Triumph (3 page)

"Have fun, you and your Mr. Lee!" And hung up.

Ben had located her by then.

The living room in Uxmal had a deeply-recessed "well" in one end, an oval pit of the sort that had grown increasingly popular in the past dozen years among those who built new houses and could afford such, to Ben, incomprehensible innovations. Black, gray, robin's-egg-blue and gold, this long room had magnificent glass walls now half-shaded by an outside awning. Like the window in his suite, it faced south. Valerie Farr was sitting on a banquette that ran around the depressed part of the room, with a plug-in telephone in one hand and a drink in the other, a greenish-yellow potion in an old-fashioned glass.

After replacing the phone she fini6hed the drink; ice tinkled, jewels on her fingers flashed, and a ray of sun leaked through an awning aperture. It set the red in her nearly-black, wavy hair gleaming with a beauty that, Ben thought, was probably natural, though carefully nurtured.

She saw him. "Ben, darling! Join me!"

He approached on a carpet so deep it almost seemed to require a balancing effort. She added, "Mind the stairs! Five of them. down to here! If you trip--and people have done it-

-you can land in the goldfish poo!."

He laughed, lightly came down the steps, took her hand. "You look marvelous, Valerie!"

She surveyed him, holding his hand, standing--tall, graceful, and glad to see him, plainly. More glad, he thought, than usual. And perceived the obvious reason: Faith was engaged to Barlow so he was no longer a potential peril. He noticed that her dark eyes had a too-wet glitter not from tears but owing to her sad affliction. Her addiction. He wondered how many hundreds of thousands of women like this one "had everything" and also had the same disease. Women similarly shielded in their illness by friends and family and by their own refusal to acknowledge that they were alcoholics.

"You
look, Ben," she finally said, "as pale as an oyster; and you seem to get more round-shouldered every month. You need to get outdoors more, take some exercise!

Meantime, how about a slalom?"

"Slalom?"

Valerie lifted her glass and rattled the ice. "A little drinkee I concocted, and named. 'Slaloms' are those tricky zigzags in skiing that make so many people fall down!"

She laughed, a bit too heartily.

Ben shook his head. "Not cocktail time for your round-shouldered, pallid, physicist friend. But, iced coffee?"

Valerie nodded, pressed a button, spoke into something invisible from his angle, and ordered another slalom with his iced coffee.

Afterward she chattered. "Vance just phoned. He's still in New York, at the office.

He had expected to come out for dinner but he has a meeting." She paused. "Meeting,"

she repeated, rather dully. "With his Far East manager, he says. Who was to be out here also. And has a daughter. Charming, Vance says. The girl was in Maine but she's driving down and expects to reach here any minute. I haven't met these Lee people." She waited while Paulus Davey brought the two beverages and until she could take a few slow, multiple swallows of her slalom. Her ensuing, "Thank you, Paulus!" was a trifle too stiff and at the same time too vigorous. The Negro bowed--sadly, Ben felt--and left.

Valerie mused, "I wonder if they're related to the Robert E. Lee family. I know half a dozen people who are."

He sipped his sugared and creamed cool coffee and reflected that he had never before considered the probability of living relatives of the Civil War general, either direct descendants or collateral. No doubt there were many, and no doubt the Farr's knew those who were illustrious, wealthy, or social--or all three. He also reflected that, as a Bernman, he was related to sundry other Bernmans, to Koviskis, a Cohen, certain Steins, and one Walters family that had once been Wildenbeiter.

Faith appeared, then, in a dress like amber mist, and when she crossed a ladder of sunbeams he had a momentary glimpse of most of Faith. She was smiling and her eyes danced. "Imagine!" she exclaimed. "I've just had a long, long talk with Kit. And he's not coming for dinner! Because why? Because he's down at the Yacht Club and he made a bet he could swim from the dock there to Savin Rock--must be a dozen miles. The idiot is starting right now!"

"We're being abandoned right and left," Valerie said to Ben, somewhat irritatedly; she carried that tone in her subsequent words to Faith: "You seem to be totally undismayed."

"Why, of course! Because now I'll have Ben to myself all evening!"

Mrs. Farr's eyes gleamed briefly with temper. But she controlled it. Or perhaps a new thought erased it. "Maybe. But a Miss Lee is due here soon. And she may find the Great Scientist as fascinating as you do, dear." Valerie explained about Miss Lee.

