Foxfire (29 page)

“Have them put it on my bill, Andy,” he said with sudden gentleness. “We know each other too well for phony pride.”

She sat down in one of the carved upholstered armchairs. “Tim, why are you doing all this? Why have you saddled yourself with the whole raft of us here?”

He shrugged and sat up. “Only way I could get at you, honorably. I'm a very honorable young man. I even invited Dart, didn't I? Though I'm enchanted that you didn't bring him, my angel.”

Her eyes flashed, she spoke with emphasis. “I tried to. I wanted to. He wouldn't come. He's terribly busy.”

“Sure. Sure. I understand.” He gave her a winning and impudent grin. “Main thing is
you're
here. Now that's over with, come on up to my patio, we'll have cocktails. I've asked a crowd to join us.”

That first cocktail party, under the stars and the palm trees in Tim's patio, set the tone of the rest of the week. It was gay and noisy, enlivened by several flirtations and gilded for Amanda by Tim's light and expert lovemaking. It duplicated many vacation times of her past life and she slipped back into the mood with ease.

There were only a dozen people, hand-picked by Tim from the sixty-odd hotel guests. Jean and George, of course. Then there were two charming little divorcees, Kitty Stevens and Mimi Todd, who were recuperating here from the Reno “cure” on their way back to Chicago. There was a movie starlet, Lora Morton and her boy friend, a sloe-eyed Latin gentleman who had perfect manners and spoke perfect English and was vaguely referred to as an actor. There were two youngish married couples from St. Louis and a pale languid bachelor of thirty named Waterman, who dabbled in the arts, and had come from Philadelphia to Arizona for his health. They were all wealthy,—one had to be to stay at El Castillo—and though they occasionally alluded gloomily to the depression and speculated with even deeper gloom upon the crackpot course outlined by the new President, it was apparent that none of them was emotionally involved in anything but having a good time. And Amanda, walling off Dart and Lodestone as much as she could, most willingly joined them.

It was not hard to wall off Lodestone, since none of these people had ever heard of it. They hadn't heard of Gila County or Globe. They knew nothing of the present mining industry in Arizona, they had an idea that all that sort of stuff went on up in the Rockies or in Canada. For them Arizona contained the Grand Canyon, a few annoying nighttime stops on the Santa Fe's Chief, and Phoenix and Tucson. Nor was anyone in the least curious. Except for horseback rides in the desert and a vague recognition that the air was dry and exhilarating, El Castillo and its inmates might have been transported intact to Florida or California.

Jean kept a contented eye on Amanda's progress, when she was not playing golf with George and the St. Louis couples. She even managed to extract twenty dollars from George as a gift to Amanda who would not charge her session at the beauty parlor to Tim. Jean at first thought this finespun point of honor was idiotic. “My God, Andy, Tim's crawling with money. It isn't any different from accepting a corsage.... But still I don't know but what you're right. Play it cagey, my girl.”

“I'm not playing anything, any way,” snapped Amanda. “Don't be disgusting. This is just—just an interlude.”

Jean raised her eyebrows. “Have you heard from Dart?”

“I don't expect to. There's no reason why I should.” Amanda flushed, for she
had
expected to hear from him, a phone call, a note, something to bridge that chill impersonal chasm which had opened between them.

Jean decided that the time had come for plain speaking. “You might as well face it, dear. Dart just isn't the man for you. It sticks out a mile. And you're not cut out to be a drudge in a hovel in the wilds. Especially not when there's something better in view. A whole lot better.”

“I love Dart,” said Amanda, but her voice wavered. His image had blurred for her. Riding, playing tennis, dancing with Tim, she managed not to think of Dart. It was only at night, alone in her twin bed, that there would come a pain so sharp that she denied it instantly and her empty arms would go heavy and her eyes, staring into the darkness, would see his face but not the face of love. She would see him in the other aspect—grimly withdrawn—his gray look,—ironic and cold.

