Bright Young Things

6

THE TOWN OF WHITE COVE HAD BEEN FOR SOME generations unyieldingly small and outrageously expensive; it was close enough to the city to attract a great deal of wealth, but offered enough natural beauty and quiet that one could go there with his secrets and count on seclusion. The grand houses were surrounded by buffers of hedges or high gates or arboretums, and were either completely invisible to their neighbors or only willing to reveal themselves in coy parts: a few white columns here, a tiled roof there, a lap pool reflecting the orange and pink glow of sunset above. To Astrid, reclining in the spacious backseat of a Daimler that did not belong to her, it was a sky deliciously reminiscent of sherbet.
So, she thought, as they proceeded through the gates and up the long gravel path, it is not to be a small party after all. The narrow public road that connected the estates did not look like much—pine trees and intermittent pavement—and the whole stretch on either side of the Greys’ place was lined with automobiles, pulled to the side so that their right tires were in the ditch. Guests in willowy dresses and lightweight suits strolled through the gates, where they were observed by discreetly out-of-view gunmen, before venturing up the lawn. They did not have to be told that only known vehicles were allowed on the property.
“Mr. Charlie says I should bring you ‘round the side,” the driver announced when they had almost reached the house.
Astrid smiled and said nothing.
Her forehead was mostly covered by the band of a turquoise and silver beaded headpiece, which skimmed over her ears and was fastened at the back of her skull under a curve of rich yellow hair. Her lips were very red, and the skin of her eyelids was shaded deep purple; the dress she wore was made up of exquisite diamond-shaped pieces of silver-colored silk, with a rather low neckline supported by whisper-thin straps. Charlie had given it to her on her seventeenth birthday; he had delivered it to her at school himself, along with a hundred white roses. Only girls were allowed on the campus, of course—it was still a mystery how he had managed it without getting caught.
The fading day had cast the grass the color of straw, and the guests were trailed by their own long shadows as they ascended toward the vast white tent, strung up with tiny lights, where a band had already begun to play. But Charlie wanted Astrid to be dropped not at the tent or even on the grand stone steps of the house, but around the side, and she couldn?t help but wonder, as she often did with Charlie, if it wasn?t because there was some treat in it for her: a bracelet he wanted to slip on her wrist before the party, or a room filled with the smell of hyacinth, or baskets laden with pink grapefruit shipped all the way from Texas. So she went on smiling, and once they?d come to a stop, she let the driver help her out of the backseat and up to the side entrance. She shivered—it was almost a premonition of the chill that would really come only late at night—and wondered if Charlie hadn?t chosen a new fur for her. It was hardly the right time of year for it, but that would be just like him.
She went through a darkened spare room and then into the gothic library with its showy, uncut books. When she saw Charlie, she stopped. His back was to her, the broad expanse of it crossed by dark suspenders that held up light brown pinstriped pants. As often happened when she entered a room and saw him for the first time after a matter of hours or weeks, she found that she had forgotten how unusually tall he was, and had to let her heart calm a few seconds. She loved the size of him. She wondered if it was possible to love someone as much as she loved Charlie.
Beyond him, in a stuffed leather chair by the window, was Elias Jones, who always seemed to be in Charlie?s father?s wake, doing him some discreet and loyal service. He was probably in his late thirties, and he had a long horse?s face capable of only a few expressions. His gaze rose slowly to assess Astrid, and then Charlie turned. When she saw his eyes, she knew there was no gift for her.
“Thank you, Elias,” Charlie said. There was fury in his tone.
Elias rose and gave Astrid a gentlemanly nod. When he opened the door, the twinkling voices of a few women and men—particular guests of the Greys who mingled in the glass-enclosed west porch, having a first cocktail of the evening—carried in the air. He left the room.
“Hello, mister.” Astrid put a flirtatious hand on her hip and smiled at Charlie with one corner of her mouth.
“Don?t try that with me,” Charlie snapped as he took several long steps toward her.
“Try what?” Astrid asked innocently.
