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Flame-haired Grady McNeil is beautiful, rich and defiant. Her privileged society life leaves her wanting, and excitement comes in the form of the highly unsuitable Clyde, a Brooklyn-born, Jewish parking attendant. When Grady's mother and father leave her alone one summer in their New York penthouse, her secret affair intensifies and she is forced to make decisions that will alter her future indelibly. Truman Capote's recently discovered debut novel is a captivating portrayal of first love.
About The Author
Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1925 and was raised in various parts of the south, his family spending winters in New Orleans and summers in Alabama and New Georgia. By the age of fourteen he had already started writing short stories, some of which were published. He left school when he was fifteen and subsequently worked for the New Yorker which provided his first - and last - regular job. Following his spell with the New Yorker, Capote spent two years on a Louisiana farm where he wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). He lived, at one time or another, in Greece, Italy, Africa and the West Indies, and travelled in Russia and the Orient. He is the author of many highly praised books, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949), The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), In Cold Blood (1965), which immediately became the centre of a storm of controversy on its publication, Music for Chameleons (1980) and Answered Prayers (1986), all of which are published by Penguin. Truman Capote died in August 1984.
About The Author
Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1925 and was raised in various parts of the south, his family spending winters in New Orleans and summers in Alabama and New Georgia. By the age of fourteen he had already started writing short stories, some of which were published. He left school when he was fifteen and subsequently worked for the New Yorker which provided his first - and last - regular job. Following his spell with the New Yorker, Capote spent two years on a Louisiana farm where he wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). He lived, at one time or another, in Greece, Italy, Africa and the West Indies, and travelled in Russia and the Orient. He is the author of many highly praised books, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949), The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), In Cold Blood (1965), which immediately became the centre of a storm of controversy on its publication, Music for Chameleons (1980) and Answered Prayers (1986), all of which are published by Penguin. Truman Capote died in August 1984.
Chapter 1
'You are a mystery, my dear,' her mother said, and Grady, gazing across the table through a centrepiece of roses and fern, smiled indulgently: yes, I am a mystery, and it pleased her to think so. But Apple, eight years older, married, far from mysterious, said: 'Grady is only foolish; I wish I were going with you. Imagine, Mama, this time next week you'll be having breakfast in Paris! George keeps promising that we'll go...I don't know, though.' She paused and looked at her sister. 'Grady, why on earth do you want to stay in New York in the dead of summer?' Grady wished they would leave her alone; still this harping, and here now was the very morning the boat sailed: what was there to say beyond what she'd said? After that there was only the truth, and the truth she did not entirely intend to tell. 'I've never spent a summer here,' she said, escaping their eyes and looking out the window: the dazzle of traffic heightened the June morning quiet of Central Park, and the sun, full of first summer, that dries the green crust of spring, plunged through the trees fronting the Plaza, where they were breakfasting. 'I'm perverse; have it your own way.' She realized with a smile it was perhaps a mistake to have said that: her family did come rather near thinking her perverse; and once when she was fourteen she'd had a terrible and quite acute insight: her mother, she saw, loved her without really liking her; she had thought at first that this was because her mother considered her plainer, more obstinate, less playful than Apple, but later, when it was apparent, and painfully so to Apple, that Grady was finer looking by far, then she gave up reasoning about her mother's viewpoint: the answer of course, and at last she saw this too, was simply that in an inactive sort of way, she'd never, not even as a very small girl, much liked her mother. Yet there was little flamboyancy in either attitude; indeed, the house of their hostility was modestly furnished with affection, which Mrs. McNeil now expressed by closing her daughter's hand in her own and saying: 'We will worry about you, darling. We can't help that. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure it's safe. Seventeen isn't very old, and you've never been really alone before.'
Mr. McNeil, who whenever he spoke sounded as though he was bidding in a poker game, but who seldom spoke in any event, partly because his wife did not like to be interrupted and partly because he was a very tired man, dunked out a cigar in his coffee cup, causing both Apple and Mrs. McNeil to wince, and said: 'When I was eighteen, why hell, I'd been out in California three years.'
'But after all, Lamont...you're a man.'
'What's the difference?' he grunted. 'There has been no difference between men and women for some while. You say so yourself.'
As though the conversation had taken an unpleasant turn, Mrs. McNeil cleared her throat. 'It remains, Lamont, that I am very uneasy in leaving—'
Rising inside Grady was an ungovernable laughter, a joyous agitation which made the white summer stretching before her seem like an unrolling canvas on which she might draw those first rude pure strokes that are free. Then, too, and with a straight face, she was laughing because there was so little they suspected, nothing. The light quivering against the table silver seemed to at once encourage her excitement and to flash a warning signal: careful, dear. But elsewhere something said Grady, be proud, you are tall so fly your pennant high above and in the wind. What could have spoken, the rose? Roses speak, they are the hearts of wisdom, she'd read so somewhere. She looked out the window again; the laughter was flowing up, it was flooding on her lips: what a sparkling sun-slapped day for Grady McNeil and roses that speak!
'Why is that so funny, Grady?' Apple did not have a pleasant voice; it suggested the subvocal prattlings of an ill-natured baby. 'Mother asks a simple question, and you laugh as though she were an idiot.'
