In order to allay any fears Mrs. Ruykendahl might have had, Celia was even more businesslike than usual at the office the next day, but before the week was out they had shared one of the strictly one-hour lunches which was all Mrs. Ruykendahl and her cohorts allowed themselves. On the next occasion they were joined by a woman of whom Celia stood in genuine awe.
Blanca Devlin was the only real professional at the League, a fund-raiser of almost legendary accomplishment. In her late forties, she was a magnificently handsome creature—tall, swashbuckling, with a lustrous tan at all seasons of the year, engaging laugh-crinkles about amber-brown eyes in which no honest mirth ever appeared, and creamy teeth as polished as if they had just emerged from a tumbling machine.
She wore her black hair in a chignon and had her big-brimmed hats designed to accommodate it, and had been married to a well-known foreign correspondent, now an alcoholic, and a novelist who also had drinking problems. (There was some, but not much, speculation about this coincidence; Blanca would be a bad enemy.) She was on first-name terms with the segment of New York to be found in fashionable restaurants and theater lobbies, and even well-established Mrs. Ruykendahl had been known to send currying little smiles in her direction.
Blanca Devlin took a cool and somewhat sardonic liking to Celia, almost as though she had divined Celia’s origins and goals at a glance and were tendering a half-mocking salute. One result was that Celia’s circle of acquaintances began to widen automatically; another, that she gradually took on, like reflected light, a faint trace of the older woman’s arrogance. Mrs. Devlin had this down to a fine art. Kept waiting in an outer office in spite of an appointment confirmed by telephone, there was never, for her, anything so amateurish as the glanced-at watch or the tapped foot. Instead she would draw from one of her bold handbags a small lizard notebook and a narrow gold pencil and, gazing with apparent blankness at the female behind the desk, commence making notes.
“They can’t stand it,” she told Celia indulgently. “No secretary is that secure.”
By June, Celia had taken over the sublet of a small, pretty apartment near Gramercy Park, the normal domain of a young divorcee friend of Blanca’s. She paid without a qualm a rent which would have appalled her two years earlier. She was being better paid than she had expected at LADY; she had been able to save a good part of her salary at the Hotel Alexandra; she received dividends from her investments. Most of all, she had learned to spend money only where it would pay her a return.
As it had. It was a measure of Celia’s progress that she looked back in wonderment to her sense of achievement at having been sent as a possible model to a Seventh Avenue garment house—but only that far back. She was too realistic to fall into any half-daydream about her family background, but she was so at ease with her own version that she was able to do some casual embroidering. When she gave her first small cocktail party, after much reading up on the subject, she attributed her superlative little cheese puffs to the recipe of a housekeeper they had once had. “A terrible bully, really, but a heart of gold. At least we always assumed she had a heart of gold; I don’t think it was ever put to the test . . .”
The shock was all the greater when the whole inherently dangerous business threatened to come crashing down around her.
Fifteen
JUST as New York could narrow down to the confines of a very small town and produce when it was least wanted the rage-congested face of a Willis Lambert, it could suddenly appear to have swallowed, or spewed forth to untraceable places, every known contact with the past. On a late morning already sticky with heat, Celia had nothing more worrisome on her mind than the luncheon and fashion show being sponsored by the League and a Fifth Avenue store, invitations to which had been sent out to the store’s charge customers two weeks earlier.
In spite of Mrs. Devlin’s competence, there were usually last-minute, behind-the-scenes little crises which Celia was particularly good at dealing with, bringing to the job a kind of built-in calm and inventiveness. Anyone else might have been rendered helpless with mirth on many of these occasions, but Celia was proof against such dangers.
It struck nobody at the League or the store as being in the least piquant, for instance, that the fashions to be shown for wealthy young sprigs were of a kind achieved effortlessly in the slums and ghettos to which, after the salaries of Mrs. Devlin and Celia and the publicity man and the earnest college girls and the lesser corps of personnel, the proceeds of the affair were directed. What one fashion magazine called “the wonderful woebegone look” was having its brief heyday, and there was not a tongue in cheek anywhere.
This particular function was running very smoothly indeed, and a few minutes before the fashion show itself was to begin Celia received from Mrs. Devlin the signaling glance that meant all was well and she could go back to the office. It was an absolute rule that a copy of the League’s by-laws be at hand, in the unlikely event that anyone should ask a question about structural organization, and Celia started automatically for the table and microphone Mrs. Devlin would share with the store’s commentator.
Across perhaps five yards of murmurous, mildly expectant space, she met the idly quartering eye of Mrs. Cannon.
Their glance was like a tiny clash between tiddlywink counters, with Celia having the minute advantage of overlap simply because she was on her feet and moving, while Mrs. Cannon, seated and faintly bored, needed that extra click of time to synchronize sight and recognition. Celia
