Friends till the End (2 page)

Freda Simms and her boyfriend were now hotly debating something to do with the circus—Indian versus African elephants, it sounded like. Ruth cast an agonized glance around the room. Her eyes rested briefly on Isabel, Walter Sloane’s daughter. She looked beautiful as always, with her straight silk-blonde hair drawn back in a knot and those striking blue eyes. She was sitting in the corner, deep in conversation with the young man she had brought along tonight. Next to them sat her teenage brother, Richard—another product of Walter Sloane’s first marriage. Ruth wondered vaguely what Richard was doing here. He didn’t usually put in an appearance at his parents’ parties. Isabel was always there, of course, an unobtrusive presence at your elbow, offering food and drinks, scuttling
back and forth from the kitchen—as though they couldn’t afford to hire help, and as much as they wanted!—another example of Walter’s notorious miserliness. She dragged her attention back to Freda, who had gone on to another topic and was now saying,

“The last time I was in Monte Carlo—”

Monte Carlo, indeed! Ruth felt a prickle of resentment.
Some people
didn’t have the money to travel to Monte Carlo whenever they liked. Of course Freda had always been rich. She didn’t know what it was like not to be. And of course she had never had children. Children made a big difference; yes, a very big difference.

Over in the corner, Isabel Sloane was saying,

“What are you doing here, Richard?”

Her brother shrugged.

“No date for tonight?” she asked teasingly. Her brother’s blond good looks were very much appreciated by the female members of his high school class.

Her brother grinned at her. His usually morose face lit up.

(“When he smiles he looks almost human,” she had told a friend recently. “The trouble is, he never smiles.”)

“Oh, shut up,” Richard Sloane said, but his tone was friendly.

The young man who was with Isabel leaned back, regarding them with an amused eye.

“When I was Richard’s age I couldn’t stop going to parties,” he said. “It was sort of a mania with me. When my brother and sister wanted to find out where I was, all they had to do was call around the neighborhood and see who was having a party. I was never invited, but I went anyway. I would do all kinds of affairs: weddings, cocktail parties, receptions. Funerals. I once got thrown out of an embassy on East Seventy-first Street in New York for crashing an official reception. The Vice-President was going to be there and they were all excited about the security breach, but all I wanted was a snack.”

“I hate parties,” Richard Sloane said firmly.

“Oh, well, you never know. Maybe you’ll grow into it.”

“Mrs. Abrams needs a drink,” said Isabel and bolted
toward the bar. Her companion watched her go with a feintly worried look in his eyes. But all he said was:

“Know anything about Boccherini?”

“No,” said Richard.

“ ‘Well, this is your big chance. There’s someone over there who appears to be an expert.”

Harry Crandall had switched topics once again and was now being dazzling and authoritative on the works of a slightly earlier composer.

“Let’s hope that Dad doesn’t know anything about it either,” said Richard gloomily. Professor Crandall had trapped his host and hostess in his immediate circle, and Walter Sloane was clearly growing restive.

Walter’s wife Laura was listening with a frozen smile to the details of Boccherini’s early life when her stepdaughter Isabel handed her a drink.

“Thanks, sweetheart. Did you look after the others?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, thanks. Listen, there’s something I want to talk to you about. Excuse us for a moment, Harry.”

She steered Isabel over to a corner. “Thanks for the rescue,” she whispered.

“It’s okay. It’s better than slime molds, anyway.”

“I don’t know how his wife can stand it.”

Isabel looked over to where the tall thin figure hovered anxiously over a tray of tempura vegetables. “She’s too busy monitoring her own cholesterol level,” she said.

“I had those vegetables made especially for Heather,” her stepmother replied. “She won’t eat meat, she won’t eat fish, she won’t eat caviar. She won’t eat anything. Including those vegetable things. You’ll see.”

“I told you, she won’t touch anything that’s been fried.”

“But darling,” Laura Sloane said piteously, “if it’s not meat, and it’s not fried, then I ask you, what is it?”