'Grady doesn't think me an idiot, surely not,' said Mrs. McNeil, but a tone of weak conviction indicated doubt, and her eyes, webbed by the spidery hat-veil she now lowered over her face, were dimly confused with the sting she always felt when confronted by what she considered Grady's contempt. It was all very well that between them there should be only the thinnest contact: there was no real sympathy, she knew that; still, that Grady by her remoteness could suggest herself superior was unendurable: in such moments Mrs. McNeil's hands twitched. Once, but this had been a great many years ago and when Grady was still a tomboy with chopped hair and scaly knees, she had not been able to control them, her hands, and on that occasion, which of course was during that period which is the most nervously trying of a woman's life, she had, provoked by Grady's inconsiderate aloofness, slapped her daughter fiercely. Whenever she'd known afterwards similar impulses she steadied her hands on some solid surface, for, at the time of her previous unrestraint, Grady, whose green estimating eyes were like scraps of sea, had stared her down, had stared through her and turned a searchlight on the spoiled mirror of her vanities: because she was a limited woman, it was her first experience with a will-power harder than her own. 'Surely not,' she said, twinkling with artificial humour.
'I'm sorry,' said Grady. 'Did you ask a question? I never seem to hear anymore.' She intended the last not so much as an apology as a serious confession.
'Really,' twittered Apple, 'one would think you were in love.'
There was a knocking at her heart, a sense of danger, the silver shook momentously, and a lemon-wheel, half-squeezed in Grady's finger, paused still: she glanced swiftly into her sister's eyes to see if anything were there that was more shrewd than stupid. Satisfied, she finished squeezing the lemon into her tea and heard her mother say: 'It is about the dress, dear. I think I may as well have it made in Paris: Dior or Fath, someone like that. It might even be less expensive in the long run. A soft leaf green would be heaven, especially with your colouring and hair—though I must say I wish you wouldn't cut it so short: it seems unsuitable and not— not quite feminine. A pity debutantes can't wear green. Now I think something in white watered silk—'
Grady interrupted her with a frown. 'If this is the party dress, I don't want it. I don't want a party, and I don't intend to go to any, not those kind at any rate. I will not be made a fool.'
Of all the things that fatigued her, this tried and annoyed Mrs. McNeil most: she trembled as if unnatural vibrations jarred the sane and stable precincts of the Plaza dining-room. Nor do I mean to be made a fool, she might have said, for, in contemplating the promotion of Grady's debut year, she'd done already a great lot of work, manoeuvring: there was even some idea of hiring a secretary. Furthermore, and in a self-righteous vein, she could have gone even so far as to say that the whole of her social life, every drab luncheon and tiresome tea (as in this light she would describe them), had been suffered only in order that her daughters receive a dazzling acceptance in the years of their dance. Lucy McNeil's own debut had been a famous and sentimental affair: her grandmother, a rightfully celebrated New Orleans beauty who had married South Carolina's Senator LaTrotta, presented Lucy and her two sisters en masse at a Camellia ball in Charleston in April of 1920; it was a presentation truly, for the three LaTrotta sisters were no more than schoolgirls whose social adventures had been heretofore conducted within the shackles of a church; so hungrily had Lucy whirled that night her feet for days had worn the bruises of this entrance into living, so hungrily had she kissed the Governor's son that her cheeks had flamed a month in remorseful shame, for her sisters— spinsters then and spinsters still—claimed kissing made babies: no, her grandmother said, hearing her teary confession, kissing does not make babies—neither does it make ladies. Relieved, she continued through to a year of triumph; it was a triumph because she was pleasant to look at, not unbearable to listen to: vast advantages when you remember that this was the meagre season when the junior assembly had only such deplorable persimmons to choose among as Hazel Veere Numland or the Lincoln girls. Then, too, during the winter holidays, her mother's family, they were the Fairmonts from New York, had given in her honour, and in this very hotel, the Plaza, a distinguished dance; even though she sat now so near the scene, and was trying to recall, there was little about it she could remember, except that it was all gold and white, that she'd worn her mother's pearls, and, oh yes, she'd met Lamont McNeil, an unremarkable event: she danced with him once and thought nothing of it. Her mother, however, was more impressed, for Lamont McNeil, while socially unknown, and though still in his late twenties, cast over Wall Street an ever enlarging shadow, and so was considered a catch, if not in the circle of angels, then by those of a but slightly lower stratum. He was asked to dinner. Lucy's father invited him to South Carolina for the duck-shoot. Manly, old grand Mrs. LaTrotta commented, and, as this was her criterion, she gave him the golden seal. Seven months later Lamont McNeil, pitching his poker voice to its tenderest tremor, spoke his piece, and Lucy, having received only two other proposals, one absurd and the second a jest, said oh Lamont I'm the happiest girl in the world. She was nineteen when she had her first child: Apple, so named, amusingly enough, because during her pregnancy Lucy McNeil had eaten them by the barrel, but her grandmother, appearing at the christening, thought it a shocking bit of frivolity—jazz and the twenties, she said, had gone to Lucy's head. But this choice of name was the last gay exclamation point to a protracted childhood, for a year later she lost her second baby; stillborn, it was a son, and she called him Grady in memory of her brother killed in the war. She brooded a long while, Lamont hired a yacht and they cruised the