Everyone else admired Celia too; there was no trenchant green-eyed Mrs. Pond in this insulated world. Blanca Devlin said that she would have no trouble in finding another interim tenant for the smart little apartment, and Mrs. Ruykendahl pressed upon Celia the addresses of and notes of introduction to two Junior League friends who had migrated to the west coast. “And you must let me give a little dinner.”
Mrs. Devlin also entertained for her, a circumstance Celia would have found unimaginable a year ago but greeted now with cool pleasure, as though her adult life had been full of such events. As opposed to the stately progress of cocktails and several dinner courses at the Ruykendahls’, there were bottles in profusion on a long marble-topped Italian table and a deceptively careless-looking buffet of anchovied toast, shrimp and avocado salad, ham, strong runny cheese, cold fresh fruit, paralyzingly potent coffee in elegant little red and gold cups. Of the perhaps twenty guests—to Celia’s awe Blanca lapsed into rapid French with a few—the prize was an older woman who had been asked chiefly because she had just returned from a year in San Francisco.
The woman was shy, an oddity in this self-possessed gathering, and seemed flattered to be considered an authority on anything. Celia’s attentiveness encouraged her to provide information on what might be expected of the climate in the next month or so, and—she was clearly unaware of the supposed reason for Celia’s departure—an estimate of the apartment and job conditions. Before leaving, she wrote a few names on a piece of paper, circling the last. “A distant connection, in a complicated way,” she said with peculiar deprecation, and Celia glanced politely at the paper and stowed it away with Mrs. Ruykendahl’s friends.
At the end of the evening, thanking Blanca Devlin, she asked, “Who was that woman who was telling me about San Francisco, the rather elderly one in the printed chiffon?” and Blanca said carelessly, “Mrs. Hays-Faulkner. Nice, isn’t she, in a wispy way? Her husband was consul in one of the Latin-American countries before he died. Jim and I knew them quite well at one time.”
Jim was the newspaperman ex-husband. Celia went away impressed, and spent a few minutes before bed in what had now become a ritual inspection of herself in various attitudes before her mirror. (‘Celia Brett, deep in conversation with Mrs. Hays-Faulkner, widow of . . .’) Cecelia Brett, she thought suddenly. A tiny alteration, but perhaps a safeguard if her name should appear in a San Francisco society column. . .
With her decision to leave New York, the city became peopled immediately with frightening likenesses of Susan Vestry, Mrs. Cannon, and Willis Lambert: the wonder now seemed that one of them hadn’t pursued her into LADY’s offices. She thought that she saw a thinner David Macintosh in a Longchamps. More disturbing still, on a train visit to the lawyer, was a woman with a crimson mouth and black brows beetling over a blue gaze, menacingly reminiscent of Betty . . . Schirm, was it? Suspicious even all that long time ago, sulkily losing her new-found attraction for Willis to the charms of 4 Stedman Circle . . .
It couldn’t be. Still, Celia sweated lightly inside her linen dress, gazed out at the blazing landscape, fished in her bag with an unhurried air for a pair of huge sunglasses which masked her from cheekbones to eyebrows.
People could be so vicious. She did not feel really safe until, after a farewell champagne lunch which America’s Deprived Youth would have to fit into the scheme of things somehow, her plane was airborne.
Mrs. Ruykendahl’s introductions proved to be as useful as such things generally were. One was, or said she was, coping with a measled child; the other was deep in arrangement for a sister’s wedding, after which she and her own husband were departing for a vacation in Bermuda.
Celia, established in a hotel recommended by the consul’s widow, was tranquilly pleased at the outcome of her two telephone calls. It had seemed politic to go through the motions, in case she ever wanted some kind of endorsement from LADY, but it was a relief to have severed all connection with the past.
Mrs. Hays-Faulkner could hardly be said to count in this respect. She had obviously been dredged up for a single occasion; moreover, she had said something wistful about returning to the Latin-American country where her husband had served. Celia consulted the notes, bought a map of the city, and studied the newspapers. Not the want ads —there could be nothing of interest to her there—but the society sections.
She had brought with her a certain New York impetus, a kind of confidence that stopped just short of arrogance, and six weeks after her arrival she was being interviewed over tea by two women from the benefit committee of the prestigious Opera Guild. They smiled, assessed, exchanged eye signals like old bridge partners; asked questions like, “Real communication is terribly important, don’t you think? And so very hard to achieve.”
Celia had learned a good deal of the patter, and when she was at a loss she simply gazed ambiguously into her tea. She knew that she was looking very well-turned-out, even to these Neiman Marcus-oriented eyes: hair wound into a smooth gleam, a single small gold leaf pinned to her ivory suit, bronze gloves cast down as carelessly as though they had not cost her eighteen dollars that morning. She had the air of dallying with the Opera Guild, rather than they with her.
She came shudderingly close to taking the job. Because that evening—the consultation of eyes had decided that perhaps
