Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

She stopped short midway down the gallery, well before we had emerged into view of the drawing room, which the two men had already entered.

“I have premonitions of a run,” she said. “I don’t trust these sheers.” But what she did was jog her elbow into my side, in a sort of wordless message or signal, as she turned aside and went in through the nearest doorway. That doorway.

I turned and followed her; that was what her nudge had summoned me to do.

Lights went on, and the big bed leaped into view in the background.

She went toward the full-length mirror in a closet door. She went through the motions of validating her excuse for stepping in here; raised her skirt, cocked her leg askew toward the mirror, dropped her skirt again. Then she reached out and purposefully took hold of the faceted glass knob of the closet door.

“Jean,” I said with chaste misgivings. “Don’t do that.”

I saw she was going to anyway.

She swept it wide, the door, with malignant efficiency, and stood back with it so that I could see, and looked at me, not it, as she did so.

Satins and silks, glistening metallic tissues, flowered prints; and in the middle of all of them, like a queen amidst her ladies in waiting, that regal mink.

Then there was a blinding silvery flash as the electric light flooded across the mirror, and the door swept back into place.

“Back again,” she said, brittly. “This time, for keeps.” And, I thought, what an apt word.

But for long moments afterward, long after the other things had faded and been effaced, it still seemed as if I could see the rich darkness of that mink, through glass and all, as if shadowed against some X-ray apparatus. Then finally it, too, dimmed and was gone, and there was just clear mirror left. With somebody’s woeful, heartsick face on it. My own.

She put out the light as she shepherded me across the threshold; I remember the room was dark as we left it behind. I remember that so well. So very well.

She held her arm around me tight as we walked slowly down the remainder of the gallery.

I needed it.

“Tune in the stadium concert, Luthe,” he suggested at one point. “It must be time for it.”

I wondered what he wanted that for.

Some very feverish dance band drumming filtered out.

“If that’s the stadium concert,” Jean said, “they’ve certainly picked up bad habits.”

“Luthe,” he said good-naturedly, “what’re you doing over there? I said the open-air concert, at the Lewisohn Stadium.”

“I can’t seem to get it. What station is it on?”

“ABC, I think.”

“I’m on ABC now. Doesn’t seem to be it.”

“Does it?” agreed Jean, pounding her ear and giving her head a shake to clear it, as a particularly virulent trombone snarl assailed us.

“Call up the broadcasting station and find out,” he suggested.

Luthe came back.

“No wonder. It’s been called off on account of rain. Giving it tomorrow night instead.”

“It’s not raining down here,” Jean said. She returned from the window. “It’s bone-dry out. Do you even have special weather arrangements for Park Avenue?” she queried.

“Look who we are,” he answered her. A little distraitly, I thought, as though he were thinking of something else. “What time is it now, Luthe?” he asked.

She arrived about an hour and a half later. Perhaps even two hours.

I don’t know; since I hadn’t been expecting her, I wasn’t clocking her exactly. If he was, he’d kept it to himself; you couldn’t notice it. No more parenthetic requests for the time, after that first one.

There was one thing noticeable about her arrival. I mean, even over and above the usual flashlight-powder brilliance of her arrival anywhere, anytime. It was that she was not announced. She simply entered, as one does where one belongs. Suddenly, from nowhere, she had taken her stance there on the auction block (as I called it after that first time). Then, after flamboyant pause and pose there, she was coming down the steps to join us.

He’d made a few improvements in her. Surface ones only; that was the only part of her he could reach, I suppose. Or maybe he needed more time. Her dress was a little higher at the neck, now, and the phantom price tag had been taken off. You got her value after a while, but not immediately, at first sight.

She’d even acquired an accent. I mean an accent of good, cultivated English; and since it was false, on her it was an accent.

When she walked, she even managed to use the soles of her feet and not her hips so much anymore. I wondered if he’d used telephone directories on her head for that, or just clouted her there each time one of them swayed, until she’d stopped it.

Or maybe she was just a good mimic, was getting it all by suction, by being dunked into the company of the right people more and more often. For my money, she’d had all the other makings of a good sponge right from the start; why not in that way, too?

“You remember Annie and Jean, and Paul,” he said.

“Oh yes, of cowass; how are you?” she leered affably. She was very much the lady of the manor, making us at home in her own domain. “Sorry I’m so late. I stayed on to the very end.”

“Did you?” he said.

And I thought, Where? Then, No. It can’t be. This is too good to be true...

But she rushed on, as though speaking the very lines I would have given her myself. She wanted to make a good impression, avoid the cardinal social sin of falling mute, not having anything to say; all those unsure of themselves are mortally afraid of it. So the fact of saying something was more important than the content of what it was she said.

“Couldn’t tear myself away. You should have come with me, Billy. It was heavenly. Simply heavenly.” Business of rolling the eyes upward and taking a deep, soulful breath.

“What’d they play first?” he said tightly.

“Shostakovich,” she said with an air of vainglory, as when one has newly mastered a difficult word and delights in showing one’s prowess with it.

You couldn’t tell she’d said anything. His face was a little whiter than before, but it was a slow process; it took long minutes to complete itself Until finally he was pale, but the cause had long been left behind by that time, would not have been easy to trace anymore.

She caught something, however. She was not dense.

“Didn’t I pronounce it well?” she asked, darting him a look.

“Too well,” he said.

She was uneasy now.

She didn’t like us. She was hampered by our being there, couldn’t defend herself properly against whatever the threat was. And although she didn’t know what it was herself, as yet, she couldn’t even make the attempt to find out, because of our continuing presence.

She sat for a moment with the drink he’d given her, made a knot with her neck pearls about one finger, let it unravel again. Then she stood up, put her drink down over where they originally came from.

“I have a headache,” she said and touched two fingers to the side of her head. To show us, I suppose, that that was where it was, in her head.

“Shostakovich always gives me a headache, too,” Jean said sweetly to her husband.

She shot Jean a quick look of hostility, but there was nothing she could do about it. There was nothing to get her teeth into. If she’d picked it up, that would have been claiming it for her own.

“If you’ll excuse me now,” she said.

She was asking him, though, not the rest of us. She was a little bit afraid. She wanted to get out of this false situation. She didn’t know what it was, but she wanted to extricate herself.

“You don’t have to stand on ceremony with us, Bernette.” He didn’t even turn to look at her, but went ahead dabbling in drinks.