Hot, stiff, eyes flashing, she said in a taut low voice that trembled, “I understand perfectly well, and I don’t want to listen to any more of-”
“You don’t? Christ, honey, you gotta listen to somebody. You got it sticking out all over you-you think you’re in love with this bastard, you’re taking it seriously, but he ain’t, he won’t even interduce you to his precious mother, right? You want love and marriage, and he wants something else, right? I know these guys, believe me-all he wants is sex.”
“That’s not so!”
“You think about it, honey. And while you’re with this guy, you see if you can tell yourself it ain’t just sex. You think I don’t know the way you kids carry on nowadays? Hell, I’m a broad-minded old sonofabitch, I don’t carry no horse whip, you know that. But this guy-Christ, I never even met the bastard, and I can read him like a book.”
“It’s not so! It isn’t!”
Her father lowered his eyes to the can of beer. He said softly, “Don’t try to persuade me, honey-see if you can persuade yourself first. Y’unnerstand what I mean?”
“All right,” she snapped viciously. “Maybe he is just toying with my affections. Maybe I’m just in a mood to have my affections toyed with.”
He murmured, “Don’t talk like that, Anne. Not to your old man.”
Wound up, she said with glittering anger, “Loving is more important than being loved, anyway. Isn’t it? What does it matter if-”
“It matters, honey. You think about him not taking you to meet his mother, and you think hard, and you see what you come up with.” He leaned forward suddenly and gripped her wrist. She tried to jerk back, but he held her in a tight fist; he said earnestly, “You really love him, Anne? You really want the guy? Then make him marry you before he leeches his way out!”
“What? How?”
“How have women done it for five thousand years?”
“Poppa!”
He released her and slumped back in his chair; his jowls seemed to sag. He said, “Forget that. I take it back. Christ, I got troubles of my own, honey, half the time I don’t know what I’m saying myself, y’know what I mean? It’s only, well, hell, I’d like to see you get yourself a good husband, get out of this rat hole here. Nothing’s ever gonna get any better here. You gotta get out of it while you can, honey. You gotta grab any chance you can get. And don’t worry about me and her. We’re all used up anyway-I don’t want you throwing your whole life away on a couple old wrecks like your mother and me. We got nothing left to look forward to. You have. You got your youth, which is a precious thing, y’unnerstand what I’m tryna tell you?”
“Stop talking like that, Poppa. I don’t know what to think.”
He said slowly, as if thinking it out with great care, “Listen to me, honey. When you’re in love the way you are, you seem to lose a lot of your self-respect. Maybe you get to thinking, ‘I’m gonna have him, marriage or no marriage, it don’t matter.’ But it does matter. You gotta have something to show for it, or you’ll find out the world’s full of bastards that’ll use you up and throw you out. You gotta fight that, honey-you gotta grab your chance when you can.”
He chugged the rest of the beer down and hurled the can in the paper bag by the sink, got up and shuffled heavily toward the door. She hadn’t realized before how old he was getting.
He mumbled, “You think about it, honey,” and went out of the kitchen.
She sat for a long time in the silence. Confused by double loyalties, she sat motionless until finally her hand, almost of its own will, reached for the phone, and she began to dial Steve’s number, hardly aware of what she was doing. She was remembering the evening he had taken her window-shopping and given her the silver from Jensen’s; thinking of him, listening to the phone ring and ring and ring, her body was in torment.
Brian Garfield
Villiers Touch
20. Steve Wyatt
Attended by four servants and a yard man, Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt lived in barely adequate comfort in a gabled rococo house on sufficient East Hampton acreage to ensure privacy, with a long soft lawn that rolled down to a grove of big old willows around a pond, on which floated a few swans and ducks. There was, inevitably, a gazebo. The faint fishy smell of the Atlantic came up from the nearby beach, and the evening breeze seemed to have cleared away the gnats and moths and some of the heat, making it possible for the Friday-night gathering-a tradition with Wyatts for eighty years-to move out onto the lawn after the late dinner.
Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt was sixty-seven. Her hair, waved tightly and meticulously, looked like a gray stone sculpture, done in a style that had not changed in forty years. She had a homely angular resemblance to Andrew Jackson and looked as if she might drink straight from the bottle, though no one had ever actually witnessed her doing so. She was confident enough of her impeccable antecedents and the position which accrued to it that she had long ago given up demure pretense; she had allowed her natural self to emerge, and in so doing she revealed that for all her imperious nobility she was in fact a creature of remarkable vulgarity-loud, vital, hearty, with tenacious jaw and strong whiskey-baritone voice. She was a character-a landmark.
Of the nine guests who had attended the dinner gathering, five had departed shortly after ten o’clock, pleading fatigue and the long drive back to Morristown, where they lived amid polo ponies and tennis courts. Letting the group out the front door with the aid of his mother’s maid, Steve Wyatt heard one of the departing guests complain as they got into chauffeured Mercedes, “Really, you don’t get invited to dinner at Fran’s-you get sentenced to it.” Steve exchanged glances with the maid, whose face gave away absolutely nothing, and listened to the low run of laughter from the departing guests before the car pulled away, its headlights stabbing the night, and surged toward the highway.
When he returned to the rear lawn, he found his mother engaged in spirited argument with Prescott Van Alstyne, bitterly declaiming “those imbeciles in Washington,” by which she meant Congress, not the administration; she had had a Democrat in the house once, but she hadn’t known about it until after he left, and he had never been invited to return. It was said, with reasonable accuracy, that anybody at all could be invited once to Fran Wyatt’s, provided of course he had minimum credentials; the real sign of acceptance was a second invitation, which was extended to few.
The Van Alstynes were among the select-not the Best Known People perhaps, but assuredly the Best People. You had to catch Prescott Van Alstyne between yachting expeditions to the Adriatic and skiing safaris to Austria. He had played poker with Onassis on a yacht in the Aegean, and his wife had been photographed dancing with the Duke of Windsor. She was a fleshy woman in rubber-soled shoes and matter-of-fact tweeds, wearing the careless look of old wealth and good horses.
They had with them tonight their daughter Beth, a tall chic blond who spent her time Junior Leaguing-being decorative, attending concerts and ballets, opening exhibitions in galleries, and performing Good Works: her current passion was a foundation raising money to aid Asian children whose limbs her government had blown off. She never admitted her main purpose in all these activities was to show off clothes.
Wyatt’s mother had thrust Beth Van Alstyne upon him without trying to disguise her motives. He always did his best to humor his mother; but Beth conformed to her inbred type; she was a dull creature of ritual and repetition, preoccupied with appearance and gratuitous gossip. Within the past month he had learned firsthand that she disapproved of sexual experimentation-not on moral principle, but because it was vulgar. By now, merely the way she said “Hellew” was enough to make his skin crawl.
Even so, she was a pretty girl. Very tan, just slightly leathery, with squint creases from tennis and riding. She had sun-streaked blond hair, medium length, and for this occasion she wore the kind of upper-crust clothing that never went out of fashion-a McMullen blouse with round collar and short sleeves, a poplin skirt, practical shoes, a simple double strand of pearls. Wyatt rather enjoyed looking at her. He amused himself with a fantasy of sewing her lips shut with surgical sutures and taking her on an involuntary tour of exploration of the country discovered by the Marquis de Sade.