Saratoga Trunk (31 page)

“Because I’m not you. I explained that to you a minute ago. And I’ve been a fool most of my life.”

Kaka brought the coffee, fragrant, steaming. Clio sugared it generously, drank it, creamless, in great grateful gulps. “Ah! That’s wonderful! Another cup, Kaka.” Kaka, in the bedroom, busied herself with the India silk, the froth of garments lately discarded.

“Tell your woman to shut that door.”

“It doesn’t matter. Kaka knows everything. She never talks. If you mean me harm she would be likely to kill you. She would make a little figure like you, out of soap or dough, and she would sdck pins in it through the place where the heart and the brain and the bowels would be if it were alive. Aid you’d sicken and die.”

“Not I,” retorted Mrs. Coventry Bellop, briskly. “I’ve had pins stuck in me all my life, and knives, too. Clarissa Van Steed alone would have been the death of me if I hadn’t the hide of a rhinoceros.”

Clio, sipping her second cup of coffee, set the cup down on the saucer now with a little decisive clack. “All my life, Mrs. Bellop, I have been very direct. If I wanted to do a thing, and it was possible to do it, I did it. I say what I want to say. That old woman on the piazza, she is a terrible old woman, she dislikes me, she makes no pretense. I rather admire her for it. I shall be grateful if you will be as honest.” She placed the cup and saucer on the tabouret at her side; she leaned back and regarded the woman before her with a level look.

“You’re a babe,” Mrs. Bellop began, briskly, “if you think that old adder is honest. She isn’t. But that’s neither here nor there. You’re right, she hates you and she wants to run you out of Saratoga and she’ll do it unless—”

“Unless?”

Sophie Bellop spread her feet wide apart, leaned forward, rested her hands on her plump knees and looked Clio straight in the eye. “Look, my girl. I know you’re no more the Comtesse de Trumpery and Choo-Choo than I am Queen Victoria. But if I say you are, if I take you in hand, if I stand up for you against this old buzzard and her crew, the world will believe you are. I’ve watched you now for two weeks. And I’ll say this: you’ve been wonderful. Bold and dramatic and believable. But from now on you’ll need a strong arm behind you, and that handsome Texan’s arm won’t be enough. It’s got to be a woman who’s smarter than old lady Van Steed and who they’re scared of.”

As the woman talked, Clio was thinking, well, here it is. I wonder if she knows everything. I suppose I was foolish to think that America was so simple. It’s no good being grand and denying things and telling her to go.

“What is it you want?”

“I’m coming to that. Let me just rattie on a little, will you? I’m gabby, but what I’ve got to say to you is important to both of us. And I like you more than ever for not trying to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Now listen. I know my way around this world. I’ve known what it was to be very rich. I know what it is to be very poor; I’ve lived on nothing for years. In luxury.”

“Blackmail?” inquired Clio, pleasantly, as one would say, for example—farming?

“Give me credit for being smarter than that. Listen, my child. You’ve been shrewd, but you can’t beat this combination without inside help any more than you can beat the roulette and faro games at the Club House simply because you happen to win once or twice. You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself. Same with Saratoga; same way with everything. I know everybody. I’ve been everywhere. I know Europe. I know America. If I give a party that somebody else pays for, everybody comes because I’m giving it. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. I’m nearly sixty. I dress and look like a washwoman, so the women are never envious of me and the men never fall in love with me and I have a fine time. I’m afraid of nobody. If you know anything about America, which you probably don’t, you know that Coventry Bellop was one of the wealthiest of the really rich men of the 1860’s. He was in on Erie— maybe you don’t know what that meant and I won’t go into it now— but the New York Central crowd took it away from him, and then Astor and Drew and Van Steed and Fisk and Gould came in on Erie— well, when Covey died of a stroke in ‘69,1 was left: as bare as the day I was born and people began to call me not Sophie Bellop or Mrs. Coventry Bellop, but Poorsophiebellop, just like that, all in one word. Poorsophiebellop. The wives of the very men who’d ruined him. Not that I blame them. Covey’d have done the same to them if he’d been smart enough to beat them. Well, they thought Poorsophiebellop would take their old clothes and live in that fourth-floor back bedroom in a rich relation’s house and be glad to be asked in for tea. Right then I made it my motto to insult them before they could insult me. I was earning my living—and fairly honesdy, too—in a day when it wasn’t just downright common and vulgar for a woman to work for her living the way it is now—it was considered criminal. Not that I really worked. I schemed. I planned. I tricked and contrived. I made certain hotels fashionable by touting for them. I put Saratoga on the map. I made Newport, though I must say I can’t bear the place. Remember, I’ve known the cream of two continents in my days— Daniel Webster, Washington Irving, Henry Clay, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James, for brains—not to speak of rich riffraff like the Astors, Drew, Jim Hill, the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, and plenty of dressed-up circus mountebanks like Jim Fish and his brawling crew. As for the gloating friends like Clarissa Van Steed and the rich relations—I threw their cast-off clothes back in their faces and I snapped my fingers at the hall bedrooms. If I’d been a beauty, like you, I could have had the world. I don’t know, though. There’s always been a soft streak in me that crops out when I least want it. Now Bellop. I knew he was weak when I married him. But his eyes were so blue and he cried when I refused him. I thought I could make him strong and self-reliant. But you can’t make iron out of lead. ... So then, there I was, a widow and a pauper; I had two black dresses, one for daydme, one for evening, and that’s been my uniform ever since. I don’t bother about clothes and it’s wonderful. Nobody cares how I look, anyway. I’m the life of the party. Most people don’t know how to have a good time, any more than spoiled children. I show them. I spend their money for them, and they’re grateful for it. I’ve got nothing to lose because I live by my wits. They can’t take that away from me. So I say and I do as I please. It’s a grand feeling.”

