Francie Comes Home (7 page)

He was a beautiful young man. He had a profile like Marlon Brando's, and good, careless clothes. He didn't look a bit like Jefferson; not that Jefferson's young men were worse than others, but they didn't dress like that, and they didn't grow their hair that long. Francie stared without realizing that she could be seen in the window as clearly as any of Mrs. Ryan's
objets d'art
.

However, the young man seemed unaware of the attention he was getting from this unlikely vantage point. He was looking at the shop next door, smiling at somebody behind the door there. Francie saw him enter, and then she came to herself and set to work again, squatting down on her shoeless heels.

A moment later the beautiful young man reappeared, tenderly holding Miss Chadbourne Fredericks's elbow as if she might slip and break if he didn't support her. Chadbourne was transformed. She had taken off her smock and sandals; she was wearing cocktail black, calf pumps, a little hat with a touch of mink on it, and a huddly warm mink jacket. She was laughing and saying something over her shoulder to a woman at the door: Francie couldn't see the woman, but she heard the voices dimly through her glass. Chadbourne and the man walked past her, only a few inches away, and as they passed by Chadbourne glanced up and her eyes met Francie's.

After all, they had met, in a fashion. Thinking about it later, Francie told herself furiously that she couldn't well have done anything else;
could
she have stared coldly, as if she'd never seen the red-haired little thing before? Of course not. It had nothing to do with the fact that this dreamy man was on Chadbourne's other side. Naturally, Francie smiled pleasantly.

Chadbourne was different. Chadbourne could stare coldly, and did. Not a flicker of recognition lit those green-blue eyes: she just looked, and then looked away. She said something or other to the beautiful young man; he laughed; they climbed into the car and drove off.

No, Francie didn't like that girl. Definitely not.

CHAPTER 6

Snubbing is infectious, as Francie knew. When you've been stared at and cut dead, you are in danger of taking it out on the next person you encounter. Francie remembered the impulse from the rugged days of school in England: spite leads to spite. Therefore she tried extra hard to be polite to the next person she saw who, as it happened, was a customer—a woman who dropped into the Birthday Box a minute after Francie clambered out of the show window and put on her shoes.

It wasn't easy to be courteous. She was still smoldering with rage. Moreover, the Box should rightly have been closing, if not already closed with shuttered and locked doors, at that moment. The woman seemed to her just the sort of person who typified everything unsatisfactory about unsatisfactory Jefferson—provincial, Philistine, Middle West Jefferson that produced snobs like Chadbourne Fredericks. This woman was just a nice middle-aged creature who looked eager and innocent. That was enough for Francie, in her mood; she condemned the lady. Why should anyone look eager about the crummy stock in that shop, for goodness' sake?

Still, it doesn't do to take things out on innocent bystanders. Grimly Francie gritted her teeth and waited while the aggravating customer walked around and idly picked up things like little gilded china shoes, turned them over to examine the price mark, and put them down without saying anything. She seemed undecided as to what disagreeable object to waste her money on. She was thoroughly ordinary to look at, dressed in plain hat and dark-gray coat, like three out of any four of the women who came into the Box. There was nothing at all to distinguish her unless it was that she seemed to be drawn unerringly to all the stuff Francie disliked particularly. From one gimcrack horror to another she wandered.…

Suddenly she looked up from her inspection of a cast-iron dachshund planter to meet Francie's eye. The eye must have been eloquent, for she said, “I'm sorry; I'm afraid I'm keeping you. What I really want is a basket. Have you any? A pretty shopping basket?”

“Baskets,” said Francie reflectively. “I'm afraid we don't stock genuine shopping ones, but would this do instead?” She brought out knitting bags appliquéd with patterned chintz flowers, and other affairs of stretched nylon, conscientiously picking out those that she considered in the worst taste, to match that of the customer. The woman, however, didn't see anything she wanted. They were still pawing over the bags when Florence Ryan emerged from the office and greeted the stranger like an old friend.

“Anne! My dear, this isn't like you,” she said. Francie thought the remark mysterious, but the customer laughed a little, as if she understood.

“No, it isn't, is it? But I do need a basket—right now—and I thought you might, just once, have something useful.”

