Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (165 page)

He was waiting outside on the street at five o’clock, when she went to do her evening errands. “Wendy said you always left the house at this time for a short while,” he said. “Dinah, you must listen to me.”

“I’m in a hurry.” Her lips barely moved as she brushed past him.

“So am I. I’m in a hurry to make you understand.”

She forged ahead, not paying any attention to him.

“Now listen, Dinah,” he said at her heels.

She ignored him.

“Dinah! You listen to me, do you hear?”

She gained the corner and pulled open the door of a grocery store. He slid in after her. “I’m not engaged any more,” he told her imperatively.

“Does she know that?” Dinah flung at him over her shoulder, and turned to the clerk behind the counter. “A six-pack of Tab,” she reeled off from a list she was holding in front of her. “Maxwell House coffee. Two pounds of tomatoes.”

“Dinah …”

“Oranges and lemons and waxed paper and Reynolds wrap,” she recited.

“Dinah …”

She left the store straining under the weight of a shopping bag.

“I’ll take that,” he said, masterfully, but she kept her eyes fixed on the far distance. She turned in at the apartment building. Wordlessly, he reached for her arm, but she plucked his hand off with chill fingers and headed for the elevators.

“You’ll have to think of something,” he told his aunt a quarter of an hour later. “What would you suggest I do?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“The only thing I can think of is write to Cam, and tell her the engagement’s off.”

“A splendid idea,” she said, warming to it.

“You think so too?”

“I’m sure I can’t think of anything else. Either you want Camilla or you want Dinah. And if you want Dinah, scratch Camilla. It’s the only solution to this knotty problem.”

“Fine. Then I shall write Camilla.”

“Here’s a pen and paper.”

“Oh.”

“Do it now,” she said, seating him at her desk.

He sat down and scribbled for a while. After half an hour or so he showed her the letter. “That seems definitive enough,” she said approvingly. “I like that sentence …
since I’ve met someone who has everything
I need in a woman.
Capital, Dick. If I were Camilla, I’d get the message.”

“I don’t see how she can help but get the message,” he said, sealing the envelope.

“Let me post it.” His aunt reached for the stamped envelope. “It will give me the greatest pleasure I’ve had in a long time. Besides, you might get cold feet.”

“Am I that characterless in your opinion, Vicky?”

She regarded him. “You’re of this nebulous,
irritating
generation of young people,” she said after a bit. “But your heart’s in the right place, Dick, and so is mine. Good luck. I hope it will have a happy ending.”

Chewing his fingernails, Dick waited impatiently for Camilla’s answering letter. It came on a Tuesday morning, marked air mail, and it was vitriolic. Each vituperative sentence brought home to him how narrow his escape had been.

He thought of his mother and father, and was glad he had escaped the fate of nuptials with Camilla. There was such a thing as a good marriage, he reflected, and a good future, for he had seen it flourishing in the days of his boyhood. “A dozen long-stemmed red roses,” he told the florist over the phone. “They must be delivered at noon tomorrow.” He inserted a hasty grace note. “The longest stems you can find. The flowers must be perfect, the finest possible.”

Then he addressed an envelope to Dinah Mason, care of the Wallaces, and inserted Camilla’s astringent letter. The mail would reach her between nine and eleven, and the flowers would follow, at noon. He put the letter in the box and sat back to wait, every nerve twanging. He didn’t even try to work. There were times in a man’s life when work had to take a back seat. He spent most of the day at the window in his office, looking out at the sky, and when it had turned to a darkling purple, he locked his desk and went home.

Mr. Claiborne knotted his correct tie, smoothed down his shirt and slipped into his jacket. He was calling for Margaret Paley at six-thirty. They were going to the bistro on the West Side. It hadn’t, miraculously, been torn down after all but was still a culinary delight. The prices had gone up, rather staggeringly, but the ambience was still as quiet and unpretentious as it had been in the old days.

