Time After Time (55 page)

She glanced automatically
at the door to Cornelius Eastman's room, though she knew he was
holed up in the carriage-house apartment. "It'd be so nice if your
father made an appearance later. Did you try him one more
time?"

"Tried and failed. To tell
the truth, I envy him; he has an ironclad excuse. Of course, I'll
only have to suffer through the dinner; but even that'll seem
endless.

"Oh, I
know,
you poor thing," Netta said in
a deadpan voice. She turned on her heel and began walking down the
stairs.

"Hey — what's
that
supposed to mean?"
said Jack behind her.

"Put the rest of your
clothes on, dear," she said without turning around. "The guests
will start arriving any minute."

"Netta," Jack said in a
dangerous voice. "Come back here, please. I'd like an
explanation."

She sighed and decided
that maybe he deserved one. She retraced her steps to the landing,
then took Jack by the shirt-sleeve and hauled him over to the
eight-foot-tall cathedral window, intricately paned in clear leaded
glass, that overlooked the grounds. Together they looked down at
the huge tent, bedecked with thousands and thousands of white
lights, that hovered over the lawn like a fairy castle at
twilight.

"You see that?" she asked
Jack.

"It'd be hard to miss," he
said dryly. "I didn't have to turn on the bathroom lights when I
shaved just now."

"That tent is the result
of a lot of hard work by a lot of good people. Everyone — even
Deirdre — put in long hours. Now, I'm not saying that you haven't
been generous with your house or quick to write a check. But that's
about it, Jack. The rest of the time you hide behind closed doors,
away from us all. Between you and your father — well, I don't know.
It's very disappointing."

"You needn't be
disappointed, Netta," Jack said, flushing with anger. "After
tonight I'll probably come back out."

"Jack, Jack," she said,
shaking her head in sorrow. "What're you afraid of? No — let me put
that another way. Why
are you afraid of
her? Things were going so well between you."

Jack said nothing, only
stared down at the tent. The caterers were moving about, making
last-minute adjustments.

"She did a great job,"
Jack said curtly.

"Have you told her that? I
haven't seen you say boo to her lately. And don't tell me you got
tired of her, because I won't believe it."

Jack scowled ferociously.
"She's not the kind of woman a man gets tired of. Her husband must
have been the world's biggest ass," he added.

Emboldened, Netta said,
"She could've dumped
you,
I guess, but that would be a first, and I don't
suppose it happened."

"Not that it's any
of your business, Miss Simmons, but the fact is,
we've decided on a cooling-off period," Jack said in a lifeless
voice as he scanned the tent and the grounds.

"And what would the point
of that
be?" asked Netta. "To keep from
doing bodily harm to one another?"

"It's to — to reassess.
Things were getting out of hand. I needed time to
think."

"You think much longer,
you're going to die of old age, dear," said Netta in a voice of
sweet reason. "Do you love her or not?"

Jack's smile was
noncommittal. "You know me better than that, Netta," he said
ambiguously, and headed back to his room.

So. He wasn't going to
confide in her. It wasn't surprising. Jack had grown up among
people who believed that spilling your own guts
was the worst form of barbarity. She sighed, then checked the
time.

The creature had better
know what she's doing,
Netta thought as
she went to answer the first summons of the evening.

It was the creature
herself, in the same odd, fierce mood that she'd been in all week.
Victoria was dressed in what Netta supposed was New Age style: her
gown was of slinky silver lamé fabric that rippled and glittered
when she moved. Her shoulders were bare, though the bodice reached
up and encircled her neck in a seductively modest way. Her hair was
piled high on her head and woven through with silver stars. She
wore no real jewelry—unless you counted the stars — but over her
heart was pinned what looked like airline wings, the kind pilots
give children on long flights. What a curious sense of style she
had.

"Oh, Netta, you look
exactly right," Victoria cried.