“I don't know as I ought to sell anything to you. You're a naughty girl,” said Mrs. Ryan, continuing in a jocular, scolding vein. “I do think I might have what you want, though. Francie dear, please run down and bring up that Spanish basket for Mrs. Clark.”

The Spanish basket was very pretty and simple—one that Francie would never have thought of as suiting a woman who admired gilded china shoes. She wondered a little as she ran down to the storeroom to get it. But she decided Mrs. Ryan ought to know her own clientele, and as it turned out, she did; Mrs. Clark pounced on the basket and bought it immediately. The two older women chatted a considerable time before she took her leave: Francie, waiting impatiently for permission to lock up and go home, reflected, not for the first time, that her elders and betters had an infinite capacity for vapid conversation. Committee meetings. Personalities. Television. Housekeeping problems. One hardly ever heard them discuss exciting things like plays or books or concerts. Of course, one didn't get many plays or concerts in the flash in Jefferson, but after all it wasn't terribly far from Chicago, and there was radio and TV, though you'd never think, to hear Jefferson people talking, that TV carried any program except giveaways and “I Love Lucy.” Still, who was Francie Nelson to put on airs about the town? How was
she
spending her time, anyway—was she reading good books or listening to Beethoven on the Sunday radio? Not at all. She had puttered about with her paints over the weekends, but she was discovering gradually that what she wanted most was to paint
for
something. Stage sets, or fabrics, maybe; objects even more tangible than a painting. How could that be done in Jefferson?

And she was going around rather too much, if the truth were told, with Marty Jenner's set. She was dancing to juke-box music in joints, and wasting time over Cokes, accepting the kids' admiration, even depending on it. She was in danger of becoming known, God help her, as their leader. At her age, too! And yet, she thought with quick defensiveness, what else was there to do, placed as she was? If Jefferson didn't like her choice of company (not that anybody had hinted at criticism except maybe Cousin Biddy) they should find her more fitting companions. Everybody her age was either away, like Glenn, or settled down and dull like Ruth.

“Someday I'll be an institution in the town,” she thought glumly. “Pete and Marty and Jinx will go away or marry, and then there'll be another younger gang that can take me up. I'll be known as that woman who won't act her age. Either that, or I'll turn into somebody like this Mrs. Clark, drifting around in gift shops, buying iron dachshunds and trick lamps.”

Her eyes followed the quiet figure when Mrs. Clark at last took her leave and the women in the shop were free to start locking up. Mrs. Clark somehow seemed to her to epitomize the drab future; she was not the more likable for that. Francie felt an almost unpleasant emotion about her. It would have been different, she admitted, if she'd been able to look forward to an exciting date with Glenn that evening. She slid a cabinet door shut with a bang. Or if she had a date with a man who had a profile like Marlon Brando's. But what was the use? She didn't. Probably she never would have an exciting date, ever again.

It was a waste of time to read the local news in the paper at breakfast, but everybody did in Jefferson, sooner or later. The personal columns began to mean something to Francie as the weeks went by. How gay they sounded! They were misleading, though. If you didn't know for a fact that Miss Fritzi Smithers didn't wash her neck quite often enough, you might be more impressed by the account of her Canasta Club luncheon party. On the other hand, having seen Juliet Harper close up and admired her neat little person, it was pleasant to read that she was going away for a dance at Culver. Francie hoped Julie would have a marvelous time. Even the Jefferson Country Club Saturday night dances sounded glamorous in “Chit-Chat”, which is what the column was really called, though Francie knew it had always meant the same old crowd, the old decorations. If you didn't know Jefferson you'd never think the reporter was talking about the same drab club, with its buff-colored walls and heavy maroon draperies.

Depressed, Francie reflected that it was more fun to read about practically any Jefferson social function than to attend it. If she had thought about it two months previously, she would have said that she knew all about Jefferson and whatever went on in town in the party department; she had grown up in Jefferson—she knew it, it knew her. But lately she had become acutely aware of a faction she didn't know at all. There was a part of Jefferson that didn't seem to be conscious that she was alive—or care. Such a novelty could be described in a few words—Chadbourne Fredericks and her group. They had a social life different from the usual, and Francie's juke-box crowd didn't mix with them at all.

