going to take advantage of the situation and pretend that I’m escorting both of you tonight. Fair enough?”
I remember that the brunette smiled, but for the first time in my life I didn’t pay much attention to a brunette. I was looking at the blonde. She was neither a bright and glittering blonde nor a grubby imitation one. She was a girl with fluffy, curly, very attractive gold-colored hair. I mean that literally. If you’re not too young, you’ve got a token gold piece around the house somewhere and remembering it, you will know at once the color of Anne Cramer’s hair.
She told me her name almost at once. I suspect that she wanted to impress me at the very start—make sure that I wouldn’t for a minute misconstrue her purpose in being here. Everyone in the township knew the name of Cramer. It might ring a bell with you, too, if you heard the full title that her father wore with distinction. Brigadier-General Gunther Cramer.
To a former second lieutenant of infantry it was pretty impressive.
I got my breath back and said, “I’ll bet you played in this house as a kid. I mean—the Prescotts and the Cramers and the—” for a minute I couldn’t think of any of the other old and impressive family names. In my boyhood there had been room only for a villain and a hero. Prescott had been the villain, but time and the clay pits had taken care of him. Now here was the hero’s daughter.
She laughed and said, “Yes,” and gave me an odd, straightforward look. “I played here as a child with Sue Prescott and when I came home yesterday and heard that the old mansion was now a—”
“Ginmill?” I said softly.
“Exactly,” she said in her soft, grave voice. She looked at me very steadily and I thought that she was going to ask me how I could have done such a thing, as though it were some kind of desecration. But she didn’t ask anything. She sat looking at me as though an explanation from me would be her natural right.
I didn’t hurry to answer. I saw her jaw was broad and firm. Her skin was very good, creamy and tight-textured. Her clear, appraising eyes hinted at a secret boldness. I thought the traditional thing—spoiled, rich brat. But then I knew that I was using the worn-out thoughts of other people, not my own, and tried to reassess her and fit a new thought to that face.
Before I could get anywhere with the idea she was after me with words.
“How did you happen to do this?” she said. “This isn’t a cocktail lounge, this is a replica of the old barroom down on the flats. I remember my father telling about it. It was a grim and terrible place.”
I looked around the room. I inhaled my cigar slowly and came back to her. “It isn’t grim or terrible here, is it? The same bar, the same fixtures, the same sort of tables and caned chairs. Even the kerosene lamps along the wall came from down on the flats. But the sheriff has never been here, the ambulance has never backed up outside that door. It must be true that God made two kinds of people—the rich are better-mannered. When we get the others, they behave.”
There was amusement away back in her eyes.
“When I heard that a man named Jason Broome was running River House, I tried to place the name. The last name. I could understand about the Jason. For generations, the oldest male Prescott was always named Jason. That suggested that your father might have worked for Jason Prescott.”
“He was a straw boss in the brickyards when I was a kid. He died the week after the yards closed down.”
“And in your mind,” she said, “that took on some twisted significance. You blamed Jason Prescott for your father’s death. And turning the Prescott mansion into a roadhouse was your idea of a subtle revenge.”
I could look at her and not mind. I could laugh at her. I had her then, caught and trapped by her own words.
I said, “Prescott didn’t close the yards down for the sake of a whim. He ran out of clay. No clay, no brick. And my father died of pneumonia, caught duck-hunting out of season. It had nothing to do with a broken heart and the loss of a job after a lifetime given to it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then why this hatred? Why this flaunting in the face? Why bring a fine old house and fine old memories to such an end?”
I let the laughter in me show, and if she wished to read the mockery also, why, that was there too.
“An ex-bootlegger by name of Gallagher bought the place at a tax sale, fixed it up and got a license. I was in the army at the time and the last thought I had in mind was running a roadhouse in the Hudson Valley. Now, may I bring you something from the bar?”
She said, “Scotch and soda. Eloise, too.” I remembered that she had not presented me to the brunette. She thought of it at the same time and said, “I’m sorry. I was too taken up with history. Eloise, this is Jason Broome, our host. Eloise Ruysdale, Mr. Broome.”
I said, “How do you do?” I thought that if I had any sense I would pay some attention to Eloise Ruysdale. She was a brunette and I had always liked the dark ones. But I found it difficult in the presence of Anne Cramer—only she came through at the moment.
I came back from the bar with the three glasses. I know that it is poor practice to drink with the customer—I haven’t the paunch for it and I don’t really like the stuff. But I knew an occasion, and this was one.
Anne Cramer said, “It was nice of you not to have us thrown out. I’ve only just come in from the Coast. They aren’t so particular in some of the cocktail lounges out there.”
I smiled and said, “There are places along the side streets down in Newburyport where they aren’t so particular, either. Every so often someone writes a piece about it for a newspaper or magazine and a license gets revoked. I try to be a practical businessman.”
“You seem to have been very practical, Mr. Broome. But I have the feeling that Eloise and I are keeping you from your work.” Anne Cramer stood up and, of course, I stood up too. I had a really good look at her then, full length. She was as tall as I—it was difficult to tell much else about her except that she was not obviously misshapen. There are so many ways to improve on nature today that a man is a fool to take all he sees as evidence of perfection.
But she was wearing a summer evening gown and a summer fur and the rest seemed to be all her own. I liked what I saw and was trying to think how I could prolong this meeting or at least get some assurance that there would be another, when she spoke.
She said, “It has been an interesting evening—I’m really sorry about an engagement made earlier. I’d like to know more about how you have changed the Prescott mansion into River House.”
I said, “Tomorrow?”
She said, “Tomorrow, then.”
There was a considerable crowd in the room. We worked our way to the door. I was wondering whether to go as far as her car with them, across the blue gravel. But she gave me her hand, briefly, and with no hidden pressure that I could detect.
There had to be the rest of the evening, but I moved through it without conscious reflexes. There were suddenly things that needed thinking about.
It is easy, now, with hindsight, to know what I should have done. But at the moment no one on earth could have persuaded me to go down and jump in the river and not hold my breath. No one told me about the clay pit, for of course no one had thought of the clay pit in years.
