Chocolates for Breakfast (11 page)

“Well,” he said, “what would you like for dinner?” He mustn't let Courtney know that she had hurt him; it wasn't the child's fault that she had stopped loving him.

“Roast beef, very rare. And a Caesar salad to begin with, please.”

“Hollywood habits,” he smiled. “We'll have to make a New Yorker out of you again.”

“It's going to be good to be back in New York,” she said. “I'll see Janet again, for one thing.”

“Is she still at Scaisbrooke?”

“No,” Courtney said. “She got kicked out last spring. She went to school in New York this year.”

“She seems to have a habit of getting kicked out.”

“Yes,” Courtney said. “She's gotten the axe from every school she's gone to—except one, back in elementary school.”

“Do you think it's such a good idea for you to start seeing her again? I remember your housemother used to say she was a bad influence on you.”

“You worry so, Daddy. No, Fo-bitch never liked Janet, that's all. Janet's all right. She just has a grudge against institutions. I wonder what it will be like, being back in New York? For one thing, it will be nice to have a change of seasons. Perpetual blue skies drive me mad.” She grinned. “I used to wake up in the morning and pray for rain, for wretched drizzle to break the monotony. Even the rainy season is monotonous.”

“It will be good for you to get back to sanity, too,” Robbie said. “Hollywood is the sort of town where you wake up in the morning and look out to see if it's still there. I expect the whole movie colony to pick up its tents one night and go back to whatever fairyland they came from.”

“That's Mummy's line.”

“I know. I have nothing to call my own.”

When Robbie thought about the dinner afterwards, reproaching himself for not having said the things he had meant to say, he found it difficult to remember what they had talked about, although the dinner seemed very long. Yet there was really nothing he could have said. It was too late to undo what had been done, or to do what had not been done, and he could not ask his daughter to give him what he had denied her.

Robbie went back to New York that evening, and found a summer sub-lease in Murray Hill at a reasonable rent. He was so in debt now that he was at least determined that Courtney should have a nice home to come to.

Sondra and Courtney Farrell followed, a few weeks before Courtney's seventeenth birthday, laden with new clothes in new white luggage, all on charge accounts. They were very gay fugitives, heading for a life they could not know. As the lights of Hollywood fell behind the black California hills, Sondra opened the bottle of Piper Heidseck and they toasted each other and New York in paper cups.

“To a lovely life,” Sondra said, and looked at her daughter a moment. “Darling—you do love me, don't you?”

“Yes, Mummy,” Courtney smiled, and sipped her champagne.

Chapter 14

T
he sublet apartment was not furnished in the wall-to-wall carpeting, solid-color taste of her mother, but it was pleasant and contained many antiques. There was a solid and secure feeling to it, and the building was only a few doors from Park Avenue. Courtney was pleased that they would live here, and she wondered, as they entered with their white luggage, what associations the apartment would come to hold for her.

That night, feeling adrift and isolated, Courtney called the only person whom she had cared to salvage from the many years at boarding school, Janet Parker. Janet was surprised and delighted to hear from Courtney, and being somehow without a date for the evening, she asked Courtney to come up to her apartment.

As Courtney took the taxi up Park Avenue, she felt a sense of peace at the reassuringly businesslike, gray buildings of New York. Hollywood, with its pastel buildings and lotus-shaped swimming pools, was behind her now, and except for the new consciousness which she carried within her, might never have existed.

The maid answered the door, pale and starched in her uniform, and looking somehow harassed. Courtney had just started to ask for Janet when she came out of the bedroom in her bathrobe. She was slightly tanned from spring house parties, but her tan was augmented by make-up too dark for her years. She rushed past the maid as though she were not there and flung her arms around Courtney.

“Court! Darling! How absolutely great to see you!”

The maid muttered something about taking Courtney's coat which passed unheard, and shuffled ineffectually into the kitchen.

“Come on into my room,” Janet said. She lowered her voice. “The room is in an awful mess and the stupid maid refuses to clean it, but I hate to sit in the living room. Daddy is slightly bombed in there and he's angry with me about something—I'm not sure what—but if you really feel you ought to, you can come in and see him. Yes, I guess you should; you're about the only one of my friends he likes, but really, he's bombed out of his head.”

“That's all right,” Courtney grinned. “I'll go through the motions anyway. Jesus, it's great to see you, sweetie! You really look just the same.”

“I'll bet you have an awful lot to tell me,” Janet continued as she led Courtney into the living room. When she came into the room she stopped. There was only one light on, and Mr. Parker sat by the window with a glass of bourbon, staring out at Park Avenue eleven stories below. He was a heavy-set, gray-haired man with the weak eyes of the alcoholic. His face was square and determined, belying the ineffectual eyes. There was something alien about him as he sat beside the window with his drink. He was a man apart, one sensed a dangerous man, a man who no longer cared for the niceties of companionship or ice with his bourbon. He did not turn around when they came in or acknowledge their presence by any change in expression.