Mediterranean; at every bright pastel port, from St. Tropez to Taormina, she gave on board sad weeping ice-cream parties for gangs of embarrassed native boys the steward shanghaied from ashore. But on their return to America, this tearful mist abruptly lifted: she discovered the Red Cross, Harlem, the two-demand bid, she took a professional interest in Trinity Church, the Cosmopolitan, the Republican Party, there was nothing she would not sponsor, contribute to, connive for: some said she was admirable, others said brave, a few despised her. They made a spirited clique, however, these few, and over the years their combined strength had sabotaged a dozen of her ambitions. Lucy had waited; she had waited for Apple: the mother of a topflight debutante has at her hands a social version of atomic revenge; but then she was cheated out of it, for there was the new war, and the poor taste of a debut in wartime would have been excessive: they had instead given an ambulance to England. And now Grady was trying to cheat her, too. Her hands twitted on the table, flew to the lapel of her suit, plucked at a brooch of cinnamon diamonds: it was too much, Grady had tried always to cheat her, just simply by not having been born a boy. She'd named her Grady anyway, and poor Mrs. LaTrotta, then in the last exasperated year of her life, had roused herself sufficiently to declare Lucy morbid. But Grady had never been Grady, not the child she wanted. And it was not that in this matter Grady wanted to be ideal: Apple, with her pretty playful ways and aided by Lucy's sense of style, would have been an assured success, but Grady, who, for one thing, seemed not popular with young people, was a gambling chance. If she refused to cooperate, failure was certain. 'There will be a debut, Grady McNeil,' she said, stretching her gloves. 'You will wear white silk and carry a bouquet of green orchids: it will catch a little the colour of your eyes and your red hair. And we will have that orchestra the Bells had for Harriet. I warn you now, Grady, if you behave rottenly about this I shall never speak to you again. Lamont, will you ask for the check, please?'
Grady was silent some moments; she knew the others were not as calm as they seemed: they were waiting again for her to act up, which proved with what inaccuracy they observed her, how unaware they were of her recent nature. A month ago, two months ago, if she had felt her dignity so intruded upon, she would have rushed out and roared her car onto the port road with the pedal flat on the floor; she would have found Peter Bell and cut the mischief in some highway tavern; she would have made them worry. But what she felt now was a genuine disinvolvement. And to some extent a sympathy with Lucy's ambitions. It was so far off, a summer away; there was no reason to believe it would ever happen, a white silk dress, and the orchestra the Bells had had for Harriet. While Mr. McNeil paid the check, and as they crossed the dining-room, she held Lucy's arm and with a coltish awkwardness gave her cheek a delicate spontaneous peck. It was a gesture that had the sudden effect of unifying them all; they were a family: Lucy glowed, her husband, her daughters, she was a proud woman, and Grady, for all her stubborn oddness was, let anyone say whatever they would, a wonderful child, a real person. 'Darling,' Lucy said, 'I'm going to miss you.'
Apple, who was walking ahead, turned around. 'Did you drive your car in this morning, Grady?'
Grady was slow in answering; lately everything Apple said seemed suspicious; why care, really? What if Apple did know? Still, she did not want her to. 'I took the train from Greenwich.'
'Then you left the car at home?'
'Why, does it make any difference?'
'No; well, yes. And you needn't bark at me. I only thought you could drive me out on the Island. I promised George I'd stop by the apartment and pick up his encyclopaedia—such a heavy thing. I'd hate to carry it on the train. If we got there early enough you could go swimming.'
'Sorry, Apple. The car's in a garage; I left it here the other day because the speedometer got jammed. I suppose it's ready now, but as a matter of fact I have a date in town.'
'Oh?' said Apple peevishly. 'Mind if I ask who with?'
Grady minded very much, but 'Peter Bell,' she answered.
'Peter Bell, good Lord, why do you always see him? He thinks he's so smart.'
'He is.'
'Apple,' Lucy said, 'Grady's friends are no concern of yours. Peter is a charming boy; and his mother was one of my bridesmaids. Lamont, do you remember? She caught the bouquet. But isn't Peter still up in Cambridge?'
Just then Grady heard her name shouted across the lobby: 'Hiho, McNeil!' Only one person in the world called her that, and with an imitated delight, for it was not the happiest time he could have chosen to appear, she saw that it was him. A young man expensively but perversely dressed (he wore a white evening tie with a severe flannel suit, the trousers of which were held up by a wild-west belt of jewelled inappropriateness, and on his feet there were a pair of tennis sneakers), he was pocketing change at the cigar counter. As he went toward her, she going half-way to meet him, he walked with the easy grace of one who expects always to know the best things of life. 'Aren't you pretty, McNeil?' he said, and gave her a confident hug. 'But not as pretty as me: I've just been to the barber shop.' The impeccable freshness of his clean neat-featured face showed as much; and a fresh haircut lent him that look of defenceless 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 colour 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 sister
Harriet; 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 travellers: '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 female photographer who flashed Lucy in her rigidest rotogravure stance: 'What are we planning to do abroad?' said Lucy, repeating the reporter's query. 'Why, I'm not sure. We have a home in Cannes that we haven't seen since the war; I suppose we'll stop by there. And shop; of course we'll shop.' She hemmed embarrassedly. 'But mostly it's the boat ride. There 's nothing to change the spirit like a summer crossing.'
