Saratoga Trunk (22 page)

Kaka, rustling importantly in her best silk and her embroidered petticoats, stood sociably drinking her own cup of coffee.

“How you going drink spring water after all that coffee?”

“I’m not going to drink the water, silly. Vile stuff!”

“Faire parade,
h’m?” She rather liked this faring forth to stare and be stared at. “It’s time. Two days lost.”

“Not lost at all, idiot! I could go for days now without rest or sleep. I’ve stored up sleep as a camel stores water. . . . Let me see. I think I shall wear the mauve flowered cretonne and the shoes with the little red heels.”

“Red heels are not for widows,” grumbled Kaka. She began deftly to dress Clio’s hair in a Marquise Cadogan coiffure, bangs on the forehead, very smooth at the back and tied in a club with a black ribbon à la George Washington. It was a youthful, a girlish arrangement.

Clio grinned. “But my dear husband, the Count de Trenaunay de Chanfret died—oh—at least two years ago. So I’m out of mourning. Even second mourning. I only keep on wearing it because my heart is broken. . . . The large leghorn hat, Kaka, with the black velvet facing.”

It was scarcely half-past eight when they appeared in the hotel lobby. Clio, followed by Kaka and Cupide, looked spaciously about her, seeing everything, enjoying everything—the vast brass spittoons, the ponderous brass gas-chandeliers, the glimpse of garden at the back, the dapper and alert Northern black boys in uniform, so different from the slow-moving, soft-spoken Southern Negro.

As she approached the great open doorway Roscoe Bean, looking more than ever like Uriah Heep, slithered out of his cubbyhole under the stairs. “Why Your Ladyship—why Mrs. De Chanfret! You are an early riser indeed! Is your carriage at the door? May I assist you?”

“I am walking to Congress Spring.”

“Walking!” His surprise and horror could not have been greater if she had said crawling.

“Certainly. I am in Saratoga for my health. I shall do here as I and everyone else did in Aix-le-Bains, in Vichy, in Evian, in Wiesbaden. No one in Europe would dream of driving to the springs. It is part of the
régime
to walk.”

Bean, murmuring at her side, was all deference. “Of course. Naturally. So sensible.”

She stood a moment in the doorway, surveying the vast spaces of the piazza. A scattering of portly and rather pufiy-eyed men smoking large cigars. A few very settled matrons in the iron embrace of practical morning costumes—sturdy sateens, bison serge, relentless brown canvas, snuffy cashmere, high-necked, long-sleeved. Clio thought, I’d as soon wear a hair shirt for my sins, and done with it.

Well back near the wall in a rocking chair that almost engulfed him sat a little man, thin-chested, meager, with brilliant feverish eyes. With sudden conviction, “That is Mr. Gould, isn’t it?” Clio demanded.

“Yes.” Bean managed magically to inject awe, admiration and wonder into the monosyllable.

Audaciously she moved toward him, Kaka and Cupide in her wake, a reluctant Bean deferentially at her side. “I must speak to him. Though perhaps he may not remember me. Perhaps you’d better introduce us.”

“Oh, Mrs. De Chanfret! I really—”

But it was too late. Deftly she covered his remonstrance by taking the office from him. “Oh, Mr. Gould, I was just saying to him— uh—to this—I used to hear my dear husband speak of you. I am Mrs. De Chanfret.”

He rose, his eyes hostile, his face impassive. “I do not know the name.”

Nasty litde man, thought Clio. She smiled sweetly. “You will recall him as the Count de Trenaunay de Chanfret, no doubt. Please don’t stand. After all, we’re all here for our health, aren’t we? So charming. So American!” Rather abruptly she moved away toward the street steps. No knowing what a man like that might do, she thought. But I’ve been seen in conversation with Mr. Jay Gould. All these frumps on the piazza saw it. That should soon be spread about. She dismissed Bean with a soulful smile and a honeyed good day and moved down the street, her attendants in her wake. She looked about her with the liveliest interest. A neat New England town with a veneer of temporary sophistication, like a spinster schoolteacher gone gay. Wall Street tickers in the brokerage branch occupying a little street-floor shop in the United States Hotel; millinery and fancy goods, stationery and groceries in the windows of the two-story brick buildings to catch the fancy of the summer visitor. A spruced-up little town with an air of striving to put its best foot forward, innocendy ignorant of the fact that its white-painted houses, its scroll-work Victorian porches, the greenery of lawn and shrub and ancient trees furnished its real charm. Past the Club House, Morrissey’s realized dream of splendor, its substantial red-brick front so demure amidst the greenery of Congress Spring Park.