Laura Sloane was a big good-looking woman with an easy way about her. She dominated her husband and his children so naturally that they never had time to think about or resent it. She was tall and slightly heavy, with deep-set brown eyes and honey-blonde hair. Laura was always doing big things: selling or buying companies with her father’s and first husband’s millions; traveling around
the world; even, in one notorious instance, hang gliding. She had been left a widow at a young age and it had been years before she met Walter Sloane and remarried. In those years, she had become known for her flamboyance, she and Freda Simms both; they had been friends since high school. They had traveled the world, learned to speak twelve languages between them, sailed on foreign seas and laughed their way out of any mishap. Once, when Laura had been dumped by a man she was seeing, she had rented a plane and written the word
BASTARD
in large plumy letters across the sky above his house. She and Freda had the same loud laugh and the same charming way about them. Even Laura’s marriage to Walter Sloane, three years before, had not dimmed their friendship, although it was a well-known fact that Freda hated Walter’s guts and the sentiment was warmly returned.

The adventures, however, had not continued after Laura’s second marriage. She seemed at last to be settling down.

“And the worse for it, too,” Freda often said, packing her bags to fly off to another romantic resort, silently mourning the fact that her companion was Ted, or Eddie, or Fred (they all seemed to have the same name) instead of the marvelous Laura. “No spirit for adventure anymore, that’s Laura’s trouble. Old Wally has sucked the blood out of her, like the accursed vampire he is.”

Freda called him Old Wally to his face, which only served to increase the strength of the feeling between them.

“Old bitch,” Walter Sloane called her behind her back. “Old hag.”

Freda, busy with her packing, would laugh if she heard about it.

“My mission in life,” she would say, “is to make Walter Sloane uncomfortable”; and she seemed to be succeeding.

Now Laura Sloane looked around at the progress of her party with a practiced eye. Everything was going delightfully well, as usual. Of course her parties always went well. She planned them for weeks ahead of time and everything ran like clockwork. The only problem was that Freda, naturally, was getting drunk. So was Walter. They
both had an unfortunate tendency to drink and then to quarrel. Laura could stop her husband by taking the drink out of his hand, but she could not bring herself to do that to Freda. Freda’s claim was that she never felt the liquor; no, not one bit. She said it simply made her sparkle. Laura remembered the party, in this very house, where Freda had sparkled so violently and so long that she had not been able to get out of bed for a week afterward.

“Isabel,” she said now, “no more drinks for your father or Freda, okay?”

“Okay.”

Isabel sat down again in the corner next to the young man she had invited. Laura regarded her stepdaughter thoughtfully. When Isabel had announced that she was bringing this friend of hers—what was his name again? Snooky? She hoped she was remembering it wrong—Laura had looked interested and asked a few questions. Who was he? Where was he from? How had they met? Isabel had smiled in that cool way of hers and said, “He’s a friend—an old friend from college.” Laura wondered what that meant, nowadays. Perhaps it meant that he really was just a friend. There was no telling anymore, was there? She thought he looked a trifle
young
for Isabel, who was in her mid-twenties and typically dated men ten years older than she.…

Laura crossed the room and took the drink out of her husband’s hand, giving him a warning look as she did so. The look said,
Don’t fight with me.
Of course he didn’t. He just shrugged and turned away. Laura began to chat with Ruth and Sam Abrams, rescuing them from a discourse on the water resources of the Pantanal by Professor Crandall, who seemed to have worked himself up into a positive frenzy of factual information this evening.

An hour later the party began to break up. The guests drifted back and forth aimlessly, as opposed to their earlier purposeful perambulations. Heather Crandall floated over to Laura and said, “
Such
a wonderful party, as always.”

“Thank you.”

“We should be getting home now,” said Heather, casting a faintly worried eye over to where her husband stood furiously expounding the merits of field research versus
laboratory work. “Little Harry will be tired of babysitting for the other two.”

Laura nodded. She suddenly felt very tired and a little sick.

“To paraphrase Alice B. Toklas,” Heather Crandall said with amusement in her eye, “it will take Harry ten years to understand what he’s said here tonight.”

Laura looked at her sharply. Heather was Harry Crandall’s third wife—or was it the fourth?—but she wasn’t a fool like the others. She may have her own private obsessions about health food, but she saw her husband’s more public obsessions clearly. Good for her, Laura thought wearily.

