Lost Lake House (2 page)

Rather unfortunately for both of them,
Alderman Perkins did not understand his pert, butterfly daughter
much better than Dorothy understood him. A widower for some years,
a busy and often harassed municipal politician, he was
uncomfortably aware that he had not devoted as much time as he
might have to raising his motherless daughter—and, not being very
well informed on what was suitable or not suitable for a girl of
Dorothy’s age, he compensated by forbidding everything. At least it
seemed like everything to Dorothy, for she seemed to have a knack
for desiring things that her father regarded with suspicion.

Dancing, for instance—at fifteen she had
discovered dancing and fallen hopelessly in love. Alderman Perkins’
only acquaintance with the art in any form came from the
disreputable nightclub speakeasies he made it his mission in life
to break up, and scathing articles in the newspapers denouncing
(often quite justly) the state of modern morals among the Young.
Thus, he was immovable. The respectable mammas whose parties he
forbid Dorothy to attend would probably have been astonished to
learn that the Alderman conflated their brand of hospitality with
the decline of Modern Morals.

There had been several unhappy instances
where Dorothy had finessed her way into accepting party invitations
by slightly misrepresenting the nature of the entertainment—only to
have it come out afterwards that she had been dancing after all. It
was after the last of these that Dorothy, feeling much injured and
bruised in spirit after a censuring from her father, poured out her
woes to her friend Kitty Lawrence—simply because Kitty happened to
be nearest.

“Why bother asking his permission, then?”
said Kitty, a singularly cool and uninhibited young lady.

“He’d find out I went. Someone we know would
let it out. I can’t just go out to parties without him knowing I’d
gone—and besides, it’d be wrong anyway,” said Dorothy, who, despite
all the rebelliousness she felt, still had an innate sense of the
duty owed a parent. She turned away from her bedroom window, where
she had been leaning on the sill looking out, and sat down
dejectedly on the ruffled stool by the dresser. She felt she had
kept the letter of the law by obtaining permission, however
unscrupulously, and the dust-up afterwards seemed dreadfully
unjust.

“You don’t have to go to parties. If it’s
just the dancing you’re after, there’s a much better way,” said
Kitty, languidly inspecting the modest array of hairbrushes and
face creams on Dorothy’s dresser.

“You mean those dance halls? Oh, gosh, I
wouldn’t go there for—”

“Not that. You’ve heard—” Kitty leaned one
shoulder closer with an air of delicate conspiracy “—You know about
the Lost Lake House, don’t you?”

Dorothy was intrigued, thrilled, a bit
shocked. “But that’s a—isn’t that a—”

“Nightclub, of course. It’s the swellest one
there is around here. They’ve got the best musicians for miles
around, and you should
see
the inside, it’s a perfect dream.
But what makes it perfect for you is the vow of secrecy.”

“The
what?
“

“It got started as a joke, but it caught on,
and now Maurice Vernon tells the guests about it himself whenever
he comes out to make a speech. Everybody who goes there swears
never to tell about anybody else they met—except of course to
others who’ve been at the Lake House themselves. But never to
outsiders, you see? It’s kind of a gag but it makes it more
exclusive
, you know?”

“Do you mean
you’ve
been there?” said
Dorothy, whose mind was still circling interestedly around the
words ‘best musicians.’

Kitty waited for a fraction of a second, and
tweaked an end of her black bobbed hair, as if to highlight the
extreme casualness of her answer. “Sure,” she said lightly. “Lots
of us have been. Only I can’t tell you who because of the vow. It
doesn’t matter if you tell about yourself, of course. But like I
was telling you, Dolly, if you really can’t live without dancing
you should come with us. It’s the one place your father’ll never
know you’ve gone.”

Dorothy opened her mouth, and shut it again.
When she opened it a second time she said, “How could I get there
without his knowing?”

“Sneak out, of course!” said Kitty as if
talking to a very young child. “That’s what we all do. A bunch of
us are going again on Friday night. If you want to go, meet us on
the corner of King and Water streets about nine o’clock.”

There were several things at work at this
moment. Kitty’s air of superiority, for one, when Dorothy knew she
was only seventeen and a half, barely a year older, but putting on
airs like she was all of eighteen or nineteen. The indifferent way
in which she spoke of such sensational experiences was crushing.
And then, the lilting rhythm of dance music never quite stopped
humming in Dorothy’s brain, the more when she had been away from it
long. It was humming strongly and intoxicatingly at this moment.
Dorothy moved her toes half unconsciously, then tucked her feet
under her stool.

But even all this might not have tempted her
had not the sting of her recent scolding still been fresh upon
her—with a little surge of resentment she said to herself that it
really wasn’t fair. All she wanted was to have a good time. Wasn’t
it unreasonable and unfeeling of her father to deny her that? He
just didn’t
understand
.

Dorothy’s pride was flicked and her
conscience was sulking. The four walls of her little white room
seemed close and cramping, and her toes beneath the ruffled stool
were itching to dance. She got up and went to the window again, and
leaned her folded arms on the sill. It was early evening, and even
on this quiet street there was life and activity below. A couple
was strolling arm-in-arm along the sidewalk across the way; a man
walking quickly on this side with a parcel under his arm; a boy
went by on a bicycle. From the blocks downtown Dorothy could hear
the distant noise of automobiles and omnibuses and horns, the
quick-paced life of the city. Everyone but her seemed to be alive
and busy and going somewhere—Life itself seemed to be passing her
by. At sixteen the world seems to be spinning fast and time
slipping away, and our hearts burst with the conviction that if we
cannot have our dreams
right now
they will be somehow
imperfect when they finally come true.