Clio Dulaine was ecstatically aware of a lightness and gayety of spirit and body and mind such as she had never before experienced. She had eaten almost nothing in the past three days. The hot, strong coffee had been a powerful stimulant. Every nerve, artery, muscle and vein had been refreshed by her trancelike sleep. After the clammy and stifling heat of New Orleans the pine-pricked air of Saratoga seemed clear, dry and exhilarating as a bottle of Grand Montrachet. Added to these were youth, ambition and a deadly seriousness of purpose.

Here, in July, were gathered the worst and the best of America. Even if Maroon had not told her she would have sensed this. Here, for three months in the year, was a raffish, provincial and swaggering society; a snobbish, conservative, Victorian society; religious sects meeting in tents; gamblers and race-track habitués swarming in hotels and paddocks and game rooms. Millionaires glutted with grabbing, still reaching out for more; black-satin madams, peroxided and portiy, driving the length of Broadway at four in the afternoon, their girls, befeathered and bedizened, clustered about them like overblown flowers. Invalids in search of health; girls in search of husbands. Politicians, speculators, jockeys; dowagers, sporting men, sporting women; middle-class merchants with their plump wives and hopeful daughters; trollops, railroad tycoons, croupiers, thugs: judges, actresses, Western ranchers and cattle men. Prim, bawdy, vulgar, sedate, flashy, substantial. Saratoga.

I knew America would be like this, Clio Dulaine thought, exultantly. Everything into the kettie, like a French
pot-au-feu.
Everything simmering together in a beautiful rich stew. I’m going to have a glorious time. How Aunt Belle Piquery would have loved it, poor darling. She’d have had one of these dried-up millionaires in no time. Well, so shall I, but not in her way. Though I’m more like Aunt Belle, I do believe, than like Mama.

She turned her head to catch Kaka’s jaundiced eye and the strutting Cupide’s merry look. “It is well,” she said, speaking to them in French. “This is going to be very good. I can feel it.”

Kaka shrugged, skeptically. “
Peut-être que oui.
Not so fast, my pigeon.” But the volatile Cupide whistied between his teeth, slyly, and the tune was Kaka’s old Gombo song of “Compair Bouki Et Macaques”; Compair Bouki who thought to cook the monkeys in the boiling pot and was himself cooked instead.

Sam-bombel! Sam-bombel taml

Sam-bombel! Sam-bombel dam!

Now there was the sound of music. The band was playing in Congress Spring Park. They turned up the neat walk with its bordering flower-beds of geraniums and petunias and sweet alyssum. There at the spring were the dipper boys, ragamuffins who poked into the spring with their tin cups at the end of a long stick and brought up a dripping dipperful. Kaka had brought her mistress’s own fine silver monogrammed cup, holding it primly in front of her as she walked. The little crowd of early-morning walkers and drinkers gaped, nudged, tittered, depending on their station in life. Saratoga’s residents, both permanent and transient, were all accustomed to all that was dramatic and bizarre in humanity. But this beautiful and extravagantly dressed young woman with her two fantastic attendants were more than even the sophisticated eye could assimilate. One tended to reject the whole pattern as an optical illusion.

Dipper boys stared, promenaders stared, the band trombone struck a sour note. Clio, enjoying herself, walked serenely on toward the little ornate pavilion with its scrolled woodwork and colored glass windows and its tables and chairs invitingly set forth. Kaka, very stiff and haughty, held out her cup to be filled. Then she turned and marched off to tender the brimming potion, while Cupide, in turn, flipped a penny at the spring boy and strutted on. Strolling thus while Clio seemed to sip and contemplate the scene about her, they circled the little green square three times, and three times the cup was filled. If Clio poured its contents deftly into the shrubbery, no one saw. And now fashion began to arrive. They came in carriages, in dogcarts, on horseback; a few nobodies came afoot, the women’s flounced skirts flirting the dusty street.

The crowds began to arrive in swarms. Clio had been waiting for this. She would leave as they came, moving against the incoming tide of morning visitors to the Congress Spring. She did not know these people but she marked them with a shrewd eye. Later she was to learn that it had been the Jefferson Deckers who had dashed up in the magnificent Brewster coach, black, with the yellow running gear, drawn by four handsome bays. The black-haired, black-eyed beauty, partridge-plump, guiding two snow-white horses tandem with white reins, for all the world, Clio thought, like a rider in a circus, could be only Guilia Forosini. The handsome old fellow beside her, with a mane of white hair and the neat white goatee was her father, of course, Forosini, the California banker-millionaire. There came Van Steed. Now he had seen her. The doll-like blonde stopping him now must be the Mrs. Porcelain that Clint wrote about. Where is he? Where is he? Some left their carriages and walked into the park to the spring; others were served at the carriage steps, the grooms or spring boys scampering back and forth with brimming cups.

