Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
She used her headache to beg off making supper and coming to the table.
It was after eight when the telephone rang. Honora didn’t open her eyes. The calls were mostly for Crystal.
The door opened, and Crystal popped her head in. “For you, Honora. Want me to say you’re under the weather?”
“Who is it?”
“The masculine gender.”
“Gerry?” One of the San Francisco City College blind dates had become enamored of Honora. His loud, droning voice irritated her—and besides he wasn’t Curt. She invented previous engagements when he called.
Crystal shook her head. “Deeper, more witty voice. This is wild, and of course it couldn’t be him, he’d have said something to me—but it sounded like Curt Ivory.”
Honora leaped out of bed, pulling on her plaid dressing gown, which was so old it only reached to her knees.
The telephone was in the kitchen, where Langley, Joscelyn and Crystal were playing Monopoly.
Honora picked up the receiver. “H-hello.”
“Headache better?” Curt asked.
At the sound of his voice, she sank into a rush-bottomed kitchen chair. “Much, thank you.”
“Good. Then you can come out.”
She drew a sharp breath. She wanted nothing more than the reassurance of being with him, but a resistant wall—pride, maybe—made his invitation unthinkable.
“It’s late,” she hedged.
“Not exactly the witching hour yet.”
“I get up very early.”
“Stroud’s is closed on the weekend.”
“I mean, I got up early this morning.”
“I know a place where the weary gather to rest. Pick you up at nine.” The phone went dead.
She stood holding the buzzing instrument, wondering how she had lost the argument. Then she realized Curt Ivory had invited her on a date!
Crystal, as banker, counted out hundred-pound notes. “Well, you look more human,” she said. “Who cheered you up?”
“It
was
Curt. He’s picking me up at nine.”
“You can’t mean you’re going out?” Langley threw down the dice cup and a die rattled to the floor. “I forbid it. Not with that nasty headache.”
“The rest cured me, Daddy. Honestly, I’m well now.”
Langley hesitated. He trod warily when it came to discussions of health with his older daughters, fearing such conversations might intrude on the tabu of menses. Then he peered at her. “Curt? You can’t mean
Curt Ivory?
”
She nodded with that blatantly joyous smile.
“You’re not going anywhere with him!” Langley cried. “You’re just a baby. He should
be thoroughly ashamed!”
“Daddy, it’s only for a soda water . . . .” Honora was pleading.
The other two girls casually ignored their father’s regulations, but Honora treated his commands with balmful respect. Poor child, her face was quite white. He relented. “Since you’ve already accepted, you may go. But I don’t want him hanging around you.” At the thought of Curt, so coolly debonair, hanging around any girl, Crystal and Joscelyn tittered. Langley barked sternly. “I’ll not stand for any nonsense from him.”
“Good grief, Daddy, let her get dressed,” Crystal said. “It’s twenty-five to nine. Come on, Honora, I’ll help you.”
Descending the worn wooden steps, Honora bit back a nervous giggle. If it hadn’t been for the cold dampness penetrating her thin coat and the odor of rotting oranges rising from the big trash barrels below, she would have imagined herself asleep, suspended between a euphoric dream of being on a date with Curt Ivory and the humiliating nightmare of their earlier encounters today.
“Vilma’s Place isn’t far,” Curt said. “On Columbus. Feel up to walking?”
“Absolutely. But you do realize they won’t serve me? I’m nineteen.” Last week the family
had celebrated her birthday with a rose-decorated cake that Langley had brought home in a cellophane-topped box, and paper chains that Joscelyn and Crystal had festooned around the kitchen. Stating her age still surprised and pleased her—nineteen had a ring of maturity.
“We don’t need to advertise you’re under legal age.”
Vilma’s Place was dimly lit by the dripping candles at each table. In the rear, a crowded bar surrounded the dais where a woman in flowing white swayed over a piano, rippling out a wondrously convoluted version of “September Song.”
A colored waiter wove through the crush of small tables to stand attentively at theirs. “Evening, Mr. Ivory. Good to see you.”
“Hey, Martin, how’s it going? Honora, what’ll you have?”
She had already decided on a ginger ale, but since she was with Curt Ivory, a regular patron, no IDs would be demanded of her. “I’d adore a sloe gin fizz,” she said, picking a name that had always intrigued her.
