Love & Mrs. Sargent (22 page)

“
Why, Mrs. Sargent!” Mrs. Flood took a tentative step forward.

“Oh, Floodie, what have I done to deserve all this? First Allison. . . .”

“Is anything the matter with Allison?”

“Oh, no. Nothing! Only that today she turned on me like a viper—threw into my face everything I’ve ever tried to do for her.”

“Young people are very odd nowadays, Mrs. Sargent. Tomor
row she’ll be a different girl.”

“Then Dicky. He knows, Floodie. He knows about everything. About that review I wrote, about the books I bought. He knows it all and he hates me for it.”

“Oh, you mustn’t say that. No
nice
boy would
ever
hate his
mother!”

“And now. . . .” Her sobbing had become uncontrollable. “And now . . . Peter . . . Mr. Johnson has gone out. . . . Just out. . . . Not that I’d mind. But he lied to me. He can’t . . . he can’t stand the sight of me. . . .”

“I’m so sorry, my dear,” Mrs. Flood said, laying a wrinkled hand on Sheila’s shoulder. “I know that you. . . . Well, I
sensed
that you felt very warmly toward him.”

“Floodie, they all hate me after all I’ve done for them. Every one of them. And, Floodie, what can I do? I can’t stand going on this way for one minute more. I can’t stand any more. Truly, Floodie, I can’t stand it.”

“Oh, Mrs. Sargent,” Mrs. Flood said, “I know things look black now but I keep remembering the wonderful, wonderful thing you said: ‘God giveth the shoulder according to the burden.’ You must remember that, my dear, and always. . . .”

Sheila’s hand shot out and struck Mrs. Flood. “You fool! Get out of here! Do you understand me?”

“Mrs. Sar-gent!”

“Yes, you heard me, you pretentious old nincompoop. Get out and stay out! Get out! Get out! Get
out
!”

Ashen, her jaw hanging slack, Mrs. Flood backed out of the room. Alone again, Sheila threw herself onto the sofa and dissolved once more into loud, racking sobs.

FRIDAY

I.

At exactly half past six in the morning Taylor, mystified and
still groggy with sleep, tapped on Mrs. Sargent’s bedroom door.
Taylor was a creature of habit and it was his habit to rise at seven-fifteen, set the breakfast table, give the lower floor a cursory tidying and read the funnies before anyone required his personal attention. The only time Mrs. Sargent had
ever
rung for him between the hours of midnight and nine was the night
when Allison had been born eighteen years ago and the experi
ence had unsettled him so that he scraped the chromium trim off the running board of Sheila’s La Salle in the parking lot at Evanston Hospital.

Taylor was neither quick nor bright and his wife Bertha reminded him of it often enough so that he was fully aware of his shortcomings. He realized that his wife, his employer, his employer’s daughter and his employees secretary—even though female—were more intelligent, in varying degrees, than he. (Although he hadn’t quite understood when Bertha told him that he was
almost
as stupid as Mrs. Flood.) Bertha was smart enough for two and Taylor was perfectly satisfied to leave things as they were. And this morning Bertha had been smart
enough to stay in bed herself and let Taylor be the one to dress and answer Mrs. Sargent’s bell.

But Taylor just did not care for the recent changes in his placid routine. All week there had been funny things happening, “People missin’ their meals,” Taylor grumbled. “Trays to tote; not a blessed soul showin’ up for Bertha’s good chicken marengo; Mr. Dicky drunk an’ cryin’ in his room; Miz Flood cryin’ in
her
room; Miss Allie in
her
room; Miz Sargent locked in
her
room talkin’ to herself, won’t even let Bertha turn down the baid; that reporter man takin’ my fresh-washed Lincoln out in the rain; crazy gal with a gun! Just don’t seem lak. . . .”

“Come in,” Sheila called brightly, “Good morning, Taylor.”

“Good morning, Miz Sargent. You feelin’ all right?” She certainly
looked
all right, Taylor thought—pretty new dress on, crazy new cat coat, fancy new hat.

“Perfectly splendid, thank you,” Sheila said. “Taylor, I wish you’d bring the Lincoln around to the side door. I’m. . . .”

“The Lincoln, Miz Sargent? Hadn’t I oughta wash the Lincoln for tonight? Station wagon’s nice and. . . .”

“I want the Lincoln,” Sheila said flatly. “I’m going out now. The others are to breakfast in their rooms. Say you’re waxing the dining table and please send these notes up to them on their trays.” She handed Taylor four envelopes.

“You don’t want any breakfast, Miz Sargent? It ain’t even seven.”

“I’ll stop off somewhere, thank you, Taylor. I expect to be out all morning but I’ll be back early this afternoon. Please ask Bertha to give the others a
very
good lunch. Something fancy. And I think you might open a couple of bottles of champagne. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Miz Sargent.”

