Summer Crossing (2 page)

Of all the things that fatigued her, this tried and annoyed Mrs. McNeil most: she trembled as if unnatural vibrations jarred the sane and stable precincts of the Plaza dining-room. Nor do I mean to be made a fool, she might have said, for, in contemplating the promotion of Grady’s debut year, she’d done already a great lot of work, maneuvering: there was even some idea of hiring a secretary. Furthermore, and in a self-righteous vein, she could have gone even so far as to say that the whole of her social life, every drab luncheon and tiresome tea (as in this light she would describe them), had been suffered only in order that her daughters receive a dazzling acceptance in the years of their dance. Lucy McNeil’s own debut had been a famous and sentimental affair: her grandmother, a rightfully celebrated New Orleans beauty who had married South Carolina’s Senator LaTrotta, presented Lucy and her two sisters en masse at a Camellia ball in Charleston in April of 1920; it was a presentation truly, for the three
LaTrotta sisters were no more than schoolgirls whose social adventures had been heretofore conducted within the shackles of a church; so hungrily had Lucy whirled that night her feet for days had worn the bruises of this entrance into living, so hungrily had she kissed the Governor’s son that her cheeks had flamed a month in remorseful shame, for her sisters—spinsters then and spinsters still—claimed kissing made babies: no, her grandmother said, hearing her teary confession, kissing does not make babies—neither does it make ladies. Relieved, she continued through to a year of triumph; it was a triumph because she was pleasant to look at, not unbearable to listen to: vast advantages when you remember that this was the meager season when the junior assembly had only such deplorable persimmons to choose among as Hazel Veere Numland or the Lincoln girls. Then, too, during the winter holidays, her mother’s family, they were the Fairmonts from New York, had given in her honor, and in this very hotel, the Plaza, a distinguished dance; even though she sat now so near the scene, and was trying to recall, there was little about it she could remember, except that it was all gold and white, that she’d worn her mother’s pearls, and, oh yes, she’d met Lamont McNeil, an unremarkable event: she danced with him once and thought nothing of it. Her mother, however, was more impressed, for Lamont McNeil, while socially unknown,
and though still in his late twenties, cast over Wall Street an ever enlarging shadow, and so was considered a catch, if not in the circle of angels, then by those of a but slightly lower stratum. He was asked to dinner. Lucy’s father invited him to South Carolina for the duck-shoot.
Manly
, old grand Mrs. LaTrotta commented, and, as this was her criterion, she gave him the golden seal. Seven months later Lamont McNeil, pitching his poker voice to its tenderest tremor, spoke his piece, and Lucy, having received only two other proposals, one absurd and the second a jest, said oh Lamont I’m the happiest girl in the world. She was nineteen when she had her first child: Apple, so named, amusingly enough, because during her pregnancy Lucy McNeil had eaten them by the barrel, but her grandmother, appearing at the christening, thought it a shocking bit of frivolity—jazz and the twenties, she said, had gone to Lucy’s head. But this choice of name was the last gay exclamation point to a protracted childhood, for a year later she lost her second baby; stillborn, it was a son, and she called him Grady in memory of her brother killed in the war. She brooded a long while, Lamont hired a yacht and they cruised the Mediterranean; at every bright pastel port, from St. Tropez to Taormina, she gave on board sad weeping ice-cream parties for gangs of embarrassed native boys the steward shanghaied from ashore. But on their return to
America, this tearful mist abruptly lifted: she discovered the Red Cross, Harlem, the two-demand bid, she took a professional interest in Trinity Church, the Cosmopolitan, the Republican Party, there was nothing she would not sponsor, contribute to, connive for: some said she was admirable, others said brave, a few despised her. They made a spirited clique, however, these few, and over the years their combined strength had sabotaged a dozen of her ambitions. Lucy had waited; she had waited for Apple: the mother of a topflight debutante has at her hands a social version of atomic revenge; but then she was cheated out of it, for there was the new war, and the poor taste of a debut in wartime would have been excessive: they had instead given an ambulance to England. And now Grady was trying to cheat her, too. Her hands twitted on the table, flew to the lapel of her suit, plucked at a brooch of cinnamon diamonds: it was too much, Grady had tried always to cheat her, just simply by not having been born a boy. She’d named her Grady anyway, and poor Mrs. LaTrotta, then in the last exasperated year of her life, had roused herself sufficiently to declare Lucy morbid. But Grady had never been Grady, not the child she wanted. And it was not that in this matter Grady wanted to be ideal: Apple, with her pretty playful ways and aided by Lucy’s sense of style, would have been an assured success, but Grady, who, for one thing, seemed not
popular with young people, was a gambling chance. If she refused to cooperate, failure was certain. “There
will
be a debut, Grady McNeil,” she said, stretching her gloves. “You will wear white silk and carry a bouquet of green orchids: it will catch a little the color of your eyes and your red hair. And we will have that orchestra the Bells had for Harriet. I warn you now, Grady, if you behave rottenly about this I shall never speak to you again. Lamont, will you ask for the check, please?”

