Jean decided she could quite easily become addicted to the life of a traveler. It was not what she saw outside the walls of her hotel room that pleased her as much as how she felt inside those walls.
She felt so free. She was free. It was not her responsibility to see that the sheets were changed, the bed made, the small sink scrubbed, the carpet swept, the trash emptied, the windows washed, the insurance on this building paid on time, the roof repaired, the gutters cleaned out, the walls freshly painted.
This was also different from her life in the condominium. There, too, someone else took care of the basic building necessities. The difference was that residence in a condominium implied permanence of a very limited nature: a giving up, a settling down, a closing in, a narrowing of life to small rooms and small routines performed within them. Life in a hotel, on the other hand, implied movement, change, fresh starts, new discoveries, infinite possibilities.
On any morning Jean might awaken and decide to lie in bed reading a Maigret mystery or to dress quickly and spend the whole day at the Louvre. She could leave for Versailles for a day or two, keeping this room, or depart for good for Rome, because the weekly rates were so low that it wouldn’t trouble her to lose the money. She was becoming very fond of her little hotel room in Paris, however, and found herself simply curling up in various corners to watch the way the sun entered at different hours of the day. The afternoon light against the white plaster walls was as brilliant as snow. The wooden legs of the upholstered armchair near the window were scratched and gouged, but the headboard of her bed was a thick, scrolled dark walnut. Nothing in the room quite matched. The fake Oriental carpet was mostly wine-colored, the skirt around the little sink a garish pink, the cushions of the armchair a splotchy blue and green, and her duvet a deep rose; yet she wouldn’t change a thing. It was her room.
Here in her charming, shabby hotel room she pondered the nature of belonging. In all the spacious houses she’d lived in for forty years and left this summer, she’d never had one room that suited her so well.
This summer, when she and her children packed up the house, she’d sensed how her touches were everywhere, but no one room was only hers.
Al had had a private room, his study. When she and her children went through Al’s study, it had taken days, because they had spent so much time exclaiming over discoveries. Her husband had had a secret life. Everyone has a secret life, but Al had a room for his. They found nothing shocking or obscene—no old Playboy magazines hidden beneath his atlas, no love letters in his files. Of course Al had known he was dying, and probably had been wise enough to discard anything repellent or offensive—if he’d had anything like that; as probably, because of the sort of man he was, he hadn’t.
Still, he surprised his family. They knew that he had had an enduring, even obsessive, love for the United States Navy, and the walls of his study were hung with beautifully matted photographs and drawings of various battleships and submarines; the shelves of his study were stacked with giant, glossy coffee-table–type books on the history of the navy, which his wife and children had given him over the years for Christmas and birthday presents.
What they didn’t know and were amazed to discover was that he had kept, hidden in a locked filing cabinet, a multitude of newspaper clippings and magazine articles about the navy. The label cards on the wooden doors of the file read “Insurance and Will” or “Warranties and Service Information,” but all that pedestrian household stuff was crammed together at the bottom of the filing cabinet under a section headed “House.” The rest of the chin-high cabinet held an orderly array of files, arranged chronologically, month by month, year by year, the file folders headed “June 1981,” or “December 1989.” Inside each folder was an article about the navy and at the top of each article, in Al’s clear, determined handwriting, the name and date of the publication: “The Nation, June 1986”; “U.S. News and World Report, August 1986”; “Life, September 1987.” The files seemed to have begun in 1981, the year Al retired from his law firm, although they found in a large box in the bottom of his study closet a mass of uncatalogued clippings dating from the fifties.
“Oh, Mom! Poor Dad!” Susan had cried out. She, like all the children, knew that her father had wanted to be a career man in the navy but had relented in the face of Jean’s pleas for a more normal life. He had resigned his commission after World War II, finished law school, and joined a firm near Washington.
“What if your father had had a passion for Antarctica or Borneo?” Jean had responded. “Would you have wanted to spend your life there? We were all much better off with his having the navy as his hobby rather than his life!”
This summer, packing up the house, and for the fifty years beforehand, Jean had been adamant in her righteousness, but now in her rented room in Paris she gave herself the freedom to reconsider, at least to imagine how it might have been. If Al had stayed in the bavy, there would have been no spacious sheltering colonial to provide stability and refuge; instead, there would have been a series of houses of varying sizes throughout the world, wherever Al was sent. The family would not have accumulated so many possessions; they would not have had one house standing as a museum of their lives. If Al had stayed in the navy, he would have been a happier man, there was no doubt about that. And Jean would not have had to work so hard to please him, to make up to him for what he had sacrificed for her. Their marriage would have been completely different.
Jean had not insisted that Al resign from the navy because she wanted a grand white house and a sheltered, stable life. She hadn’t insisted because she didn’t want to spend her life paying court to the wives of her husband’s superiors, as her own mother had done. She had insisted that he resign because she knew that the life of a military man could be dangerous, and she wanted him to live.
No, she was not sorry for the life she had imposed upon Al.
