mower.
When the raffle is over and the dancing begins again, he goes out onto the terrace for a breath of air, and we follow him and speak to him there.
“Victor?”
“Oh, how nice to see you again,” he exclaims. “What in the world are you doing in Pittsburgh?” His hair has grayed along conventionally handsome lines. He must have had some work done on his teeth, because his smile is whiter and more dazzling than ever. The talk is the conversation of acquaintances who have not met for ten or fifteen years?it has been that long?about this and that, then about Theresa, then about Violet. At the mention of Violet, he seems very sad. He sets the megaphone on the stone terrace and leans on its metal rim. He bows his head. “Well, Violet is sixteen now, you know,” he says. “She’s given me a lot to worry about. She was suspended from school about six weeks ago. Now I’ve got her into a new school in Connecticut. It took a lot of doing.” He sniffs.
“How long have you been in Pittsburgh, Victor?”
“Eight years,” he says. He swings the megaphone into the air and peers through it at a star. “Nine, actually,” he says.
“What are you doing, Victor?”
“I’m between jobs now.” He lets the megaphone fall.
“Where are you living, Victor?”
“Here,” he says.
“I know. But where in Pittsburgh?”
“Here,” he says. He laughs. “We live here. At Salisbury Hall. Here’s the head of the dance committee, and if you’ll excuse me, I’ll make my report on the raffle. It’s been very nice to see you again.”
ANYONE?ANYONE, that is, who did not eat peas off a knife?might have been invited to Salisbury Hall when the Mackenzies first went there. They had only just arrived in Pittsburgh, and were living in a hotel. They drove out with some friends for a weekend. There were fourteen or fifteen guests in the party, and Prescott Brownlee, the old lady’s eldest son. There was some trouble before dinner. Prescott got drunk at a roadhouse near the estate, and the bartender called Mrs. Brownlee and told her to have him removed before he called the police. The old lady was used to this kind of trouble. Her children were in it most of the time, but that afternoon she did not know where to turn for help. Nils, the houseman, hated Prescott. The gardener had gone home. Ernest, the butler, was too old. Then she remembered Victor’s face, although she had only glimpsed it in the hall when they were introduced. She found him in the Great Hall and called him aside. He thought he was going to be asked to mix the cocktails. When she made her request, he said that he would be glad to help. He drove to the roadhouse, where he found Prescott sitting at a table. Someone had given him a bloody nose, and his clothing was splattered with blood, but he was still pugnacious, and when Victor told him to come home, he got up swinging. Victor knocked him down. This subdued Prescott, who began to cry and stumbled obediently out to the car. Victor returned to Salisbury Hall by a service driveway. Then, supporting Prescott, who could not walk, he got him into a side door that opened into the armory. No one saw them. The air in the unheated room was harsh and bitter. Victor pushed the sobbing drunk under the rags of royal battle flags and pennants that hung from the rafters and past a statue of a man on horseback that displayed a suit of equestrian armor. He got Prescott up a marble staircase and put him to bed. Then he brushed the sawdust off his own evening clothes and went down to the Great Hall and made the cocktails.
He didn’t mention this incident to anyone?not even to Theresa and on Sunday afternoon Mrs. Brownlee took him aside again, to thank him. “Oh, bless your heart, Mr. Mackenzie!” she said. “You’re a good Samaritan. When that man called me up yesterday, I didn’t know where to turn.” They heard someone approaching across the Great Hall. It was Prescott. He had shaved, dressed his wounds, and soaked his hair down with water, but he was drunk again. “Going to New York,” he mumbled to his mother. “Ernest’s going to drive me to the plane. See you.” He turned and wandered back across the library into the Venetian Salon and out of sight, and his mother set her teeth as she watched him go. Then she seized Victor’s hand and said, “I want you and your lovely wife to come and live at Salisbury Hall. I know that you’re living in a hotel. My house has always been known for its atmosphere of hospitality as well as for its wealth of artistic treasures. You’ll be doing me a favor. That’s what it amounts to.”
The Mackenzies gracefully declined her offer and returned to Pittsburgh on Sunday night. A few days later, the old lady, hearing that Theresa was sick in bed, sent flowers, and a note repeating her invitation. The Mackenzies discussed it that night. “We must think of it as a business arrangement, if we think of it at all,” Victor said. “We must think of it as the practical answer to a practical problem.” Theresa had always been frail, and living in the country would be good for her. This was the first thing they thought of. Victor had a job in town, but he could commute from the railroad station nearest Salisbury Hall. They talked with Mrs. Brownlee again and got her to agree to accept from them what they would have paid for rent and food, so that the arrangement would be kept impersonal. Then they moved into a suite of rooms above the Great Hall.
It worked out very well. Their rooms were large and quiet, and the relationship with Mrs. Brownlee was easygoing. Any sense of obligation they may have felt was dispelled by their knowing that they were useful to their hostess in a hundred ways. She needed a man around the place, and who else would want to live in Salisbury Hall? Except for gala occasions, more than half the rooms were shut, and there were not enough servants to intimidate the rats that lived in the basement. Theresa undertook the herculean task of repairing Mrs. Brownlee’s needlepoint; there were eighty-six pieces. The tennis court at Salisbury Hall had been neglected since the war, and Victor, on his weekends, weeded and rolled it and got it in shape again. He absorbed a lot of information about Mrs. Brownlee’s house and her scattered family, and when she was too tired to take interested guests around the place,
