Beautiful Days (16 page)

“Come on, Good Egg,” she encouraged happily, and her dog went bounding ahead of her toward the house.

By the time she'd made her way up the stone steps to the wrought-iron table, Charlie was gone, but she saw that Cordelia was there, her eyes shaded from the sun with a flattened hand.

“Good morning,” Cordelia said, in a voice that Letty, despite their many years of friendship, did not recognize. It was deep, hoarse with something, which Letty supposed was the smoking she seemed to be doing so much of recently.

“You didn't finish your breakfast,” Letty said, once she could see that this was the case. In fact, the plate of eggs was barely touched.

“No, I don't have much appetite this morning.”

Letty pressed her lips together and took a long look at her friend. Cordelia's hair was limp, and the skin under her eyes had a faint green tinge. “What's the matter?”

“I've got to tell you something, Letty.” Cordelia reached forward across the table, her long fingers fumbling for a cigarette. “I know you're excited about the club's opening—”

“Oh, I am! I've been practicing all my songs and the dances that'll go along with them. But don't think I'm not open to suggestion. I am, of course. I only want to be prepared, but I'll sing any songs you want me to.”

“That's just it.” Cordelia had managed to get a cigarette lit, and her eyes drifted toward the grounds. She shifted her jaw back and forth—a bad habit she used to have when she was younger and anxious, before John came along. “You can't open the club.”

“What?” The earth below Letty's feet seemed to fall away. She waited for the punch line, to wake up from the dream, or at the very least for some small act of grace that would fix this, that would make it not so bad as it had initially sounded. “But I thought Charlie said—”

“We all think you'd be a fine act for the club, Letty. But the opening, that's a big night for us. A big night in a big city, and I'm afraid for the Greys' speakeasy, what we need is a star.” She exhaled in a hurry, and added, as though this would somehow soften the blow: “A real star.”

“Oh,” Letty managed. She tightened the robe around her and turned her face away from Cordelia toward the big stone tiles of the porch. Now she was the one who couldn't make eye contact. The joy drained from her small frame. All her frenzied rehearsing yesterday suddenly seemed embarrassing, like the foolish leaping and yodeling of a girl who didn't know her place in the world. “Oh,” she repeated, in an even fainter voice.

“Lets, I'm sorry.” For some reason Cordelia was talking louder now and at a rapider clip. “I know you were excited. But this is a serious business, and I'm afraid—well, it's just what I have to do. That's all. You understand, don't you?”

Letty nodded, perhaps too enthusiastically, to overcompensate for the fact that she couldn't bring herself to look at Cordelia. If she did, or if she attempted to speak, she knew she would begin to cry. Still nodding, she passed into the house, through the ballroom where earlier she had sashayed and pliéd and done the Charleston, back when she'd still labored under the delusion that someday soon she'd be a nightclub singer. What a pitiful creature that girl seemed now. She trudged into the main hallway, so lost in her own thoughts that she didn't at first notice Astrid coming down the stairs.

“Oh, darling! There's a telegram for you,” she said as Letty reached the second step.

“I'm not sure I could read right now.” Letty had still not regained her voice—she sounded, even to herself, like she was speaking from beneath the staircase.

“Might cheer you up.” Astrid paused as Letty passed her on the way up.

“I'll read it later.”

Letty's shoulders remained slumped as she moved slowly, determinedly toward the Calla Lily Suite—the room that she'd slept in for many weeks now, but which was still decidedly Cordelia's—where she landed facedown on the white bedspread and finally let out the low moaning sob that had been building inside her since she'd stood on the verandah and listened meekly while she was told that everything she had been living for was a lie.

Downstairs, in the library that nobody used anymore, Cordelia sat alone, feeling shattered by the night before and all the things that she had done. She wanted very badly to hear the voice of someone she had known for a long time. The slow, country voice of John Field saying her name as though it was the prettiest word he knew.

