Buck?”
“You sittin’ by yourself at this bare old table, and the Colonel down the street sittin’ by himself at his bare old table.”
I expect I set my coffee cup down. It was on the bare old mahogany, six inches from the saucer, when I noticed it. I was so staggered I wouldn’t have known if I’d put it on the floor. But no more staggered than Sergeant Buck, I think. He came to a sort of semi-attention, his cast-iron jaw the color it must have been when they first took it out of the furnace.
“No offense meant, ma’am,” he said hastily.
“And none taken, Sergeant,” is what I should have answered, and what I’ve always answered, ever since that exchange became the password of our mutual forbearance. But this time I couldn’t say anything at all.
He cleared his throat again. “But if you’d let the Colonel be, till he gets back, ma’am. . . . He’s mighty busy. He ain’t got himself packed yet. You’d do him a personal favor if he calls up to come over, if you’d say no dice, ma’am.”
As both he and I knew well that Colonel Primrose has never packed himself since he left West Point, I saw he’d already regretted his momentary dissolving. But I nodded. I was still too touched, even then, to be articulate. And when Lilac, my cook for twenty years, waddled her two hundred pounds of sometimes sulphur and sometimes molasses, I never know which, up the stairs, I was still half-dazed.
“What you done to Mister Buck?” she demanded, her black moon face hovering between perplexity and righteous indignation. “What you say got him all outside himself?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell her it was what Sergeant Buck had said, not me. Never could I have foreseen him as a concrete-mixer-like Salome handing me on a silver charger the head of his St. John Primrose. “Nothing,” I said.
“You goin’ to take that girl in here for Mister Buck?” she inquired dubiously.
“We’re going to take her.” I was clear-headed enough to underline our joint responsibility. “It’ll only be for a few days.”
“Hm” she said. “Govamen’ Girl, Troublemen’ Girl. . . .”
That startled me too. I hadn’t got the idea the high-class little lady was in Washington for a job. Not that it would have mattered, however, and not that I’d have heard Sergeant Buck really if he’d told me in so many words. He did tell me where it was she’d never been away from more than once or twice, and I wasn’t bright enough to catch that.
I’d just left the bare board that had moved Sergeant Buck so incredibly when Colonel Primrose did call up, quite innocent of the recent disposal operation and merely wanting to drop in for a few minutes before their plane left.
“No,” I said, keeping faith with Sergeant Buck. “I’m doing you a personal favor. No dice. You’ve got to pack.”
He laughed, not too amused, I thought. “I’m sorry we’re saddling you with this girl of Buck’s,” he said.
“It’s a pleasure. There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for Mister Buck.”
“Mister Buck’s a damn fool,” he said. “Clucking around like an old hen with a yellow chick to hide. He’s been combing the town for the last three days.”
Of course, I should have known, when Buck came, that a favor from me was an avenue when all other avenues were closed. But I was still too touched to remember that leopards don’t really change their spots, and delighted for him to hide his yellow chick in my respectable precincts. In a burst of predawn goodwill I even decided to take her to a garden party I was going to on Friday. Depending, of course . . . I’d seen only one other female friend of the Sergeant’s and she was fully feathered and the moulting season well advanced. But I suppose it was fate, really, and nothing else, stacking the cards against the Rufus Brents, that decided that. I can only think now how different things would have been if Sergeant Buck’s little lady had walked into that garden party with me. It seems incredible that Miss Virginia Dolan’s train being held up two hours by a flash flood in West Virginia could have made such a fantastic difference in the lives of the famous industrialist and his wife, who’d never seen or heard of Miss Virginia Dolan, and in the life of little Molly Brent, which in the long run was by far the most important.
It was Thursday, the day before the garden party and the little lady’s arrival, that I met Mrs. Rufus Brent the second time. I was having some people in to lunch, so I left the Red Cross early to get home and make the cocktails. Lilac belongs to the “Whoso Never Will” Society, and touching liquor is one of the things they chiefly won’t. Even her friend Mister Buck has to get the bourbon bottle out of the cupboard downstairs for himself. When I saw her moon face peer up out of the area window at me, obviously disconcerted about something, I hurried, thinking I was late, until I got along the hall to the living room that opens on the walled garden and saw the woman I’d seen at the beauty shop, sitting there patiently waiting for me.
The bright red hair was dry now, gathered on the back of her neck in a bun that was magnetized, I judged from the way her flowered pink straw hat kept slipping back, giving her a dizzy off-center look. She had on a white print dress with purple, red and green splotches that looked like a colored plate from a textbook on visceral diseases in a final stage. Her face was heavy and looked as if she’d been crying, and her pale blue eyes searched my face with a tremulous pathetic uncertainty and no sign of recognition at all.
“Are . . . are you Mrs. Latham?” She wavered a moment. “I’m Lena Brent . . . Mrs. Rufus Brent. I’m a friend of Tom and Marjorie Seaton’s.” Her eyes moved down to the framed photograph of my two boys on the pembroke table. “You look so much . . . younger than I’d expected,” she said. “Are these your sons? You really. . . .”
(“Don’t let ’em feed you that, Ma, it’s because we’ve had a hard life, withered before our time. . . .” I could see it in the two engaging faces.)
As she looked back at me then, her face lighted incredibly with the most lovely smile I think I’ve ever seen. It transformed her utterly. If some kind of magic wand had touched her or my eyes that were seeing her she couldn’t have been so totally another being. All the uncertainty and the heaviness, even the splotchy print, had dissolved in a warm soft radiance. She had an almost other-worldly quality of simplicity and kindliness that was really beautiful. It hadn’t been her smile entirely. Her voice was so sweet, and so clear and gentle in an almost childlike way that the smile was only the completing of the whole illusion of youth and loveliness—if it was illusory, if it wasn’t the flesh that was the illusion and the spirit the true reality.
“I’m very fond of boys,” she said. “I have a picture of our two. Would you like to. . . .”
“I’d like to very much, Mrs. Brent,” I said.
She undid the catch of her green straw bag. “It was a Mother’s Day present. They went down together and had it taken for me.”
She opened the folder she’d taken out, her face shining with the tenderness mothers are supposed to have and often don’t, or conceal because it isn’t very fashionable any more. “That’s Rufie Jr. on the left, and Robbie.”
And fine looking lads they were, clean-cut, alert and intelligent. You could see they were having their pictures taken as a labor of love and having fun while they were at it. But it was the middle picture I was most absorbed in, and utterly astonished by.
“They’re wonderful,” I said. “And is this your daughter?”
It would be less than the truth to pretend I wasn’t curious about the picture I’d heard of, at the beauty shop and again at dinner. Between the two boys was a girl, seventeen, I’d say, no lipstick, her hair, lightish in the picture and probably red as her mother’s had no doubt once been and indeed still was, slicked back and tied with a ribbon, and about as weedy and unglamorous as the dreary school uniform she wore. She was holding her lips pressed together, to keep from laughing or to cover up the braces on her teeth perhaps, or maybe both. Her