In any case, his life had not been totally within her control or even within her knowledge. In the bottom drawer of his desk, under some L. L. Bean catalogues, was a miscellaneous collection of photographs and descriptions of pipes. Al had obviously begun this collection when he learned he had lung cancer and was forced to give up smoking. It was this hidden cache that made Jean weep. The physical pleasures of the last few years of Al’s life had, because of his illness, grown more and more restricted. The image of her husband sitting alone in his study at night, secretly running his fingers over the cold and printed lines of a meerschaum, imagining the sweet taste of tobacco and the tug of his lips at the heated stem, seemed infinitely sad. He had never, to her knowledge, smoked a pipe; but this, at least, was not her fault. When he gave up cigarettes, he did not try cigars or pipes or chewing gum. But the well-thumbed pipe catalogues were proof that he had spent hours dreaming of smoking just as a woman might look through fashion magazines, fantasizing about romance.
Other secrets surfaced when Jean and her children dug deep to the bottom of Al’s desk drawer. Al had been a handsome and dignified man, distinguished even, and much admired. Anything he considered a weakness in himself he kept as well hidden as he could, and so Diane had been astonished at the number of medications he kept locked in his middle desk drawer. Salves for hemorrhoids and arthritis, thick, milky potions and chalky pills for indigestion and constipation, blood-pressure pills and antihistamines. Pain pills. Jean knew about most of these medicines and had always guessed he kept them hidden in his study because they were not in the medicine cabinet in their bathroom—too available to the eyes of a cleaning woman, a houseguest, or a curious grandchild.
By contrast, Jean’s life in that house had been spread out on display for everyone to see. Her medicines were in her bathroom cabinet, her skin cream on the bathroom counter, her diet drinks on the kitchen shelves, her checkbook, personal correspondence, and embossed stationery in the unlocked desk in the den. Her life had always been an open book for her family to read at their own whim. When the children were little, it had been only common sense that she establish her desk in the room where they played, because then she could pay bills while still keeping a watchful eye on them. Never in the fifty years of her marriage did she receive one letter she would not have shown to her husband or most innocent child. Eventually, after they moved into the big white colonial, she had a room of her own, but it was a sewing room, and there could hardly be anything secret in the smocked dresses she made for her daughters, the Halloween costumes she created for her sons, or the embroidered flannel skirt she decorated for the Christmas tree. She never shut the door from the hallway into her sewing room. Perhaps there had been days when she had rested there, putting her feet up on an ottoman as she bent over her mending, but everyone in the family always had instant access to her and to that room. No one would ever have thought to knock before going in; yet they always knocked before entering Al’s study and waited for him to give permission: “Come in.”
All her life she made lists organizing her time; these lists were public property, held by a magnet to the refrigerator door or left on her desk in the den. Her children had given her memo pads adorned with humorous quotes on which to write her lists. Why, then, was Jean moved to tears when she discovered in her husband’s study a list locked in the middle drawer of his desk? The list read:
Clean out fishing tackle box, label lures, send to Susan’s boys
Remind Art—tactfully—he still owes it to his family to get some health insurance
Golf clubs—? Salvation Army? All those damned joke golf gifts
Write Jean a letter
Call Corkins for a tune-up for the Volvo
Château Frontenac in July—visit Diane & Co. and Art & brood on the way up?
Al had died before July, before getting the Volvo tuned or sorting out his tackle box or taking Jean on a romantic trip to Quebec or writing her a letter of good-bye. It was possible he had called or written Art about health insurance; Jean decided not to inquire; Art was a grown man now, living with a woman who had had two children by him even though they weren’t married, living in upstate Maine pretending to be a farmer, for heaven’s sake. Joy, the woman Art had lived with for the past eight years, claimed she was a spiritual healer and a good witch; and although Joy hadn’t managed yet to find an herb that would reduce her rather remarkable excesses of cellulite, it was still a good bet that she’d vow she would, with her own spells, keep Art so healthy that he’d never need health insurance.
The golf clubs, expensive ones in a leather bag, had been in the garage. Jean had donated them to a neighborhood school fund-raiser. The abundant collection of misshapen, cartoonish, rather hideous golf figurines—the mug shaped like a golf ball, printed with the words “Golf is a beautiful walk spoiled by a small white ball,” the suede bag holding golf tees with Al’s name printed on them, the golf club cleaner in solid beechwood, the several golfing caps, the golfing videos—all these Jean quickly swept from the shelf in Al’s study and into a plastic trash bag that she carried out to the curb herself. In their foolish abundance they had seemed like an insult to her husband. That such a powerful man had come to this, to receiving from his four children and eleven grandchildren such pathetically stupid gifts! Oh, well, any man was hard to shop for, but these things showed a lack of imagination, a lack of genuine interest in him. She’d been silently angry for days at each one of her children.
Susan and Diane, who were there at that time, had thought Jean’s dark mood resulted from embarrassment at her own stupidity: Jean knew the combination to the small safe in Al’s study but could not remember it, or rather could not remember it correctly. On a sunny summer morning, not yet too humid, she and her daughters had gathered in the study after a pleasant, hearty breakfast. Jean had knelt on the floor and worked the combination lock through the three clicks she knew as well as she knew her own name. The lock had not opened.
“I must have done it too quickly,” she said and turned the knob again, more deliberately.
Again it did not open. “This lock is getting to be like me, old and cranky and difficult!” She laughed.
For quite a few minutes she continued to try it, still not losing her temper, and when Diane in frustration said, “Mom, let me!” she pleasantly moved aside and told her daughter the numbers. The lock didn’t open for Diane, either.
