She was waiting for a different answer now; they all were. Noreen Delaney glanced up from her hands, flushing. “I wasn’t sure at first.” The hands gripped each other, mutely defensive. “It was six years ago, in Boston. She wore her hair differently then and she wasn’t so thin. Everyone called her Ceil—Ceil Poynter. It never occurred to me until I heard her called Lucy, here, that Ceil could be the other part of Lucille.”
She braced herself visibly, gazing at Elizabeth. “I’m twenty-five, not twenty-two. My name isn’t Delaney. I took that because—”
“I think I know,” said Elizabeth gently, and Noreen glanced quickly away. “I was nineteen then, and working as a maid for some people named—but you don’t care about that. They had a lot of money, and their son had just gotten engaged to Mrs.—Miss Poynter. We all knew his parents didn’t like it, but they gave in. There were a lot of parties . . .”
Between the halting words, Ceil Poynter grew out of the lamplight, hungry, shrewd, fiercely determined under the air of sureness and casual poise. Her charm had carried her through the screen set up by cautious and elderly parents, and the conclusion was foregone: the sheltered young man, surrounded since college by suitable daughters of suitable families, was instantly dazzled. They had met at Christmas, they were to be married in July. But Ceil made the classic mistake of wanting the best of two conflicting worlds, and at a week-end houseparty two months before the wedding, the worlds collided.
“I couldn’t help it,” said Noreen, flushing, “and I wasn’t spying. I’d had the job of straightening out the living-room after they all went upstairs, and I woke up hours later wondering if there was something I’d forgotten to do. It worried me so that I went down to look, and—Ceil Poynter was there with a man.”
She had screamed at the sudden startled sound in the dark room, and the house awoke. The man with Ceil, whom she had introduced as a cousin, turned out to be a well-known figure in gambling circles—the heady world Ceil Poynter couldn’t quite bring herself to leave entirely, whose stimulation she craved.
The affair was glossed over, the explanations of both parties accepted—and the engagement dissolved. For Ceil Poynter, the money and the servants, the summer house at Bar Harbor and the golden security of the inner circle, fled before a housemaid’s scream.
Soon after that Noreen had left her position as a maid in the house. She left her aunt and uncle’s home too, because she was going to have a baby.
She was not accepting the way out that Elizabeth had offered her. Her color came up but her eyes didn’t lower. “I hated being a maid, and he said he’d marry me. He didn’t, of course. I’d saved some money, so I went to New York and got a part-time job and had the baby there.”
The baby was a girl, and frail. Noreen might have managed somehow to support a normally healthy child; she felt defeated before a long future of medicines, climes, special care. She had made a few contacts at the dress shop where she worked, and one of them led to a home for the little girl. Then, torn between loss and relief, she had returned to Arlington to live with her aunt and uncle. (And, thought Elizabeth—remembering the gay girl in the photograph, looking now at the pale face and downcast eyes —the self-imposed sackcloth-and-ashes.)
The next time Noreen saw the woman she had known as Ceil Poynter was in Elizabeth’s living-room.
She said again, “I wasn’t sure. It was such a long time ago, and she didn’t seem to recognize me at all. But there was something about the way she came in the day after Jeep’s birthday. . . . I began to think who it was she reminded me of.”
Of course, thought Elizabeth, her mind flashing back. Lucy in the doorway, Noreen at the foot of the stairs, looking at each other with that hostile awareness. And, later that day, Lucy’s alien face staring out of Noreen’s window, and the drench of heavy obvious perfume she would never have connected with Lucy, and the discovery of Mrs. Bennett’s pocketbook on Noreen’s closet shelf . . . would any of it ever have happened, would Lucy’s bitter envy have overflowed the bounds of reason if she had not found the perfect scapegoat?
“She came to the house in Arlington,” Noreen said, twisting her hands. “She knew I’d changed my name, and she guessed why—I suppose she’d watched me with Maire. That’s where she met that—Jagoe. She pretended to be nice, she said she’d rather I didn’t mention that other affair because it might get back to her husband, and he was so jealous. She asked about my baby, and said she wouldn’t dream of telling you because that would be the end of my job. And then a few nights later, when you people were out, Mr. Jagoe came here to the house.
She shivered a little. “I’d always been afraid of him, and that night he told me that if I was careful and kept my mouth shut the way Mrs. Brent said, nothing would happen to Maire or Jeep. It frightened me, because he’d been outside the window long before I knew it—Maire saw him first.”
Maire, and her oun. The very real touch of danger, pinpointed in those thick curved lenses that watched among the cedars. Elizabeth stirred in her chair. Noreen said in a low voice, “Something else happened, later on. On Christmas day I got a telegram from the people who adopted my little girl. They’d promised to let me know if they decided to have the operation the doctors said she needed—but this was an emergency one. I couldn’t
