Читать книгу Road to Folly - Leslie Ford - Страница 4

When I told Phyllis I wouldn’t join them at the theatre that night I’d meant it. I’d seen about enough of her to last me a good week, for one thing. I’d also heard the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals sing a number of times, both here and in New York. I hadn’t, however, counted on meeting an old friend of my mother’s dining in solitary grandeur, just waiting to pounce on the first likely person to use her other ticket.

I’m sure now it was Fate itself, lurking in the clear green waters of the Villa pool. If I hadn’t gone that night, I’d never have seen, in the kind of blinding clarity that a streak of lightning illuminates a countryside with, so that it sticks in your retina long after it’s dark again, the situation that made an awful lot of things Phyllis had said, or not said, dreadfully clear and dreadfully important. Nor should I have had the exclusive—assuming that everybody within a mile of us was deaf—services of a super-commentator on the Charleston scene who by a dozen winters and a lot of relatives had picked up enough local gossip to make the recent tornado look like a summer zephyr.

She was leaving the next day, and I suppose it was that fact among others that unlocked the flood gates. Though in some ways there’s an appalling lack of ordinary reticence about other people’s affairs in Charleston, just as on the other hand there’s also an even stronger code of “That’s the sort of thing one doesn’t discuss.” It depends, I suppose, on which clan is discussing what . . . though again—and this really did amaze me—there was the most total silence, on the part of a very considerable and very dissimilar group of people, on a couple of points that would have seemed to an ordinary observer very legitimate subjects of gossip, that any one could imagine.

The odd thing about both of those points was that they weren’t actually that important to anybody, and a lot of unhappiness and the lives of at least two people and perhaps a third would have been saved if the discussion had been nearly as free . . . well, as in another quite famous Charleston cause celèbre. But that’s the sort of thing—its reticence and its lack of it, depending on the occasion—that seems to me part of the charm, and certainly part of the enigma, of Charleston.—How, for instance, a dozen people could sit Sunday after Sunday in St. Michael’s and watch two of their friends, their eyes fastened on the letters “Thou Shalt Do No Murder” burned in letters of gold on the cypress altar panel, and never breathe a word of it, still astonished me, a mere tourist.

It was a little late when we hurried through the reddish stone pillars of the first theatre in America. The jaunty little painted figures of the be-turbanned eighteenth century Negro pageboys, with their brocaded coats and lace jabots, holding the yellow cords in the foyer, were startlingly real for a moment. It was the first time I’d seen the restoration of the Dock Street Theatre, and I Was delighted. The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was singing “Eberybody Libin’ Goin’ to Die.” It was very nice. The ladies in their full-skirted off-the-shoulder gowns didn’t look the least ante-bellum, what with the present styles, but the gentlemen in their ruffled shirt fronts and black ribband ties did, very. And when the lights went up at the interval it seemed to me that all of Charleston not on the stage was on the floor.

I looked around.

“Look, my dear.” My mother’s friend nudged me violently. “That’s Mrs. Atwell Reid . . . that lovely woman with the white hair.”

We’d got up and were following a fair part of the audience out into the moonlit courtyard, with its high brick walls and the massed azaleas from Middleton Gardens just coming into bloom. It was quite all right to stop and stare around at people, because the Dock Street Theatre manages someway to combine the intimate quality of a neighborhood country club and an almost continental sophistication. I don’t suppose any theatre that hadn’t a genteel tradition stretching back to 1736, or that hadn’t been restored as a community enterprise in the best sense, could possibly have quite the friendly feel of noblesse oblige that this one has.

“See . . . the woman with the tall young man.”

My mother’s friend nudged me again. It was the tall young man I was looking at. I remembered perfectly the tight lean jaw and the dark haunted eyes with shaggy brows making them seem more deeply set than they really were. And I wondered then, as I’ve wondered a good many times since, if murder doesn’t take its own bitter toll when society doesn’t. It had certainly set Colleton Reid apart. Phyllis’s “No one ever asks him to shoot with them” flashed through my mind.

But it wasn’t Colleton Reid, really, that I was interested in. It was the big blond-haired man following Phyllis Lattimer up the crowded aisle, head and shoulders above most of the people around him. Rusty Lattimer’s face had lost the defeated, almost sullen look it had had when I saw him last in Palm Beach in a chromium and white leather chair under a yellow beach umbrella, a fifth or sixth whisky and soda in his hand. His grey eyes were clear and hard, his face lean and brown and determined. He didn’t, God knows, look happy, but he did look like a man who was captain of his soul.

My mother’s friend touched my elbow. “That’s her son, Colleton Reid.—Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Reid? This child is Diane Baker from Philadelphia.—And Mr. Reid.”

Colleton and his mother gave me oblique greetings in the crowded aisle. Phyllis Lattimer, moving out into the courtyard, spotted me and nodded brightly. I had the uneasy feeling that her sharp little mind was busy every moment. And we’d no sooner crossed the foyer into the white moonlight than she was beside me, one hand on my wrist and the other on Mrs. Atwell Reid’s.

“Diane—this is marvellous! How did you happen to turn up in Charleston? My dear, why didn’t you wire me you were coming?”

She was turning on her full radiance, knowing I couldn’t possibly do anything about it.

