When young Hugh Stevenson came home from college for the summer, Celia’s education grew much wider. Then the house was full of people hardly older than she, all of whom seemed to possess sports cars. The boys she dismissed, even though she caught an occasional and interested raised eyebrow between them; it was on the girls that she trained her attention. Like a naturalist confronted with a new species, she studied the way they walked and sat and maneuvered themselves into coats held for them; their make-up, or largely lack of it that year; their clothes.
It was the clothes that sent up the first faint smoke-signal.
As the product of a large and poor family, Celia had learned, perforce, how to make primitive alterations on handed-down garments. When she had been with the Stevensons for a year and a half, she asked Mrs. Stevenson to teach her to sew. There was a machine, seldom used, in the daughter’s bedroom, and Mrs. Stevenson was pleased at this evidence of enterprise. Celia took well to instruction—her neat-handedness had never been more to the fore—and made first a pillow slip, then a cotton shift from a pattern, then, recklessly, a dress from a length of beautiful avocado-gold brocade. It was almost as simple in’ line as the shift, and the seams were dubious, but in it Celia was someone else. She was One of Those Girls.
She never went home on her day off now, but sent a terse few dollars a week instead. Home was an ugly husk she had shed, a place full of noise and hungrily outstretched hands. In the town she was not a maid but a girl lunching in a restaurant while she practiced Mrs. Stevenson’s manners, a languid afternoon shopper who rarely bought anything but basked in the attention of salespeople. Occasionally, because it seemed an improving thing to do, she went and sat in a small, green, tree-shadowed park, looking as though she were enjoying nature, before she returned to the Stevensons’, fixed herself a small salad in the kitchen, and went upstairs to her room.
On a day in late August, newly slim in her avocado dress, she turned out of the park and was seized about the waist from behind. A male voice deep with laughter said, “Aha! Going to stand me up, were you?” and a kiss landed on the side of her throat before she whirled and stared at the aghast and reddening face of Hugh Stevenson.
“Celia. I’m so sorry, I thought you were . . . It must be the dress. I was meeting someone here, and I could have sworn . . . Did I scare you to death?”
They had an audience: a gleeful child, a zestfully attentive old man, a sympathetically smiling couple with a cocker spaniel on a leash. Celia said primly that it was quite all right and walked away, her throat still blazing from that unexpected contact.
But it was not all right. The smiling couple obviously knew the Stevensons. Celia was dismayed but not altogether surprised when, a calculated week later, Mrs. Stevenson said with brisk pleasantness, ‘I’ll hate to lose you, Celia, but a friend of mine is ill and in need of someone competent to help out . . .”
Two
CELIA did not like the Strykers at all. The wife was a vain and silly hypochondriac who felt that back rubs were the routine duty of a maid; the husband, a florid fifty, was given to standing too close and remaining lodged in doorways so that it was necessary to press past him.
Although their menage was on the surface more opulent than the Stevensons’—there was an unfriendly cook—it was full of little meannesses. There was margarine instead of butter for the servants, and a narrow eye was kept on Mr. Strykers imported marmalade. As Mrs. Stryker lived in fear that her handsome rugs would fade, heavy draperies were drawn at the offending hours of the morning and afternoon, plunging the house into a funereal gloom.
Nor was all marital harmony. The Strykers, perhaps because of his wandering eye and her imaginary illnesses, kept up a constant low-level bickering which was far more wearing than an occasional explosive scene. Celia discovered that she was the fourth new maid in less than a year.
Almost any situation could be turned to advantage, and she made up her mind at once to become indispensable to this querulous pair. She frequently told Mrs. Stryker that she looked tired, at which the invalid would snatch up a mirror and regard herself with morose satisfaction; and on one occasion in the pantry, when Mr. Stryker’s hand ventured too close, she fixed him with a long stare of such grimness that the incident was not repeated. At the end of six months, when she had them both lulled into a sense of security, she boldly demanded, and got, a raise.
She had been at the Strykers’ a year when something happened which gave a subtle shape to the future: one of the women guests, a Mrs. Caswell, slipped out to the kitchen after dinner and to the accompaniment of nervous backward glances, offered to better whatever the salary was here. Celia said decorously that she was satisfied with her present situation—which she was, with her employers more or less in the palm of her hand—but something she did not recognize as a feeling of power filled her. Before she went to bed, she took a long appraising look at herself.
The rather heavy girl
