Let Me Tell You (5 page)

Alice was twelve; to be precise, Alice was twelve and a day when she went to a famous nightclub with her mother and father and Mr. and Mrs. Carrington. The Carringtons were friends of her family's, and had just arrived that day from Chicago. “So Alice was twelve years old yesterday?” Mr. Carrington had said, looking down at Alice and grinning. “Don't you think that calls for a little celebration?” Mr. Carrington was big and cheerful and red-faced; when he said “a little celebration” it meant he wanted to spend money and show someone a good time.

Mrs. Carrington had red hair and was big and cheerful, like Mr. Carrington; Alice was very fond of both of them. “A girl's only young once,” Mrs. Carrington had said. “This ought to be the finest celebration this old city has ever seen.”

Alice's mother and father were cheerful people too, and they had seen to it that Alice had a very pretty twelfth birthday party; her father gave her a charm bracelet with a tiny silver cocktail shaker and glasses on it, which made her feel daring and sophisticated, and her mother gave her a manicure set with natural-color polish. Because Alice was an only child she felt very close to her mother and father, in spite of an uneasy feeling at times that they had a complete life apart from her. She knew that they were immensely popular people, that their friends were witty and charming, and that their books were good and their ideas modern; only occasionally did she wonder what they talked about all the time when they were with their friends, since they had so little to say to each other.

“Alice has never had a real grown-up celebration,” her father said. He reached for Alice, who was standing next to him, and pulled her down onto his knee. “She's not a little girl anymore,” her father said. “She's a young lady. What am I going to do,” he asked Mr. Carrington, “when some young man comes along and wants to take her away from me?”

“Make sure he's rich,” Mrs. Carrington said. “If I had a daughter I'd make sure she married a man who could support Charley and me in our old age.”

“Stop mauling the child, Jamie,” Alice's mother said. “She's too big, and it's undignified.”

“Two days ago I could still hold her on my lap,” Alice's father said, “but now that she's twelve I can't?”

“On my fiftieth birthday,” Alice told her father, “I'll come around and sit on your lap.”

Alice's father began to laugh. “See, honey,” he said to his wife, “not everyone thinks it's undignified to sit on my lap.”

Mrs. Carrington said quickly, “But what about this celebration? I propose that all of us go out somewhere to dinner, wherever Alice wants to go.”

“I want to go to the Arabian Nights,” Alice said, quickly. Everyone looked at her, and she blushed.

“What on earth?” her father said. He turned Alice's face around. “Why do you want to go there?”

Mr. Carrington was trying very hard not to laugh. “I don't blame her,” he said. “I'd like to go there myself. Always did want to.”

Alice held her breath. The Arabian Nights was a very big, very noisy, very famous nightclub; if she went there for dinner she could wear her new bracelet and her nail polish.

Alice's mother was laughing too. “She must have heard Jamie talking.”

“I always wanted to go there,” Alice said to Mr. Carrington.

“If that's where you want to have your birthday celebration,” Mr. Carrington said. “Only there must be places you'd
rather
go?”

“Nowhere else,” Alice said breathlessly. “I've been reading about it and hearing about it for a long time.”

Mr. Carrington looked at Alice's father, and Alice's father nodded. Then Mr. Carrington looked at Alice's mother, and she hesitated, and then shrugged and smiled at Mrs. Carrington. Then Mr. Carrington turned to Alice. “I guess that's it, then, Alice,” he said. “Shall I phone for a reservation?”

“Wear your blue dress,” Alice's mother said, “and the bracelet your father gave you.”

Alice sat between her father and Mr. Carrington with her nails shiny and pink beyond the bracelet, in the lavishly decorated Arabian Nights, at a table that had been especially reserved. She sat with her elbow on the edge of the table, and her chin in her hand, with her shoulders pulled tight together, and she looked disdainfully at the people sitting nearby. They're just like everyone else, she thought; I'm not afraid of any of them. When everyone had a drink—Mr. Carrington had ordered a glass of sherry for Alice—she picked it up and took a sip from it just like everyone else, and she watched how her mother toyed with the stem of her glass, and did the same thing. Seen through the glass, her fingers were long and thin.

When the floor show started, Alice had just begun her soup; her father and Mr. Carrington ate right on through in the almost-darkness and so did she. It's canned tomato soup, like at home, she thought with surprise. They were sitting very close to the stage, and everyone had taken care that Alice should sit where she could see everything. The comedians embarrassed her because it was necessary for her to pretend not to understand them when she saw her mother glance at her and then tighten her lips to keep from smiling. Her father and Mr. Carrington were watching her too, and she was proud when she realized she was acting exactly like everyone else. The dancers delighted her; one of them came down to the edge of the stage with a bowlful of gardenias to throw to the audience, and he saw Alice and tossed her one.

