RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (21 page)

And he was still smiling.

And now it was she, waiting there alone under the Canton clock. Something she, at least, had never done before, no matter what other girls did. The men in her life had always been waiting there ahead of her, well ahead of her.

But now it was she.

She was sitting there in a chair and everyone that came in looked at her, but the only one she would have looked at didn't come in.

If it had been anyone else she was waiting for, she would have got up and gone long ago. But if it had been anyone else, she wouldn't have been here in the first place.

She wanted to go-and yet she couldn't. She was held fast, bound, trapped. It was as though there was a rope around her, lashing her to the chair. What was that song-- Prisoner of Love --that was she.

She got up from the chair at last, unable to endure the ogling, and the circling and the maneuvering that seemed to be going on about her, with herself as the focus. That expression so plain to be read on all their faces, "Wouldn't I do, instead? I wouldn't treat you this way. Just give me a chance and I'll show you. Won't you let me meet you--instead of him, whoever he is?" She went over to the side and took refuge by one of the thick, fluted columns. That way they couldn't get at her so easily, they had to walk all the way around the column, like a huge Maypole, if they wanted to stalk her.

She opened her compact and looked at herself. It didn't look like the face of a girl who got stood up, who let this happen to her. And yet, even now, rather than the annoyance, the humiliation, the wounded pride, she would have felt if it had been someone else, her main feeling was one of uneasiness, of chill foreboding; of worry, rather than resentment. Because it was he.

"What is it? What's wrong? Has he gone and left me? Won't I see him again? Oh, I must! He has to come!"

She knew in her innermost heart, though she kept telling herself "This is long enough. Not another minute. I'm going to walk out of here right now," that she'd still be here an hour from now, still waiting like this. And even at midnight, with the lobby empty and the lights. turned down, she'd still be here waiting.

She couldn't help it. It was something stronger than she was. It was love.

And then suddenly a bellboy bawling, "Miss Drew. Calling Miss Drew."

She almost ran across the lobby toward him, she went so fast. Shot out from alongside the column.

"What is it? What?"

"There's a call for you. You can take it in the Three Booth, over there."

If she didn't actually run toward the designated place, it was only by exercising the utmost self-control. Her hopes ran and her fears ran; it was only her feet that didn't.

She picked up the phone-piece, dropped it in her haste, regained it.

Then he said contritely, "I've kept you standing there all this time. . . . Will you forgive me? I couldn't help it. I tried my level best--"

"It doesn't matter, it's all right-- Only, what was it?" she said in staccato.

"I'm a little beaten up."

Her breath siphoned sharply inward. "Were you held up? Were you--"

"It was more of a social call. One of your friends paid me his respects."

"Bill Morrissey," she said instantly.

He confirmed it with an indulgent little laugh, without any direct answer.

Again she drew her breath in, this time in exasperated anger. "That does for him. That finishes him with me. Are you bad? Are you--"

"I could get down there in a taxi, I suppose, but I don't look so good. Court plaster here and court plaster there. I'm not sure that you'd want to be seen with me in public."

"Where are you?"

"Up at my own place."

"But are you sure you're all right?" she kept saying. "Are you sure you're all right? Not badly hurt?" "I hate to call it off like this. Unless of course-- Would you want to come up here instead?"

She hesitated. Whether it would have been prolonged or not, he gave it no chance to be anything but momentary. He answered for her.

"No, of course not. I understand. I shouldn't have asked that, should I?"

That decided her, inversely. "I'll come up," she said firmly. "Where is it? You've never told me where you live."

He was now the reluctant one, rather than she. "I don't want you to do anything that's against your--"

"Jack," she said. "Don't you understand? I love you. I want to come."

The door swung slowly inward, his hand upon the knob, and the rectangular opening revealed them clinging together in a final embrace just inside it, outlined in gold on one side by the lamplight, outlined in blue on the other by the shadows.

Reluctantly they separated and his encircling ann dropped away.

"Now you see? You're leaving just as--just as unharmed as you arrived."

"Are you quite sure," she whispered, "I wanted to be?"

"There's always tomorrow."

"But this was tonight."

"Never mind, tomorrow will come. Tomorrow, the thirty-first of May."

"When a girl's not in love, she hates it if you're not a gentleman. When she is in love, she hates it if--you are."

"Mad," he said, crushing her to him. "I didn't want, to get you up here under false pretenses. Not you, Mad, you're too lovely. That would be cheap and sneaky. But that was tonight only. Now the period of grace is over. Now I'm giving you fair warning. Mad, if you ever come here again . . ."

She looked at him. She understood, and acquiesced. She gave him one last kiss.

"Till tomorrow," she said.

"The clock at the Carlton?" he suggested.

She shook her head. She tapped her index finger downward toward the floor. Then she turned and fled away from him down the stairs.

She was still in a state of exaltation, beatification, stars blinding her eyes, golden pinwheels blurring her senses when she opened the door of her own bedroom half an hour or so later.

The lights were on full blast, but even this did not register on her intoxicated faculties at first. She could almost have walked into a raging fire without realizing it, the state she was in.

Then little by little the fact that all her dresses, her lingerie, in fact her complete wardrobe, was strewn about in varying ordered piles, on chairs and on the bed, penetrated her awareness.

Her mother came in suddenly through the communicating door between their two rooms, further articles overlaying her arms.

"What is it? What are you doing?"

