Time flies or does not, according to the eyes of the beholder. As the days began to lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors and magazines to don summer covers, it seemed to Lilly that somewhere an interim too subtle for mortal eyes must have occurred, because suddenly there came a very torrid day in September, the fourteenth, to be exact, when the little apartment in West End Avenue stood denuded, stripped to a few huddled trunks, and Zoe's dressing table, chair, piano, and desk ready to be carted out to the little sea-view room that awaited her in Ida Blair's Long Island bungalow.
They were a group diverse of emotion and perilous to one another's nerves this last morning.
MRS. BECKER: "I think I'd better write my girl another postal to be sure and have supper ready when we get home Thursday night. There is some canned salmon in the grocery closet, I forgot to mention, and she can borrow a few potatoes from the Shriners for frying, until I get a chance to lay in supplies when I get home. Poor Albert! How he loved creamed salmon and fried potatoes! Ben, help me to realize what has happened. O God, I—"
MR. BECKER: "Now, Carrie."
MRS. BECKER: "The Shriners are nice neighbors, Lilly. They are the only ones besides us on the block who stuck after the street began to go down. You'll like Edna Shriner. You remember her? Pock-marked. She used to be in your dancing-school class. She never married, but how she keeps that little home for her old father! Kitchen floor! You could eat off it. And as handy a body with the needle as ever lived. Her French knots. The guest-towels that girl has French-knotted."
It was as if Lilly could not take her eyes from off her daughter.
"Remember what Triest said, dearest, let your nerves be so many violin strings, tightening but not quivering."
"It's your going, Lilly—I—I can't seem quite to grasp it. You will come back to me soon—in two months—one—I couldn't stand it longer!"
"Yes, and, Zoe, you will write every day. Every little single thing. Your work—your life—your friends—every tiny success—"
"Lilly, Lilly—don't go! It's madness. Stay, darling. I feel like a pig—all that money—his fortune. If you are not entitled to touch it, I am not—"
"You are his child and the only wrong you ever did him was through me."
"Lilly—don't go, darling—"
"Zoe, don't tear me to pieces."
"I'll work, darling, as I've never worked before."
"Zoe, Zoe, go straight to your mark."
"I—I can't realize it, Lilly. To-day! He's going to hear me to-day—this very afternoon. I—I feel as nervous at the prospect of singing before you as before him. I—I think I'm the luckiest girl in the world. Lilly, sometimes I—I—think life has—has sort of cleared the way for me to walk in its lovely places—you have cleared the way. But what—what if he doesn't think I've the voice maestro thinks I have? I couldn't stand that, Lilly—the way you stood it."
"But he will," said Lilly, a memory shaping itself. "Remember your power begins where mine left off. You heard Du Gass the year before she died, but you were too young to remember. Your voice is so much—so infinitely bigger, Zoe, and your knowledge and defiance of life and of the Auchinlosses—makes me so unafraid for you—"
"Kiss me, Lilly. I'm frightened—not of Auchinloss—or life—but of—Oh, I don't know—frightened of silliness, I guess."
"I'm not."
"But you're trembling."
"Of hope."
At eleven Lilly went down to her office. Leon Greenberg already had her desk. It was largely a matter now of sliding in the new prop before sliding out the old.
There were several farewell offerings from various of the older girls. The immemorial trifles that women exchange. A bottle of eau de cologne. The inevitable six handkerchiefs. A silver bodkin for running ribbon through lingerie. And from the booking department, a silk umbrella suitably engraved. She cried a little.
By noon the top of her desk was bare and the drawers empty.
She sat looking out over the waves of roofs of a city that had beaten her back at every turn, lashed her, and yet with the mysterious counterflow of oceans had carried her out a foot for every ten it flung her back.
She felt full of sobs, but quiet. Strangely quiet, as if the champing machinery of her life had stopped suddenly, leaving an hiatus that made her heart ache of passivity.
At two o'clock, by appointment, came Zoe … like a blaze of light. Her eyes with her mother's trick of iris, full of inner glow, and her blond hair so daringly boxed, set off with a droop of tam-o'-shanter.