He went to the window, where day was turning into dusk. He stood there and let himself remember. It was painful still. Reflections of a man on the recollection of his dead wife, he thought, and recalled that once, in the long ago, there had been a young man and a young woman, both with dreams, young, eager dreams. Gordon Claiborne watched the day ending and deliberately summoned up the long-gone past, remembering moments of it, indelible fragments of time that glimmered in the interstices of the years like the bright gloss of alabaster. When they had been young …

Walking hand in hand along Fifth Avenue. Eating blintzes at the Russian Tea Room. Seeing art films. Getting their passports, as happy as starlings. Climbing up in the ancient dust of Greece to the Acropolis. Swimming in the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean.

That was long ago
, he told himself, turning away from the window. Very long ago. There were many years to be lived yet. He felt in his pocket, where the small, velvet-lined box lay. “Margaret,” he would say. “I want to share my life with you.”

Margaret … Margaret …

We’re not really old
, he thought.
We have a future. Neither of us will be lonely any more.
He thought suddenly of Christmas holidays. A tree, gifts. And New Year …

“Happy New Year.” He said it aloud, and pleasure surged through him. They would have a huge party. The drawing room would be festooned with greens. There would be mistletoe.

You can’t live without love
, he told himself, and was impatient to get to her. It was only the middle of August, but he was signing Christmas cards in his mind.

Margaret and Gordon Claiborne.

Wendy brought in the morning mail. “For you, Mommy,” she said importantly.

“Thank you, darling.”

“And for you, Dinah.”

“Thanks, Wendy.”

She wouldn’t have recognized the handwriting. How could she? She hadn’t ever seen Dick’s handwriting before. It was the name that alerted her … Richard Claiborne.

“Dinah, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“You look as if you’d seen a ghost,” Mrs. Wallace said.

“It’s nothing.”

She put the letter down and busied herself with some small tasks. She wouldn’t read it. She’d toss it in the trash can. Imagine that! Now he was writing to her.

“Aren’t you going to open your mail?” Mrs. Wallace asked after a while.

“Later on.”

“What discipline you have. I can’t wait to tear my morning letters open. But then admittedly I’m a greedy pig.”

“This isn’t important.”

She looked long at it, later on in her own room. Her room at the Wallaces’ was quite pretty, with blond wood furniture and filmy Austrian blinds. There was a small adjoining bathroom. It was every bit as comfortable as home.

Home … the word gave Dinah an odd feeling. Home was all over, for someone like her. Home was at the Wallaces’, or at Mrs. Paley’s, or whatever patient she happened to be tending. Why, she was far more often at someone else’s home than she was at her own. A pang accompanied this admission. She was past the quarter century mark, and living other people’s lives. She had a vision of herself ten years hence. Ten years from now she’d be thirty-six. It was hard to believe that you were ever going to be thirty-six, but there you were. It would come along someday, that thirty-sixth birthday, and the birthdays after that.

Whose house will you be living in then
? she asked herself, and picked up Dick’s letter. She stared at it for quite some time. Richard L. Claiborne. She looked at the number and the street, trying to picture just where that would be, and then she realized that, of course, where Richard Claiborne lived was very near the Sutton Place park. Just around the corner, in fact.

Everybody seemed to live near the Sutton Place park, she thought. Mrs. Paley. That man on the bench who read Baudelaire. And Richard Claiborne. She looked at the envelope a little while longer and then slit it open with a fingernail.

The interior envelope, addressed to Dick, brought a gasp from her. Mr. Richard Claiborne …

And in the upper left-hand corner, Camilla M. Farrington. The Ritz Hotel, Place de Vendome, Paris …

There was a moment of numb incredulity. For a terrible second it was like one of those nasty Valentines, the insulting kind. Then, trembling and with stiff fingers, she opened Camilla’s letter and read the contents. She read it once and then she read it again., Then she read it a third time.

“Oh,” she said, and felt as if hundreds of pounds had been lifted from her chest. The feeling of lightness made her seem almost airborne.
He meant it
, she thought.
He really meant it. He’s not engaged any more.

He’s not engaged any more
, she kept saying to herself, and after a while got up and looked in a mirror.
It’s true
, she thought, regarding herself from all angles.
He’s broken it off. He’s not engaged any more …

The flowers came an hour later. A long, impressive box, with blood-red blooms pillowed in pale green tissue, the moisture on the roses like teardrops. “To my one and only,” the card read. “With love always and forever, Dick.”

