Bright Young Things (3 page)

Cordelia was relieved she didn‧t have to respond. Escaping Union for the big city was the idea that had bonded Letty and Cordelia to one another, but Cordelia was an altogether more durable creature than her friend, and she knew nothing came so easily as all that—especially fame and fortune and all those treasures that everyone desires.

Perhaps it was this sharper sense of the realities of life that made Cordelia tight-lipped about her own dream. She had allowed her best friend—her only friend, really—to believe she was simply running for the fun of it. But the real reason was the kind of story an orphan girl can feed on for years, and she knew in some buried way that if anyone had questioned or doubted it, she might have had to curl up and die.

Outside, Ohio fell away in the night; she was traveling at unprecedented speed toward the place she had always dreamed of going back to. The other passengers in the car had stopped talking. It was quiet, and the lights above had dimmed. If she could have foreseen everything that was to happen in the next couple of weeks, how sleepless and manic and full they would be, she might have tried to get some rest, too. But her eyes were wild, and there was so much electricity in every corner of her head and heart—she was too alive with awake dreams to try to have any of the other variety. She wanted to see the sun coming up in another state, and everything else the world had been holding just out of her reach.

3

THE MARSH ESTATE WAS DECEPTIVELY NAMED, FOR THE grounds were expertly manicured by a team of ten gardeners so that its appearance would have none of the wildness that name might otherwise conjure. The place was called Marsh only because the man who had built it had been called Marsh. It sat on the lovely finger of land that marked the eastern border of White Cove, on the north shore of Long Island—a short drive to Wall Street and all the money that was made there, but a long way from the city‧s more sordid quarters.

The impossibly green lawns were populated as far as the eye could see by a hundred varieties of tree, many imported from the English countryside. Beneath the arbor of their branches walked a girl wearing loose-fitting, pale peach silk pajamas, an old tennis visor, and a mink jacket that was short enough to reveal the fast cadence of her slim hips, even though it was late enough in the day that somewhere, people were already dressing for dinner, and a season when fur is hardly necessary.

Her name was Astrid Donal. She had a full head of egg yolk yellow hair, cut so that its tips curled against her jaw, and the soft, heart-shaped face of a girl young enough to still have a taste for sweets but old enough to have been quite frequently kissed. If she had been asked the time, she might have guessed from recent experience that it was no longer morning, but it would have been impossible for her to name the exact hour. As for the coat, it was merely an aberration of Astrid‧s temperament that she often felt cold when no one else did. But now, as she wandered across the lawns, she began to feel truly warm, and let the mink slip from her shoulders and fall onto the ground.

“Miss Donal!”

Astrid squinted in the bright sunlight to make out her maid on the stone verandah of the home that belonged to her mother‧s third husband, Harrison Marsh II.

“Telephone for you!”

Astrid‧s feet carried her up a gentle slope, ending her meander sooner than she‧d really intended. “I lost my jacket somewhere, somehow,” she announced a little breathlessly when she reached the maid‧s side. “Do send someone out to find it, dear?”

“Yes, miss. Telephone for you.”

“I heard you,” Astrid replied, hurriedly but not unkindly, as she went into the dimly lit first floor and tried to make her eyes adjust. Her bones had that delightful weightless quality of having not been awake very long, and she smiled a little to think that she could simply skip over the hours when one wore daytime clothes. Was it only one week ago she had returned from her all-girls boarding school in Connecticut, arriving by a private ferry that carried her and her fourteen pieces of luggage across the sound? She had another year at Miss Porter‧s, but somewhere over the course of the last seven days she had acquired the fatalistic notion that she would not be returning there. She wasn‧t exactly sure why, for she could be a very good student when she bothered to concentrate. Perhaps it was that her life here seemed to swallow her so completely, and then everything outside it began to seem vague and unimportant.

Crossing through the library with its leaded glass windows on either side, she arrived in the main hall at the front of the house. No lamps had been turned on yet, and there was only the bluish natural light coming in from the great windows that flanked the door. The receiver of the telephone lay on its side atop a little polished rosewood table. She paused a moment before picking it up, noticing that her pajama pants had become slightly muddied at the hems.

“Hello?” she finally said, resting the receiver next to her face.

“Hello, baby.”

Astrid‧s eyelids sank closed, and a small crescent emerged at the left corner of her lips. The sound of his voice always made her feel like a precious doll. His voice was like him, big and impressive, and it immediately brought to mind the various places they had been last night and the many things they had done. “Morning, Charlie. Are you just waking up?”

