Like my dream last night. About the crystal house.
There, I won’t listen to them. I’ll just think about my dream, and Celia’s crystal house. Maybe it will keep me thinking straight. Because the secret is there. I knew it all over again, the truth, when I went out of the dream house stumbling...
I went to the house that was built of crystal. No glass — Celia Hartman’s house would never be built of common glass. I touched its door to enter. In the way of dreams the door swung back and the floor itself seemed to move, although I felt no movement, and without walking a step I was inside the house. I was looking for Celia.
Instead of wallpaper in the great entrance hall there were golden designs imbedded in the crystal walls. There were no lighting fixtures. A glow was in the ceiling and I wished I could see how it worked — it was so fabulous, so rich. Like Celia. Eighty millions, Jack said she had. Or maybe it was one hundred and eighty millions — a hundred millions from her family and eighty millions from her former husband. It doesn’t matter. It was so much that it was shocking.
But the crystal house and its feeling of infinite luxury didn’t shock me. Somehow I expected it to be this way. Anything less would have been a disappointment.
I wondered where the butler was. Because, by this time, everyone knows that Celia Hartman has a butler.
The instant I wondered, there he was, strutting toward me from a gold-fretted archway.
“Where’s Celia?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he said. “She’s probably hiding. And you haven’t a key, so you can’t hunt for her.”
“My brother has a key,” I said. “One key is quite enough for one family. And Celia must be here.”
“In that case,” he said, and turned and strutted ahead of me. He led me into a room, not quite as large as the auditorium of the San Francisco Opera House.
“Is this the living room?” I asked.
“Drawing room,” he corrected primly. “It will be handy for your brother to paint in. Look at the beautiful divans. They’ve been freshly upholstered.”
When I saw the divans, my throat swelled in the way it’s been behaving lately. Nerves, the doctor says. I suppose he’s right, but sometimes I can hardly breathe; it might as well be real instead of nerves. And for all its vastness this room was crowding, squeezing, choking me with its fat, stuffy divans.
“They’re hideous,” I said. “I can’t imagine anyone with as much money as Celia putting towels on her furniture.”
“Not towels,” he said superciliously. “Toweling. Special hand-woven, deep-piled toweling. Clean and efficient. Look,” he said, leading me to an immense table beside the crystal wall. It, too, was covered with toweling. “If one spills paint or blood or what have you,” and he knocked over a vase with roses in it, “it sops up. Very handy, as you see.”
I began to think that surely I was wrong in my taste, for Celia wasn’t crazy — at least where physical things were concerned. The quick way she took Jack away from Gigi proved that. She knew the ultimates of clothes and jewels and cars and yachts and men, and, I suppose, houses. If she upholstered her furniture in toweling, it must be right.
“Perhaps it’s fur,” I suggested.
“Fur is for poor people,” the butler said. “This was woven from Miss Celia’s own design in Miss Celia’s own mills.”
My throat tightened over that queer lump again...
I remembered the only fur coat our family ever had. It was ten years ago, right after Jack and Gigi were married. Jack had sold a painting to a bar on Mission Street. I was upset because he sold it to such a vulgar place — spittoons, beer smell, and a juke box blaring. Especially when the painting was so sparkling, clean-lined, one I especially loved of San Francisco on a clear, sunshiny morning. Jack had it priced at $500. I had insisted that he put high prices on his paintings, even his first ones, because people take a second look when things cost a lot.
Then, when I found out Jack had sold it to the bar for $75, I was furious. I told him to take the money back and ask for his painting. But Gigi was so happy that he had actually sold one, he wouldn’t do it.
Jack and Gigi should have used the money to pay the studio rent; I told them they ought to. I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough money for everything. There was a big bill at the art supply store and the bill for clothes I’d bought for Jack so that he would look impressive when he called at the galleries — I had all those to pay.
But Gigi was only nineteen and so beautiful. And she was always threatening to go to Hollywood to earn the money they continually needed. So Jack bought her a fur coat, to prove he could give her what she wanted. Jack loved her. He really loved her very much. I don’t think he ever loved Celia the same way.
They went to Market Street to a cut-rate store and paid $71.45, including tax, for a genuine seal-dyed Dymka. I never heard of such a thing before. I asked about it at my office — and they should know about such things there, it being the office of the biggest department store in San Francisco. The girls laughed like crazy and started playing around with the letters and came up with “d — m yak.”
When I first saw the fur coat, with Gigi parading around their studio with the black fur clutched tight to her flat tummy and slim hips, it frightened me. It looked so expensive that I thought here would be one more bill for me to pay. When she took it off, it changed. Dymka was either rabbit-piled mouse, or mouse-sheared rabbit. Or yak. Still, on a person, even on me, it looked rich. I’m not as young as Gigi. And nobody was ever as beautiful as Gigi. But I am slim and tall, and all those years of ballet gave me a grace I’ll never lose. After I got Gigi the job modeling at the store and she bought a camel’s-hair coat, I could have used the Dymka. But she said she never thought I’d want her discards, so she gave it to a thrift shop.
When their studio rent came due, right after Jack bought the coat, I had to lend them $50. I always keep a hundred dollars or so ahead in the bank for Jack. He’s my baby brother and I feel responsible for him. When we were children, I told him we would be famous together, rich and famous. I was studying ballet, and good at it. And after Jack began to copy cartoons out of the funny papers when he was only six, I knew he should be an artist. I planned it all for us.
But the doctor had to find that murmur in my heart. I’d rather he had let me die. Because he said I had to stop dancing. Mama was just sick about it; she was always sure I was the genius of the family. But after Mama died... well, anyway, there was the murmur. Besides, it takes two people to be a genius, one to push and one to do. The way things turned out, Mama was wrong. Jack was the genius...
“My sister-in-law had a fur coat,” I told the butler. “She didn’t look poor in it. She looked like a million dollars.”
“We’ve got a million dollars in our refrigerator,” said the butler, his nasty little face twisting all over itself. “Miss Celia keeps it on hand to serve with cocktails. That’s what she intends to serve at Mr. Jack’s exhibition.”
“I want to see it,” I said. “All my life I’ve wanted to see a million dollars.”
“This way, madam,” said the butler, drawing himself up, sticking out his stomach, making me notice for the first time that he was wearing red and white striped velvet pajamas. “They’re liveried pajamas,” he explained, smirking.
We walked — slowly and heavily, like wading through water — into the kitchen. There was the refrigerator, all done up in toweling too.
That idiot butler hopped into the kitchen sink, pajamas and all, and turned on the water. “Hand me the towel off the icebox,” he said.
“Don’t be such a fool,” I said. “All the stories I’ve read about butlers, they didn’t act like you. I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want to see Celia’s money, I want to see Celia. Where’s she hiding?”