She said directly, “Mr. Tomlinson, if it’s all right with you I’d like to have a few of my friends in after class tonight.”
Mr. Tomlinson gazed at her in puzzled disbelief and cupped an ear. “A few of your . . . ?” It was clear that he thought his hearing to be at fault, and Celia’s resolve hardened.
“A few of my friends,” she repeated levelly, “as I can only see my family once a month.” Then, so that there should be no misunderstanding, she added, “We wouldn’t be here until nine thirty. I could see you settled comfortably upstairs before I go. Or if Mrs. Ellwell will be coming in—
The courteous old blue eyes gazed steadily back, understanding perfectly, weighing Celia’s undeniable competence and protection from his niece in the matter of Mrs. Ellwell against the indignity of being forced upstairs in his own house before nine thirty. The gaze also comprehended the sheet of paper she had wheeled into the old typewriter, over whose keyboard her fingers were poised as though they might never fall again.
“That will be quite all right, Celia,” said Mr. Tomlinson. “I’ll be able to manage very well by myself. Nine thirty, you say? Now, I believe we left off with that tape where I met the young fellow . . .”
Celia was taking a risk, she knew, but a minimal one. Dr. Fowler’s calls were in the afternoon, at stated intervals, and out of deference to Mr. Tomlinson’s age there were no unscheduled evening droppers-in. Mrs. Cannon had been on the telephone the morning before in her crisp weekly interrogation; it was very unlikely that, living in Manhattan with her stockbroker husband, she would undertake a visit to New Jersey at night.
Still, Celia felt a qualm as she stood on the frost-twinkled sidewalk after the typing class that night and suggested that they all go back to her house for a change. She was casual about it, as though she didn’t care either way, and she mentioned in an offhand tone that they would have to be on the quiet side as her uncle was having one of his bad spells, but at bottom there was a terrible thought: What if the old man had changed his mind, and was sitting in the living room in his quiet anger when they came trooping in?
Her apprehension was only increased by the fact that Betty Schirm and Ted Vanney and Willis were all impressed by the mere mention of Stedman Circle; although the house was old-fashioned it was apparently a very good address. Willis, beside Celia in the back seat of Ted’s surprisingly new car, gave her a proud possessive squeeze. If after all this . . . ?
But it went off without a hitch. The house, seen by Celia with new eyes, held only the faint lemony scent of the furniture polish favored by Mrs. Meggs and an unmistakable air of tenancy somewhere above. She put a cautionary finger to her lips to remind them all of it, closed the living room door, and stopped worrying.
The evening was an unqualified success. Mr. Tomlinson kept an ample variety of liquor for his guests, but Celia had punctiliously supplied her own along with nuts and potato chips. Going unerringly for napkins and glasses and ice, she seemed indeed a niece of the house. In the unfamiliar atmosphere of old brocade chairs and parchment-shaded lamps and an entire wall of books with polished bindings, Ted Vanney was apprehensive, Betty Schirm awed and envious, Willis complacent. Celia herself, who had started reading the society pages when she worked at the Strykers’, felt like a debutante at her coming-out party. When she had closed the front door after them at shortly before midnight, she stood unmoving in the hall for a few moments before she commenced the process of cleaning up.
Her whole body felt as her face once had when she had tried the beaten-egg-white treatment recommended by a magazine—curiously tight and new and invulnerable. It was just as well that there were all those nut dishes and ashtrays and glasses to be dealt with, as she could not possibly have slept yet. Willis Lambert had actually sat in Mr. Tomlinson’s wing chair, she had occupied the one facing it, Betty Schirm and Ted Vanney had taken the dark-blue velvet couch. In her odd excitement Celia now dropped down into each place, studying the room from different perspectives, seeing this background as they must have seen it.
A growing awareness of Willis’s cigar haze brought her to her feet. She opened a window, unbothered by the rushing cold—in this mood no physical discomfort could touch her—but closed it when, almost at once, the oil burner burst into its dim roar. She sprayed air freshener about instead. Half an hour later, kitchen immaculate for the morning, she was in bed.
She told the dark ceiling that that was that; she had simply taken a single and necessary step to avert what had threatened to become a crisis. The question of having her friends in again need not come up, but if it did she would say regretfully that her uncle was very much worse, and the doctor had said absolutely no visitors in the house . . .
. . . Wouldn’t she?
Mr. Tomlinson was his usual decorous self in the morning. He did not refer in any way to the evening before— although he could hardly have forgotten, the alien cigar smoke having triumphed heavily over the air freshener— and neither did Celia, who had been prepared to thank him prettily. Two years ago such a silence, such a complete wiping-out of an astonishing departure, would have struck her as menacing, and indeed from the Strykers