There he was at last! There was Clint Maroon in the glittering dear familiar clarence with the fleet bays. Now Clio made her leisurely way up the path, her head high, Cupide following, Kaka, stately and rather forbidding, walking, duennalike, almost beside her.

And now she was passing Van Steed. She did not pause, she nodded, her smile was remote, almost impersonal. She felt the light brown eye appraising her—figure, gown, hat, face. Van Steed was not accustomed to being passed thus by any woman. These past two days he had watched for her.

“Mrs. De Chanfret! I heard you were—have you been ill? You haven’t been down. I hope—” Van Steed at his shyest.

“Not ill. Weary.”

“I can understand that. But you look—uh—you seem quite recovered if appearances are any—uh—that is, Mrs. Porcelain would like to meet you. . . . Mrs. Porcelain . . . Mrs. De Chanfret.”

Mrs. Porcelain’s was a litde soft chirrupy voice with a gurgle in it. “Oh—Mrs. De Chanfret, you must have driven down very early.”

“I didn’t drive. I walked.”

“Walked!”

Van Steed waxed suddenly daring, emboldened as he was by temporary freedom from maternal restraint. “Then you must allow me to drive you back.”

“No. No, I’m walking back. There is that fascinating Mr. Maroon. Isn’t it? You presented him—remember? And he will ask to drive me back, too. You are all so kind. But I really never heard of driving to a spring when one is taking the waters. I intend to walk down and back every morning, early, as everyone does at the European cures. ... I must say
au revoir,
now.
Au revoir,
Mrs. Porcelain.” She was moving on, then seemed suddenly to recall something, came back a step, held up a chiding forefinger. “
Méchant homme!
It was naughty of you to pretend you didn’t know that this Mr. Maroon is a great famous American railroad king, dear Mr. Van Steed. You were having your litde joke with me because I have been so long in France. Was that it?”

“Who?”

“That Mr. Maroon. Do you know, that is why I have been so weary until now. All that first night I was unable to sleep. Talk, talk, talk in the next room. Railroads, railroads! I thought I should go mad. I am moving to a cottage apartment this morning. For quiet.”

Bart Van Steed’s pink cheeks grew pinker, and the amber eyes suddenly widened and then narrowed like a jungle thing scenting prey. Ah, there it is, thought Clio. Those eyes. He isn’t such a booby after all.

“Oh, talking railroads, were they? Now what could they say about railroads to keep a charming woman awake?”

“Dear me, I don’t know. Such things are too much for me. But they argued and shouted until really I thought I must send one of my servants to protest. Albany and Something or Other—a railroad they were shouting about—and trunk lines—tell me, what is a trunk line?—and—oh, yes, they were talking about you, too, Mr. Van Steed. I even heard Mr. Maroon’s voice say that you were smarter than any of them. By that time they really were shouting. I couldn’t help hearing it. But maddening it was. No repose. You have such vitality here in America.”

“Who? Who was there?”

“Why, how should I know! I know no one in Saratoga. When I was talking with Mr. Gould early this morning on the piazza I thought his voice sounded like the one that was disputing Mr. Maroon. Of course, I don’t know. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I don’t understand such things. I just thought I would twit you with it because you had said he wasn’t a friend of yours, teasing me I suppose, and I couldn’t help overhearing him say that he was with you, or something like that. . .
Mon Dieu,
have I said anything? You look so troubled. I am so strange here, perhaps I shouldn’t have . . . Please don’t repeat what I have said. It is so different here in America after . . . Good-by.
Au revoir
.” She was thinking, even as she talked, it can’t be as simple as this. Now really!

They saw her move on. The eyes over the cups of water followed her as she went, dipping and swooping so gracefully in the flowered cretonne and the great leghorn turned up saucily at one side to reveal the black velvet facing. They saw White Hat Maroon jump down and bow low with a sweep of the sombrero, they saw him motion toward the clarence in invitation; there was no mistaking the negative shake of her head, the appreciative though fleeting smile as she moved on down the street, the Texan staring after her.