“You’re sharp, I’ll give you that,” she said, and snapped the suitcase shut, settled the camera more securely over her shoulder and, still holding the envelope, moved out into the hall. “If you wouldn’t mind getting the door?”
Celia opened it. Stedman Circle still had trees in spite of encroaching industry, and shadows stirred over the polish of the dark-gray Imperial parked outside. “I won’t say goodbye,” said Mrs. Cannon to Celia with a curiously menacing head-to-toe smile, “because we never know what might come up, do we? I’ll just say . . . no, I won’t say that either.”
She walked rapidly down the steps, closed herself and her cargo into the car with an expensive thump, and drove away. Celia, gazing after her, puzzled over that last phrase and decided that Mrs. Cannon had toyed with, and discarded, “good luck.”
The house was appraised at $56,500, and the real-estate firm engaged by Celia’s lawyer—she had been horrified to find that she needed a lawyer—was of the opinion that a buyer would not be hard to find. She was also dismayed to learn that the periodic services of the gardener who kept the rear of 4 Stedman Circle from turning into a weedy jungle were now being charged to her.
Accustomed as she was to room and board, she was astonished at the speed with which money melted away. Breakfasts of tomato juice and coffee, frugal drugstore lunches, the hotel’s special for dinner, mounted to what seemed like an astronomical sum. When you did not wear launderable uniforms, clothes and dry cleaning took another bite. City pavements were ruinous to the lifts on heels.
And there was the five dollars—an unvarying sum since Celia had first gone to work at the Stevensons’—that went weekly to her family. She sent it out of wariness rather than any feeling of obligation, because although she had Anglicized her name it was always possible that, if the money stopped, they might trace her somehow and, discovering the legacy, descend upon her like wolves. Celia had not seen any of them for four years, and in fact had only a vague idea of the ages of her younger sisters and brothers, but she was coldly sure that they would want appendixes out, or night school, or wedding garments. The only dream that ever frightened her contained the flaking yellow tenement in Bridgeport and its spongelike demand for cash.
She would never be reduced to that again. When she got the money from the sale of the house she would buy a few really good clothes and then she would . . . what?
On her first visits to New York she had been awed and dazzled by the sleek, pretty, astonishingly well-dressed girls who poured out of elevators in marble lobbies every afternoon. Now, less awed, she studied them at greater length and knew without regret that theirs was a world in which she could not compete even if she mastered shorthand. They had some indefinable quality which she would never possess—lightheartedness? The confidence instilled by high school dates and college proms and added to ever since? Whatever it was, they were as clustered as birds and as given to carefree, spontaneous cascades of sound.
But for all their wit and intelligence they were, to Celia, in ruts. Smooth and attractive ruts, certainly, but still. She had no idea, as she watched them at Schrafft’s, that she had somewhat the air of a puma observing house cats.
She was not yet articulate enough to put her own situation into words, but she had had a taste of power. She had done her real maturing among the extremely well-to-do, if not the actually wealthy, and what she really wanted was to be accepted on their own level by the kind of people for whom she had brought cocktails, pressed evening dresses, peeled small yellow grapes, on one unforgettable occasion, for a guest who idly fancied them with rum and powdered sugar. To be, not “Celia” but “There’s Celia Brett.”
To another girl who less than five years ago had stumbled over her English and painstakingly learned how to set a dinner table, it might have seemed a ridiculous goal. To Celia, waiting for the sale of a house snatched from the jaws of Mrs. Cannon, it did not seem impossible at all.
She took the first step almost by accident.
Seven
CELIA’S room, one of the cheapest at the Hotel Alexandra, was in a kind of twilight zone between other guests and the servants’ quarters. On one side was a room usually allotted to transients—the Alexandra thought of itself as a family residential hotel—and on the other side dwelt Mrs. Pond, the hotel’s social director.
It was an inflated title for the somewhat spiritless activities that went on at the Alexandra, or would have been except for Mrs. Pond. Lithe, mid-thirtyish, invariably in black as though it had been invented for her, she had a low husky voice, wise green eyes, and the gift of making an assemblage for bingo seem as exciting as though naughty movies were about to be shown. Somehow she had maneuvered the management into providing her with a small office in the comer of the lobby, furnished with cypress and lime tweed, and here, with the chef, she plotted the intricacies of old Mrs. Blaine’s birthday dinner party or, with the manager, discussed the feasibility of a weekly puppet show for the many children who swarmed about the place. She was decorative in the dining room every evening; it was thought that a great many single men, and possibly a few others, came back to the Alexandra because of Mrs. Pond.
She was also surprisingly and genuinely friendly. She and Celia encountered each other often in their corridor,
