Death Before Bedtime (3 page)

“She seems very pleasant.”

“Like her mother … a wonderful woman.”

“So I’ve been told.”

The Senator rose. “I’ll see you this evening then, at the
house. Got a committee meeting now. Rufus will show you around. Remember: this is a kind of crusade.”

A crusade was putting it lightly. It was an unscrupulous and desperate effort of one Leander Rhodes to organize the illiberal minority of the country into a party within his party … and, I suspect, if he’d been younger and a little more intelligent he might very well have got himself into the White House. As it was, from what little Rufus Hollister would tell me, the Senator had some impressive backing; he also had some very sinister backing. I disguised my alarm, though, and by the time I took a taxi to the Senator’s house on Massachusetts Avenue, Mr. Hollister was convinced that I too was a crusader for Good Government and True-Blue American Ideals.

The house on Massachusetts Avenue was an heroic imitation of an Italian villa, covered with yellow stucco and decorated with twisted columns and ironwork balconies. The Senator, I soon discovered, was a very wealthy man though the source of his income was not entirely clear to me. Mr. Hollister spoke vaguely of properties in Talisman City.

A butler showed me to my room on the third floor and, as I went up the marble staircase, I caught an occasional glimpse of ballrooms, of parquet floors, of potted palms, all very 1920 Grand Hotel
chic.
Dinner would be announced in an hour, I was told. Then I was left alone in a comfortable bedroom overlooking the Avenue.

I was dozing blissfully in a hot bath, when Ellen marched into the bathroom.

“I’ve come to scrub your back,” she said briskly.

“No, you don’t,” I said, modestly covering myself. “Go away.”

“That’s hardly the way for my fiancé to act,” she said, sitting down on the toilet seat.

“I haven’t been your fiancé for almost a year,” I said austerely. “Besides, the bride-to-be is not supposed to inspect her groom before the wedding.”

“You give me a pain,” said Ellen, lighting a cigarette. She wore a very dashing pair of evening pajamas, green with gold thread, quite oriental-looking … it made her look faintly exotic, not at all like a simple girl from Talisman City. “By the way, I told Mother we were engaged. I hope you don’t mind.”

I moaned. “What is this allergy you have to the truth?”

“Well, it
was
the truth a few months ago … I mean time’s relative and all that,” she beamed at me. “Anyway it should help you with my father.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said, recalling the Senator’s look of pain at the mention of his only daughter.

“The house is full, by the way,” said Ellen, exhaling smoke. “Some of the dreariest political creatures these old eyes have seen in many a moon.”

“Constituents?”

“I suppose so. One’s rather sweet … a lovely boy from New York, a newspaperman. He’s doing a profile of Father for some magazine, very Left Wing I gather, and of course poor Father doesn’t have the remotest notion that he’s being taken for a ride. Did you ever see the piece the
Nation
did on him?”

I said that I hadn’t; I asked her the name of the lovely boy who was doing the profile. “Walter Langdon … a real dream. I had a quick drink with him in the drawing room,
before I dashed off to make violent love to my prospective groom.”

“I have a feeling that our engagement isn’t going to last very long.”

“You may be right. Oh, and you’ll never guess who’s here … Verbena Pruitt.”

“My God!” I was alarmed. Anyone would be alarmed at meeting the incomparable Verbena, the President of the Daughters of the War of 1812 as well as National Committeewoman for her party, one of the most powerful lady politicos in the country.

“She’s from Daddy’s state, you know. She has the hairiest legs I’ve seen since that football game at Cambridge last week.”

“I had better get myself a hotel room quick,” I said, letting the bathwater out and standing up, my back turned modestly toward Ellen as I dried myself.

“How do you keep so slim?” asked the insatiable Ellen.

“No exercise is the secret,” I said flexing a muscle or two in an excess of male spirits.

“You’re really not bad at all,” she said thoughtfully. “I wonder why we ever fell out.” She rose and came toward me, a resolute expression on her face.

“None of that,” I said, making a dash for the bedroom. I had my trousers on before she could violate me further. She relaxed and we went on talking as though nothing had happened. I dressed more slowly.

“Then there’s an old buddy of Father’s staying here, Roger Pomeroy and his wife, a poisonous creature. I don’t know what
they’re
doing here. He’s an industrialist back in Talisman City, makes gunpowder or something like that.…”

“Sounds like a chummy gathering.”