“No, baby, I can‧t lounge around like you all day.” In the background, she could hear the voices of men speaking in three-word sentences.

“No … you‧ve been up for hours, I suppose, seeing to very important things,” she teased. Her eyes were still closed, and she swayed in the cool quiet of Marsh Hall‧s foyer. It had been more than a year now that she‧d been calling Charlie her boyfriend, since the beginning of the previous summer. “Not me. Me, I have been exquisitely lazy, until I got very ambitious and went to see what the grass felt like between my toes.”

“Good. You‧re getting some beauty sleep. I want my girl to be the best-looking girlie at the party tomorrow.”

“What party?”

“The party my father is throwing. It‧s his birthday.” Everyone in White Cove knew that Charlie‧s father was one of the biggest dealers of illegal liquor in New York, and he used his nearby estate as a kind of advertisement for the lifestyle his wares made possible. “I told you last night. Don‧t you remember?”

“Did you? I guess I forgot,” she replied, not because she truly had no recollection but because she hated ever doing anything according to a plan.

“Wear the silver I sent you when you were at school. I‧ll have a car come round to pick you up.”

Astrid tilted her head dreamily to the side. The silver dress he was referring to didn‧t fit her, of course. Charlie always bought things two sizes too large, as though he couldn‧t quite comprehend how much smaller than him she was. But she could have it taken in by tomorrow, she supposed—one of the maids would do the work that night.

Astrid opened her eyes then and realized that she was not alone in the room. “Are you lost?” she said to a young man wearing a denim shirt tucked into worker‧s pants. He was long and ropey, and his skin was brown from the sun. He had pretty, sad eyes.

“Who‧s there?” said Charlie on the other end of the telephone line, suddenly at greater attention.

“No one. Never mind. Send a car round tomorrow, cocktail time. Good-bye.” Then she put the receiver back in its ornate cradle. “Don‧t I know you?” she purred, though knowing the handsome, decidedly unrefined boy seemed unlikely.

To her surprise, he nodded. His black hair was falling in his eyes, and he pushed it back a little shyly before answering. “Yes, ma‧am. My name‧s Luke. We rode together a few times when we were young. My pa ran the stables at Count de Gruyter‧s place over in Great Neck.”

“Aha, I knew it!” she lied. “We must have been about eight,” she said, because her mother had only been married to the count—her second husband—for a year and a few months, around 1920. “Anyway, what brings you here, Luke? You couldn‧t possibly be working for us again.”

“No …” He paused awkwardly and looked at his feet. “I work over at the White Cove Country Club now.”

For some reason this made her smile, and when he saw it, he smiled, too. Then she decided she didn‧t want to know anything about the series of events that preceded his arrival in her foyer on that particular afternoon—it was one of her virtues that she was often content to know little—and shrugged happily. “I‧m suddenly so hungry, aren‧t you?”

“Actually, yes.”

She moved breezily to his side and took him by the hand, and they hurried together through the quiet rooms of the house to the kitchen, where the cook and her assistant were busy making bread. The cook glanced up—she had a kind, fat face, just as all cooks should—and there was only a brief moment where a little scandal lingered in her eyes at seeing the young miss wearing pajamas in the late afternoon and holding the hand of a strange boy in work clothes. She had been employed by old, rich families a long time, and could remember the days when a girl‧s reputation was ruined over much less. But all the rules had changed in the last decade, and in Marsh Hall, as on many of the surrounding estates, people with fine names were always having meals at unusual hours with people who were not at all like them.

These days one might enter a Fifth Avenue parlor or a pool hall and encounter socialites in feather boas and reporters just off the crime beat, Princeton sophomores and heiresses wearing men‧s trousers, gold diggers and gamblers, bankers and bootleggers (what was the difference, really?)—and occasionally a few stray, incorruptible innocents. One might encounter three generations of debutantes, each wearing her heirloom jewels, shoulder to shoulder with a known racketeer at a boxing match, all heckling with equal gusto the hulking, sweating, bleeding men in the ring, and all manner of fine people frequenting the kind of joint where brandy was served out of chipped coffee cups. And so, the sight of Astrid Donal with a stable boy was unlikely to shock the cook.

“Martha, we‧re hungry,” said Astrid, showing her lips in their full poutiness. Of course she did not mean to pout, and in fact she was comforted by the smell of rising flour and the simple quality of that part of the house, with the copper hoods over the stoves and the brick-sized white tile everywhere. She let go of Luke‧s hand, with its rough skin and firm grip, and crossed the room. “Won‧t you make us some eggs?”