“We should have thought to get her some flowers,” Mr. Carrington said as he pinned the gardenia onto Alice's shoulder.

Intermission arrived just in time for Alice to eat her steak. The lights all went on again, and everyone turned to Alice at once and began to talk.

“Do you like the show?” her mother said.

“How are you enjoying yourself?” Mr. Carrington asked.

“Want to go home yet?” her father said.

“You look very pretty, Alice,” Mrs. Carrington said. Alice looked around at everyone and said: “I'm having a wonderful time. Everything's wonderful.”

“Cigarette?” Mr. Carrington said to Alice very solemnly. Alice looked at her mother, and her mother shook her head. I suppose I can't have everything, Alice thought. “No, thank you,” she said to Mr. Carrington. “I don't smoke.” And Mr. Carrington, smiling, put the cigarette case away.

Alice's mother was staring off at the entrance, her eyes narrow and interested, and at the same time her hand was feeling around on the table for her bag; when her hand found it, she took out her compact, still without looking, then her lipstick and comb. Finally she dropped her eyes and hurriedly opened the compact and looked at herself, touched her nose with the powder puff and her hair with the comb, turning the compact to see the sides of her hair, and then she put on a little more lipstick, and raised her eyes again to the entrance. While she looked, her hands were busy again, putting everything back into her bag and the bag back onto the table. Then suddenly she turned to Mrs. Carrington. “Look,” she said excitedly, “isn't that Clark Gable, coming in with that party? Over
there.
” She gestured for Mrs. Carrington to look. “About three tables in back of Alice? I'm certain it is.” Mr. Carrington and Alice's father were listening by this time; Mrs. Carrington gave one quick glance to the side.

“It certainly does look like him,” she said.

Alice's father and Mr. Carrington both looked. “Sure, it's him,” Mr. Carrington said.

“Major Gable,” Alice's father said, “volunteered to be a top gunner during the war.”

“Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn,” whispered Mrs. Carrington to Alice's mother.

Alice didn't turn around, because everyone else at the table had; people all over the room were looking too, and she felt oddly conspicuous because she was so close to Mr. Gable and at a table where everyone was turning around to look.

“How soon does the floor show start again?” she asked her father.

“Pretty soon,” her father said absently. He was looking sideways at the famous man's table.

“I've always thought I'd like to be an actress,” Alice's mother said gaily. Everyone laughed.

“Look over here, Gable,” Mr. Carrington said softly, “I could use a million dollars.”

“A man like that means glamour to a lot of people,” Alice's father said. “Made six, eight movies with Jean Harlow!”

“I remember you playing Romeo in college,” Alice's mother said. She took her eyes off the nearby table for a minute and looked at Alice's father. “You might be pretty,” she said, “but you sure can't act.”

Alice's father laughed again, unhappily. “I never had a chance to learn to be an actor anyway,” he said. “By the time I was married and had a wife and baby—”

“Shh,” Alice's mother said, “he's looking this way.” She looked at Mr. Carrington and smiled vivaciously. “Aren't we silly,” she said, and threw back her head and laughed. Mrs. Carrington joined in, nudging Mr. Carrington, and Mr. Carrington sat back and guffawed. Alice's father didn't laugh; he sat quietly with one hand over his eyes and the other before him on the table. Alice reached out and touched his hand. When he looked up she smiled embarrassedly, and he sighed and dropped his head to his hand again. Suddenly, Alice's mother stopped laughing and sat back in her chair. Mrs. Carrington looked around once, then picked up her glass and took a long drink from it.

Alice's mother said across the table to Alice's father: “You look like you just lost your last friend.”

Alice's father dropped his hand from his eyes and sighed. “Just thinking,” he said.

“About what you might have been if you hadn't had a wife and baby?” Alice's mother asked. Alice looked up, surprised at her mother's voice.

“ ‘It seems too logical…I have missed everything, even my death,' ” Alice's father said softly. He looked at Mrs. Carrington. “Cyrano,” he said apologetically, then laughed sadly again.

“It's all right,” Alice's mother said. “He isn't looking this way anymore.”

“I'd like to meet that man,” Mrs. Carrington said. “He looks so intelligent.”

Alice's father looked up. “Alice!” he said, and everyone listened. “Why don't we have Alice go over and ask Gable for his autograph?” he said.

“She's only a child, she could do it,” Alice's mother said.

“Say, you might even ask him to join us,” Mr. Carrington said to Alice. “You know, just for a drink or something.”

