“Where is he, Grace?”
There was nothing waggish in his weatherbeaten face, which seemed drawn in spite of the healthy overlay of wind-and-sunburn that comes from being a farmer as well as one of Washington’s leading younger lawyers. He and Marjorie and their three youngsters move down to their six hundred sub-marginal acres on West River in Maryland as early as they can in the spring and stay as late as possible in the fall. They’d even gone down at the end of January, this year, and it was the first time I’d seen them together in town all spring.
“You’ve got to get Colonel Primrose to help us out, Grace. We——”
He glanced past me down the staircase and managed a frigid bow at whoever was behind me. I turned and understood perfectly. Tom Seaton is Mr. Rufus Brent’s legal representative in Washington. The man who’d come up was Edson Field, the gangly greying columnist who’d first christened Congressman Hamilton (Call Me Ham) Vair the Hot Rod from the Marsh Marigold State, and was more responsible for his initial rise to fame, or whatever, than any other single individual including Ham Vair.
“—And that’s one of the reasons,” Tom Seaton said as Field went on into the drawing room. “Something’s got to be done, Grace, about all this back-alley stuff about Rufus Brent. Tell the Colonel, won’t you?”
“Not me,” I said. “I’ve gone out of business, as of today.”
We were interrupted then, and it wasn’t till we were at dinner that I saw it was no accident that had brought Rufus Brent’s attorney and Ham Vair’s columnist together. They were seated directly across from each other. Field’s long nose was quivering with enjoyment.
“Perhaps you could tell us, Seaton,” he remarked as he took his first spoonful of clear turtle soup. “What are Mr. Brent’s plans? There’s a good deal of anxiety about whether he’s going to stay on as head of the Industrial Techniques Commission. There’s some feeling that the facts Vair’s bringing out may . . . er . . . impair, let’s say, Mr. Brent’s usefulness in ITC.”
“I hadn’t realized Mr. Vair had brought out any facts,” Tom Seaton said. “He’s made charges . . . on the floor of the House, where he’s immune from legal action.”
“Rufus Brent wangled the Brentool Plant—right in Vair’s own district, Seaton—from the War Assets Board for two dollars a thousand of the taxpayers’ money. That means Surplus Property sold him the people’s farm land the plant was built on for one cent an acre. That’s shrewd business even on Mr. Brent’s level, isn’t it? Funny business, Vair calls it. He’s demanding an investigation of that deal.”
I saw Marjorie Seaton’s eyes smoulder as she shook her head at her husband from across the table.
“The Army paid fifty dollars an acre for the land, originally,” Tom Seaton said. “I imagine the farmers didn’t get more than about a cent an acre, after they’d paid off the mortgages Vair’s father held, for farm machinery he’d sold them. I’ve never blamed Vair for being sore about Mr. Brent’s deal. He had a deal of his own—no capital required—with the Gulf States Scrap Company that fell through, because of Brent, to the tune of thirty-five or forty thousand bucks. The fact that the Brent plant had raised the per capita income there till it’s the richest county in the state doesn’t concern Mr. Vair, I suppose. But I’d rather not speak for Mr. Brent. He knows as well as you do Vair’s just trying to make him quit and go home. It certainly wouldn’t do the people of Taber County any good if Mr. Brent closed Brentool Taber City down—which Vair’s also trying to make him do. The place would be a sinkhole of poverty again in nothing flat, if——”
“But, Tom!” It was a woman who broke in. “If Mr. Brent wants people to be on his side, why doesn’t he do something? Nobody knows them, here in Washington . . . they might as well be buried alive.”
“Oh, my dear, it’s that daughter of theirs, haven’t you heard?” Another woman hurried in. “She’s tragic, a complete alcoholic——”
“That’s false! That’s utterly false!” Marjorie Seaton’s eyes were blazing. “It’s more than false, it’s a——”
“Shut up, Marge.” Tom Seaton didn’t raise his voice, but she stopped short. “—I apologize for my wife. We’ll be as civilized and malicious as everybody else when we get back to town. Living with steers and tobacco distorts your point of view.”
“But Marjorie, you can’t say it’s a lie, dear.” That was a determined dame at the other end of the table. “The camera doesn’t lie. There may be a good reason why the Brents’ daughter should be running out of a place where there’s just been a mob killing——”
“What are you talking about?” Marjorie Seaton demanded hotly.
“Just what everybody else in Washington’s talking about, darling. If you prefer your steers and tobacco you can’t hope to know, can you, dear? I’ve seen the picture.”
“I’m afraid it’s nothing you can laugh off, Marjorie,” Edson Field said. “They’re very rigid, out in the Marsh Marigold State, you know. That sort of conduct might be corrupting for their own youngsters.”
It was the picture I’d heard about at the hairdressers’, of course, and I tried to recall Mrs. Rufus Brent’s face as she struggled up out of her chair. It was clear that Marjorie Seaton had never heard of it. Her face was as pale as the lilacs, and she sat in stunned silence in the babbling sea that broke around her.
“Of course, I don’t approve of Vair’s tactics, but—” It was a man contributing that now current Washington cliché. I heard something else whispered sharply to my left. “—It isn’t the daughter, from what I heard, it’s Mrs. Brent. They say she’s completely gaga, my dear. They say she’s a——”
I put my goblet down quickly. “Kleptomaniac” was what I thought I’d heard. Then a man laughed maliciously as he said, “Oh, really? How interesting,” . . . and if you don’t think men can be as malicious as women you’ve never lived in Washington, D.C.
“Of course, I don’t really believe it,” the woman who’d said it remarked pleasantly. “But it might explain why he never lets her go out without him. I asked her to lunch and she told me so herself. I told Lucy . . . she was trying to capture them and I thought a garden party might be the safest. . . .”
Bright laughter bounced like a shower of pingpong balls back and forth across the table. Marjorie Seaton’s eyes were burning again, her cheeks patched with scarlet, and when we left the table and she caught up with me, her hand on my arm was trembling and icy-cold.
“Come on, Grace,” she whispered. “I’ve got to talk to you.”
A woman ahead of us with a pile of bright blue hair and so bony that a shroud would have looked better on her than the glittering backless frontless job she wore raised her voice so Marjorie would have had to be stone deaf not to hear her. “I’m told Mrs. Brent isn’t a recluse at all, really, only it’s men she likes . . . all very young and very handsome. And of course, the Seatons are in rather a spot, aren’t they? I hear it’s not any five or ten percent they have with the Brent connection, it’s something fabulous, that’s why Tom can afford to throw away all that money farming. I mean, they’ve really got to be on the Brents’ side. . . .”
I felt Marjorie stiffen taut as an arrow, and when she dropped my arm I took hers, though I didn’t suppose she was really going to strike one of her mother’s oldest friends.
“Listen, Grace.” She closed the powder-room door. “You’ve got to get Colonel Primrose to do something. That poor woman . . . you don’t know what she’s going through. They’re driving her out of her mind. That’s why she doesn’t go out. She’s terrified at what she’ll run into. And she’s an angel, Grace. She’s fey as hell, but my God, she’s got a right to be fey. And poor little Molly Brent . . . I don’t know what the picture is they’re talking about, but I don’t believe it. She’s really