The Lucky Ones (2 page)

2

BY THE TIME LETTY REACHED THE CITY, THE SIDES OF her brand-new dress were damp with sweat. She wore a straw cloche to shade her eyes and carried her own suitcase, which felt twice as heavy as it had when she left White Cove. The sidewalks of Park Avenue were mostly abandoned, and she noticed that the poodles and French bulldogs and Malteses were being walked exclusively by maids in uniform. She thought of Good Egg and felt a little sad—when she left Dogwood her greyhound had followed her all the way to the entrance, and then stood there howling dolefully from behind the big gate until the car had rounded the bend. But there wasn’t much room for sadness in this particular day, for she was standing at the breathtaking beginning of her next chapter, and she couldn’t bring Good Egg with her.

Over the last two weeks, her knowledge of what it was to be a performer had multiplied each day. After a chance encounter with Valentine O’Dell—the movie star whose every expression she knew from the pictures—she had been taking the train into the city so that he could teach her what he knew. They had been full days, and not always easy, and she had danced in front of the big mirrors at his dance teacher’s studio for hours until her movements became perfectly effortless and her feet swelled beneath her. This routine was so thrilling and so exhausting that again Valentine had suggested Letty come live in the city with him. Sophia Ray, his wife and favorite leading lady, was returning from the coast, so it wouldn’t be unseemly. Plus, Sophia would have a lot to teach her, too.

“Sophia Ray!”

Letty glanced up, bewildered by the sound of a girl’s voice behind her saying the name she had just been turning over in her thoughts. She must have gotten distracted and not noticed the numbered streets passing by. Now she saw the elegant dark green awning with
THE APOLLONIAN
inscribed in gold cursive lettering and knew that she had arrived.

A tall woman with full red lips—whose face was largely obscured by black sunglasses, but whose distinctive halo of peroxided blond hair was not disguised in the slightest—was stepping out of a town car. Even posed like that on a city sidewalk, Sophia Ray glowed with an otherworldly quality that demanded to be looked at.

The redheaded girl who had called Sophia’s name had meanwhile rushed past and was reaching for her idol as though she hoped the famous actress would give her a benediction.

“It’s such an honor to meet you!” the girl gushed. “I just had to tell you how divine you were in
The Hobo and the Heiress
! I think it’s probably my absolute fave O’Dell–Ray picture to date!”

“Oh, well, aren’t you the
sweetest
!” Sophia replied while her posture recoiled. Although her eyes crinkled affectionately, there was an undercurrent of disdain in the way she regarded this stranger. It was subtle, but Letty heard it and felt suddenly rather small and insignificant.

“Now,” Sophia went on, her words turning saccharine, “why don’t you just run along, dear.”

In Letty’s imagination, Sophia had been her friend, but now that she saw her in person, she shrank in embarrassment—after all, it was Valentine who had been so generous and familiar, and she wondered now if this impressive-looking woman would care about a little girl from the country with her silly big-city dreams.

Letty froze, waiting for the right moment to escape. But before she could, Sophia tipped her head to one side and fixed Letty in her gaze. A radiant smile spread over her red lips, and in a very different voice, she said: “You must be Letty.”

The fan swiveled around and regarded Letty with a mixture of envy and awe.

“Yes,” Letty tremblingly acknowledged.

“Well, don’t just stand there, honey, come on in!” Sophia extended her hand, and with a guilty bob of her head Letty allowed Sophia Ray to shepherd her into the pink marble lobby of her apartment house. “Valentine will be along shortly—we just had lunch at the Plaza, and then some people recognized him on the way out and insisted that he play the piano a little for them, and he’s always so giving that way, as I guess you know by now, and he couldn’t say no. You see, my dear, how
exhausting
it all is…”

It took a few seconds to sink in with Letty that she was the “dear” in question, but once it had, she nodded exuberantly. “Oh, yes!”

“It’s a lucky thing Valentine found you before you got too far along in this business. We’ll keep an eye on you and show you the ropes.”

“Thank you!” Letty gulped. “I feel so grateful that you’re letting me come live with me—I mean you—I really do.”

