Читать книгу Reno Rendezvous - Leslie Ford - Страница 4

Out of the enormous white letters scattered over the smooth dun-colored mountains of Nevada—as if some petulant giant baby had chucked the whole alphabet out of his soup—I at long last spotted the “R” that stands for Reno. But not before the blonde girl in black had put her tiny veil down from her smart close-fitting black straw hat and gathered her handsome silver foxes on her arm. It was the first move she’d made, except to order a sandwich she’d hardly touched. Through half a dozen states she had not turned her eyes from the tiny window at her side. The merry quips that even sensible people can’t resist making at the merest mention of Reno, and that the other passengers, all men, had been tossing off since one of them had asked me where I was going, had left her cold. We knew she was going there too; her parchment bag said so. And she looked it, some way—the set of her round jaw and the droop at the corner of her hard red mouth, and her fixed gaze out of the window.

I’d been wondering about her, across the shining green corn carpet of Nebraska, wondering if this was another of what people call the tragedies of Reno. Not that she looked particularly tragic, or even unhappy for that matter. She looked moody and disturbed, but on the whole more like a gal who knew what she wanted and was jolly well on her way to get it than like any frail blossom broken by the iron heel of Life. Would Judy Bonner be like this, I wondered? . . . and for the three hundredth time, I suppose, since I’d got it two days before, I took out the cable that was bringing me, Grace Latham, widow—by act of God, not Court—to Reno instead of to Maine to spend the summer with my two boys as originally planned. It was from London, from my brother-in-law. From my husband’s sister Mildred’s husband, to be precise.

“Judith in Reno divorcing Clem,” I read. “Urgently beg you go out and try make her listen to reason. Mildred in state of collapse. Nothing gained by her going out which she insists doing unless you agree go. Reports from Reno disquieting. Beg you go at once great favor me and Mildred.”

And I was going—but the favor, if any, was to Judy, not her parents. I didn’t know what had happened to take Judith Bonner—twenty-two, and married three years—to Reno. I did know very well that it wouldn’t help to have her mother, who is probably the most charming and utterly silly woman in the world, out there in one of her periodic states of collapse, trying to persuade Judy to listen to reason. That in itself sounded pretty ominous. I’d never, some way, thought of reason and Judy in the same breath, or dreamed her parents would . . . though in the years I’ve known her I’ve been from time to time almost reduced to tears by her sudden young sweetness, and her almost childlike loyalty and honesty, and the stanch passionate little spirit that she wears like a banner.

—And Clem, I wondered again? Her mother had collapsed because she married him, and was now collapsing because she was divorcing him. What could have happened? How would he be taking this? He’d been married and divorced before he married Judy. That was part of the disgrace that had reduced Judy’s mother to the point where she’d had to take a six months’ cruise around the world to put her on her feet again. Though that divorce hadn’t been Clem Bonner’s fault—or so I’d always understood. In fact I remembered, as well as if it had been the day before, Judy standing in front of the marble fireplace in her parents’ apartment overlooking Central Park, her chin up, her red-gold curls tossed back, her wide-set sea-gray eyes dark shining pools, saying quietly, “I’m sorry, Mother—but I’m going to marry him. I love him . . . and I do know what it means. It means everything’s all different, and everything I’ve ever done seems stupid, and empty. And he’s all there is! Oh, don’t you see!”

I still remember her mother, weeping in the corner of the sofa: “But, Judy . . . he’s divorced!”

And Judy, the light of heaven in her lovely sun-gold face, passionately loyal, defending him. “But it wasn’t his fault, Mother! She only married him because his family had money, and when they lost it she left him cold—just walked out on him! Everybody knows that. She married again the minute she got her divorce—the papers were full of it!”

And I could still see Judy’s father, haggard and upset, torn between the two of them. “We only want you to be happy, Judy . . . not to make a mess of your life!”

“I’m not going to make a mess of it! The mess would be if I didn’t! I love him—and I’m going to marry him! Nobody can stop me!”

And nobody could. They drove down to Elkton in Maryland and got one of those people with the lighted signs on their lawn—“MINISTER, MARRIAGE LICENSE”—out of bed at two in the morning.

So that’s why I was going to Reno . . . not to try to reason with her, but to keep her mother, who can collapse from anything from sudden death to underdone soufflé, from trying to do it; for I couldn’t believe that a marriage like that could go on the rocks without leaving bitter heartache.