There had been a new frock of heavy white crepe with a wide white hat for this occasion. Instead, with last-moment decision, she had come in one of the straight blue frocks, the wide patent-leather belt, a knot of orange and blue ribbon, representing her active membership in a local canteen service, at her throat. She came glowing through the daring simplicity, flamboyantly and to the nth power of Lilly's slower personality, her mother's child.
"Hurry, darling, I've a taxi waiting. We're to meet maestro at the Opera House."
"Zoe, I'm glad you wore this instead. Did your grandmother feel badly that you didn't wear the one she gave you?"
"I wasn't myself in it. No—room."
In the corridor, going out, Bruce stepped suddenly out of his office into their path.
Zoe's hand had shot out.
"Hello, you!" she said.
He looked at her through a slow smile.
"Well, I'll be hanged! The youngster! Good Lord! What have they done! Who elongated you? Where are the knee dresses and the corkscrews?"
She withdrew a highly haughty hand.
"You poor, misguided Rip Van Winkle. When did you return from the Catskills?"
"When did it happen?" he asked Lilly, trying to keep his eyes from crinkling.
It was the first time in this last brace of weeks that there had been more than the merest perfunctory word between them, and she tried to thaw her cold lips into a smile.
"You forget that you haven't seen her since last Christmas. Six inches more of skirt and a few hairpins did it."
"Well, I'll be hanged!" he kept reiterating. "Zoe grown up!"
"Is it true you are going to try for the aviation? Ida Blair says you are."
"Looks that way."
"You're too old."
"Well, then, I'll have to come down to earth. You and your mother have different ideas regarding my age. I'm rather dizzy about it this minute, myself. Either time is putting one over on me or you have caught up. By Jove! that's it! You've caught up! You're immense!"
She was suddenly, and to Lilly's amazement, a creature of flashes and quirks, of self and sex consciousness.
"Don't like to be—immense!"
"Gorgeous, then."
"Better."
"Don't go. Let me look at you."
"Come with us. Dare you."
"Zoe!"
"Where?"
"I'm singing this afternoon for Auchinloss. My audition at the Opera House."
"The deuce you say!"
"I've a cab waiting," she said, challenging him with a flash of eyes to their corners.
"Wait," he said, darting into his office.
"Zoe, how dared you?"
"Lilly—he's thrilling! I want him along; I feel keyed up now. The way I want to feel! Edgy!"
Before her persistently cold lips would reply he rejoined them and presently they were all three in the cab.
His contemplation of Zoe became a stare.
"So the little Zoe grew up."
"I'm eighteen. You used to be old enough to be my father. Not any more. Now you are old enough to be my—anything."
"Zoe!"
"Good Lord!" he said. "Fact."
Suddenly her nervousness came flowing back over her.
"Lilly, look at me every second while I'm singing, darling. You too," leaning toward him and placing cold fingers on each of their wrists.
"Delightful and easy task."
She made him a moue, prettily pouty.
"You'll be sorry, when I'm famous, that you didn't take me seriously."
"How can I take you at all when you've taken me off my feet?"
"You've never heard me sing, have you?"
"No."
"Wait."
"I palpitate."
"I'm going to be all alone now, you know," she said, looking at him with her brilliant eyes filling.
"More's the pity," he said, feeling rather than seeing the downward brush of Lilly's lashes.
"I'll be out at Ida Blair's until—for a while."
"May I come out and play with you, now that you are caught up and I can be your—anything?"
"You may."
Laughter.
With the stopping of the cab such a javelin of nervousness shot through Lilly that it was as if it had pierced her heart.
A lovely pallor was out over Zoe, enlarging the dark pools of her eyes.
"Sit out in the house, center aisle, and look at me, dears—so I can feel you there—"
To the magic of a bit of cardboard Lilly and Bruce were in the vast fantastic hinterland of the Opera House, and, stumbling through various degrees of blackness, were presently down in the colossal maw of the auditorium, finding out seats in the great pit of darkness.
They sat in silence, except that for Lilly the beating of her heart seemed to record like a clapper against her brain.
"Don't be nervous," he said once.
"I'm not," she lied.
There was a bunch light on the stage, a dirty backdrop of Corinthian pillars and esplanade and no wings, one or two stage hands moving about, and finally a concert grand piano dragged down.
Suddenly Lilly recognized Auchinloss. He was standing just outside the pool of light that flowed over the piano, the unforgetable outline of his shaggy head, joined by two little peninsulas of sideburns to the heavy spade of beard, gray now and not the sooty black she remembered.