“I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down,” she said. “I don’t feel very well. Thank you so much for coming.”

“Probably something you ate,” Heather said. “Remind me to talk to you about fried foods sometime.”

Laura went upstairs to bed, and Walter Sloane stood by the door seeing his friends out. He came back into the living room with a smug expression on his face.

“Bunch of fools,” he said to his children. Isabel’s young man still lounged in the corner. “That Harry Crandall especially is an idiot. Did you hear him blowing off steam about the Pantanal? I’m sure he doesn’t even know where the damned thing is. He’s never even been to Argentina.”

“The Pantanal,” said Isabel’s friend in a lordly manner, “isn’t
in
Argentina.”

“What?”

“It’s in Brazil. In the southwest corner, to be exact. A region of swamps and flourishing animal life. Anacondas. Snails. Jaguars.”

“Good Lord,” said his host, giving him a frozen glance. “It’s as bad as having that stuffed shirt Harry around. Where’s the whiskey? Laura never lets me drink a decent amount. Whiskey, anyone?”

No one wanted any whiskey.

“Good,” said Walter Sloane with satisfaction, and poured himself out a huge drink.

*      *      *

Conversations in the various cars departing from the Sloanes’ house:

“That Walter,” Freda Simms said with emphasis, “is an old bore.
And
a deadly miser. Did you see him watching every drink I took? What a creep. How could darling Laura have married him, I ask you? Eddie?”

Eddie shrugged. “I just met these people.”

“Well, what do you think?”

Eddie maneuvered the car expertly onto the main road. “They’re okay, I guess.”

From there the conversation turned to his next performance at the circus and various other things. It was only when the car drove up to Freda’s house that she caught herself saying with venom,

“That old hog Walter had better watch out! Did you see Harry Crandall giving him the evil eye tonight, wondering if he would pick a fight? He didn’t, but only because of Laura, poor dear. Old Wally had better watch out—someone’s going to do it in for him one of these days!”

In the Crandalls’ car Heather was saying fretfully,

“I
told
her
never
to eat anything that’s been fried in oil. Really, the only cooking oil that’s suitable for frying is Indian
ghee.
You know. It’s stable at high temperatures and—”

“Did you see Walter’s face when I was talking about the resources of the Pantanal?” said Professor Crandall, following his own train of thought. “I’ll bet he doesn’t even know where the Pantanal is. Don’t you think so, darling?”

“Yes, Harry,” Heather said submissively.

“Ignoramus,” her husband said gleefully. “That’s what he is, you know, Heather. A total ignoramus.”

“Yes, darling.”

“What were you and Laura talking about?”

“She wasn’t feeling well. I was going to tell her about
ghee
but I didn’t have the time.”

“Oh, well. Next time, then.”

“Yes,” said Heather. “Next time.”

*      *      *

In the Abramses’ car the conversation was short and direct.

“That Freda,” Sam Abrams was saying. He was a little gray man with a resigned expression. “Has she ever had a day’s worry in her life?”

“Oh, Sam, that’s not fair,” said Ruth. “Her husband died.”

“And left her with more money than she knows what to do with.”

“Oh, Sam.”

Her husband gave her a quizzical glance. “You wouldn’t think of knocking me off, now would you, honey? For the insurance money, maybe?”

“Oh,
Sam.
” Ruth felt resentful. You shouldn’t even joke about things like that, her expression said.

But it was true enough, what he had said about Freda Simms. Not that she had had such an easy time of it—look at the way she drank, she certainly had her share of problems. She was running away from
something.
But she had never had to worry about money.

Ruth felt that awful feeling again, that stab of resentment.

She had never had to
worry
.…

Isabel Sloane saw her friend out to his car.

“Snooky,” she said, “it was terrific seeing you again. How long will you be at your sisters?”

“About as long as she and her husband can stand me.”

“Let’s get together soon.”

The young man looked down at her thoughtfully. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night?”

“Your sister wouldn’t mind?”

“Oh, no. She and Bernard love that kind of thing.”

“Well … okay. That would be great. See you then.”