Читать книгу Fair Tomorrow - Emilie Loring - Страница 3

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Coatless, immaculate white shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, red-headed Terrence Leigh scowled thoughtfully at the gate-legged table set for two in the sunny window, ceased his muted whistling to shout:

"Hi! Pam! Which side of the plate shall I put the cranberry jell?"

In answer a door swung into the room with an agonized squeak. The sound startled the green and red parrot dozing on a gilded perch. He lost his balance, righted himself with a strident:

"Gosh!"

With the opening door came a potpourri of savory scent: roasting turkey, sage, oyster stuffing, crisping sausage, onions, spicy mincemeat. Came also a girl's head with a suggestion of black hair edging a white Dutch cap, a hint of anxiety in brilliant dark eyes, a flush from kitchen heat on satin-soft skin.

"Jelly at the right, Terry." Slender, graceful, her yellow linen frock almost obscured by a snowy apron cloud, Pamela Leigh followed her voice into the dining room. The door swung shut behind her.

"Ooch! That squeak sets my teeth on edge. Wait a minute!" She dashed into the kitchen, returned with a cake of soap. "Rub that on the hinges. The jelly stands up well, doesn't it?"

"Like soldiers."

Terrence soaped the hinges. His boyish smile was humorously one-sided as he swung the door experimentally. "That's all right. Table looks like a million dollars, what?"

His sister's eyes followed his to the maple gate-legged table in front of the long French window which framed a view of a russet-tinged lawn enclosed by a picket fence, guarded by an iron dog whose black and white nose sniffed the salty air. Beyond it blue water stretched to the purple haze of the horizon like a sea of sparkling sapphires streaked with malachite, above it thin filaments of fleecy cloud striped a turquoise sky. Pamela appraisingly regarded the glossy damask, Chinese medallion plates, crystal goblets, molds of cranberry jelly like huge cabochon rubies. Her glance traveled on to the lowboy with its load of cracked nuts, figs, board of cheeses, jug of cider, came back to the table. She rearranged the russet Beau Belle pears, Banana apples, gold and sunburned to a dusky pink, purple and white grapes, in the choice old comport as she agreed thoughtfully:

"It does look well, Terry. I hope that we have provided the right setting. The ad distinctly stated:

"'Wanted: by two persons, old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner. Anywhere on Cape Cod.'

Nature has obligingly furnished the Cape. The dinner is as much like the one Grandmother Leigh used to serve as I could make it."

"Except the price. Five per! You have the nerve of a robber chieftain."

Pamela's lovely eyes, her ardent mobile mouth widened in a laugh. "My instincts are kind but my necessities are urgent. Perhaps the price is a hold-up, Terry, but when Madge Jarvis sent the ad she had clipped from a newspaper, she wrote:

"'Don't give away the dinner, Pam. That advertiser is out for sentiment. Sentiment is the most expensive luxury in which one may indulge, it ought to be taxed. Charge five dollars a cover at least. That might be high for shredded wheat and milk, but it isn't high for a cooked to order meal.'"

Terrence whistled and pulled down his sleeves. "Dinner for two in the wilds of Cape Cod. In the language of Hitty Betts, 'I guess them advertisers like privacy.'" He hummed and cut adolescent antics as he set chairs at the gateleg table. The green and red parrot blinked lidless yellow eyes, jabbered:

"Look who's here!"

Terrence shouted with boyish laughter. "Atta-boy! Old Mephisto will add the modern touch. Cabaret stuff. Hope he doesn't croak, 'Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye!' in the middle of the dinner. The advertisers might leave without settling. Five dollars per! Zowie! For a hard-boiled female lead me to a college grad and an ex-reporter."

Lightning slashed Pamela's eyes, eyes as dark as eyes may be. "I was never a reporter, Terry Leigh. I did features. That is why I get such a thrill out of the Silver Moon Chowder House. Grandmother called this place The Cottage. Too prosaic. A business like ours needs something with a lift. Silver Moon somehow sets my imagination a-tiptoe. To me each patron means a story. In our English course at college we made diagrams of plots. Mr. A starts for B at the other end of a straight line. Half way he meets C. That contact sidetracks him to D. Contacts represented by dots. Sometimes my Mr. A never reached B."

"You can put that over in a story but it doesn't click in real life."

"Doesn't it? What happened when Father, A, started to visit you, B, at school? Half way he met an actress, C, whose car had broken down. Took her to her home, D. Married her the next month. Never reached you at school, B. What did that meeting with C do to our lives? Tangled them into a snarl, messed them tragically, didn't it?"

"I guess you're right. We'll be in a great old jumble if every person who orders chowder dots our lifelines."