Stealing the champagne, Peter Bell led Grady away and up through the saloons and onto an open deck where voyagers, parading with their well-wishers against the city skyline, had already proud ocean-roll walks. One lone child stood at the railing forlornly flying kites of confetti: Peter offered him a swallow of champagne, but the child's mother, a giant of uncommon physique, advanced with thunderous steps and sent them fleeing to the dog-kennel deck. 'Oh dear,' said Peter, 'the dog house: isn't that always our lot.' They huddled together in a spot of sun; it was as hidden as a stowaway's retreat, a yearning bellow from the smokestacks poignantly baled away, and Peter said how wonderful it would be if they could fall asleep and awake with stars overhead and the ship far at sea. Together, running on Connecticut shores and looking over the Sound, they had, years before, spent whole days contriving elaborate and desperate plots: Peter had assumed always a serious enthusiasm, he'd seemed absolutely to believe a rubber raft would float them to Spain, and something of that old note shivered his voice now. 'I suppose it's just as well we're not children anymore,' he said, dividing the last of the wine between them. 'That really was too wretched. But I wish we were still children enough to stay on this boat.'
Grady, stretching her brown naked legs, tossed her head. 'I would swim ashore.'
'Maybe I'm not up on you as I used to be. I've been away so much. But how could you turn down Europe, McNeil? Or is that rude? I mean, am I intruding on your secret?'
'There isn't a secret,' she said, partly aggravated, partly enlivened with the knowledge that perhaps there was. 'Not a real one. It's more, well, a privacy, a small privacy I should like to keep awhile longer, oh not always, but a week, a day, simply a few hours: you know, like a present you keep hidden in a drawer: it will be given away soon enough, but for a while you want it all to yourself.' Though she had expressed her feeling inexpertly, she glanced at Peter's face, sure of seeing there a reflection of his inveterate understanding; but she found only an alarming absence of expression: he seemed faded out, as though the sudden exposure to sun had drained him of all colour, and, aware presently that he'd heard nothing she had said, she tapped him on the shoulder. 'I was wondering,' he said, blinking his eyes, 'I was wondering if there is, after all, a final reward in unpopularity?'
It was a question with some history; but Grady, who had learned the answer from Peter's own life, was surprised, even a little shocked to hear him ask it so wistfully and, indeed, ask it at all. Peter had never been popular, it was true, not at school or at the club, not with any of the people they were, as he put it, condemned to know; and yet it was this very condition which had so sworn them together, for Grady, who cared not one way or the other, loved Peter, and had joined him in his outside realm quite as though she belonged there for the same reason he did: Peter, to be sure, had taught her that she was no more liked than himself: they were too fine, it was not their moment, this era of the adolescent, their appreciation he said would come at a future time. Grady had never bothered about it; in that sense, she saw, thinking back over what seemed now a ridiculous problem, she'd never been unpopular: it was just that she'd never made an effort, not felt deeply that to be liked was of importance. Whereas Peter had cared exceedingly. All their childhood she'd helped her friend build, drafty though it was, a sandcastle of protection. Such castles should deteriorate of natural and happy processes. That for Peter his should still exist was simply extraordinary. Grady, though she still had use for their file of privately humorous references, for the sad anecdotes and tender coinages they shared, wanted no part of the castle: that applauded hour, the golden moment Peter had promised, did he not know that it was now?
'I know,' he said, as if, having divined this thought of hers, he now replied to it. 'Nevertheless.' I know. Nevertheless. He sighed over his motto. 'I suppose you imagined I was joking. About the university. Really, I was kicked out; not for saying the wrong thing, but for saying perhaps the too-right thing: both would appear to be objectionable.' The exuberant quality that so suited him rearranged his mischief-maker face. 'I'm glad about you,' he said inexplicably, but with such a waterfall of warmth that Grady pressed her cheek near his. 'If I said that I was in love with you, that would be incestuous, wouldn't it, McNeil?' All-ashore gongs were clanging through the ship, and ashes of shadow, spilt by sudden cloud-shades, heaped the deck. Grady for an instant felt the oddest loss: poor Peter, he knew her even less, she realized, than Apple, and yet, because he was her only friend, she wanted to tell him: not now, sometime. And what would he say? Because he was Peter, she trusted him to love her more: if not, then let the sea usurp their castle, not the one they'd built to keep life out, it was already gone, at least for her, but another, that one sheltering friendships and promises.
As the sun flooded out, he stood up and pulled her to her feet, saying, 'And where shall we be gala tonight?' but Grady, who every moment meant to explain that she could not keep a date with him, let it pass again, for, as they descended the steps, a steward, brassy with the shininess of a gong, called his warning to them, and later, confronted with the activity of Lucy's farewell, she forgot altogether.