“Oh, Mom, you must have the numbers jumbled in your mind!” Diane said, not hiding her impatience.
Jean did not miss the look that passed between her daughters. Of course she was as exasperated with her memory as they were.
“Look,” she told them, “obviously I’m remembering it incorrectly. Let’s go do something else. Let’s go sort through your father’s clothes in the bedroom closet. You know how it is—the harder you try to remember something, the more it hides. If I think of something else for a while, no doubt the right combination will pop into my mind.”
The girls agreed, and they spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs, accomplishing so much that they decided to treat themselves to dinner out and a movie. Jean was tired. She did not like to let her daughters know how tired she got these days; she didn’t want to worry them. They were used to her as a sort of windup toy of a grandmother now, whirring about with cookies and milk and hand-knit blankets for their children, always cheery and smiling. While she couldn’t quite achieve that, now—and they wouldn’t expect it of her after the death of her husband—still she did not want them to know the extent of her exhaustion.
So she was grateful for the cover of darkness in the movie theater. She closed her eyes and entered a state that was not quite sleep, and after a while she realized why she had gotten Al’s safe combination wrong. She had been working the combination to a similar small safe that had been in a similar spot in her own father’s study so many years, so many decades, before.
1939
War Stories
Jean Marshall’s family was among the group of old, monied, aristocratic families known in Washington in the thirties as the Cliff Dwellers. But certainly they did not dwell in cliffs. Their houses were beautiful, and luxuriously comfortable. Jean’s room was a girl’s dream of a room, in polka-dotted dimity and rose-papered walls. Her family ate dinner every night in the dining room, seated at a long linen-covered table, using silver and china, though not the good china; the food they ate was cooked by the black cook and brought to the table by their father’s “man.” The Marshalls had only two servants: Agate, a calm black woman who came by bus every day except Sunday to cook and keep the kitchen clean, do the washing and ironing, and help Mrs. Marshall with the heavy housework—and Stafford. Stafford lived in an apartment over the garage. He was their butler, chauffeur, gardener, and handyman. Wherever Commander Marshall had been stationed, he had arranged for help in his house—paid for by his wife’s inheritance, if necessary. Jean and Bobby had grown up with Agate and Stafford and felt comfortable with having help in their house.
In fact, Jean and Bobby were accustomed to having all sorts of people going in and out of their home. Their mother was the head of various charitable organizations, which necessitated committee meetings and teas and wreath-making parties. Both parents were serious bridge players and held bridge evenings at home at least once a week. In addition, the Marshalls had a seemingly endless stream of old friends they had met while Commander Marshall was on tour in the navy, and navy friends and civilians they had known in Malta or California or Guam came to visit for as much as a week at a time. Often these people were accompanied by their children, in which case Jean was politely pressed into babysitting or, worse, entreated to entertain some hapless adolescent.
Bobby and Jean were also used to their father’s receiving more businesslike visitors at any and all hours of the day or night. Often these men were the same ones their parents met socially for golf or a dance, but when they showed up, without their wives, these men had a gray cast about them that spoke of business. Then Stafford, if he happened to answer the door, or Mrs. Marshall, or Jean or Bobby, would automatically interrupt Commander Marshall at whatever it was he was doing, and the two men would go into his study and shut the door.
It was no secret from anyone in the house that Commander Marshall was involved in naval intelligence work, or that when the gray men came to be closeted with him in his study they were discussing issues of importance. In fact if Jean had been told that her father secretly ruled the world, she wouldn’t have been much surprised because her mother was forever impressing on her the significance of her father’s work, making her practically tiptoe and bow whenever he entered a room.
In return, Commander Marshall treated Jean as if she didn’t have a brain in her head. Perhaps she deserved some of that, for her grades in math and science were not sterling, although she still managed to get into Radcliffe. Commander Marshall was not unkind, but he was nearly medieval in his thinking; he believed there was a hierarchy beginning with the Lord and filtering down quite a long way before coming to any female.
Probably because of that, it never occurred to him that his own daughter would or could betray him, and so it was very soon after they’d moved into Bancroft Place, when Jean was only about twelve, that he asked her to memorize the combination to the small safe in his study.
There were two shelves in his safe. The lower one held a locked strongbox containing Commander Marshall’s will and other legal papers. The top shelf was a repository for the odd bits of paper on which he scribbled his thoughts. He often brought his work home to do, finding that in an atmosphere of peace and relaxation, problems that had tortured him at his office on Constitution Avenue suddenly presented him with answers. He was not an absentminded man, but he was a very busy one, and so Jean grew quite used to picking up the phone to hear him say, “Jean? Go into my study, dear, open the safe, take out the top sheet of paper, and read it to me, will you? That’s a good girl.” She never tried to make sense out of what she read to her father, never tried to memorize it, for it was always gibberish: a group of numbers and letters, or four names with odd symbols next to them. Once she had asked her father what a certain message meant and he had answered sternly, “Nothing for young girls to bother their pretty heads about.”
Commander Marshall also told his wife the combination to his safe, and she was the one he first asked to get the information he’d forgotten. He’d ask Jean only if his wife was not at home. He did not tell Stafford or Agate the combination, and he made a point of not telling his son because he did not want Bobby ever to be in the position of having to compromise his principles. He knew his son was going into the navy.