Curt repeated her order. “The usual for me, Martin.”
After the waiter left, Curt sat back. “Now you know where I come when I have in mind to debauch underage waitresses.”
The remark, rather than embarrassing her, put them back on their old jocular footing.
“Is the mood often upon you?” she asked.
“Each time the new moon rises.”
She was luxuriously aware of his legs near
hers under the tiny round of table. Her drink was frothy and extraordinarily delicious, and she sipped it rapidly through the short pink straw. The badinage that passed between them was as light as a breeze-tossed shuttlecock. Honora had not eaten since her breakfast at five thirty, and her father had never spoken of the swift depredations of alcohol on an empty stomach, so she decided that her wit was entirely due to the sophisticated ambience at Vilma’s Place and the wry amusement that tugged one side of Curt’s mouth.
“Something I’ve always wanted to know,” she said, “is what, exactly, an engineer does.”
“Good Lord! Is this Gideon Talbott’s niece?”
“I’ve never truly understood.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Honora. It’s not a complicated line of work at all. The client tells an engineer the impossibility that he wants done or built and the engineer makes the necessary designs and watches over the construction of everything from dams and highways to pyramids and rockets and land reclamation. He calculates the strength of material necessary. It’s up to the engineer to insure every structure will remain standing for a good long time under the most extreme conditions that it will be used.”
“One time Daddy took us to see Hadrian’s wall.”
“Ahh, those Romans, they built to last. I’m a civil engineer. As far as civil engineering goes, the Romans were the greatest. Their roads are still in use, and some of their aqueducts
and bridges.” His voice went lower. “That’s my definition of immortality, having one of my projects still in use two thousand years from now.”
“I’m sure that it will be,” she said.
“Honora, I hate to break the news to you,” he said dryly, “but I’m Mr. Talbott’s assistant. Thus far I haven’t headed up a single project.”
“You will. Curt, explain about Talbott’s. I’m confused. You don’t only do engineering, do you?”
“We’re also in construction. Talbott’s will either bid on the plans and supervision for a client or take over the entire project.” Curt caught Martin’s eye and pointed at their table, a signal to bring another round. “Now it’s your turn. Tell me about
your
career.”
“What can I say about it?”
“For openers, what attracted you?”
“MGM begged me to come to Hollywood, but I said no, I need much more of a challenge. And it’s crass, but a lot of the brokers who eat at Stroud’s make less than I do.” Was she quoting Vi’s wisdom? No matter.
“So it’s the money?”
“The bare truth is, wonderfully qualified as I am, for some reason nobody else saw fit to hire me.”
“Waitresses there
do
pull down good tips, don’t they?”
Was Curt obliquely pointing out that her father was derelict in his fiscal responsibilities? Her high-voltage glow dimmed a trifle. “There’s a lot of expenses when you’re getting on your
feet in a new country, you know.”
“You’re very different,” he said.
“How?”
“Beats me.”
“Is it being English?”
“You’re just different. Not like other girls.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Bad, very. Honora, you’re up the creek unless you manage to find some pervert with a taste for classy females who are hopelessly altruistic—and have dark, velvety eyes with little lights behind them.”
Warm with delight, she made her honest, routine disclaimer. “Crystal has the looks in our family.”
“She’s stunning all right,” he said. “Me, I go for tall brunettes.”
“Like Imogene Burdetts?” The overly candid question jumped from her lips.
“Jealous?” The candlelight shone on his mocking grin.
“Why should I be?”
“Come on, Honora, we both know you’re mad about me.”
In her inviolable security, she laughed. “True, true,” she said. “It’s your turn again. Are you ready to confess about those terrible rumors?” A frivolous question.
His smile faded. “No truth at all,” he said. “I do assure you on the best authority that I am not the illegitimate scion of my boss.”
Gideon? Curt? She knew her mouth had opened in surprise.
“You hadn’t heard that bilgewater?” he
asked.
She shook her head.
“I jumped in unnecessarily, didn’t I? It’s hardly a tale that a veddy, veddy proper Englishman takes home to his nubile fold.”
