocade, good stout tweed, wisps of ostrich and osprey, bits and pieces of lace and mesh, rattling boxes of seed pearls and jet, tufts of ermine and sable. Her clothes were forever being taken up and let down, trimmed and untrimmed. Her husband and children had once teased her about this frugality—her "squirrel habit."

Now it was a necessity. Tonight she felt dowdy. She was wrong. Some women have been said to look like a million dollars, but Mrs. Ames looked like the most carefully invested billion in history.

There was a great deal of backing and filling at the door before the three cars were emptied of their lady passengers.

Claire got just close enough to Mrs. Ames to see that the chinchilla was genuine. She rather regretted the stole she was wearing which was plush dyed to look like moleskin dyed to look like plush dyed blue. Perhaps she should have tried to borrow something from the fur department. She was also itching to find out who designed Mrs. Ames's clothes, but she thought it a little premature to ask. Probably one of those hidden-away places in Paris where they keep the name a secret and only deal with duchesses, she thought. But won't it be a feather in my cap when I get
her
into the shop. The commissions!

Felicia was tense and she was angry because John had told her she was tense. She'd burned a small cigarette hole in her dress and he'd taken the cigarette from her and thrown it out of the car. "You're smoking too much," he'd said calmly. Just like that! She also felt that she'd like to slap her mother, throttle Kathy and tell off Claire Devine. As for Elly, she'd always disliked her and Aunt Lily had that unsettling way of seeming to look right inside her. She wondered what the world would be like without any other women in it. Perfect she was sure.

Kathy was displaying the subdued behavior of one who knows one's had too much to drink. Elly's posset had disposed of all the Hell-for-Leather punch, and, Kathy believed, most of her stomach as well. She'd never been so sick before. Now she stuck close to her sister, partly because she felt she needed her and partly because she was so angry with her,

"For the last time, Eleanor Ames," she hissed, "where's my eyeshadow?"

"I told you," Elly said. "I flushed it down the toilet. Gee, the water came way up in the bowl and made a terrible bubbling sound and . . ."

"Don't be disgusting!"

"Listen to who's talking! You're much better without it. At least you don't look like you'd been on a cocaine jag. Besides, I bet that stuff can give you terrible pink eye or something."

"Shut up and lend me your comb. Is this dress all right?"

"It'll be okay if you don't drop a breast into the madrilene. I don't
have
a comb."

"But what about your hair?"

"It'll just get mussed up again anyhow. Come on, let's get out of here. I can't stand all these babes gabbling away. And try not to get cock-eyed tonight."

"Elly, you're incorrigible!”

"But sober."

They followed their mother out to the lobby—the picture of sisterly affection.

Since Uncle Ned and Manning Stone weren't responsible for parking the cars, they were prompt to retire to the lounge and set the waiter to arranging chairs around the particular sofa which Uncle Ned had chosen. Then Uncle Ned clapped his hands and ordered champagne and fourteen champagne glasses in French. "Yes, Manning, dear boy," he said, "there's nothing like champagne to settle the stomach." A sharp attack of flatulence went through him like a bullet. He silently cursed Sturgis for lacing him in so tightly.

Now he was conscious of a sharp bit of melba toast caught in his bridge. He felt sick and miserable and he was wondering how best to approach dear Lily about that little loan—not much, mind you, just enough to tide him over until next quarter. "Ah, yes, Manning," he said, laying a long hand on Manning's knee, "the times we used to have in this poor old club! Not chic, by any stretch of the imagination, but for an
American
club, one of the best." Yes, keep the spirits up. That was it. "I recall so well when I brought Crown Prince . . ." He looked up and saw Mrs. Ames entering the room. "Ah, Lily, dear girl! I've taken my hostly duties to heart and ordered champagne all 'round. By the way," he said, turning to the waiter, "what kinds of caviar have you?"

Between seeing that her guests were placed and nodding charmingly to members of the club who had settled down for one last drink before dinner, Mrs. Ames tried to figure the damages—so far. Dinner for fourteen at ten dollars a head was one hundred and forty. Champagne at twenty a bottle was—well, four bottles up to now—that's eighty. Eighty and one-twenty were two-ten. No, two hundred. Let's say the
most
they could manage was one bottle apiece. That's fourteen times twenty, it came to . . . "Oh!"

General Cannon had caught her quite by surprise. It was his great pleasure to take women by surprise. Part of his charm. He had simply come up from behind her, wrapped his arms around her and given her a little nip on the nape of the neck. "The French technique of romance," was how he described it. Then he came around and kissed her hand. His daughter could have dropped gratefully through the floor.

Betty liked the Ameses. She wished she knew them better than she did. She envied them. They seemed so united. With four of them, how could they ever be lonely? They all had each other. "Kathy," she said, sitting down next to her—anything to cover for Daddy, "Kathy, I'm so glad you're all right. It was terribly hot out in the garden and I felt the sun was getting too strong for you . . .

Elly snickered into her champagne glass, and a bit of her drink spilled onto her dress.

"Yes, Betty," Bryan said quickly, "poor Kathy can't take the heat very well." What a girl that Betty Cannon is, he thought. In spite of her old man she could really go places. Take tonight, for example, when she's all fixed up. She looks every bit as grand as Felicia. With a little training she could be a great wife—really an asset; meet people, dress well, be charming in a natural way . . .

"Sometimes I think," Betty went on, "that our parties would be better
inside
the house. But it's so higgledy-piggledy with all of Daddy's trash that he's dragged from one horrible place to another that . . ." The sentence trailed off. Betty was amazed at herself. What
can
I have said? she thought. She repeated it silently. It pleased her. It pleased her so much that she repeated it again. "Yes," she said aloud, "our house—which could be lovely if it were left as my mother had it, is so full of Daddy's junk that we really can't have
anybody
inside it, except for a few stuffed carcasses and simple-minded old Sergeant Timberline and our idiotic maid of all work—a Miss Betty Cannon. Could I just have a drop more, please, Bryan?" I've really lost my mind, Betty thought. This is it. This is the beginning of the end.

Golly, Bryan thought, where's
she
been? I've never paid any attention to
her
before. Look at those eyes! The color in her cheeks! She's about—let's see, Paul's twenty-seven, Elly's twenty-two—she's about twenty-five, give or take a year. "Here, Betty," he added tentatively, handing her a glass. Their fingers touched and Bryan started slightly.