clear, we’ll be able to make our plans, definite plans.”
Happiness should have been singing through Cristie. The happiness was there but there were other things mixed up with it.
“Sara won’t be with you?” she said. “Margot asked her.”
“No,” Steven replied, signaling to the waiter. He ordered cocktails. “‘Sara’s going to the opening of ‘The Star-spangled Manner’ with the Johnsons.”
The cocktails were brought. “To us,” Steven said, raising his glass.
Their eyes met and held. A wave of joy engulfed Cristie. She stopped fighting, let it take her. They kept on looking at each other.
Cristie had come to New York from Texas late in the spring, after her mother’s death. She was staying for the summer with Margot St. Vrain in Margot’s penthouse on East Sixty-fourth Street. Margot’s people had been friends of Cristie’s father. Margot and Margot’s cousin, Johnny St. Vrain, the radio announcer, had been in Texas when her mother died and they had both pressed her to come north. It was Margot who had fallen on Cristie’s pen-and-ink sketches with a scream of delight, Margot who had made her send them around. They had had an almost immediate, if modest, success.
Steven left Cristie at the door of Margot’s apartment. Her mood of exhilaration began to fade as he walked away. Entering the lobby, going up in the small private elevator that serviced the penthouse, the doubts and tremors and questions began to come back. Granting that Sara wanted a divorce herself, would she make some impossible conditions? Cristie tried to push her fears aside; they refused to go, completely.
When she went into the penthouse living room, Margot was there, with Euen Firth, the man Margot was engaged to, and so was Johnny. Cristie said hello to Margot, tall and competent and square in a superbly cut, brown shantung coat and skirt that intensified her height and leanness and brought out the lines of a magnificent pair of shoulders and arms. They were Margot’s one really good point and she made the most of them.
Johnny waved a cheerful greeting to Cristie as she pulled off her hat and settled down in a corner of the immense geranium-red sofa. Looking at Johnny’s shapely head, his compact body, his pleasant handsome face, listening to his voice, a voice that even in a room had the ring to it that had put him well at the top of America’s leading announcers, Cristie knew why she hadn’t married him when he had asked her in the spring. It was because he wasn’t Steven. Her refusal hadn’t made any difference in the camaraderie between herself and the St. Vrains. She had been afraid it would, but it hadn’t.
Margot’s engagement to Euen Firth had been announced in the morning papers. They were discussing plans and a date. Margot said firmly that she couldn’t leave New York until after Thanksgiving. Two or three pots were due to boil in late November and she had to be on deck to watch the proceedings.
Cristie looked at her wistfully. Margot was so sure of herself. At thirty-one she was the foremost band agent in the country, and she had started from scratch. Left with an illustrious name and nothing with which to back it up, she had gradually built a business that was the despair of her competitors. “You’ve got to see St. V. to swing” had become an axiom among the jive and jam folk. Winchell had called Margot the Queen of Swing in a Sunday night broadcast.
But Cristie knew that although Margot’s income was large, her expenses were high and the pace was terrific. She had engaged herself to Euen Firth with her eyes open, made no secret of it. She wasn’t and she didn’t pretend to be, madly in love with the gangling, not quite “ex-” playboy in his early thirties, with a prospective couple of millions in his jeans. Euen was the son of Charles Firth, one of the country’s leading drug manufacturers. Not that Margot wasn’t fond of Euen in her own way. She was, but she had explained to Cristie quite frankly that he could give her the things she wanted, the chance to stop and take a deep breath, to lie back and relax and laze a bit—for a while, anyhow.
Margot went on talking, but she gave Cristie a shrewd glance. Cristie averted her face. The gnawing little worm of fear in her breast stirred. Margot was terrifically keen, saw all there was to see. She didn’t know, specifically, about Steven. Cristie didn’t want her to know, didn’t want anyone to know—yet.
She was relieved when the maid entered and said that Margot was wanted on the phone. Cristie wasn’t afraid of Johnny or of Euen. Men didn’t notice things, like women. Johnny went on reading the lyric of a new Harry Woods song and sipping a Tom Collins. Euen was engrossed in a newspaper.
Margot was away for about five minutes. When she reentered the living room, a modernistic room mollified by incongruous and comfortable additions that would have driven its designer mad, a change had come over her. Her mouth was constricted and her strong plain face was a bad color. Johnny put his feet, flung over a chair, on the floor.
“Who was it, Margot?” he asked, frowning at his cousin.
At Margot’s answer the blood rushed into Cristie’s face, stained her throat. Standing near a table, rolling a cigarette between the fingers of a large shapely hand, Margot said in a queer flat tone, “It was Steven Hazard’s wife, Sara.” The cigarette she was holding broke and tobacco dribbled to the floor.
Cristie was aware of the fact that Margot knew Sara. They had been at Miss Brandon’s school together, and Sara had been a pupil there when Margot was teaching deportment for room and board and nothing a year before she started her upward climb. The connection between them was neither close nor intimate. Cristie’s hands tightened in her lap. What had Sara Hazard said to Margot to make her look like that? Something disturbing, certainly.
Margot threw the ruined cigarette into the waste basket, got another from a box, lit it and said, without turning to Euen Firth, lolling in his corner with a highball, “Sara Hazard mentioned you on the phone just now, Euen. I didn’t know you were a friend of hers.”
A surge of relief, a dart of surprise, wonder; it was then that it began for Cristie, that baffling sense of distortion, of values superimposed on other values, the underlying ones quite different from those that showed on top.
Euen Firth blinked sandy lashes. His eyes were uneasy, furtive. “Sara Hazard…? Who the hell is Sara…?” His long, sallow, high-nosed face and dish-chin smoothed themselves out. “That’s right,” he said, “I remember now. Yes. I met a Mrs. Hazard at the Jettison’s on Long Island last winter.”
He got up and helped himself to a fistful of Scotch and very little vichy. His narrow-shouldered back was turned. He forgot to release the siphon on the bottle and the vichy squirted over the tray in a wide pool.
The other two didn’t notice, but Cristie did. Margot was looking at Johnny. It was a strange look, weighing, speculative. Cristie was conscious of a slight feeling of suffocation. Johnny didn’t meet Margot’s glance. He was gazing out at the terrace with its hedge of cedars in red terra-cotta pots against the broken frieze of the towers of New York and a mauve evening sky barred with long streaks of green.
There was a funny little pause. Nobody said anything. Then Johnny said with a yawn, “I don’t like that woman. I ran into her the other day with the Henleys. I don’t care how long it is before I see her again.”
Margot was crossing to her desk, a chromium and leather contraption with half a hundred drawers. She seated herself, took out a memorandum book and said over her shoulder, “Oh, but you will, Johnny, darling. You and Euen will both see her, shortly. She wasn’t coming to my party tonight. She’s changed her mind.” Her intonation was clipped, incisive.
Euen’s highball halted