He was fond and proud of his daughter, but not much more fond or proud than he would have been of a clever dog who had been trained to fetch. His highest hope for her was that she marry a navy man and bring him an interesting son-in-law. Jean would inherit much of her mother’s money, and it was a tradition that navy men marry wealthy young women; just so had Commander Marshall found and courted and married his wife.
Jean’s life and her brother’s had always been circumscribed by their father’s laws, and that cold December night Jean was filled with dread as she rode home from the Carlton Hotel. Bobby would believe it was his duty to inform their father immediately about her behavior at the Army-Navy Christmas Ball, how she’d ignored a navy man, and flirted with a stranger. Al knew his best friend’s family, and for a while the air inside the cab was chilly as Al and Jean were borne closer and closer to her parents’ home. Jean pulled her fur coat around her and bent over to shake the snow off the hem of her long evening gown. Her feet were frozen. Outside the windows, the snow drifted down in feathery silence.
“Perfect weather for the holidays, ain’t it?” the cabdriver remarked cheerfully.
“It is,” Al replied politely, and then it was quiet in the cab until they pulled into the drive.
“Would you like me to come in with you?” Al asked. “Bobby can drive me back.”
Jean considered. “That would be great, Al. Thanks. Dad will have to be polite, and he’s always glad to see you. It will at least postpone if not prevent the slaughter.”
Al paid the cabdriver, put his hand under Jean’s elbow, and helped her through the snow. Agate was at the front door. While she took their coats she looked down at the floor, a sure sign she knew that trouble was brewing.
The family was gathered in the living room around a silver coffee service. Bobby had reached home before Jean, and when she entered the room, his chin jutted out defensively. That alerted her. Bobby had told.
“Who’s this strange fellow you spent the entire evening with!” Commander Marshall demanded almost the moment the young people were settled in the living room, with Mrs. Marshall scurrying around giving everyone coffee.
“God, Bobby, you really are a pathetic old tattletale,” Jean said, glaring at her brother. “It’s too bad your own love life is so boring that you have so much energy and attention to give to mine.”
“Young lady, it’s no good looking at your brother. I want to know about this man, and I want to know about him now. I won’t have a daughter of mine making a spectacle of herself in public. If you can’t give me a proper account of yourself and your actions tonight, you’re confined to the house for the rest of the holidays, and I’ll have to reconsider whether or not I’ll let you return to Cambridge. It seems a lot of radical ideas have been put in your foolish little head. I knew sending you away to a northern college was a mistake.”
At this, even Bobby looked appropriately horrified. He had only meant to protect his sister, not to end her college career. Mrs. Marshall kept pouring coffee, handing out napkins, little spoons, offering sugar. Jean did not look to her mother for help; she knew Mrs. Marshall wouldn’t have dreamed of interfering. This was the way of Jean’s mother’s world; this was the way her own father had treated her, threatening her so many years ago with cutting her out of her inheritance unless she married the right man.
“Daddy, that’s not fair! For God’s sake! Dancing with Erich has no relation whatsoever to Radcliffe!” Jean felt her face redden with the childish pressure of tears.
“Don’t use that tone of voice with me, young lady, and don’t take the Lord’s name in vain! Who is this man you spent the evening with? How did you meet him? Who introduced you? Does he know anyone?”
By “anyone,” Commander Marshall meant only and specifically anyone within the elite group of the navy and Washington and Cliff Dweller spheres. In fact, Jean wasn’t sure Erich Mellor did know any of those people. She waited for Bobby to come to her rescue—after all, Erich had been talking to him—and when her brother didn’t speak, she said, “Bobby knows him.”
“No, I don’t. I chatted with him, but I don’t know him.”
According to her parents’ rules, girls of Jean’s age and class were supposed to be introduced to the right people by the right people, and dancing all evening with a man who knew “no one” amounted to wantonness deserving of the worst possible punishment. For a long moment, the room was silent.
“His name is Erich Mellor,” Jean began bravely. “He’s a banker, with the Washington branch of the Upton and Steward Bank. His family lives in New York.”
“New York,” Commander Marshall said gruffly. New York, as far as he was concerned, was a city full of Yankees, Jews, and liberals. “What kind of a name is Mellor, anyway? Sounds German.”
The silence in the room deepened ominously.
“Sir, I believe Erich Mellor was at the dance as the guest of his cousin Jimmy Heflin, who was two years ahead of Bobby and me at the academy,” Al said. Immediately he was rewarded with a look from Jean of such fond gratitude he could almost interpret it as love. He deserved it. He had just altered the truth by elevating Erich Mellor’s relationship with Jimmy Heflin from that of friend to cousin. And after all, Al knew Heflin had brought Mellor to the dance, and no one had told him the two men weren’t cousins, so he hadn’t exactly lied to Commander Marshall.
“Humph. I suppose he’s all right, then. Still, Jean, I thought you’d been raised with better manners than you’ve exhibited tonight.” Commander Marshall paused to gather his thoughts. He couldn’t scold his daughter for ignoring Al all evening with Al sitting in the living room, yet he couldn’t let Jean’s actions go unpunished. “Go to your room. Now.”
Jean felt the pressure of indignity push tears behind her eyes and pull down the corners of her mouth, but she rose and politely said good night to Al, then swept from the room without another word to her brother, father, or her hopelessly ineffectual mother.
