Wild Midnight (15 page)

No, she wasn’t ready for this at all, Rachel thought as she studied her unfamiliar bright blue taffeta image in the pier glass. Not the game of trying to be attractive and desirable—a game that D’Arcy seemed to think was perfectly valid for an eligible young widow. And particularly that part of it when she had a hard time choking back that war, and people who trained constantly for it. She’d wanted to stand up, throw her napkin on the table, and leave them to their good-natured macho jokes about how funny it was.
 

“Will you quit that?” D’Arcy said, taking the pins out her mouth long enough to speak. “It’s not going to come up any
higher,
Rachel, that taffeta’s interlined and won’t give an inch. So just quit it!”
 

“D’Arcy, it’s not a question of that—I just can’t breathe,” she protested. “After all”—Rachel looked down at herself despairingly—”my bust is, uh, so much bigger than yours.”
 

D’Arcy handed the pin box to Sissy, who sat on the bed watching the operation with critical eyes. The older sister rolled her eyes heavenward. “Are you listening to all this? Do you realize she’s actually
complaining
about having that lucious Dolly Parton-type figure? When all I’m trying to do is find her something decent to wear so that Major Furman, or whoever Bob’s got for her tonight; will take one look at her and be absolutely
blown away
?”
 

The three women regarded Rachel’s reflection in the long mirror.
 

“It’s the wrong color,” Sissy said, squinting at the taffeta gown judiciously. “That peacock blue’s too dark for somebody with red hair, D’Arcy. And it is too tight in the bust. It’s sort of mashing her.”
 

“I can wear a street-length dress,” Rachel gasped. “Or better yet, I can stay here tonight with Sissy. I’d enjoy that, D’Arcy, really I would.”
 

Rachel’s more voluptuous figure wasn’t suited to the daring gowns that D’Arcy, almost fashion-model thin, managed so elegantly. She had formal dresses of her own, but as the executive secretary of a newly formed farmers’ cooperative in a rural southern town, Rachel hadn’t considered them a top priority item when she’d packed to leave Philadelphia. Besides, her wardrobe at home was the ultimate in conservative styling when compared to D’Arcy’s collections.
 

It was the moment to insist that she wanted to stay at home to watch Saturday night television with Sissy. But Clara, the cook and the Butlers’ general housekeeper, suddenly said from the bedroom doorway, “I think Miss Sissy’s right. Why don’t you try that new white dress you ain’t worn yet, Miss D’Arcy, the one you done bought in New Orleans?”
 

“Oh, mah God.” D’Arcy got to her feet and blew back a strand of fine gold hair from her mouth. Frowning, she stared at Rachel, her hands on her hips. “Ugh, why didn’t we think about this before I started with the damned hem? Here I am down on my knees, and you’re just standing there and squashed just flat as a damned board in front, Rachel, besides looking like you’re choking to death.”
 

“D’Arcy, this is a lot of trouble to go to—” Rachel began. Her words were cut short as D’Arcy and the tall black cook quickly stripped away the taffeta ballgown, leaving her clad only in her sensible cotton panties.
 

“I’ll get it,” Sissy cried, jumping up from the bed.
 

“D’Arcy,” Rachel said, reaching vainly for something to cover her and finding nothing but her hands. “I really appreciate your going to all this trouble, but actually I’m not all that keen on—”
 

They weren’t listening. A length of heavy white silk crepe settled over Rachel’s head. Hands zipped up the back of the gown and smoothed it over her breasts and waist as Rachel watched with something between laughter and sheer amazement.
 

“I think we’ve got it this time,” D’Arcy cried. Her fingers were busy with the long single braid of Rachel’s hair, pinned back in a low bun at her neck.
 

Rachel could hardly bring herself to look in the mirror. The exquisite formal gown was made of heavy white crepe cut on Empire lines, the waistline brought up abruptly under a low-cut bodice embroidered with seed pearls and tiny crystal beads, barely supported by self-covered spaghetti straps. Where the blue-green taffeta had made Rachel look garish, the white crepe molded itself to her with an impossible mixture of seductiveness and almost Olympian majesty.
 