She did go as far as having the operator connect her to Union, Ohio, and requesting Dr. Field's line, which was one of the few private house lines in town. “Is it an emergency?” the operator asked, and Cordelia told her that it was. But then she felt ashamed of herself. What did she have to feel shattered by, besides the misbegotten attentions of a very questionable fellow, and her only half reciprocated interest in another, and the grave wrongs that she herself had done to her family and to her oldest friend? Why would the boy she had married only to leave behind want to know anything about that? In the harsh light of midday she wasn't sure why anyone would ever want to hear from her again, so she put down the phone and walked out of the house.

Chapter 15

FOR A LONG WHILE AFTER THE CROSS-COUNTRY WIRES had ceased to crackle with remorse, Letty remained upstairs, prostrate on the bed. Nobody came to disturb her, which was a sure sign that Cordelia was giving her a wide berth. Letty felt blue and emptied out, and she longed, however idiotically, for a friend as old and close as Cordelia upon whom she could unburden her miseries.

It was only one of the many injustices of that afternoon that the only person who might sympathize with her sad and sorry situation was also the person who had taken from her the thing she'd been most looking forward to. Singing at the nightclub had been more than that, even—it had been the event her every second was building toward. The sense of belonging she'd felt that morning had evaporated in seconds, and the dull pain that follows drinking had returned to her forehead. Once she had managed to stop crying she went into the dressing room and situated herself in front of the vanity, but she no longer liked what she saw in the mirror.

The brightness had been sapped from her eyes by the previous night and it was impossible for her to smile, much less mug. She knew she would feel better if she danced and practiced—but what good was that anymore? What good was anything? She had probably been a fool to believe that she could be somebody. None of the people who occupied the rooms below could understand what it was she'd dreamed of, or what Cordelia had cost her by taking away the gig.

But of course she did know a person who understood, and she laughed out loud to think that it had taken this long for her mind to come back around to him. Her view had grown so desperately narrow—she had been so broken up over losing her chance to perform at the club, drowning in that lousy, worthless feeling, that she had forgotten the world outside Dogwood. Grady would listen to her. He was the one who had encouraged her in the first place, and he would surely encourage her now, at this nadir of suffering.

Letty was still a little teary when she boarded a subway car for the Village. But she managed to hold her head up by clinging to the memory of the way Grady had made her feel, like a girl in the pictures, a girl who was at the very beginning of something wonderful; and as she came around the corner onto Barrow Street, she almost managed to smile with the notion that everything was about to be made all right.

Then she did see him, and broke out into a run. “Grady!” she cried. “Oh, Grady, I'm so glad to see you!”

It was not until she reached him that she realized he was wearing a tuxedo, and that his hair was pomaded with extra care into two high, fair ridges over his brow. An older gentleman, also wearing a tuxedo, and a woman draped with an embroidered and tasseled wrap, lingered just behind him as though he were escorting them somewhere. Though ordinarily Letty would have been stunned into a shy silence by the presence of such well-dressed people, at this particular moment she could not help but rush straight to him, already spilling her tale of woe.

“Oh, Grady, the most terrible thing has happened. Cordelia told me this morning that I can't be the singer at their club. I'm back to having nothing again, and I feel so alone out there at Dogwood . . .” She would have gone on—indeed, she still wanted desperately to catalog all the indignities of the day—but she had noticed that neither Grady nor the two people behind him seemed in the least moved by her story.

“Letty Larkspur,” Grady said finally, in a stiff and formal manner that indicated a great distance had opened up between them, “these are my parents, Lewis and Roberta Lodge.”

“Oh, well,” Letty stuttered, “I'm awfully—I mean
very
pleased to meet you!” She tried to put aside her misery for a moment to give them a pleasant impression of her, but she could see that everything had already gone terribly awry. No one budged to shake her hand—his mother only glared at her from the other end of a long, pointed nose and made a disapproving sound from the back of her throat before turning away. Her husband followed quickly behind her. Grady's brow crumpled over his gray eyes and he looked at the sidewalk and then back at Letty as though wishing she would do something different. What that thing would have been she couldn't imagine. Her mouth opened, but before she could think of what to say, he went to follow his parents. He reached the car before they did and opened the door so that they could climb inside.