Once released from the overwarm living room, however, up in the privacy of her bedroom, she felt free and glad. She hated sitting with her parents and Bobby and Al, everyone so stiff and formal. She was mad enough at Bobby to spit, and she hated her father and pitied her mother. She wanted to get away from them all, but she couldn’t, not now, not tonight. So she hurried through her bedtime ablutions and crawled into bed, gratefully forsaking all considerations of her family and surrendering completely to thoughts of Erich Mellor.
She remembered the warm, firm pressure of his hand on her back as they danced, how his touch had been guiding but not commanding, and how, over the course of the evening he had gradually, subtly, brought her closer to him, so that finally she had rested her head on his shoulder. At first she’d been embarrassed by the unavoidable knowledge of her breasts pressing against his chest, but before long she’d relaxed and let herself enjoy the full physical geometry of her female shape against his male body.
Jean forced herself to remember how she felt about Hal Farmer. Erich was every bit as intelligent and fascinating as Hal but much more mysterious, and much smoother. Whatever Hal Farmer had called up in her seemed frivolous, light, in comparison to the torrent of emotions Erich Mellor caused.
She wanted to go to bed with Erich Mellor.
Sunday morning Jean went to St. John’s with her parents. In her secret heart she had grown impatient with religion, finding it all too hypocritical to bear, but she had to ingratiate herself with her father and win back his favor if she was going to get his permission to see Erich Mellor again.
Her parents were pleased by her docile presence in church and later with her running stream of chatter about her friends and courses at Radcliffe as they sat around the dining room table for their formal Sunday dinner. She spoke of tea parties and cotillions, the socially acceptable activities.
Jean could see the tension drain from her parents’ faces as she blathered on and on. She caught the message her mother flashed her father with her eyes as she asked him if he wanted some more mashed potatoes and gravy: “See, dear, it’s all right; Jean’s learned her lesson.” Could it really be this easy to fool her parents?
Bobby was spending the day with Betty and her family. After the huge Sunday meal, Commander Marshall retired to his study, closing the door in order to work—or to nap on the leather sofa. Mrs. Marshall sat in the living room listening to a program of classical music on their Philco radio as she wrapped some last-minute Christmas presents. Finally, Jean was free to escape with her best friend from high school, Midge Carlisle.
Midge honked the horn of her shining gray Nash sedan and Jean yelled good-bye to her parents, then raced out the door and jumped into the car.
“Oooh, I’m so glad you’re here!” Midge squealed, hugging Jean. Her bouncy blonde curls were tied back with a red-and-green plaid ribbon.
“I’m so glad to get out of there!” Jean laughed. “And I’ve got so much to tell you!”
“Shall we go to Bailey’s for ice cream?”
“All right, as long as there’s no one there we know.”
“Well, well, well.” Midge rolled her eyes playfully. “What’s up?”
“I’ve just got so much to tell you, and I don’t want anyone to hear.”
“You’ve met someone.”
“Right.”
“Oh, I’m so jealous!” Midge nearly steered the car into a snowdrift in her excitement.
“Well, there must be hundreds of good-looking men at George Washington!”
“Yeah, but the only ones who’ve asked me out are boring. I want someone thrilling.”
“So do I,” Jean agreed. “And I think I’ve met him.”
“Oh, you’ve got to tell me everything!”
“Well—” Jean began, and she launched into a detailed description of the night before. They talked about Erich and the dance all through their sundaes and then through coffee, and before they knew it, it was time for them to go back to Jean’s house for the Marshalls’ annual Christmas party.
It was only two days before Christmas. Mrs. Marshall, with Agate and Stafford’s help, had completed decorating the house, and when Midge drove Jean back home late that Sunday afternoon, they saw the plummy Scotch pine towering in the living room, its lights glittering through the mullioned windows. Tonight the carolers would come, and friends and acquaintances of the Marshalls, and they all would be invited in for eggnog and fruitcake and Christmas cookies as they warmed up by the fire. Mrs. Marshall had always set much emotional weight on the holidays. She liked having the entire family gathered around, and Agate and Stafford there, too, discreetly refilling the crystal eggnog bowl and passing around the cookies and cakes. The more friends who arrived for this ceremony, the happier she was, the more content and optimistic about her own particular slice of the world.
Midge had been part of this evening ever since she and Jean had become best friends six years before. She parked her car in front of the house and the young women hurried through the cold night and into the Marshalls’ house. They were giddy from ice cream and gossip. They couldn’t stop giggling as they took off their raccoon coats, handed them to Stafford, and went into the living room.
“We’re not late, are we, Commander Marshall?” Midge asked, all simper and charm. She kissed Mrs. Marshall on the cheek. Her father was an architect, and a Cliff Dweller, so Midge was one of them.
“We can’t be late. Bobby isn’t back with Betty yet,” Jean said, automatically defensive, her voice already edgy with the exasperation she felt every time she was near her parents. She was so tired of having continually to appease and apologize.
Then she saw Erich Mellor sitting on the living room sofa. Her mouth fell open in surprise, and she stood just staring at the man.
Erich rose, moved toward Jean, and offered his hand.
“Hello, Jean,” he said.
Numbly, she shook his hand, but she was still too shocked to speak.
“This young man called me earlier today,” Commander Marshall said, noting his daughter’s discomfiture with amusement. “Called to ask if he could come by and introduce himself. Turns out we have a few friends in common.”