Clio laughed suddenly, spontaneously, in sheer delight. “You’re like Aunt Belle. It’s wonderful!”

“Who’s she?”

“Mama’s sister. My Aunt Belle Piquery. Only she was more— well—
légère.
But she used a word—a Northern word. Spunky. She used to say she liked people with spunk.”

“M’m. I know about your mama. I made it my business to find out. I’ve got connections in New Orleans.”

“Then it is blackmail, after all?”

“No, child. I tell you I like you. And I hate Clarissa Van Steed and everything she stands for. She and women like her have kept America back fifty years. Hard and rigid and provincial. And mean. She’s got the ugliest house in New York; the curtains at her front windows amount to a drawbridge moat and basdon. What’s a bastion, anyway?”

Clio laughed again. “You came here just to talk. But I think you are really wonderful. The one amusing person I have met in America.”

“That’s right. Keep up that French accent. Your natural theater sense is one of your most valuable assets—though sometimes you overdo it. . . . So you’re set on marrying litde Bart Van Steed, eh?”

“I do not think that concerns you.”

“You can’t do it without me. He hasn’t asked you yet, and he never will, now that the old devil’s here, unless he’s properly managed.”

Suddenly, “I do not think I care to go on with this conversation.”

But Sophie Bellop blithely waved aside this blunt statement which Clio had followed by rising as though to end the visit. Brighdy, chattily, she went on, her attitude more relaxed now, her big body leaning comfortably against the chair back.

“Sit down, child, and stop fussing. Now then. Bart’s really rich. I don’t mean just rich—he’s got seventy, eighty millions if he’s got a cent and even if the Gould crowd trick him out of the trunk line—”

Clio sat down then. “You know about that, too?”

“Of course. I’m coming to that later. Maroon. Let’s see—what was I saying? Oh, yes. Well, I’ve watched you like a hawk, you’re a smart girl, you’ve got the jaw of success, and if you manage that big handsome brute right, even if he isn’t as smart as you are—oh, I forgot, you’re set on marrying Van Steed instead. Well, perhaps you’re right, but I suppose if I had it to do I’d be a fool and marry the Texan though he hasn’t a penny. I never could resist a magnificent specimen like that. Those shoulders, and small through the hips, and the way he looks at you. Ah, me! Well, lucky I haven’t turned silly in my old age. I play the piano like an angel, I never forget a face, I’m healthy, I don’t nip away at a bottle the way some women do, my age, poor things.”

She had not yet put her cards on the table. Her handsome shrewd eyes were on Clio; she was talking now in order to give the girl time in which to digest what she had heard. “They’ll be after you now; they’ve only been waiting for a leader; they’ll tear you to pieces if you try to go it alone from now on. But they’re afraid of me. It was I who fixed on the number Four Hundred for the Centennial Ball in ‘76. You probably don’t know about that. Most of the world thinks that Ward McAllister and Mrs. William Astor picked the Four Hundred. But the inner circle knows I did it. More heads fell that winter than at the dme of the Bastille. Those daughters and granddaughters of peddlers and butchers and fur dealers and land grabbers are afraid of me because I’m not scared of them. And I give them a good time, poor dears, and show them how to have fun with their money.”