“This is Diane Baker, Mrs. Reid. We were talking about her yesterday . . . it was her grandmother Miss Caroline stayed with in Philadelphia.”

Mrs. Reid, firmly pinioned by Phyllis’s right hand, held out hers. She was tail, with snowy-white hair and clear fine skin, blue eyes and dark brows. She was over fifty, I suppose, and still gracefully slender in a grey lace dress with long sleeves, high neckline, and pearls around her throat. She was a stunning woman still, but I knew she must have been unbelievably lovely when she was young.

“You’ve been in Charleston before, haven’t you?” she asked. “I’ve heard of you from time to time. I want you to meet my son.”

She glanced around. Colleton Reid had moved away and was over by the fountain in the wall, talking to a blonde girl I recognized as Rusty Lattimer’s sister Anne. She was much thinner and more tired-looking than when I’d met her at Phyllis’s in Newport. Her hands were nervous; she smoked three cigarettes, it seemed to me, to Colleton Reid’s one, and smiled too brightly at people as they moved back and forth.

“You know Rusty, Diane.”

Phyllis released Mrs. Reid’s arm and took hold of her husband’s.

“Hullo! How did you get down here?”

Rusty Lattimer grinned and held out his hand. It was like taking hold of a piece of iron wrapped in coarse sandpaper.

“It’s funny, Phyllis was talking about you last night . . . wondering if you’d given us all the go-by.”

A flicker of anxiety went through his wife’s face. For an instant I think she wasn’t so sure I wasn’t going to let her down with a thud, She had it coming, I thought; but there was something in Rusty Lattimer’s face now that I saw it closer that would have stopped me even if I’d been the gal to do it—which I wasn’t, and which Phyllis, of course, knew very well. I had the instant feeling that Rusty Lattimer needed all the faith he had in his wife . . . even needed it bolstered as much as possible. There was a kind of profound disillusionment in the back of his grey eyes and in the sun lines at the corners of them, and in the almost grim set of his big mouth, that even his welcoming grin didn’t manage to wipe out.

Just then, as I’d said, “Oh, I’m apt to turn up practically anywhere,” the darnedest thing happened. There was one of those instants of silence that sometimes fall on a room full of chattering, laughing people, and a warm soft voice fell across it like sunlight through a glass of rich burgundy.

“Don’t be silly!”

I don’t know why particularly—because people can be silly about a lot of things—but the whole quality of it, the warmth, the laughing banter, a kind of rejection and at the same time invitation, with complete mastery of the situation, indicated as plain as day that a man was making love to a girl. And just as instantly every one in the group I was interested in stiffened like so much frozen meat. Because I was facing the wall I couldn’t see the girl, but I saw the rest of them: Mrs. Reid’s sudden panic of alarm, her son Colleton’s eyes flashing dark fire. I saw the girl beside him give him a quick frightened glance as her eyes moved from him to his mother, and then to her brother.

And it was Rusty Lattimer’s face that really stopped me. If anybody could translate visually, in anybody else’s face, the kind of instant and gone but perfectly tormenting pain that shoots through a tooth you’d thought was perfectly sound, that would be the nearest approach to what I saw there. Rusty Lattimer was in love with this girl . . . and I knew she must be Jennifer Reid. I knew he was—instantly, clearly and definitely. I knew too that it was a destroying kind of love, and utterly hopeless, because Rusty was the kind of man who being married to another woman could do nothing about it.

I was literally stunned. It was the only thing I hadn’t thought of coming down on the plane. It just simply had never occurred to me that a man Phyllis wanted could be in love with anybody else. I glanced at her, and stopped again. She was still smiling . . . untouched and completely confident, looking at her husband with an amused, almost mocking smile, it seemed to me. In fact she looked precisely like a prize cat that had not only won the blue ribbon but had got a saucer of thick yellow cream thrown in.

Then every one started talking again. It hadn’t taken, all of it, more than a split second . . . but it was all there, a situation perched neatly on as large a keg of dynamite as I’ve ever seen in a public place,

I glanced around. A girl and a man were standing beside a tub of blush-pink camellias, beside the stone column under the long tiled stoop over the foyer doors. The girl, apparently unconscious of anything unusual, was laughing up at the man whose back was turned toward us. She was dark, with short cropped curly black hair, blue silvery black in the white moonlight. Her face and bare arms, and throat above her black net dress, were as warm as her voice and as cool as the camellias in the tree beside her, her eyes were blue and dancing. But it wasn’t them, or her face or her skin, as much as some quality over and above all of them that made her electric just then.

Then the man turned, and if it had been a simple enough problem in dynamite before, I realized now that it was anything but. It was Phyllis’s divorced husband, Bradley Porter. I looked at Phyllis. She gave me a quick almost imperceptible wink, and I felt my face flush angrily. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t decent. I was ashamed of Brad even more than of her, to let himself be part of her scheme to defeat anything so young and lovely, with such a proud little head and clear untarnished eyes.

And I looked at Rusty. Did he know, I wondered? Was that part of the disillusionment and racking pain behind his own clear eyes? I think I could have killed Phyllis just then. And I could see she knew very easily what I was thinking. She laughed suddenly.

“—Brad, 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.