“Charley,” Mrs. Carrington said reprovingly, “how could the child ask a man like that over for a drink? Anyway, he wouldn't dream of coming.”

“He might,” Alice's father said.

They're all thinking he'd look over here anyway, Alice thought, and see all of them and notice them, and maybe even bow to them on his way out. “I couldn't do that,” she said.

“Don't be silly, darling,” her mother told her. “You're only a child, it wouldn't look funny.”

“She could say her mother—her mama—didn't want her to come over,” Mrs. Carrington said, “but it's her birthday and she wanted to meet Clark Gable.”

“I won't do it,” Alice said.

“Alice!” her mother said.

“When I was your age,” Mrs. Carrington said heavily, “little girls minded their mothers.”

“Yes, indeed, Alice,” her mother said. “You're not usually a disobedient child.”

“Honey,” her father said, “it's just a joke. You only pretend, don't you see?” He looks like the devil, she thought.

“I couldn't pretend to want his autograph,” Alice said.

“Just tell him it's your birthday, then,” Mr. Carrington said.

“I should think,” Mrs. Carrington whispered, “that when a little girl gets taken out to a nice party and then someone asks her to do something, she'd do it and not be so silly about it.”

“He's leaving,” Alice's mother said in a flat voice. Everyone turned around to look. Then they looked back at Alice.

“It's too late now anyway,” her father said.

“Well, it doesn't matter after all,” Mr. Carrington said finally. “It wasn't important, Alice. Don't worry about it.”

“I'm sorry,” Alice said to her mother.

“It doesn't matter,” her mother said.

The lights began to dim for the second half of the floor show. Alice put her hand on Mr. Carrington's arm. “Mr. Carrington,” she said, “I've got a lot of algebra to do for tomorrow, so as soon as we finish dinner could we go home?” Mr. Carrington was moving his chair to see the floor show, but he stopped for a minute and looked at her. Alice put her hands under the table and began to work the fastening of the charm bracelet. “I've got all my French to do, too,” she said.

The first sign that the Oberons were coming might have been early blossoms on the peach tree, but Mrs. Spencer did not know until she got the letter. It came on Thursday, when Mrs. Spencer was already beginning to feel the first tensions of anxiety over the day, with guests invited for dinner and Donnie's dentist appointment at three—itself requiring split-second timing at the school—and then there was the shopping to be done and the flowers to be arranged and the lemon cream to be made
early
this week to avoid the near catastrophe of last time, when people actually had to eat it with spoons. Now here was a strange letter in the mail.

Mrs. Spencer distrusted letters on principle, because they always seemed to want to entangle her in so many small, disagreeable obligations—visits, or news of old friends she had conveniently forgotten, or family responsibilities that always had to be met quickly and without enjoyment. If she had not persuaded herself that it was ill-bred to throw away a letter without opening it, Mrs. Spencer might very well have given up mail altogether, except for important things like Christmas cards from the right people, and announcements for the Wednesday Club, and invitations correctly engraved.

The letter from the Oberons looked, even on the outside, as though it carried some request, and Mrs. Spencer regarded it with distaste. The address straggled across the envelope, there was a dirty finger mark on the flap, and the stationery was obviously cheap; sighing, Mrs. Spencer opened it daintily. “Why would anyone with handwriting like this try to write a letter?” she asked irritably, and frowned up at her husband. “I can't even
read
it.” Annoyed, not wanting to touch the letter, she threw it down onto the breakfast table.

Harry Spencer, who breakfasted in a mingled fragrance of good coffee, good shaving lotion, and the printers' ink of his morning paper, reached for his orange juice and said lazily, “Couldn't be anything very important, anyway.” He smiled pleasantly at his wife. “Throw it away,” he said.

“Nothing is
ever
important to
you.
” The lemon cream, and the dentist, and the flowers, and the silver to be polished; Mrs. Spencer sighed. “I have enough on my mind for one day,” she said. “
You
read it.”

Mr. Spencer reached over and took up the letter and looked curiously at the sharp black handwriting. “It's not really so bad,” he said. “A kind of puzzle, actually. He makes his
e
's Greek style, and that funny little wiggle is an
s.
John Oberon—who is he, anyway?”

“
I
certainly could not tell you. No one I know, I'm sure.”

Mr. Spencer laughed. “You may
get
to know him,” he said. “This fellow wants you to find him a house.”

“A house?” Mrs. Spencer stared as though she had not spent all her life in one house or another, adorning, cleaning, enriching. “A
house
?”

“They liked our town when they drove through,” Mr. Spencer said, studying the letter. “Old friends of your sister's.”

Mrs. Spencer set the marmalade down abruptly. “Of
Charlotte's
?”