“Daddy, Courtney is here. She just got back from California.”

He turned reluctantly.

“Hello, Courtney. I'm glad you're back. Maybe you can make some sense out of Janet. Are you here for the summer?” His voice was harsh and strong, as though he were giving instructions to a subordinate.

“Hello, Mr. Parker, it's good to see you again. No,” she answered his question, “I've moved back to New York.”

He nodded briefly and retreated to the world beyond the window.

“Come on, Court,” Janet said. “Do you want a drink? Oh, I guess you still don't drink.”

“No, I'd love a drink, Jan. Scotch.”

“Sweetie, you're becoming domesticated.”

She went into the pantry and fixed the drinks. The harassed maid was doing the dinner dishes and humming abstractedly to herself. Then Janet took Courtney to her bedroom.

Janet's bedroom, like the rest of the apartment, had a slightly brocaded look to it which Mrs. Parker mistook for elegance. The walls were light blue and the furniture was upholstered in pink with overtones of gold. There was a large mirror above her dressing table which reflected the bed, unmade and covered with records and clothing, and a lighter space on the door leading to the bathroom which indicated that a full-length mirror had been there. The room was more than disarrayed; it was chaos. Crinolines, dresses, a bedspread, letters, and photographs littered the floor. On the bureau was a silver shoe, standing in solitary splendor among the perfume bottles and photographs, undoubtedly placed there while Janet was trying to locate something on the floor.

“Are you hungry, sweetie? The maid could bring us something, along with a lecture on my room—whenever she comes in here she lectures me. Mother should have fired her, but she's a little afraid of maids, and Daddy doesn't care.”

“No, Jan, that's all right. Well tell me, what have you been doing with yourself in the past year?”

Janet was sitting at the dressing table taking off her make-up with cold cream. She looked at Courtney in the mirror, pausing dramatically.

“Court, you're going to flip. Or maybe you won't. It finally happened.”

“Did it
really
?” With Janet, Courtney was beginning to resume the staccato prep-school speech which she had fallen away from.

“Yes, it was when I was in Bermuda. I got bombed one night and the son of a bitch did it. I really didn't know what was happening until afterwards, and I was mad as hell, but it had happened. Then I met this guy—this drummer from Harvard—and I figured what the hell, and we made it. Then it was different and it really had happened. I had an affair with him for months—two—he has this beautiful body, his neck sort of
blends
into his shoulders—really beautiful.”

It never occurred to Courtney to ask Janet if she was in love.

“Is it still going on? I mean, this drummer?”

“No, after he went back to Harvard I didn't see him. I went up there once and looked him up, but he had a date for the weekend. He simply
ignored
me. Bastard.”

Courtney leaned back against Janet's pillow. Now was the time for a roommate's confidences, now that she knew Janet would understand.

“Well, you know that actor I wrote you about?”

Janet nodded in the mirror.

“Well, I—we—I had an affair with him.”

Janet got up and sat on the bed.

“Oh, sweetie, how great! Well, so you're not a kid any more.”

Courtney shook her head.

“But isn't he the one you said was a fairy?”

“Yes . . .”

“Well, doesn't that—I mean—”

“No, it doesn't make any difference.” Courtney was feeling very much like a woman of the world.

Janet grinned and shook her head.

“Well, I never would have thought it of you. I mean, that both of us—well, it's really funny, the way you were so naïve in school, and now we've both made it. Funny, the way things work out.”

“But it's only one with me.” Somehow Courtney felt a need to re-establish her moral superiority.

“Yes, I've had two.” A note of pride came into Janet's voice.

This wasn't at all what Courtney meant. Somehow, too, she felt that telling Janet cheapened what she and Barry had had. But she was glad that she had told her, so that she wasn't alone with it any more. Each of the girls felt a justification in the other's complicity. As Janet talked, Courtney felt somehow that Janet had missed something, and she was glad that with her it had been Barry, and not some tight college boy. Then suddenly she didn't want to talk about it any more.

“Hey, Jan, what about putting on a record or something?”

Janet looked around the bed until she found the record she wanted. She grinned as Kenton's “Abstraction” filled the room with the familiar sounds.

“Court,” she said, “want a banana?” And suddenly, it was as though they were back at boarding school, before they had known all this.

“Janet, sweetie, you're an idiot.”

They both laughed. Janet handed Courtney a cigarette and lit one herself. She nodded approvingly as Courtney smoked hers. They lay on the bed in familiar silence. It was good to be with Janet who knew her so well, and with whom she did not need to explain herself. They formed a happy world when they were together, a world without censure or criticism. It was good that in their separation their lives had followed similar patterns, so that they could be with each other with no strain or lack of understanding. They resumed where they had left off, their friendship strengthened by the new knowledge that they held in common. They both had been alone for a year, and it was good not to be alone any longer.

