her, the expression on his face inexplicable to me. I did know that it wasn’t inexplicable to her. Whether it was a challenge or an accusation, I couldn’t tell; something, certainly, that it shouldn’t have been, probably would not have been if Rick hadn’t been drinking far more than was good for him or anybody, not only that day but for many many days before.
I saw Cheryl’s slim bare back stiffen defensively, and the color deepen slowly in her high exquisitely modeled cheeks. If she could have spoken before, she couldn’t possibly now. Nor could Dan. If you dissect the loveliest butterfly it’s a mess; the most delicate and complex frost pattern on a window is a drop of dirty water in your hand. How could either of them tell any of these people that they’d sat up all night in front of a tiny cathedral on a little hill in a plain in France, and that the patron of a village bistro that had oleanders blooming at the door had brought them chocolate and croissants at half-past four in the morning, because they were amusing young Americans who had declined his own room . . . when everything would have been so entirely discreet?—I could see him shrugging his shoulders—“Ah, les Americains!”—and raising his fat peasant hands.
Or how could either of them say that they’d shaken hands and said good-bye, and waved good-bye again, Cheryl from her rattletrap French car on the sunny plain, Dan from the fence by the door of the little cathedral on the hill, not knowing each other’s name, not knowing, yet, that that simple starry night had so changed both their lives? They couldn’t have told it. No one in that room would have believed it if they had. No one but Mara, and Mara could believe anything. She still believed that Alan Keane was an innocent man, and he had served thirteen months in a Federal prison because no one else believed it.
Irene’s perfect genius of tact in just such moments is a byword in Washington, in Aiken and Newport, anywhere, in fact, on the Eastern seaboard where there are tables like the one we were at and where it’s so easy, these days, to mix inadvertently new deals and old, both foreign and domestic. But Irene, still with that fixed sweet smile of inquiry on her lovely face, was obviously smoothing no paths for her daughter-in-law.
And that increased and deadening silence lengthened almost unbearably, until the auburn-haired girl by my side did her best by putting in—and I don’t think she meant it in the least to sound as bad as Mara Winthrop’s quick retort made it sound—“I’m sure it was quite all right!”
“Has anybody suggested there was anything not all right?” Mara demanded instantly, with positively devastating smoothness. “—And as Mother was saying before Dan went native on us, this is Miss Lane, Dan—Natalie to you—and this is Grace Latham, Cheryl and Natalie . . . for her sins a friend and relative. And now that that’s over, Mother, couldn’t we eat? Grace and Dan must be starved.”
“Oh, of course they must!” Irene cried charmingly, and I thought she gave her daughter a not entirely ungrudging glance of admiration for her rather heavy-handed but effective putting things in place. She drew Dan down in the chair beside her, and I took the one between Natalie Lane and Major Tillyard. I looked at Mara again. Her pointed little face under its cloud of dark hair was perfectly expressionless except for the droop at the corners of her wide unrouged mouth. Was her defense of Cheryl, I wondered, because she liked her—or because she didn’t like Natalie Lane? Or did it spring from something deeper than that, some passionate sense of justice that her own moody little soul had invented, and made a cross for all her family to bear? She’d always, I knew, been a sharp thorn in her mother’s side, from the day Irene first discovered she had a changeling in the cradle and that all the pretty frilly things made for baby girls made Mara look rather like an Armenian refugee, and act worse. When the boys were brought in and proudly exhibited, little Mara was always left in the nursery. I could still hear Irene’s gay careless voice: “Mara? Oh my dear, she’s quite unpresentable . . . such an odd little creature . . . but I’m sure she’ll be awfully interesting when she grows up!”
I looked again at the small pointed face and great somber eyes reflected under the flowers in the candle-lit Empire plateau. There might be something in it, I thought, but next to the lovely golden oval of the face of the girl sitting next to her, her long lashes brushing her flushed cheek, it didn’t seem very like it.
I glanced down the table at Rick Winthrop, as big as Dan and with the same blond hair, with broad square shoulders that looked even broader in his perfectly tailored white dinner jacket. He’d always been far handsomer than Dan, I realized with a kind of minor shock that he wasn’t now. The thing in Dan’s face that made him so attractive and engaging wasn’t visible in Rick’s; his cheeks were heavy, his dark eyes brooding and sullen and the flesh around them puffy, his full mouth sagged at the corners. The contours that had made him so much better looking than Dan were coarsened and blurred. He had wasted what nature had given him, and wasted it in a short time, I thought. Three years before, when I’d seen the most of him, he hadn’t gone quite so much to the fleshpots. I glanced back at Cheryl, wondering vaguely what could have happened to him. He hadn’t, obviously, gone completely off, or he’d never have married this girl. Heaven knows there was nothing of the fleshpots about her. She was more like a willow branch tipped with gold in the spring than like the glamour girls one heard vaguely that Rick trained with around 52nd Street. I found myself wondering how it could have happened, this marriage, and what they were thinking now, the two of them, their eyes fixed steadily throughout dinner on the delicate juicy soft crab and water cress, the tender broiled chicken and young asparagus and spiced sweet potato balls, and the tipsy squire pudding that had been a specialty at Romney when General Washington dined there, that old Yarborough’s white-gloved hands successively placed in front of them and removed barely touched. Through it all Irene’s light chatter rippled, like threaded rose and silver through a dark woof, or sunflecked froth on a portentous sea.
4
When Yarborough had brought coffee and closed the pantry doors, Irene put her bare elbows on the polished table and leaned forward, her smooth chin resting on the back of her clasped jeweled fingers. A hush fell over the table, and in the mirror of the Empire plateau I saw the corners of Mara Winthrop’s mouth droop and the sides of her nostrils as sensitive as harp strings quiver, and her whole dark little body grow suddenly perfectly still. She had been waiting for this. So had all the rest of them—even the girl next to her. I looked at her, and our eyes met for the first time, just as Irene said, in her most charming voice:
“Grace dear, you must tell us everything you’ve been doing, you look too fit, really you do! What have you been up to? And Dan, I know you’re simply dying to talk Paris! How was the trip over? Was it awful?”
A quick smile flickered for an instant behind Cheryl Winthrop’s long gold-tipped lashes and was gone, as Irene, without waiting for Dan to speak—and heaven knows he looked less like a man dying to talk Paris than anyone I’d ever seen—went rippling along.
“I did want all of you together tonight! Because Sidney—” she held out one lovely hand to the man at her side—“Sidney has finally persuaded me there’s no use of our waiting any longer. We’re going to get married!”
She paused brightly and looked around. Good seeds, I’m afraid, never fell on thornier ground. That they had all known it for several weeks didn’t seem entirely to account for it. Even Natalie Lane, who tried to look pleased and interested, didn’t succeed particularly well. Irene, if she noticed it, didn’t mind, and neither, apparently, did Major Tillyard. He looked affectionately pleased, and really quite nice.
“Of course, the real point is that this is a sort of . . . well, a sort of council of war,” Irene said.
Dan’s eyes caught mine. I looked away quickly, and across at Mara, staring with unseeing eyes into the bottom of her green Worcester coffee cup.
“You see,” Irene said—she looked earnestly about at her small