A moment ago she had felt such expectation and excitement over being Charlie?s special guest, but now she wanted nothing so much as to be with those others down the hall.
“Acting sweet to cover up the things you done.”
Astrid?s smile dissolved. “What things?”
“You know exactly what things,” Charlie replied hotly.
Now it was her turn to speak angrily. “I certainly don?t, and if you think I enjoy playing silly guessing games with you, then you are sorely mistaken.”
“That tack may work with your teachers at your fancy school. But it ain?t gonna work with me. I know you been flirting with strange men in your own home, eating breakfast in the kitchen with ‘em and God knows what else.”
Astrid returned his accusation with a cool stare. Honesty had never been a point of sentimentality with her. “You?re crazy,” she said. Then she brushed past. She was almost to the door when she felt his grip on her arm.
“I see everything you do.” His breath was on her ear—unpleasant with whatever he?d eaten for lunch, and she disliked him irrationally for it.
She glanced back at his face, at its high, taut plains, at the constrictions of his neck. His fingertips were pressing into the white skin of her pale, soft arm; her eyes darted from the red irritation growing there and back to meet his.
“Your jealousy tires me,” she announced, allowing a decided lightness to creep back into her tone, before shaking him off and striding on, in the direction of the voices, toward the safe clinking of glasses and excited murmurings.
Astrid moved through the crowd in the enclosed porch, ahead of Charlie, toward the edge of the room, where she could look down at the girls in slinky dresses on the lawn below and the men trying to get up the courage to talk to them. She knew Charlie had followed her, but she was still jarred when he put his mouth near her ear and spoke again.
“Well, if you weren?t flirting with him”—his voice had now grown a little plaintive—“who was he, and what did you want with him anyway?”
“If you are so determined to bore me, I may just have to go home.” Astrid sighed carelessly. “What a shame, when I am wearing such a pretty dress.”
“It?s only that I?d hate to rough up a man who doesn?t deserve it,” Charlie—becoming gruff again—shot back.
Down below, Astrid noticed a boy, who would have been handsome except for his unfortunately large ears, whisper something to a long, thin girl with straight blond hair, which made her blush. Astrid?s heart softened, remembering how involuntarily pink a girl could become. When they were first in love, Charlie used to make her blush all the time. Suddenly she was sick of always being this way with Charlie—of adoring him and hating him, of promising each other everything one moment and tearing each other down the next. She twirled to face him.
“Oh, let?s not be quarrelsome!”
But by the time the words had lifted off her tongue, Charlie had already turned, his attention caught by something near the door, and before she could help it, the softening in her heart had ceased. A moment ago, she would have done anything to win back his goodwill, but his distraction angered her, and she drew herself up, hard and proud, and decided not to give him any more of her attention.
Some minutes before Astrid and Charlie?s hushed altercation, a dusty pickup slowed to a stop down on the main road, in front of Dogwood.
“Right here is fine, sir,” a very different sort of girl announced.
“Here?” The farmer looked away from her, toward the wrought-iron fence and the row of cars along the side of the road. His brow was rippled with misgiving. “Are you sure, honey?”
Cordelia took a deep breath and smoothed the skirt of her light blue dress. “Yes.” It was the only explanation she felt it necessary to give the old man, who wore overalls just like all the old-man farmers where she came from and had the same deep lines in his face.
She was not without trepidation, but she had no intention of showing it. Anyway, whatever doubt she felt was overcome by the strength of her desire to prove that Letty was wrong, that the connection between Cordelia Grey and Darius Grey was not fantastical in the least.
“Thank you,” she added, and then she slipped down from the worn green vehicle and slammed shut the door. For a moment she left her hand on the metal side, feeling the warm shaking of the engine.
“You take care, now,” the man said, and then he gave the truck gas and went on down the road.
She stood still, her limbs heavy, until the smell of exhaust and dust faded. It had been a long time since she?d slept. She?d moved through the night and the morning with a single purpose. Of course—as she had discovered at about dawn—she had been going about finding her way to White Cove all wrong, and her feet had taken her instead to the southern tip of Manhattan. If her peregrinations had delivered her to some other place, she might have grown angry, but the smell of the sea was new to her, and she had been able to see—through the freight and masts—piers and houses across the water, sparkling at the beginning of the day.
