Love & Mrs. Sargent (25 page)

Watching poor, foolish old Mrs. Flood, Sheila suddenly realized that she
did
have dignity. By God, somewhere under the purple frizz, the war paint, the junk jewelry, there was real, genuine dignity.

“But, Floodie, where will you go?”

“My dear old friend, Mrs. Stacy Por. . . .” Mrs. Flood began
grandly from force of habit. Then she stopped and said very simply, “I’m moving in with a practical nurse down in Rogers
Park. I’ve left notes for Dicky and Allison. I—I didn’t like to disturb them. Oh, and you’ll find a five dollar bill on top of the mail. It’s—it’s for some flowers I ordered. Your mink coat is
hanging in my closet and so is the little broadtail jacket. I thought
Allison could. . . .”

“Floodie, I gave those things to
you.”

“Oh, Mrs. Sargent, I won’t be needing a mink coat in Rogers Park. It would be inappropriate.
Pretentious.
Allison can use it when she’s older. There’s years of wear in it.”

“Things are all in your car, Miz Flood,” Taylor said.

“But Floodie, can’t you ever forgive me?”

“Forgive you? Oh, Mrs. Sargent. I’m
grateful
to you. That’s why I’m leaving. Now. Before it’s too late.”

“But, Floodie, where can I reach you?” Sheila was becoming
desperate. There was no getting
at
the old girl today. “Moving in with this . . . with this nurse may not work out at all. You may. . . .”

“You can always find me in the Social Register, Mrs. Sargent—
under Dilatory Domiciles. Now I must run. Good-by and thank you.”

“Floodie!” Sheila cried.

Mrs. Flood handed Taylor a folded bill and a small, wrinkled bag from Saks. “Good-by, Taylor, and thank you. This is for you and the little package is for Bertha. It’s a cocktail veil.”

Sheila stood motionless until Taylor broke the
silence.

“Miz Flood leaving us?” Taylor said.

“Obviously,” Sheila said testily. Then she gave Taylor a
warm, sincere smile. “Yes, Taylor. Wonderful news. A distant relative died and left Mrs. Flood a very handsome bequest. She’s retiring. I’m so happy for you, aren’t you?”

“That is nice. Mr. Malvern called. He called two, three times.
He says for you please to call him soon as you get in.”

“Thank you, Taylor,” she said. She marched into the office. “Oh, Taylor,” she called, “the ice bucket is empty. Will you please fill it right away?” Really, when she was out of the house for so much as a minute everything went wrong! “And do you know where Mr. Johnson is?”

“I think he’s up in his room, Miz Sargent.”

“Will you please ask him to come down?”

All morning Peter had felt that he was living under a very
comfortable sort of house arrest. The prospect of breakfast down
in the dining room with Dicky looking like death and Mrs. Flood making him look worse and worse as she described in horrific detail the components of her late father’s daily breakfast had not been cheering. Allison, he imagined, in her role of
Enchanted Princess, would undoubtedly be offstage—still locked
away in her tower. If so, Allison had all the luck. And just what The Star would be doing, saying, wearing, would be anyone’s
guess.

“How did it all happen?” he had asked the man he saw tying a necktie in the big empire mirror. “How did I happen to come here to write an unimportant story about a fairly unimportant woman for an unimportant magazine and end up like this—wet nurse to the son, father confessor to the daughter, listening audience to the secretary and lover to the woman herself? Just four days and. . . . Damn it!” The new necktie—raw silk or Siamese silk or whatever the hell Sheila had said it
was—just wouldn’t tie right. He had yanked it off and put on one of his old dollar ties from Cardinal’s. Then he had put on the new cashmere jacket and rejected that, too. It had seemed suddenly too lush, too soft, too rich for his tastes—something a woman might pick out for a new lover.

Gritting his teeth, he had been about to set off for breakfast when Taylor had arrived with a tray and a large, vivid blue envelope. It had been like a temporary reprieve from the gas chamber. With a feeling of grim apprehension, Peter had plucked Sheila s note off the tray and begun reading it. A charming note, indeed, but Peter hadn’t been charmed. The expensive blue paper, the elaborate engraved monogram, the large, sloping, utterly fashionable writing, had rather revolted
him.