Of course, she reminded herself, it was only Chadbourne's fault and Chadbourne's loss. The red-haired girl wasn't really a part of the town, and that was probably why Francie, back in her teen-age days, hadn't noticed her. Mrs. Fredericks, though legally a resident of Jefferson, had spent much of her life in other places and had sent Chadbourne to school here and there in the East. Her center of interest had always been elsewhere, and the girl's present status was the result of it. Once, discussing the matter with the family, Francie was so extreme in her disapproval as to call Chadbourne an “outsider.” Pop immediately picked her up on it.

“If it comes to that, chicken, you're an outsider yourself, by Jeffersonian standards,” he said warningly. “You've been around the world a lot more than Ruth and your other friends, so why criticize the Fredericks girl?”

“I'm not criticizing, Pop. At least, I didn't mean to,” said Francie. “I was just saying to Aunt Norah, that's all, that Chadbourne isn't one of the girls and so I can't very well expect her to drop in as if she were. It's not the same with me, anyway. Admittedly I've spent a lot of time in other places, but I did spend my
youth
here, and that's what counts.”

Pop seemed to find this statement immoderately funny, but Francie knew very well what she meant. She plunged ahead, undaunted. “I mean, I went to grammar school here. And I went to dancing-classes on Saturday morning with the gang. We knew each other; it was the same for all of us. We ate our lunch together at junior high, and went to football games together, and had crushes on the same movie stars and … well, all that. It makes a bond. Now Chadbourne, for the little time she was here now and then, as far as I can make out treated the place like a summer resort. She just dropped in on the place when she felt like it.”

“Or when her mother felt like it, more probably,” put in Aunt Norah.

“Exactly. When her mother felt like it, but the effect was the same,” said Francie triumphantly. “It shows how in the way Chadbourne behaves to the rest of us. As if we were mere natives. Why, she even imports all her friends from outside. Who are the people she's always with? No locals, anyway.”

Aunt Norah said Francie was perfectly right, though perhaps a little hard on the Fredericks girl. “It's all Lottie's fault, really,” she said. “I hope she doesn't come to regret it now she's decided to make a go of the life here. That Chadbourne looks to me like a difficult child—discontented and snippy. Spoiled. She's obviously delicate anyway, with that bad complexion; I remember she always was, from a child.”

Mr. Nelson, remaining recalcitrant, said with some irritation that it wasn't necessarily a law of nature with del-growing up outside Jefferson should be punished with deicate constitutions. He pointed out that America was full of healthy girls who had never so much as seen Jefferson, let alone been born there, but Aunt Norah was unconvinced. Francie, however, felt a bit ashamed of herself. She knew she had come very near to being downright catty, and she suspected, with a guilty twinge, that Pop had somehow divined the reason.

Dropping the subject, she read again the item in “Chit-Chat” which had brought on all this discussion.
A gay treasure hunt was held on Thursday evening for twenty guests at the home of Miss Chadbourne Fredericks. The eager treasure seekers divided up into teams of two. First clue was hidden among the lilac bushes growing on the spacious grounds of the Fredericks estate. The discoverer, appropriately enough, was Mr. Bruce “Lucky” Munson
—
he is always called “Lucky” by his friends
—
who, with Miss Fredericks, led a ravening party pell-mell to the car park and thence to the Old Mill in the North Road
… etc, etc. If you didn't allow for the lady reporter's lush style, Jefferson sounded like the popular idea of Hollywood.

“Lucky” Munson indeed, thought Francie; that must surely be the glamor-boy she had seen with Chadbourne. She disliked him without even knowing him. How long would he stick around, anyway? She rather thought he must have a job with Fredericks & Worpels; he turned up there every day in his noticeable car and usually departed at closing time with Chadbourne, so there seemed to be no likelihood of his going back soon to wherever he had come from. And that, no doubt, was why Chadbourne herself was still in Jefferson. Without imported boy friends the town wouldn't be good enough for her. As for girl friends, surely there must be something wrong if a person carried her own crowd around with her.… Francie pulled on her coat and set off to work in a rebellious mood, quite as if she hadn't often reflected that Jefferson wasn't good enough for her, either.