The Americans Read online

  Will shrugged to suggest the apology was accepted, though not considered important or necessary. Marcus slouched in a chair and hooked a leg over the arm. He peered at the end of his cigarette.

  “Might as well tell you something else. You’ll notice it soon enough anyway. Mother and Father aren’t exactly what you’d call loving spouses. Perhaps they were once. But these days things are strained. Father’s got a shopgirl in town. He keeps her in one of those new French flats near Forty-fifth and Lexington. I don’t believe Mother knows about it. But she certainly suspects. If she ever gets definite proof, I suppose she’ll throw him out. The friction does nothing to improve the atmosphere in this house.”

  Will was startled but tried to conceal it. Marcus expected him to take the revelations in stride. A man was always free to enjoy a woman’s favors so long as that woman had loose morals, and could by no stretch of the imagination be considered a potential wife—although as the prostitute Aggie had sensed, Will had trouble being that cavalier about any girl.

  He reached for a hairbrush. In a calm voice he said, “You surprise me, Marcus. You and your sister act as if there isn’t a bit of trouble in this house.”

  Now Marcus shrugged. “We both try to stay out of range of the squabbling. I tend to take my father’s side—I don’t give a damn what he does. Laura sides with Mother.”

  Was that a nasty note in his voice? As though he were the weaker of the two, and resented it? Will couldn’t be sure, and Marcus concealed any ill feeling with another nonchalant lift of his shoulders.

  “In any case, I don’t want Father’s behavior to spoil your visit.”

  Will thought of Laura’s shapely figure and angelic face and said, “Never.”

  ii

  Mr. Carnegie wasn’t present for supper; Thurman Pennel said Carnegie had departed while the guests were refreshing themselves in their rooms. The main meal of the day had been eaten at noon, but supper was still a feast. It consisted of cuts of turkey and some other, more gamy fowl set out with a multitude of side dishes and a large selection of white wines and champagnes. The meal was served in a dining room so large and heavily hung with tapestries, Will again thought of some great baronial hall in England.

  Before the meal began, Marcus presented him to Mrs. Pennel. She was a small, curly-haired woman who seemed unusually shy. She murmured a word of welcome and then returned to her daughter’s side, as if she had nothing further to say, and—being married to a man as important and dominating as Thurman Pennel—would have no right to utter it if she did. Will soon learned how mistaken he was in making that judgment.

  Marcus had warned him that relationships in the family were strained. As the supper commenced, he saw signs of that; some were embarrassingly obvious.

  Thurman Pennel lurched along the sideboard, filling his plate from the dishes set out in the light of silver candlesticks. Pennel spooned up candied yams but missed his plate, depositing a large, glistening mass of food on the floor. Several of the young house guests noticed and pretended they hadn’t. Mrs. Pennel’s face grew stiff with disapproval.

  Pennel started to stagger on toward his place at the head of the long table. He saw his wife watching him. With a scowl, he squatted and picked up the sweet potato with the serving spoon which he then handed to a serving girl who hurried forward. Only then did he move on, his neck red.

  Will was watching Mrs. Pennel. No smile broke her sedate face. But he thought he detected a gleam of triumph in her eyes—particularly when she exchanged looks with Laura.

  To reach his assigned place between two of the house guests, Will had to circle Thurman Pennel’s chair at the head of the table. As he did, he again smelled gin.

  Pennel didn’t try to sober up during supper. Instead, he drank a great deal of champagne. The moment his champagne glass was empty a servant refilled it and he started gulping again. Except for a certain slurring of his speech which had been evident earlier, he didn’t act drunk. At least not until he called for everyone’s attention and told an off-color story that had no place in the conversation of mixed company.

  The story angered Mrs. Pennel. “My dear—if you please” was all she said when he finished, and that was said very softly. But Pennel had been tongue-lashed and he and everyone else knew it.

  Pennel started to retort, looked at his wife and then at Laura and said nothing. He snapped his fingers. The servant with the champagne bottle rushed forward. Pennel pointed at his empty glass.

