Collected Novels and Plays Read Free Page A

the damp cheek unwillingly. “Is this where?”
    “No. Way inside.”
    “I’m sorry.
    “I think I’ll survive.”
    “For today, I mean.”
    Her mother’s eyes opened, though Lily could see that the effort hurt her. “I am too.” She smiled. “Go to sleep now. Dream about tomorrow. You’re having a magician, did you know?”
    “Don’t try to talk,” said Lily consolingly; clearly
she
wasn’t going to be consoled.
    From the bathroom came a blurred, guttural sound—her father’s throat being cleared. “Oh,” her mother said, as if just then reminded of the fact, “we spoke to Grandpa in the West Indies. He’ll be up here the end of this month, for the summer.”
    “Did you tell him about the portrait?”
    “Yes. He took it very well.” Whatever that meant. Unexpectedly, her whole face quivered.
    Lily took her hand. Once Enid had been somebody’s little girl. Indeed, she seemed, just now again, to have gone all hurt and helpless, with great fringed eyes that shut like a doll’s. She hadn’t even power to send Lily back to bed, but lay, her wrist surrendered to a gentle stroking, and neither, at that particular moment, certain which was mother and which child.
    2. Francis Tanning received Enid’s letter in Rome.
    Before collecting their mail he and Jane had just “discovered” San Giovanni Decollato, and were full of the crazy frescoes in the refectory. Fancy watching a decapitation while you ate! They planned to haveeverybody go see
that
, and so bring about an unwilling recognition, by the cross-eyed monk who kept the gate, of an
attrazione turistica
within his precincts.
    They sat now on the rim of the Piazza di Spagna fountain, their bare legs hanging in dazzling water, and as he glanced through Enid’s thin blue pages, “Oh melodrama!” exclaimed Francis. “No thank you! Not if that’s the sort of thing I’m going back for!
You
go back, Jane, you marry your young man! I’m glad I listened to the tiny voice that said not to book passage!”
    Jane blinked.
“Non riesco a capire
—”
    So he showed her the letter, rereading it over her shoulder and from time to time—for she never kept it straight—distinguishing among his father’s wives: Enid’s mother,
then
his own, finally Fern. “Or rather
not
finally, it now appears,” he said, rolling back his frayed shorts, actually trousers he’d trimmed himself, to get more sun.
    Enid dwelt mostly upon Mr. Tanning’s response in the matter of the portrait. He hadn’t taken it well at all. Reading between her cautious lines, Francis marveled at the old man’s egoism. He had assumed from the first that the blow was aimed not at Enid but at himself. And by Fern. It hurt him to admit that a person with whom he’d lived intimately for so many years was capable of this cruel spiteful act. When Larry, having already ascertained
     from three sources that Fern was indeed in New York, had grabbed the phone and tried to express his own suspicions, Mr. Tanning had blown up. Irene Cheek was a fine straightforward woman. Nobody’s on God’s earth liked to be snubbed and talked about as if she were dirt under the Buchanans’ spotless feet. Then to pretend that Irene—! The wires to Jamaica had crackled and buzzed as he ranted. What about the dinner party Larry and Enid, deaf to his entreaties,
     had declined to give in honor of the Cheeks, the previous summer? What about the Cheeks having taken
him
into their bungalow in Jamaica, the previous winter, at great inconvenience to themselves, but knowing he wasn’t physically up to the season at Hobe Sound with Fern? What aboutthe transformation Irene had wrought in Cousin Charlie, who had been the town drunk before she married him? On and on. “Now there are rumors,” Enid’s
     letter said, “of Daddy’s wanting to marry Irene.”
    “There you are!” cried Francis, gesticulating cynically in the warm light. “Why can’t Larry and Enid be nice to Irene, instead of
driving
her to Reno? Wait