“That?s Brooklyn,” an old bum had told her.
“Brooklyn,” she mouthed to herself. She knew, from the maps she used to collect and study, that Brooklyn was part of the city but also on Long Island. There was something whimsical and genteel about the word—not at all like Manhattan, which had the bravado of a conquering Indian—and it gave her courage. She remembered how, when she and Letty went to the movie theater in Defiance, they would walk along the road with their thumbs extended for a ride, and she figured that New Yorkers might not be such a foreign race that they didn?t use that gesture, too. She had hitched with several different people, of all types, and she had walked a good deal of the way, too. It had taken her all day, but now, at dusk, she found herself on the road that snaked by the famous bootlegger?s mansion.
The gates stood open, but for a moment she was paralyzed by the notion that she was standing on the threshold of the place she?d been yearning to see for so many years. There remained, ever since the conversation with Letty, a great angry knot inside her. It insisted that with a few graceful hand gestures, she could make logical the strange history of her origins. How her mother, the younger of the two Larson girls of Union, Ohio, had been spotted on the front porch of her parents’ Elm Street home during the long, hot summer of ‘09, by a young man working as a driver for a Chicago gangster who was well known in those days but whose name is now forgotten. Fanny Larson had been sixteen at the time, and the driver knew at a glance that he had to have her. He had told her father as much, but the Larsons were God-loving people and didn?t want their daughter mixed up with that unsavory element. But Fanny had never seen a display of romantic feeling like what this young man showed her. She left that same day and went east to live with him.
Sometimes they had a good deal of money, and sometimes they had none, but nothing was ever so perfect as that summer day when they first laid eyes on each other. It was when Fanny realized she was pregnant that she began writing home again and came to regret the choices she had made. This according to Aunt Ida, who burned all the letters. Of course Aunt Ida would never do harm to a Bible, and so when Cordelia was given her mother?s copy, she found the love letter buried deep in its pages with the signature D.G. That was the year Cordelia started working in Uncle Jeb?s shop, and the legend of Darius Grey was just beginning to spread west, and she began to put the two stories together.
Soon after giving birth to her only daughter, Fanny fell ill, and there was no money for a doctor, and they had run out on their bills when the baby came, so there was no goodwill, either. “The only sensible thing your mother ever did,” Aunt Ida used to enjoy telling her niece, “was telegramming me when she knew the end was near. I came immediately and took you away from the bad man who was your father, and brought you back home. And he was a bad man, an evil man, even—and I think he would have stopped me by whatever violent means, had he not been so weak with drink when I found him.”
Cordelia was certain that he had only been distraught, and if he had not been laid so low by her mother?s death, he would certainly have made sure his daughter wasn?t taken from him. He wasn?t a bad man, she had assured herself in the silence of Aunt Ida?s hall closet, where she was made to stand in the darkness when she had broken a rule, or sent to bed when she was not yet tired enough to fall asleep. And now it was plain to her, as she looked across the sprawling lawn at the parallel rows of lindens that ran along either side of a gravel driveway, at the soft curve of a hill that obscured all but the sparkling roof of a grand house—for no one truly evil could live in a place as beautiful as that.
People whose whole bodies were dotted with bright and colorful ornaments, and who seemed already to have drunk in some joy that evening, were moving in twos and threes along the side of the road and through the front gates.
“Darling, have you never been to any of Grey?s parties?” said a voluptuous girl in pink flowered chiffon, which at that hour proved see-through.
“Isn?t it shaming?” replied another.
“Yes!” cried the first, and afterward the whole lot of them shrieked in laughter.
Cordelia had that itchy sensation as though she were being watched, and her eyes darted to a little guardhouse on the edge of the property. It appeared empty, but she couldn?t shake the suspicion of a presence there. Still, she kept close enough to the well-dressed group she was trailing to conceivably be one of them, and she held her old trench folded over her arm, the way she had seen New York women do it.