“I look like an extra in a movie about Napoleon,” Rachel groaned, covering her nearly naked upthrust breasts with one hand. “My nipples will pop out if I bend over!”
 

“If you drop anything, just let your date pick it up,” D’Arcy told her practically.
 

It was Sissy’s idea to wind a strand of fake pearls in the thick heavy braid D’Arcy had plaited into a dark red coronet at the top of Rachel’s head. It was not the first time Rachel had worn formal clothes, they all understood that. But somehow with D’Arcy’s fabulously expensive gown, this one with an Yves Saint Laurent, the braided coronet of dark red hair with touches of pearls gave Rachel a look that was decidedly not quite her own.
 

“She looks very Old Charleston,” Sissy observed. “Especially since she doesn’t wear makeup.”
 

“Oh, mah God, I knew we had forgotten something,” her sister cried.
 

Sissy was sent for D’Arcy’s morocco leather makeup case, and under protest Rachel allowed the teenager to touch her lips with a shade of russet lipstick that for once did not clash with her hair-color or the opaque white skin tones of her bared shoulders and bust. While Rachel moaned, Sissy enthusiastically added dabs of green-brown eye shadow.
 

There was a silence as they stood back to view the finished product.
 

“Good Lord,” D’Arcy murmured, “she needs a
fan
! She looks like something out of
My Fair Lady
!”
 

“Suck in your gut,” Sissy said tersely. “It makes your boobs stand out.”
 

“You look just fine, honey,” the cook said approvingly. “Don’t let them girls tease you.”
 

Rachel stared at the woman in the pier glass. An incredible redheaded vision appeared there in a white Empire gown that dramatically, even outrageously, revealed her slender, lush figure, her long creamy neck, and the frivolous wonder of her jeweled coiffure.
 

She stood studying herself for a long moment, unwilling to analyze her own confused feelings. Within the space of a few days her life had taken so many abrupt turnings, she was not sure herself how to cope with them. It was not just this beautiful woman who stared back from the glass that disturbed her. Even attired as a fashionable Charleston beauty on her way to dinner and the opera, she recognized herself; she knew she had a certain prettiness, that it could be enhanced, and that she’d been blessed with a figure that had always attracted more attention than Rachel considered good for her peace of mind. It wasn’t even the startled realization that D’Arcy’s exquisite gown somewhat resembled the one she had worn in her dream of the night before, that curious foreboding fantasy of storm and ghostly ballrooms, when she had danced in Beau Tillson’s arms.
 

No, more than anything it was the puzzling knowledge that she was revealed as a disturbingly sensuous creature. This was what the full-length pier glass was telling her with brutal honesty. It was that sensuousness, Rachel knew with a sudden shiver, Beau Tillson had seen and desired.
 

She saw reflected in the pier glass a woman in all the elegantly worldly trappings of her beautiful clothes, who had responded so eagerly to her lover’s warm hard mouth and the feel of his hands, who had lain in his arms and desired him without remorse, without guilt, without restraint—only wildest pleasure. It didn’t matter that this was someone she didn’t know existed. She was there.
 

She couldn’t drag her eyes away from this somewhat frightening image of herself.
 

D’Arcy murmured. “Mah God, I don’t even think she knows how she looks!”
 

Ah, but she knew, that was the problem. “What do you think?” Rachel said in a small voice.
 

The three women stared back at her.
 

It was D’Arcy who said softly, “Honey, I guess you’re going to have to get used to the fact that you’re downright beautiful.”
 

The evening might well have been, as Rachel feared, a disaster. But it was very much a success, if exhausting. The Air Force major D’Arcy’s date provided seemed happy, dazzled, even overwhelmed. At the Charleston Opera Company’s presentation of
Rigoletto
he spent most of his time studying Rachel’s fascinating cleavage instead of the melodrama unfolding onstage.
 