Fanfaring a handkerchief, and embracing her daughters fitfully, Lucy followed them to the gangplank; once she'd seen them down the canvas tunnel, she hurried out on the deck and watched for their appearance beyond the green fence; when she saw them, all clustered together and gazing dazedly, she started flagging the handkerchief to show them where she was, but her arm grew strangely weak and, overtaken by a guilty sensation of incompleteness, of having left something unfinished, undone, she let it fall to her side. The handkerchief came to her eyes in earnest, and the image of Grady (she loved her! Before God she had loved Grady as much as the child would let her) bubbled in the blur; there were stricken days, difficult days, and though Grady was as different from her as she had been from her own mother, head-sure and harder, she still was not a woman, but a girl, a child, and it was a terrible mistake, they could not leave her here, she could not leave her child unfinished, incomplete, she would have to hurry, she would have to tell Lamont they mustn't go. But before she could move he had closed his arms around her; he was waving down to the children; and then she was waving too.
'You are a mystery, my dear,' her mother said, and Grady, gazing across the table through a centrepiece of roses and fern, smiled indulgently: yes, I am a mystery, and it pleased her to think so. But Apple, eight years older, married, far from mysterious, said: 'Grady is only foolish; I wish I were going with you. Imagine, Mama, this time next week you'll be having breakfast in Paris! George keeps promising that we'll go...I don't know, though.' She paused and looked at her sister. 'Grady, why on earth do you want to stay in New York in the dead of summer?' Grady wished they would leave her alone; still this harping, and here now was the very morning the boat sailed: what was there to say beyond what she'd said? After that there was only the truth, and the truth she did not entirely intend to tell. 'I've never spent a summer here,' she said, escaping their eyes and looking out the window: the dazzle of traffic heightened the June morning quiet of Central Park, and the sun, full of first summer, that dries the green crust of spring, plunged through the trees fronting the Plaza, where they were breakfasting. 'I'm perverse; have it your own way.' She realized with a smile it was perhaps a mistake to have said that: her family did come rather near thinking her perverse; and once when she was fourteen she'd had a terrible and quite acute insight: her mother, she saw, loved her without really liking her; she had thought at first that this was because her mother considered her plainer, more obstinate, less playful than Apple, but later, when it was apparent, and painfully so to Apple, that Grady was finer looking by far, then she gave up reasoning about her mother's viewpoint: the answer of course, and at last she saw this too, was simply that in an inactive sort of way, she'd never, not even as a very small girl, much liked her mother. Yet there was little flamboyancy in either attitude; indeed, the house of their hostility was modestly furnished with affection, which Mrs. McNeil now expressed by closing her daughter's hand in her own and saying: 'We will worry about you, darling. We can't help that. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure it's safe. Seventeen isn't very old, and you've never been really alone before.'
Mr. McNeil, who whenever he spoke sounded as though he was bidding in a poker game, but who seldom spoke in any event, partly because his wife did not like to be interrupted and partly because he was a very tired man, dunked out a cigar in his coffee cup, causing both Apple and Mrs. McNeil to wince, and said: 'When I was eighteen, why hell, I'd been out in California three years.'
'But after all, Lamont...you're a man.'
'What's the difference?' he grunted. 'There has been no difference between men and women for some while. You say so yourself.'
As though the conversation had taken an unpleasant turn, Mrs. McNeil cleared her throat. 'It remains, Lamont, that I am very uneasy in leaving—'
Rising inside Grady was an ungovernable laughter, a joyous agitation which made the white summer stretching before her seem like an unrolling canvas on which she might draw those first rude pure strokes that are free. Then, too, and with a straight face, she was laughing because there was so little they suspected, nothing. The light quivering against the table silver seemed to at once encourage her excitement and to flash a warning signal: careful, dear. But elsewhere something said Grady, be proud, you are tall so fly your pennant high above and in the wind. What could have spoken, the rose? Roses speak, they are the hearts of wisdom, she'd read so somewhere. She looked out the window again; the laughter was flowing up, it was flooding on her lips: what a sparkling sun-slapped day for Grady McNeil and roses that speak!
'Why is that so funny, Grady?' Apple did not have a pleasant voice; it suggested the subvocal prattlings of an ill-natured baby. 'Mother asks a simple question, and you laugh as though she were an idiot.'
'Grady doesn't think me an idiot, surely not,' said Mrs. McNeil, but a tone of weak conviction indicated doubt, and her eyes, webbed by the spidery hat-veil she now lowered over her face, were dimly confused with the sting she always felt when confronted by what she considered Grady's contempt. It was all very well that between them there should be only the thinnest contact: there was no real sympathy, she knew that; still, that Grady by her remoteness could suggest herself superior was unendurable: in such moments Mrs. McNeil's hands twitched. Once, but this had been a great many years ago and when Grady was still a tomboy with chopped hair and scaly knees, she had not been able to control them, her hands, and on that occasion, which of course was during that period which is the most nervously trying of a woman's life, she had, provoked by Grady's inconsiderate aloofness, slapped her daughter fiercely. Whenever she'd known afterwards similar impulses she steadied her hands on some solid surface, for, at the time of her previous unrestraint, Grady, whose green estimating eyes were like scraps of sea, had stared her down, had stared through her and turned a searchlight on the spoiled mirror of her vanities: because she was a limited woman, it was her first experience with a will-power harder than her own. 'Surely not,' she said, twinkling with artificial humour.