"Packing your things for you. I waited as long as I could for you to get home, but it seemed as if you were never coming and I thought I'd better begin it myself. We've got an early start to make tomorrow."

"An early start to where?" Madeline demanded warily.

"We're going down to the shore place."

"But why tomorrow? Why not next week, next--?"

"We were told--" Her mother stopped short. "We were told to make it tomorrow, at the very latest. It's essential that you--that we leave here tomorrow."

Suddenly she understood. "That man. The one that was here with Father when I went out the other night.. Has he been around here again?"

Her mother didn't answer.

"For heaven's sake, Mother! I like a good joke once in awhile myself, hut this one's getting stale. Is that what they pay him for, to intimidate people?"

"He's convinced your father, and that's good enough for me."

"Well, he's not running my life for me! He's not ordering me about, telling me when to come and when to go!"

"Sit down here. I want to have a serious talk with you." She moved some of the things aside. "I'm your mother. We're alone now."

"You're my mother, and we're alone now," Madeline said dryly. "Both those facts are self-evident."

"Is there anyone new you've been seeing lately? Anyone besides the boys you grew up with?"

"Are you starting in now? They asked me that the other night!"

"Who were you out with tonight?"

"Isn't that going backward a little? About ten years?"

"Madeline, who were you out with tonight?"

"Bill Morrissey." She looked her mother unflinchingly in the eye. "What am I supposed to have been guilty of?" she asked coldly.

"Madeline, this isn't a mother's strictness asking you this. It's a question of your own safety ."

" He told you to," she flared accusingly. " He's the one."

"Madeline, who were you out with tonight?"

"That's the third time you've asked me that. And this is the second time I'm telling you. Bill Morrissey."

"Madeline. Bill called up here a little before ten tonight and asked for you ."

The cleansing tissue she was rubbing off her face cream with never missed a stroke. "Certainly. We had words and I got up and walked away from him, left him sitting there in the theatre. I suppose he thought I'd gone home. That must have been when he called. I sat by myself in the lounge through the whole second act. Then I went back to my seat just before the final curtain."

"Oh," her mother said, in a faint, relieved little voice. "Oh." When you want to believe, you believe. She reached over and patted Madeline's hand.

"Have I ever lied to you before?" (But, she thought, have I ever been in love like this before?)

Her mother kissed her appeasingly on the forehead. "Good night, dear." She moved toward the door. "And you will let us take you to the shore place tomorrow? You won't make any fuss about it?"

Madeline looked at herself inscrutably in the mirror. "I won't make any fuss about it," she promised docilely.

They started early, the sun still only high enough to lie in slanting slats on the streets, like a fallen yellow picket fence--almost as if afraid to let the full, baleful light of the fatal day find them still in the zone of danger. The servants and the greater part of the household impedimenta had already gone on ahead the night before (Madeline only now discovered); there was, nonetheless, great to-do and commotion with the hand luggage, repeated false emergences and reentries into the house on the part of her mother before they were at last ready to make off.

Madeline, through it all, sat there in the back seat of the town car in complete indifference, a cigarette in one idling hand, an overnight case in the other, almost as though she were an onlooker at this whole proceeding, it had nothing to do with her whatever. She even looked the other way, out the opposite side of the car, away from the house.

She only showed rancor at one point, when, after the driver was already in his seat and just as they were about to start, Cameron suddenly opened the forward door, got in beside the driver, and closed it again. He had not come from their house; it was as though he had suddenly appeared from nowhere.

"Does he have to ride with us?" she demanded in a quite audible voice. "What is this, a deportation?"

"Sh-h-h," her mother urged tactfully.

Only the back of his neck seemed to have overheard her; that took on a slightly deeper tinge.

When they arrived at the shore place, he disappeared again as abruptly as he had first appeared. Got out, and suddenly wasn't around any more, was nowhere to be seen. You wouldn't have known he had come down with them.

Madeline had a sardonic smile indenting one corner of her mouth; perhaps elicited by this, or perhaps due to her thoughts in general.

Just before lunch, however, while she was stretched in a deck chair on the grounds some distance from the house, he materialized again, as though he'd been wanclering about making a tour of inspection. She pretended not to be aware of him although she could hear the grass rustle under his feet and see his shadow on it, coming from behind her.

He just stood there and looked at her, very unobtrusively.

Her head suddenly went up and she gave him a thunderously dark look.

"I'm reading a book," she scowled. She held it up grimly to show him. "See. Book. You know what they are, don't you? You do this to them"--she bent over it-- "and then some jailer comes along and gawks--"

"I'm sorry, Miss Drew," he said mildly. "You seem to resent having had to come down here."

"I happened to prefer it where I--" she began incautiously. Then stopped short.

" Was there some association that's been interrupted?" And he gave her a needle-like look of speculation.

She fell suddenly silent; turned her shoulder, went back to her book. As if realizing she'd almost made a tactical error just then.

At lunch she was suddenly someone else again. The stiff mouth was gone, the sullen mien was gone. She was gay, talkative; a little too high-strung perhaps. But she seemed to have accepted the change of scene with good grace, reconciled herself to it. She only made one indirect reference to it and that was a favorable one. "It is lovely down here; we should have come down earlier other years, not waited." And even toward him, Cameron (he lunched right at the table with them), she was more amiable though she did not address him directly. Let a brief smile fall athwart him once or twice in passing it on to someone else. As if to say, "See? I'm perfectly happy here. I'm content. No other place holds any attraction for me. You were mistaken."