“Grim … awfully grim. That tiresome Rufus Hollister,
Father’s secretary, also lives in. I have often said that he was the reason I left home. Did you ever feel his hands? like an uncooked filet of sole … which reminds me I’m hungry, which also reminds me I desperately need a drink. Do hurry … here, let me tie your tie … I love tying a man’s tie: gives me such a sense of power when I think with just the slightest pressure I could choke him to death.”

“Darling, have you ever been analyzed?”

“Of course. Hasn’t everyone? I went every day for three years after my annulment … Mother insisted. When it was over I was completely normal; I had passed my course with flying colors: no more inhibitions, no frustrations, an easy conscience about alcohol as well as the slightly decrepit body of a middle-aged analyst named Breitbach added to my gallery of conquests.” She finished tying my tie with a flourish which made me jump. “There! You look such a lamb.”

The drawing room was a large draughty affair with French windows which looked out on a bleak garden of formal boxwood hedges and empty flower beds, black with winter. Several people were seated about the fire. Two men rose at our entrance. A woman in black lace rose, too, and approached us. It was Mrs. Leander Rhodes.

“Mother, I want you to meet my fiancé, Peter Sargeant.”

“I’m so happy to see you, Mr. Sargeant. I’ve heard such a great deal about you … such a coincidence, too … the Senator engaging you without knowing about you and Ellen.” She was an amiable-looking woman of fifty, thin and rather bent with, as far as I could tell through the swatches of black lace, no bosom and no waist. At her throat old-fashioned
yellow diamonds gleamed. Her eyes were black; only her wide full mouth was like her daughter’s. “Let me introduce you around,” she said; and she did.

Verbena Pruitt was worse than I’d expected: a massive woman in mauve satin with henna-dyed hair, bobbed short over a red fat neck, large features, small pig eyes and a complexion not unlike the craters of the moon as seen through a telescope. She gave my hand a vigorous squeeze. So did Roger Pomeroy, a tall silver-haired man of distinction. His wife, Camilla, a fairly pretty dark woman, smiled at me winningly, one heavily veined hand at her smooth neck, fondling pearls. Ellen’s lovely boy Walter Langdon, a red-haired youth, mumbled something incoherent as we shook hands. He was obviously uncomfortable. And well he should be, I thought righteously, coming into a man’s house like this with every intention of axing him later in a magazine.

“The Senator and Rufus should be along soon,” said Mrs. Rhodes, as a maid brought Martinis. Ellen gulped one quickly, like a conjurer; then she took another off the tray and held it in one hand, occasionally sipping it in a most ladylike way. Whom was she trying to impress, I wondered. The lovely boy? or her mother? or the assorted politicos?

At first, I thought that possibly I was the one who was ill at ease but, by the time dinner was over and we were all seated in the drawing room having coffee beneath a virile painting of Senator Rhodes, I decided that something was obviously going all wrong and I surmised that it had to do with Ellen’s unexpected visit to Washington. Yet she was a perfect lady all evening. She was a trifle high by the time dinner was over but she spoke hardly at all … in fact, I’d never before seen her so restrained. The Senator was in good form but I had a feeling that the funny stories he told,
and his loud rasping laughter were mechanical, a part of the paraphernalia of public office rather than sincere good spirits. He eyed Ellen and myself suspiciously all evening and I began to wonder just how long my job was going to last. I cursed Ellen to myself, fervently, furiously … her announcement that we were engaged had messed up everything.

The other guests seemed uneasy, except for Verbena Pruitt who matched the Senator laugh for laugh, joke for joke in a booming political voice.

Brandy was served with coffee and Senator Rhodes, turning to Roger Pomeroy whom he had ignored most of the evening, said, “Got some good cigars in the study. Want one?”

“No thank you, Lee,” said the other. “I’ve had to give up the habit … heart.”

“None of us are getting any younger!” snorted Miss Pruitt over her brandy, a hairpin falling softly to the carpet.… His eye is on the hairpin, I thought irreverently.

“I’m sound as a bell,” said the Senator striking his chest a careful blow. He did not look very sound, though. I noticed how pale he was, how one eyelid twitched, how his hands shook as he lighted a cigar for himself. He was an old man.

