The cough is nothing unusual at first. She has had plenty of coughs. You don’t get to be however old she is without having had coughs. The nurse who looks like a chest of drawers — a highboy — makes more fuss than Penelope thinks is necessary. Matt comes to visit. Penelope hopes the nurse has not called him. He assures her he was coming anyway, that he comes every day. She doubts that, but it doesn’t seem worth challenging him. He is looking happier, she thinks, though happier than what she does not know. When was the last time she saw him?
They sit in the solarium. That’s the name they have given the plastic bubble at the end of the hall. She laughed at the pretentiousness the first time, but she has come to accept the name, to use it when she can remember it. The other prisoners tend to avoid the sun. She is tempted to make a vampire joke to Matt but she is not sure how he will take it. As a small child he used to come out with the most outrageous things. Thora and she would laugh and laugh. But she is not sure he is funny anymore. So she just tells him it’s nice and quiet in the greenhouse, or whatever you call it.
He has brought along one of her mother’s bags — or it may be hers. “Where did you find this?”
“In the workroom. I’ve been doing a bit of organizing.”
She suspects she is supposed to apologize for something here. “Clearing out, you mean?”
“I thought some of it might be fun for you to look at.”
Fun. How little he knows.
He unfolds a yellowed square of newsprint. “Would you like me to read it to you?”
“How do I know? What if it’s my obituary?”
“What if it’s mine?”
Good. Maybe he is still funny. “I can read just fine.” She takes the paper from him. It is and it isn’t an obituary. She looks through the names. Lily Pons. The singer. She died of something miserable. Pancreatic cancer. Penelope remembers that because her Mount A roommate died of the same thing a few years later. Myrna Loy. The movie star lived much longer, she thinks, into her late eighties at least, though she had two mastectomies in the seventies, not long after Penelope saw her on Broadway in that play with all the women. Then there is the painter. Is he dead? She cannot recall. He was older than she, though she didn’t think much about that during that long-ago summer.
It has been years since she has been to an actual party. Since the war, really, and at first she tells Robin no, she can’t join him, but then she relents when she sees his face fall. She knows she should be flattered that he has asked her, that he is so obviously prepared to be seen with her on his arm. What the townspeople will think is another matter. If they see them. Penelope doubts that any locals will be at the actual party itself, so it’s really only the getting there that’s a problem. She suggests she meet him there, pleads responsibilities at the shop that will claim her until a bit after the cocktail hour begins. She doesn’t want to hold him up.
She regrets the plan as soon as she begins the walk up the long driveway all by herself. With every step she takes, the house grows larger, more imposing. Thora has always told her the summer people are only people; somewhat foolish people, she often says, with more money than good sense. She had a hand in decorating some of the summer palaces forty years ago and she pronounced several of them utter follies — though she still cashed the cheques. As the three-story shingled facade looms above her, Penelope has a hard time convincing herself that everyone inside is just a person and the house just a house. She thinks she can hear the party around the back of the building and debates whether she can simply slip around or whether she must ring the front doorbell. Mercifully, Robin appears on a side verandah just as she is about to mount the steps. She throws herself into his arms with more fervor than she had meant to, hopes nobody else sees.
“You’ll spill my drink!” But he gives her a long kiss. His tongue tastes of gin. “Let’s go get you one.”
He sweeps her across the verandah, through an arbour, and onto the emerald expanse of the rear lawn. There is croquet set up. The slight slope in the direction of the water would pose some challenges, Penelope thinks. At a table with a linen cloth and a pyramid of cocktail glasses there is a barman who is somebody she went to school with, but he maintains his professional distance, pretends he has never seen her before. Or maybe he has forgotten or doesn’t recognize her.
Penelope does not really like martinis, not that she has had a lot of occasions to test her taste for them. But before she can ask for white wine, Robin has told the man to shake her one of what he’s having. “Olive or twist?” her schoolmate asks, and she thinks he is reminding her of the Dickens they read. “Olives. Two,” says Robin before she has caught up. She would rather have had lemon, looks at the pair of olives floating in the glass and can’t avoid thinking of testicles in formaldehyde.
Robin steers her past the croquet pitch to a terrace at the bottom of the garden. He wants her to see the view of the water, he says, but she sees that there is a knot of painters and poets that is probably the real draw. Surely, he knows she has seen the water from every possible angle, isn’t much impressed by new views of it. One of the artists, a woman in her late fifties who works mainly in pastels, is apparently quite popular with collectors in the States right now. She is Scandinavian but she draws and paints under an Irish name and didn’t burst onto the scene until she was a grandmother. Penelope wonders whether that isn’t what’s needed to make it in the art world: letting everyone know you are using an assumed name, or that you are a remarkably late bloomer. Something unique about you, unusual. Talent will only get you so far. Robin introduces her to the woman, whom he seems to know quite well. Penelope wonders whether he is trying to make the other woman jealous by showing off this thirty-two-year-old on his arm. He doesn’t call her his model or his mistress but both labels sit in the air around her, she knows. Rather, he describes her as a painter.
“And what do you paint, my dear?” The my dear sounds like the woman is expelling a turd.
“Actually, I work in felt. I make paintings out of felt. Landscapes. Seascapes.” She expects the woman to sniff and turn on her heel.
“How wonderful. How authentic. I want to know more. Come, walk with me. I need another drink.”
Penelope can’t tell whether the woman does actually want to know more or whether she simply wants to separate her from Robin, but she has no choice but to follow her back toward the bar. The woman seems genuinely interested to hear about Thora and the business and all of the background, but her eyes glaze over a little as Penelope begins to describe her methods. Perhaps it is the fresh martini, which she has downed in two gulps.
