FOUR
BUT UNDISTINCTIVE as the dance had seemed, it was, nevertheless, important. For it marked the beginning of a new factor in Irene Redfield’s life, something that left its trace on all the future years of her existence. It was the beginning of a new friendship with Clare Kendry.
She came to them frequently after that. Always with a touching gladness that welled up and overflowed on all the Redfield household. Yet Irene could never be sure whether her comings were a joy or a vexation.
Certainly she was no trouble. She had not to be entertained, or even noticed—if anyone could ever avoid noticing Clare. If Irene happened to be out or occupied, Clare could very happily amuse herself with Ted and Junior, who had conceived for her an admiration that verged on adoration, especially Ted. Or, lacking the boys, she would descend to the kitchen and, with—to Irene—an exasperating childlike lack of perception, spend her visit in talk and merriment with Zulena and Sadie.
Irene, while secretly resenting these visits to the playroom and kitchen, for some obscure reason which she shied away from putting into words, never requested that Clare make an end of them, or hinted that she wouldn’t have spoiled her own Margery so outrageously, nor been so friendly with white servants.
Brian looked on these things with the same tolerant amusement that marked his entire attitude toward Clare. Never since his faintly derisive surprise at Irene’s information that she was to go with them the night of the dance, had he shown any disapproval of Clare’s presence. On the other hand, it couldn’t be said that her presence seemed to please him. It didn’t annoy or disturb him, so far as Irene could judge. That was all.
Didn’t he, she once asked him, think Clare was extraordinarily beautiful?
“No,” he had answered. “That is, not particularly.”
“Brian, you’re fooling!”
“No, honestly. Maybe I’m fussy. I s’pose she’d be an unusually good-looking white woman. I like my ladies darker. Beside an A-number-one sheba, she simply hasn’t got ’em.”
Clare went, sometimes with Irene and Brian, to parties and dances, and on a few occasions when Irene hadn’t been able or inclined to go out, she had gone alone with Brian to some bridge party or benefit dance.
Once in a while she came formally to dine with them. She wasn’t, however, in spite of her poise and air of worldliness, the ideal dinner-party guest. Beyond the Esthetic pleasure one got from watching her, she contributed little, sitting for the most part silent, an odd dreaming look in her hypnotic eyes. Though she could for some purpose of her own—he desire to be included in some party being made up to go cabareting, or an invitation to a dance or a tea—talk fluently and entertainingly.
She was generally liked. She was so friendly and responsive, and so ready to press the sweet food of flattery on all. Nor did she object to appearing a bit pathetic and ill-used, so that people could feel sorry for her. And, no matter how often she came among them, she still remained someone apart, a little mysterious and strange, someone to wonder about and to admire and to pity.
Her visits were undecided and uncertain, being, as they were, dependent on the presence or absence of John Bellew in the city. But she did, once in a while, manage to steal uptown for an afternoon even when he was not away. As time went on without any apparent danger of discovery, even Irene ceased to be perturbed about the possibility of Clare’s husband’s stumbling on her racial identity.
The daughter, Margery, had been left in Switzerland in school, for Clare and Bellew would be going back in the early spring. In March, Clare thought. “And how I do hate to think of it!” she would say, always with a suggestion of leashed rebellion; “but I can’t see how I’m going to get out of it. Jack won’t hear of my staying behind. If I could have just a couple of months more in New York, alone I mean, I’d be the happiest thing in the world.”
“I imagine you’ll be happy enough, once you get away,” Irene told her one day when she was bewailing her approaching departure. “Remember, there’s Margery. Think how glad you’ll be to see her after all this time.”
“Children aren’t everything,” was Clare Kendry’s answer to that. “There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don’t seem to suspect it.” And she laughed, more, it seemed, at some secret joke of her own than at her words.
Irene replied: “You know you don’t mean that, Clare. You’re only trying to tease me. I know very well that I take being a mother rather seriously. I am wrapped up in my boys and the running of my house. I can’t help it. And, really, I don’t think it’s anything to laugh at.” And though she was aware of the slight primness in her words and attitude, she had neither power nor wish to efface it.
Clare, suddenly very sober and sweet, said: “You’re right. It’s no laughing matter. It’s shameful of me to tease you, ‘Rene. You are so good.” And she reached out and gave Irene’s hand an affectionate little squeeze. “Don’t think,” she added, “whatever happens, that I’ll ever forget how good you’ve been to me.”
“Nonsense!”
“Oh, but you have, you have. It’s just that I haven’t any proper morals or sense of duty, as you have, that makes me act as I do.”
“Now you are talking nonsense.”
“But it’s true, ‘Rene. Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, ‘Rene, I’m not safe.” Her voice as well as the look on her face had a beseeching earnestness that made Irene vaguely uncomfortable.
She said: “I don’t believe it. In the first place what you’re saying is so utterly, so wickedly wrong. And as for your giving up things—” She stopped, at a loss for an acceptable term to express her opinion of Clare’s “having” nature.
But Clare Kendry had begun to cry, audibly, with no effort at restraint, and for no reason that Irene could discover.