A Young Man's Heart (3 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Her Successor

1

They
had guests almost every evening after that, friends of Giraldy’s who brought friends of theirs, who in turn soon brought friends of their own. There was a piano, black and neurotic. Giraldy could play and frequently did, light things of the music halls, his ring dashing about over the keys like a mad jewel.

He made a captivating host, having a certain male charm about him, very difficult to describe, that made him efface himself as much as possible, without actual diffidence, so that the burden of entertainment fell largely upon others with the result that they courted him rather than his having to court them. He served Benedictines to the women and Scotch and soda to the men. Blair wondered at the distinction.

A rapturous young woman, whose name was Fairchild, was an incessant guest of theirs. She frequently took dinner with them before the others arrived. At such times she had her highball, cool as any man could be, yet later on in the course of the evening Blair would see her sipping cordial sweet as glycerin with the ladies, too delicate to swallow it outright. She chanted when Giraldy played and once she gave an exhibition of a nautch dance with an Eastern scarf. One evening she appeared at dinner in a dressing-gown with flowing angel sleeves, saying she had stolen a bit of a nap, that she would dress for company the minute dinner was through. Blair had not even known she was in the house.

“I don’t know what Blair will think of me,” she said coyly.

Giraldy smiled at him engagingly and thrust two fingers under his dinner plate. Blair never moved. When dinner was finished and he was alone in the room he lifted the plate. A leaf of paper money that had been folded to the size of a postage stamp reared and slowly righted itself. At the party that evening Fairchild was more chastely decorous than ever, she fairly outdid herself. When the gathering broke up, Blair, who was narrowly watching each guest leave, did not see her go. He had lost sight of her some little while before. The following morning he was excessively antagonized to have her walk into breakfast while they were there, in a shadow hat of pink chiffon as though she had stepped out of some garden fête.

“Good morning,” she said with a sugared smile, and added, “Good morning, Blair.”

“How do do,” said Blair.

“Won’t you have some breakfast?” offered Giraldy pleasantly, lifting himself an inch or two above the seat of his chair and then relapsing again.

Blair considered all this merely pretense; he felt that he understood and they might at least respect his intelligence: they had gotten married.

She seated herself; the old woman came in from the kitchen and whisked away a serviette: the conventional layout of knives, forks, coffee and fruit spoons stood revealed. The table had been arranged beforehand for a third person. None of this was lost upon Blair, who after all had been brought up in an exceedingly artificial atmosphere where every detail counted for something.

“How did you get in?” he asked ingenuously,
“I
didn’t hear the bell ring.”

“It stood open and I walked in,” she grinned. “Wrong of me, wasn’t it?” There was a brittle quality about this last.

2

Giraldy and the second Mrs. Giraldy were entertaining their friends. The overhead lights had been done away with after the up-to-date manner. Instead there were a number of glazed pottery lamps with parchment shades on which were depicted silhouettes of satyrs and nymphs in an endless procession going on and on. These lamps shed light upward and downward in a funnel-like arrangement, but kept the greater part of the room in a grottolike twilight, very hard on the eyes until you got used to it. Estelle’s women friends—Estelle was the new Mrs. Giraldy— Estelle’s women friends had an idea she persisted in this arrangement of her rooms possibly because her complexion was past its prime. Of course they didn’t say so in her presence but only when she was out of the room. Her men friends wondered whether it was on account of pregnancy. Naturally they said this only behind the backs of their hands. Blair, who had to live with her and had overheard their ideas on the subject, made investigations. He found her complexion quite tolerable, even in the early-morning light. He would have checked up on the other insinuation too, only was not sure of its meaning. He used to watch her feet to see if she was lame. As a matter of fact these novel lighting-effects were simply an effort on her part toward modishness. The simplicity of the reason laid it open to misconstruction.

There were eight people in the room altogether. They were singing when Blair went in, and he paused in the doorway.

“She has rings on her fingers, bells on her toes,

Elephants to ride upon where-ever she goes.”

He knew whom they meant. He had seen pictures of her on the inside lids of cigar-boxes, allegories all in gold and primary colors. She was a barbaric princess, coffee-colored and naked. She had plumes on her head and there was usually a tiger crouched beside her and a little negro emptying a cornucopia either of fruits or flowers or else of gold coins at her feet, while she gazed serenely out to sea from a grove of ferns and palms.

Underneath the picture it usually said something melodious like
Flor de Jamaica
or
Manila Exquisitos.

He stepped into the living room.

Estelle came toward him at once, and as though to screen the fact that she had been obliged to send out for anything that was not in the house, carried him back outside the room with her once more by the impetus of her approach. This was a detail of the elaborate technique known as company manners, still in vogue, though less adhered to than formerly. By throwing secrecy over the most harmless household incidents and arrangements it drew a line between host and guests that was unwittingly an actual reversal of the true meaning of hospitality.