She realized then that envy brewed ugly explanations for Curt’s success at Talbott’s and that this malice was as painful to him as her job was to her. The revelation that they shared similar mortal weaknesses brought a peculiar ache to her heart, and she reached out in consolation. When she touched the warm, hard flesh of the back of his hand, her fingers trembled. She withdrew hastily.
He said, “First of all, Mr. Talbott—”
“Why don’t you call him Gideon, like we do?”
“He hasn’t made the request. I am not family. Repeat. I—am—not—family. Mr. Talbott is a man of rare and unique carnal rectitude—as opposed to me, Honora dear. To my knowledge he never cheated on that dreary woman, your aunt.”
“You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Curt said, crushing out his cigarette. “I ought to be.”
“Why?”
He stared at her somberly. “You should be very fond of him, too. There’s not many employers in this republic who’d put up with your father’s pathetic ritual snobbery.”
She realized he was paying her back for what he considered prying, but how could she let the insult pass unanswered? “Daddy’s a wonderful
editor,” she said with quiet intensity. “He’s not a snob. Not at all. He’s a gentleman.”
“Gentleman? Is that a synonym for a guy who gets his back up at every little remark that hits him the wrong way?”
Loyalty to her father stung her into opinions that sober she might have kept to herself. “And why do you think Gideon’s so wonderful? Being faithful to his wife? Decent men are. He’s pompous and conceited, he lords it over people, bossing them around. Good? Do you consider it good or generous or kind to leave your family out in the cold?”
“I gather what you’re saying incoherently is that it isn’t enough for Mr. Talbott to employ your father, who though a wonderful editor and etcetera, has a tendency to take off an extra hour for lunch and then show up smelling of booze. You believe that it’s Mr. Talbott’s duty to shower the lovely Sylvander sisters with all the luxuries their father cannot provide.”
His vehemence had blown out the candle. While he struck a match to relight it, Honora stared down at her glass.
Curt said quietly, “Now we each know where our loyalties lie, don’t we?”
“I suppose,” she said listlessly.
“Make you a deal. You lay off Mr. Talbott and I won’t attack your father, who incidentally doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.” He raised his hand again for the waiter. “What we need is another drink.”
The third drink restored her. Now they were no longer bantering, but gazing at each other.
His mouth had an unfamiliar softness; she wanted to ever so lightly trace his lips, a tactile urge so strong that she reached for her pearls instead—Crystal, selecting the strand at Woolworth’s, had taken ages to find the deepest luster.
All at once the heat and noise engulfed her like a bone-crushing demon, spinning her amid the crowded tables. A sourness rose in her throat. She stumbled to her feet, peering around. “Curt, will you excuse me . . .”
Curt was standing too. “The restrooms are back there,” he said, giving her a gentle push.
She tottered dizzily past the piano bar. Mercifully the toilet was free. She crouched over the bowl, throwing up stringy, pinkish liquid. The great heaves reminded her of this morning’s weeping.
What a day
, she thought, leaning back on her heels, wiping her hand over her cold, sweaty forehead.
When she emerged, a woman was repainting her mouth at the rococo mirror. Honora could see their two reflections, her own apparently raised from a crypt.
“Had one too many?” the woman asked nonjudgmentally. She fished through her beaded bag for a half-finished round of Life Savers. “Here, this’ll take the taste away.”
Honora thanked her, washing her face and cupping handfuls of water to her mouth before she chewed the candy.
At the table a cup of black coffee waited. Unable to look Curt in the eye, she stared down at the steaming liquid, her hands circling the
thick, hot china. “I didn’t have dinner,” she said. “Do you suppose that was my trouble?”
“Christ, why didn’t you tell me? I’d never have let you have three. I shouldn’t have, anyway. We’ll get you a burger.”
“Just fresh air, please,” she said.
She could not resist a professional glance at the tip he dropped. It was outrageously large.
Fog had rolled in, and the lighted windows of the closed Italian food stores shimmered hazily and there were no hard-edged shapes, no distances. Headlights and an occasional pedestrian came out of nowhere. She took deep, restorative breaths of the moisture-laden air. Curt didn’t speak, but after they had climbed a hilly block he took her hand. He pressed his hard, warm palm against hers, and their fingers clasped. In the touch of their bare flesh there was a sense of preordained intimacy.
In the entry tunnel to her building, he turned her toward him, holding her loosely with his hands linked behind her waist. “Better?”