“They say it?s a party for Grey?s birthday …,” the girl in chiffon continued. She probably believed that referring to him by his last name made her sound jaunty and urbane, but to Cordelia it was exasperating. No matter how country she may have looked, Cordelia could spot a labored gesture.
“The party is for his birthday,” one of the boys agreed. “But they say Grey grew up a street urchin with no knowledge of his parents and doesn?t even know the day he was born, and so he celebrates it whenever he pleases.”
“Which is often several times a year!” added a second man.
They all twittered at the audacity of this.
By then the group had walked a good way up the drive, and the house?s redbrick face and curving white accents had come into view. All around rolled green land and giant lawns with billowing trees. Just below the house, on one side, stood a large white tent. Music traveled on the breeze, and for a moment Cordelia was exquisitely aware of the leaves touched by that current, their gentle shaking and the playful shadows they created on the grass, as though everything had been placed there, just so, to please her.
The moment ended when she became cognizant of the twittering again, and when she looked up, she realized the big girl in chiffon and the girl who had never been to one of “Grey?s” parties were staring back in her direction—that it was now her they found funny. Cordelia rolled her shoulders back and met their gaze. By then they had all taken a path across the grass, toward the tent, and when the girls could no longer go on walking straight and staring, they turned away, and Cordelia herself veered in the direction of the house. She knew that in a moment they would all begin watching her again, but she kept her head high, and reminded herself that this was, in a sense, her house. Then she found she did not mind them very much.
Cordelia climbed the grand curvature of stone steps ascending from the circular gravel drive toward the house, and then another impressive flight leading to the entrance. The double oak doors stood open, and she stepped tentatively inside. The entryway was more expansive than any church in Union, and it seemed to soar higher, too. On one side, a great staircase of dark wood went one direction and then another, up three flights or more; and to her right, the hall extended in the direction of mild laughter. She turned toward the sound.
“Whoa, there.”
Cordelia froze.
“No guests in the house,” the voice went on. He was young, though he suffered from a reddening of his face that made his age difficult to determine. His hand rested on a holster, but he did not move to point the gun in her direction.
“Of course not.” Cordelia leveled her gaze and locked eyes with the boy. “But I?m not a guest, you see.”
“No? Then who are you?”
Cordelia paused a moment, and then began to explain: “I?m the girl who jumps out of the cake.” The phrase hung in the air, confident and strange. She didn?t know where it had come from, but now she went on: “It?s Mr. Grey?s birthday, I suppose, and someone thought it?d be a nice touch. That I would be a nice touch.”
“I know when Mr. Grey?s birthday is.” He adjusted the angle of his head slightly and assessed her from head to toe. “You don?t look like a dancing girl.”
Now Cordelia offered him a sly smile. “You don?t think we girls walk around giving away what we got for free, do you?” She lifted the suitcase, partially obscured beneath her trench coat, and patted it with her other hand. “My dancing things are in here.”
This inspired a goofy grin to overwhelm the young man?s face. Then all of him relaxed. It was possible, but doubtful, that Cordelia fully absorbed the lesson of this moment—that when girls use the brightness of their eyes or the softness of their skin, they have an uncommon advantage in getting what they want. Being cleverer than most, she might have counted herself lucky, but it is a lesson that few women truly appreciate until their looks begin to go.
“I see now. Sorry, miss.”
“Where?s the kitchen?” Cordelia went on breathily, before he could think better of letting her inside.
He inclined his head, indicating a door beyond the stairs, away from the murmuring. A different kind of noise emanated from the kitchen—the low curses of servants, the rushing of water, the clattering of plates. Cordelia headed in that direction, but when she saw that the guard?s back was turned, she slipped through another doorway, darting into a series of rooms that must have lined the hall where she had just been apprehended. She passed through an enormous dining room with drawn aubergine drapes and a long, mighty table from which knights of old might have supped, and then through a vast, empty ballroom with a waxed floor and a white grand piano, its lone piece of furniture. The curtains were drawn there, too, but they were of a filmy cloth, and she could see through them to a great stone verandah, another series of stairs, and lawns stretching out to trees for what seemed like miles.
