Too Much Too Soon (3 page)

Crystal turned in surprise.
“Mr. Ivory?”

“Curt Ivory. He works for Uncle Gideon.”

“That most fearfully divine man in the gorgeous pale gray suit that you snagged off alone into the music room, is
Curt Ivory?
Of course he’s at Talbott’s. He’s Uncle Gideon’s right-hand man. That skinny Imogene was playing up to him like mad. Her dress, it’s the New Look. Maybe a Dior original—can you imagine how divine it’d be to wear originals? Well, why not? With her family.”

“Are they so important?”

“Oh, honestly, Honora. How you can be so clever at literature and books and such an idiot at remembering every single thing that counts in real life? Remember? Daddy told us that Mr. Burdetts and Uncle Gideon are involved in something called a joint venture to build that freeway in Oakland. What’s he like, Curt Ivory?”

“He’s Imogene Burdett’s young man.”

“You sound disappointed. I’ll bet anything she’s not a virgin.”

“Crystal, this whole conversation is so—”

“I know, I know. Daddy would say it’s common and Sylvanders don’t giggle over young men like scullery maids. But what’s so wonderful about being a Sylvander? Do you suppose any of those rich old cows has an attractive, eligible son?”

“You’re only seventeen.”

“They get serious much younger here. Remember
what they said in the war? Yanks are oversexed.”

“We’re going home to England the minute Daddy’s on his feet again.”

“Which means, Honora dear, that we’re staying here forever and ever, amen.”

Honora forgot the aged chauffeur and her voice rose, shaking. “What a filthy thing to say!”

“I love Daddy as much as you do, Honora, but you’re just not realistic about him. He’s not cut out to be a business success. So we have to look out for ourselves.” The energy and determination in Crystal’s expression, rather than tarnishing her beauty, made her yet more irresistible. “We have to find rich husbands.”

“I could never get married like that, for money.”

Shrugging, Crystal said, “At least we have Uncle Gideon behind us.”

“Now who isn’t being realistic? He didn’t even remember our names.”

“Well, we’ve met him and that’s the first step.” Crystal’s eyes turned a darker blue. “He
has
to take an interest in us. I’ll be meeting the right kind of young men. And if you aren’t so keen on marriage, at least you won’t have to grub at some filthy job, you’ll be at university. Joscelyn can go to a decent school where everyone isn’t Chinese or Italian. Daddy won’t drink so much—”

“Crystal!” Honora’s whisper trembled with intensity.

Crystal, glancing at the chauffeur, nodded, and said no more.

The car had left the fine homes behind. As they glided up Lombard Street between drab apartment buildings toward the steep hill topped by the gray, upraised finger of Coit Tower, Honora bent forward to tap the separating pane of glass. “This is our number,” she called politely.

The big sedan braked, passing a nearly invisible entry, a narrow arch that led below a block of flats. The brilliant afternoon sunlight exposed the leprous flaking of gray Navy-surplus paint.

A third-story window was flung open, and a man leaned on the window ledge, his thinning brown hair blowing around his long, pale features, his unknotted old school tie flapping.

“Oh, God, look at Daddy,” Crystal whispered.

“You two deserve a good hiding!” Langley Sylvander shouted. “Where in the devil have you been, all tarted up?”

“He’s really blotto,” Crystal muttered.

Honora, not waiting for the chauffeur to open the door, jumped from the car with a mumbled thank you. Crystal was right after her.

They dashed through the dark, narrow tunnel with its line of mailboxes, emerging in a sloping, cracked cement courtyard. Sheets and clothes billowed overhead on lines crisscrossing between two barrackslike frame structures.

They raced up three flights of exterior steps. Before Honora could use her key, the door swung open and Langley blocked their way.

The upper part of his face was strong and handsome, with a broad brow and deep-set eyes nearly as vivid a blue as Crystal’s. With his muscles loosened by drinking, however, the weakness of his chin and the self-indulgent petulance of his full, well-chiseled mouth showed.

“I won’t have the pair of you getting into trouble,” he bawled.

“Daddy, please let us in,” Honora said. “We can explain it all.”

“What were you doing, parading around in that gaudy American motorcar?”

Crystal raised her chin. “It belongs to Uncle Gideon.”

“That common upstart! What were you doing with
him?
”

“You told us to go to his house.”

