Saratoga Trunk (26 page)

In desperation he almost shouted, “I always seem to say the wrong thing to you.”

“But no, no. It is I who am clumsy—
sans savoir faire.
You must help me to do and say the right thing. Will you?”

He sent flowers, remorsefully. Mounds of them.

Kaka, divesting these chaste offerings of their tissue-paper wrappings, surveyed them with a jaundiced eye. “Flowers! Posies!” Her tone should have withered them on their stems. “That’s a Northerner for you! Your mama, gendemen just see her riding out in her carriage would send her jewelry. You say he got money—this litde pink man?”

“Millions. Millions and millions and millions!”

“Why’n’t he send you jewelry gifts, then? Diamonds and big stone necklace and ruby rings like your mama got.”

“Because I’m a respectable widow, that’s why. To take jewelry from a man who isn’t your husband, that is not
convenable.’’’’

“Your aunt Belle was a widow. She never had a husband no more than you. But she got jewelry. She never had to put up with no flowers.”

Clio regaled Clint with this bit of conversation; she gave a superb imitation of the black woman’s disdain for mere roses; she enjoyed her performance as much as he. The two conspirators, at ease with one another, went into gales of laughter.

He said, ruefully, “You haven’t had any jewelry off of me, either. I sure would like to load you with it, honey. You can have my diamond stud, and welcome, if you’ll take it.”

“Clint! I’m ashamed of you. Where is your loyalty! You know that diamond is for the ring when you marry the litde blonde Texas beauty—the finest little woman in the world.”

Morosely he retorted, “Some day you’ll be play-acting yourself right out of Saratoga if you don’t watch out.”

“No,” she said, “I was quite wonderful with Van Steed. Real tears. I must make him think he is strong and masterful. He must feel he is deciding everything. You know, it’s a great strain, this pretending. Mama never had to pretend. She was actually like that. Languid and lovely and sort of looking up at one with those eyes. I try to be like that—when I think of it.”

“You’re really a strong-minded female, honey. No use your soft-soaping and fluttering around. You wouldn’t fool any man.”

She flared at that. “I never bothered to try to fool you.”

“Yessir, Countess,” he drawled, “that’s right. I reckon I just wasn’t worth fretting about, that day in the French Market.”

“Touche,”
she laughed, good-naturedly.

Sometimes even she found it difficult to tell when she was herself and when she was the mysterious Mrs. De Chanfret. Perhaps no one enjoyed her performance more than she. Frequently she actually convinced herself of her own assumed role. In a way she enjoyed everything—even the things she disliked.

She regarded the vast dining room with a mingling of amusement and horror; rarely entered it. The crowd, the clatter, the rush, the heavy smells of too-profuse food repelled her. When she did choose to dine there it always was late, when the hordes were almost finished. She kept her table, she selected special dishes ordered ahead by Kakaracou, she tipped well but not so lavishly as to cause the waiters to disrespect her judgment. She refused to countenance the heavy midday dinner.

“Barbaric! All that rich food in the middle of the day. I dine at night.”

Her cottage apartment was situated on the other side of the U-shaped wing. She frequently dined or lunched in her own sitting room. You saw the black waiters in stiffly starched white skimming across the garden, mounting the wooden steps, racing along the veranda toward her apartment, their laden trays miraculously balanced atop their heads. The dining-room meals were stupendous; the United States Hotel guests stuffed themselves with a dozen courses to the meal, for everything was included in the American plan. Clio fancied the specially prepared delicacies for which the outlying inns and restaurants were famous. There she grew ecstatic over savory American dishes, new to a palate trained to the French cuisine.

“I never saw a woman enjoy her vitdes more than you do,” Clint Maroon said admiringly, as she started on her third ear of hot corn on the cob, cooked in the husk and now dripping with butter.

“Mama said always that the only decent food in America was to be found in New Orleans. Of course the food at the hotel is—you know—no imagination. And cooked in such quantities, as for an army. How can food be properly cooked that way! Naturally not. But here it’s delicious—all these American dishes, what a pity they don’t know of them in France. In France, they think Americans live on buffalo meat and flapjacks.”

Woodcock, reed birds, brook trout, black bass, red raspberries at Riley’s. Steak, corn on the cob, at Crum’s.