Grady was silent some moments; she knew the others were not as calm as they seemed: they were waiting again for her to act up, which proved with what inaccuracy they observed her, how unaware they were of her recent nature. A month ago, two months ago, if she had felt her dignity so intruded upon, she would have rushed out and roared her car onto the port road with the pedal flat on the floor; she would have found Peter Bell and cut the mischief in some highway tavern; she would have made them worry. But what she felt now was a genuine disinvolvement. And to some extent a sympathy with Lucy’s ambitions. It was so far off, a summer away; there was no reason to believe it would ever happen, a white silk dress, and the orchestra the Bells had had for Harriet. While Mr. McNeil paid the check, and as they crossed the dining-room, she held Lucy’s arm and with a coltish
awkwardness gave her cheek a delicate spontaneous peck. It was a gesture that had the sudden effect of unifying them all; they were a family: Lucy glowed, her husband, her daughters, she was a proud woman, and Grady, for all her stubborn oddness was, let anyone say whatever they would, a wonderful child, a real person. “Darling,” Lucy said, “I’m going to miss you.”

Apple, who was walking ahead, turned around. “Did you drive your car in this morning, Grady?”

Grady was slow in answering; lately everything Apple said seemed suspicious; why care, really? What if Apple did know? Still, she did not want her to. “I took the train from Greenwich.”

“Then you left the car at home?”

“Why, does it make any difference?”

“No; well, yes. And you needn’t bark at me. I only thought you could drive me out on the Island. I promised George I’d stop by the apartment and pick up his encyclopedia—such a heavy thing. I’d hate to carry it on the train. If we got there early enough you could go swimming.”

“Sorry, Apple. The car’s in a garage; I left it here the other day because the speedometer got jammed. I suppose it’s ready now, but as a matter of fact I have a date in town.”

“Oh?” said Apple peevishly. “Mind if I ask who with?”

Grady minded very much, but “Peter Bell,” she answered.

“Peter Bell, good Lord, why do you always see him? He thinks he’s so smart.”

“He is.”

“Apple,” Lucy said, “Grady’s friends are no concern of yours. Peter is a charming boy; and his mother was one of my bridesmaids. Lamont, do you remember? She caught the bouquet. But isn’t Peter still up in Cambridge?”

Just then Grady heard her name shouted across the lobby: “Hiho, McNeil!” Only one person in the world called her that, and with an imitated delight, for it was not the happiest time he could have chosen to appear, she saw that it was him. A young man expensively but perversely dressed (he wore a white evening tie with a severe flannel suit, the trousers of which were held up by a wild-west belt of jeweled inappropriateness, and on his feet there were a pair of tennis sneakers), he was pocketing change at the cigar counter. As he went toward her, she going half-way to meet him, he walked with the easy grace of one who expects always to know the best things of life. “Aren’t you pretty, McNeil?” he said, and gave her a confident hug. “But not as pretty as me: I’ve just been to the barber shop.” The impeccable freshness of his clean neat-featured face showed as
much; and a fresh haircut lent him that look of defenseless innocence that only a haircut can.

Grady gave him a happy tomboy shove. “Why aren’t you in Cambridge? Or is the law too boring?”

“Boring, but not so boring as my family are going to be when they hear I’ve been booted out.”

“I don’t believe you,” Grady laughed. “Anyway, I want to hear all about it. Only now we’re in the most terrible rush. Mother and Dad are sailing for Europe, and I’m seeing them off on the boat.”

“Can’t I come, too? Please, miss?”

Grady hesitated, then called, “Apple, tell Mother Peter’s coming with us,” and Peter Bell, thumbing his nose at Apple behind her back, ran into the street to signal a taxi.