“The Senator has the stamina of ten men,” said little Sir Echo, Rufus Hollister, smugly.

“He’ll need it, too, if he’s going after that nomination,” said Miss Pruitt with a wink. “Won’t you, Lee?”

“Now who told you I was interested in the nomination?” said Senator Rhodes with an attempt at roguishness, not much of an attempt at that; he was obviously paying very little attention to us. He seemed preoccupied with some perplexing problem. His gray eyes looked unfocused.

While Verbena Pruitt and the Senator sparred, I talked to
Mrs. Pomeroy who sat beside me on the couch. “Such a marvelous man, the Senator,” she said, her eyes glowing. “Have you known him long?” I shook my head, explaining my presence in the house.

“We’ve known the Rhodeses for just years, back in Talisman City. Were you ever there? No? It’s a wonderful
residential
town, almost Southern in a way, if you know what I mean. Except we’re getting quite a bit of industry there … my
husband
is in industry.”

“That’s very nice,” I said.

“We have a
government
contract,” said Mrs. Pomeroy importantly. She chattered on about herself, about their hometown, about the gunpowder business, about the latest developments in gunpowder: the new process Pomeroy Inc. had developed. While she talked I watched Ellen making time with lovely boy Langford on the couch opposite us. She was talking to him in a low voice and I could tell by the gleam in her eyes and the flush of confusion on his youthful puppydog face that before this night was over he would be forced to revise his estimate of the Rhodes family since, I was quite confident, long before Aurora showed her rosy head in the east, he would be engaged to the daughter of the house. He was a gone goose … for a few weeks anyway. I wondered if Mrs. Rhodes was on to her daughter. If she was she hardly showed it. She completely ignored her, speaking for the most part to Mr. Pomeroy and Rufus Hollister who sat on either side of her, their voices pitched a register below those of Senator Rhodes and Miss Pruitt who were now speaking of various scandals attendant upon the Denver Convention of 1908.

Just before midnight, Mrs. Rhodes stood up and announced that she was going to bed but that the others should take no notice of her if they wanted to remain up. “Good nights”
were said and the hour for breakfast set. I was wondering whether I should go straight up to bed or wait for some sign from Ellen, when the Senator beckoned to me. “Like to have a little chat with you,” he said. “We can go up to my study.” I said good night to everyone. Ellen hardly noticed us go; she was already beginning to unravel poor Langdon, right there on the couch … all very ladylike, though: only an experienced eye like mine could tell what she was up to.

The Senator’s study was a corner room on the second floor with windows on two sides, oak paneling and bookcases filled with law books (which looked unopened), bound copies of the
Congressional Record
(fairly worn), and thick scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, much used, dating from 1912. There were photographs on the walls … less political, however, than those in his office. Photographs of his family at various moments in their lives … even one of Ellen as a bride. This surprised me since, as I remembered the story, she had eloped with an undesirable and had been brought home before, in the eyes of the law at least, he had soiled her.

The Senator seated himself at a desk in front of the windows. I sat down in a leather armchair beside the unlit fireplace; the room was chilly, I thought. I remember shivering.

“I must tell you frankly,” said the Senator, looking at me severely, “that I didn’t anticipate this … situation.”

“What situation?” I acted innocent.

“This business with my daughter … this ‘engagement.’ ”

“Sir, there is no business with your daughter,” I said, sitting up very straight.

“What do you mean, sir?” He was obviously going to out-courtesy me; our manners became more and more antebellum. “My daughter gave me to understand that you and she were to be married.”

“She is mistaken,” I said; the job was over, I decided sadly.

“You mean that you refuse, sir, to marry my daughter?”

“I mean, Senator,” said I, suddenly weary of the whole farce, “that I have never in my one year’s acquaintance with your daughter thought of marrying her nor has she ever thought of marrying me.”

He looked at me as though I were Drew Pearson investigating the inner workings of the Senate Committee on Spoils and Patronage. He blustered. “Do you mean to imply my daughter is a liar?”

“You know perfectly well what she is,” I snapped.

Leander Rhodes sagged in his chair; he looked a hundred years old at that moment. “Young man,” he said huskily, “I have misjudged you. I apologize.”