Mr. Spencer glanced up at her briefly, curiously, and then back to the letter, and Mrs. Spencer sighed again. “I can't
help
it,” she said, almost apologetically. “
You
know I'm fond of my sister, and I do have them here every Thanksgiving, and I'd do just anything in the world for them—”

Mr. Spencer glanced up again. “I never said a word,” he remarked mildly.

Mrs. Spencer looked away. “It's just,” she said helplessly, “that I feel it's important for you, and your position at the bank, to have a house and a family you can point to with pride. I'm really
terribly
fond of Charlotte, you
know
I am, but even I can see that she's not exactly the sort
we
want to know socially, and her husband is loud and coarse and vulgar and—”

“I always liked him,” Mr. Spencer said.

“Really? Would you want him working with you in the bank?”

“He hasn't asked me.” Mr. Spencer smiled across the table. “Never mind,” he said. “Throw the letter away if you want to.”

“Some people really have no consideration for other people,” Mrs. Spencer said, touching the letter with one finger.

“They only want to know if you've heard of any summer places nearby,” Mr. Spencer said. “Three bedrooms.”

“Really,” Mrs. Spencer said. “
Really,
Harry.” She pushed away her half-finished coffee. “What earthly
right…
”

“That old house down by the river is for rent,” Mr. Spencer said idly. “I heard the other day that Mrs. Babcock is very anxious to get a tenant this summer, and heaven knows she could use the money. Might just ask her,” he told his wife.

“But why?” she demanded, staring. “Why?”

Mr. Spencer gathered his newspaper and rose. “I don't know why,” he said, not looking at his wife. “Why does anybody do anything?”

Obscurely troubled, somehow defensive, Mrs. Spencer watched as her husband gathered his letters and left the breakfast room. “Don't forget we're having guests for dinner,” she said after him, but he did not turn. “Today, of
all
days,” she told herself, and took up the intruding, unreadable letter and carried it out to the garbage pail. She was putting the dishes into the washer when Mr. Spencer called goodbye from the front door, and she answered him absently, thinking lemon cream, silver, flowers; when she dropped the coffee grounds into the garbage pail the unreadable letter was covered, safely hidden away. I must try to get in a half hour of rest sometime during the day, Mrs. Spencer was thinking; I really cannot drive myself like this.

The phone rang at about eleven, when the lemon cream was safely in the refrigerator and the living room was dusted and the silver polished, and she answered it upstairs, where she was mending a tiny rip in her dinner dress. Mrs. Spencer never allowed her clothes, which were expensive, to fall into disrepair, and the tiny rip infuriated her, since it had not been there before she sent the dress to the cleaner, and this meant that now she would have to remember to speak sharply to the cleaner's delivery man when he came on Monday. When the phone rang she immediately assumed that it was Harry calling from the bank to say that he would be home for lunch after all, and that would be too much, altogether too much, this day of all days. “Yes?” she said into the receiver.

“Mrs. Harry Spencer? Long distance calling.”

Her sister, Charlotte, had been in the back of her mind since breakfast, and Mrs. Spencer told herself that if this was really Charlotte calling just to chat over family news she would absolutely hang up; Charlotte ought to have more consideration, she thought, and tapped her finger irritably against the phone table. I will tell Charlotte frankly, she thought, I will tell her frankly that I simply have no
time
for—

“Hello?” The voice was far away, truly a long-distance voice. “Hello?” it asked faintly.

“Charlotte?” Mrs. Spencer said. “Hello?”

“Maggie?”

No one except Charlotte called Mrs. Spencer “Maggie” anymore, not since she had implored her husband to introduce her to his friends in this new town as Margaret.
Margaret Spencer,
it said on her stationery and her personal checks,
Mrs. Harry Elliott Spencer.
“Hello?” she said.

“Maggie? It's John. John Oberon.”

“Who?”

“Driving home today…” The voice was really very faint; perhaps there was something wrong with this upstairs phone. Mrs. Spencer raised her eyes to heaven, thinking, I will have to call the man to check the phone. “Drop in about four…say hello…”

“I can't hear you,” Mrs. Spencer said, speaking louder. “I really can't hear you, I'm sorry. We must have a bad connection.”

“Just a minute.” The voice came more faintly still. “Rosie wants to say hello.” Distantly, like that of tiny people talking thinly in a dollhouse, or a dream, the little voice said, “Here's Rosie.”