Her feet fell lightly. Breath was almost impossible. She had known from the papers that Darius Grey was rich, but this house and all its objects were beyond anything she could have imagined. Everything was big and everything shone. Here she was, at last. Sneaking through the house, it was true, invisible and silent—but most definitely here.
After the ballroom came a library, with the same dark wood that paneled the hallway, and built-in shelves crammed with every kind of book. Ferns curled from the corners, and the sofas were well stuffed and worn, and she wished for a moment that her aunt Ida could witness just for a second what a collection of books was kept by the man the old lady believed so rough and bad. On the low, squat table at the center of the room, a gold-rimmed glass contained a few melting chips of ice and the dregs of an amber liquid. Someone had been there recently—they might come back. Her heart beat a little faster when she realized she could not stay here very long, either.
Finally, she stepped back into the hall. At the opposite end from the kitchen she could now see the source of light chatter and clinking glasses—the doors were ajar, and she glimpsed the silhouettes of ladies and gentlemen. Behind them great windows framed a sky striated with magenta and gold and every color in between.
Cordelia stepped into the room, which had a heavy, sweet smell—of lilies, perhaps, or else the women there were wearing a great deal of perfume. If this was the case, it would not be their only point of excess, for the ladies wore a truly defiant amount of lipstick and those who smoked did so out of cigarette holders that appeared implausibly long. Cordelia felt as though she were sitting at the back of a darkened theater, watching a beautifully choreographed scene projected large just for her.
But that illusion did not last very long.
“Who let this girl in?”
Everything in the room grew louder and then entirely quiet. Then she saw, through the assembled bodies, a face she recognized: It was the boy with the cruel brown eyes, the one who had made fun of Letty last night at Seventh Heaven.
“Who let her in?” he repeated, striding aggressively in her direction.
Now all the faces in the room turned to her—and what a catalogue of amusement and surprise and chagrin and curiosity they wore. On the ladies, the makeup exaggerated whatever it was the sight of this plainly dressed girl, carrying a suitcase and old coat, stirred in them. She knew she would make herself ludicrous if she told any of these people that she was Darius Grey?s daughter, and beyond that, what was there to say? She had half decided that she would demand to see the bootlegger himself and hope for the best—when a beautiful, soft-faced thing, wearing a gleaming and exotic band on her forehead, slipped through the crowd smiling. Her skin had an unearthly quality, as though it were made entirely of diamond dust.
“I did,” Astrid said in a suave and sparkling voice, and then she hooked her elbow with the girl?s.
It was impossible for Astrid to imagine what Charlie might have against this girl, and she hated him for his bullying tone. She was reminded of the time she had accompanied Charlie and his father on a hunting trip and realized that they were going to deal a mortal blow to some defenseless creature. Perhaps that was why she had crossed the room—the silver silk rustling against her legs, her fur stole slipping just slightly from her shoulder—to intervene on a stranger?s behalf.
Now that they were close, the girl turned her big brown eyes—which had been fixated on Charlie in cool defiance—to Astrid. Even though her dress was made of the humblest cotton, and her shoes were laced-up boots like some nineteenth-century schoolteacher, there was an elegant quality about her prominent cheekbones and long, strong limbs. She blinked perhaps once, but if she was surprised or confused by what Astrid had said, she did not let it show on her features. Astrid offered the stranger a plush smile, and then turned to face the room.
Charlie was standing before her, legs spread wide and glaring. Behind him guests watched with mouths slightly agape as the very important girl in the elaborately beaded headpiece and five-hundred-dollar dress clung to the unknown girl in plain, wrinkled country cotton. One of the women stifled a giggle, and in the silence of the room everyone could plainly hear a man whispering at her to shut up.
“Come, darling,” Astrid said, to the room as much as to the girl, giving her new friend a tug. “Let?s get you a drink, shall we?”