wouldn’t you think?”
“It might very easily,” I said, not having the faintest notion that anything had to be explained, or how that explained it.
“She’s running around now with Geoffrey McClure,” she went on. “He’s a ninety-second secretary at some legation. They say he’s a nice chap but has a definitely European view of marriage. Money first—love will follow.—What do you think of the new batch on the Hill? I think her husband’s a lamb.”
She nodded across the table at the new senator’s wife and went on from there, and Karen Lunt’s name dropped out.
It dropped out of my mind too, until I was coming back around six from a tea at the Belhaven Country Club on the other side of Alexandria. As I got to the light at the end of Washington Street it occurred to me that I might stop by and see Jeremy Candler, and find out how formal these little suppers in Karen’s transmogrified carriage house were. And it wasn’t very long before I was wishing very much that I’d had a flat tire instead.
Alexandria is a small place rather like Georgetown, except that it’s eight miles along the Potomac from Washington instead of just next door. Unlike most towns, it didn’t just grow. It was laid out at the end of the Rolling Road so the planters in the Northern Neck of Virginia would have a waterway to the sea and England for their tobacco, and a place where warehouses and wharves could be built. To make it completely urban, no man was allowed to buy more than two adjoining half-acre lots, at the original auction, and if he didn’t build a suitable dwelling or place of business within a given period his lots were resold. And where once ships came laden with stuffs and manufactured goods from the mother country, and went back with sweet tobacco and cotton and furs from a new young land, where the tax policy that led to the Revolution was first discussed and the Bill of Rights was written, where Washington had a town house and Robert E. Lee spent his childhood, is now a sleepy town of mellow Georgian brick and new white paint, inhabited mostly by people who work by day in the capital and come back by the Memorial Highway along the Potomac to another world.
There are still old Alexandrians, of course, in spite of the Foreign Legion, living in the houses their pre-Revolutionary ancestors lived in. Chatham Street, where the Candlers have an old Georgian house with hipped roof and dormer windows, belonged, all of it, to Judge Candler’s father. It’s just below Lee Street, overlooking the dingy factories and wharves along the Potomac. The house across the street, however, where Philander Doyle and his sister and his son now live, is the old Candler place. It was confiscated by the Northern troops during the Civil War, and when the Judge’s grandfather and father returned, it wasn’t, which is how the Candlers came to live in the less imposing house across the street, where Peyton Candler was born, and Sandy and Jerry and Billy. The two chestnut trees covered with wisteria were already there then, and the crape myrtles that made an arbor to the old carriage house where Karen lived. In fact very little must have changed since then, I thought as I went up the steps . . . not even the old darkey who opened the big green door and peered out through the gloom of the two old gas lamps burning in their wrought-iron standards at the corners of the iron handrail.
“Come in, Miz’ Latham. Set down in th’ parlor, Mis’ Jerry she in th’ liberry.—Ah reckon you two ladies knows each othah?”
Sitting in the crepuscular dimness of the Candler drawing room was a lady I didn’t recognize for a moment . . . she seemed, like the room, so of another period altogether. Not Georgian, however, but old Edwardian, with her black velvet hat and purple feather boa around her thin shoulders. Even then I could see she’d been lovely once . . . a sort of lass with a delicate air. She rose and held out her black-gloved hand.
“How do you do, Mrs. Latham?”
“Oh, Miss Doyle—I didn’t recognize you.”
“No, I’ve been ill.”
She pronounced the “been” as “bean.”
“But I’m quite recovered, now,” she said, with a kind of vague graciousness. “I’ve been sitting in this chair literally hours, waiting to see Judge Candler. He’s closeted with the young people. I’m afraid he hasn’t much time for an old woman, now he’s becoming so famous.”
She didn’t say it with the least rancour, but rather charmingly, as if she were more amused than put out.
“So I really must be going. I have several things to see to. Really, my dear, I wonder one ever gets as many things done as one does. My brother laughs at me—he says I’m just a potterer. Goodbye, my dear, remember you’re going to have tea with me one day soon. Goodbye! Make it real soon, won’t you? My dear brother was speaking of you just last night at dinner. He’d be charmed to see you!”
Miss Isabel Doyle went on out, and since Philander Doyle doesn’t know me from Adam, and Miss Isabel Doyle is known never to receive the people she asks to tea, I skipped that and sat down in the leather upholstered Chippendale chair she’d vacated. And I started—not violently, but definitely. That chair was cold as ice. Wherever Miss Doyle had been sitting, it was not there. And then—because I’m a natural-born busybody, I suppose—I found myself wondering why she’d bothered to say she’d been sitting in that chair literally for hours; wondering if, perhaps, it was just another patch out of the whole cloth of fantasy she always weaves.
I looked around the old room, lovely with age in spite of its dinginess. Its blue walls and white cornice and window trim and chair rail, carved but indistinct from a hundred coats of paint, and the horsehair carpet with its faded roses, all fitted so perfectly with the old furniture that generations of darkey hands had rubbed to a velvety satin patina. I doubted, some way, that Miss Doyle would have been just looking at any of this, or at the dark portraits on the wall. Then I heard the low confused murmur of voices through the closed door with the carved pineapple set in its broken pediment. It struck me instantly that that was where Miss Doyle had been: by that door, listening, deliberately, at the keyhole. That would account for the fib about the chair and her hasty departure under that barrage of nonsense about her dear brother.
I conquered an instant impulse to creep over to the door myself and find out, and it’s just as well I did; for at about the time I would have got there, and probably had my ear bent down to the polished brass keyhole, the door swung open, and Karen Lunt flashed out. She wasn’t in mink this time. She had on a simple black wool dress with enormous filigree silver buttons that set off her white skin and corn-colored hair as nothing else under heaven would have done. But it wasn’t the dress or the hair, or even what I’d heard at lunch, that brought me to a sharp focus. It was the look on her face, perhaps in the smile on her soft red mouth, perhaps in those two wide-set eyes, as blue as lakes and almost as big. Whatever it was, it was culminated perfectly in the quick little dance step she took toward the door, flicking her open palms together at the same time as if she were washing her hands, in the most complete and triumphant satisfaction, of a matter that was in the finished business basket. She hadn’t so much as seen me sitting between the two front windows in the high-backed leather chair, and I’m not small, nor is my gold wool number from Muriel King any more unobtrusive than Miss Doyle’s purple feather boa. Obviously Karen Lunt was so pleased with herself and whatever she’d accomplished behind the closed doors of Judge Candler’s study that she hadn’t eyes for anything else. Moreover, she hadn’t bothered to close the door behind her, entirely, and the next instant I heard Jeremy’s voice, throbbing passionately.
“I won’t, Dad—do you hear? I won’t! It’s blackmail, I tell you! It’s nothing else in the world!”
And Judge Candler’s voice, quiet and slow but oh so terribly firm:
“I’m disappointed in you, Jeremy. I never thought a child of mine would be selfish and
