I’m not going to let Rusty disrupt my whole life.”
I started to say, “Then why don’t you go to Reno again?” but I didn’t.
All the airy gaiety had gone out of her face. The grim determination of a gal who’d always had her own way had hardened in it.
“Let’s skip it, shall we?”
She glanced at me, trying to recapture the earlier mood. I nodded.
“Okay. Let’s go back to Strawberry Hill,” I said. “Where do I come in the picture? That’s what I can’t make out.”
“It’s very simple. More than that, it’s a natural, really. You will do it, won’t you?”
“It depends,” I said. It wouldn’t be the first scheme of Phyllis Lattimer’s that I’d been uneasy about, nor would it be the only one I’d walked out on.
“I mean, Diane, it isn’t just that you’ll be doing me a favor. It’ll be an act of kindness to everybody. It really will. Wait till you see Jennifer and Colleton. You’ll see exactly what I mean. And their mother too. It’s a rotten shame—they really need the money.”
I looked at her. It doesn’t do to be too cold-blooded about one’s friends, but I couldn’t help it here.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” she said, with a shrug. “I admit I want the furniture. And if I don’t get it before old Miss Caroline dies, I’ll never get it. Because Jennifer will get it—every stick of it. That’s why she guards the old woman like a watch dog.—And I want it, I tell you.”
“Which obviously settles it,” I said.
“It does as far as I’m concerned,” she retorted curtly.
“Then why don’t you go to Miss Caroline and explain it to her? She seems to be a rugged individualist too. She might understand you perfectly.”
“Because she doesn’t receive visitors, that’s why,” she answered, still more curtly. “That’s the only reason in the world I don’t. I’ve tried a thousand times. She doesn’t allow anybody but about three blue-blooded octogenarian cousins from below Broad Street in the presence.”
“What about Jennifer and Colleton and their mother?”
“They’d sell in a minute—Colleton and his mother, not Jennifer. She knows the old lady will die pretty soon, and she’s in on the ground floor. I’m sure she’s the stumbling block in the whole thing.”
“Have you tried working on them?”
“—Have I.”
She fished in her tweed jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette.
“If I could only see old Miss Caroline,” she said slowly. “That’s all I need.—That’s what I want you for.”
I gasped at that. “Me?”
She nodded. “I just found out yesterday from Colleton’s mother, and rushed out and wired you. You can do it—on two counts.”
“You’ve got a touch of fever already, darling,” I said patiently. “But do go on.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the empty verandah. The brilliant afternoon sun going down beyond the Battery stencilled a moving arabesque of long palmetto leaves on the white columns and filtered across the closed door with its great polished brass knocker. She put her feet up on the gleaming balustrade again and leaned her head nearer my chair.
“Old Miss Caroline visited your grandmother two winters in Philadelphia, in the Eighties. She was introduced to society with her, and they were presented at the Monday Germans in Baltimore together. Her mother had known your great-grandfather before the War—that’s the Civil War, down here, you know. There’s some connection there that explains why Strawberry Hill wasn’t burned when Darien was, during the march to the sea. I haven’t got it quite clear, but that’s it. Anyway, the point is—she’ll receive you.”
“Oh,” I said . . . rather stiffly.
Phyllis wouldn’t notice that. She went blandly and blindly on.
“But wait. That’s not all.”
She took her feet down again and leaned forward, her pointed chin cupped in her brown palm.
“Miss Caroline, like everybody else down here, has written her memoirs . . . and also like everybody else, thinks that if she could find an honest publisher, she’d make a fortune. I heard Jennifer talking to a man about them the other day. And that’s where both you and I come in.”
I looked at her. There was a shrewd concentrated intentness in her face that was new to me, well as I knew her. I was a little angry, but I was interested. I couldn’t help being. I knew of course that Phyllis could read; I never had known that she cared enough about people generally to know that they liked to write.
“Your brother is a publisher. I’ll pay for a ghost to sort out the memoirs and have them published . . . as de luxe as hell. She’ll love it.”
A sardonic little smile crossed her eyes. “The rest will be pie. You know about people being motivated by vanity and cupidity. This is Miss Caroline’s vanity against Mrs. Reid’s cupidity. It’s very simple.”
“I’d skip it, Phyllis,” I said.
She shook her head.
I shook mine.
“It stinks,” I said coarsely.
She settled back in her chair, her brown face a little pale, her dark eyes smoldering.
“I always thought you were the one person in the world I could count on, Diane,” she said. Her foot at the end of her crossed jodhpurred leg beat a tattoo on the white fat-bellied balustrade stretchers, the way an angry cat’s tail moves against a chair leg.
“Be your age, Phyllis,” I retorted, rather angry too. “It’s just not the sort of thing people do.”
We sat in silence—not, I may say, a particularly comfortable one—for several moments. The blue, almost Mediterranean sky above the palmettos and live oaks with their thin wisps of grey moss, the bluer water beyond and the low mauve line of the islands beyond it, the cool brilliant sun going down to meet them . . . these were Charleston, and another world. And not, moreover, a world in which one chiselled a great old lady out of the gods she clung to . . . not if one had any faith to keep.
“I’d be willing to pay almost anything, within reason,” Phyllis said, after a long time. “More than any New York dealer would.”
I don’t know why that annoyed me more than anything she’d said.
“Maybe there are a few things your money can’t buy, Phyllis,” I said shortly.
She shrugged. “I’ve never seen one of them.”
I realized that it was I who was being the stupider of the two. She never had, of course . . . because of the values she lived by. The things