"I look hot," Netta said,
dismissing her enthusiasm. "Where's Liz?" she added, surprised.
Victoria was supposed to have her in tow.

"She went right to the
tent with a box of Sterno for the dipping chocolate. She won't come
into the house; you know that."

Netta knew it very well.
"And yet you think you'll be able to get her in here when you have
to?"

"I got her into the gown,
didn't I? You should see her, Netta. She fought the idea, same as
you, but once she saw herself in it — well, I think she knows it
was made for her. It fit like a glove. I put her hair up in a
French braid; she looks breathtaking. It's all coming together. I
knew
it would. Is Meredith here
yet?"

"She just called to say
she's on her way."

"Isn't this fun, Netta?
Isn't it?" Victoria sighed happily, then swayed in place. "God —
I'm light-headed from it all!"

"Dear, you have to calm
down a little. Now: you have the pin?"

Victoria opened the
drawstring on the little silver handbag that was looped over her
wrist and pulled out a tiny open heart of gold. "Okay, Netta," she
said, her cheeks flushed with excitement. "Let's do it!"

She and Netta slipped off
to the dining room. The table, Netta had to admit, was a tour de
force. Meredith Kinney's staff had done a wonderful job, although
it was Victoria who was the guiding light behind it.

Netta had been told about
the old letter describing a dinner that John and Lavinia Eastman
had given a hundred years ago, the letter that Victoria had used to
persuade Meredith Kinney into using the same seashore theme for
tonight's table. Netta had seen the letter — which Victoria was
using like a recipe — but hadn't been able to make hide nor hair of
the writing. So Victoria had read some of it aloud to
her.

Netta was thoroughly
impressed with the part about sand in the soup. Because with those
silly little sand pails at every place — well, it was bound to be a
mess, that's all. The party favors — bits of amber and other such
stones — were already in the buckets, waiting to be dug out. Netta
had been careful to put them in not too deep. No matter. There'd
still be sand everywhere. Still, for now it was very pretty. They'd
gotten everything right, from the dozens of candles intertwined
with beach roses to the seashells that were scattered up and down
the table.

The original crystal
mermaid and dolphins, though, no longer existed. For maybe two
minutes, Victoria had been stumped. Then she hit on the idea of an
ice sculpture, and Meredith Kinney, a good sport, agreed to pay,
and now the iceman was in the basement, chiseling away, and if the
dumbwaiter decided to break down again, Netta didn't know
how
they'd get the
blessed thing upstairs.

"It's nice to see the
Meissen out again," she murmured to herself, tucking a dinner plate
a sixteenth of an inch to the right.

"Yes." Victoria was deep
in a frown, staring at the seating arrangement. "No. This is wrong.
I can't put her on Jack's right. She'll freak out if she sees she's
in the place of honor."

"Meredith Kinney might not
take kindly to your having fiddled with her seating arrangement,
either," said Netta.

Victoria hardly heard. "I
have to make it seem more casual than that. I'll put her four down,
on his right. With Jack at the head — yes, he can still see the pin
pretty well."

She moved quickly between
the first and the fourth places, switching placecards. Then she
took a chunk of amber out of the fourth-place bucket and put it in
her bag. And after that, she took the heart-shaped pin, so small,
so easily missed, and tucked it just beneath the surface of the
fourth-place pail.

Suddenly she gasped and
looked up, her face as pale as the damask cloth that covered the
fully extended table. "Oh, Netta — do you see what I'm doing
—
again
?
I'm
switching things—again! What if this is wrong — again?"

"Whatever," said Netta,
completely bewildered by the girl's manner. Why Lavinia Eastman's
pin had to be returned in this roundabout way, Netta had no idea.
She was willing to indulge the child in her whimsical secret plan.
But now that the event was about to begin, it was time to put an
end to all this.

"Time to go," she said,
cradling one arm around Victoria's slender waist and ushering her
firmly out of the dining room. "That will be Mrs. Kinney at the
door."