“Oh, honey, I’m lucky too. Val’s told me all about you, and I can already tell we’re gonna be fast friends. You know, it’s terribly difficult for a girl like me to make friends. Most other girls are jealous of me, and the ones who aren’t just want free hand-me-downs, or to be introduced to someone important, or to be photographed standing next to me. But
you’re
not like that, are you?”

“No!” Letty shook her head with as much gusto as she had put into nodding a few seconds before.

“Yes, I can sense it already.
You
I can trust.”

Letty beamed up at Sophia. She was so overwhelmed by this welcome that she was more or less speechless, but luckily the elevator made a dinging sound before the silence became awkward, and the large brass doors drew back.

“Well, of course we can trust her!” Both women turned and saw Valentine standing behind them. He was grinning, and his chestnut hair rose in a healthy ridge above his tan forehead. The warm, confident timbre of his voice caused a blush to creep from Letty’s cheeks down across her neck.

“Yes, honey, you’re one of us now, whether you like it or not!” Sophia led the way into the elevator, and Valentine and then Letty followed. Sophia pressed the button that had no number and instead read PH. As the doors closed, Letty glanced up, her eyes darting from one of her idols to the other, as though if she looked away for too long they might disappear. She squeezed her eyes, but when she opened them Valentine and Sophia were still there, and the floor beneath her had begun to rise.

The heat had abated not at all when Astrid Donal stepped out of her chauffeured car and heard her grandmother’s appraisal of her appearance.

“You look like your mother,” Mrs. Earl Donal, née Caroline Oakhurst, announced flatly from the wide wrap-around porch of the grand Victorian house where Astrid’s father had been born.

This was not precisely a compliment; Astrid had heard plenty of what these two ladies had to say about each other over the years, and she knew what her grandmother really meant. It was as if mother- and daughter-in-law had set out to define one another in opposition, for where Caroline was decorous, Virginia was louche, and where Caroline was regal, Virginia was blowsy. Their disagreements often began at money, but over the years each woman had come to treat the other as a repository of everything one should avoid in life. Astrid, for her part, had learned to hear as little as possible from either party and remain always carelessly above it all, which was more or less the spirit in which she advanced across the lawn now.

“Oh, Nana, please,” Astrid replied as she came up the steps and embraced the elegant lady waiting for her. Although her grandmother wore her ash-blond hair in the high pouf of her girlhood, and though her black crocheted dress was cut in the conservative style more commonly seen before the war, she was not strict about the old social ways with her only grandchild—she returned the embrace, as though Astrid were still a little girl and thus exempt from the elaborate formalities she usually preferred. “Don’t be unkind—I am far too blond for any of that, and don’t you think I have the Donal nose? You always
used
to say so.”

“Let us hope and pray.” Grandmother Donal took Astrid by the hand and brought her into the house. “The true Donal nose does not fully emerge until one is at least twenty-five, so you have some time yet. I presume that boy loitering by the car is not your husband?”

“No! That’s my bodyguard. Charlie’s awfully sorry he couldn’t come tonight—he did
want
to.”

“If you say so,” the older lady replied indifferently.

They had come through the long, wide hallway that ran down the middle of the house and into the parlor that faced the Sound.

“Ahhhh…” Grandmother Donal sighed, as though she had just returned from a long day in the rough-and-tumble of the world (which she most certainly had not). With a clap of her hands she sank down into a scroll-armed pink satin fainting couch, and within seconds her liveried butler appeared with a silver tray bearing two sweating highballs. “It’s good to have you back in civilization, dear.”

Astrid accepted her highball and surveyed her grandmother’s definition of
civilization
: walls cluttered with portraits of seven generations of Donals and Oakhursts, rosewood furniture that might have once been sat upon by nobility. The house itself was large and airy, but hardly as palatial as Dogwood or Marsh Hall; although her grandmother could afford a more monumental sort of home, she took a snobbish pride in not replacing that which did not need fixing.

Astrid paused to swallow a gulp of cocktail, the lime and tonicness of which provoked a series of involuntary associations. It was the smell of her grandmother’s breath when she read her good-night stories, but then it was the smell of her mother’s breath, too, when Virginia had scooped her daughter up and taken her on a tour of Europe that lasted years. “Where are you getting your gin these days?”