“I really cannot hear you at
all,
” Mrs. Spencer said firmly, and put the receiver down on the small little “Hello?” from a long, long distance. “Good heavens,” she said aloud, “why people think they have the
right…
”

She rarely lunched improperly, because she felt that it was important to do things correctly even if one was alone, and she had her pretty salad and her cup of tea every day by the kitchen window, where it was sunny. Today, however, with the shopping and the dentist still to do, she had only a cup of tea, standing up to drink it, looking out over the handsome wide lawn that surrounded the house, making a mental note to locate the Carter boy and get him to trim the edges
correctly
next time if he wanted his money. After her cup of tea she forced herself to lie down on her bed for half an hour, dutifully going over in her mind the things she still had to do.

The Oberons must have come while she was waiting for Donnie at the dentist's office, chafing over the magazines, impatient at the leisurely, reassuring tone of the dentist's voice and Donnie's half-nervous giggle. She had bought Donnie his usual ice cream cone on the way home and he was still toying with it, delighted that with the novocaine freezing his lip he could not feel the cold ice cream. When she drove into the driveway and hurried him out of the car to play on his swing until the ice cream was gone, she was brought up short by the sight of a note tacked to her front door. It had been put up with a pin, and there was a tiny scratch on the white paint where the pin had gone in; she set her lips thinly and tore down the note, remembering at once the angular, unreadable black writing. “Those
frightful
people,” she said, and then, to her son, “Look what they've done to our door.”

Donnie pressed closer and his ice cream dripped onto the steps; it was really too much. Mrs. Spencer never slapped her children, or permitted them to be abused with any violent punishment, but today of all days she almost raised her hand to Donnie. Finally—because of course taking out one's annoyance on children was unfair, and unladylike—she wiped up the ice cream with her handkerchief, which she must now remember to drop into the hamper when she went by it, and sent Donnie quietly around to his play set in the back. The note she had taken from the door she dropped into the kitchen wastebasket without trying to read it.

The trash would not go out to be burned until morning, so the note stayed there, covered by the papers from the groceries and the wrapping from the candles for the table, and eventually Harry's evening paper. Mrs. Spencer gave Donnie and her daughter, Irma, their supper, and chilled the wine, and checked the lemon cream, which had come out admirably, and got the steak ready to broil, and whipped the potatoes, and made shrimp sauce. When she went upstairs to dress and say good night to her children, her kitchen was immaculate, dinner preparing invisibly, her table set and lovely in a quiet stillness of shining glass and white damask, and her living room, charming and so very like Margaret Spencer, people said, ready for the entrance of guests.

By the time her first guests arrived, Margaret Spencer's children slept, clean and warm and dreaming correctly, and she was waiting in the hall, as calm and lovely as always, gracious and elegant. “How well Margaret always manages,” her guests told one another on their way home. “Entertaining seems no effort to her, somehow; she's done wonders for Harry's position in town.” And one or two of the women reflected that Margaret Spencer might really be a very good choice for president of the Wednesday Club.

Before she went to bed, Margaret saw to it that the ashtrays were emptied and the glasses washed and the chairs moved back where they belonged, and she put salt on a wine stain on her tablecloth (and even if the tablecloth was permanently stained, it was a small loss, since the wine had been spilled by old Mack Ramsey; this was the first dinner invitation the Ramseys had accepted from the Spencers, and Mrs. Ramsey had really been
most
gracious about the living room drapes) and checked that the windows in the children's bedroom were open four inches from the top.

She had not remembered to tell Harry about either the telephone call from the Oberons or the note on the front door. She had so completely forgotten the Oberons by the next morning that she only stared blankly when Mrs. Babcock—a plain woman, and not one of the sort who dined with the Spencers—stopped her on the street by actually putting a hand on her arm. “I was going to call you,” Mrs. Babcock said. “I saw the Oberons—” She waited, but Mrs. Spencer, moving her arm slightly away, still stared. “I thought I'd ask you,” Mrs. Babcock explained, “seeing as they're friends of yours, and your family. About the
house.
”

“What house?”

Mrs. Babcock laughed. “I guess they never told you they looked at it, even though I thought they were pretty taken with it. My old house down by the river. Heaven knows it's big enough for them, and they thought having the river right there would be nice for the children. Not,” she went on consideringly, “that it's any kind of a fancy, dress-up place, but then they didn't look to me like fancy people.” She glanced quickly at Mrs. Spencer and then away. “But of course I like to make sure,” she finished.

“I'm really afraid—”

“I thought,” said Mrs. Babcock, as though spelling it out, “that I would ask you what kind of people they are, these Oberons. They said they are old friends of yours, and it's not as though I'd need references or anything, with the kind of people they seemed to be, so nice and friendly and all, but I did think I ought to mention it to you and you could tell me if you know anything against them. Anything that would mean I oughtn't to rent them the house.”