“I couldn’t get the ones you told me to get,” said Blair, sinking his voice to a whisper just outside the door.

“That’s too bad,” she said, taking the package from him and turning it around with her thumb to look at it. “These Spanish cigarettes are strong little beggars.”

She looked at them a second time. “They’ve already been opened,” she said. “How’s that?”

No explanation occurred to him but the simplest one. “I took one.”

“Did you smoke it?” she said humorously.

She went inside and he heard her telling every one, “Blair has smoked a cigarette,” and laughing a little over it.

How treacherous, he thought, to betray him like that.

“Where is he?” Giraldy said. “Blair, come in here.”

Blair obeyed reluctantly, vainglorious yet apprehensive. Everyone was watching him.

“Try another,” Giraldy ordered.

Blair hesitated.

“Here,” Giraldy said arbitrarily.

Mistrustful that a trick was being played on him, Blair slowly took one from the package extended toward him in his father’s hand. He put it to his lips. It fell out, and he caught it in mid-air and put it back again. Giraldy checked an impatient laugh.

He struck a match, protected it with the hollows of his hands (though the air in the room was still) and crouched forward above his own knees, offering it. Blair directed the cigarette at it with his mouth, thrust it a little too far to one side, then almost immediately covered up his mistake and attained the proper focus for combustion. He drew in breath till his heart felt empty.

“Now go ahead,” Giraldy smirked.

No one in the room was making a sound, all were patronizingly watching. They had discovered a new diversion: liqueurs, piano music, now a young boy smoking a cigarette.

Blair held his mouth open like an O and a casual silver thread began to curl over the edge of his upper lip. Some of it reentered his nostrils. Some got into his eye and scalded.

“That’s not the way,” said Giraldy.

“He look like a feesh,” observed a woman. She opened her own mouth in ludicrous imitation.

Blair felt he ought not to fail them. He thrust his stomach forward and blew through his rounded mouth like a valve. The toiling silver thread was jerked to a horizontal position and expanded into a cone. A few particles of moisture went with it but the rest was undoubtedly smoke.

Giraldy ruefully dabbed the side of his face with a handkerchief. No doubt intended as a burlesque gesture, it was accepted as such and caused laughter.

A spasm of coughing followed on Blair’s part. Someone coming up behind him unexpectedly, pounded him between the shoulders with the flat of his hand. Blair whirled around enraged, and still occupied with strangling, kicked sketchily at the man’s shins. Close as they were to one another, he failed to reach him. A universal and, to Blair, inexplicable laugh accompanied this. Everyone in the room participated, including the man himself. Everyone but Blair, that is.

“Go and drink some water,” Estelle said encouragingly.

“And stay outside,” added Giraldy.

Several hours later Estelle, on her way to her ablutions in a preposterous pink wrapper, encountered a tottering green-faced ghost emerging from the bathroom.

“Blair,” she said, “aren’t you well?”

“I learned how,” was all he answered, and shut himself in his room.

Half an hour later there was a discreet tap at the door, and when he grudgingly opened it an inch or two, the old household crone stood there with a malicious grin on her warped face and a cup of steaming black coffee on the palm of her outstretched hand.

“The young lady,” she lisped hoarsely, “ordered this for you,” and depositing it on the dresser, turned her back and pattered off on her naked coppery feet.

This incident, although it was quickly forgotten, established a sort of bond of understanding between Blair and Estelle. It was as though they had once shared a secret together. It was as though, to use his own mental terminology, she had once been “on his side.”

3

The old woman who did their cooking had had an increase of family. Not personally, that is, but in the form of a nephew or niece, Blair was never sure which. With the baby came a girl of fourteen or fifteen, café-au-lait, stockingless, red corals in her ears, her oily black hair plaited down her back, whose task it was to manage it while the old woman was busy in the kitchen and the patio. Blair and this girl were thrown much together. It was evident that she admired the blueness of his eyes, a color she had never thought of before in connection with eyes. She told him as much. Devils, she then remarked, had red eyes.

“There are no devils,” said Blair.

This went on for days. Neither one of them would yield, until finally the topic had to lapse. However, whenever either of them quarreled after that or became irritated at anything, they immediately flew back to the subject as if by mutual agreement.

“There are no devils.”

“There are. The priest told me.”

Her name, it seemed, was Maria. Certainly no great distinction among a class that numbered its Marias by thousands. And possibly because there were other, contemporary Marias in her immediate family circle, she was known as Mariquita (that is, little Maria), to distinguish her from the nebulous rest.

“I’m going to draw your picture,” he said to her once. “You have very good teeth for a picture.”