Faith seemed interested, but not worried. She rang, if that was what happened, and ordered a martini on the intercom, which eventually Paulus Davey brought. He had changed to a mauve dinner jacket, black silk trousers, pumps, and a dark-purple bow tie.

Whether that was his own idea or Mrs. Farr's, Ben could not guess.

The faint sound of door chimes made Paulus change his course. Presently they heard his gentle voice say, with an undertone none of the three people in the living room could interpret but all three caught, "Oh. Miss Lee. Of course! I'll take your luggage and put your car away. You'll want to greet Mrs. Farr."

A voice that had a strange quality and yet was without accent, an alien but American voice which, to Ben, seemed enchanting, said, "Yes, of course. I'll unpack and change soon, though. So--"

Then she appeared. She had black, shining hair and dark, dark eyes. She was exquisitely made and dressed in a soft, rosy suit of some sort. Her lips were a rosy-red of the same hue but with a heightened intensity. She came in smiling a little, walking with a very straight and yet not self-conscious carriage. She was--at Ben's guess--a little younger than Faith Farr. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes sloped and almond shaped, and her skin a golden-tan color . . . the ensemble, Ben thought, beautiful as water lilies. Miss Lee, he also thought, and turned to see Valerie react, was not a relation of Robert E., or any such Lee. Indeed, it proved that the lovely young woman spelled her name in a different way: not L-e-e but L-i. Lotus Li.

She was Chinese, a fact Vance Farr had either neglected to tell his wife or deliberately omitted. Ben wondered which. Overlooked, he decided. Farr wasn't the sort of man who would risk embarrassing a girl to play games with his wife. Besides, the Farr family was cosmopolitan beyond the American norm.

Valerie exhibited that quality almost instantly. After a sub-audible gasp, her face broke into a smile and she actually went up out of the recessed area to greet the girl.

"You're Miss Li! How perfectly charming, my dear! We're delighted to have you--though we're also a bit disappointed! Did you know your father and my husband won't be here for dinner. Not till late, in fact."

Miss Li was bowing slightly. She took Valerie's hand. "Yes, I know," she said. "I have a phone in my car. I talked to Daddy--oh, a half hour ago--while I was stuck waiting for the police to clear up a wreck on the Turnpike. I do hope I'm not delaying you?"

"Of course not."

Introductions. Faith was first. She said to Miss Li, frankly, "I think the Chinese are the most lovely women on earth--and you are one of the loveliest I ever saw!"

At dinner they were to find her first name was Lotus but everybody at Radcliffe, from which she had just graduated, called her "Lodi." Now, she flushed faintly at Faith's words and then, realizing they were frank and intended, she smiled with a vividness that Ben found breath-taking.

"Thank you," said the Chinese girl, and, looking straight at Faith,
"You
can easily afford to say such a thing!" Whereupon they both laughed.

Everybody did.

Lodi Li soon departed to change for dinner. Faith and her mother waited till the footfalls died on distant flagstones and then both said, though differently,
"Well!"

Ben supposed Mrs. Farr meant, "What a surprise!" and Faith, "What a beauty!" In any event, he said, "Exactly." And that seemed the right word, for Valerie smiled at him and Faith, after an appraising glance, gave him a sudden, almost undetectable wink. . . .

Ben sat on a terrace after dinner with Lodi and Faith, in sling chairs, beside coffee cups on low tables. Valerie had made her apologies at the end of the meal and vanished, not quite steadily but unaided.

The last sun fell on the upper leaves and structures of Fenwich Village and the long, sloping, hazed land that led to the sea, the Sound, Long Island, and the Atlantic beyond. Ben mused absently over Lodi Li's slight reaction to Valerie's going.

The Chinese girl had watched, of course, then turned to Faith and said, with the utmost quietude, "Does she often--?"

Faith had replied softly, "Always."

Lodi Li had finished the conversation insofar as that topic went: "Oh, dear! How pitiful."

The terrace was shielded from the near-horizontal sun, a red ball, about to set behind the lesser ridges west of Sachem's Watch, which dominated them. A hazy sky began to accumulate tints: salmon-pink, orange, meringue-tan.

Far to the south a darker darkness emitted occasional flares or pink light. A thunderstorm, there, moved toward Connecticut and then retreated, leaving them in sultry calm.

"Which do you like better?" Faith asked. "Sunsets or sunrises?"