“I'll be right back,” she heard him say, and then the car door slammed.

“I've been awful somehow, haven't I?” she asked when he returned to her.

“Didn't you get any of my telegrams? Didn't they tell you that I'd called?”

“Your telegrams?” she said, but by then realization was upon her. The dot of her mouth quivered and her eyes got big. “We were supposed to have dinner.”

“Yes. Tonight. We were supposed to have dinner tonight. My parents loathe this part of the city, but they came tonight because I told them how important it was to me, what a special girl you were. My place is filled with twenty dollars' worth of flowers. I kept calling you to see if I could pick you up, but there was no answer. I tried to tell myself it was only that you were getting yourself ready for tonight.” He shook his head, and put his hand in the pocket of his jacket, as though he was rummaging for something. “What an idiot I am. When you didn't show, Mother and Father kept saying that we ought to forget about it and just go have dinner, but I made them wait two hours, insisting you were on your way and worth every minute, even though it meant missing our reservation at the Colony.”

There were many things that Letty wanted to say, but somehow, “Oh, no,” was the only thing she could manage to give breath to. The setbacks of the afternoon seemed another lifetime away already.

“It's my fault, I suppose, for wanting to make it all happen so quickly—” Grady began to say, but he was interrupted by his mother. She had rolled down the window of her limousine and was staring out at the boy and girl standing awkwardly on the walk.

“Young lady, you have already ruined my dinner. Would you kindly allow me to enjoy the rest of my evening?”

“I ought to be going.” Grady sighed and put both hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth. “Mother is awfully upset, and now she'll be very scandalized by the knowledge that the first girl I've wanted them to meet since prep school is not only very rude, but also the kind to sing in nightclubs.”

“I'm so sorry, I can explain everything that happened!” She opened her palms up to him hopefully. Had she meant to grab his collar, touch his face? In any event, he stepped back, and she had no choice but to lower them, slowly and pathetically, to her sides. “I'm sorry,” she repeated in a smaller and more chastened voice.

“At times, you and I have seemed to be the perfect company.” Grady's gaze went to the treetops, and then to the pavement—but never to a place where he might accidentally see the sorrow in her face. “And other times you seem not to care about seeing me at all. That's fine, I suppose, only—only I don't much like the way it makes me feel.”

“I'm sorry, I—”

Now his eyes did meet hers, and she found that being looked at in such a situation is infinitely worse than not being looked at. “In fact, I'm rather sick of the game, and I don't know that I care to see you anymore.”

“Oh, Grady, please don't say that,” she whispered. Too quickly he was in the car, and the car had sped down the street, and she was alone in the hot, still night.

Or not completely alone, for as soon as she'd scrunched up her eyes—as though that might take the sting away—she heard footsteps on the stoop behind her and a low whistle. She kept her eyes tight and her hands balled up with fistfuls of skirt and hoped this unwanted presence would dissolve back into the city. But no such luck.

“Those Lodges sure do travel in style.”

It was a male voice, neither young nor old. She prayed that he was talking to someone else, but apparently he was alone, because when he went on, he addressed her.

“You look classy enough, but not of their ilk. The sort to drive around in limousines, lunching at the Ritz, flying down to Florida whenever the weather round here gets so they don't like it. Must be a nice way to live, don't you think?” When she didn't say anything, he repeated himself. “Don't you think it would be nice?”

“I think it would be nice.” Her voice sounded hollowed out.

“Me, too. That's why I can't figure the Grady fellow. Wants to be a writer, wants to make his own way in the world. If I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I wouldn't care if I knew how to read. I'd have daiquiris by the pool and pay someone to read to me. Takes a strange man to work when he doesn't have to, and stranger yet to turn down money that could be his for nothing.”

“The Lodges are pretty fine, are they?” Her shoulders went slack. Suddenly she felt sore and fatigued from her practicing the day before.

The man whistled again. “They are pretty fine. Haven't you ever heard of Dorian Dog Food? That's where her money came from, piles of it, and he's from one of those nice old families that send their sons away to school. I'd say they are pretty fine.”

