breakfasting with him at Florian’s . . . wild strawberries and hot chocolate, the wintry shadow of the campanile flung across the hot glare of St. Mark’s Square, and the fuzzy-legged German trampers thumbing their Baedekers . . . Betsy posing for snapshots in front of the candy-cane columns of the Doges’ palace, looking as dainty as a Dresden shepherdess in a stiff white piqué dress with a blue-and-white polka-dot sash . . . Betsy on the marble floor of Chez Vous, the candlelighted sunken garden night club on the Lido, dipping and wheeling to the music of the Argentine tango orchestra playing Adios Muachos, Plegaria, and Mama, Yo Quiero Un Novio . . . Betsy curled against him beneath the canopy of the gondola tied to the music barge in the Grand Canal, guitars and throaty singing . . . and Betsy lying in flushed, tender sleep under the mosquito netting while the fan whirred on the ceiling. . . .
Stanton never realized—it would have shocked him to realize—that by only remembering her as his bride he completely insulted her as his wife.
“Why, Stan, it’s wonderful. That’s a wonderful theme.” Betsy still had the violet eyes and the black lashes. But she looked down and turned her face aside when he kissed her, and her hands in the rustling sleeves of her dressing gown merely brushed his shoulders. When he put his arms around her she stiffened and backed away.
“Who were you talking to?” he asked.
“Talking to? Oh, just now—on the phone? Is that what you mean? That was . . . uh . . . Mrs. Hazen, about the Red Cross Drive. Come on, Stan—breakfast’s on the table, getting cold.”
“Do you really think it’s good?”
“Good? Good? What—?”
“My speech. The idea, theme——”
“Oh.” There was relief in her voice. “A marvelous idea, Stanton, really wonderful. I’m so glad you finally have it straightened out. You’ve been worrying over it all week, haven’t you?”
“I’ve had it on my mind,” he admitted. He was a little disappointed that she had nothing definite or positive to say about the speech; he wasn’t looking for easy words like “wonderful” and “marvelous,” but for something indicative of critical interest. Besides, she seemed abstracted by something, an abstraction which he had detected more and more often in the last few months, baffling and inexplicable. His mood of elation dwindled; probably it wasn’t any good after all, and Betsy was just trying to be nice.
“It’s the first speech I’ve tried to make since prep school,” he said. “I wish you——”
“You haven’t made it yet, Stan,” Betsy interrupted. “Come on, let’s have breakfast, shall we?”
She lightly slipped an arm through his and let a slender hand rest lightly on his wrist while she guided him toward the breakfast room.
It was silly to buy a house, Stanton reflected, only because you wanted a single room, yet the breakfast room was the reason Betsy had settled on the place. The original builders had located it on the summit of a long, low hill which stretched in a compass-true line from east to west, and along the entire southern exposure of the house they had installed a brick terrace with colonnades up to the second floor, which projected over the terrace. This arrangement had endured with only minor alterations until Betsy snapped her fingers and decided on the breakfast room. The colonnades were removed, although the contractor swore that without them the house would collapse in the first strong wind. The old bricks in the terrace were taken up and used to extend the side walls out to the line of the projecting second story. After some Herculean engineering, huge plate-glass windows which stretched from floor to ceiling were installed across the whole exposure. These could be raised or lowered at the touch of a button, and would disappear completely into the floor—a spectacular feature which had involved an awe-inspiring expenditure.
Betsy had decorated the room in stark white from end to end. The walls were whitewashed, and the floor was covered with a white fur rug made up of dozens of squares of goat hides which Betsy had imported from Mexico. The breakfast furniture was white wrought iron, and she even had found a white sideboard. In fact, the only relief from white was the vines spilling from the flowerpots hung every few feet along the back wall—these, and a pair of Marie Laurencin pastels in white frames. Stanton never cared for the room; it always made him feel as though he were having breakfast on a movie set, and aesthetically it displeased him because it was so out of keeping with the rest of the house. But Betsy wanted it that way, and that was that.
Otherwise, the house was comfortable and unpretentious—even modest, for Fairfield County. It was the kind of house which would be appropriate for a fairly minor advertising account executive, say, during the interim period of his career before he hit the really big money and moved on to a shore-front estate with stables and a private dock.
This was precisely what the former owner had done. Stanton occasionally ran into him at the country club, and never ceased marveling at the way the world rewarded a man for fanatic loyalty to things in which he didn’t believe. At least, Stanton didn’t see how it was possible for the man—who was reasonably intelligent—really to believe that his agency’s particular brands of tooth paste, breakfast food, and whatnot were any better than any others, yet he had heard him fervently proclaiming in the country club bar that Popsies (his breakfast-food account) was virtually the salvation of America’s children. But then, Stanton reflected, it was natural enough, because Popsies had put him on top of the ladder.
The man—his name happened to be Smith—was the first person in the whole evolution of the human race to realize that the basic thing about breakfast food (“basic” was Smith’s favorite word) was not flavor or nutritional value, but the amount of noise it made in a bowl of milk. Smith not only had had the luminous inspiration of advertising Popsies for sound instead of substance, but had developed a special microphone technique so that the actual sound of Popsies popping in milk could be broadcast as the theme introduction to the Popsies Parade radio program. Surely genius of this order deserved at least a fifty-foot oceangoing yacht, the shore estate, and a four-year psychoanalysis. Which Smith had.
As he entered the breakfast room Stanton perceived that Smith’s trail crossed his own glass-topped table, with the geraniums blooming in the pots attached to the white wrought-iron legs. Popsies were popping in the bowl in front of Jeremy, his son, named for an uncle of Betsy’s who conceivably might leave something. Jeremy was wearing Brooks Brothers suits to school. He had something of Betsy’s hair and eyes and more than a little of her manner.
“Hello, Dad,” said Jeremy. “There’s another story about you in the paper this morning.”
The white wrought-iron chairs with the white leather cushions were not designed for anyone of Stanton’s dimensions, and he settled himself with difficulty into one of them.
“Morning, Jerry. What are they saying about me this time?”
He glanced at the folded copy of the Westport Herald lying beside his plate, and saw the headline: WESTPORT MAN TO RECEIVE COVETED ARCHITECTURAL AWARD; WILL ADDRESS CHICAGO GROUP. He read the story perfunctorily: “Mr. Stanton Wylie, of Crestview Road, Westport, departs this afternoon for Chicago, where he will attend the annual banquet of the American Association of Architects and Industrial Designers, to be held tomorrow night at the Hotel Stevens. The banquet will be marked by the formal presentation of the Association’s 1947 annual award for the most distinguished contribution to American architecture. Considered the most coveted prize in the profession, the award this year went to Mr. Wylie for his plan and model of ‘the ideal American city,’ which was four years in preparation. Mr. Wylie, still in his thirties, is the youngest architect to receive the award since it was first established in 1910, and in an unprecedented decision, the Association’s
