Mrs. Pond was extremely astute at her job, which necessarily overlapped into other of the hotel’s functions, and Celia’s attention to learning was as eager as a sponge. Mindful of the fight but crisp admonition against throat-cutting, she stayed in the background at first, dealing with routine chores and being meticulously businesslike from the moment she entered the office in the morning. She never advanced new ideas, for the simple reason that she hadn’t any, but could often, because of her domestic training, find practical short cuts in Mrs. Pond’s.
Gradually, she took on slightly more important tasks. She dealt with outside caterers when there was an unexpected clash and the hotel kitchens were busy; she interviewed purveyors of puppet shows and other diversions for the young residents of the Alexandra; she occasionally filled in for Mrs. Pond at such activities. She found out the lowest price for which a ballroom could be decorated with flowers without looking like a rural high-school dance, and absorbed by osmosis how much chicken a la king and patty shells and peas, preceded by fruit salad supreme and followed by coffee and petits fours, would be needed to stoke a banquet of shoe buyers.
She substituted occasionally in the fashion shows, and she did the preliminary screening for the monthly amateur nights which were one of Mrs. Pond’s prime headaches. (“Why will mothers think fat nine-year-olds look fetching in tutus? Why are people allowed to roam about at will, playing harmonicas?”)
And all the time, Celia learned. Like a person with extraordinary peripheral vision, she took in far more than she realized.
She became able to sense, as many women never did, the moment when a mood—at a convention or birthday party or anniversary celebration—was going flat or, worse, turning bellicose. There wasn’t always something to be done about it: “A Jolly Good Fellow” might fall on sullen ears, and an enormous candlelit cake be greeted with silent derision, but it was a valuable thing to know. So was the average number of cocktails needed to oil any adult function. Two, decided Celia; one left people resentful about the stinginess of the affair and three always had a few indiscretions burbled into the wrong ear.
For her own purposes, perhaps the most important skill she acquired was the ability to see as a whole any social function of a public nature. It might look impossibly daunting, but it could be broken down into a number of quite tidy parts which meshed at the end without a seam showing. Although Celia was not aware of it then, this faculty was one which highly educated, far more intelligent women than she often could not master in a lifetime.
Inevitably, she was thrown into contact with a good many people for the first time in her fife. Being without humor, she would never be a participant in the light, fast give-and-take around her, but she had the possibly more valuable gift of realizing her limitations; this gave her a removed and reflective air, as if there were all sorts of witty contributions she might make if she felt like it.
Some of the people she met were like images springing out of a scrapbook kept in Celia’s head: slender, beautifully groomed women who were fifty and looked forty, busied themselves with smart charities and cropped up in the society sections of the Sunday papers. Celia learned not to be cowed by them even when, making arrangements for a benefit luncheon, they called her “Sweetie,” which she discovered was a mask for upper-level feminine irritation. She also learned unconsciously to preface her own exclamations, so that she greeted good news with “But how marvelous!” and the other kind with “But how ghastly.”
One such woman was Mrs. Horace P. Dillworth, “Cricket” to Vogue and her other intimates, and it was through Mrs. Dillworth that, not quite a year after she had started working at the Alexandra, Celia became an associate coordinator for the League for America’s Deprived Youth. Or, as its stationery indicated chastely, LADY.
The League was an accredited charity, receiving a tiny automatic slice of federal child-welfare funds but supported mainly by private contributions and endowments. Its executives were handsomely housed in two burgundy-and-gray floors of a midtown office building, and from some mystifying source—through caseworkers?—an actual Deprived Youth was produced and featured in a monthly newsletter which went to the League branches in Chicago and Houston.
Much to her relief, Celia never saw a flesh-and-blood waif in all her tenure there. She was well paid, with a little office of her own in which she scrupulously read newsletters about what other charities were doing and made notes which sometimes appeared in their own newsletters. Her chief duties were the decorously hounding letters which went off regularly to reliable contributors from the past (“LADY is knocking at your door again . . .”) and legwork for the frequent fund-raising breakfasts and luncheons and dinners.
The staff wasn’t large. There was a switchboard operator who got in a lot of reading, and two typists who coped with a vast flow of pointless correspondence. There were also two or three interchangeable-looking, just-out-of-college girls with the ink scarcely dry on their sociology degrees; a publicity man, a handsome occasional lawyer who said, perhaps truthfully, that he donated his time to the League, an office boy who had the flavor of one of the better prep schools, and a large handful of decorative women with grown children, bored husbands, and otherwise-occupied friends. These last really did donate their time and, as they were not in a position to do much harm, probably did a little random good.
Certainly the League suited them. They stayed effortlessly busy and animated all day, and in some mysterious way which Celia could not fathom, their delicately dry faces did not secrete anything as vulgar as oil; at five o’clock, only the quick whiff of a
