It was that that startled me rather than the voice itself. “Oh, my dear, that’s Grace Latham.”
Why women think frosted glass booths are soundproof, or try to talk when they have that instrument of torture known as the dryer whirling in their ears, deafening them so their voices are ten times louder and higher than normal, I’ll never know. The girl doing my hair stopped. “Shall I tell her to shut up, Mrs. Latham?” she asked anxiously.
I shook my head. The woman was an old friend and my life’s a fairly open book. But I was surprised at the red-haired woman next to me. She’d opened her eyes and turned her head. She was listening too.
“You must meet her.” My friend went happily on. “There are enormous advantages in knowing Grace Latham. She has two perfectly enchanting sons. They always come home for the holidays, which is when you need attractive young men the most. And then, she’s got Colonel Primrose. You’ve no idea what that means if you should ever get into trouble of any kind. He’s a sort of super-intelligence agent of some kind, but he’ll do anything for Grace. My husband’s niece . . . my dear, you remember the perfectly foul mess she got into when somebody murdered that miserable husband of hers. She was a friend of Grace’s and the Colonel really saved her life. My husband sent him a whopping check, but he sent it back. He said he’d just done it for Grace. So you see, my dear . . .”
She laughed pleasantly. “Of course, I’m devoted to Grace,” she said, and I took a deep breath, waiting for the “But . . .” that I knew was bound to come. “But she’s an awful fool, realty.”
The hairdresser and I looked at each other, and we both laughed.
“I’m sure she could have married John Primrose a dozen times if she’d just make up her silly mind. I’ve told her so a dozen times.”
It was nearer fifty, as I recalled it.
“Her husband was killed in an air accident when the two boys were small. She was terribly brave, I thought, but frightfully stubborn. Life can be very disillusioning for a young widow in Washington. But the boys aren’t children any more, and Colonel Primrose would make them a wonderful stepfather. Just hostages to fortune is all that stops her.”
What hostages to fortune I had I couldn’t think, but she went on to count them.
“It’s that barn of an old house of hers, and that dreadful old savage that cooks for her. Lilac’s been with her so long, I don’t know what either of them would do without the other. And the Colonel’s got an old house, just down the block from hers on P Street in Georgetown. Her ancestors built hers and his ancestors built his and they’re just like Chinese, my dear, they’re stuck, they just can’t get rid of their damned ancestors. And John Primrose has that dreadful sergeant he brought back from some war with him.”
That was Sergeant Phineas T. Buck (also 92nd Engineers, U. S. Army, Retired), Colonel Primrose’s guard, philosopher and friend, also self-styled “functotum,” she was talking about then.
“The Sergeant saved his life, or something, and I know he kept that old house going through the depression, because John Primrose didn’t have a bean except his retired pay and the Sergeant had a sockful. And that old cook of theirs, Lafayette, he must be a hundred, and he and Lilac don’t even speak. It’s just a conspiracy, my dear, of sticks and stones, and sons, and cooks, and sergeants. It’s so irritating. If Grace didn’t have what money she needs, she’d have to marry, and she’d get over this quixotic idea she’s got that it wouldn’t be fair to disrupt that military menage of theirs.
“And my dear, she lives right across P Street from me, and every time John Primrose comes to see her, that Sergeant of his marches right along behind him, and sits in the basement kitchen till time to take him home. It’s perfectly absurd, you’ve never known two people chaperoned the way they are. I doubt if John Primrose has ever even kissed her. And she’s not getting any younger, and how she keeps that figure of hers is a mystery to me, there’s not that much difference in our ages.”
I was playing hop-scotch on P Street in Georgetown when she married if it makes any real difference.
“And people think she’s attractive, as she is, but she’s not the beauty her mother——”
She broke off. “Oh, my dear, did you see this? ‘Colossus of greed with a wart on his nose.’ Ham Vair’s shocking, really.” She laughed, not shocked at all. “But I must say he’s getting himself tremendous publicity. When you think nobody ever heard of him up to a month or so ago. . . . My husband says you won’t be able to get a good man to come to Washington . . . but I say where there’s smoke, my dear, and it’s very peculiar that nobody’s been able to answer any of Vair’s charges. Not that I approve of Vair or the way he’s going at it, but really . . . And you’ll notice the Brents haven’t brought that daughter of theirs to Washington.”
“—I’ll get you a glass of water.”
I heard the operator say that to the red-haired woman next to me. She was sitting there, her eyes closed again, her face pale and splotched, tugging at the tie of the pink salon coat swaddling her. She was trying to get up, but she was so shaken she slumped back in the chair. The voice across the room was going on.
“—Have you seen that picture of the girl the night she was caught in a raid on some gangster. . . . Oh!”
I could feel that breathless gasp. The red-haired woman had got up. The girl doing my hair stopped, her hands suspended, her own face white as her starched uniform. There was a discreet flurry of operators, and the soft-voiced manager was there outside and they were taking the woman somewhere.
My operator leaned down. “That was Mrs. Rufus Brent, poor thing,” she whispered.
But apart from the painful embarrassment of seeing a woman so acutely distressed, I didn’t think too much about Mrs. Rufus Brent. You tend to get case-hardened, in Washington. If an important man comes to do a job and nobody talks about him, you take it for granted he’s not so important, and you automatically assume that if a man’s clay feet haven’t shown by the second week it’s because he hasn’t had time to take his shoes off. Then the whispering innuendo about his home life begins to creep its scurrilous rounds. If you live here, you just assume it’s a calculated risk.
I do remember thinking it was too bad the Brents’ daughter should be caught in a gangster’s raid, but actually I was more concerned with what I’d heard about myself than the Rufus Brents. I hadn’t known about that whopping check Colonel Primrose had sent back, and. I was a little staggered, because he’s helped a lot of my friends. I’ve even thought of myself as an unpaid five percenter that people run to when they’re in a jam. It’s never occurred to me that anything else was involved. Whenever I’ve seen Sergeant Buck’s lantern-jawed, rock-ribbed dead pan congeal forty degrees and the viscid glaze come over his fish-grey eyes, which is whenever my presence is forced upon him, I’ve assumed it was purely in the interest of his Colonel’s matrimonial unentanglement and that Buck unwaveringly viewed me as a termite doggedly chewing away at the foundations of their masculine independence. I hadn’t realized I was also chewing at their financial structure.
So I was a little appalled at the whole thing, realizing too that they don’t normally do private stuff. It’s the Treasury they work for, mostly, sometimes Justice or State, and always in really superior criminal echelons. And it may be quixotic, of course, to feel it would be a shame to separate the Colonel’s substance from his long-time and devoted non-commissioned shadow, but obviously that’s what would happen if I married Colonel Primrose. Buck finds me difficult enough to take living up in the next block and across P Street. The glacial immobility that would permanently paralyze him if worse came to worst is something no woman in her right mind would care to contemplate—or not me, anyway. And as for the rest of the conspiracy of sticks and stones, sons, cooks and sergeants, there’s one simple fact, at any rate: it’s that Colonel Primrose has never actually asked me to marry him, and I’m sure we’d both be very much embarrassed if I suggested it.
Other people constantly do, though, and I doubt if I go anywhere without the man when some