'I'm sorry,' said Grady. 'Did you ask a question? I never seem to hear anymore.' She intended the last not so much as an apology as a serious confession.
'Really,' twittered Apple, 'one would think you were in love.'
There was a knocking at her heart, a sense of danger, the silver shook momentously, and a lemon-wheel, half-squeezed in Grady's finger, paused still: she glanced swiftly into her sister's eyes to see if anything were there that was more shrewd than stupid. Satisfied, she finished squeezing the lemon into her tea and heard her mother say: 'It is about the dress, dear. I think I may as well have it made in Paris: Dior or Fath, someone like that. It might even be less expensive in the long run. A soft leaf green would be heaven, especially with your colouring and hair—though I must say I wish you wouldn't cut it so short: it seems unsuitable and not— not quite feminine. A pity debutantes can't wear green. Now I think something in white watered silk—'
Grady interrupted her with a frown. 'If this is the party dress, I don't want it. I don't want a party, and I don't intend to go to any, not those kind at any rate. I will not be made a fool.'
Of all the things that fatigued her, this tried and annoyed Mrs. McNeil most: she trembled as if unnatural vibrations jarred the sane and stable precincts of the Plaza dining-room. Nor do I mean to be made a fool, she might have said, for, in contemplating the promotion of Grady's debut year, she'd done already a great lot of work, manoeuvring: there was even some idea of hiring a secretary. Furthermore, and in a self-righteous vein, she could have gone even so far as to say that the whole of her social life, every drab luncheon and tiresome tea (as in this light she would describe them), had been suffered only in order that her daughters receive a dazzling acceptance in the years of their dance. Lucy McNeil's own debut had been a famous and sentimental affair: her grandmother, a rightfully celebrated New Orleans beauty who had married South Carolina's Senator LaTrotta, presented Lucy and her two sisters en masse at a Camellia ball in Charleston in April of 1920; it was a presentation truly, for the three LaTrotta sisters were no more than schoolgirls whose social adventures had been heretofore conducted within the shackles of a church; so hungrily had Lucy whirled that night her feet for days had worn the bruises of this entrance into living, so hungrily had she kissed the Governor's son that her cheeks had flamed a month in remorseful shame, for her sisters— spinsters then and spinsters still—claimed kissing made babies: no, her grandmother said, hearing her teary confession, kissing does not make babies—neither does it make ladies. Relieved, she continued through to a year of triumph; it was a triumph because she was pleasant to look at, not unbearable to listen to: vast advantages when you remember that this was the meagre season when the junior assembly had only such deplorable persimmons to choose among as Hazel Veere Numland or the Lincoln girls. Then, too, during the winter holidays, her mother's family, they were the Fairmonts from New York, had given in her honour, and in this very hotel, the Plaza, a distinguished dance; even though she sat now so near the scene, and was trying to recall, there was little about it she could remember, except that it was all gold and white, that she'd worn her mother's pearls, and, oh yes, she'd met Lamont McNeil, an unremarkable event: she danced with him once and thought nothing of it. Her mother, however, was more impressed, for Lamont McNeil, while socially unknown, and though still in his late twenties, cast over Wall Street an ever enlarging shadow, and so was considered a catch, if not in the circle of angels, then by those of a but slightly lower stratum. He was asked to dinner. Lucy's father invited him to South Carolina for the duck-shoot. Manly, old grand Mrs. LaTrotta commented, and, as this was her criterion, she gave him the golden seal. Seven months later Lamont McNeil, pitching his poker voice to its tenderest tremor, spoke his piece, and Lucy, having received only two other proposals, one absurd and the second a jest, said oh Lamont I'm the happiest girl in the world. She was nineteen when she had her first child: Apple, so named, amusingly enough, because during her pregnancy Lucy McNeil had eaten them by the barrel, but her grandmother, appearing at the christening, thought it a shocking bit of frivolity—jazz and the twenties, she said, had gone to Lucy's head. But this choice of name was the last gay exclamation point to a protracted childhood, for a year later she lost her second baby; stillborn, it was a son, and she called him Grady in memory of her brother killed in the war. She brooded a long while, Lamont hired a yacht and they cruised the Mediterranean; at every bright pastel port, from St. Tropez to Taormina, she gave on board sad weeping ice-cream parties for gangs of embarrassed native boys the steward shanghaied from ashore. But on their return to America, this tearful mist abruptly lifted: she discovered the Red Cross, Harlem, the two-demand bid, she took a professional interest in Trinity Church, the Cosmopolitan, the Republican Party, there was nothing she would not sponsor, contribute to, connive for: some said she was admirable, others said brave, a few despised her. They made a spirited clique, however, these few, and over the years their combined strength had sabotaged a dozen of her ambitions. Lucy had waited; she had waited for Apple: the mother of a topflight debutante has at her hands a social version of atomic revenge; but then she was cheated out of it, for there was the new war, and the poor taste of a debut in wartime would have been excessive: they had instead given an ambulance to England. And now Grady was trying to cheat her, too. Her hands twitted on the table, flew to the lapel of her suit, plucked at a brooch of cinnamon diamonds: it was too much, Grady had tried always to cheat her, just simply by not having been born a boy. She'd named her Grady anyway, and poor Mrs. LaTrotta, then in the last exasperated year of her life, had roused herself sufficiently to declare Lucy morbid. But Grady had never been Grady, not the child she wanted. And it was not that in this matter Grady wanted to be ideal: Apple, with her pretty playful ways and aided by Lucy's sense of style, would have been an assured success, but Grady, who, for one thing, seemed not popular with young people, was a gambling chance. If she refused to cooperate, failure was certain. 'There will be a debut, Grady McNeil,' she said, stretching her gloves. 'You will wear white silk and carry a bouquet of green orchids: it will catch a little the colour of your eyes and your red hair. And we will have that orchestra the Bells had for Harriet. I warn you now, Grady, if you behave rottenly about this I shall never speak to you again. Lamont, will you ask for the check, please?'