  While he drank, he again scrutinized his wife and daughter. Will was shocked to see the expression in the man’s dull brown eyes. Am I crazy, or does he hate both of them?

  The young men and women at the table were minimally polite to Will. But it was clear that they felt awkward—in a couple of cases, irked—to have an outsider in their midst. He was just as uncomfortable, unable to make much sense of their conversation about someone’s yachting party last summer, or someone else’s recent victory in a lawn tennis match. Laura always knew what was being discussed; her conversation was cheerful and animated.

  Few remarks were addressed directly to Will. To those that were, he replied with a murmur, or a smile and a nod. He kept quiet for fear of making a fool of himself—then began to fear that his silence was creating precisely that impression.

  After the meal, he was thunderstruck when Laura walked straight to his side. She’d barely spoken a word to him at the table. As Marcus led the group toward the music room, she took his arm.

  “I suppose you found all that social chatter frightfully boring, Mr. Kent. Your studies keep you occupied with matters ever so much more serious and important.”

  Was she mocking him? He saw no sign. He wanted to jump up and click his heels; he hadn’t come off as a clod after all. His shyness had been misinterpreted as intellectual boredom.

  He didn’t intend to alter the impression. “I hate to admit it to a charming hostess, but you’re right. When you deal with life and death, it isn’t easy to work yourself into a passion over lawn tennis.”

  “Doctors in training must see sights that are positively shocking.”

  A thoughtful pause—he wanted to drain every drop of advantage from the situation. “On occasion. The real world isn’t as sheltered and comfortable as Pennel House.” With difficulty, he framed a compliment. “By the way—I’ve never seen anything quite so pretty as that outfit you’re wearing.”

  Marcus had kept the other guests moving. Will and Laura were momentarily isolated in a passageway designed to resemble an arched tunnel in a castle. Not too authentic a tunnel, though. Gas fixtures jutted from the walls; some illuminated large, conventional landscapes in heavy gilt frames.

  “Ah, do you like it?” Laura spun into a pirouette in the center of the passage. Will caught a flash of the toe of her shoe. Her skirt had no bustle, and fitted so snugly that he saw, or thought he saw, the suggestion of the cleft between her buttocks. Unbearably erotic, somehow—

  She turned full circle, her cheeks flushed from wine. “Papa doesn’t like me to wear it. It’s the very latest thing, but he thinks anything from France is immoral. Imagine a judgment like that from someone like him! Mama’s a modernist, though. She wants me to look up-to-date.”

  Laura took his arm again. He felt the pressure of her breast against his sleeve. The contact was evidently unintentional. She drew away, turning still redder. A swift glance down the passage seemed to suggest she’d let her emotions carry her away.

  But no one had seen them. Marcus and the other young people were trooping into the music room. Mrs. Pennel and her husband had disappeared as soon as the group left the dining room.

  “Mama probably struck you as a proper and dutiful wife, didn’t she, Mr. Kent?”

  He wondered what kind of answer she wanted. Not knowing, he hedged. “Very soft-spoken, certainly. I hardly heard her say a word except when your father told that story.”

  “Wasn’t that dreadful? The poor man simply can’t control his tongue when he drinks. Sometimes he�
�s just impossible.”

  “Your mother acted with great restraint—”

  “Don’t mistake that for a lack of backbone, Mr. Kent. Whatever you see in this house that pleases you—whatever you eat that you enjoy—be assured it’s all Mama’s doing. She even picks out Papa’s clothes. The only area in which she defers to him is in the choice of some of the paintings.”

  She nodded at one of the two canvases. “Papa still considers Thomas Cole and the rest of the Hudson River painters to be very advanced. He’s fifty years behind the times, but Mama humors him. I’m afraid you won’t find a Matthew Kent at Pennel House. Not while Papa’s alive, anyway.”

  “Oh, you know my uncle’s work?”

  “I’m more familiar with—what do I dare call it? His social life—?”

  Will grinned. “Try escapades.”

