and flicked the spectacles off. It was Cathy Slocum; I hadn’t recognized her until then. The glasses and the look they gave her had added ten years to her age, and the shape of her body was misleading. It was one of those female bodies that bloomed very young. Her eyes were large and deep like her mother’s, and she had better lines. I could understand the chauffeur’s passion for her. But she was very young.
“My name is Archer,” I said.
She gave me a long, cool look, but didn’t know me. “I’m Cathy Slocum. Is it mother or grandmother you want to see?”
“Mother. She asked me to the party.”
“It’s not her party,” she said under her breath to herself. A spoiled-little-girl look made two black vertical lines between her eyebrows. Then she remembered me, and smoothed them out, and asked me very sweetly: “Are you a friend of mother’s, Mr. Archer?”
“A friend of a friend’s. Would you like my Bertillon measurements?”
She was clever enough to get it, and young enough to blush. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude—we see so few strangers.” Which might account for her interest in a rough-talking chauffeur named Reavis. “Mother’s just come up from the pool, and she’s dressing, and father hasn’t come home. Would you care to sit down?”
“Thank you.” I followed the tall fine body to the swing, amused by the fact that it contained an adolescent who had to be reminded of her manners. Not a usual adolescent, though. The book in her hand, when she laid it down on the cushion between us, turned out to be a book on psychoanalysis by Karen Horney.
She began to make conversation, swinging the spectacles back and forth by one end: “Father’s rehearsing a play in Quinto, that’s what the party’s about. He’s really a very fine actor, you know.” She said it a little defensively.
“I know. Much better than the play.”
“Have you seen the play?”
“I caught a scene of it this afternoon.”
“And what did you think of it? Isn’t it well written?”
“Well enough,” I said, without enthusiasm.
“But what do you really think of it?”
Her look was so candid and girlish that I told her. “They should jack up the title and build a new play under it and change the title. If what I saw was a fair sample.”
“But everyone who’s seen it thinks it’s a masterpiece. Are you interested in the theatre, Mr. Archer?”
“Do you mean do I know what I’m talking about? Probably not. I work for a man in Hollywood who deals in literary properties. He sent me up to look at it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Hollywood. Father says it’s much too literary for Hollywood, and it’s not written to a formula. Mr. Marvell plans to take it to Broadway. Their standards are much subtler, don’t you think?”
“Much. Who is Mr. Marvell? I know he’s author-director of the play…”
“He’s and English poet. He went to Oxford, and his uncle’s a lord. He’s a good friend of father’s, and father likes his poetry and I tried to read some of it but I couldn’t understand it. It’s awfully difficult and symbolic, like Dylan Thomas.”
The name rang no bell. “Is your father going along, when Marvell takes the play to New York?”
“Oh, no.” The swinging spectacles described a full circle and struck against her knee with an audible tap. She put them on again. They lengthened and aged her face, and gave it piquancy. “Father’s just helping Francis out. He’s putting it on to try and get some backing. Father has no histrionic ambitions, though he is a really fine actor, don’t you think?”
A mediocre amateur, I thought. I said: “No question about it.” When the girl mentioned her father, as she frequently did, her mouth went flower-soft and her hands were still.
But when he mounted the veranda a few minutes later, with Marvell skipping beside him up the steps, she looked at James Slocum as if she were afraid of him. Her fingers interlaced and strained against each other. I noticed that the nails were bitten stubby.
“Hello, father.” The words left her mouth ajar, and the tip of her tongue moved along her upper lip.
He walked toward us purposefully, a middle-sized, thin-chested man who should have had a Greek torso to support his startling head. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Cathy.” The sensitive mouth was stern. “I expected you to wait for me at the theatre.”
“Yes, father.” She turned to me. “Do you know my father, Mr. Archer?”
I stood up and said hello. He looked me over with his sad brown eyes, and gave me a limp hand as an afterthought. “Francis,” he said to the blond man at his shoulder: “See if you and Archer can find a drink for yourselves. I’d like to have a moment with Cathy here.”
“Right.” Marvell touched me in the small of the back, ushering me to the front door. Cathy watched us go. Her father stood looking down at her with one hand on his hip, the other at his chin, in an actorish pose.
We entered a living-room as dim and cool as a cave. The windows were few and small, masked by Venetian blinds which laid horizontal bars across the light. The barred light fell on a floor of black oak, partly covered with faded Persian rugs. The furniture was heavy and old: a rosewood concert grand at the end of the room, carved elaborately to nineteenth-century taste, stiff-backed chairs of mahogany, a tapestried divan in front of the deep fireplace. The beams that supported the time-stained plaster ceiling were black oak like the floor. A chandelier of yellowing crystal hung down from the central beam like a misshaped stalactite.
“Queer old place, what?” Marvell said to me. “Well, what shall it be, old boy? A Scotch and soda?”
“Fine.”
“I expect I’ll have to look you up some ice.”
“Don’t bother.”
“No bother at all. I know where everything is.” He trotted away, his light hair flying in the wind of his own motion. For the nephew of a lord, he was very obliging. I myself was the nephew of my late Uncle Jake, who once went fifteen rounds with Gunboat Smith, to no decision.
I tried to remember what my Uncle Jake looked like. I could remember the smell of him, compounded of bay rum, hair oil, strong clean masculine sweat and good tobacco, and the taste of the dark chocolate cigarettes he brought me the day my father took me to San Francisco for the first time; but I couldn’t remember his face. My mother never kept his pictures, because she was ashamed to have a professional fighter in the family.
The murmur of voices drew me to a window which open outward onto the veranda. I sat down in a straight chair against the wall, hidden from outside by the heavy drapes and the half-closed blind. Cathy and her father were talking on the swing.
“I didn’t see him afterwards,” she said tensely. “I walked out and got in the car and drove myself home. He wasn’t even in sight.”
“But I know he drove you home. I saw his cap on the front seat of the car just now.”
“He must have left it before. I swear I didn’t see him after.”
“How can I believe you, Cathy?” The man’s voice held genuine torment. “You’ve lied to me before, about him, too. You promised me you’d have nothing to do with him, or any other man, until you were older.”
“But I didn’t! I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You let him kiss you.”
“He made me. I tried to get away.” A trace of hysteria came into her voice like a thin entering wedge.
“You must have encouraged him in some way. A man doesn’t act like that without a reason, surely. Think about it, Cathy, didn’t you do or say something which might have led him on?” He was trying to be cool and fair, the impersonal cross-examiner, but hurt and rage buzzed like blundering insects in his tone.
“Led him on, father. That’s a hideous thing to say.” The onset of sobbing rocked her words.
“Darling,” he said. “Poor darling.” The swing creaked as he leaned toward her, and the sobs were smothered. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Cathy, you know that. It’s simply because I love you that I’m so concerned about this— this ugly thing.”
“I love you too, father.” The words were muffled, probably by his shoulder.
“I wish I could believe that,” he said gently.
“But I do, father, I do. I think you’re the best man in the world.”
There was something queer about the conversation, made stranger still by the girl’s extreme urgency. They could have been two lovers, of the same age.