Maroon said, “I get to where I can’t look at all that fancy fodder at the hotel. I just want to wrassle with a good thick T-bone steak.” The two enjoyed food and understood it. They would taste a dish in silence, let the flavor send its message to the palate, then they would solemnly look at one another across the table and nod.

“Ma, coming from Virginia, she fancied her food. I reckon that’s how I came to be a kind of finicky feeder. Ma, she used to say she didn’t trust people who said they didn’t care about what they ate. Said there was something wrong with them. Texas, though, it isn’t a good-feeding state. Everything into the frying skillet.”

It was at Moon’s that Clio first tasted the famous Saratoga chips, said to have originated there, and it was she who first scandalized spa society by strolling along Broadway and about the paddock at the race track crunching the crisp circlets out of a paper sack as though they were candy or peanuts. She made it the fashion, and soon you saw all Saratoga dipping into cornucopias filled with golden-brown paper-thin potatoes; a gathered crowd was likely to create a sound like a scuffling through dried autumn leaves.

Concluding a dinner with Maroon, she was conscious of her tight stays. In contrast, dining with the dyspeptic Van Steed was definitely lacking in gusto. The De Chanfret veneer frequently cracked here and there so that Belle Piquery, Rita Dulaine and the hotblooded Nicolas showed through to the most casual observer. But in Saratoga it was, for the most part, put down to the forgivable idiosyncrasies of the titled and the foreign.

The first time she lighted a cigarette in public the piazza shook to the topmost capital of its columns. A woman who smoked! But even fast women didn’t smoke in public. She had lighted a tiny white cylinder one evening strolling in the hotel garden under the rosy light of the gay Japanese lanterns. It was just before the nine o’clock hop. She was accompanied by the timorous Van Steed and she was looking her most bewitching in a short Spanish jacket over a tight basque, a full skirt of flowered silk with a sash draped to the side and caught with a tremendous bow.

Van Steed had watched her with dazed unbelief that grew to consternation as she extracted the cigarette from a tiny diamond-studded case which she took from her flowered silk bag, tapped it daintily and experdy, placed it between her lips and motioned him wordlessly for a light. He struck a match, his hand trembling so that the flame flickered and died. He struck another; she smiled at him across the little pool of light that illumined their two intent faces.

“You smoke cigarettes, Mrs. De Chanfret!” This obviously was a rhetorical question, since she was now blowing a smoke spiral through her pursed lips into the evening dusk. “I—I’ve never seen a lady smoke cigarettes before.” His shocked tone had in it a hint of almost husbandly proprietorship. Even the stout professional madams who marshaled their bevy of girls in the afternoon Broadway carriage parade knew better than to allow them to smoke in public.

Clio shrugged carelessly. “It’s a continental custom, I suppose. I’ve smoked since I was thirteen. There’s nothing so delicious as that single cigarette after dinner.”

Nervously he glanced about, sensing a hundred peering eyes in the dusk. “People will—people will misunderstand. In a hotel, people talk.”

“Oh, how sweet—how kind of you to protect me like that! Perhaps you are right. I am not used to American ways. But a cigarette”—she held it away from her delicately, she looked at it, she laughed a little poignant laugh—”a cigarette is sometimes cozy when one is lonely. Don’t you find this so, dear Mr. Van Steed?”

“Cigar smoker myself,” he said gruffly.

She murmured her admiration. “But of course. So masculine.”

He cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t think you’d be lonely, Mrs. De Chanfret. You never—that is, you’re so popular—a woman of the world.” She was silent. The silence lengthened, became unbearable. In a kind of panic he looked at her. Her face was almost hidden from him; she had turned her head aside, the lashes lay on the white cheeks. “Mrs. De Chanfret! Have I said something! I didn’t mean—”

Still she was silent. They walked beneath the rosy glow of the Japanese lanterns. Inside the hotel the orchestra struck up the popular strains of “Champagne Charlie.” Now she turned to him, she just touched her lashes with her lace handkerchief. “A woman of the world,” she repeated, very low. Her tone was not reproachful; merely sad. “Imagine for yourself that your dear sister should suddenly find herself a widow, and her dear mother dead, too, suddenly—forgive me that I even speak of such a thing—but
par exemple
only—and she finds herself alone in—shall we say—France. Alone, with only a servant or two, and knowing no one. No one. She follows the ways to which she is accustomed in her own loved America. Is that a woman of the world!” She pressed the handkerchief to her lips.