  She smiled too. “That does fit, doesn’t it? Your uncle’s name pops up in the Saunterer’s column every now and then.”

  “The Saunterer,” Will repeated. “You must read Town Topics.”

  “Everyone in our set reads Town Topics. Don’t you?”

  He shook his head. “My father won’t allow it in the house. He says the Colonel is a blackmailer and a disgrace to journalism.”

  Will was referring to Colonel William d’Alton Mann, a raffish adventurer who’d acquired the foundering weekly tabloid called Town Topics in 1885. Mann had instantly converted it to the most scandal-packed paper in the nation.

  He piously claimed that his journalistic mission was to improve the behavior of society by exposing immorality when and where he found it. Gideon had a different opinion. He said the ten- or twelve-page Saunterings column, which contained the week’s juicy gossip and was written by Mann himself, was no instrument of moral reform but a blatant moneymaking device. Mann’s biggest income came from items left out of his paper.

  The Colonel kept a table at Delmonico’s Restaurant for the convenience of wealthy men to whom he’d sent an advance galley proof of some scandalous item concerning them, their wives, children, or mistresses. Usually the victim was willing, not to say eager, to pay to have the item omitted from the next edition. Once a week the Colonel received the supplicants—and the bribes—at his table, where he also managed to work in his favorite meal: six mutton chops, two heads of lettuce with a creamy dressing, a dozen biscuits, a huge portion of chocolate cake, two full bottles of champagne, and a cigar.

  “Deserves to be shot” was Gideon’s opinion of the editor and publisher of Town Topics—which from time to time chronicled some of Matt Kent’s rowdy exploits at Europe’s fashionable resorts.

  “—yes,” Laura concluded, “I’d say the Kent name is a familiar one in this household.”

  He laughed. “Though not for the right reasons.” He indicated the paintings. “If your mother’s responsible for everything except the art in this house, she’s to be complimented.”

  “Thank you. In our set, a wife’s expected to take charge. The husband only appears to run things. The power really belongs to what the newspapers call the lioness.”

  “The what?”

  “Lioness,” she repeated with a dazzling smile. “I don’t know who first applied the term to women like Mama, but I think it’s rather appropriate. The male goes out to hunt for food while the female defends the home, tends the young, and disposes of whatever bounty the male dutifully brings back. The lioness runs everything. The limits of propriety are never exceeded because she sets those limits. You heard Mama speak to Papa when it became necessary—”

  And saw him back down the moment she ordered it, he thought.

  The rules in the Pennel household were clearly different from those under which Gideon and Julia operated. They treated their marriage as a partnership, not as a struggle for dominance between—God help him—carnivorous animals. Lioness struck Will as a ridiculous conceit. And yet Laura seemed taken with it. So taken, it made him uneasy.

  A new thought troubled him. By describing the Pennels’ relationship, was Laura also setting out the terms for any friendship she might develop with him?

  His silence brought a frown to her face. “Do you disapprove of Mama speaking to Papa as she did? Do you disapprove of a wife guiding her husband’s life in his best interests?”

  Three of the young people appeared at the door of the music room, searching for them. One pointed. “Oh, there they are.”

  Will said, “I don’t think it’s my position to approve or disapprove, Miss Pennel.”

  Pink-faced over the stares they were receiving, she nevertheless stood her ground, whispering, “I do wish you’d call me Laura.”

  “Very well—Laura. I repeat, approval or disapproval isn’t mine to give. I don’t move in the same circles as you do.”

  The others started calling for them to hurry so the caroling could start. Inside the music room, near a great candle-decorated tree, Marcus was seated at a rosewood piano and was playing the opening notes of “Good King Wenceslas.”

  Laura turned so that the young people couldn’t see her touch his arm for a second. “You mustn’t downgrade yourself. Politics aside, your family is eminently respectable—”

  “Respectable is not the same thing as belonging to your set, as you call it,” he replied with a wry smile. “Why, I’ve never even been invited to Mrs. Astor’s January ball.”

  “But it could be arranged,” she said softly.