It was Courtney who broke the silence.

“Where is your mother?”

“Oh, didn't I tell you? No, that's right—that last letter I wrote you was returned.” Janet did not ask why her letter was returned, why Courtney had left Beverly Hills without a forwarding address. If Courtney wanted to tell her, she would.

“Mother is in the sanitarium again,” Janet continued. “You know, she just can't take Daddy's drinking, and I guess my staying out on two-day parties and all doesn't help. She's been there for six months now. She just cried all the time, and had all these obscure ailments.”

“Do you know when she's getting out?”

“It's kind of indefinite. She may be back in July. You know, every once in a while she just has to leave.”

“Yes, I remember at Scaisbrooke when she left for a few months.”

“Well, nobody can take Daddy without some relief. Of course, I'm home as little as possible. You see that door, the one that leads into the bathroom between my bedroom and the parents?”

Courtney nodded.

“There used to be a full-length mirror there, when they first moved in. This room was the nursery, and my crib and all was here. Mother used to run in here at night sometimes when Daddy was really drunk and lock that door. She always was kind of afraid of him, even then,” she mused. “And he used to try to break that door down, and he knocked off the mirror and cracked it so often that finally Mother decided there wasn't any use in getting it fixed any more.”

“Kind of violent of him.”

“Well, Daddy and I have an understanding. I'm not afraid of him the way Mother is. He knows if he ever tried to hurt me, I'd kill him. We respect each other, in an odd way. We're kind of alike. Once he slapped me and I threw my shoe at him and called him a son of a bitch, and I came in here and locked the door and wouldn't let him in. He was mad because I had stayed out two nights on a party—you know, we all fell asleep on the floor and then woke up and resumed the party; one of those—and he was sure I had slept with somebody. I hadn't,” she added.

This was the ugliness in Janet's life, a life of wealth and endless dates, of subdeb and then deb parties, of superficial glamour and gaiety. Courtney knew of the ugliness at Scaisbrooke, and when Janet mentioned it now, she reacted as she had with the ugliness in Barry's life. She did not want to know about it, to talk about it, as though by ignoring it, it would disappear. The dead leaves were in this swimming pool as well, but perhaps by walking by very quickly she would not see them.

“You know,” Courtney said, “I really love being in New York, but the trouble is I don't know any men here.”

“Well, sweetie, I can take care of that. Look, give me your phone number—no, better yet, stay overnight here—and I'm going to a cocktail party tomorrow night, and I'll get you a date.”

“Oh, Jan, that would be marvelous. I adore cocktail parties.”

“Now that you drink, you know, I can dig up lots of parties. I couldn't before, because you were sort of out of it. I think you'll like this party, it's going to be a real blast, and the whole crew will be there. You'll probably get some dates out of it, and once the crew gets to know you, you'll be all set.”

And so, almost by inadvertence, Courtney began to adopt Janet's life. She called her mother and told her that she was staying overnight with Janet, and her mother was pleased that Courtney would not be alone. Courtney was happy that she would be going to a cocktail party the following night, she was happy that she had such a good friend in Janet. The days of spending her life with adults were over; she was about to discover a group of young people who, like Janet, had led lives similar to her own, and the guilt and solitude that she had known with Barry Cabot were far behind her now. She was sure of these things as she lay in bed beside Janet, who was already asleep. She was sure that with Janet, and with Janet's friends, she would find herself.

Mr. Parker awoke before them and had escaped to his Wall Street office by the time they got up for breakfast. It was almost noon, and the maid muttered to herself that Miss Janet always wanted breakfast when she was in the middle of cleaning the house, and she never could have breakfast when Mr. Parker did, to make things simpler for her.

“If you don't like my hours, Peggy, you can always quit,” Janet said curtly. The maid didn't answer but went into the kitchen to fix their breakfast.

“Mother is always talking to Peggy about my getting up late, so she feels she has some right to criticize me. Mother always spoils the maids, but when we get new ones, they usually quit because of Daddy's tempers or my room or something, so we have to put with second-rate maids,” she explained.

Janet was able to get Courtney a date with a Yale junior, George Keyes. She assured her that George was very attractive and a great drinker—never got bombed. In short the ideal date for a cocktail party.

Courtney went home to change and Janet went with her. Mrs. Farrell was pleased to see Janet. Despite Scaisbrooke's insistence that Janet was a bad influence on Courtney, Sondra had always liked Janet. She admired the courage, however misdirected, that caused her to rebel against the school's students and faculty, and she felt that Janet's determined gaiety was good for Courtney, who tended to get so moody.