The odor of that little room up on Amsterdam Avenue came winding back. Millie du Gass, the supreme soprano of two continents—dead now, of heartbreak, some said; Alma, in her plaid-silk waist and the bookkeeper's curve to her back. That walk across the parlor floor—
"There's Auchinloss now," said Bruce.
She did not reply, but sat with her handkerchief against her mouth and crowded breathing.
There were three auditions.
A high-bosomed young woman with a powerful mezzo soprano that pulled her mouth to a rhomboid sang Santuzza's famous aria from "Cavalleria Rusticana," stopping suddenly to some unseen signal.
"Fine, strong voice of resonant tin," said Visigoth, under his breath.
A throaty young tenor sang "Ride, Ride, Pagliacci," through to the sob, anticipating it with a violent throw of body.
Then Trieste took the piano, running downward an avalanche of quick chords, the sepia-outlined head of Auchinloss gone meanwhile from the stage and down somewhere in the sea of dimness that rolled through the auditorium. Lilly could see his profile etched into the twilight.
Very suddenly Zoe was downstage, and through the cymbals hitting into Lilly's consciousness the voice finally came through to her, flowing so easily on the beautiful, the tried old theme of Michaela's aria that she had the feeling of great bolts of every color ribbon, winding about and not even half un-flung as they struck the topmost places.
How true her flight!
With each fluty mount how like a bird, the line of her throat, as her chin went up, throbbing slightly of its warbling, and from where she stood her gaze seeming to plumb them out.
She sang through without interruption, so that when she had finished, the timbre lay like a singing wire on the silence.
Somewhere between the ecstasy of the elbow that pressed against hers, and the ecstasy of her child's voice still trilling on the black silence, Lilly was conscious of movement. The gray silhouette marching down the aisle of gloom. A group up about the piano. Another chord struck out. Zoe's voice skipping upward in grace notes.
Vague, indeterminate passings of figures through a fluid of unreality, like submarine life behind glass.
Then somehow they were out again into the gloom of wings and then on to the white, incredible humdrum of the side street, standing there beside the little door marked "Private," Bruce at her side, rather quivery at the flanges and mopping constantly at the damp rim of his hair.
"Lilly, you've won!"
She felt sillily inclined to laugh.
"I seem to have, don't I?" she said, turning her face under pretense of adjusting her hat, but really for fear that even a smile would induce the threatening laughter which she knew, once let go, would slip up beyond her control.
"She's a flute. She's a lark. She's a dream. I—I don't believe I seem to take it in."
"Nor—I."
Later, Zoe joined them, an air of assumed composure belied by the flaming brilliancy of her eyes and cheeks.
"Why didn't you come up afterward?" she said, forcing a commonplace, and to Bruce, "Hail a cab, Pretty-please."
He did, helping them in and poking his head in after.
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Let it be the Park for a while, Lilly?"
She nodded.
"Is three a crowd?"
For answer she drew him in by the sleeve and on the jouncing off of the cab was in her mother's arms, covering her cheeks with close-pressed, audible kisses, and, after the inexplicable manner of women, both of them crying.
"He—he didn't say much, Lilly. Kissed my hands. Told me to live beautifully and work endlessly. Asked me if I loved poetry and painting and sunrises and spring—a lot of stuff about the awakening of spring. And kissed my hands again. I'm going back to-morrow. They're discussing things now—he and maestro—something about a five-year contract—but a great deal of red tape first—board meeting. I'm to be a secret until next season, maestro cried—and Auchinloss—Lilly, you need never be afraid for me—you hear—you hear—never! We measured each other—he called me wonder-child. Me—Zoe. Lilly—it's happened … and you—did it. Lilly, kiss me."
"You darling. You're like a queen. All the little lives that go into the making of your cloth of gold, yet each proud to be ever so humble a party to it!"
"Lilly, you're sad! On my day you're sad."
"Glad! You're the meaning of everything. The road had to lead somewhere. Everything is so clear now. You're the lovely meaning, Zoe, behind all the circumstances that went to weave you."
Only half plumbed, Zoe sprang from her mood, flashing with all the amazing coquetry that was so new to Lilly, around toward Bruce.
"Well—what?"