“Oh,” Jean said. “Well …”
“Hi! I’m Midge Carlisle, Jean’s best friend.” Midge shook hands with Erich, nudging Jean slightly with her hip as she did.
Jean sank into a hard wing chair at the side of the coffee table. She smoothed her skirt over her trembling knees.
“We’ve been so sinful,” Midge gushed. She knew the Marshalls liked an accounting of their daughter’s activities. “We ate so much ice cream we’ll never fit into our clothes. Ice cream in the winter. Brr. I’d love some coffee.”
As she chattered, Midge settled herself on the sofa next to Erich. Jean’s mother poured coffee for Midge and Jean, then handed Erich a cup. Jean was surprised at how docile he looked, trapped on chintz between females, the dainty cup and saucer in his hands.
“We’ve found something out about your new friend!” Mrs. Marshall announced.
“Oh?” The one syllable was all Jean could manage.
“It just so happens that Erich is a bridge buff!” Her mother beamed, truly pleased, for she loved nothing more than a good game of bridge. “I think we’ve got time for a round or two before the guests arrive!”
So it was arranged. The card table was unfolded in the living room, the waxy flower-backed cards in their elaborate holder brought out with the score pads and the stubby pencil, and they sat down to play. Erich teamed up with Commander Marshall, Jean with her mother. Midge flitted around the table, looking at their hands. She’d always thought bridge was boring.
Jean wasn’t crazy about the game herself, but it was a sure way to win over her parents, so she played her hand with the best humor and concentration she could summon while seated so close to Erich. Her hand, arm, elbow were only inches away from his. Now and then she was sure the touch of his knee against hers was deliberate. She wished he wouldn’t do that; she was afraid her face flushed scarlet each time she felt the gentle, urgent pressure.
The sound of his voice aroused her deeply. Yet his words were commonplace, so dishearteningly normal. As they played—Commander Marshall won the bid of four hearts; and Erich laid out his cards on the table—Erich handed out bits of information about his life.
“Where are you living?” Commander Marshall asked after covering Jean’s jack of spades with his king.
“I have an apartment in the Wardman Park Hotel,” Erich said. “Several of us New Yorkers call it home. I’m with the bank, Brigham Phelps is with an architecture firm, and two others are with the government.”
“We’re seeing so many changes in Washington these days, so many new people,” Jean’s mother said plaintively.
“It’s only just beginning,” Commander Marshall said. “These New Dealers FDR’s bringing in, not to mention all the internationals coming and going with all this fuss Hitler’s stirring up in Europe.”
“I’d be down here anyway,” Erich told them. “Upton and Steward have had a Washington branch since before the turn of the century.”
“Do you like it here?” Mrs. Marshall’s voice was coyly suggestive: he should answer yes.
“Actually, I find it a bit boring compared to New York,” Erich said. Mrs. Marshall’s lips went rigid in disapproval—she hated to have anyone hint that her town was not the ultimate place for life to be lived. But Jean’s heart beat a little faster with relief and excitement: at least Erich wasn’t going to be a yes-man, ingratiating himself with her parents. And she would have been disappointed if he hadn’t liked New York more than Washington.
When Bobby and Betty arrived, the bridge game broke up. Agate and Stafford brought in the crystal bowl and cups for eggnog, while Mrs. Marshall supervised Jean, Midge, and Betty as they scurried through the kitchen and dining room setting out sandwiches and cookies. Erich went back into the living room to talk with the men. Jean could tell that Bobby was abrupt with Erich; he didn’t like this intruder involved with his sister. Then Al arrived. The guests came in groups, filling the house with rushes of fresh air and laughter. The carolers swept in, sang exuberantly, drank eggnog, greedily devoured the Christmas goodies, and left. Jean didn’t have a moment to talk with Erich, or even to stand near him.
Still, when the evening was finally over, Erich had invited her to the movies with him the next night, and had her parents’ permission to take her.
They went to Loew’s Palace Theater to see a Betty Hutton movie, which might have been projected upside down and backward for all Jean knew. As the shadowy images moved on the screen, similar ghostly shapes flickered within her. After carefully helping her remove her coat and align it along the back of her seat, Erich did not let his hand linger against her back. He did not try to hold her hand during the long movie or even to rest his arm alongside hers. She was aware of his steady, gentle breathing; the calm rise and fall of his chest pulled her vision sideways. Every time she dared to glance at his profile, she saw a man engrossed in a movie, almost unaware that he had a companion. His long legs stretched down into the darkness parallel to hers but never touching. Yet he seemed to be purposefully infusing the air with his own special odor, an incense of attraction.
After the movie Erich took her for a drink at the Metropolitan Club. It was the first time she’d been there without a member of her family, and as she sat sipping her martini at the small table Jean felt exquisitely sophisticated. She’d gotten drunk enough times by now at Radcliffe, and earlier, when she and Midge had experimented with liquor with ghastly results, to know that she could handle one drink, and perhaps two, without losing her dignity. But the combination of Erich’s proximity and gin was a heady mixture. There was so much she wanted to know about him, yet she found herself babbling on and on about herself. It was nerves. And excitement. And anticipation mingled with terror because the moment of losing her virginity seemed to her now to be very close.
