"God, I can't sleep. How can I sleep when…"
"You can sleep, because you're a young, healthy woman. Here, turn over and let me put my arms that's right. Now go to sleep, and we'll have breakfast when we wake up. Then I'll give you a ride home to get dressed for class. Goodnight, darling."
Celia sighed and nodded, settling herself against Janice. "Night," she murmured, her voice muffled against Janice's breasts.
Janice sighed again as she looked up at the ceiling, thinking. Presently she began quietly crying as Celia breathed with a slow, deep rhythm.
CHAPTER FIVE
Janice swung the Camaro to the curb and braked it sharply to a stop in front of the academic building, and Celia opened the door and paused with her feet on the curb as she looked over her shoulder at Janice. "I'll see you at orchestra class this afternoon, then?"
"Yes. Now run, or you'll be late."
Celia nodded and grinned, then she hopped out of the car and slammed the door as she raced across the sidewalk. Janice watched her run up the steps, taking them two at a time, and she chuckled and glanced over her shoulder for oncoming traffic as she slid the gear lever into drive. They had got up late, and there had barely been time for a cup of tea and the quick drive to Celia's room to change into a skirt. But she would make it to her class on time if she ran all the way, Janice reflected as she drove along the street. And if she didn't run, she didn't deserve to get to class on time. Running occasionally was part of it.
Janice drove back to her house to get ready for the nine o'clock meeting. It was the scheduled monthly business meeting for the symphony orchestra, and slacks wouldn't do. She picked out a severely plain white dress and put on hose and low heeled white shoes, then she combed her hair again, put her wallet and keys in a small white purse, and left.
The chairman of the trustees of the symphony was also the president of the largest bank in the city, and the business meetings were always conducted in the conference room on the third floor of the bank building. Janice parked around the corner from the entrance, then went in and took the elevator up. Doctor Janison, the conductor, had just stepped out of the other elevator when she walked out into the hall. He was a large, burly man of about fifty-five or so, given to wrinkled wool suits, striped shirts, and dingy-looking ties which were always askew. He was a competent musician with occasional flashes of brilliance, and a firm, controlling hand over the orchestra. He was always congenial and friendly toward Janice, and he seemed somewhat diffident toward her and slightly in awe of her academic qualifications.
"Hello, Doctor Wycliffe. We're not late, are we?"
She smiled up at him. "Good morning. I don't believe so, but if they've already started we shouldn't have any difficulty in catching up."
It was a comment on the dreary, endless minutiae which occasionally kept the business meetings dragging on for hours, and he laughed heartily and nodded as they walked on down the corridor.
Part of the people were there, seated at the conference table, and a couple of women who worked in the bank were putting ashtrays, notepads, and pencils in front of the chairs. Mr. Carleton, the bank president and chairman of the trustees was already seated at the head of the long, shiny table. A large man of sixty with a florid face and stark white hair, and he was leaning over and talking to a woman who sat on his right. Christina Barker, the most active and musically knowledgeable of the trustees. A tall, attractive woman in her middle thirties, and a childless widow. She was of one of the old, settled, and monied families in the area and knew virtually everyone in the city, and she was perhaps the sole reason why the symphony organization ended each year with its books showing a small amount on the credit side while many others in the country went further and further into the red. Her trusteeship had been more or less inherited from her husband, a man several years her senior who had died of heart trouble a few years previously, and she had apparently found her mission in life. No detail of the symphony was too minor for her attention, and she knew each musician in the orchestra by name. And people who had known her family for years were prone to flee upon her approach because they knew they would be buttonholed for a subscription to the symphony.
On Carleton's left was Edward Chumley, a man of forty or so with a bad complexion and an uncomfortable habit of picking at his ears. He was also from an old family in the area, but he wore it like a mantle and had a self-assumed mission of providing culture and education to the masses. He was caustic critic of youth and all its endeavors and a prude. Janice had almost laughed aloud once when the thought had suddenly occurred to her that mention of Eroica, the Funeral March, would send him scuttling for a musical dictionary. Like all the trustees except Christina Barker, he had an appaling lack of knowledge about music, and he was the one who did most of the talking at the meetings.
Carleton nodded to Jannison and Janice still talking to Christina, and Christina flashed them a quick smile. She seemed to be a warm, personable woman, but her activities and Janice's had seemed to keep them apart because they weren't well acquainted with each other. But every time Janice had met her, there had been a tiny, insistent feeling that Christina was interested in her in areas which had nothing to do with the symphony, and now her eyes moved over Janice and lingered on her before they turned back to Carleton.
Chumley nodded to Jannison and looked away before his eyes met Janice's. There had been an instinctive enmity between them from the time they first met, and Janice dismissed him from her mind as she nodded to the other trustees. One was a dowager of sixty or so who always looked uncomfortable in her brightly colored dresses and mink stoles, another was a thin old man of sixty-five or so with a pronounced Adam's apple and pink scalp showing through his thin, white hair, and the tiny, frail old woman who always wore old-fashioned black dresses and shoes was absent; she missed about half the meetings. In addition to the trustees, the orchestra personnel manager and union representative, Charles Albertson, was at the table. He was second bassoon in the orchestra, a competent musician with seven children who had taken the extra job for the money and made no bones about it in his impatience with complainers among the orchestra.
The general manager of the symphony organization came in as Janice and Jannison sat down. Frank Bailey, a tall, personable-looking man in his early thirties with a modicum of musical knowledge and a talent for management as such. A PR man with a quick, ready smile, but touchy about his prerogatives as general manager. He seemed grateful that Janice's sole concern was with music and she took no interest in management of the organization – which assistants to conductors occasionally did – and they were always on good terms, tempered by his slightly defensive, school boyish attitude toward her.
Bailey nodded and spoke to everyone as he opened his briefcase across the table from Janice took out a stack of agendas which had been run off on a duplicator, and passed them around the table.
Carleton looked up at him and nodded as he took the sheet of paper, then he cleared his throat and glanced around the table. "Well, it looks as though everyone's here." One of the women who had been putting out the things on the table sat down at the other end of the table and began taking shorthand notes on a pad. "So… I'll call the meeting to order. Frank, would you like to go over the minutes of the last meeting?"
Bailey nodded and took a folder from his briefcase. He opened it and thumbed through the papers in it, then cleared his throat and began reading one of them. Christina sat with her elbows on the edge of the table and doodled on the pad in front of her as Bailey's voice murmured, Carleton looked at him politely, blinking his eyes, and Chumley's attention was riveted on him. Everyone else was lounging back in their chair, and a couple of people were absently watching a distant airplane through the window behind Carleton.