She is not reunited with Robin until the dinner gong sounds half an hour later, but she has by then been dumped by the Scandinavian-Irish grandmother and fallen in with a poet whose work she admires. They don’t talk about poetry or pictures. Rather, the poet fills her in on the guests of honour for the evening. When Penelope confronts Robin about why he has failed to mention their names to her, he shrugs and dismisses them as just people. She thinks of her mother, wonders how she would be faring in this milieu.
If you squint, Myrna Loy looks not much older than when Penelope first saw her on the screen in The Thin Man and Manhattan Melodrama, and that must be twenty years ago. She calculates, though, that Miss Loy must be about as old as Thora. Robin says she doesn’t do much film work anymore. She is busy with UNESCO. With her husband. Her fourth. Even from a distance, you can tell she is exactly the witty, bubbly person you saw on the screen. Penelope wishes she could read lips.
“She started out in the silents, you know,” Robin says. “Usually as a femme fatale. Asian or Eurasian, if you can believe it.”
Penelope can believe it, having just spent time with the Scandinavian who markets herself as Irish.
“All serious roles. Heavy. Louis B. Mayer didn’t want her cast in The Thin Man. The director really had to push.”
She knows that the director had in fact had to push Miss Loy into a swimming pool. He did it just to see how she’d react. That was her audition. Penelope had read all about that kind of thing when she was twelve. Robin seems to lose forty years and become about twelve around the celebrities, she thinks.
Lily Pons, she recognizes from her advertisements for Lockheed and Knox gelatin. She has heard recordings, of course, but she missed seeing her movies, not being a fan of the RKO operetta. Miss Pons is maybe a bit younger than Myrna Loy but it is impossible to tell. Robin is full of information about her too, but Penelope manages to tune much of it out. She’d be more curious to hear about the singer’s Russian husband, the conductor, but there Robin is no help.
After dinner, they are ushered back out onto the lawn where folding chairs have been set up in rows facing the house. From the upper-story windows an enormous white cloth has been hung, anchored at the bottom by the planters that line the rear verandah. Their host — somebody from Montréal to whom Penelope has not been introduced and whose name she has forgotten — stands in front of the makeshift screen, making obsequious remarks about Miss Loy and Miss Pons. Finally, he assures them all they are in for a huge treat, gesturing behind him at his oddly draped house.
There is the whir of a projector. “I love The Thin Man,” Penelope whispers to Robin. She has had a lot to drink and she nibbles his earlobe a little. But it is not Myrna Loy who appears on the huge screen. It is Lily Pons.
The film is in black and white and must be from the thirties. Even two decades later, Miss Pons’s costume draws gasps from the after-dinner crowd assembled in the cooling summer evening. Her breasts, about a quarter of the size to be expected in an opera singer, are held high and firm in a bandeau. Her midriff appears unapologetically bare (though likely encased in a stocking, Penelope thinks). But to call it a midriff is too clinical, and bare does not do it justice. The exposed belly button and the sensual curve below her tiny waist are eclipsed by the cross-gartering at her hips. Her long skirt is held up by two crossed straps that mark a spot exactly above where her bush must be. Between the upper and lower straps at either side, the smooth bare flesh of her hips pouts a tiny bit, beckoning, daring. It may be one of the sexiest outfits Penelope has ever seen. She squeezes Robin’s hand, puts it on her own thigh.
Although the sound is scratchy, the Little Nightingale’s coloratura is nearly as breathtaking as her costume. Mostly, what she is singing sounds like nonsense, although Penelope can pick out the odd French word. Diction is obviously thrown to the winds in favour of the incredible, exquisite high notes, though she thinks some of the highest may not have words assigned to them anyway. Robin tries to explain that this is the famous “Bell Song” from Delibes’s Lakmé, but she hushes him right away. It doesn’t matter. She wants to listen and watch and nothing more.
The piece is being sung as part of a staged performance, with an onstage audience made up in three equal parts of officials dressed in the awkward trappings of the British Raj, heavily made up Brahmins, and a third distinct group of sailors and soldiers. Penelope watches Pons charm them all with her waving arms and warbling voice. Several times during the five minutes the scene lasts, the camera cuts away to an audience bedecked in Western evening dress listening sedately in an ornate theatre auditorium. The tight tuxedos and stiff gowns and what you can tell, even in black and white, is blue-rinsed hair all send a chill through her. More menacing, though, she thinks, are the two men watching from a private box — a pair of leering pencil-thin moustaches and bow ties.
As Miss Pons finishes the song, the onstage Indian audience congratulates her while the onscreen theatre audience — Paris? New York? — rises to its feet. Moments later, as the fifty-eight-year-old singer steps in front of the now lifeless screen to take an awkward bow, the dinner guests in St. Andrews also offer a standing ovation. Penelope tries and fails to map the delicious hips and belly button of a few minutes before onto the evening-gowned body of the aging star. She thinks about all the levels of watching, of looking, wonders whether others too are trying to reconcile the celluloid memory of Lily Pons, tricks of light projected on a billowing screen, with the flesh-and-blood woman of the present moment.
Over a nightcap, Penelope meets Myrna Loy’s (fourth) husband. He says she looks very familiar and haven’t they met somewhere? He never forgets a face. Robin says that Penelope has been modelling for him a little this summer. The man says that must be it. Penelope thinks about Lily as Lakmé and Lily tonight and hopes that it is indeed her face and only her face that the man has not forgotten.
She and Robin have an argument about it as he walks her home to Birch Hall. She has tried to tell him about trying to reconcile the singer with her nubile former self and how she couldn’t look at Miss Pons the same after seeing the film. He claims not to understand. And then she asks him how many people have seen the paintings he has made of her.
She looks at the bag Matt has spread across his lap, the childish effort she had made at a coat of arms or something. And she thinks she knows what he is about to pull out next.