“They’re from Richard,” Dinah told the girls, who were clustered around. “Aren’t they glorious?”

“I like Dick,” Wendy announced.

“So do I,” Joanie echoed. “I wish someone would give me flowers like that.”

“Someone will, someday,” Dinah said, and went to the telephone. “This is Dinah Mason, Miss Blanding,” she said. “Thank you, I’m fine. Could I ask you for a favor?”

“Certainly,” the clipped voice of Miss Blanding answered. “What is it, Dinah?”

“May I have your nephew’s telephone number?”

There was a brief silence. Then, “Delighted to oblige,” Miss Blanding said. “Just a moment, Dinah. I’ll get my little blue book.”

“My son seems to have gotten himself un-engaged and re-engaged,” Mr. Claiborne said to Mrs. Paley over the telephone.

“I beg your pardon, Gordon?”

“He’s thrown Camilla over. Now he’s to marry someone else.”

“Oh. Well, does it upset you?”

“Not particularly. Whoever she is, she can’t be worse than Camilla. Is it any surprise to you that it doesn’t affect me very much one way or the other? It’s a long time since I’ve been selfish. Is that very reprehensible of me?”

“I don’t think it is.”

“I’m very happy,” he said, his voice deep. “That’s a word I never thought I’d use again.”

“You’re echoing my sentiments,” she said.

“Margaret, dear …”

“Gordon …”

A clerk entered his office, and he became more businesslike. “I’m going to meet the young lady on Thursday evening,” he said. “It’s to be dinner at home. Will you help me? Just the four of us.” He looked up, and with a curt nod dismissed the lingering clerk. When he was alone again he said, “I must tell Dick some time. Let’s spring our own surprise on Thursday night.”

“I’ll leave it up to you,” she said.

“Very good. I’ll call for you around six. We can visit for a bit before they arrive.”

“Lovely.”

“And, Margaret?”

“Yes, Gordon?”

He hesitated. “I’m so very happy,” he said.

“I’m glad. I’m happy too, Gordon.”

He hung up. It shouldn’t be so difficult to say. He wanted very much to say it, but so far he hadn’t been able to.

I love you
, he wanted to say, but he had said instead,
“I’m so very happy.”
Well, the words would come in time.
I do love her
, he told himself and somehow he was sure she knew it.

“Do I look all right?”

They were walking toward Dick’s car. “You look superlative,” he told her, and thought how inadequate it was. Once he had thought Dinah was less beautiful than Daphne, not as glimmering as Camilla. How wrong he had been. Dinah was the loveliest, most radiant girl in the world, and she was his. No face in the entire universe could make up for the loss of this dear one, he thought humbly, and knew he was a captive. For the first time he understood his father’s loss, the terrible rupture of a whole and complete life.
I couldn’t bear to be without Dinah
, Dick thought.
I’d rather die.

A strand of her fair hair blew across her cheek. He pushed it back and caught her hand, pressing it. She smiled at him. “What?” she asked.

“Nothing. Just, I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said seriously. “Just the same, we’re running late. I don’t want your father’s first impression of me to be tinged with displeasure. If we keep him waiting, I shall simply say you were making passes at me on the sidewalk.”

“My chief concern is to see he doesn’t make passes at you himself.”

“You do say the most bizarre things.”

“He wasn’t doing so badly that day in the park.”

“What day in the park? What are you talking about?”

His smile was tantalizing. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Know what? What’s this about the park?”

“I saw you,” he said. “You were deep in conversation. I didn’t think Dad had it in him.”

“Had it …” She seized his arm. “What are you
talking
about?”

“Never mind.”

“Dick Claiborne. Tell me instantly what you mean.”

It was very odd, though. Somehow she had a faint inkling, born of Dick’s Sutton Place address, of his pursuit of her with Mrs. Paley’s overnight bag. It was as if something finally clicked into place. That man in the park …
“I saw you in the park … you were deep in conversation.”

“Richard.” Her voice was faint. “Listen, don’t kid around. What do you mean about that day in the park? Don’t torment me. That man I spoke to …”

He side-glanced wickedly at her. “So absorbed in conversation you dashed off without your valise,” he said.