Ben waited but Miss Li didn't respond. So he said, "Why, I don’t know. Both, equally, I guess. Some of my scientist-colleagues probably take the same view, on different grounds. The grounds that both phenomena are merely the result of light rays being reflected by dust, and absorbed, too--and by water vapor, of course. This, with the rotation of the planet, causes sunrises and sunsets--misnomers, they'd also doubtless point out--optical effects readily explained and of no special novelty or import."

Miss Li laughed. "Perfect! For a scientist."

Faith said, "And you?"

Ben chuckled, sipped coffee and let the cool air that eddied from some silent but potent source flow over him, gratefully. Finally he said, "As for me, I am a good scientist only when at work. As of now--digesting filet and a lot of other delicious things--I feel more inclined to the poetic view than the physical. Sunrises and sunsets, even though explicable, always have a mystical effect on me. And I never inquire why I feel any mystical sensation, unless I'm in a lab. They're too rare and valuable to analyze."

"Me, too!" Faith nodded. "Sometimes when I watch the sunset, I'm almost angry with education. I wish I didn't know about the diffraction of light and the rotation of the earth and so on! It must have been far more fun to be alive when everybody didn't know everything!"

"Everything?" Miss Li murmured.

"Too damned much, anyhow."

"Oh, yes!" The Chinese girl agreed with that. She was looking at something that had caught her interest.

Another girl--as different and, in her way, as lovely as Lodi Li--appeared, briefly.

A Negress. Tall, tawny-skinned, lithe, and striding, almost--yet with feral smoothness. In white shorts and sneakers, with a white halter, carrying a tennis racket which made Ben realize he'd been dimly aware of the thonk of tennis balls ever since they'd come out on the terrace for coffee. The girl's black hair was wavy and long and worn now in a pony tail. She looked toward the house and raised her tennis racket. "Hello, Faith! Evening, people!" She laughed in saying that--calling it, really, over green lawn and the hedges silently busy pushing out their shadows.

"Hi, Connie!" Faith's response was warm and clear and, otherwise, unexplained.

Lodi Li had murmured something when the dark girl had appeared, but Ben hadn't caught it.

Now, Faith said, "There's the first star."

Ben looked up in the darkling azure where overhead, and only overhead, the smoggy mist of the heat wave had not faded the sky's blueness. He was on the point of correcting the word "star" to "planet" and decided it would be too damned exact. Too Brookhaven. He nodded. They sat in silence and peace.

By and by Lodi Li stood up. "If you two will forgive me, I'm going to my--" she smiled at Faith--"
very
elegant rooms. They gave me a farewell party up in Maine last night. And I packed afterward. And then I started driving. So--"

"You mean, you didn't sleep at
all?"
Faith exclaimed.

Lodi Li nodded. "Not any. So--"

"Lord! You must tell me how you managed not to show a trace of it!" "That's easy! I managed by telling myself, the whole afternoon and so far this evening, that I'd soon be asleep!"

"Zen!" Faith cried, pleased and not mocking.

"Yogi," the Chinese girl chuckled. "But it doesn't work endlessly. If you'll forgive me--?"

When she'd gone, the two people on the terrace were quiet for so long that each began to wonder, in the deepening dusk, if the other had dozed off. But just before Faith rose to make a close inspection, Ben, seeing the preliminary movement, said, lazily,

"What's that giant rockslide that looks fresh-blasted, down below Sachem's Watch? You quarry limestone here?"

"Papa's Panic Palace," Faith answered--sharply, he thought. "Hasn't he told you about it, by now?"

"Panic Palace?" he repeated. "No." He sounded puzzled and then, not. "You mean--?"

Faith nodded and he saw that clearly, because just as her bright head moved, she turned on lights which, though wan and indirect, momentarily almost hurt his dark-accustomed eyes. "He'll take you on the grand tour tomorrow, that's for sure. However, I'd rather talk about almost anything else in the world than that! It's so dull, and so interminable. I'd even rather talk about Antarctica. "

He grinned. "Okay. Let's."

From Antarctica their conversation fled the world over, but rested mainly upon themselves and their agreements and differences on more subjects than either would have guessed they could or would summon in an hour or two of random talk at twilight, subjects that ranged from sleeping "raw" (they both did, they found) to junk jewelry (neither one liked it, as a rule), and from French cigarettes (another point of mutual distaste) to horseback riding (she did; he didn't).