Hollywood Read Free Page B

vain, to sweat. But today the small blue eyes were bright and there was even a suggestion of color in her cheeks due to the north wind, while the end of her somewhat thick nose was also rosy—moist, too. Like a trumpet, she blew her nose into a large handkerchief and said, “I hate incense. So foreign, so bad for the air.”
    “
Chacun à son goût.
” Madame Marcia was gracious. “Let me take your wraps.” As the Duchess was divested, she turned to Jess. “We’re invited to Mrs. Bingham’s but …” The Duchess was about to name her husband; then saw the dark brown myopic eyes of Jess so unlike her own small gray far-sighted ones; remembered the rule of
omertà
. “… but I don’t want to go alone. So you can take me, can’t you?”
    “Sure thing, Duchess.”
    “Now, Madame Marcia,” the Duchess made the priestess sound like the patroness of a disorderly house, “I’ve been hearing so much the last couple of years about you and I’m really glad to meet up with you though I can’t say I’m all that much a believer in all this.” The Duchess’s face set in whatJess was convinced she believed was a jovial expression but the long sheep-like upper lip and thin mouth produced an effect more alarming than not.
    “Dear lady,” Marcia sighed and blinked her eyes. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.…”
    “I don’t like Shakespeare.” Jess was always surprised by how much the Duchess knew and, usually, disliked. But then she had had a hard life which was probably not going to get any easier. She could hear storm warnings more clearly than anyone else he knew, like those animals that were able to anticipate earthquakes, much good it ever did them. “I saw the Frank Deshon Opera Company once.” The Duchess did a complete reversal; she was also a perfect politician when she chose to be. “They played Cincinnati. I went with my … brother. That was way before your time, of course.…”
    “Oh, my
dear
lady!” Madame Marcia was properly hooked.
    “Now what do I do? I feel like I’m at the dentist’s.” Madame Marcia took her client’s arm and steered her into the back room. “It will be painless, I promise you.”
    “Now, don’t you listen, Jess.” The Duchess touched the beads.
    “I never listen when I’m not supposed to.”
    “Says you! Those big ears of yours flap like nothing I ever saw outside the circus.”
    Jess resolved not to listen; and heard everything. “The subject,” as the Duchess’s husband was referred to, “was born November 2, 1865, at two P.M . in the Midwest of the United States. Jupiter.” Then something, something. Then, “Sign of Sagittarius in the tenth hour.” Jess stared into the small coal fire set back in an iron grate. Washington was just like Ohio, nothing big city at all about these R Street brick houses. But then everyone liked to say that Washington was just a big village which happened to be full of big people of the sort Jess was naturally attracted to as they were to him.
    Lately, Jess had started to keep a notebook in which he recorded the name of every important person he met in the course of a day. In Washington his fingers soon got tired, adding up the day’s score. Even so, he was looking forward to Mrs. Bingham’s reception. A wealthy widow, Mrs. Bingham conducted what Jess had first thought was a political “saloon” like a bar and grill until it was explained to him what a salon was. Mrs. Bingham was also the mother-in-law of the publisher of the Washington
Tribune
, a paper most friendly to Ohio Republicans, unlike the Washington
Post
, whose owner, John R. McLean, an Ohio Democrat, had died the previous summer, leaving his son Ned to do right by the Duchess and her husband. Ned and his wifeEvalyn were now their close friends; and so, marvelously, was Jess, who had never dreamed that he would be taken up by a rich and glamorous couple of the highest society. Evalyn was especially magnificent, with the most diamonds of any