“Thank you, Taylor. And now, if you’ll bring the car around.”

The last twelve hours had been strange and exciting for
Sheila, Strange because she had never before felt such a melange of conflicting emotions and exciting for the same reason. Last
evening she had caught herself in the midst of her furious weeping and got so interested in the fact that she was crying that she stopped, blew her nose and tried to figure just how long it had been since she’d cried that hard. Well, she’d shed a couple of tears at Allison’s graduation from Roycemore, but
those were tears of sentiment. She’d shed even more when Dicky had been asked to leave Yale, but those were tears of rage. She’d
cried quite a lot at the premiere of
The Dick Sargent Story
but those had been tears of pride. It must have been when her husband died. Not at the great funeral, not at the memorial services. She had kept perfect control then, smiling wanly, bravely from behind a rather skimpy mourning veil made patriotically in accordance with L-85 wartime restrictions. No, she remembered. It was the very night his plane had gone down. She had retired early with a book and had lain in bed disapproving of
Forever Amber
when the doorbell rang. She had gone
downstairs, received the telegram, read it, asked the boy to wait,
gone to fetch her change purse, tipped the boy, thanked him and returned to her room. Then she had thrown herself onto the bed she had expected to be sharing with her husband twenty-four hours hence and cried her heart out. The next morning—by then it was in every newspaper—she had been composure itself. She had tried to explain to Dicky that Daddy wouldn’t be back that night and that he would have to be the Man of the House for some time to come. She had telephoned Bishop
Stewart to arrange for the funeral and then dressed in black broadcloth to grant the press an interview. After that there had been moments of longing, but no more tears.

Last night Sheila had gone quietly up to her room before the servants could see her in her disheveled condition, locked her door and sat down before her mirror to have a frank, heart-
to-heart talk with her reflection. She was constantly urging her
readers to look deep within themselves and to answer, unashamedly, such embarrassing questions as “Was I wrong!?”
“Have I been fair?” “Is this a real emotion or is it simply vanity?”
Sheila was proud of being ruthlessly honest with herself no matter how much it hurt. She had written more than a few times—in her column and in her books—that the troubles of the world could be cut in half if only
everybody
would subject
himself to periodic bouts of introspection, casting out pride and
self-deception for honesty and genuine reappraisal.

She had felt almost like beginning with “Mirror, mirror on
the wall.” But, having got a good look at herself, she had decided
to postpone the Inner Sheila for just long enough to do something about the Outer One. Her face and hair had been a
perfect mess. At some time during the past week she had added,
item by item, rouge, mascara and a kohl-ish sort of eye pencil to her modest toilette. Tonight none of them had quite lived
up to the manufacturers’ claims of waterproofness nor, for that
matter, their promises of irresistibility. And Mr. Mario had really
given her kind of a bad steer on her new hair-do. Oh, all very soft and loose and youthful when just out from under Mario’s
final flick of the comb, but altogether too wildly fly-away and—
well, yes—fright wiggish after a night of anything more active
than lying rigid in bed, the cranium unalluringly swathed in nets.
Mr. Mario would simply have to set her hair all over again in a more manageable style for the do-it-yourself practitioner.

And the dress! Frightful! Cretin that she was, Mrs. Flood had been absolutely right in referring to it as “girlish.” Too lacy of bodice, too fluttery of skirts, too short and too bare-armed, “girlish” was the perfect word. Pure Mrs. Mill sort of thing.
Sheila had seemed to recall voicing just such reservations in the
fitting room at Blum’s. Her first impulse last night had been to rip it off right down the front, but self-control (and the grim recollection of its sobering price tag) had triumphed. After hoisting the dress over her tousled head, Sheila had folded it carefully and placed it in her wastebasket where Bertha could reclaim it for that niece at Roosevelt College. The dress would have been All Wrong for Allison and God forbid that it should fall into Mrs. Flood’s hands. Floodie would have
worn
it!

Having washed her face, applied a modicum of fresh make-up,
brushed her hair into a more suitable and becoming arrangement, Sheila had put on her peignoir and returned to the mirror braced for Absolute Truth.

“Well, now,” the Other Sheila had said out loud to the Actual Sheila reflected prettily in front of her, “just what do
you
think was the reason for that rather silly outburst downstairs?” In all
of her Good Straight Talks with herself, Sheila started out gently
and got a lot tougher as the interrogation went deeper. Sheila the Inquisitor generally ranged from Best Pal to Kindly Uncle
to Family Doctor to Liberal Priest to Tolerant Psychoanalyst to
School Marm to Stern Parent to G-Man to Cotton Mather to Tomas Torquemada.

“Well,” Sheila the victim had said, hedging ever so slightly, “I mean after all who
wouldn’t
cry? It’s been a damned exhausting week.”