Another car passed on the street, but it was not Grady coming back to see if she was going to be all right.

Turning, she tried to smile, but it was a weak attempt. “Everything that goes down must come up, right?” She had once heard a girl say this in a radio play, and it had sounded irreverent and brave in her lyrical radio voice. But the words were like lead when Letty heard them coming out of her own mouth.

The man, who had a five o'clock shadow but otherwise didn't look much older than Grady, put his cigarette to his lips, considering what she'd said. “I think it's the other way around,” he replied after a while.

This, for some reason, was the thing she finally could not bear. She covered her face and hurried down the street, hoping that she could make it around the corner before the tears started and she embarrassed herself again.

“Don't go.” Cordelia sprawled across Astrid's bed and watched her friend imploringly. She'd spent most of the afternoon walking the grounds and brooding, and had come indoors just in time to see Letty advancing toward the gates, a tiny figure clad in white amid a field of green. Angry at herself, she'd pulled her sweat-dampened tunic over her head and thrown it across the room. Even after she knew Letty was gone, her guilt had thrummed on unabated, and for a while she stewed in her suite, wondering how everything in her life had turned to rot so quickly. She continued in a similar state of mind until she heard an unusual amount of traffic on the main stairs, and had drifted into Astrid's room. “Please, don't go.”

“Can't be helped, darling.” Astrid bent over the chair of the vanity, turning her face this way and that to best assess whether or not the wide-brimmed black hat she was wearing should come with her or not. “I might have to murder your handsome brother if I stay, and prison garb simply won't do justice to my figure.”

“But couldn't you talk again in the light of day?” asked Cordelia, for whom a dramatic departure had always signaled an intention not to return. “Maybe you were both just overheated last night.”

Astrid straightened and caught Cordelia's eye in the mirror. “There's been plenty of time this morning for him to apologize, if indeed he was merely ‘overheated.'” With nimble fingers, she removed the hat, and then walked across the floor and handed it to Milly, who was struggling with one of the several pieces of luggage that had reappeared in the hallway that morning. “But he has more important things to see to, I suppose, and it won't be
me
groveling to
him
saying
I'm
sorry.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm
not
sorry.”

The strap of Cordelia's slip fell away from her shoulder and she put it back in place. “He didn't really say that he has more important things to see to than you, did he?”

“Oh, yes. He said it was a dumb idea, my coming to live here, and that he couldn't really think about me, what with the business and the Hales and how the situation with them changes every minute.”

“Every minute? That's a bit much, isn't it?”

“I don't know.” Astrid waved her hands in the air dismissively. As though this reminded her of something, she went over to the nightstand and picked up her engagement ring. “Something about the Hales vandalizing the club.”

Cordelia had been lounging before but now she bolted upright. “My club?”

Astrid blinked at her. “Yes, I suppose.”

Was that what Thom was threatening last night? Had he left The Bedroom and gone to the Greys' place to oversee the damage himself? Cordelia's jaw got tight and her teeth clenched together. Only when Astrid's green eyes sailed from Cordelia's face to her hands did she realize how overwhelmed with fury she was.

“I'm sorry,” Cordelia whispered.

“Don't be sorry, darling. I know you want to talk to Charlie about what's happened.” A fragile smile played on her face. “Well, go!”

Cordelia went to Astrid and put her arms around her neck. “Come back soon, all right?”

“All right.” Astrid winked sadly and released Cordelia from her embrace. “Don't think I'd miss your club opening for anything in the world.”

“I'll ring you.”

She found Charlie in the poolroom on the second floor, playing billiards in a worn undershirt and tailored slacks. He was with Danny and some of the other boys, and when she came in, he glanced up from the table but did not speak. He seemed reluctant to acknowledge her at all, but after a moment of glancing from her slip to her face, he handed her the collared shirt he had been wearing earlier. With a faint nod of understanding she pulled it on and rolled the sleeves up. Once she was more covered he bent to take his shot.