“Come along, Mike; Nancy will want to meet you.”
He had last seen Nancy Miller when she was a fat little girl riding in a wicker basket behind a fat pony. Now that she was fifteen years old, he had imagined that she would have come to look like an heiress. If she had been merely homely, he would have been less disappointed than in this commonplace girl, still fat, and as lumpy as back-yard soil.
“Is this the famous Mike Jordan?” She had one of those insincere, heavily inflected, finishing-school voices, hideously unbecoming to a fleshy girl with big bones. Her enthusiasm, her synthetic charm, her schooled graces contrasted painfully with her cousin’s pretty reticence. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“I guess you mean a couple of other fellows,” he replied wittily. “I’m just the Mike Jordan nobody knows.”
She smiled coyly. “A famous man shouldn’t be so modest.”
As Mike danced with Phyllis he noticed that Nancy’s dark eyes were following them. Phyllis noticed, too, and smiled. Later, of course, Mike had to dance with his hostess. She was too heavy for him, too self-assertive, the sort of girl who had to control her instinct to lead.
“I read your essay,” she said. “I think it was wonderful. It reminded me of Thomas Paine or Patrick Henry.”
He accepted the tribute grudgingly.
“I was curious to meet the man who wrote such inspired words,” Nancy added. And Mike actually felt himself blush as she went on, “That’s why I asked Phyllis to bring you tonight. And” — she looked into his face brazenly — “I’m not disappointed in the writer, either.”
When the music stopped he tried to break away, but Nancy clung to him, accompanying him in his search for Phyllis.
They found her on the porch, surrounded by boys. “Isn’t my cousin the most popular thing?” Nancy squealed. “Men are always wild about her.” She broke through the circle of Phyllis’s admirers, encircled her cousin’s waist with a strong, swarthy arm. “You’re absolutely bewitching in that dress.”
Phyllis froze. Muttering a sullen thanks, she went off to dance with Johnnie Elder. Nancy giggled, and later, at supper, attempted again to flatter her cousin: “Isn’t Phyllis just too sweet in blue? That dress looks as if it were designed for her.”
A couple of Nancy’s girl-friends giggled. The significance of the scene was lost upon Mike then, and it was not until years later, when Nancy, herself, explained its peculiar agony, that he understood that certain traits of character are called feminine because they are implanted early in girl-children.
“Well, Mike, how did you like the party?” Phyllis asked, as they walked home in the moonlight.
He dared not show how thin was his lacquer of sophistication, so he answered dryly, “It was all right.”
“It was ghastly. All that silver and velvet; just showy ostentation.”
Johnnie Elder honked past them, waving from his brother’s roadster.
Phyllis watched the vanishing tail-lights. Abruptly gripping Mike’s arm, she whispered, “She hates me, Mike, she hates me desperately; she wishes I was dead.”
“Who?”
“Don’t be stupid. Didn’t you notice anything? She’s hated me ever since we were little kids, because they could buy her everything except looks. Her hair’s as straight as an Indian’s. And Grandma always felt sorry for me because my mother was poor and had to support us, so she always made a fuss over me instead. Once my grandmother gave me a big doll” — Phyllis’s hands measured the height of this wondrous memory — “it was bigger than any doll Nancy got that Christmas. And it was only that I was poor and didn’t have so many toys that Grandma gave me this big doll. Nancy was so jealous that she grabbed the doll out of my arms and deliberately smashed it. There’s still a chip in the fireplace where she broke it. The head was in pieces. She hates me.”
She stood quite still. Moonlight, shining through the catalpa tree, fell upon her so that half of her face, lighted in silver, was clear-cut and exquisite, while the other half was scarred by a shadow as jagged and irregular as a birthmark. Mike took her arm and jerked her out of the shadows.
As they walked through the shabbier streets to her mother’s house, Phyllis told him of her ambitions: “I’m going to be an actress. I mean to be very successful and rich, and then I’ll laugh at everyone.”
The gate creaked as they walked up the untidy path. Phyllis looked at the moon and laughed...
The next season she joined the Dramatic Club. Mike Jordan thought her the best actress in the high school, and when, in his senior year, he became a member of the club’s executive board, he promoted Phyllis at every opportunity, just as though he were a silly old manager in love with a pretty actress.
Every year the club gave a show. Mike was then trying to write like O’Neill, and he wanted them to do The Straw, with Phyllis as the tubercular heroine. But Nancy had come to the high school that year. Her mother was ill and she was spending the winter in town. She had the whole school imitating her, fawning upon her, copying her attitudes. No elderly opportunist is ever so slavish as a youngster who finds that he can skate on a private pond, play tennis on fine courts, and be treated to quantities of pop and ice cream.
Nancy’s word was law, her whims undisputed fashion, and when she said Romance was her favorite play, more than half the club board was willing to vote her ticket. Mike was too much the politician to tell them he thought it a bad play, so he argued that they could never afford the elaborate costumes and sets. He was voted down.
At the next board meeting he heard the proposal that they give Nancy the part so that her father would pay for their props and scenery.
Phyllis was her mother’s gallant child. She uttered not a word of self-pity. Mike took her to the show, and as he sat beside her, studying her fine profile, he admired the dignity with which she hid her disappointment. After the final curtain she asked him to go backstage with her. Nancy’s dressing-room was filled with extravagant floral offerings, tribute from her father’s business associates.
Phyllis broke through the crowd of chattering girl-friends, kissed Nancy’s rouged cheek, and cried sincerely, “You were wonderful, darling, simply wonderful.”
That swarthy old lady whom Mike had seen at the party rose from a small chair beside Nancy’s dressing table. She was dressed in rich, musty black silk. “You could have done it better,” she told Phyllis.
“But Nancy has real talent and temperament, Grandma.”
“You have beauty.”
This was in May. At the end of June, Mike finished high school. He spent the summer as a counselor in a boys’ camp, and in September went to New Haven. Mike’s father was the editor of a small newspaper, and it was enough of a struggle to send his son to Yale without providing money for holiday trips.
During the next two summers Mike worked in Connecticut, but he never lost touch with the home town. His father sent him the newspaper, and he was still sufficiently interested in his old friends to read the society columns. Nancy Miller, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller, “came out” and was thereafter entitled to silver tinsel and black velvet decorations at her parties. Shortly afterward Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller announced the engagement of their daughter to John Price Elder II.
The Roman numerals amused Mike. Johnnie Elder’s father had come to the town as a laborer, had worked himself up to foreman and then to plant manager in one of the mills. During a strike he had done the dirty work for the owners, dealing with scabs and gunmen brought to town to break the strike. Mike’s father had nicknamed him “Judas Elder” and made him the butt of scathing editorials which were never noticed by the people who elected J. P. Elder to the City Council. The son Johnnie was a big, thick-skinned fellow, ruddy and good-looking, fullback on his college football team, and a god to the town girls.