while mused on what a romance with the young English-woman might be like; but it was the merest daydreaming. He remained devoted to his wife, in his fashion. Rhoda had received her husband back with a puzzling mixture of moods — demonstrative affection, and even lust, alternating with spells of heavy gloom, coldness, and loud irascibility over her move back to Washington from New York.
She levelled off to a low-temperature detachment, busying herself with Bundles for Britain and her old-time music committees, and making numerous trips to New York for one reason or another. She sometimes mentioned Palmer Kirby, now one of the chairmen of Bundles for Britain, in a most casual way. Rhoda went to church with Pug and sang the hymns, and relayed gossip about unfaithful Navy wives, all exactly as before. She was plainly disappointed when Pug went back to War Plans instead of getting a command at sea. But they settled back into their old routines, and Pug soon was too preoccupied to worry much about Rhoda’s moods, which had always been jagged.
News about their children intermittently drew them together. Byron’s offhand letter about his hasty marriage in Lisbon was a shock. They talked for days about it, worrying, agonizing, comforting each other, before resigning themselves to live with the fact. Warren as usual sent the good news. His wife was returning to Washington to have her baby, and he had been promoted to lieutenant.
Pug turned fifty on a Sunday early in March. He sat in church beside his wife trying, as he listened to the choir sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” to shake off a sense that he had missed all the right turns in life. He counted his blessings. His wife was still beautiful, still capable of love; if she had failings, what woman didn’t? His two sons were naval officers, his daughter was self-supporting and clever. Perhaps his career had gone off the rails, but he was serving in a post where he was doing some good. He could not really complain.
Rhoda, as she sat there beside him, was thinking mainly about the fact that her husband, for the first time since his return from abroad, would soon be meeting Palmer Kirby face to face.
A snowstorm clogged the capital on the night of Rhoda’s dinner party. By quarter past seven her guests, including Kirby, had straggled in, brushing and stamping off snow, but the dinner was still stalled. Pug was missing.
In the cramped hot kitchen of an elegant little furnished house on Tracy Place, rented from a millionaire who was now the ambassador to Brazil, Rhoda made a last-minute check of the dinner and found all in order: soup hot, ducks tender, vegetables on the boil, cook snarling over the delay. She sailed out to her guests after a scowl in the hallway mirror and a touch at her hairdo. Rhoda wore a silvery dress molded to her figure; her color was high, her eyes bright with nervous excitement. In the living room, Kirby and Pamela Tudsbury were talking on the big couch, Madeline and Janice had their heads together in a corner, and on facing settees before a log fire, Alistair Tudsbury and Lord Burne-Wilke were chatting with the recently elected Senator Lacouture and his wife. It was a hodgepodge company, but since it was for a hurried dinner before a Bundles for Britain concert, she was not too concerned. Pug’s meeting with Kirby was the chief thing on her mind.
“We’ll wait ten more minutes.” Rhoda sat herself beside the scientist. “Then we’ll have to eat. I’m on the committee.”
“Where is Captain Henry?” Pamela said calmly. Her mauve dress came to a halter around her neck, leaving her slim shoulders naked; her tawny hair was piled high on her head. Rhoda remembered Pamela Tudsbury as a mousy girl, but this was no mouse; Rhoda recognized Kirby’s expression of lazy genial appetite.
“I’m blessed if I can say. Military secrecy covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it?” Rhoda laughed. “Let’s hope he’s working on defense, and not a blonde.”
“I very much doubt that it’s a blonde,” said Pamela. “Not Captain Henry.”
“Oh, these goody-goody ones are the worst, my dear. That’s a divine dress.”
“So you like it? Thank you.” Pamela adjusted the skirt. “I feel all got up for a pantomime, almost. I’ve been in uniform day and night for weeks.”
“Does Lord Burne-Wilke drive you that hard?”
“Oh no, Mrs. Henry. There really are masses of things to do. I feel so lucky at being in Washington, that I guess I work off my guilt with the late hours.”
“The Waring Hotel then would be the best bet, Pamela?” Kirby’s tone took up the conversation Rhoda had broken into.
“If they’ve repaired the bomb damage. By now, they should have. The Germans went after Buckingham Palace very hard, and the whole neighborhood took quite a beating, but that was back in October.”
“I’ll shoot a cable to the Waring tomorrow.”
“Why, Palmer, are you going to London?” said Rhoda.
Kirby turned to her, crossing his long legs. “It appears so.”
“Isn’t that something new?”
“It’s been in the works for a while.”
“London! How adventurous.” Rhoda laughed, covering her surprise.
Mrs. Lacouture’s voice rose above the talk. “Janice, should you be drinking all those martinis?”
“Oh, Mother,” said Janice, as the white-coated old Filipino, a retired Navy steward hired by Rhoda for the evening, shakily filled the glass in her outstretched hand.
“That baby will be born with an olive in its mouth,” remarked the senator. The two Englishmen laughed heartily, and Lacouture’s pink face wrinkled up with self-satisfaction.
“So, you did see Byron,” Janice said to Madeline. “When was this?”
“A couple of weeks ago. His submarine put in at the Brooklyn Navy Yard overnight. He took me to dinner.”
“How was he?”
“He’s — I don’t know — more distant. Almost chilly. I don’t think he likes the Navy much.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like being married much,” Janice said. “I never heard of anything so peculiar! A couple of days of whoop-de-do in Lisbon, and back she goes to Italy, and off he chugs in his little S-boat. Why on earth did they bother to get married?”
“Well, possibly a Jewish girl would insist,” Madeline said in arch tones.
Janice laughed shortly. “That may well be. I’ll say this, she’s a mighty bright and pretty one.” She grimaced, moving her large stomach under her flowing green gown, trying to get more comfortable. “Ugh, what a bloated cow I am. This is what it all leads to, honey. Never forget it. And how’s your love life?”
“Oh dear. Well -” Madeline glanced toward her mother. “You remember that trombone player? With the big sad eyes, the one who dressed all in brown?”
“That Communist? Oh, Madeline, don’t tell me -”
“Oh, no, no. Bozey was an utter drip. But I went with him to this peace rally at Madison Square Garden. It was really something, jam-packed, and this gigantic red, white, and blue sign stretching clear across the Garden — THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING” — Madeline waved her hands far apart — “and all these Loyalist Spain songs, and these mass chants they do, and novelists and poets and college professors making red-hot antiwar speeches and whatnot. Well, there was this other fellow in our box. He writes horror programs. He’s very successful, he makes about five hundred dollars a week, and he’s handsome, but he’s another Communist.” Madeline sneezed, blew her nose, and looked slyly at Janice. “What do you think would jolt my family more, Byron’s Jewish girl or a Communist? Bob comes from Minnesota, he’s a Swede at least. He’s awfully nice.”
Janice said, “What about that boss of yours?”
“Hugh Cleveland? What about him?”
The two young women regarded each other. Wry knowing wrinkles turned up the corners of Janice’s mouth.
Madeline colored under the rouge and powder on her pallid face. “Yes? Why the grin, Janice?” She drank most of her martini.
“Oh, I don’t know. You keep taking up with one impossible fellow after another.”
“If you mean am I lying in wait for Mr. Cleveland,” Madeline said with her father’s briskness, “you’re about as wrong as you can be. He’s a paunchy pink-haired, freckled man, ten years older than I am, and personally I regard him as a snake.”
“Snakes have the power to hypnotize, dear.”
“Yes, rabbits and birds. I’m neither.”
