But it did not come. A pillar with inset panels of mirror intervened, and Celia kept it between her and a side exit until a gradual hush, and then a spatter of applause and a woman’s light, clear, amplified voice, told her that the the fashion show had begun. Only then did she dare to stop and peer guardedly around a looped-back fold of pink velvet curtain.
Even from this changed perspective it wasn’t difficult to locate Mrs. Cannon, shiny black head arrogantly bare in an assemblage of almost universally hatted women. She appeared to be absorbed in a model lounging down the runway in pipestem corduroys—“knotted about the waist, you’ll notice, with real rope,” the commentator was saying in tones of charmed delight—but as Celia watched, the black head turned to one side and then the other in a combing inspection of the audience. The way in which Mrs. Cannon presently lit a cigarette had a dismissive, I-must-have-been-mistaken air.
Celia went back to the League, where her shaken appearance (she did not pale prettily) was immediately noted by one of the college girls proffering iced coffee: “It’s this heat, Miss Brett—you look just awful”
In her own office she reminded herself that she had been hatted and gloved in that lightning confrontation, that there was nothing to identify her with LADY, no conceivable reason why Mrs. Cannon, faffing to find her in the audience, should approach Mrs. Devlin after the fashion show and say, “Your organization doesn’t by any chance employ a Celia Brett—tall, blonde, in burgundy and white stripes today? . . . Well, what an absolutely weird coincidence. She was housekeeper for my uncle until his fatal accident—I’d found her as a maid, actually . . .”
The air conditioning turned Celia coldly damp. She knew all about Cinderella, and had been to see My Fair Lady, but she had also become acquainted with the mores of the magic circle into which she was finally beginning to winnow her way. It was acceptable to be a multiple divorcee, or to enter into a liaison without benefit of divorce if this were done with sufficient dash. Feckless heirs who were openly known to have the last piece of Faberge in and out of hock were regarded with indulgence and sympathy—in fact, vied for. Triumph over origin was given its enthusiastic due, especially at LADY: “He’s an assistant producer now, if you please, and when you think that his father was a steam presser that’s rather marvelous, isn’t it?” but these plaudits were rendered among the insiders, like the handshake of a secret society. “Only in America” was carefully left unsaid, lest the accent come out wrong.
What these people would never forgive was a feeling of having been made fools of—not only to themselves but, far worse, to each other.
There is nothing to worry about, said Celia strengtheningly to herself. Hadn’t Mrs. Cannon visibly decided to shrug the whole thing off as a startling resemblance? For that matter, and for all she knew, Celia might have married in that long interval and, there as an invited charge customer, have some entirely untraceable new name. Yes, she would think that—wouldn’t she?
But it was a long afternoon. No echo of Mr. Tomlinson’s despairing old voice or clutching fingers intruded, nor did any vision of the narrow black slipper that had fallen from Mary Ellen’s foot when the ambulance men carried her out. Celia had only the simple and obsessive fear of someone who just might have slipped a self-destructive letter irretrievably into a postbox.
At four o’clock, Blanca Devlin’s cut-out cartwheel of pale gold straw appeared around the doorway. “It went off very well, I thought. Come along to my office and well get a report off and then”— she was the only woman at the League who would have made such a frivolous suggestion —‘well leave a bit early and reward ourselves with something long and cold.”
It would have been easy, and very possibly fatal, to have been lulled then; to have argued that that shocking near-encounter with Mrs. Cannon or another enemy was hardly likely to happen again, or that even the strongest desire for revenge was apt to wither with time. Celia did not deceive herself. She had been warned, with the accuracy of a shadow projected along a wall in advance of the actuality that was casting it. In the morning, with just the right amount of regret masking her savage resentment at being driven out of this berth, she tendered her resignation.
Mrs. Cockburn, who did the hiring at LADY, was regretful too. Large, bland, dressed in a small-fortune’s worth of clothes that fitted her like random slipcovers, she said, “I really am sorry. Both Mrs. Devlin and Mrs. Ruykendahl have spoken very highly of your work. If you’d been here longer we might have been able to arrange a leave of absence or some such thing, but as it is I’m afraid . . .”
Celia indicated with a smiling gesture that she hadn’t expected anything of the kind. Mrs. Cockburn inspected her from burnished head to polished toe and grew almost petulant, peering over her pearls and her massive bosom at the fresh memo clipped to the personnel file. “Hasn’t this—person someone else to call upon? Surely when it’s a matter of your career . . .”
Celia shook her head with every appearance of ruefulness. “Apparently not, and I do feel obligated. She was so very land during my mother’s last illness.”
Mrs. Cockburn, in her particular avocation, had no choice but to be struck by this display of duty: it was by no means usual in this day and age for a young woman to terminate a successful job in