It seems strange now the way it all worked out. I’m sure I didn’t, when I left Washington, have the slightest inkling that anything more serious than domestic tragedy was waiting for me beyond the plains. I did telephone Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. Army, Retired, the night before I left; but I only did it because he was in San Francisco, as special agent for the Treasury Department on a counterfeiting case, and getting ready to leave for home. I hoped when I did it that he and not his man Friday—if that’s not too frivolous a thing to call Phineas T. Buck, First Sergeant 92nd Engineers, U. S. A., Retired—would answer the phone. But things don’t happen that way, not in my life. When I heard Sergeant Buck answer, it didn’t take television for me to see his lantern-jawed granite pan congeal and his dead fish-gray eyes narrow as he recognized my voice. Nor did his sinister tones saying “I’ll call the Colonel, ma’am,” in any way conceal the fact that he was thinking bitterly that not even a continent between us was sufficient to keep his Colonel from my designing clutches. For Sergeant Buck has long been convinced that no widow of thirty-eight can meet a man—any man, but especially one as engaging as his Colonel, even if he has successfully avoided the shoals of matrimony for fifty-one years—and not have definitely dishonorable intentions.

And, of course, for her to telephone from the East Coast that she’d be in Reno in three days, and do stop and see her, was just to confirm Sergeant Buck’s worst fears and most horrible imaginings. I knew that from Colonel Primrose’s chuckle coming over three thousand miles of wire, and wished instantly that I hadn’t been so stupid, and had let them pass me somewhere in Nebraska, and given Sergeant Buck the pleasure of finding me gone when they got home. I was even sorrier I hadn’t, a day or so later.

The blonde girl put on her gloves. The plane bounced gently, and taxied steadily to a stop. Outside, the hot desert air struck like a draft from a blast furnace. I stood there for an instant, a little bewildered in the general confusion. It seemed curious to me then, and I never did get used to it, about Reno, how so comparatively few people could make so much turmoil. There weren’t more than seven or eight there, milling about, all lit in varying degrees, shouting and screaming, waving good-bye to a girl with a spray of battered gardenias long enough for a gangster’s funeral on her shoulder. She was rather tighter than the rest.

The co-pilot grinned at me.

“Just an old Reno custom,” he said tolerantly.

I learned he was right, even to the sheaf of brown-edged gardenias tied with silver ribbon, a sort of reverse bridal bouquet, and the shouting and laughing and kissing farewell as they shoved a free woman onto the plane, almost before the blonde girl and I were properly debouched.

Not, however, before I heard her glad cry: “Dex! Darling! How marvellous!”

And there she was, silver foxes, veil and all, in the arms of a tall handsome chap, booted and spurred, in an elegant flaming red satin shirt and blue jeans tucked into the tops of a pair of fancy high-heeled Western boots.

“Kaye—darling!”

The man called Dex held her at arms’ length and looked up and down her slim smart figure.

“You look like a million! But you’d better get the city clothes off, or they’ll have you in the jug!”

I scrambled around for my luggage.

“Hotel Washoe, miss?”

An odd-looking colored man, also in a red satin shirt (rayon, this time) and a cowboy hat, broke through the milling crowd and grabbed my bag. Somebody took down the steps, and the big red and silver plane roared away, and the little crowd around went suddenly flat. Like a New Year’s Eve party when you wonder, all of a sudden, what you’re shouting about, and wish you were home in bed where it’s quiet. At least that’s the way I feel, on New Year’s parties, and after having been in Reno a week it’s certainly the way I feel about divorce parties. Except that the let-down is worse. It didn’t occur to me then, as it always did later, that the girl flying away over the dun-colored mountains had quit laughing too, and the faint nausea in the pit of her stomach wasn’t entirely due to the sudden rising from the earth.

But I didn’t think about that then. All I thought about was that the deflated little crowd of people in circus clothes was moving away. Somebody said, “Oh God, if I don’t get a drink I’m going to die,” and that seemed to put a little life into them again.

“I’m taking Kaye in,” the man called Dex said. “The rest of you can get in with Whitey.”

He tossed the blonde girl’s bag into a dark green coupé standing there. Considering what that car came to mean to me in the next few days, it’s surprising I didn’t notice then that it was custom-made, with yellow leather seats and a tortoise-shell wheel, and carried New York license plates.

“Hey—where’s the old lady?” the man they called Whitey shouted from the big open car that all the rest of them had piled into. He was a bandy-legged little man in tan jodhpurs and a salt-sack polo shirt, and his hair, eyes and eyelashes were so blond that he was practically albino.

Dex shrugged. “Dunno. Must have missed the plane.”

Then one girl in Whitey’s car got out. I saw her say something to the rest of them, and both cars vanished in a cloud of dust. She came swiftly across the sand to me—a slight, willowy girl with dark chestnut curls cropped close to her head, nice dark eyes, and no makeup except the scarlet lips and the warm brown of the desert sun. She had on blue jeans and a white shirt open at the neck. She smiled a friendly rather shy smile. “Are you by any chance Judy Bonner’s aunt Mrs. Latham?”