Darling Peter—
Surprise! Breakfast in bed!
It’s just midnight and I’m almost asleep. I’ll be up and out long
before you see this on an errand too mysterious to put into writi
ng. . . .

He had stopped reading right there. The note had struck him as the work of a willful child. He had suddenly discovered that he was glad she was away—overjoyed—and that he couldn’t manage to care where she was or why or when she would be back. He had drunk the coffee on his breakfast tray, ignoring the muffins, the bacon, the eggs, the grapefruit. Using the back
of Sheila’s “masterpiece” as scratch paper, he had telephoned the airline to see how soon he could get a flight for New York. Then
he had placed a long distance call to
Worldwide Weekly.

While he was packing, Dicky—looking exactly a corpse—had
tapped on his door and come in. Peter had answered, as well as he could, all of Dicky’s questions. Then they had driven off
together, lunching on beer and hamburgers on the way back. To leave while Sheila was still away from the house was a coward’s way out. Had she been there, he would have told her that he was going, thanked her for everything and left. But, as long as she had vanished theatrically into thin air, he felt relieved that he could simply write a polite note, call a taxi and
then wait around Midway Airport for a few comparatively placid
hours. He was halfway into his letter of farewell when Taylor appeared at the open door.

“Oh, here you are, darling!” Sheila said. “Just in time to have a
drink with me. Not a very drinkish time—only half past three—
but after the morning I’ve put in, fraught with adventure, I certainly need one. Scotch?”

“Nothing, thanks, Sheila.”

“Nothing? Well, I don’t ordinarily like to drink alone, but after this morning. . . .” She plopped some ice cubes into her glass and poured in a frightening amount of whiskey. “Heavens, it’s all been so exciting and so unsettling I haven’t even thought about taking my coat off. It’s new. Like it?” She sat down on
the sofa spreading her leopard opulently. She patted the seat next
to her. Peter did not sit down. He crossed to the desk and leaned on it, watching her carefully,

“Well, aren’t you going to ask where I’ve been? What I’ve been doing?” She looked at him seductively over the rim of her
glass.

“All right, Sheila, where have you been? What have you been doing?” He asked the question as one would ask a naughty little girl who was wheedling for just one more chance to show off.

She looked at him teasingly over her glass again. “I won’t tell.” What she meant was that she wouldn’t tell just
yet.
She
didn’t like his attitude, the way he was receiving her when she was being so very, very charming. She knew that eventually
she was going to tell him
something—
perhaps that she’d gone out
to buy him some wonderful surprise like a new car; perhaps that she’d been to a doctor and learned that she was going blind, that she had cancer, that she was pregnant. It would all depend on how things went and she wasn’t pleased with the way they were going just now. Peter could be so damned moody. She redoubled her efforts at charming him. “You tell first. Have a
good time with your friend last night? I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Very nice, thanks.”

“
Where did you go?”

“I don’t know. Some steak joint down in the Loop.” He looked away because he was lying and because he was doing
it as badly as ever. Actually he had driven her car down Sheridan
Road in the general direction of nowhere. And nowhere was the place he had ended up. He had come to a sort of widening in the road. It had been a Spanishy little place of fairly expensive looking shops, all tile and plaster. He had had dinner in a restaurant called San Somebody’s where no liquor was sold. Then he had gone across the street to the Teatro del Something and sat through two complete showings of two of the worst movies he’d ever seen. He had sat there until the theater closed and then he had driven very, very slowly back.

“All the way into Chicago?” There was a dangerous edge to her voice. “You must tell me your shortcut. When I looked
at the speedometer today I saw that you hadn’t gone thirty miles.”

“I drove to the station and took a train. I don’t like to drive other people’s cars. I told you that.”

“It’s not thirty miles to the Lake Forest station and back—although sometimes it seems that long. What station was it?”

“Sheila, I don’t know what station it was. Does it really matter?”

“Of course not, Peter. You get so cross. Just like a little boy. And what did you do all morning?”

“I had breakfast on a tray. . . .”

“Yes?” Sheila said hopefully. He knew that she would want him to make some comment about her note. And he did not.

“Then I had a chat with Dicky.”

“How is Dicky?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“And then what?”

