taxi skidded around the corner and to the curb in front of Abigail Whitney’s house. I caught my breath and got out. The house wasn’t pink. In the icy rain, it was the color of raspberry sherbet, and the soot had left black streaks hanging from the window ledges. I rang the doorbell and noticed I wasn’t alone on the step. A squirrel sat there, old and wet, twitching his moth-eaten tail impatiently, looking up at the door. It didn’t seem extraordinary to be standing there with him, and I wasn’t surprised when the butler, as old and in a coat as moth-eaten, took a walnut out of his pocket and gave it to him before he gave me a childlike, vacant smile and picked up my bag.
“Mrs. Latham? Madam is in her room.” His voice had the remote quality of the very deaf.
I followed him inside. The house was very handsome and surprisingly modern—more surprisingly so, in fact, than I then realized. There were mirrored panels in the soft beige walls. We went up a marble staircase curving gracefully to a wide foyer on the second floor. On the side wall were two more large mirrored panels, and in the space between them a decorative recess with a carved shell ceiling. A paneled library stretched across the back. The door to the room at the front stood open, and the voices coming from it, and not sounding very amicable, stopped abruptly as we came up.
“Madam’s room,” the butler said.
If the squirrel didn’t surprise me, Abigail Whitney did. It hadn’t occurred to me, when she’d said she did not now leave the house, that it was anything but another of the vagaries she was famous for, but in the wide room overlooking the square she sat propped up in yellow satin cushions against the yellow satin-upholstered back of an Empire swan-sleigh bed. There was a green satin cover over the blanket, and otherwise nothing of the bedroom apparent around her. The room was a drawing room, elegantly furnished, but crowded, as if she’d brought as much as possible out of her glamorous past to be there with her.
The windows by the bed bowed slightly, so that she had a full view of the square, and I saw that she had more than that. Outside were two mirrors. One was an old Philadelphia custom I’d heard of but never seen. It was placed so that the ladies of a day when they were less mobile and more ladylike could see who was at the door in the street. The other was fixed at an angle that showed the brownstone front next door. Bed or no bed, Abigail Whitney could keep track not only of her own entrance but her brother’s too.
“Oh, Dear Child,” she said as she held out her hand to me.
I was aware there were other people in the room, but it was the pair of blank blue eyes in the saffron face of the old woman that focused my attention. They were blank and vague, but they sharpened with surprising intentness as she took me in from head to foot, and without a glimmer of remembrance or recognition.
“Dear Child,” she repeated. “You haven’t changed at All. I’m so Happy to see you Again.”
I wouldn’t have remembered her either. There was no trace of the extraordinary beauty she’d had once. She had on a black padded silk coat with an enormous burst of diamonds in the white ruching at her neck. Her nose was sharp as a hawk’s and her hair was a preposterous dye job of brilliant henna in a short fuzz all over her head.
Abigail Whitney’s feud with her brother didn’t, it seemed, extend to his family.
“You remember my Brother’s children, dear Child,” she said. She emphasized words the way she capitalized them when she wrote. “Elsie, and Monk, and Elsie’s husband, Sam. No, not Sam. No one remembers Sam, because no one knew him. Sam is Respectable. . . . Come, dear Boy, I want you to meet Mrs. Latham. . . . This is Sam Phelps, dear Child.”
Respectable was the word, I thought as Sam same forward. He was very bald, with a waxed mustache, pince-nez in his hand, a high wing collar, a black coat and knife-edge-pressed, gray-striped trousers. He was forty, I imagined, and looked as if he had all the prejudices he would ever need.
We spoke to each other. There was nothing cordial about Sam, but there wasn’t about any of the others. Philadelphians, a famous Philadelphian once said, are taller and fairer than the Chinese but not so progressive, and, he might have added, not so warmly effusive as the English. In this instance, however, looking around at the three others nodding stiffly to me, I wasn’t surprised, for they’d obviously been in the course of a first-class family row.
“And Travis, dear Child. You remember Travis Elliot.”
The son of Mrs. Whitney’s old friend who had taken his own life seemed much more at home than Sam Phelps did, and furthermore, I thought, he did not look as if it would take any particular gratitude to make a girl delighted to marry him. He was tall and attractive and about thirty-five, and looked definitely what Mrs. Whitney had said he was, a successful young Philadelphia lawyer. I looked at Judge Whitney’s son Monk with more interest. He was at least old enough to be a major in the Marine Corps, and from the double row of ribbons, two of them star-sprinkled, over the pocket of his tunic, he had seen action in places far remote from Rittenhouse Square. His face was broad, rugged, tough and weather-beaten, and so sun-bronzed that his gray eyes looked very light. He had shaggy eyebrows and a big, generous mouth, and what was left of his hair after a G.I. haircut was dark and crisp.
I wondered whether he’d really been wild or just headstrong. He looked disciplined enough now, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven or eight, and people don’t get to be majors in the Marine Corps—out there—without something.
After he’d spoken to me, Sam Phelps went abruptly to the side of the bed. “We must be going, I’m afraid. Mustn’t tire you.”
“Good-by, dear Boy,” Abigail Whitney said, hastily and with considerable relief, I thought. “Good-by, Elsie.” She turned to me. “Do sit down, my dear. What is that you have in your hand?”
I wasn’t aware at all that I was still holding Myron Kane’s fan mail.
“It’s just a letter for Myron Kane,” I said. “A little man named Toplady gave it to me in the taxi.”
I thought even then there was a short silence in the room.
Mrs. Whitney spoke quickly, “Wasn’t that a book? Toplady on a Totem Pole? . . . Travis, where is Elsie’s coat? She has a Meeting.”
Elsie Phelps spoke sharply. “I’m not leaving this house, Aunt Abby—not until you’ve told us what’s in that profile of father. You know what’s in it. We want to know too.”
I’d already got the impression that Elsie Whitney Phelps was the focal point of the seething disturbance in the room. It seemed to me a fine instance of natural selection that she was Sam’s wife. She was thirty, probably, sandy-haired, with rather pale blue eyes, and not unattractive, in a green tweed suit and hat that she’d had a long time and would continue to have till she gave them to some extraordinary deserving and respectable indigent. There was a simple conviction of superiority about her that was not complacent at all, but just the natural consequence of having been born in Philadelphia, a Whitney, endowed at birth with the knowledge of right and wrong and no sense of humor.
Mrs. Whitney held out her hand to me. “Elsie’s a Tiresome Woman, Dear Child,” she said. “You have no interest in this——”
Elsie Phelps cast me an angry glance. “She’s a friend of Myron Kane’s, isn’t she? I’ll tell you what’s happened, Aunt Abby. You’ve been sitting up here for years trying to make trouble for father, and now it’s backfired.”
Her husband and her brother both started to speak, and she turned on them hotly. “If you had any pride you’d do something, Monk Whitney!”