Mrs. Lawrence, too, kept an eye on the proceedings but hers was not a contented one. She seldom joined the younger group but she had found three bridge-playing cronies and from a nook in the lobby, she gained many glimpses of her daughter, Amanda's lovely figure in a white bathing suit borrowed from Jean, as she shrieked and splashed with Tim in the aquamarine pool. Amanda in beige jodhpurs and a tricky little suede jacket borrowed from the movie starlet, looking coquettishly up into Tim's eyes after he had lifted her down from her horse. Amanda at night in her own rose-flowered chiffon dinner dress, dancing with the starlet's boy friend and flirting over his shoulder with Tim, who was being pursued by little Kitty, the divorcee.

No harm in all this, of course, thought Mrs. Lawrence. Young married people nowadays didn't climb on shelves and cleave only to each other. For that matter, there had been quite a lot of giddiness and carryings-on in the Smart Set of her own early married days before the war. But I didn't
want
to, she thought suddenly. I didn't want to do anything I couldn't share with David, and we were terribly poor, too, after the panic of 1907. I can't remember that it mattered so much, we fought through it together.

And yet there was no denying that Amanda had bloomed into a new vital beauty during her days here. She showed no resemblance to the defensive unkempt little drudge who had so shocked her mother in Lodestone.

If this was what she wanted, why, oh why, didn't she marry Tim in the first place? Mrs. Lawrence asked herself unhappily. If this marriage with Dart was only an infatuation, how could she so have convinced me that it was real love? Ah, no doubt she'd been a sentimental fool, as Jean said. One should have realized how young the girl was and how—spoiled. No, that wasn't quite the word for Amanda. She was intrinsically too sensitive and gallant for that. There was a new phrase used by popular articles on psychology. “Over-protection.” Was that the trouble? David and she had loved the child so dearly. The sins of the parents—that was the constant theme of the new books Jean read.

Mrs. Lawrence sighed, then jumped as her partner recalled her to the deal. “Sorry—” she said, “I was wool-gathering.” She gathered up the cards and pushed Amanda's problem from her mind, but it returned half an hour later when she walked outside for a view of the gorgeous sunset glow on the Catalina Mountains to the north. She wandered to the swimming pool, deserted now since almost everyone had gone off to dress, and stood beside a clump of oleander to admire the ravishing rose and purple mystery of the desert beyond this oasis.

Then she heard Tim's unmistakable drawl from the other side of the oleander. “Move over, honey, and I'll share my flask with you.” There was a murmur and a gurgling sound. Amanda, thought Mrs. Lawrence. I wish she wouldn't.

But it was not Amanda. A higher, lisping voice giggled, “Oh, Timmy, I didn't think you'd ever have a moment for poor me, you're so taken up with your blonde.”

Mrs. Lawrence backed hastily away. Actually, there was no reason why Tim should not flirt with Kitty Stevens if he wanted to. Amanda would be the first to agree, but, but ... Her pleasure in the sunset was spoiled. They should never have come here, put themselves in this—this parasitical position. It was
not
like visiting Tim's parents as equals. If only Jean and George would leave now and Amanda go back where she belonged, or come home to New York, if she was really unhappy. But Jean and George showed no signs of leaving. They were having a wonderful time and George had wired his father there'd be a slight delay in closing the San Francisco branch. He had even taken to treating Amanda with a jocular respect since she was the tacit reason for this windfall. It was all wrong, sleazy somewhere, thought Mrs. Lawrence sadly, but what was there she could do about it? One might as well stop fretting.

On the night of Saturday, April first, the hotel was giving its big end-of-the-season ball. It was to be a costume party on the theme “Arizona Pioneers.” A hundred appropriate costumes had been sent in from Chicago for the guests and nobody would be admitted without one.

Tim threw himself wholeheartedly into the plans for the ball. He saw to it that his own guests had first choice, made the rental arrangements and himself picked out Amanda's costume. It was of black velvet embroidered in pearls and sequins, the bodice cut low across the breasts and a wide, knee-length skirt over black ruffles. There were also black net stockings and black satin slippers with red heels. This creation represented a “dance-hall girl” of a western mining camp in the eighties and Amanda was enchanted. The dress made her feel frivolous and abandoned and it showed off her beautiful legs. By seven o'clock, when she was just leaving her cottage to join the rest of their group for cocktails, a bellboy tapped at her door and delivered a bulky letter.