Now that Clio Dulaine understood thoroughly, she put her question bluntly. “How much do you want?”

“Understand,” parried Mrs. Coventry Bellop, “you don’t need anyone to manage you; you’ve been clever as can be from the very first. That spectacular entrance and then disappearing for two days. They nearly died. I see you’ve got a crest on almost everything. Can’t make it out, though.”

“Kaka embroiders so beautifully. My name is Clio. She combined that with the crest of the Duc de Chaulnes and part of the coat-of-arms of the Dulaines. Sometimes I use just the plain letter C, with a vine or a wreath.”

Sophie Bellop burst into laughter. “That’s what I mean. You’re a natural success. You have the right instinct. Nothing can stop you— with me behind you.”

“How much do you want?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Bellop rattled on, “you’ve got the right to help yourself to a couple of crests and titles. Look at the people who’ve come over this land like vultures. Not only Americans. Lord Dunmore’s got a hundred thousand acres of good American land if he’s got a grain. Dunraven’s got sixty thousand up in Colorado. We’re fools. We’re fools. We think it can go on forever. Too much of everything. I’ll bet in another hundred years or even less we’ll find out. We’ll be a ruined country unless they stop this grabbing. We’ll be so soft that anybody can come and take us like picking a ripe plum. It’s something to scare you, this country, I always say. There’s never been anything like it. Floods, grasshoppers, snowstorms—never anything in moderation. Too hot or too cold or too high or too big. The whole West from North Dakota on buried in snow last winter. You can’t begin to—”

“How much do you want?”

“I think you can get him if you want him. Mrs. Porcelain’s too Dolly Vardenish and pink for him. And the Forosini’s too common. I’m nearly sixty. I won’t live more than another ten or twelve years. I’ll take twenty-five thousand down on the day of your settlement and ten thousand a year for ten years. I don’t want to be grasping.”

“How do you know—how do I know—that I can’t do this alone?”

“Very well. Try it.”

“Or suppose, together, we don’t succeed. Then what?”

“Nothing. You’ll have learned from me and I from you. You can give me a present—something negotiable, I hope. Now then, I like everything in writing, black on white. It saves a lot of rumpus in the end.”

The sound of swift, light footsteps on the cottage veranda, the hall door opened and shut, a tap at the door of the little sitting room. Clio stood up, an unaccustomed scarlet suddenly showing beneath the cream-white skin.

“Come in!”

Maroon’s height and breadth seemed to fill the little room. He brought with him the smell of the stables and of barber’s ointment and cigars and leather.

The lusty Sophie sniffed the air. “You smell nice and masculine. It’s grand.”

His blue plainsman’s eyes looked from Clio to Sophie and back again. “You two plotting something? You look guilty as all hell.”

Clio trailed her laces over to him, she picked up his great hand, she looked at it intently as though examining it for the first time. Ai intimate gesture, childlike. “Mrs. Bellop is going to be my—my chaperon.”

He grinned. “Little late, I’d say.”

Mrs. Bellop stood up and shook herself like an amiable poodle. “Not too late. We hope.”

He eyed Clio straight. “Not too late for—what?”

Clio dropped his hand then and walked to the window that looked out on the sun-dappled garden. She shrugged her shoulders evasively.

Mrs. Bellop furnished a brisk answer. “For social success and a brilliant marriage—with someone who is really mad about her. You know who.” She came over to Maroon, the plump poodle looked saucily up at the mastiff. “Though I’ll say this: how any girl can look at any other man when you’re around is more than I can see. If I was twenty years younger—well—twenty-five, say—I’d snatch you off if I had to drug you to do it. Speaking of drugs, that horse of yours—well, we won’t go into that. Thanks for the dp, though. Comes in handy when a girl’s got her own way to make. . . . What was I saying—oh, yes. If she wants to marry money, why, that’s her business. I did. And now look at me. But don’t think I’m going to neglect you, dear boy. I’ve got a scheme I want you to present to Bart Van Steed—you can say you thought of it—and I’ll swear it will save that trunk line of the Albany and Tuscarora from falling into the clutches of—”