“Darling, my butler takes care of that; I don’t ask.” Grandmother Donal turned her face so that her strong profile was illuminated against a pink lampshade, which was her signal that she had nothing more to say on the topic. “A grotesque business, from start to finish—I was never one of the sanctimonious women who made themselves hoarse arguing the dry cause, but I love this country still, and I’ll not tarnish that love by flouting her laws.”

“Well, Nana,” Astrid forged blithely on, “perhaps I could help you with all that, or rather
we
could, now that Charlie and I are hitched, for as I’m sure you know he does a good trade in the booze racket.”

“Yeee-eee-ees,” Grandmother Donal replied ominously, drawing the word out so that its meaning changed as it took on syllables and eventually became everything but affirmative.

The elder lady cleared her throat and walked across the room to a sideboard that bowed under a complete set of Shakespeare with aubergine cloth covers and gold lettering. She paused, her back toward Astrid, and tilted her head to look at the grand portrait of her late husband, whose face was as long and thin and patrician as her own. “It is fortuitous that you came alone tonight—I do want to meet your fellow, of course, some other time. But I have a wedding gift that is for you alone, and it seems that now is the time to give it to you.”

“Nana!” Laughter burbled up through Astrid, and she waved her hand at her grandmother before going on buoyantly: “Charlie and I are man and wife, and I am terribly sorry—for your sake, if not for Mother’s—that we didn’t do it more properly and invite everyone and have it announced beforehand in the papers. But we are married now, really and truly married, which means we share everything.”

“Of course.” The older woman’s voice had turned soft, which was unlike her. Usually she spoke in a high, fluty tone that was an accent all her own. She paused, running her hands over the books on the sideboard, until she reached
Othello
and plucked an envelope from in between its covers. Then she strode back toward her granddaughter, where she began to speak with such urgency that Astrid found she could not maintain her smile of the moment before. “Just the same, humor me. I don’t pretend to know how you young people do things nowadays, but criminals are not new to the world, and I have seen the final acts of a few lawbreakers in my time. Money can’t save anyone, but it can certainly help those who, in a bad situation, desire to help themselves. It isn’t a huge dowry anyway, my dear, just the right amount of money for a woman coming out in the world. My hope is that you and Charlie will live happily for many years and have no need of it, and you can give it to your daughter.”

The older woman handed over the envelope, and Astrid—still taken aback by the uncommon tone of their conversation—could think of nothing to do but open it. Inside was a little green booklet with the words
WHITE COVE SAVINGS & TRUST
embossed on the cover. She ran her fingers over the pages and saw that while her grandmother was right—the figure she had settled on was not outrageous—it was nonetheless far more than Caroline had ever allowed the widowed Virginia, and also much more than even Astrid would ever know what to do with.

“Don’t worry, it’s in a nice, safe little savings account, and it can remain there comfortably for some time. Only—you must not tell Charlie. The terms of the gift are that you and you alone may withdraw from the account. You understand me? This is to remain a secret.”

“Thank you,” Astrid mumbled. She wanted to protest that she couldn’t keep a secret from Charlie if she tried, but she was stunned by the serious intensity with which her grandmother was regarding her. She blinked and put the booklet back in the envelope. For the first time, she resented Charlie for not coming tonight—if he was there, her grandmother would have seen that they were a married couple, and that he could be trusted. Plus, Charlie would have known what to do with the money, instead of leaving her to deal with it alone.

“Wonderful!” Grandmother Donal clapped her hands, her tone once again aristocratic and detached. “Come, darling,” she went on, taking Astrid by the elbow and drawing her up from her chair. “I’m sure dinner is ready by now—oysters and a light fish soup—and I believe we’ll have some champagne to celebrate your being married and so grown-up-looking.”

As they came into the hall, Astrid caught a glimpse of Victor, the bodyguard, keeping watch on the lawn, and for the first time since becoming Mrs. Charlie Grey, the notion of being married and so grown-up-looking seemed a little less than a glittering, endless party.