Howard had once said of Carrie that she looked as though she dressed herself out of the costume room at Madame Tussaud’s, and it was true that veils and ribbons and trailing swatches of material made up a great proportion of her usual apparel. He had also once said that when she walked she sounded like a tin can factory falling down a hill, and it was equally true that she tended to drape herself in a superfluity of necklaces and bracelets and earrings that jangled. But somehow she was all of a piece, the apartment, the clothing, the tinkling jewelry, the round cheerful face, the hoarse but loud voice, the endlessly inquisitive acquisitive manner as though a magpie had been crossed with a kitten and the result blown up all out of proportion, but none of it false or affected, all fitting nicely together and amazingly producing a person who was eccentric without being ludicrous.
Possibly because she was so totally without pretension. She might have craved a living room full of Sartres, but she never pretended to be a de Beauvoir. She was a Boston-born girl, from a family who owned a downtown department store, and she’d married a Boston-born corporation attorney and given him two sons and a daughter. Another young attorney in the same law firm, Bradford Lockridge, had eventually gone on to become President, but Carrie was not one to bask in reflected glory. She preferred to be the star in her own life story, and she handled the part to perfection.
She came forward now into the small front parlor to greet Evelyn and Edward, jangling as usual, trailing wisps of nylon and lace, her round face beaming, her arms outstretched. “Evelyn! You lovely lovely child, let me look at you!”
People usually found themselves overpowered by Carrie, and Evelyn was no exception. She stood there like a slave on the block, an awkward smile on her face, while Carrie grasped her by the elbows and looked her up and down. Meanwhile Edward was saying, “I don’t suppose Janet’s here yet.”
“Of course not, silly boy.” Carrie gave Evelyn a look of mock-frustration and said, “Husbands will never understand that wives must dress. But how charming you look! You’ve been shopping already. You bought that dress here.”
“No, actually, I got it in New York. In March.”
“Incredible. You make me want to go back, but I’ll resist. But why didn’t you bring Dinah?”
“I thought it was too long for her to be away, ten days.”
“So selfish. You know she’s the one I really wanted to see. She’s four years old now, I haven’t seen her since she was two.”
“That’s right,” Evelyn said. She was always surprised at Carrie’s memory for details. Who would expect her to keep track of the age of an unrelated child a continent away?
“Well, never mind, you’ll remember to send me photographs, and next time you’ll bring her. Now come along, we have some very interesting people here.”
But they weren’t. Carrie’s parlor was large, bright and full of comfortable places to sit. Floor-to-ceiling windows faced northeast, three stories up, with a beautiful view of the Bois de Boulogne, lush and green with summer. There was no direct sunlight, but the room was bright enough without it, the park across the way reflected in the plants scattered everywhere throughout the room.
There were ten people present. Five were wives of American diplomats, two were a tourist couple from Boston, one was a slender young Frenchman with a vaguely oily look about him; and the last were an American computer company executive, currently stationed in Paris, and his wife. The five diplomat wives wanted nothing more than to gossip among themselves about people unknown to everyone else present, as though Carrie’s apartment were a beauty salon. The tourists wanted to be amused, but not to participate. The Frenchman wanted desperately to establish some sort of connection with anyone at all, but seemed not to know how to go about it. And the computer couple preferred to talk about the increasing inequity of the American income tax.
Edward was the only saving grace, and Evelyn told herself ruefully that she could have stayed in her hotel room and listened to Edward and been well ahead of the game. Edward had decided to explain Paris to the tourists, and in so doing had separated the city into so many multi-leveled Parises that he was obviously getting confused himself after a while. There was the tourist Paris. There was the American Paris. There was the business Paris. There was the Parisian’s Paris, subdivided into several other Parises depending upon income, occupation and background of the particular Parisian. There was the Real Paris. There was the bohemian Paris. There was the lustful Paris. There was the gourmet Paris. It went on and on, Edward cheerful and voluble and totally baffling throughout, his audience laughing as much at their own confusion as at his performance.
After a while Evelyn was distracted from Edward’s monologue by the Frenchman, who had circled half the room to get to her side. He asked, in a mutter usually reserved for the sale of obscene postcards, if she were unattached. He didn’t quite meet her eye.
“Not really,” she said. “Excuse me, would you?”
Carrie’s apartment was large, with room upon room. Evelyn had been in it a dozen times or more in the last few years, but she was never quite sure about the layout. She left the parlor now, and because the entrance was to the left she turned right instead.
She was looking for Ann. Carrie’s oldest son, Daniel Gillespie, had died a retread in Korea, leaving a pregnant wife, Ann, who had moved in with Carrie and her own then-living husband, and who was still living under Carrie’s roof, she and her son Charles having made the move from the Maryland horse ranch to Paris when Carrie’s husband died. Ann was quiet, retiring, very shy, and tended to avoid the parlor when Carrie was entertaining. But she was pleasant to talk to, particularly when the parlor was dull, or when it contained a slightly oily Frenchman who wanted to know if one was unattached.
The first room she tried was occupied, but not with Ann Gillespie. Instead it contained two young men, one of whom she recognized at once as Charles, Ann’s son. “Hello,” she said. “I’m looking for your mother. I didn’t know you were home.”
“They graduated me,” Charles said, mock-surprise in his voice. “Princeton will never be the same.” Tall and very slender, eyeglassed, Charles at twenty-one still had the same hesitant, respectful, deprecatingly humorous manner that had throughout his childhood made adults automatically think of him as a “good boy.” And a good boy he invariably was, polite, attentive to his studies and obedient to the wishes of his elders.
“Congratulations,” Evelyn said. “What do you do now? Graduate school?”
Behind his glasses, Charles’ eyes looked worried. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“There comes a time,” the other young man said with dark passion, “to stop studying and start acting.” He ignored the pained look that Charles gave him, and stared intently at Evelyn, saying, with something mocking in his voice, “Don’t you think so, Aunt Evelyn?”
She frowned at him in surprise. Aunt Evelyn? Who was he? He was dark-haired, with the long lank hair no longer considered truly up-to-date in the states. His clothing was proper, but he wore it with a kind of careless ease. He was shorter and stockier than Charles, and seemed somewhat younger. And in some way familiar, though she couldn’t at all place him. She said, “Do I know you?”
“Depends how you mean that, Aunt Evelyn,” he said. “I’m Eddie.”
“Eddie! For Heaven’s sake, I didn’t even recognize you!” She stood staring at him, still having trouble believing it. This was Edward Lockridge, Jr., the son of the man subdividing Paris in the parlor. He was still only — what? — seventeen at the most. When she’d last seen him he was a neat and ordinary fifteen-year-old. “What’s happened to you in the last two years?” she asked him.