"Let's make a plot diagram for today, Terry. We will call the advertiser who is coming, A, and his friend, B. C is their objective, the house to which they return from here. Perhaps I'll get a story germ. As for my being hard-boiled—somebody must be with Father sick, and those creditors of his sending threatening letters and calling on the telephone—and you having to leave prep school your last year and go to this country academy when you were leading your class in studies and were being groomed for a pitcher,—. Life is just a hideous nightmare."

Terrence cleared his throat. "Brace up, Pam. We'll get out of the woods yet. Remember that poem of Holman Day's I came across the other day about the two frogs in the pail of milk? One gave up and was drowned, the other kicked till he churned an island of butter and hopped out." He patted her shoulder. "Kick, frog, kick! Don't you worry about me. I like the Academy, honest. If you lose courage, 'twill be a cockeyed world." He swallowed hard, brushed his hand over his eyes. "Make that advertiser plank down the cash. Remember the last cheque we took in payment for five chowder dinners?"

Pamela laughed. Not too steadily, not too convincingly, but it passed. Terrence's eyes cleared.

"Remember it? If ever my heart is X-rayed, seared into its jacket will be found the two words written on that returned cheque, 'No Funds.' Hitty Betts is coming to help clear up. We don't even know the gender of our plot germs. Perhaps A and B are men. If they are, I hope they won't be like the two who dropped in for chowder last week. Their eyes were like gimlets boring into our lovely old pieces of furniture and the Sandwich glass, till I expected to find the maple full of holes and the glass cracked after their departure."

"Perhaps they were antique dealers and knew the real thing when they saw it. A guy wouldn't need a Rhodes scholarship mind to realize that old John Leigh isn't of 20th century vintage."

Terrence and his sister looked up at the portrait above the maple lowboy. A long-gone Leigh as Thomas Sully had seen him. Black coat, white stock, snowy hair, sparse on top, thick and waving over the ears. Speculative blue eyes under bushy gray brows, florid complexion, a hawk nose, which almost met the thin line of clamped lips. A fine hand holding an open letter.

"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye!" croaked the parrot irritably as he swung head down.

Pamela started for the door. "Thanks for the reminder, Mephisto. One would think I had nothing to do. I hope, Terry dear, that they give you a good tip. If the plot germs, A and B, are men, they will. I'm not so sure about women."

"No two of a kind in it if it's a matter of sentiment, I'll bet my hat."

"I can stand this mess we are in but it seems as if I couldn't bear it for Terry," Pamela told herself as she entered the big sunny kitchen. The floor was covered with a gray and white linoleum, patterned like tiles. Chairs and tables repeated the color of the pale green walls. The girl flinched mentally even as she approved the charming effect. She had bought the paint and floor covering before she had known of the flock of bills which came flying home to roost soon after the family had moved into the old Leigh homestead.

She shook off the depression which thought of the indebtedness wrapped round her spirit like a smothering cloak and tried to be just. Why shouldn't the creditors clamor for their money? They had supplied the goods. If only she could pay them.

She beat potatoes to swansdown delicacy, added rich cream and seasoning and fluffed again. She struggled valiantly against bitterness as she remembered her last Thanksgiving. Terry had come from school to join her in the city. They had had a grand and glorious time. Twice to the theatre. Lunch and dinner at gay restaurants. She mashed copper-golden squash to delectable lightness as her thoughts trooped on. The financial crash had swept away not only her father's fortune but the money their mother had left to her children. He had gone to pieces physically—so characteristic of him not to brace with all his force to see a difficult situation through. Young Mrs. Leigh had sent for her, had furiously condemned her husband for his lack of judgment; had declared that it was the duty of his two children whom he had expensively brought up—just as if all parents didn't spend money on their children when they could—to look after him now that he was a physical wreck, that she would return to the stage. That night she had departed with all available cash, leaving hotel bill, doctors, nurses unpaid. Pamela's throat contracted as she remembered her dazed bewilderment. Her father had quarreled furiously with Phineas Carr, the lawyer who had been his mother's adviser, who had settled the estate. She couldn't go to him. She had sent for Terrence. Together they had worked out the plan to take their father to the Cape Cod farm house which Grandmother Leigh had left to her with all its contents, with acres of shore land, a short time before. She had given up newspaper work to become home-maker and nurse. The legacy had included fine diamonds. Those had been sold to pay hotel, nurses and doctors. How it had hurt. She adored jewels. She had been glad to get away from the city, with its reminding shop windows glittering with gems.

An automobile! Stopping? She slipped a pan of oysters—with pink strips of bacon between their rough shells—into the oven. Excitement rouged her cheeks. If she made good this time the two advertisers would recommend the Silver Moon, and its fame would spread and spread and spread. Once established, she would make a specialty of chowders, lobster, clam, fish, corn, egg, the variety was endless. Pies for dessert. Her friend Madge Jarvis had put the idea into her mind.