She fell back upon the letter of the law.
Her father had never actually pronounced the words “You must not
dance”; he’d only said “You must not go to parties where there is
dancing”—he hadn’t said anything about
nightclubs
—

A breeze blew in through the open window,
brushing the light curtains gently against her bare arms. It seemed
to carry the spirit of gypsy adventure on its wings—and behind her
Kitty Lawrence shifted a slender lank shoulder and yawned as if she
found sneaking out to nightclubs something utterly trifling.

Dorothy set her mother’s dainty dimpled chin
in an expression that belonged to her father. “All right,” she
said, “I’ll be there.”

The ferry ground ashore at the bottom of the
path with a little bump, and Dorothy, no longer able to hold her
fancies to herself, hopped ashore and was swept up the lighted path
amid the noisy laughing crowd of her friends. At the doors
white-coated waiters appeared like conjurors to whisk away hats and
coats, and then the guests went forward through the main hall. The
floor and walls were of golden-brown marble polished till it was
like walking on glass; the staircases were rimmed with curling,
spidery metal railings, and matching brackets on the walls
supported lamps that were like an artist’s idea of tulips done in
frosted glass. They went through into the largest ballroom, where
the band in ice-blue jackets were half hidden in potted ferns at
the far end—the arched doorways all around the room gave on outer
passages where more French windows opened onto a variety of gardens
and terraces, lit by more strings of electric lights laced through
the trees. There were shimmering teal-green velvet draperies in the
arches, and fat, opulent-looking sofas upholstered to match sat
under gold-framed mirrors on the walls.

As Dorothy’s group passed into the ballroom
another shrill cascade of laughter met them, and Dorothy wrinkled
up her nose a little. She wished people wouldn’t interfere with the
music so much. She looked around expectantly, anxious to enter at
once on the business of the evening—and did not have to wait long;
a boy asked her to dance and she accepted with alacrity.

She leaned on his arm, humming along to the
music a little. A phonograph record playing, music on the
radio—even sitting and listening to a band playing never seemed
like
enough
to Dorothy—she had to move with the music, to
feel that magical sense of lightness when her feet caught the
rhythm of a song. While the mellow, swinging music poured out from
among the ferns, and her nimble scuffed shoes whisked lightly and
skillfully across the polished floor, she was perfectly happy, and
it almost did not matter who her partner was so long as he was a
good dancer—although there were certain ones among the Lost Lake
House habitués whom she preferred
not
to have if she could
help it, for reasons separate from their dancing.

For several dances she was happily engaged,
and then, her final partner departing and no other immediately
appearing, Dorothy sat down on a sofa in a corner, and found
herself alone for a few minutes. She watched the drifting,
fox-trotting crowd on the ballroom floor—the men in elegant black
evening dress, the feathers and rhinestones against the women’s
shingled hair, the bright-colored silken frocks with draped backs
and necklines—and many smart shoes. Many of the couples who drifted
in through one particular door on the north side of the ballroom
had glasses in their hands, and these were always a little more
raucous and a little less in time to the music. Dorothy half
unconsciously tucked one foot under her on the sofa, as she often
sat in her bedroom at home, feeling an unreasoning little pinch of
loneliness. She liked the crowding and the glamor in its impersonal
sense, but when she began to look at the people as individuals she
sometimes felt a queer sense of depression she could not
identify.

She flicked the thought away. Once she was
out in the middle of it again the moving colors of the kaleidoscope
would close round her and make her forget she had seen anything
unsettling when the whirl slowed.

Kitty and Sadie and Ida Greenbush washed up
on the shores of the dance floor, each with her arm linked through
that of a much-slicked-up and endlessly grinning young man. They
descended on Dorothy’s corner, appropriated the ends of her sofa,
and being in search of amusement, found it in teasing her.

“Dolly’s mad because they’re not playing the
Charleston often enough,” cried Sadie Penniman. “She just can’t
keep her feet still two seconds together.”

“Unless she sits on them,” pointed out one
of the young men, and the entire party found this hilarious.

“Just don’t dance it with Horace next time.
He tires
so
easily,” said Kitty Lawrence, with a proprietary
little knife-slice in her voice that was meant to keep Horace in
line.

“Oh, certainly. I wouldn’t harm poor Horace
for the world,” said Dorothy, who possessed a tongue of her own;
and Horace, his arm still safely linked through Kitty’s as though
in irons, managed a sickly smile.

“Personally, I find all this dancing
exhausting
,” said Ida Greenbush, striking a languid pose and
looking out through the French windows toward an imaginary horizon.
“I should much prefer a stroll on the terrace, wouldn’t you,
Peter?”

Peter was never allowed to get a word in
edgewise, so his opinion was negligible. Kitty and Sadie were
already trilling with laughter over the ridiculousness of someone
named Maude with whom they had amused themselves on the other side
of the ballroom, and her infatuation with a man who wouldn’t look
at her. Dorothy sat and fingered her scuffed toe and thought about
having a headache.