“Yes, I am,” I said.

She laughed a little.

“The rest of them said you were too young—you were just another customer out for a divorce,” she said. “I’m Polly Wagner. I’m a friend of Judy’s. She asked us to meet you.”

We shook hands. All the things I’d been hearing about Reno sort of evaporated. Here was another girl like Judy—not like the blonde girl on the plane.

I smiled with some relief. “Where is Judy?” I asked.

Her dark eyes clouded just a little.

“I’ll go in with you, part way,” she said. She held the door of the Hotel Washoe’s lumbering old limousine open and we got in, while my colored cowboy labored to get it started, the perspiration making large spots on his rayon satin shirt.

She gave me a quick little smile.

“Judy’s perfectly all right,” she said. “I don’t mean she’s not. But . . . you know, Reno’s an awfully funny place. It does odd things to people, if—well, if they’re unhappy. And Judy is, even if she’d rather die than admit it.”

I didn’t say anything. Polly Wagner, who didn’t look a day older than sixteen, flushed.

“Please don’t think I’m barging in on Judy’s private life. But I . . . well, she’s such a perfectly swell person I hate to see her sort of . . . oh, you know how when you’re hurt and bewildered, and all that, you try to pretend you’re having a grand time, and you dance all night just because you can’t bear to go to bed and be by yourself to think, and you’re too proud to just go in a corner and die.”

“Is that what Judy’s doing?” I asked quietly.

“Well, not exactly. But—she’s staying in town. Most girls like her go out to one of the good ranches. I’m at Sun Mountain Ranch. But she was out one night and went back. It was so quiet she couldn’t stand it.”

“You seem to be standing it,” I said. I looked at her eager young face that certainly had nothing tragic or unhappy in it.

She smiled again. “That’s different. You see, I’m like about ninety per cent of the people who come out here. They know they’re going to marry somebody they’re awfully in love with before they come. They’ve made a mess of one marriage and everything’s ahead of them. The ranch is marvellous then, because you’ve got time to think, and you’ve got something awfully swell to think about. The other ten per cent just have a mess behind and nothing ahead. The desert’s empty and . . . desolate, then. Me, for instance—I’m going to marry a man I adore, and I’ve had a perfectly rotten five years. So I . . . I love the desert, and the mountains, and the . . . the peace. I don’t get any kick out of gambling and night clubs.”

“And Judy does?”

“That’s the point,” she said quickly. “She doesn’t. She hates it all. But she’s got to do something to keep her mind off . . . off things. Oh, you know how it is, don’t you? It’s why Paris was so gay during the war.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. I wondered vaguely where she’d heard that. She must have been a babe in arms when Paris was so gay.

She turned her open friendly young face earnestly to mine.

“What I mean is, don’t . . . don’t be surprised at people like Dex Cromwell, and the rest of them—and don’t let her do anything she’ll be sorry for when she gets away from here . . .”

“Who is Dex Cromwell?” I asked.

She looked a little embarrassed.

“He was the man back there with the red shirt and the green car, who took the other woman off the plane.”

“Oh,” I said. “And does everybody always dress as if he belonged to a circus?”

She laughed.

“That’s just for the rodeo. But if it isn’t the rodeo it’s something else. It helps people forget their troubles.”

She looked at the watch on her brown wrist.

“I’ll get out here and wait for the station wagon to Sun Mountain.”

My cowboy chauffeur drew up beside the gray walls of the Nevada Stock Farm on the main road. Polly Wagner started to get out. Then she turned back to me.

“What’s Clem Bonner like?”

I looked a little surprised, I suppose. “Hasn’t Judy told you?”

She shook her head.

“She never mentions him, and when everybody else starts telling what perfectly swell people their husbands are—so you wonder why on earth they’re getting a divorce until you find out that’s part of the Reno pattern—Judy always leaves. I think she’s still frightfully in love with him. I just wondered what sort of a person he is.”

“I should have thought he was perfectly grand,” I said. “I like him a lot. This divorce is all bewildering to me.”

“There’s your car, miss.”

The chauffeur pointed to a station wagon coming along the road. Polly dashed out and stood in the road, waving one hand to them and the other to me. A nice-looking girl driving drew up to take her in. There were five others in the back, all in the clothes people wear at dude ranches, all charming and all laughing . . . and all of them, I thought, remembering what Polly had just told me, belonging to the ninety per cent, with life ahead of them.

I nodded to the driver. I had better get on, it occurred to me, to Judy Bonner of the ten per cent—whose life had stopped, and whose future was only a bewildering memory of the past.