Saratoga Trunk Read Free Page B

do it today. It’s going to be the day of the little man. Tell them to have faith and believe that they’re the best Americans in the decentest government the world has ever seen. It’s true, I tell you. We’re just coming out of the darkness. Don’t let anyone tell you that America today isn’t the—”
    “Sure. Sure. We know.”
    She turned to go then, with a glance at them over her shoulder—a whimsical and appealing glance from those fine eyes that seemed to convey a little secret understanding between her and them. I am leaving an old and sick man in your care, the glance said. Be lenient. Be kind. Aloud, “Don’t keep Mr. Maroon too long, will you? And please help yourselves to drinks and sandwiches there on the table. If I come back at the end of—oh—fifteen minutes don’t be too cross with me. Mr. Maroon finds this heat rather trying.”
    “Thanks, Mrs. Maroon. You’ve been swell. . . . Think it’s safe to leave a bunch of newspapermen with all this scotch and rye?”
    She went then, carrying herself with such grace and dignity that if it had not been for her steel-gray hair you might have thought her a woman of thirty, her soft draperies flowing after her, her head held high. As she closed the door and vanished she heard Keppel’s voice, not quite so suave now, for time was pressing. “Now then, Mr. Maroon, is it true that you . . .” And then the hard incisive tone of Larry Conover’s voice keyed to the tempo of the tabloid he represented. “Hi, wait a minute, fellas. Something tells me Mr. Maroon isn’t kidding. Are you, Mr. Maroon? Say, listen, maybe we’re missing the real story. What was that again about—”
    She made as though to turn back and re-enter the room. But she only hesitated a moment there before the door, and shrugged her shoulders with a little Gallic gesture and smiled and did not listen for more.
    She and Clint Maroon had met and fallen instantly in love at breakfast in Madame Begué’s restaurant that April Sunday morning in New Orleans, almost sixty years ago. Though perhaps their encounter in the French Market earlier in the day should be called their first meeting. Certainly there he had persisted in staring at her and following her, and he had even attempted to speak to her. She had had to administer punishment, brisk though secondhand—for his boldness.
    Clio Dulaine was back in New Orleans after an absence of fifteen years. Though she had left it as a child and had not seen it again until now, when she had just turned twenty, she was as much at home in it, as deeply in love with it as if she were a Creole aristocrat with a century’s background of dwelling in the Vieux Carré. Throughout the years of her life in France she had heard of New Orleans and learned of it through the memories and longings of two exiled and homesick women—her mother, the lovely Rita Dulaine, and her aunt Belle Piquery. These two, filled with nostalgia for their native and beloved Louisiana city, had lived unwillingly and died resentfully in the Paris to which they had been banished—the Paris of the 1870’s. In those years the mind of the girl Clio had become a brimming reservoir for their dreams, their bizarre recollections, their heartsick yearnings. Though they dwelt perforce in France, they really lived in their New Orleans past. The Franco-Prussian War, the occupation of Paris had been to them a minor and faintly annoying incident. Their chief concern with it was that in those confused years their copy of the New Orleans French newspaper L’Abeille sometimes failed to arrive on time. Its arrival was an event. They fell upon its meager pages with the eager little cries of women famished for news from home. They devoured every crumb of information—births, deaths, marriages, society, advertisements. Though these two women belonged to that strange and exotic stratum which was the New Orleans underworld, Rita’s life had been for many years entwined with that of one of the