buy the things he liked and that were attractive to him and to other men, but since the tragedy she had had no desire to attract any man, and so bought her clothes only with an eye to what was currently fashionable. She frowned and pivoted before the mirror and for the first time realized that the cocktail gown she was wearing, though simple, was indeed cut so well and fitted her so perfectly that it revealed every line and curve of a very good figure. She was annoyed and thought of changing to something else, but there wasn’t time. As she walked away from the mirror, though, she looked back once and the ghost of a smile appeared in her dark eyes.
She passed the darkened living room, which was rarely used because of its size, and went on to the softly lighted study to arrange the vases of flowers a florist had delivered that afternoon. The study was a large, outsized room that had once been the formal dining room. It was long and narrow, with a massive wall of plate glass at one end that looked north over the necklace lights of the Golden Gate Bridge. A fairly large bar, complete with sink and hidden refrigerator, had been built into one wall and elaborately stocked. There was also a large desk in a corner, book shelves, a tall, glass-faced cabinet for filing purposes and a grouping of chairs that had come from the original library. Otherwise the room looked not at all like a study and was decorated and furnished as a living room.
The upstairs, where the master bedrooms and guest rooms were located, had been left intact, but since the deaths of her parents and her subsequent marriage to Jay Wilson, Irene had made a number of changes on the main floor. Thomas Tinsley, Irene’s father, a man who had enjoyed living in the grand manner, had built the house for large-scale entertainment as well as for gracious living. The kitchen wing, in fact, was equipped to handle anything from a pair of boiled eggs to a banquet for two hundred. During his life it had often been pressed to its utmost capacity and beyond.
Irene sighed as she thought of how those days had been. She had been an only child and had arrived late in the lives of her parents, so that she knew them only as middleaged and then as elderly people. It was almost as if she had been raised by her grandparents. She had been a spoiled, arrogant, domineering child. She had been shielded so carefully that she was almost in her teens before she realized there were other people in the world who did not sit down to a formal dinner with fifty or sixty guests at least once a week.
Her world was the world of wealth and fashion and the great people who wined and dined at the Tinsley mansion. Opera stars and senators and state governors occupied the guest rooms. There were winter weeks at Palm Springs and golf events at Pebble Beach and every summer quick flights to Europe and leisurely returns on the plush liners. It came to an end in 1941 when the Tinsley yacht went off course in a heavy Pacific fog, struck a reef and went down off Point Sur. Irene’s parents were lost, along with her father’s partner, Jeb Wilson, and Wilson’s wife. The following year Irene married Jay, the younger of the two Wilson sons, and for the first time in her life had to cope with reality.
Now she bit her lower lip and walked over to the windows to look out at the lights of the great bridge. She had failed, she knew; it was not Jay who had failed. He had tried to understand her unreasonable demands and her snobbish arrogance and he had tried to exercise patience with her, but he had been young, too, and his tolerance was limited. In the end, he had begun drinking heavily and staying out late at night and then rowing with Irene every following morning. If Jay had not been killed that summer they would have been divorced anyway, before the year ended.
She heard the door chimes, but knew that Carl would be on hand and remained where she was. When Frank and Glenna Wilson entered they had to walk the full length of the room to be greeted by Irene. Glenna’s amber-green eyes narrowed and the hatred that was never far from the surface danced into view. She was positive that Irene had deliberately made them walk that far. But she touched a cheek to Irene’s, forced a smile and stepped aside as Irene shook hands with Frank.
They were an oddly matched couple. Frank had just reached his fiftieth year and looked it. The fringe of hair around his bald head was white, his big frame had become heavy with flesh, his large nose and cheeks were mottled with blue veins and the constant flush of his face was caused by high blood pressure. He had once dressed as gaily as had his much younger brother, Jay, but he had become extremely conservative, and even dowdy, with the passing years. One glance at him and anyone knew instinctively his position in life, president of a bank, chairman of the board and long-time member of the Stock Exchange.
Glenna Wilson was forty-eight, and she looked almost young enough to be her husband’s daughter. She was the envy and despair of all her friends and the constant amorous target of their middle-aged husbands. Her waist was still twenty-two inches, her breasts were firm and high, her hips were slim and her legs were as gracefully curved as they had ever been. Men half her age turned to smile at her on the street and tried to pick her up in cocktail lounges. Yet, except for a light henna rinse applied to her dark blonde hair—that was always worn in a full page boy—and carefully applied make-up, Glenna did absolutely nothing to keep her figure trim, her eyes clear and her skin smooth. She ate and drank whatever she pleased, she lived as hard as she pleased and she simply did not age. She was not, however, a contented woman. Her twenty-year-old daughter, Sue, was running with a fast, Bohemian crowd and Tommy, her twenty-four-year-old son, was about to make her a grandmother. But the main source of her discontent was the rapid aging of her husband and their friends. She still felt as young as she looked and she hated being constantly in the company of what she had begun referring to as “the old crowd.”
Perhaps because they disliked each other so intensely, Irene was always aware of her sister-in-law’s attitudes and so knew more about her than anyone else. She was the only one in the family who seemed to realize that it would not take much for Glenna to walk out on her husband and children and take off for Reno. She also knew that when and if it happened she, too, would be partially responsible, though innocently so.
Irene asked Frank to act as host, so he moved heavily to the bar as other guests began to arrive. The party was small, comprising only a dozen couples, and represented the social residue of the chipping away and wearing down of ten years. Most of Irene’s friends had deserted her immediately after the tragedy. Others she had cut adrift herself when she realized that the loyalty of so many of them was based on the color of the Tinsley-Wilson millions. There were also large social groupings in the city wherein Irene was no longer welcome or acceptable. The people at the party were those who believed in Irene’s innocence and, if they did not, kept it to themselves and liked her, anyway.
Irene gave her cocktail parties every other Friday night. The pattern was so well established that no one was any longer invited. They simply arrived at the proper time. The parties were never very gay and they never lasted more than a few hours. A few drinks, some hors d’oeuvres, a little chatter and the guests began drifting away to late dinners and other, more lively affairs.
This Friday night, however, was enlivened by the introduction of Morgan O’Keefe’s name. Irene was standing by the fireplace, talking over business of the bank with Frank, when Nicky and Tina van Ostrand wandered over to join them. Irene smiled at her two closest friends, relieved to break off the boring conversation with Frank. Nicky was tall, slim, blond and handsome and at one time had been the target of most of the city’s debutantes. It was still a surprise to everyone, even after eleven years, that he had married Tina. She was small, she was chubby, her lipstick was always the wrong shade, the best hairdressers could never do anything with her mouse-brown hair, and she made expensive gowns look like cheap hand-me-downs. Tina, however, was more of a woman than any woman had a right to be, a fact of which Nicky was happily aware. She had a vast love for humanity that encompassed almost everyone, she adored her husband and children and she had a talent for savoring every moment of living that was sheer genius. She would not have traded places with any woman in the world and Nicky, though he still had a roving eye and occasionally had to be reminded where the home pasture was located, felt exactly the same way. They were the only two people with whom Irene had absolutely no reservations.
Nicky sipped at his highball, winked at her and said,