“And then I went with him—as sort of moral support—while he enlisted in the army.”

“You
what?”

“I said I went. . . .” There was no need to continue. Sheila was out of the room and shouting up the staircase for her son.

Dicky had never looked better, “Yes, Mother?”

“Is this some sort of preposterous practical joke—and if it is, let
me say that it’s
un
-funny in the extreme—or have you actually
done what Peter says you’ve done?”

“Joined up? Yes. Just this morning. While you were out.”

“You realize, of course, Dicky, that you’re still a minor. And my consent is necessary. . . .”

“It isn’t necessary. Anyway I said that I was twenty-one.”

“You mean you lied? Well, in that case a simple telephone call from me will. . . .”

“Will postpone things by six days. I’ll be twenty-one next week, Mother. You’d look pretty foolish, don’t you think, making a big, public stink for a matter of six days. My mind’s made up. It was yesterday.”

“You were drunk.”

“Today I’m sober.”

“But, Dicky darling, your career? Your new novel?”

“It’s not my career, Mother. It’s yours. It’s your novel, too. I left it in my room. You can finish it if you like. I promise to give it a rave review.”

“Dicky, darling, I’m sorry about—about all the things I did that didn’t seem . . . well, didn’t seem quite honest. But you can understand that I only did them because I love you, because I wanted you to feel confident and successful.”

“I’m not angry, Mother. I’m even pretty confident. At least I’ll never have to spend another day out in the tool shed trying to do something I can’t do and don’t want to do.”

“And just how confident are you going to feel when you’re shoved into a barracks with a lot of shipping clerks and farm boys? Where there won’t be a Taylor and a Bertha to call you Mr. Dicky, Where you get up at six in the morning and. . . .”

“I’ve described the army routine to him pretty thoroughly, Sheila,” Peter said. “It’s
one
thing I know more about than you do.”

“Be still!” Sheila said. “I blame
you
for this.”

“Please don’t,” Dicky said. “It was all my idea. He just came along.”

“I see,” Sheila said. “That was
too
thoughtful of you, Peter. I suppose you’re going to tell me that the army will Make a Man of Dicky.”

“I think it might do a better job than you have, Mother.”

Sheila looked as though she had been struck. She stopped, took a deep breath and then started in again, this time smiling as she spoke. “But, Dicky, darling, if you
really
wanted to go into the army, why didn’t you consult
me?
I mean, with my
connections there would have been no trouble in getting you a commission.”

“That’s just what I mean, Mother. It’s time I did something
without
consulting you—without having you do all the groundwork, outline the chapters, charm the publisher, write the reviews.”

Sheila didn’t even hear him. She was racing on with plans of her own. “As a matter of fact, Dicky, perhaps this little technicality about your not being quite yet twenty-one may work to our advantage. At least it gives me a week to get things straightened out.” She was even now reaching for the telephone. “Now let’s see, I could call General Kissner at the Pentagon and tell him that you did this thing on impulse and now you’re sorry, but that I think the military experience would do you good and could he arrange some sort of quick commission. I know he’d do it for me; he’s dined here dozens of times and he worshiped your father. . . .”

“Mother!”

“You could start out as a shavetail and then Frank would see to it that you were put in something like the Information Service
or Press Corps—someplace where you could use your writing
experience—around Washington.”

“Sheila, for God’s sake. . . .”

“Maybe we could close up this great big house and take a little place in Georgetown. It’s charming. Really it is. Of course we’d have to wait until after Allison comes out, but I know tons of people around. . . .”

“But Allison isn’t coming out, Mother.”

Sheila wheeled and saw Allison standing in the doorway.

“Allison,” she said, “I think you’ve forgotten that I asked you to stay in your room until. . . . Oh, well, it doesn’t really matter.
Allison, darling, where
did
you find that dowdy old suit?” All of her lights were blazing now, she was all charm and vivacity, the center of everything, running the whole show. “Honestly, Peter, Allison did the maddest thing when she was about sixteen. She saved her allowance for I don’t know how long and then went off to some unheard-of dress shop in Evanston and bought that suit. It never did fit. Well, no matter, we
all
have to change before dinner. Big doings tonight. Never mind what, but
big!
”