freshness of his clean neat-featured face showed asmuch; and a fresh haircut lent him that look of defenseless innocence that only a haircut can.
Grady gave him a happy tomboy shove. “Why aren’t you in Cambridge? Or is the law too boring?”
“Boring, but not so boring as my family are going to be when they hear I’ve been booted out.”
“I don’t believe you,” Grady laughed. “Anyway, I want to hear all about it. Only now we’re in the most terrible rush. Mother and Dad are sailing for Europe, and I’m seeing them off on the boat.”
“Can’t I come, too? Please, miss?”
Grady hesitated, then called, “Apple, tell Mother Peter’s coming with us,” and Peter Bell, thumbing his nose at Apple behind her back, ran into the street to signal a taxi.
They needed two taxis; Grady and Peter, who waited to retrieve from the cloakroom Lucy’s little cross-eyed dachshund, used the second. It had a sky-window roof: dove flights, clouds and towers tumbled upon them; the sun, shooting summer-tipped arrows, jingled the new-penny color of Grady’s cropped hair, and her skinny, nimble face, shaped with bones of fish-spine delicacy, was flushed by the honeyed blowing light. “If anyone should ask,” she said,lighting Peter’s cigarette for him, “Apple or anyone, do please say that we have a date.”
“Is this a new trick, lighting gentlemen’s cigarettes? And that lighter; McNeil, however did you come by it? Atrocious.”
It was, rather. However, she’d never thought so until this moment. Made of mirror, and with an enormous sequined initial, it was the sort of novelty found on drugstore counters. “I bought it,” she said. “It works wonderfully. Anyway, what I just said, you will remember?”
“No, my love, you never bought that. You try awfully hard, but I’m afraid you’re not really very vulgar.”
“Peter, are you teasing me?”
“Of course I am,” he laughed, and she pulled his hair, laughing too. Though unrelated, Grady and Peter, they still were relatives, not through blood but out of sympathy: it was the happiest friendship she knew, and always with him she relaxed in the secure warm bath of it. “Why shouldn’t I tease you? Isn’t that what you’re doing to me? No, no don’t shake your head. You’re up to something, and you’re not going to tell me. Never mind, dear, I won’t pester you now. As for the date, why not? Anything to evade my anguished parents. Only you’ll damn well pay for it: after all, what’s the point in spending money on you? I’d prefer trotting around dear sisterHarriet; she at least can tell you all about astronomy. By the way, do you know what that dreary girl has done: she’s gone to Nantucket to spend the summer studying stars. Is that the boat? The
Queen Mary
? And I’d so hoped for something amusing like a Polish tanker. Whoever dreamed up that bilious whale ought to be gassed: you Irish are perfectly right, the English are horrors. But then, so are the French. The
Normandie
didn’t burn soon enough. Even so, I wouldn’t go on an American boat if you gave me—”
The McNeils were on A deck in a suite of varnished rooms with fake fireplaces. Lucy, just-arrived orchids trembling on her lapel, skittered to and fro while Apple trailed after her reading aloud from cards that had come with offerings of flowers and fruit. Mr. McNeil’s secretary, the stately Miss Seed, passed among them with a Piper-Heidsieck bottle, her expression vaguely curled with the incongruity of champagne in the morning (Peter Bell told her not to bother with a glass, he would take whatever was left of the bottle), and Mr. McNeil himself, solemnly flattered, stood at the door discouraging a man who televised important travelers: “Sorry, old man … forgot my makeup ha ha.” No one even liked Mr. McNeil’s jokes except other men and Miss Seed: and that, so Lucy said, was only because Miss Seed was in love with him. The dachshund ripped the stockings of a
Grady gave him a happy tomboy shove. “Why aren’t you in Cambridge? Or is the law too boring?”
“Boring, but not so boring as my family are going to be when they hear I’ve been booted out.”
“I don’t believe you,” Grady laughed. “Anyway, I want to hear all about it. Only now we’re in the most terrible rush. Mother and Dad are sailing for Europe, and I’m seeing them off on the boat.”
“Can’t I come, too? Please, miss?”
Grady hesitated, then called, “Apple, tell Mother Peter’s coming with us,” and Peter Bell, thumbing his nose at Apple behind her back, ran into the street to signal a taxi.
They needed two taxis; Grady and Peter, who waited to retrieve from the cloakroom Lucy’s little cross-eyed dachshund, used the second. It had a sky-window roof: dove flights, clouds and towers tumbled upon them; the sun, shooting summer-tipped arrows, jingled the new-penny color of Grady’s cropped hair, and her skinny, nimble face, shaped with bones of fish-spine delicacy, was flushed by the honeyed blowing light. “If anyone should ask,” she said,lighting Peter’s cigarette for him, “Apple or anyone, do please say that we have a date.”
“Is this a new trick, lighting gentlemen’s cigarettes? And that lighter; McNeil, however did you come by it? Atrocious.”
It was, rather. However, she’d never thought so until this moment. Made of mirror, and with an enormous sequined initial, it was the sort of novelty found on drugstore counters. “I bought it,” she said. “It works wonderfully. Anyway, what I just said, you will remember?”
“No, my love, you never bought that. You try awfully hard, but I’m afraid you’re not really very vulgar.”
“Peter, are you teasing me?”
“Of course I am,” he laughed, and she pulled his hair, laughing too. Though unrelated, Grady and Peter, they still were relatives, not through blood but out of sympathy: it was the happiest friendship she knew, and always with him she relaxed in the secure warm bath of it. “Why shouldn’t I tease you? Isn’t that what you’re doing to me? No, no don’t shake your head. You’re up to something, and you’re not going to tell me. Never mind, dear, I won’t pester you now. As for the date, why not? Anything to evade my anguished parents. Only you’ll damn well pay for it: after all, what’s the point in spending money on you? I’d prefer trotting around dear sisterHarriet; she at least can tell you all about astronomy. By the way, do you know what that dreary girl has done: she’s gone to Nantucket to spend the summer studying stars. Is that the boat? The
Queen Mary
? And I’d so hoped for something amusing like a Polish tanker. Whoever dreamed up that bilious whale ought to be gassed: you Irish are perfectly right, the English are horrors. But then, so are the French. The
Normandie
didn’t burn soon enough. Even so, I wouldn’t go on an American boat if you gave me—”
The McNeils were on A deck in a suite of varnished rooms with fake fireplaces. Lucy, just-arrived orchids trembling on her lapel, skittered to and fro while Apple trailed after her reading aloud from cards that had come with offerings of flowers and fruit. Mr. McNeil’s secretary, the stately Miss Seed, passed among them with a Piper-Heidsieck bottle, her expression vaguely curled with the incongruity of champagne in the morning (Peter Bell told her not to bother with a glass, he would take whatever was left of the bottle), and Mr. McNeil himself, solemnly flattered, stood at the door discouraging a man who televised important travelers: “Sorry, old man … forgot my makeup ha ha.” No one even liked Mr. McNeil’s jokes except other men and Miss Seed: and that, so Lucy said, was only because Miss Seed was in love with him. The dachshund ripped the stockings of a
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