They needed two taxis; Grady and Peter, who waited to retrieve from the cloakroom Lucy’s little cross-eyed dachshund, used the second. It had a sky-window roof: dove flights, clouds and towers tumbled upon them; the sun, shooting summer-tipped arrows, jingled the new-penny color of Grady’s cropped hair, and her skinny, nimble face, shaped with bones of fish-spine delicacy, was flushed by the honeyed blowing light. “If anyone should ask,” she said,
lighting Peter’s cigarette for him, “Apple or anyone, do please say that we have a date.”

“Is this a new trick, lighting gentlemen’s cigarettes? And that lighter; McNeil, however did you come by it? Atrocious.”

It was, rather. However, she’d never thought so until this moment. Made of mirror, and with an enormous sequined initial, it was the sort of novelty found on drugstore counters. “I bought it,” she said. “It works wonderfully. Anyway, what I just said, you will remember?”

“No, my love, you never bought that. You try awfully hard, but I’m afraid you’re not really very vulgar.”

“Peter, are you teasing me?”

“Of course I am,” he laughed, and she pulled his hair, laughing too. Though unrelated, Grady and Peter, they still were relatives, not through blood but out of sympathy: it was the happiest friendship she knew, and always with him she relaxed in the secure warm bath of it. “Why shouldn’t I tease you? Isn’t that what you’re doing to me? No, no don’t shake your head. You’re up to something, and you’re not going to tell me. Never mind, dear, I won’t pester you now. As for the date, why not? Anything to evade my anguished parents. Only you’ll damn well pay for it: after all, what’s the point in spending money on you? I’d prefer trotting around dear sister
Harriet; she at least can tell you all about astronomy. By the way, do you know what that dreary girl has done: she’s gone to Nantucket to spend the summer studying stars. Is that the boat? The
Queen Mary
? And I’d so hoped for something amusing like a Polish tanker. Whoever dreamed up that bilious whale ought to be gassed: you Irish are perfectly right, the English are horrors. But then, so are the French. The
Normandie
didn’t burn soon enough. Even so, I wouldn’t go on an American boat if you gave me—”

The McNeils were on A deck in a suite of varnished rooms with fake fireplaces. Lucy, just-arrived orchids trembling on her lapel, skittered to and fro while Apple trailed after her reading aloud from cards that had come with offerings of flowers and fruit. Mr. McNeil’s secretary, the stately Miss Seed, passed among them with a Piper-Heidsieck bottle, her expression vaguely curled with the incongruity of champagne in the morning (Peter Bell told her not to bother with a glass, he would take whatever was left of the bottle), and Mr. McNeil himself, solemnly flattered, stood at the door discouraging a man who televised important travelers: “Sorry, old man … forgot my makeup ha ha.” No one even liked Mr. McNeil’s jokes except other men and Miss Seed: and that, so Lucy said, was only because Miss Seed was in love with him. The dachshund ripped the stockings of a female
photographer who flashed Lucy in her rigidest rotogravure stance: “What are we planning to do abroad?” said Lucy, repeating the reporter’s query. “Why, I’m not sure. We have a home in Cannes that we haven’t seen since the war; I suppose we’ll stop by there. And shop; of course we’ll shop.” She hemmed embarrassedly. “But mostly it’s the boat ride. There’s nothing to change the spirit like a summer crossing.”

Stealing the champagne, Peter Bell led Grady away and up through the saloons and onto an open deck where voyagers, parading with their well-wishers against the city skyline, had already proud ocean-roll walks. One lone child stood at the railing forlornly flying kites of confetti: Peter offered him a swallow of champagne, but the child’s mother, a giant of uncommon physique, advanced with thunderous steps and sent them fleeing to the dog-kennel deck. “Oh dear,” said Peter, “the dog house: isn’t that always our lot.” They huddled together in a spot of sun; it was as hidden as a stowaway’s retreat, a yearning bellow from the smokestacks poignantly baled away, and Peter said how wonderful it would be if they could fall asleep and awake with stars overhead and the ship far at sea. Together, running on Connecticut shores and looking over the Sound, they had, years before, spent whole days contriving elaborate and desperate
plots: Peter had assumed always a serious enthusiasm, he’d seemed absolutely to believe a rubber raft would float them to Spain, and something of that old note shivered his voice now. “I suppose it’s just as well we’re not children anymore,” he said, dividing the last of the wine between them. “That really was too wretched. But I wish we were still children enough to stay on this boat.”