As Amanda took it in her hand, her knees went weak and her heart started beating violently. At last—cried a voice inside her. “Oh, thank God.... And this violent emotion seemed unrelated to her brain or to the pleasant thoughts she had been thinking. From some deep unsuspected lair it jumped on her without warning. Then she looked at the writing on the envelope. It was Tim's.

She sat down on the bed, staring at the envelope.

After a moment, she looked at the phone. She put her hand on the receiver and then her fingers loosened. Her hands fell to her lap.

“Call me if you're ready to come back.” No, he had said
“when”
but the “if” had been there. He had put it there, not she. And that night, so long ago in feeling, when they had fought about the lost mine, it was he who had said, “Do you want to go home? Shall we call it quits?” The love she had been so sure of, then it just didn't exist, perhaps it never had. He didn't care enough to lift a finger to keep her. What was the use of trying to fool herself? She sat for a long time staring at the telephone and it seemed that something tight and hard came into her breast. The hardness flowed over her mobile face and aged it.

She picked up Tim's envelope and ripped it open. There was a sheet of notepaper which said—

 

A bauble for Amanda's hair,
She needs no jewels to make her fair,
But if on her head my heart I see
I'll know that she will marry me.

 

To the paper there was pinned a large heart made of tiny diamonds encircling a ruby.

Amanda laughed—a sharp, bitter sound. “Well, there it is—” she said out loud. “Jean'll be so pleased. Unless, of course, it's an April Fool joke.” One never knew with Tim. Nor did it matter. He loved her as much as he could love anyone, she knew that. I don't love him but that doesn't matter either. No doubt Jean was right and there was no such thing as “love.” Nothing but various delusive forms of physical desire. She picked up the diamond heart and held it in her hand.

Divorce, she thought quite dispassionately. Reno. Tim will pay for it. Honeymoon abroad. Paris. The Riviera. Cocktails. Tennis, swimming and riding—just like here. And I'll adore it. We'll be an enchanting couple. Golden girl and Golden boy.

She raised the hand with the diamond heart to her hair, then stopped. She pinned it instead to the black velvet shoulder of her costume.

“What does that mean?” asked Tim, eyeing his jewel when they met in his patio. “My poetic effort certainly stipulated in the hair.”

“It means yes and no,” said Amanda lightly. “It means thank you very much for your gorgeous heart but tonight just let's have fun with no commitments. Do you mind, Tim?”

“Why no. I'll bear with your modest backings and fillings until tomorrow and that's sweet of me.”

“Very,” said Amanda smiling.

It was nearly dark on the patio, the low-hanging stars not so brilliant as they would be later. The only light streamed from the windows of Tim's cottage and she peered uncertainly at his costume. He wore high shiny leather boots, navy blue corduroy pants, a checked silk shirt and a large black felt hat turned up on one side, a la Robin Hood. He had pasted a curling black mustache above his mouth and there was a small gilded pick stuck through his belt.

“Cowboy?” she asked.

“Good lord, no. Nothing so banal. I'm a hard-rock miner from Tombstone and I leer at dance-hall girls.”

“Oh. Well, leer away. I see there's plenty of us.”

Kitty Stevens and the other little divorcee were both dressed like Amanda in short ruffled can-can costumes which exhibited all their charms. Jean and George had come as an aristocratic Spanish couple. Jean looked pretty enough in her satin gown and high-combed mantilla, but George was resplendent in the Chicago costumer's version of a Spanish Don, all velveteen and embroidery, white ruffles and a round hat with a dashing chin strap like the the ones Valentino used to wear. He looked happy too.

Lora, the movie starlet, and her boy friend were Indians in red-fringed beaded cotton, with quantities of feathers in their hair and a whole battery of clanking shell wampum around their necks. Lora had been pursuing liquid relaxation all afternoon and had now reached a stage of exuberance. “Me—Minnehaha—” she kept saying winsomely. “Him Big Chief Ha Ha!” And then she put her little hand over her mouth to emit a ululating series of whoops. These were answered by yodels and yippees from the other men of the party who were cowboys or prospectors or gamblers. The Martinis flowed fast. Tim kept his phonograph turned on full blast, playing “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and “Night and Day.” While this last was playing he came over to Amanda who had been sitting a little withdrawn from the shrieking group, trying to avoid the advances of one of the St. Louis husbands who had turned suddenly amorous.