Boadicea waved back. She didn’t want to come down, but Alethea must have had some reason for being so persistent, and anyway she did want to come down since her face and her fingers were numb with cold. The wind and the view had served the simultaneous purpose of calming her down and lifting her up. She could return to earth and talk to Alethea in a spirit of no more than sisterly combativeness.
“I thought,” said Alethea, disdaining to shout but waiting until Boadicea was quite close by, “that your story of having invited that boy here was a complete fabrication. But he’s come, on his bicycle, and there seems to be some question whether he’s to be allowed through the gate. I thought you should know.”
Boadicea was taken aback. Alethea’s action too much resembled ordinary courtesy for her to take exception to it. “Thank you,” she had to say, and Alethea smiled.
“I gave him a disc,” Boadicea fretted.
“They must have thought he looked suspicious. He does to me.”
Inside the stairwell, on the next landing down, was a phone. Boadicea dialled the gatehouse. The guard said that Daniel had already gone through, on her father’s say-so.
Alethea was waiting for her by the elevator. “Seriously, Bobo…”
“Didn’t you say, less than an hour ago, that my biggest problem was that I was always too serious?”
“Yes, of course, but seriously: what can you see in this Weinreb boy? Is it because he was in prison? Do you think that’s glamorous?”
“That has precisely nothing to do with it.”
“I’ll allow he has tolerable good looks—”
Boadicea raised her eyebrows challengingly. Daniel’s looks deserved more than a five on anyone’s scale of ten.
“—but, after all, he does represent the lower depths, doesn’t he?”
“His father’s a dentist.”
“And from what I’ve heard not even a particularly good one.”
“From whom did you hear that?”
“I forget. In any case, good or bad: a dentist! Isn’t that enough? Didn’t you learn anything in Switzerland?”
“Indeed I did. I learned to value intelligence, taste, and breeding — the qualities I admire in Daniel.”
“Breeding!”
“Yes, breeding. Don’t provoke me to comparisons.”
The elevator arrived. They had captured one of the maids, who’d been trying to go down to the kitchen on 2. They rode down in silence until she got off. Boadicea pressed G.
Alethea sighed. “I think you’re being very foolish. And, come the day that you finally do drop him, very cruel.”
“Who is to say, Alethea, that that day will ever come?”
She’d said it only to be provoking, but hearing the words spoken, she wondered if they might conceivably be true. Was this the beginning of her real life? (As against the provisional life she’d been leading up to now.)
“Oh, Bobo. Really!”
“Why not?” Boadicea demanded, a trifle too emphatically. “If we’re in love.”
Alethea giggled, with complete sincerity. And shook her head, by way of saying good-bye, and set off down the hall in the other direction, toward the stables.
It was, Boadicea had to admit, an enormous “if.” She loved talking with Daniel, she loved looking at him, for he had the sort of features that bear contemplation. But love? Love, in the sense commemorated by centuries of books and operas and films?
Once, when she’d followed him about on his paper route, they had sat snuggling together in a broken-down car in a dark garage. It had seemed, for those fifteen minutes, the supreme happiness of her life. To be warm. To relax in that utter anonymity. To savor the silences and smells of a stranger’s garage — rust, dry leaves, the ghosts of ancient motor oils. They’d talked in a dreamy way of going back to the golden age of V-8 engines and superhighways and being two totally average teenagers in a movie about growing up. A lovely pastoral moment, certainly, but scarcely proof of their being in love.
She wondered if Daniel ever wondered whether they were in love; or whether they would be, some day. She wondered if she could get up the nerve to ask him, and what he would say if she did, for he could hardly come right out and say no, the thought had never crossed his mind. While she was still in the midst of her wonderings, there he was, with his bicycle, on the raked gravel of the crescent. The first snowflakes of the year were alighting on his beautiful black hair. His nose and forehead, his cheekbones and his chin were straight out of the most arrogantly lovely Ghirlandaio in all the museums of the world.
“Daniel!” she called out, bounding down the steps, and from the way he smiled at her in reply she thought that maybe it was possible that they were already in love. But she understood, as well, that it would be wrong to ask, or even to wonder.
Grandison Whiting was a tall, spare-limbed, thin-faced, pilgrimish man who stood in violent contradiction to his own flamboyantly bushy beard, a beard of the brightest carrot-orange, a beard that any pirate could have gloried in. His suit was puritanically plain, but across the muted check of the waistcoat hung a swag of gold chain so heavy as to seem actually serviceable in conjunction, say, with manacles or fetters. And glinting within the cuffs of his coat were cufflinks blazoned with diamonds larger than any that Daniel had ever seen, even in the windows of the Des Moines branch of Tiffany’s, so that he seemed to wear, not his heart, but his checkbook on his sleeve.
His manners and accent were uniquely, unnaturally his own; neither English nor Iowan, but a peculiar hybrid of both that preserved the purr of the former and the twang of the latter. You would have felt almost guilty to say that you liked such a person as Grandison Whiting, but for all that Daniel didn’t positively dislike him. His strangeness was fascinating, like the strangeness of some exotic bird illustrated in a book of color plates, a heron or an ibis or a cockatoo.
As to the nest that this rare bird inhabited, Daniel was in no such state of equivocation. All of Worry made Daniel uncomfortable. You couldn’t walk on the carpets or sit on the chairs without thinking you’d do them some damage. And of all the rooms that Daniel had been taken through, Grandison Whiting’s drawing room, where they’d come at five for tea, was, if not the grandest, surely the most elegantly perishable. Not that Daniel, by this time, was still making sharp distinctions among the degrees of bon ton. It was all equally unthinkable, and hours ago he’d closed his mind to any but the simplest sense of having to resist the various intimidations of so much money. If you once allowed yourself to admire any of it — the spoons, the cups, the sugar bowl, the exquisite creamer filled with cream as thick and gloppy as mucilage — where would you stop? So he shut it out: he took his tea without sugar or cream and passed up all the cakes for one dry curl of unbuttered toast.
No one urged him to change his mind.
After they’d been introduced all round and the weather had been deplored, Grandison Whiting asked Daniel what he had thought of the harpsichord. Daniel (who’d been expecting a genuine antique, not a modern reconstruction built in Boston forty years ago) replied, guardedly, that it was nothing like a piano, that the touch, and the two manuals, would take some getting used to. What he’d said at the time, to Boa, was “Weird”; what he hadn’t said, even to her, was that the Steinway grand was as far beyond his ken as the harpsichord (or as the harp, for that matter), just as weird, in the sense of being wholly and unsettlingly beautiful.
Then Boa’s sister Alethea (in a white dress as stiff and resplendent as the table napkins) asked him how, in the wilderness of Amesville, he had managed to take piano lessons. He said he was self-taught, which she must have suspected was less than the whole truth, for she insisted: “Entirely?” He nodded, but with a smile meant to be teasing. She was already, at fifteen, a fanatic in the cause of her own all-conquering good looks. Daniel wondered if she weren’t actually the more interesting of the two sisters: interesting as an object, like some dainty cup with flowers painted on it in microscopic details, or like an armchair with golden legs carved into watery shapes, with that same eggshell elegance, the same intrinsic, unhesitating disdain for boors, bears, clods, and paupers like himself, which Daniel found (somewhat guiltily) arousing. Boa, by contrast, seemed just another person, a contender in the sweepstakes of growth and change, who sometimes would pull ahead of him, sometimes fall behind. No doubt the family money was in her blood as much as it was in Alethea’s, but its effect on her was problematical, whereas with Alethea it was as though the money had blotted out everything else: as though she were the form that money took translated into flesh and blood — no longer a problem, just a fact.