Love & Mrs. Sargent Read Free

had no future except as the lining of that Good Cloth Coat Mrs. Flood wouldn’t be able to afford for another month or two. So today it was the mink or nothing and Mrs. Flood felt that she had to look her very best.
    Today, while Mrs. Sargent was making a speech in Evanston, Mrs. Flood had entertained. And she had entertained to her great surprise someone poorer than herself—a Mrs. Stacy Porter, the Emily Mortimer as was. Mrs. Flood had run into Mrs. Porter in front of the Lake Forest branch of Marshall Field’s a week ago and she had been amazed to find her old friend—once the absolute gasp of Astor Street, while Mrs. Flood had never done better than North Dearborn Parkway—wearing dowdy white with white oxfords, and so long after Labor Day! “I’ve got to run, Imogene,” Mrs. Porter had said. “Here’s my number out here. Call me.”
    Putting on her very best telephone voice, in which the A’s broadened into yawns, Mrs. Flood had courageously called Mrs. Porter and, after jousting with a vicious maid, finally got through. Mrs. Flood and Mrs. Porter had discussed their girlhood on the South Side, their matronhood on the North Side—the good old days.
    “I had no idea you’d bought out here, Emily,” Mrs. Flood had said, pleased that so fabulous a friend of the past was once again close at hand. Even if the Anglia did get forty miles to the gallon, gas was expensive.
    “Buy here? I’d like to buy my way out. The six most hellish weeks I’ve ever spent.”
    “Hahahahaha! Same old Emily. Well, it is hard settling inand servants so. . . .” Thinking of servants made Mrs. Floodthink of food and thinking of food made Mrs. Flood recall the succulent meals once served by Mrs. Stacy Porter in her Italian dining room off the Chinese cocktail room off the English library off the French drawing room in Astor Street during the twenties.“We really must lunch sometime, Emily. It’s been. . . . Well, it’s been years. Where did you say you were. . . . ”An eloquent pause.
    “Oh God, not here!”
    “The club?”
    “How’s Monday, Imogene? I’m free Mondays.”
    “ Why, Monday would be lovely, Emily,” Mrs. Flood had said, thanking an R.C. God rather than her customary C. of E. Maker, that her employer would be lecturing to a club of Catholic women in Evanston that day.
    “I’ll meet you at the Inn. Twelve-thirty. And I mean twelve twenty-nine sharp. I’ve got to get back to the old pismire by three. ‘By.”
    Mrs. Flood had giggled shrilly, deliciously shocked by the same old profane, raffish, devil-may-care Emily, Today she had dressed with special care, twice lacquering her long gray nails, daubing blue onto her pleated gray eyelids, purple into her sparse gray hair. She had put her big, fake topaz ring on her right hand and her small, real engagement ring—recently redeemed from the First State Pawners—on the left. (Mrs. Flooddimly recalled that Emily, hefting two armloads of bracelets, had once described it as “cute.”)
    Emily had arrived fifteen minutes late. Once the darling of the Michigan Avenue dressmakers, the fabled beauty who “never shopped below the Bridge” wore a dirty raincoat and again the dowdy white dress and shoes.
    “Sorry I’m late, Imogene. Just as I was about to dress I had to put the old bastard on the bedpan again. I’m a sight I know.”
    “Is Stacy ill, Emily?” Mrs. Flood had asked, her brows rising beneath her bangs.
    “Come to the party, Imogene. Stacy’s been dead for six years.”
    “Dead, darling? Your husband?” Mrs. Flood’s eyebrows formed a huge circumflex above her pert little nose. “B-but how?”
    “Bottle,” Mrs. Porter said calmly. “Stacy always drank like a fish. That reminds me, why don’t we order something?”
    “Oh, certainly, darling. But who is it that’s ill?”
    “Just an old bitch up in Lake Bluff. Stroke. Partial. Unfortunately it hasn’t affected her speech centers, and she’s got bowels like a goose. Didn’t you know,