Grady was silent some moments; she knew the others were not as calm as they seemed: they were waiting again for her to act up, which proved with what inaccuracy they observed her, how unaware they were of her recent nature. A month ago, two months ago, if she had felt her dignity so intruded upon, she would have rushed out and roared her car onto the port road with the pedal flat on the floor; she would have found Peter Bell and cut the mischief in some highway tavern; she would have made them worry. But what she felt now was a genuine disinvolvement. And to some extent a sympathy with Lucy's ambitions. It was so far off, a summer away; there was no reason to believe it would ever happen, a white silk dress, and the orchestra the Bells had had for Harriet. While Mr. McNeil paid the check, and as they crossed the dining-room, she held Lucy's arm and with a coltish awkwardness gave her cheek a delicate spontaneous peck. It was a gesture that had the sudden effect of unifying them all; they were a family: Lucy glowed, her husband, her daughters, she was a proud woman, and Grady, for all her stubborn oddness was, let anyone say whatever they would, a wonderful child, a real person. 'Darling,' Lucy said, 'I'm going to miss you.'
Apple, who was walking ahead, turned around. 'Did you drive your car in this morning, Grady?'
Grady was slow in answering; lately everything Apple said seemed suspicious; why care, really? What if Apple did know? Still, she did not want her to. 'I took the train from Greenwich.'
'Then you left the car at home?'
'Why, does it make any difference?'
'No; well, yes. And you needn't bark at me. I only thought you could drive me out on the Island. I promised George I'd stop by the apartment and pick up his encyclopaedia—such a heavy thing. I'd hate to carry it on the train. If we got there early enough you could go swimming.'
'Sorry, Apple. The car's in a garage; I left it here the other day because the speedometer got jammed. I suppose it's ready now, but as a matter of fact I have a date in town.'
'Oh?' said Apple peevishly. 'Mind if I ask who with?'
Grady minded very much, but 'Peter Bell,' she answered.
'Peter Bell, good Lord, why do you always see him? He thinks he's so smart.'
'He is.'
'Apple,' Lucy said, 'Grady's friends are no concern of yours. Peter is a charming boy; and his mother was one of my bridesmaids. Lamont, do you remember? She caught the bouquet. But isn't Peter still up in Cambridge?'
Just then Grady heard her name shouted across the lobby: 'Hiho, McNeil!' Only one person in the world called her that, and with an imitated delight, for it was not the happiest time he could have chosen to appear, she saw that it was him. A young man expensively but perversely dressed (he wore a white evening tie with a severe flannel suit, the trousers of which were held up by a wild-west belt of jewelled inappropriateness, and on his feet there were a pair of tennis sneakers), he was pocketing change at the cigar counter. As he went toward her, she going half-way to meet him, he walked with the easy grace of one who expects always to know the best things of life. 'Aren't you pretty, McNeil?' he said, and gave her a confident hug. 'But not as pretty as me: I've just been to the barber shop.' The impeccable freshness of his clean neat-featured face showed as much; and a fresh haircut lent him that look of defenceless 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 colour 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 sister
Harriet; 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 travellers: '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 female photographer who flashed Lucy in her rigidest rotogravure stance: 'What are we planning to do abroad?' said Lucy, repeating the reporter's query. 'Why, I'm not sure. We have a home in Cannes that we haven't seen since the war; I suppose we'll stop by there. And shop; of course we'll shop.' She hemmed embarrassedly. 'But mostly it's the boat ride. There 's nothing to change the spirit like a summer crossing.'
Stealing the champagne, Peter Bell led Grady away and up through the saloons and onto an open deck where voyagers, parading with their well-wishers against the city skyline, had already proud ocean-roll walks. One lone child stood at the railing forlornly flying kites of confetti: Peter offered him a swallow of champagne, but the child's mother, a giant of uncommon physique, advanced with thunderous steps and sent them fleeing to the dog-kennel deck. 'Oh dear,' said Peter, 'the dog house: isn't that always our lot.' They huddled together in a spot of sun; it was as hidden as a stowaway's retreat, a yearning bellow from the smokestacks poignantly baled away, and Peter said how wonderful it would be if they could fall asleep and awake with stars overhead and the ship far at sea. Together, running on Connecticut shores and looking over the Sound, they had, years before, spent whole days contriving elaborate and desperate plots: Peter had assumed always a serious enthusiasm, he'd seemed absolutely to believe a rubber raft would float them to Spain, and something of that old note shivered his voice now. 'I suppose it's just as well we're not children anymore,' he said, dividing the last of the wine between them. 'That really was too wretched. But I wish we were still children enough to stay on this boat.'