“And don’t think I don’t know why. God knows you’ve been getting to bed
early
enough these past few nights, you hussy!”

“Oh, now
stop
it! We went into all that
days
ago. This Peter thing is just temporary. We both know that. I wouldn’t
have
it any other way.”

“Are you so absolutely sure, darling?” Many, many times in the past Sheila had caught herself calling herself “darling.” With calm objectivity, she had delved into that peculiar trait and had come up with the perfectly satisfactory answer that it was just a habit acquired from calling the children “Darling.” The problem had been abandoned, as solved, then and there, and neither of the Sheilas had been bothered again by the constant bandying of the endearment.

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Very well, then, darling, let’s probe a little deeper, I was asking, as I recall, just why you chose tonight to turn on the waterworks.” Oh, but she could be stern with herself!

“Well, as I said, it’s been a perfectly beastly, exasperating, nerve-racking week. In the first place, this
Worldwide
interview has been frightfully unsettling.”

“Ye-e-e-ah?” Cynically. And then, “Go on.”

“And then how would
you
like it if some crazy waitress came bursting into the room and tried to shoot you dead?”

“Oh, don’t give me that jazz, darling. You knew damned well that Pearl Pulaski never fired a gun before in her life and wouldn’t have today if Peter hadn’t jarred her arm. Even if she had, she was aiming way to your right
and you knew it!”

“One can’t ever be absolutely certain—not at such close range.”

“Give it up, darling. That noble Barbara Frietchie routine, ‘Shoot if you must this old gray head’ . . . and speaking of gray hairs, haven’t you plucked a couple recently?”

“Never mind, I’ll get to
that
in my own good time. As I was
saying, those mock heroics may have fractured the yokels today,
but they didn’t impress me one little bit. Remember, darling, I was tagging along during those girlhood summers out West, the pistol practice at the Evanston police station, that house party in Scotland where you had to flub every other shot so as not to make the men look like boobs. However, I
will
hand it to you, darling. You did make attempted murder so damned
soigné
that
everybody
will be trying it next year.”

“Stop it, you big bully!”

“
I’ll stop just as soon as we dig down and get the right answer. Awfully meaching and evasive this evening, aren’t you, darling?
Don’t worry, I’ve got all night.”

“We’ve got at least until Peter comes home. . . . I mean. . . .”

“Oho! That
is
interesting! Want to elaborate on that a bit? Do you think there might be some vague connection with his
going off in an absolute
tissue
of lies—and such bad lies, nothing
like the ones
you
can tell—and your hauling off and slugging poor old Flood?”

“Floodie can be very irritating. I’ve discovered that she’s a frightfully stupid woman.”

“You didn’t think she was Dr. Edith Hamilton when you hired her, did you?”

“No,” the Actual Sheila had giggled, “but she’s almost old enough.”

“Oh, that’s too,
too
funny,” Sheila the Inquisitor had said witheringly. “Just as witty and warm as Alexander King. What’s keeping you off the Jack Paar Show, your kidneys?”

“I know, I know, I know. And I
am
sorry. But it was just
more than I could bear to have her throw that dreary old German proverb at me when I was. . .”

“Floodie didn’t invent it. She doesn’t know enough German to order weiner schnitzel. She picked that lemon off your tree,
liebchen.”

“All right, I
said
I was sorry, didn’t I? And I’ll make it up to her.”

“How, darling? By letting her slap you; call you a fool?”

“She wouldn’t.”

“Damned right she wouldn’t—poor, destitute old thing.”

“Please. I said I’d make it up to Floodie. I’ll apologize—
humbly
apologize. I’ll give her a raise, not that she isn’t already overpaid.
I’ll. . . I’ll give her some clothes too—that suit I was wearing
today. . . .”

“The one that’s too matronly for you, Lolita?”

“The
color’s
wrong. It would be good on Floodie. And . . . and I’ll tell you what, I’ll give her that moleskin coat of mine.”

“The one you never liked? Got any plans for your old Kleenex?”

“Floodie
will
forgive me. I know she will.”

“Of course she will. She damned well has to, unless she plans to stop eating. Forgive or forego, eh, Greatheart?”

“And I’ll take Floodie to London with me next summer. That’s
what I’ll do. She’ll adore that.”

“Coo lumme! So it’s off to Blighty, is it? This
is
news. Seems to me I heard the Boy Reporter mention that he’d be there next June to do a feature on Edith SitwelL Well, she’ll seem pretty tame after an interview—in depth—with you. There’s nothing like a Dame, eh?”

“Oh, you’re dreadful!”

“Remember how you always tell your millions of loyal fans
to look deep within themselves? Remember how good you are at
it—frank and forthright, no niggling little self-delusions. All rightie, next question! Allison.”