****

Elizabeth Coppersmith
stood in the middle of the still-empty tent and turned slowly
around, taking it all in. This was her moment to enjoy the magic.
Her Gilded Age to New Age theme had lent itself irresistibly to a
treatment in white lights and shimmering surfaces, and she had
pulled out all the stops — within a strict budget, of
course.

But the beauty of the
theme was that she didn't need solid gold; she only needed gilding.
Gold leaf, gold foil, gold paint, and lots of it, all contributed
to the sense that when you stepped into this tent, you stepped into
a magical place.

Gold-sprayed boughs of
long-needled evergreens, pinned by huge bows of foot-wide cascading
gold French ribbon, lined the inside rim of the tent and led the
eye upward to a cluster of fat, gold-leaf cherubs (on loan from a
local church) that hung suspended from the peak, hovering benignly
over the scene below.

Bright stars and gold
suns, a leitmotif of the New Age, were everywhere, even
hand-painted on the tablecloths and on the funky tiny tent that
enclosed the palmist, who had agreed to donate half her reading
fees from the night. (The "phrenologist," in reality a professor of
Victorian literature, would read heads for free, of course: after
all, he didn't know a bump on the head from a hole in the
head.)

In any case, no cash would
be used, only gold "coins": little sun-disks that Liz had bought
ridiculously cheap from a novelty shop. The first two sun-disks
were complimentary; the rest, the guests would pay for.

Liz hoped that many
paid-for discs would end up as wishes at the bottom of the
marbelized fountain that stood, in a reasonable facsimile of
majesty, in the middle of the tent. If not, then quarters and dimes
would do just fine. Anne's Place would take whatever it could
get.

Had she brought in too
many palms and ferns? Could you
have
too many palms and ferns in a
Victorian setting? She considered moving one last palm one last
time — but her gown seemed to think not.

Feeling exquisitely
feminine, exquisitely useless in her tight sheath of satin, Liz
sighed a sigh of contradictory feelings. If only the guests got
into the spirit of the night. If only Jack would peek in — and some
of his dinner guests — at least to see what she had wrought. But
who needed them, really?

"Lizzie!" hissed Victoria
behind her.

Liz swung around, panicked
by the tone in her friend's voice. It had to be the pin. "Oh, don't
tell me his bedroom is locked again!"

"Nope, nope," said
Victoria, "the pin's all set. I wanted to know — is everything all
right? No last-minute, urn, crises or anything?"

"Everything's fine," Liz
said. "Why?"

"Just making sure. Well,
I've got to get back inside. We're almost done with cocktails and
are about to go in and chow down. ‘Bye."

"Have fun," she said to
Victoria's retreating, shimmering figure. She pushed away the
thought of Jack seated at the head of the table, playing host to
his own. Thank God she'd begged off when Meredith asked her
yesterday to come see the decorations; it made it easier not to
picture Jack now.

I'm acting like a rival
warlord,
she admitted, which was too bad,
because she respected Meredith very much. Meredith had dropped in
when the tent was nearly finished and was generous with her
compliments. No doubt she was disappointed that Liz hadn't
reciprocated.

Five minutes later,
Victoria was back. "Lizzie, Lizzie," she wailed. "You're going to
kill me ... I don't know what to do .... Please, please don't be
mad."

"My God, Tori, what? Tell
me!"

Eyes glistening, Victoria
said, "I did an awful thing. I put you down on the guest list for
dinner—"

"Tori, are you
crazy?"

"—and I didn't have the
courage to tell you, and now it's too late to change it, because
Jack has probably seen the place card, and if you don't go, he'll
think you're being petty and stuck-up — won't he? — and I know I
shouldn't have done it, and it's
all
my fault, but if the chair is
empty, it'll be so embarrassing for everyone, especially after the
fights over the tickets, and if you could just come, maybe just
through the main course? Because you said yourself you're in good
shape here .... Oh, what was I thinking? I'm
such
a fool."