"On the very day I've found you I've lost you."
"To whom?"
"Fame."
"Nonsense!" she cried. "Don't forget the awakening of spring." And buried her face against her mother because she had been outrageous.
Persiflage rose.
"Skylark, when I become more coherent I'll tell you how wonderful you are."
"Zoe dear, hadn't we better drive home?"
"Lark. Lark. I cannot go home now, Lilly. Let's have a lark!"
Suddenly Bruce caught her by the dancing hands.
"Let's celebrate."
"Let's!"
"We'll dine at Sherry's, dance at the Bilt—"
"Lovely! Lovely! I've never been to either!"
"No, no, Zoe. Please! Your grandparents at home. Besides, it's war time."
"Nonsense! Laugh while we may. Next month this time I'll probably be in the thick of it myself. Let's laugh to-day. Vote her down, Zoe!"
"Pl-ease, Lilly."
"Your grandparents, Zoe, they don't even know the news yet—"
"Lilly, this once. Tippy and Dapples aren't going to be thrilled. They think the whole business rather low, anyway. Besides—there's time—it's my day—Lilly—"
"Not Sherry's, then, Zoe—a quieter—"
"Immense! I have it! Tarrytown. An opportunity to show you the place before you go. We'll drop this taxi and pick up my car at the garage. How's that, dinner at Tarrytown? Perfect, I'll say."
"What a duck of an idea! Oh, la, la, la, la!"
And so, quite dumbly, Lilly acquiesced and by easy shift to the tan-upholstered car that ironed out all jolts, and a stiff breeze from the Hudson whirring softly against their faces, they were whirling out along quiet stretches, dusk coming down like a veil.
Seated between them, Zoe fell to singing, trilling highly and softly, her head bared to the wind, her tam-o'-shanter on Bruce's lap, and Lilly sitting silently by with lids down against hot eyeballs, and fighting a sense of cross grain.
Presently lights began to come out along the river, like the gold eyes of cats.
"How cool your fingers are, Zoe. Like the petals of something."
"Lilly, naughty man is holding back one of my hands on me."
"Lovely hands."
"Naughty man."
Silence.
"Oh dear."
"Oh dearest."
"That wasn't for you. That was a sigh."
"But I stole it."
"Cheeky."
Giggles.
Silence again and they turned off a macadamized road that was prematurely dark with trees and into a lariat of driveway that elicited from Zoe a squeal of enthrallment.
Even to Lilly, though she had figured in its purchase, there was something startling in the vast classic whiteness and formal Italian chastity of the house as they flanked it, drawing up under a porte-cochÈre of Corinthian columns. Through a double row of cypresses turning black, that inclosed a sunken garden, Dante and Virgil might have moved, and yet, Lilly, aching with the analogy which could not conjure, could only call up rather foolishly the three-color magazine advertisement of a low-streamline motor car, drawn up before just such Renaissance magnificence.
Three sheer and cunningly landscaped terraces dropped down from what was actually the rear of the house, but which overhung the river, so that, stepping out of the car, an unsuspected, breath-taking panorama of river wound itself, at that moment the Albany boat moving upstream, light-studded.
ZOE (out at a bound): "Oh! Oh! Oh! Isolde's garden. Tristan, where are you?"
"Here."
"I want to kiss a star—that luscious one up there."
"Let me be proxy."
"Lilly, chastise him!"
She smiled at him with her tortured eyes.
"Like it?" he said, smiling back at her with something impersonal in his eyes that deadened her. "All this formality is hardly my choice; it's Pauline's idea."
They were met by Pauline—known to Zoe and her mother through perfunctory office meetings. She was exceedingly petite, rather appealingly so in her widowhood, and of her younger brother's rather Spanish darkness, except for a graying coiffure worn high and flatteringly.
There were seventeen years between them and yet her shoulders were deeply white, and rose, quite unwithered, out of a jetted evening gown; and her profile, also with the heat lightning of a scarcely perceptible nervous quiver to it, entirely without the sag of tired flesh.
A certain petulance lent to her exceedingly well-bred diction quite a charm, and she was playful and adoring enough to pinch each cheek of her brother's as she tiptoed to kiss him.
