darling!”
Her voice, warm and a little mocking, made him turn toward us. I saw the old charming light kindle in his eyes. It had kindled for all women, but quicker for Phyllis. I saw now that it still did, and I saw that Phyllis knew it did . . . and that she would use it when she needed it, let the chips fall where they might.
“Come here, Brad—here’s Diane!” she called.
Brad Porter dislodged himself from against the stone column.
“Well, for God’s sake!”
He piloted the girl across the flagged court, his hand out. I was watching her. The smile had gone out of her face the way the moon can go behind a fleece of white clouds, taking all the shimmering luminous glow out of the world.
“Phyllis was talking about you yesterday. I bet she knew you were coming, the rat.”
“Brad, you beast!” Phyllis cried.
“I’ll even bet she sent for you—didn’t she?”
I laughed and shook my head.
“Watch out for dirty work at the crossroads,” he said cheerfully. “Whenever Phyl’s got a hot chestnut to pull out, she drags Diane in for front.”
He pulled the girl closer to the group.
“This is Jennifer Reid . . . Diane Baker. Or have you met?”
Jennifer Reid didn’t hold out her hand. She stood there in the very thick of us, and yet she gave, in some way that I couldn’t put my finger on, the most extraordinary sense of being completely isolated from all of us, as if she were in the center of an empty stage. She didn’t look at Rusty. She didn’t even know, I thought, that he had turned away to keep from looking at her.
I glanced at her mother. She’d moved too, and was bowing formally to a man who’d been talking to another man near the open door of the foyer. He was bowing to her. My mother’s friend caught my eye and went through an elaborate pantomime that I gathered meant I was to look at him carefully. When I did, I thought he seemed rather nice but not particularly exciting. He was large and heavy-set, with grey hair and a reserved strong-featured face, around sixty, I imagine, and not unattractive in a quiet self-contained sort of way.
Just then Mrs. Reid turned back to us, or rather to her daughter who’d moved over toward her. She kissed her cheek perfunctorily.
“We didn’t know you were coming in, Jennifer,” she said. The anxiety in her eyes touched her voice, and apparently asked another question without stating it. Jennifer said,
“Rachel is with Aunt Caroline. She said it was all right for me to come.”
It seemed to me there was something a little rebellious in the girl’s voice, and I thought defensive too. There certainly didn’t appear to be any great warmth between mother and daughter. I thought of what Phyllis had said—that Jennifer was guarding all her aunt’s property for herself, and wondered. Her mother seemed in some curious way annoyed that she was here.
Brad Porter, whose life has had a large piece of it devoted to getting around women of all ages, spoke up quickly.
“I hope you don’t mind, Mrs. Reid.” He turned on the well-known charm. “It’s all my fault. I persuaded her to come.”
Mrs. Reid looked at him, or rather through him, without a trace of cordiality. “I’m sure Jennifer felt she could leave her aunt quite comfortably, or she wouldn’t have done it.”
Jennifer’s pale luminous face flushed, her eyes darkened. Just then, fortunately, the curtain bell rang, and men and women dropped their cigarettes on the flags or buried them in the camellia tubs, and moved back into the theatre. I didn’t hear much of the second half of the performance. I was thinking about too many other things, and chiefly about the quick glance I’d seen pass between Phyllis Lattimer and her ex-husband Bradley Porter. Hers had been a question; he’d shaken his head, almost imperceptibly. Whatever she had wanted him to do, it was plain he’d not done it . . . not yet. And I was worried. What chance had Jennifer Reid with those two against her?
“Did you see the man Mrs. Reid was talking to?” my mother’s friend asked avidly, as soon as her chauffeur had picked us up and started down Church Street toward the Battery. “Well, my dear, that’s John Michener. Her husband was his first cousin. They both courted her. She was supposed to be in love with John, but Atwell Reid had the property and her mother was a bitter determined old woman.”
We turned down East Bay.
“Well, my dear, John Michener and a party of men were just leaving the plantation after a deer hunt when they heard the shot, and they all went back and found Atwell Reid dead. Of course they hushed it all up, said he’d been putting up his gun. They sent Colleton north to school, you know, for a long time. Everybody thought they’d marry—John and Elsie Reid—as soon as it blew over. But they never have. Colleton loathes him, and Mrs. Reid’s afraid of Colleton, and just as spineless now as when she let her mother dominate her. Everybody thinks if Colleton marries Anne Lattimer, then he won’t care so much about his mother. Jennifer’s charming, don’t you think? They say she’s responsible for old Miss Caroline staying out at Strawberry Hill, so she’ll get all the lovely furniture some day. The house is full of it. They say she’s the one that keeps the place shut up like a prison.”
We drew up in front of the brilliant white-porticoed grandeur of the Villa.
“However, my dear,” my mother’s friend sighed, “you can see her mother doesn’t want her going around with that attractive Brad Porter. I think it’s ridiculous, myself, but you know how they are down here. They don’t have divorce in South Carolina—it’s the only state in the Union where they don’t. And old Charlestonians don’t approve of their daughters marrying divorced men. Especially divorced men who’re dependent on their divorced wives’ pocketbooks. And the Reids are as old Charleston as St. Michael’s Well.—Thank you for going with me, dear. I hope you were amused.”
As I undressed for bed it seemed to me that “amused” was someway not quite the word for it.
3
I’d forgot that people still make formal calls, in Charleston, and also that they do it in the morning. That’s why I was a little surprised, and with my carry-over from the night before, a little dismayed, coming into the gold drawing room and finding Mrs. Atwell Reid and her daughter Jennifer sitting there. Mrs. Reid held out her hand cordially. Jennifer Reid’s blue eyes met mine so coolly that I wondered why she’d bothered to come at all. Moreover, she didn’t open her mouth while her mother and I went through the elaborate ritual of Charleston.—It was a beautiful city. The gardens were lovely, the food divine. It was snowing in New York, and rather colder in Charleston than it normally was at this time of year. How long was I staying, and had I been to the antique show at St. Philip’s Rectory?
That over, Mrs. Atwell Reid glanced a little anxiously at her daughter, who sat in a gold-brocaded chair, her motionless face even lovelier in the brilliant daylight than it had been in the moonlight the night before. She had on a blue checked jacket and powder blue sweater and a little blue felt hat worn back from her high camellia-textured forehead, and if I hadn’t known she was twenty-two I’d have thought she was about sixteen.
She didn’t move now, but I knew she’d caught her mother’s glance. The shuttered look