“What are they saying up in Boston about this war in Europe?” Erich asked.
“I can’t speak for Boston, or even for Radcliffe, but I can tell you what I’m doing about it. I hate war, hate the very idea of war. I’m volunteering for a review called War Stories; its debut issue will come out this spring. April, we hope.” As she described the review, she watched carefully for his response. Her brother, her father, Al, would have exploded by now at what they would see as harebrained, treacherous idiocy, but Erich was listening with what appeared to be detached interest.
Finally he said, “You’re very brave to become involved with such a publication.”
“Well, thank you. I would like to think I am brave.”
“If it’s any help, I agree with your goals. I hate the idea of war. And in my own way, I’m working toward peace.”
“You are? How? What—?”
Erich looked at his watch. “It’s complicated. And it’s gotten late. Let me tell you about it another time. I’d better get you home, or your father will worry.”
This time it seemed to her that when Erich helped her into her raccoon coat his hands lingered on her shoulders in a firm, deliberate caress. His body stayed behind hers a significant few seconds too long, and a significant few inches too close for courtesy. Her face flushed. During the ride home, they spoke of casual, common, everyday things: he was leaving the next day to spend some time in New York with his family. He would be back around the twenty-ninth. Would she spend New Year’s Eve with him?
Jean was glad for the chaos of Christmas. The family rituals, the visitors, the presents, the festive meals, all helped make the time pass toward the day of Erich’s return. Al had gone back to California to spend Christmas with his family, so Jean was relieved of the burden of dealing with him. She knew she was fond of Al, but every word she spoke and gesture she made toward him was weighted by her fear that she was giving him hope.
In this house, so sturdy, safe, and warm, provided by her father, kept cozy by her mother, with her smiling family milling around her like animals in a child’s picture book of a perfectly happy home, Jean knew she was a furtive, deceptive, desperate creature. She was a fox in a bunny’s costume. Her mother pampered her; her father responded to her good-girl behavior with suspicious approval.
On Christmas morning, they gave her a car.
Jean stood out in the driveway surrounded by her family, weeping. They had hastily pulled coats over their nightgowns and robes in order to hurry outside to inspect the shining dark blue DeSoto sedan, then Jean slid inside, onto its rather scratchy gray seat, and put her hands on the wheel. She was overwhelmed with emotions: gratitude, guilt, and glee: this would be her getaway car.
On New Year’s Eve there were parties all over Washington. Commander and Mrs. Marshall were invited to one set, Bobby and Betty to another, and Erich was taking Jean to yet another: a small private dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Upton, then to various celebrations at ballrooms and clubs all over town. It was possible, Jean told her parents and brother, that they’d run into each other sometime during the evening.
Secretly she hoped she wouldn’t encounter any of her family. But during the dinner party at the Uptons’ palatial home she thought her family might as well have been there, too. It was a terribly formal function. Erich was seated at the other end of the table. Jean was placed between two older men, one avuncular and jovial, the other ancient and slightly deaf, his cupped hand and inclined head requiring that she repeatedly shout his way. From time to time she looked down the long table to see Erich also deferring to his companions, two older women; once or twice he met her eyes and smiled, but generally the meal was much more work than fun.
Afterward, the banking crowd went off in their separate cars to the New Year’s Eve ball at the Raleigh Hotel. For the first hour Jean and Erich were caught up and swept along in the festivities. Jean grew discouraged—all her beauty, all her readiness was going to waste! Midge Carlisle’s parents were at the ball with another crowd, and they came across the long room to meet Erich and chat with Jean. Jean had always liked them; but she was especially glad to see them now, because she knew they could verify to her parents exactly where she’d been—in the Raleigh Hotel doing the foxtrot with some fuddy-duddies.
Still, as midnight drew near, anticipation flushed through her. When at last Erich asked her to dance, he drew her far into the middle of the crowd so that they were hidden from those he knew.
“Having a good time?” Erich asked, smiling down at her.
“Oh …” Jean said, caught. She wanted to be herself with this man, but she didn’t want to insult the people he worked with. “Well, everyone is very nice—”
“Oh, Jean,” Erich said with a laugh. “I know they’re boring, darling, but this has to be done. It’s part of the job. You’re good to put up with them. I’m grateful. They think you’re enchanting, by the way.”
He had called her “darling.” For a few moments that was all she could think of, that and the pressure of his hand on her back, the warmth of their hands together, their bodies moving together as they danced. She had to look down, away, in order to hide her eyes.
He was leading her farther away from the group, out of the center of the dance floor. When the music ended, as others clapped, he pulled her gently along to the doorway. They escaped from the noisy ballroom into a long corridor, and in silence he led her down the hall, around the corner, to another doorway. He took a key from his pocket and opened the door.
Inside was a very small, plush living room, opening onto a bedroom. He had brought her to a suite, Jean realized. He had a key to a private suite. Her heart drove blood thudding into her ears so quickly she thought she would faint.
Erich didn’t stop to notice her reaction but quickly crossed the room and shoved open a window. A blast of cold winter air whisked into the room, bringing with it sounds of merriment from the street and strains of the music from the ballroom down the hall.
“Here,” he said, beckoning.
She noticed then that on the table by the window was a silver bucket with a champagne bottle in it, and two glasses.