Grady, stretching her brown naked legs, tossed her head. 'I would swim ashore.'
'Maybe I'm not up on you as I used to be. I've been away so much. But how could you turn down Europe, McNeil? Or is that rude? I mean, am I intruding on your secret?'
'There isn't a secret,' she said, partly aggravated, partly enlivened with the knowledge that perhaps there was. 'Not a real one. It's more, well, a privacy, a small privacy I should like to keep awhile longer, oh not always, but a week, a day, simply a few hours: you know, like a present you keep hidden in a drawer: it will be given away soon enough, but for a while you want it all to yourself.' Though she had expressed her feeling inexpertly, she glanced at Peter's face, sure of seeing there a reflection of his inveterate understanding; but she found only an alarming absence of expression: he seemed faded out, as though the sudden exposure to sun had drained him of all colour, and, aware presently that he'd heard nothing she had said, she tapped him on the shoulder. 'I was wondering,' he said, blinking his eyes, 'I was wondering if there is, after all, a final reward in unpopularity?'
It was a question with some history; but Grady, who had learned the answer from Peter's own life, was surprised, even a little shocked to hear him ask it so wistfully and, indeed, ask it at all. Peter had never been popular, it was true, not at school or at the club, not with any of the people they were, as he put it, condemned to know; and yet it was this very condition which had so sworn them together, for Grady, who cared not one way or the other, loved Peter, and had joined him in his outside realm quite as though she belonged there for the same reason he did: Peter, to be sure, had taught her that she was no more liked than himself: they were too fine, it was not their moment, this era of the adolescent, their appreciation he said would come at a future time. Grady had never bothered about it; in that sense, she saw, thinking back over what seemed now a ridiculous problem, she'd never been unpopular: it was just that she'd never made an effort, not felt deeply that to be liked was of importance. Whereas Peter had cared exceedingly. All their childhood she'd helped her friend build, drafty though it was, a sandcastle of protection. Such castles should deteriorate of natural and happy processes. That for Peter his should still exist was simply extraordinary. Grady, though she still had use for their file of privately humorous references, for the sad anecdotes and tender coinages they shared, wanted no part of the castle: that applauded hour, the golden moment Peter had promised, did he not know that it was now?
'I know,' he said, as if, having divined this thought of hers, he now replied to it. 'Nevertheless.' I know. Nevertheless. He sighed over his motto. 'I suppose you imagined I was joking. About the university. Really, I was kicked out; not for saying the wrong thing, but for saying perhaps the too-right thing: both would appear to be objectionable.' The exuberant quality that so suited him rearranged his mischief-maker face. 'I'm glad about you,' he said inexplicably, but with such a waterfall of warmth that Grady pressed her cheek near his. 'If I said that I was in love with you, that would be incestuous, wouldn't it, McNeil?' All-ashore gongs were clanging through the ship, and ashes of shadow, spilt by sudden cloud-shades, heaped the deck. Grady for an instant felt the oddest loss: poor Peter, he knew her even less, she realized, than Apple, and yet, because he was her only friend, she wanted to tell him: not now, sometime. And what would he say? Because he was Peter, she trusted him to love her more: if not, then let the sea usurp their castle, not the one they'd built to keep life out, it was already gone, at least for her, but another, that one sheltering friendships and promises.
As the sun flooded out, he stood up and pulled her to her feet, saying, 'And where shall we be gala tonight?' but Grady, who every moment meant to explain that she could not keep a date with him, let it pass again, for, as they descended the steps, a steward, brassy with the shininess of a gong, called his warning to them, and later, confronted with the activity of Lucy's farewell, she forgot altogether.
Fanfaring a handkerchief, and embracing her daughters fitfully, Lucy followed them to the gangplank; once she'd seen them down the canvas tunnel, she hurried out on the deck and watched for their appearance beyond the green fence; when she saw them, all clustered together and gazing dazedly, she started flagging the handkerchief to show them where she was, but her arm grew strangely weak and, overtaken by a guilty sensation of incompleteness, of having left something unfinished, undone, she let it fall to her side. The handkerchief came to her eyes in earnest, and the image of Grady (she loved her! Before God she had loved Grady as much as the child would let her) bubbled in the blur; there were stricken days, difficult days, and though Grady was as different from her as she had been from her own mother, head-sure and harder, she still was not a woman, but a girl, a child, and it was a terrible mistake, they could not leave her here, she could not leave her child unfinished, incomplete, she would have to hurry, she would have to tell Lamont they mustn't go. But before she could move he had closed his arms around her; he was waving down to the children; and then she was waving too.
ISBN: 9780141045375
ISBN-10: 014104537X
Series: Popular Penguins
Published: 29th June 2009
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 156
Audience: General Adult
Publisher: Penguin UK
Country of Publication: GB
Edition Number: 1
Dimensions (cm): 1.5 x 11.1 x 17.9
Weight (kg): 0.09
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