“Course, dearie,” Cook answered, as Astrid draped her arms around the older woman‧s neck, happily receiving a kiss at the hairline. “Only, sit down and don‧t be in my way. There‧s coffee on the stove.”

Astrid winked at her new friend. He was fussing with his belt and lingering on the margins of the kitchen. No doubt he felt a little funny being her guest there, since he himself was more or less the help, too. She poured them each a cup of coffee in delicate china cups and beckoned for him to come sit next to her on the high stools at the worktable in the center of the kitchen, so that they could watch as Cook scrambled their eggs.

He took a tentative sip and glanced at her as though he were unsure whether or not it was his place to speak.

“You work at the club, you said?” He smelled like cut grass and sweat, and sitting so close to him gave her a pleasant, easy feeling.

He nodded. “Training the horses.”

“I never have time for that kind of thing anymore,” she replied with a careless wave of her hand. “But maybe I should take it up again, now I know
you‧re
there.” She rested her elbows on the table and leaned toward him, pausing long enough that his dark eyes were forced to meet hers. “Would you help me?”

He nodded, but was prevented from replying by the cook noisily putting two bowls in front of them. Into each she shoveled a pile of scrambled eggs, topping them with a slab of bacon.

“Thank you,” he said to the cook, with a sincere bob of his head.

“Yes, thank you,” said Astrid, as she picked up the bacon with her fingers and nibbled thoughtfully at the end. “I remember you now,” she mused, forgetting that a moment ago she had pretended to know him for sure. There
was
something familiar about him, she saw it now: a quiet boy in a plaid flannel jacket who used to lead her pony for her. “There were three of you, weren‧t there?”

“My older brothers, John and Peter.” His eyes were shining, and she realized that it pleased him to be remembered.

“And you used to walk my pony Arabella around the corral for me. You and I were the same height then …” A mischievous smile crept onto her lips. “You used to look back at me sometimes,” she whispered sweetly.

His own smile fell at this, and his face colored. Then she knew that his childhood self had had a crush on her childhood self. She was perfectly aware that the cook was giving her a disapproving look, but she didn‧t care. That was Astrid‧s way—she loved Charlie, of course, but she was an incorrigible flirt, and anyway it was glorious, making a man blush like that.

“Oh,
there
you are.”

The cook‧s eyes darted up first, and then Astrid and Luke glanced over. There, framed in the hall doorway, was her mother, Virginia Donal de Gruyter Marsh, whose strong features conveyed any displeasure that her tone might have left in doubt. Her physical presence was composed of brittle parts, but the overall effect was one of fierceness. It was very generally known that the lady of the house enjoyed a party as much as—and maybe more than—her daughter did, a fact that always made the latter wince.

Indeed, Astrid‧s mother was in full evening dress now, but it was apparent, especially in the natural light streaming through the large windows, that she was still wearing what she had gone out in the evening before. The quality of her pale skin was dull, and her sleeveless black dress, with the black sash tight at her narrow waist, hung off her in limp, wrinkled tiers. Her hair had surely been done up for whatever fete she had abandoned her husband for last night, but now it sat around her shoulders like weeds. The buckles of her high-heeled shoes, which involved diamonds and emeralds, were the only part of her that shone.

It was only after several seconds that Astrid realized it was not she, but Luke, her mother had misplaced. “I have been looking everywhere,” Virginia added unnecessarily.

The exact circumstances under which Luke had met her mother and been invited into Marsh Hall would never be fully explained to Astrid, but a vague outline of what must have occurred had now taken form in her mind—after all, her mother was very frequently at the White Cove Country Club, and people on their third marriages are rarely sentimental about fidelity—and the idea of it disgusted her. Although Astrid had inherited her mother‧s flirtatiousness, she was not nearly so cavalier. She gave Cook as true a smile as possible before standing up.

“Thank you, Martha, but it‧s just occurred to me how late it is, and I must have my dress fitted for the party tomorrow night at Charlie‧s,” she announced. Without meeting the eyes of anyone in the room, she advanced toward the hall; on the threshold, her mother grasped her wrist.

For a moment Astrid imagined she was about to be admonished for having slept so late, for so clearly planning to skip dinner in the formal Marsh dining room, for ruining a very expensive pair of pajamas, or for announcing so casually that she was going to socialize at a house that belonged to a known bootlegger. But instead her mother parted her thin lips, caught her daughter‧s gaze, and asked: “What time is the party?”