She was impressed at once. She could not actually bring to mind its former tubbed evergreens or doorman or crimson carpeting, but even to her eyes the lobby, now ornamented only with a dim mirror, a table, an urn full of sand and a long strip of black rubber matting, had an air of past opulence. She mounted four flights of stairs, each broken by a half-landing, and was met at the top by a girl in front of an open door marked 4A.
“You’re Celia Brett, and I’m sorry about the stairs— that sounds silly, doesn’t it? I mean I’m Mary Ellen Vestry, and come on in and catch your breath.”
She was as young as Celia had guessed, possibly twenty-two, with a waifish look which was then fashionable but seemed in her case to have sprung from some real illness. Her small face was almost luminescently pale, dark-rimmed glasses so large that they might have come from a disguise kit pointed up her gray eyes, her short light-brown hair clung about her head with the silky helplessness of a child’s.
She wore a blue-and-white-striped top and a pair of navy jeans into which a boy of ten could have fitted easily, but the magazine-tutored Celia recognized her sandals as imports. She said over her shoulder, ushering the way up a narrow hall stacked with cartons, “You’re seeing the place at its worst, I’m afraid, I’m not really settled yet, but that’s just as well because you’d—well, anyone would— have things that you’d want to . .
They had reached the doorway of a long, radiant, deep-windowed living room. The girl said with evident relief, “My sister, Susan . . . David Macintosh.”
Introductions were exchanged, along with remarks about what a rainy night it was. Although Susan Vestry, an older and more poised version of her sister, had been sharing a couch with the man, he obviously belonged to Mary Ellen: her face had lit to a glow. Celia did not stare, although a peculiar warmth crept in around the edges of her consciousness. She followed her hostess on a tour of the apartment: small but complete kitchen, tiny pantry, half-bath, full bath, good-sized bedroom across the hall from a slightly smaller one. She hardly heard the trailing commentary: “The landlord says he’ll put another towel rack in, but do you suppose he really will?” and “That isn’t much of a view unless you’re crazy about garbage cans, but the people seem to be quiet.”
The man back there in the living room was not Hugh Stevenson, and did not even resemble him, but something —the way his hair grew at the back of his head, or his height or his easy stance—was uncannily reminding. Celia had not consciously resented her banishment after that swift mistaken kiss, and it was with surprise that she listened to an inner voice saying with fierce pleasure, “There is no Mrs. Stevenson here.”
“Well, that’s it,” said Mary Ellen Vestry, leading the way out into the hall again. Her left hand, ringless, although it would not have mattered, had gone out to the wall switch in the second bedroom. “Do you think . . . is this what you had in mind?”
Celia was not given to easy social smiles, but she smiled now, a little downwardly, because Mary Ellen was small. “Very much so,” she said.
Eight
CELIA had been correct in her assumption that even in the impersonality of New York her background would be inquired into, however politely and indirectly. After her first look at Mary Ellen and the realization that this was the opportunity she had been hoping for, she had decided upon a scrap of conversation overheard at Mr. Tomlinson’s house. As well as sounding selfless and noble, it had the virtue of accounting for her lack of friends.
Not that there was anything as crude as an outright question; Susan Vestry, who seemed to be in charge of this aspect, merely led the conversation to the very edge of inviting little silences. Into one of these, Celia remarked that she had only been living in New York for a few weeks: her mother s final illness, at their home in Connecticut, had been a lengthy one.
“The doctor suggested a nursing home, and I suppose there are good ones, but . . .” She gazed pensively down at her hands, which in the last few seconds had more than justified their unmistakable traces of physical labor, and then up again with a forthright air of not wanting to inflict her troubles on others. “Luckily there was a little money left, and New York seemed like the best place to look for a job.”
She could not have given a wiser account of herself. There was a sympathetic and admiring glance from Mary Ellen, an impulsive murmur of “I’m sure you won’t have any trouble” from Susan Vestry. The man glanced at Celia over a match he was holding to his cigarette, but she sensed approval from that quarter as well.
In return, she learned that the Vestry family lived on Long Island, and that this apartment sprang from Mary Ellen’s newly acquired job at a nearby bookshop. She worked for fun, Celia thought with certainty and not a trace of bitterness; this was, after all, exactly the atmosphere at which she had been aiming. In fact, Mary Ellen seemed altogether like one of the girls the fashion magazines were so fond of: the well-bred baby leaving the nest to try her wings in the city, the family solicitude shown with careful casualness in the presence, tonight, of the older sister.
There was certainly money in the background. Even in her relative ignorance of New York wage scales Celia was sure that no bookstore job could support this apartment with its soft gray walls and