Langley gave her a look of surprise. “I did? Ahh yes, that was to offer your condolences on your aunt’s death. Not to use his big, vulgar possessions!” His light-timbred voice had taken on resonance.

Honora pushed him inside and Crystal yanked the front door shut.

They were in a very narrow corridor. The door to their left opened to a small bedroom crowded by a Queen Anne-style double bed and a high-legged nightstand on which stood a glass and a whiskey bottle.

“Where’s my motherless babe? Is she out bagging for coins? Joscelyn.
Joss.
”

“Isn’t she in our room?” Honora asked, worried.

“Joss-e-lynnn!” bawled Langley.

The door to their right opened. A short, thin child wearing an English schoolgirl’s tunic stood clutching a book to her skinny chest. Her mousy brown hair was skinned back from her narrow face into one long braid—in England the girls had called it a plait—her pale blue eyes appeared watery behind thick lensed glasses, her upper teeth bucked out. Joscelyn Sylvander, a remarkably homely child, was an unlikely postscript to the handsome Sylvander family.

“What’s all the shouting about?” she asked with purposeful ignorance. “Is anything wrong?”

“As if you didn’t know,” Crystal interjected—she was not too old to bicker with her little sister.

“If I call, you’re to answer,” Langley shouted.

“Oh, when you’re inebriated you’re a hopeless case,” Joscelyn cried.

“You’re being cheeky, miss.”

Joscelyn barged back into the room, the brown-painted, plywood walls shivering as she slammed the door.

“These scenes!” Crystal stalked down the slit into the square room that served as kitchen and dining room, leaving Honora to soothe their father.

Honora took his arm. “Daddy, I’ll make a nice pot of tea.”

Langley shook off her hand, asking plaintively, “How could you have let that bounder do you a favor?”

“It was wrong of us—me. Daddy, it’s nearly four. Tea’ll buck you up.” Honora’s tone was pleading.

“You girls were reared to be ladies. It’s my fault, I never should have brought you to this insufferable country!” The thin walls shivered again as the second door slammed.

Honora’s full upper lip quivered. Practical Crystal and clever Joscelyn were able to handle Langley’s atypical outbursts, but his drunken rages always shook his oldest daughter to the depth of her vulnerable soul. She not only loved him—all three girls did—but she idolized him as well. She took a few deep, slow breaths, then went into the other bedroom, which had every inch of space jammed with a large fumed oak chest of drawers and three iron beds.

“I get blamed for everything,” Joscelyn whimpered. She was hunched on the farthest bed.

“Joss, you know how most dreadfully unhappy he is, having to work for Uncle.”

Joscelyn’s left eye blinked rapidly as she struck out. “Do you suppose I’m in a state of bliss? You’re lucky, you’re not in school! All those dreadful boys mimicking every word I say. I hate them—I wish I was back in Edinthorpe, where there’s only girls. Not that the girls here are any better. They’re absolute inbeciles.” Joscelyn, placed with children two years her senior, excelled them in almost every subject, and with her blind, intellectual arrogance let them know the full extent of her
superiority. She had no more idea how to get along with her peers in San Francisco than she had in England.

Honora sighed. “On job interviews they always seem to be poking fun at me, too.” She edged along the narrow space to sit next to her little sister, kissing the top of the mousy hair, which gave off a faint odor of homemade toffee and Castile soap. “Still, it’s not all that terrible. We’re together. And we generally have a happy time, don’t we?”

“I suppose.” Joscelyn snuggled closer to her sister’s side, a nearly sly expression of contentment on her narrow face as she let her oldest sister, her surrogate mother, comfort her.

Later, while Honora stood at the sagging sink, inexpertly putting together the parts of the old-fashioned meat grinder to make a shepherd’s pie from pieces of gristly leftover lamb and leftover mashed potatoes, Crystal turned on the little radio that the previous tenants had left because the bakelite was cracked. After a moment, a swinging Tommy Dorsey version of “Buttons and Bows” filled the kitchen.

When the shepherd’s pie gave off savory aromas and the table was laid, they peered down the corridor, glancing apprehensively at one another. Honora went to give Langley’s door a tentative tap. “Daddy, supper’s ready.”

“I’m not hungry.” His reply was slurred. “Go ahead without me.”

The girls ate quickly and went to bed early, even Crystal, who generally stayed up until all
hours on the weekend.