"Of course you can earn money at home. Think up something different for people to eat and your fortune's made, Pam. The path worn bare to the door of the mythical mousetrap man won't be in it with the path to yours. Grandmother Leigh endowed you with something of infinitely more value than house and lands and jewels, when she taught you to cook. Your lobster chowder would make the mouth of that iron dog on your lawn water; as to your pie-crust—"

Terrence banged open the door. His eyes sparkled with excitement. "They've come!"

Spoon in hand Pamela tiptoed forward. Whispered in her turn: "What are they like?"

"Man and girl. Classy roadster. Black with wide brilliant red stripe, stainless steel wheels, red morocco upholstery. It's a bird! She's little and blonde, swanky fur coat. He's big and strong."

"Young?"

"So-so. Ready?"

"Will be when the glasses are filled."

Pamela pulled the pan from the oven. Big, plump oysters with crisp curls of bacon, sizzled in their own juices as she arranged six of the hot shells around a frilled half of lemon rosy with paprika, on a doily covered plate. She sniffed. Done to a turn. Luscious smell.

Would A and B be too absorbed in one another to notice the maple chest, the Sully over the lowboy, the Queen Anne mirror, the Sandwich glass in the corner cupboard, the Lowestoft punchbowl? She still had those. She would work her fingers to the bone before she sold them. To what extent was she morally responsible for her father's debts? Good grief, wasn't serving the dinner enough without getting those on her mind?

"Let's go, Pam!"

Terrence in a white coat followed his excited whisper into the sunny kitchen. He picked up the plates of oysters from the porcelain-top table, kicked open the door and disappeared. Pamela listened, caught the murmur of voices, a laugh that sent a faint vibration through her heart which had seemed numb these last nightmarish months.

What sort of girl would a man with a laugh like that care for, she wondered as she surrounded the delectably browned turkey with crisp sausages, sunk cranberries deep in the curled greenness of garnishing parsley for a bit of color.

"Hi!"

The sepulchral whisper came from the other side of the swing door. She pulled it open, admitted Terrence with a plate in each hand.

"Crazy about the oysters, A, the man, is. Take it from me, B, the girl couldn't be crazy about anything. She's a snappy number, though," he admitted before he disappeared with the hot dinner plates.

He was back in a moment for the turkey. As Pamela held the door wide for him she glanced at the dining room mirror to glimpse the paying guests. She gazed straight into reflected amused eyes, a man's eyes. They set her heart, which she had thought numb, to quick-stepping. She let the door swing shut with a suddenness which caught Terrence in the heels with a bang. She heard Mephisto's explosive,

"Gosh!"

"A's as pleased as a kid with an all-day sucker, that he has a turkey to carve," Terrence confided, as he picked up a dish of fluffy potato and one heaped with squash of feathery lightness.

"He can't get any come-back from the girl, though," he continued when he returned from serving the onions, white, bursting from tenderness in the yellow of melted butter—the giblet gravy, smooth, brown, piping hot in its silver boat. "First she found fault because there wasn't any soup. I explained in the grand manner that we never served soup before turkey, thought it killed the hanker for the national bird. Then she fussed because he hadn't provided cocktails. If you ask me, I'll say he has a rocky road ahead if he has that ball and chain fastened to him for life."

"Cocktails! Grandmother Leigh always served sweet cider! Thought that was as important with a Thanksgiving dinner as the turkey," Pamela protested. She whisked French dressing with the egg-beater before pouring it on the salad, pale green lettuce and perfect segments of chilled grapefruit, with a fig stuffed with a fluffy mixture of cheeses on the side of the plate. As she added a pink flush of paprika to its delicate yellowness she glanced at the clock. Mehitable Betts would arrive soon to help with the dishes. After Terry had taken in the dessert and coffee she would carry her father's dinner up to him. She dreaded his caustic comments. He was bitterly opposed to the Silver Moon idea, though he had no constructive money-producing plan to offer in its place.

She marked the pies in generous portions. Apple, baked in an oblong tin, the four corners lusciously candied with molasses which had been used for sweetening in place of sugar; mince pie; pumpkin pie. She stopped to look at the world outside. Two snow birds were busily pecking for their Thanksgiving dinner in the rusty grass, in front of the cottage which had once housed the farmer and his family. Purple shadows from drifting clouds cast curious patterns on the sand dunes. A rising breeze was kicking up white caps, which looked as if the sparkling blue and green sea had acquired a passion for lace ruffles. Marvelous afternoon. The dining room door swung under the urge of a vigorous kick. Terrence dodged in holding the pewter platter. He deposited it on the table, whispered:

"B's name is Hilda. Hilda Crane."

"Tender?"

He reached for a tempting sliver of white meat. "Hilda? Anything but—"

"Silly, I mean the turkey."