“Mrs. De Chanfret! Clio!”

Her face was suddenly radiant; she just touched his arm with the tips of her fingers, and pressed it gentiy and gave the effect of gazing up at him, starry-eyed, by leaning just a little. “You called me Clio. How dear, how good, how friendly! Bart!”

“Shall we go in? The—uh—the music has started.”

“She’s smoking a cigarette!” It was as though the scarlet tip of the little white cylinder had lighted a conflagration in the United States Hotel. “He lighted it for her right there in the garden as bold as you please, and now she’s smoking it, walking up and down with a lace thing over her head, and a short velvet jacket like a gypsy. . . . She’s thrown away the cigarette. . . . She’s taking his arm!”

These were the oddments which were dispatched by letter to old Madam Van Steed maintaining her grudging vigil over her expectant daughter in Newport. With the breath of the harpies hot on her neck, Clio Dulaine went her unconventional way.

It became known that she frequently rose at six and ate breakfast with the stable-boys and jockeys and grooms and trainers and horsemen at the race-track stables. Later, this became the last word in chic. Now the very idea was considered brazen beyond belief. The early-morning air was exquisitely cool and pungent with pine; the mist across the meadows pearled every tree and roof and fence and paddock. Clio made friends with everything and everyone from Waterboys to track favorites. She was fascinated by the tough, engaging faces of the stable hangers-on. Theirs was a kind of terse astringent wit. Their faces were, for the most part, curiously hard-bitten and twisted as to features; a wry mouth like a crooked slit in a box; a nose that swerved oddly; an eye that seemed higher than its mate, or that dropped in one corner, with sinister effect. Their hands were slim, flexible, almost fragile looking; their feet, too, slim and high-arched. They wore jerseys, shapeless pants or baggy riding breeches that hugged their incredibly meager knees. There was about them an indefinable style.

“Chic, ça,”
Clio would say.
“Un véritable type.”

“What’s a teep?” Maroon asked.

“Uh—I must think—” She was being very French for the benefit of Van Steed. The three were breakfasting together.

Van Steed now said, yes, indeed, you’re right, he is, and nodded to show that he too was familiar with the French language. This did little to soothe Maroon’s irritation.

“Spell it,” demanded Maroon.

“Why, t-y-p-e.
Type.”
She gave it again the French pronunciation.

“T-y—well, hell’s bells! Teep! Type, you mean. Well, it’s too bad you can’t speak American. Are you fixing to stay over in this country long, Mrs. De Chanfret? You ought to learn the language.”

“That depends, dear Colonel Maroon, on so many, many things.”

“What, for instance?” Van Steed asked with pronounced eagerness.

“Oh, things you would consider quite sordid, I’m afraid, Mr. Van Steed. Everything is so expensive over here. It takes so many francs to make one American dollar.”

He spoke with a rush, as though the words had tumbled out before he could check them. “You should never have to worry about money. You’re so—so—you ought to have everything that’s beautiful—and uh—beautifiil.” He stammered, floundered, blushed furiously.

“Perhaps,” wistfully, “if—ah—Edouard had lived.”

“Edouard?”

“My husband.”

“Oh. Oh, I thought you said—that is—I understood his name was Etienne.”

“It was. I—I always called him Edouard. A little pet name, you understand.”

Phew, Maroon thought. That’ll learn her not to be so cute.

Unruffled, she went placidly on eating the hearty stable breakfast of scalding coffee and ham and eggs and steak and fried potatoes and hot biscuits. Everything seemed to her serene and friendly at this hour of the morning. Even the race horses, so fiery and untouchable as they pranced out to the track a few hours later, haughtily spurning the ground with their delicate hoofs, seeming scarcely to touch it, like the toes of a ballet dancer, now put their friendly heads outside their stalls looking almost benign as they lipped a bit of sugar.

Cupide usually accompanied her on these excursions to the stable. It was his heaven. The stables were quick to recognize his magic with horses. They permitted him to exercise their horses, grudgingly at first but freely after they had seen what he did with the fiery Alamo, who was as yet not entirely broken to the race track.

Darting in and out of the stables and paddocks, under horses’ hoofs, into back rooms, he picked up the most astonishing and valuable bits of information, which he imparted to Clint and Clio.