"Right. Good luck, Arthur."
"Thank you," Arthur said, and hung up.
He sat in the booth for several moments, silent. Then he opened the door and looked for Mother Sauce. When he found her, he said, "I wonder if you could change our table."
"Something's wrong?" she asked.
"No, but I think Mr. Brackman and I would prefer another table."
"You're in litigation?"
"Yes."
"I understand," she said knowingly, and led him swiftly to the other side of the room.
European posters covered the walls of the small travel agency, brightly printed in yellows and whites and tans and greens, blatantly selling sunshine and sand while outside the plate-glass window the snow continued to fall. From where Chickie sat behind one of the two desks in the office, she could look out at street level onto Madison Avenue where lunch-hour pedestrians were battling the strong wind and wildly swirling flakes. She shivered involuntarily and looked up at the wall clock. It was ten minutes to one, and Ruth was not due back until the hour, but Chickie was very hungry and hoped the snow would drive her back sooner. She sat with her legs crossed, her skirt above the knee, amused whenever a male passerby stopped to peer through the front window of the agency, and then embarrassed and flushed if the scrutiny persisted, wanting to giggle.
The poster to the left of her desk, cluttered with travel folders and carbon copies of letters to hotels and auto-rental establishments, advertised Positano, the white and pastel houses climbing the hillside, the beach below, the rowboats hovering on the water. She glanced at it idly and then reread a letter from the Dorchester in London, confirming a room for Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Tannings, beginning January 10th. She wondered why anyone would want to go to England in January, and then immediately thought of Italy and Greece, and then of course remembered Sidney's proposal.
As she saw it, life was merely a matter of making the right decision at the right time; she should have known that long ago, when she was seventeen, but she hadn't. Well, she knew it now. Sidney had asked her to marry him, this is so unexpected, she had said, I'll have to think it over, meanwhile thinking that two million dollars was a lot of money, if he won his case he would get two million dollars. If he won, but how could he possibly win, a jerk like Sidney? Still, the possibility had to be considered. She could manage to live with anyone for two million dollars, and besides, Sidney wasn't all that bad, even though she didn't love him. There was a lot to be said for Sidney, but at the moment she couldn't think of a thing.
The decision, anyway, had nothing to do with Sidney. It had only to do with two million dollars, which he might or might not get, that was the trouble, too uncertain. Decisions were never easy for a girl to make even if she knew all the facts, but sometimes the damn facts came in too late or not at all, that was it. How could she possibly second-guess this idiotic trial? No jury, isn't that what he'd said? Two million dollars riding on an Irishman's heartburn. Or lack of it. How could you decide? Better to take the bird in the hand. Still, two million dollars.
(Take it, no, take it, no, no, and then his hand under her skirt, and she slapped him without wanting to, without thinking, forgetting for the moment, completely forgetting he was from the college. "Go out with the college boys, Duck," her mother advised. "Get yourself a rich boy from New York who'll be a doctor or a lawyer one day.")
Well, here it was, a rich (if he won the case) New York boy (forty-eight years old) who was a lawyer (but not a very good one) and he had made an honest old-fashioned proposaclass="underline" I am forty-eight years old, harumph, harumph, and I know that you are only twenty-seven, but I think you know I love you, I think you truly know that. Yes, I know you love me, baby, I can wrap you around my finger, I can make you jump through hoops, I can get you to run naked in the snow on Madison Avenue, you little shmuck, of course I know you love me. Come sing for me, baby, sing your little heart out and then come on down on Northeast Airlines, brother do I know you love me!
But what to do?
Use your instinct, sweetie, use that famous woman's intuition they're always talking about, where was it in the winter of 1957? Or maybe it was operating full blast, maybe I knew exactly what would happen if I slapped him, who knows? And maybe the flushed, no, the, the almost I don't know, that tight hot embarrassed feeling (I always see myself as a frightened young girl standing alone on a station platform, a suitcase in my hand) that feeling of, heavy eyes, and almost smarting, tears about to come if something doesn't happen, frightened for two weeks after that night in his car when I slapped him, was it really fear? Or was I waiting for what was about to come, not knowing what, the way I feel embarrassed and hot and try not to giggle when a man stops at the front window to look at my legs, and want to touch myself, who the hell knows?
So he asks last night, naturally. Knows me six months but asks last night when I'm on my way to Ruth's apartment to meet Jerry Courtlandt and his brother there, to go over the European trip with them. I should have said no immediately (Take it, no, I don't want to!) I should have said Look Sidney, this is a lot of fun and all, you know, I mean I kind of enjoy having you around, you dear man, to play with, you know, you're a very nice playmate to kick around the block, but marry you? Now, really, Sidney, let's not get ridiculous. I'm twenty-seven years old, I am a beautiful young girl! Please don't make me laugh, Sidney.
Touching, though.
Really touching that he should ask.
Really.
And two million dollars, if he gets it, well, with two million dollars, who knows, Sidney? Maybe I could learn to love you, who knows, baby? Italy and Greece. Hot sand under me. Stretch, mmmm, relax.
Come on, Chickie, just relax, will you? No, I want to go home.
Home was a two-family clapboard house in a town called Ramsey, four miles from the university. The houses were semidetached, each with a small backyard and a peaked attic, identical except for the paint jobs. Their own house was further distinguished by the aspidistra her mother kept in the window, even the college boys had to ask what aspidistra meant. Her grandmother had kept one in the window of their tenement flat in London, when Agnes Brown nee Mercer was a child. And so now Agnes kept one in the window of the small house in Ramsey, Pennsylvania; it was important to maintain one's heritage, keep the bloody aspidistra flying, the man had written. Pennsylvania was Fourth Street in Ramsey, and an occasional trip into Philadelphia, and it was also the high school on Buchanan Street, and later on — even before it happened — trips to the college, the road straight as an arrow along the railroad tracks and past the power plant and then out into the beautiful rolling Pennsylvania countryside.
Her father owned the drugstore in Ramsey, an aging pharmacist who had also come from London in his youth (the sign outside his shop read "Chemist"). His name was Edwin Brown, but Mother called him Luv or Duck and Chickie called him Dads, and all of his customers called him Mr. Brown. She doubted if he even knew his first name, for all the use it got. For that matter, she herself had been called Chickie ever since a cousin from Philadelphia spent the summer with them (coming out of the slums on the city's south side to breathe a little country air) and had trouble pronouncing the name Charlotte, being only three years old and barely able to pronounce her own name, which was Mary. She liked the name Chickie because her mother made it sound like a synonym for Duck, which was her favorite term of affection, and also because when she got to be thirteen and developed a good bosom, the name seemed to apply somehow, seemed to impart a mysterious sort of womanly glamor to her, or so she thought. Chickie Brown, Chickie Brown, Chickie Brown, she would practice writing it in a broad developing hand, using a thick pen point, heavily capitalizing the C and the B.