"I'll say it was. The joint fell away almost as the knife touched it. Made my mouth water. A said, 'Cooked to a turn!' She didn't eat fifty cents', let alone five dollars', worth, glory be." He returned to the dining room. When he came back with the plates he whispered:

"A's name is Scott Mallory."

"Mallory! His letter was signed, 'Cryder.'"

"Secretary, maybe."

With the dishes of vegetables, he contributed: "She's all excited because he insisted upon 'dragging' her to the country for Thanksgiving, she thought she was going where there would be music and dancing. She said: 'I hate sentiment—' then he crashed in, explaining that he hadn't had a real old-fashioned dinner since he went to South America, two years ago, that all the while he was away he kept dreaming about one. He's been back a month. Wanted a Thanksgiving dinner on the Cape. Advertised. Can't make out whether they're engaged or he's teetering on the brink of a proposal. He'd better Stop! Look! Listen! before he plunges. She's the kind who'll try to make him sit up, roll over and play dead dog. Salad looks grand," he approved as he picked up the green crystal plates.

When he came back with them empty he encouraged: "The snooty Hilda made no crack at that."

"Thank heaven, she has liked something. Clear the table. Put on the dessert plates and come back for the pies."

"Boy! Those smell good!" Terrence sniffed upon his return. He munched a flaky bit of crust. "A's getting colder and colder. That B has taken the fun out of his party. He was jolly and talkative when he came. She makes me think of the second Mrs. Leigh."

Pamela stood on one foot and then the other, to relieve the tired ache in them, as she poured steaming, dark amber coffee into a squat silver pot.

"That's the type which catches the big strong men. They like 'em little and grafting."

She prepared a tray for her father. Slipped a pan of oysters into the oven. Terrence came out with the pie-plates.

"B wouldn't touch hers. A's white with fury. He was saying something when I went in about intending to see this dinner through. He stopped short. And she said hateful like—wanted me to hear, I'll bet—'See it through then! I shan't.' How I hate rows. Just as if life in this house wasn't enough of a trail of conflict with Father upstairs seeing things battle-ship gray, without having 'em brought in by our customers."

"Clientele, Terry. Clientele, it is less commercial," Pamela corrected with an attempt at gaiety. "Bring out the pies. Then put the nuts and raisins on the table. Let the snappy Hilda pour the coffee. I will get Father's dinner ready."

As she removed the oysters from the oven she struck her hand against the door. The contact left an angry red burn across her fingers.

"Ooch! That smarts!"

She covered the turkey and vegetables with a hot plate, added crisp celery and cranberry jelly to the tray.

Harold Leigh, in a deep chair by the sunny window, frowned as his daughter entered his room. A table in front of him was strewn with postage stamps and a loose-leaf book. Sunshine accentuated the whiteness of his hair, turned his skin to the color of old wax. How old he looked, yet he was only fifty-five, Pamela reminded herself. His nose seemed about to hook into his upper lip. His resemblance to the portrait in the dining room was startling. He tapped the arm of his chair impatiently.

"Always the last one to be thought of. It's an hour past my usual dinner time."

"Sorry, but I couldn't bring it before." She pushed the stamp-laden table aside and pulled up another for the tray. Eagerly he lifted the top of one of the shells. Plump, juicy, the oyster yielded an appetizing aroma. He frowned, picked up a strip of bacon.

"I hope what you served downstairs was crisper than this. I suppose anything will do for me."

Pamela opened her lips, closed them. Why retort? She would say something for which she would be sorry later and this was Thanksgiving Day. Why take away his grievance? He would have nothing to talk about. She swallowed the lump which always rose in her throat at his irritation with her. With the assurance that she would bring the dessert later she left the room.

Curious that her father still had power to hurt her, she thought, as she went slowly down the stairs. As a child she had adored him; he had been gallant and gay, her Prince Charming. One look of affection, one tender word from him, would set little wings on her feet as she ran about to serve him. As the years passed he had grown more and more indifferent to his children; she had been rebuffed whenever her love for him had bubbled to the surface—she had been such a buoyant, bubbly sort of person in those days. His indifference had hardened her toward all men. If she hadn't laughed, she had shrugged at protestations of love. A mental hygienist, doubtless, could explain in scientific terms just what had happened to her heart; she knew only that her father's indifference had smothered something beautiful within her which had glowed.

As she entered the kitchen Terrence burst in from the dining room. His eyes, so like his sister's snapped with excitement; his red hair was rampant; his hoarse voice choked:

"Your plot germs have skipped!"

"Skipped! Terry! Not without—"

"You've said it! Without paying. That girl, Hilda, was opening up, high, wide and handsome because Scott Mallory wouldn't take her home at once. I guess I went goggle-eyed—I'm not used to women who row—for he told me to bring more coffee. Had to heat it a little. When I went back they had gone."