"Nice boy to bring home charming people and save me from the boredom of dining alone. How's my handsome brother? Naughty boy! It's the first time you've looked yourself in weeks. They work him too hard down there, Mrs. Penny. I tell my fat brother he's become little more than an ornamental gargoyle. It's too sordid for this boy, and now you running away from him just when I had hoped the time was ripe for him to dabble in some of the things he's set his heart on. The kind of plays he reads all night until I have to turn his lights out. Shame on you for running away!"
Her twitter, from topical bough to topical bough, hardly demanded reply. She exclaimed over Zoe, admiring her extravagantly, insisted upon kissing away a purely imaginary look of headache from her brother's brow, and led the way quite tinily regal, her running line of comment unbroken.
In a soft boudoir of French grays, French doors, cerulean blues, and a litter of every extravagant requisite of the toilet, Lilly faced herself in a cunningly triplicated mirror.
"We're not dressed. We shouldn't have come," trying to ride down her sense of misery.
"I'm dressed in all the cloth of gold you have woven for me," quoth Zoe, in mock grandiloquence, still pitched to her exultant key and in all her youthful capacity for it, full of self.
There were enamel-backed brushes with deep bristles that plowed her hair out into dust of gold, and a finely wrought amber comb which she ran through the fluff, striking an attitude.
"She walks in splendor like the night—"
"Zoe, you're losing your head."
"Splendor! This is me. Marble—terraces—rugs that slide—only I want peacocks—that strut—and tails that open like fans and—starlight—him—"
"Who?"
"Silly darling—nobody—the world—life."
There was no restraining her. She smoothed her mother's hair only to kiss it awry again. She fluffed a fragrant cloud of powder along her neck. Trilled at a drowsy canary in a wicker cage. Stretched herself in the conscious pose of a RÉcamier on the lacy mound of a chaise-longue, and finally followed her mother into the drawing-room, entirely at ease in the straight blue frock.
It was a room almost the width of the house, with a balcony at one end hung in a shah's silk prayer rug, and a stone fireplace, out of the Davanziti palace, opposite. Three sets of leaded doors opened out on to a flagged parapet that overlooked the Hudson and beyond the deep purple of perfect September.
They met in a little group at one of these doors, and Lilly noticed gratefully that Mrs. Enlow had thrown a net wrap over the formality of her evening gown and that Bruce had merely changed to flannels.
He smiled at her with that impersonal sort of kindness which could cause such a gush of blood to her heart, and spread himself in a playful salaam before Zoe.
"Princess."
She held out her hand to be kissed, which he did five times, finger by finger.
"These terraces," said Lilly, trying not to be heavy, "are like the setting for an Aegean romance."
He smiled back at her again through the new film across his eyes.
"Write it and I'll produce it."
"Close the doors, Dicky; it's growing chilly," said Mrs. Enlow.
"Yes," said Lilly, shivering a bit, "chilly."
"And I'm burning, Dicky, Tickey Tavey," cried Zoe, applying the name audaciously. "How can anyone be chilly on such a night as this?"
"Come, Princess, and I'll show you some stars."
"Don't wander too far before dinner, children. Mrs. Penny and I will sit indoors. Only youth can risk swollen joints."
"Yes," said Lilly, feeling herself rather terrifiedly past the fiercer rush of life, "only youth."
They sat on a great overstuffed divan that faced the parapet, lighted softly at each end by the first lamps of evening.
"Why, you poor child, you're shivering of chill! It's the damp. Let me get you a wrap."
In the thickening silence Lilly sat alone looking out through the glass doors. Bruce and Zoe were silhouetted out there against a fathomless evening sky that was brilliantly pointed with a few big stars. But they were not gazing out. Her face was up to his like a flower about to be plucked, and, looking down into it, his whole body seemed to sway to its sweetness.
Suddenly the ache in Lilly's heart was laid. With all of her old capacity for the incongruous, but without any of her usual pump of terror, she thought suddenly of her father, two nights hence, sitting down to the creamed salmon and fried potatoes on Page Avenue, hanging his napkin with the patent fasteners about his neck. Edna Shriner must teach her that French-knot stitch for Zoe's gowns—in case—heigh-ho!—in case—
With her gaze on those two etched and eloquent profiles, a piercing sense of achievement seemed to flow with a warm rush of blood, curing her of chill.
Her heart beat high with what even might have been fulfillment.
THE END
*****
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