Dinner and dancing at the night spot, Poki Joe’s, was hectically pleasant. Rachel wasn’t a very accomplished dancer and not much of a fan of loud disco music, but her Air Force major seemed perfectly willing to make the sacrifice and dance only the slow numbers, holding Rachel tightly in his arms, merely swaying in time to the music. Sometime during their third or fourth dance she discovered, from the messages his body was sending, that the major was distinctly interested in her, and she tried to put a little distance between them. The dreaded conversation seemed to take care of itself; mostly it was limited to persuasive arguments as to why Rachel shouldn’t go back to Draytonville on Sunday, but spend an extra week in Charleston; how beautiful she looked; and warnings to other Air Force officers at the night club about trying to cut in. It was all so exhilarating, even at times funny, that Rachel spent a good amount of time laughing. The effect on her date was to make him even more spellbound. It certainly cancelled out her social awkwardness of the morning’s tennis date.
 

When they finally got home at a little after two a.m., Sissy was waiting up for them.
 

“Tell me all about it,” the teenager demanded, as they climbed the great curving stair to the second story and their bedrooms. “Is he going to date her again, D’Arcy? What did he say? What did you all do? Did everybody look at you?”
 

The sisters piled into Rachel’s bedroom for the traditional evening’s postmortem. It was, Rachel thought, looking at them fondly, like being in college again.
 

“Your lipstick’s smeared,” Sissy said, staring owlishly. “Did he try to kiss you?”
 

Rachel rubbed her hand over her mouth. There had been a prolonged struggle in the major’s car over her address in Draytonville and her telephone number, which had beer flattering but not what she needed at the moment.
 

D’Arcy sighed. “Next time we’ll have things more planned.” Wearily, she leaned back on her elbows on Rachel’s bed, her blond loveliness in a black satin sheath and diamond drop earrings an exotic counterpart to Rachel’s red hair, white gown, and pearls. “Oh, Rachel honey, having you around really livens things up, you just don’t know how much! It’s just pure fun introducing a raving beauty to Charleston—there isn’t a bachelor in town who’ll get a good night’s sleep after this. When you come back we’ll have more time to do some shopping, buy a whole lot of things we don’t have to sew you into, sugar. I’d just love to dress you up. You’ve just knocked Charleston’s eyes out after tonight—last night,” she corrected herself, looking down at her gold wristwatch. “Sissy here was the most crazy ripple at the opera, you could just hear people hiking up in their seats to look, and all the programs fluttering. And, of course, there’s more eligible men around than just the Navy and Air base. I swear, during second intermission two of the Izard boys came over and just hung around, and I thought Major Furman was going to dive bomb them! Rachel, you just haven’t seen anything yet. We have to introduce you to a bunch of the Old Charleston bachelors, they’d go out of their minds. The horse crowd—we play polo around here, you know, old money, banking, and of course all the old plantation people like Middletons and Rhetts. Quiet social types, you’d feel like you’d never left Philadelphia. She reached over impulsively to pat Rachel’s hand.
 

“When can you come back?” Sissy wanted to know.
 

Rachel sighed. Things were becoming even more difficult to explain. “I’d have to think about it,” she said evasively.
 

But she had already made up her mind.
 

At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, while Sissy and D’Arcy, only nominal churchgoers, were still in bed, Rachel left the Butler house and turned westward on King Street.
 

Charleston Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, more commonly known as Quakers, was located in one of Charleston’s famous “single houses,” those eighteenth century structures turned end-on to the street and looking as though they belonged to a block of duplexes that had been pulled apart. They were straight up and down, with chimneys set in walls with round “earthquake bolts” from the remembered disaster of the last century, most with lovely walled gardens full of flowers and sweet-smelling shrubs. They made the narrow streets seem like part of a very English small city. The Monthly Meeting House was, like most of Old Charleston, “below the drain”—as the ancient boundary was called—well within walking distance.