“Marilyn, “ he said. “It g good to see you.
“You remembered!” she cried, obviously pleased. He was surprised himself He had not seen her for years. Her brother was one of his gang at college and the last time he saw her was just before graduation—before the caterpillar had turned into a butterfly.
“Have you seen Vannie since you got back?’ she asked abruptly. The question caught him totally off balance. Before he could answer, she said, “Oh, that was catty of me. I know you haven’t seen her, she’s my best friend.”
“Vanessa Bromley?”
She nodded.
“How about that,” he said for lack of anything better.
They started strolling toward the front of the big room to get a better look at the Goodman Trio.
“Is she here?” he asked.
“She will be. She’s at the th-e-ah-tah.” She closed her eyes and elongated the word with mock sophistication, then she stared up at him and quickly added, “But she’d walk out in a second if she knew you were here.”
“Stop that,” he said irritably.
The tall, bespectacled bandleader was like the calm in the center of a hurricane. Only his fingers seemed excited, fleeing across his clarinet as though the keys were on fire while the baby-faced Krupa was his antithesis, an entranced whirlwind, turning every drumbeat into a pistol shot.
“Please don’t leave until she gets here, “Marilyn blurted out. “She’s very unhappy.”
“Marilyn. .
“Anyway, this is fun. I haven’t seen you for. . . ten years? Ten years! My dad loved you. Said you were the only crazy one in the whole gang.”
“I’ve never met Freddie Armistead?”
“Freddie wasn‘t crazy, he was hopelessly insane,”
Keegan smiled at the memory, despite himself ‘Remember when he dug that hole in the Quad and put the horse in it? Took them all day to dig it out. They never did figure out who did it.”
‘Wonder what ever happened to old Armistead?” she said. “He vanished into thin air after graduation. And remember Lyle Thornton?”
“Old Turkey Thornton?”
“Oh God, how he hated that nickname. Were you responsible for that?”
‘Nah,” Keegan said unconvincingly. “But he did look like a turkey.”
She hunched up her shoulders and giggled. “Looked exactly like a turkey, “she said. She squinched up her nose. “That little scrawny neck.”
“How about that beak of his?”
“That’s cruel, Francis.”
“C ‘mon, he had a nose the size of a baseball bat.”
“Did you hear about his father? Got cleaned out in the crash, went out to Chicago and jumped out a window of the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Old Turkey floundered around for a couple of years, then he married rich and his father-in-law bought him a seat on the stock exchange for a wedding present, probably so he wouldn‘t have to support him.”
“Lyle Llewellyn Thornton, the Third, “Keegan reflected. “You have to be rich with a name like that. Who’d he get to marry him?”
“Vannie,” Marilyn answered bluntly.
“Vannie!” he said. “Vannie married Turkey Thornton! ?“
“Doesn’t make a bit of sense, does it?” Marilyn said. “One of the true mysteries of the twentieth century.
“Maybe he has some hidden talent we don‘t know about, “ Keegan suggested.
“I really don ‘t think so, “Marilyn answered. “He got involved in the theater. Turkey got a couple of uptowners involved with a Broadway show. Lo and behold it turned out to be The Gay Divorce. Now everybody thinks he can smell a hit a mile off He’s been dabbling in it ever since. They have a townhouse on East 83rd, half a block off the Park, and a summer house on Cape Cod. “She stopped for a moment and flicked a speck of confetti off her shoulder. “She’s absolutely miserable.
“Miserable?”
“Thornton turned into an absolute ogre. He knocks her around, stays out for days at a time. Once the little SOB got his hands on the money ...“ She let the sentence die, then added, “She talks about you all the time, has ever since that summer in Germany.”
“It was two days, Marilyn.
“And she never forgot it, “she said, finishing the sentence. “What are you, the Upper East Side matchmaker?”
“No. I just hate to see my friends unhappy. I have no complaints,
I’m very lucky. Happily married, have two girls who ‘Ii knock your eyes out, a big house in Westport, and a husband who dotes on me. “She stared up at him with the big green saucers. “Whyn‘t you just stay long enough to say hello to her, “ she pleaded.