  Suddenly something in him rebelled; he saw danger in the gray eyes and smiling demeanor of this sweet-faced girl. A lioness devoured. A lioness killed. He had no intention of being destroyed as Thurman Pennel had been. Laura’s father had obviously been stripped of his authority and self-respect and driven to the arms of some shopgirl by the woman to whom he was married.

  Stiffly, he said, “I doubt it very much. The Kents don’t receive invitations at that level. My father once struck Ward McAllister.”

  “Yes, I know that. But—”

  “I’d better say the rest, Miss Pennel.”

  “I thought it was Laura.”

  “We both know I’m a guest at Pennel House only because Marcus and I got acquainted through mutual friends in Cambridge.” It was the lie they’d agreed upon. “I’m studying to be a doctor. That automatically puts my position in the world much lower than yours—as if it wasn’t lower to begin with. The Kent money is new money. My father’s a radical by trade and by temperament—”

  “And you, Will? Are you a radical by trade and temperament?”

  “That makes no difference.”

  “It most certainly does. If the answer’s no, people in our set will accept you—even given your notorious profession. Actually, your profession might even help. It’s diverting to meet someone who uses his mind for more than the contemplation of a polo mallet or his own pedigree. People in my set respect intelligence so long as it isn’t—what shall I say? Radical. Dangerous. You give every indication that yours is not. There should be no limit to how high you can rise—if you have the right guidance.” She averted her eyes. “A wife with whom you share common goals—”

  Marcus stopped playing and walked to the door. “Laura, will you kindly come along and bring your friend? Or have you eloped?” he added with a smirk.

  One of the girls giggled. “They’re whispering back there as if they’re planning on it.”

  “Is that envy I detect, Charlotte dear?” Laura called out, her sweet tone not quite hiding her malice. Perhaps lioness wasn’t such a far-fetched term after all. Like her mother, Laura was proper; but she was also emotional, and quick to anger when she was threatened.

  “We’re coming,” she added, moving away from him. Over her shoulder she said, “I suppose we have held things up. But they can just wait for us. Are you bored with caroling now that Christmas is over?” She gave him no chance to answer. “I am, dreadfully. I’ll see that Marcus cuts the singing short.”

  She glided on toward the music room. A smile stole onto Will’s face as he followed. She was a curious and complex
girl. A girl of the very sort he’d dreamed about. A girl who could help him keep his promise about the future.

  “I know you’ll be staying with us for several days,” she went on, never glancing back to see whether he was there; she expected him to be. “Marcus and I have planned a great many activities for the group. You and I may not find another convenient opportunity to continue this discussion. We must do so when we see each other at some later time.”

  She added the last sentence as an afterthought, just before she made her entrance into the music room. She still didn’t look back, but her meaning was unmistakable. She liked him. And if she continued to like him, she could and would take him where he could never go by himself.

  A man didn’t succeed in her world without the right guidance. Nor without a wife with whom he shared common goals. Let the lioness rule unopposed, and everything was possible—

  And they would continue the discussion of the possibilities when we see each other at some later time.

  Not if.

  When.

  He couldn’t understand his good fortune. She could have a hundred eligible bachelors waiting on her. Why choose him? Was it for the reason she’d stated? Because he wasn’t the sort of person she usually met in her crowd?

  Whatever the explanation, he mustn’t question his luck. She was beautiful—and she could help him realize all of his ambitions—

  “Will?”

  He glanced up. She was standing in the doorway of the music room. She’d spoken his name with an undertone of annoyance.

  “Are you or are you not planning to join us?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Certainly.”

  Her own smile, hard as glass, rebuffed him because he’d made her angry. She spun away. “Then do hurry along, unless you don’t enjoy our company.”

  She disappeared into the music room. Worried, he called, “I’m coming,” and rushed after her.

  CHAPTER IX

  A DOCTOR’S DUTY

  i

  THE HOLIDAY AT PENNEL House sped by. It did so despite the activities Will was forced to join in merely to be near Laura.