Reinhart's Women Read Free Page A

date, it now seemed more subtly feminine, somehow: lace blouse underneath, a bit of jewelry, and so on.
    Grace was not, as Reinhart had mentioned, a large woman. To shake hands with Reinhart, her forearm was put at a steep angle.
    “Welcome to the humble abode, Grace,” said her host, with an expansive left wrist.
    Grace controlled the shake, irrespective of the remarkable difference in fists, and peering around, she penetrated the living room. “It’s hardly humble, Carl,” she said in her brisk voice. “But then why should it be?” She suddenly looked vulnerable, an unprecedented and, Reinhart would have said, a most unlikely phase for Grace Greenwood. She continued to walk about in a military stride.
    “Won’t you sit down?” he asked. “May I give you a drink?”
    She produced an abrupt, barking laugh. “Anything that’s wet!”
    She strode to the windows and laughed again. “There’s the river, huh?” But the view was not sufficiently riveting to keep her there for a third second, and she turned and marched to the middle of the room, where presumably she could not be jumped by surprise—so it might have looked to someone who was not aware of Grace’s credentials. Reinhart had never known anyone so confident at the core of her being; there was no bluster about Grace, none of the self-doubt usually apparent in some form in the boldest of women, and not one iota of vanity.
    Despite her apparent indifference to the choice of potation he remembered how precise Grace had been about her preprandial drinks at their other two social engagements. (At dinner she had specified Johnnie Walker Red, diluted only by a sparkling mineral water called Minnehaha, of which, it turned out, her firm was the local distributor.)
    He now poured her what she had drunk at their shopping-center lunch, a Jim Beam with tap water and ice, and was on his way to deliver it when Grace seemed all at once a frozen image in one of those cinematic stop-actions which had become a cliché in recent years, from an actress fixed toothily in mid-laugh to a car forever hurtling from a bluff into the ocean. Grace was arrested in a slight hunch of body and an enigmatic moue.
    The fact was that Winona had slunk almost silently into the room, but if Grace had seen her, it was through the back of her own head, for she, Grace, was still facing Reinhart.
    “Aha!” he cried, perhaps too stridently, but he wanted to get beyond this purposelessly awkward moment. “Grace Greenwood, this is my daughter Winona.”
    But Grace remained in her stasis, facing him. Was she deaf? Or had she actually suffered an attack of paralysis?
    Meanwhile Winona continued her sneaky approach, which seemed literally on tiptoe, but this was not the least of her eccentricities. She had changed her attire for the fourth time. She now wore black slacks, a tight black turtleneck shirt, and black shoes with high heels—it was her manner of walking in this awkward footgear that Reinhart saw as tiptoeing. Finally, her hair was pulled severely around the back of her head, where it was presumably gathered into a knot. Her eyes had a suggestion of the mysterious East: they had been slightly almondized by the tension on her skin at the temples.
    Reinhart knew he would never understand the mysteries of women’s styles of dress. Winona of course would have looked perfect in anything, but why for a spring luncheon she had finally settled on a costume suggestive of a Hollywood gunfighter’s, sans only the pancake Stetson, was inexplicable.
    At last she, as it were, rounded Grace’s corner, for Grace had still not moved, and in a special low voice, one Reinhart had never suspected she could produce, she uttered only one word, “Hello,” but put a good deal of force into that word, and having said it, she stepped back one pace, put her hands on her sleek black hips, and stared severely at the other woman.
    “Winona,” said Reinhart, “this is my new friend, Grace Greenwood.”
    Grace