Sunday morning, Honora woke first. She tiptoed from the bedroom so as not to disturb his sisters and went to the kitchen.

Langley sat at the table behind a white earthenware teapot with a brown scar.

He gave his favorite daughter a helpless little grin. “I couldn’t find the biscuits,” he said sheepishly.

She smiled back, padding in her slippers to the open shelves above the stove. “Here, Daddy,” she said, opening the tin.

The other two girls straggled out.

“Well, Joss,” said Langley, patting his youngest’s cheek. “What do you say to a visit to the Fleishhacker Zoo? Maybe we can persuade your sister to make a picnic.”

The Sylvanders readied themselves for the outing, laughing and teasing.

In spite of Langley’s profound selfishness and susceptibility to the bottle, Crystal’s vanity and ambitions, Joscelyn’s studied insolence and complete lack of beguilement, they had always been a happy family. In this transitional period, while they dangled like chrysalides in their shabby clothes between the old life and the new, they clung together yet closer.

At the zoo people smiled at the English group, the two charming older girls laughing as they lugged the brown bags, the handsome man wearing a derby and tapping his unnecessary umbrella on the cage bars as he pointed out an animal’s peculiarities to a thin, pigtailed child, a family obviously delighted in each
other’s company.

The Sylvander family tree, while not as illustrious as Langley believed, had irrefutably sprung from gentlemanly soil: his spindly branch, however, was rotted through with poverty. His father, a humorless bank clerk, had scrimped to the meanest degree to send Langley to a mediocre public school although the London County Council gave a far better education gratis.

After matriculation he gravitated to the underpaid thoroughly respectable profession of publishing and was a junior editor at Cullomton House when he met Doris Kinnon. Six years his senior, on her first visit to Europe, Doris tumbled for Langley’s accent, his handsome profile, his whimsical charm. On Langley’s part, he fell for Doris’s wholehearted adoration of him and—though his conscious mind could never admit to this—for the ease she could bring him.

Doris and Matilda’s father, a successful San Francisco attorney, had left each daughter fifty thousand dollars. Ten thousand pounds! In those years between the wars it was a fortune. Langley’s touchstone of a true gentleman was one who stood aloof from commerce, and now he cultivated his ignorance of financial matters. The eight-room flat in Kensington, the staff of
three, the fine old port, the occasional trips to the continent, tunneled deep into their capital. That, however, was the concern of Lloyd’s Bank. Langley was a happy man. Then, on September 2, 1939, the day after Hitler’s troops invaded Poland, Doris died giving birth to their third daughter. Langley, in his grief, made the grand gesture, enlisting in His Majesty’s Navy. Honora and Crystal were evacuated with the Edinthorpe boarders to a crenellated Victorian country house near Exeter, and the Head Mistress, a kindly, bewhiskered spinster, ensconced Joscelyn with her decrepit nanny in the school’s wartime quarters. Honora passed her free time cuddling the wailing, colicky baby in her thin arms.

Langley spent the duration at the British naval installation in Reykjavik. After the war, in 1947, the last block of Doris’s stocks had to be sold. The wind of impending poverty chilled Langley more than had the Icelandic blizzards. In rapid succession he lost three positions.

In extremis
, Langley composed that hortatory letter to his unknown brother-in-law.

Gideon Talbott’s terse reply sent him on a three-day bender. Bad enough that the family’s bread and butter would be dependent on his kowtowing to this common,
common
American swine, but what made Langley thirst for the bottle was the suggestion that Honora, his heart’s child, Honora with her Sylvander blood, should become a menial wageslave.

*   *   *

The Monday after the condolence call to the
Talbott house, Honora rose before six, scurrying in her dressing gown to the big trash barrels at the bottom of the steps, rummaging for the previous day’s
Chronicle.
At the kitchen table, she ran a pencil down the Help Wanted column, her dark eyes bleak as she checked two advertisements. She then bent to light the broiler, jumping back from the bursting blue flame. Today’s breakfast was toast and drippings. This week, all meals would be variations on the bread theme—mayonnaise or margarine sandwiches for lunch, suppers of fried bread with ketchup, or eggybread, which was called French toast in America.

Just like during the war
, Crystal or Joscelyn would remark, and Langley would beg with whimsical testiness,
What about a nice bit of chicken tomorrow, Honora?