“I thought that after we paid our dues to the good folk out there we should have a private New Year’s celebration ourselves. Don’t look so alarmed. I have no intention of tossing you over my shoulder and carrying you into the bedroom to ravish you. I wanted a private living room for the two of us, and all they could give me was this suite. Here. Have a glass of champagne.”
“Thank you.” Jean took the glass of champagne. She sipped, and the bubbles tingled in her nose. She looked up through her eyelashes at Erich. He was studying her.
She studied him back. He wasn’t anywhere nearly as handsome as Al; he wasn’t even as handsome as Bobby. His nose was crooked. He didn’t have that shining quality her brother and Al had; he didn’t seem so new. Bluish stains spread under his very dark eyes. Perhaps he was tired. He’d only just gotten back from New York.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you’re older than you say you are.”
He smiled. “Perhaps I am, in many ways. But I promise you, I’m twenty-four.”
He let the silence last. Jean took a deep breath and bravely said, “What do you think?”
“I think,” he said, “that it’s midnight.”
He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips. When he pulled back after only a few seconds, she was disappointed. That wasn’t much of a kiss! But he was only setting his glass on the table, then taking hers from her to put on the table, so that he could take her properly into his arms.
During the next hour they gradually moved from the table to the sofa where they sat and finally lay in each other’s arms. She had never been so thoroughly kissed. She was glad she’d put perfume on her throat, behind her ears, at her elbows and wrists, for he kissed her there, returning to her mouth often, then kissing her closed eyes, her cheeks, her hair. They didn’t speak. She could not keep from murmuring, and sometimes, in spite of herself, she moaned. Without any hesitation he put his hand on her breast; through the layers of their clothing she felt his body pressing against hers. Terrified by her audacity, she put her hands under his tux jacket in order to touch his body directly through the one soft layer of shirt. The smooth wide muscles of his back sank into the hard bony furrow of backbone which she traced with her fingers from his neck to the waistline of his trousers. She wanted to move her hands on down and to press his hips harder against hers, but she wasn’t that brave.
His hands and lips were in her hair, on her throat, on her mouth, on the naked skin swelling from the bodice of her evening gown. His hands were on her breasts, on her waist, but he did not move his hands lower. The long, entreating movements of his legs were muffled by all the material of her full skirt; still, she could feel Erich’s lower body between her legs.
And then she felt the thrust of his hardness against her. Through layers of soft clothing came an insistent, gentle battering. She tightened her arms around his back and twisted her head to one side, hiding her face against the sofa seat, concentrating on this new sensation. Erich’s body arched and shoved, and Jean’s body replied, searching to keep the connection. Her underpants were wet, and their struggles made the silk of her slip slide against her inner thighs and against her crotch, causing small exquisite thrills, along with the deeper, blunter pleasure of Erich’s hardness pushing against her flesh.
Erich supported his weight on one arm as he burrowed his face into her neck, kissing and biting lightly. She wanted to force him into her, and she ground against him with such strength it almost seemed she would in spite of all their clothing.
“Oh,” she cried. “Oh, Erich. Please.”
He let all his weight fall upon her. He took her face in his two hands and turned her mouth to meet his. His mouth crushed hers. His body crushed hers.
Suddenly he pulled away from her. With a series of awkward, almost desperate movements, he pushed himself up and away until he ended up sitting at the far end of the sofa. A lock of dark hair had fallen down over his forehead, and he pushed it back. His chest was heaving. Jean, embarrassed and baffled, sat up, pulled herself together, and rearranged her disheveled clothing.
“I’m sorry,” Erich said.
“ ‘Sorry’!” Jean repeated, shocked. It was the last thing she’d expected him to say.
“That was ungentlemanly of me. To force myself on you.”
“It wasn’t—you weren’t—” She did not know how to respond. Certainly Al had never moved in on her with such ferocity, but she had never wanted him to. Al’s kisses, caresses, what few there had been, had been gentle—considerate.
“We should rejoin the others,” Erich said, rising. “They’ll be wondering where we’ve gone. There’s a—powder room—through that door if you’d like to freshen up.”
Jean collected her purse and went into the privacy of the hotel bathroom. Her face in the mirror dazzled her. She was radiant, flushed, glowing, beautiful. How could he resist her! What an odd man he was, what a mixture of impulse and restraint!
By the time she came out of the bathroom, he had smoothed and straightened his clothing, and together in silence they left the hotel suite and walked down the hall to the ballroom door. The pulse of music struck Jean’s senses like a blow: so much noise and movement, laughter, light—an entire world was going on. They slipped back into place among the dancers. Erich held Jean just a slight bit away from him, so that their legs and chests did not touch. A glaze had come over Erich’s face, and his eyes were distant. It was almost as if he were angry with her—but why?
They rejoined the banking crowd gathered around the tables. Many people had gone home. Jean looked at her watch and was startled to see that it was almost two o’clock. They had been together on the sofa for almost two hours! It had flashed by like an instant.
“I should take you home now,” Erich said, coming around the table to stand next to her. “We don’t want your parents to worry.”
“They may not be home yet from their own parties!” Jean protested.
But Erich did not relent. He stood, smiling a somehow official smile, while she gathered up her purse and said polite good nights to the people around her. At the coat check he helped her into her fur with only the briefest of touches. He was silent as they walked through the lobby of the hotel and waited for the man to bring the car around.