"About both parts of the invitation?"
"Well, I accept for myself. Whether or not I invite Toni is what I'll think about."
4
Christmas Eve. Toni had never before felt such an energy on such an occasion. The Cords. They made an electricity. The vigor of these people and the tension among them was unique in her experience.
Standing in the living room of the ranch house, Toni wondered where Jonas Cord really did live, since it was apparent he did not live here. She had seen the apartment in the Waldorf Towers twice since November, and it was apparent he did not live there. The places where he was supposed to live were too tidy, too sleek; they looked like hotel suites. He had an office in the Towers apartment and one here, and in those she could see some mark of the man; but she saw none in the living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms.
The decor was too resolutely Western, saying this was not really a Western home lived in by a man of the desert and mountains, but was the simulacrum of a ranch house, its furnishings assembled to make the effect.
Only one item said something. Sitting on the crude mantel above the huge smoke-stained fieldstone fireplace was a small framed photograph, a snapshot actually, of a grim, solid man in his fifties or sixties. He wore a no-nonsense expression, glaring disapprovingly at the world but not at the photographer. He wore a dark three-piece suit, not very well tailored and not well cared for, plus a gray hat set squarely on his head. He sat at a rolltop desk in a wooden swivel chair. If you knew what you were looking for in the picture, or used a magnifying glass, you could identify a bottle of bourbon on the desk. On a table at his side were two candlestick telephones. That was Jonas Cord the First.
She sipped Scotch and spoke to Bat and his half sister Jo-Ann. "Your father is not what I imagined he would be."
She had seen pictures of Jonas Cord, so his appearance was no surprise. What she had not seen in his newspaper and magazine pictures was that he swaggered. Yet ... he carried it off well, and it was not offensive. A man who had achieved what he had achieved had to be engaging; an ugly, aggressive man could not have won the kind of success he had won, could not have enticed all the women he was said to have seduced. He was aggressive, beyond doubt, but besides that he was easily, naturally charismatic.
"Our father is no end of surprises," said Jo-Ann acerbically.
Bat hadn't been able to take his eyes off his half sister, from the moment they arrived. Toni could have become jealous, except that she understood his fascination had its origin and motive strictly in curiosity. She knew Bat was struggling to read Jo-Ann. The girl had reason to resent him, but if she did she concealed it.
Jo-Ann was about eighteen years old, as Toni understood it; and she was extraordinarily beautiful. She was a student at Smith College. From her father she had inherited poise and self-confidence, obviously. What she had inherited from her mother would be difficult for Toni to guess, since she had never met Monica Cord. She could guess that an element of it was a sense of style, since Jo-Ann wore a cherry-red cocktail dress with bold decolletage and a flared skirt that was shorter than this year's styles dictated.
"For example," said Jo-Ann, continuing her response to Toni's comment that Jonas was not what she had expected, "look at the dish he's brought with him. I don't know what made me think he wouldn't bring his new girlfriend to this party. But I didn't. I didn't think he'd have the nerve. Jesus! Look at her!"
Toni had decided that Angie Wyatt was the most beautiful woman at the party, in her thirties and older than Toni or Jo-Ann. If she was not the most beautiful, she was the most self-possessed — conspicuously pleased with herself and with her place in life. She worked for Jonas Cord and slept with him, too, as Bat had confided. She was handsomely dressed, from the spike-heeled shoes that tightened the muscles in her sleek legs, to the tight cream-white silk brocade dress that clung to her figure, to the emerald necklace — likely a gift from Jonas — that hung around her neck.
Jo-Ann spoke to Bat. "Make a point of getting to know Nevada Smith. Nevada knows more about the Cord family than anybody, including Jonas himself. If he chooses to talk to you, he'll give you plenty of ammunition to use when you have to deal with our father."
"Ammunition?" Bat asked. "Will I need ammunition?"
"The way I see it," said Jo-Ann, "you have three choices: to let him run your life the way he runs everybody else's, to back away from him and go your own way, or to fight him. Nevada knows his weaknesses ... but probably won't tell you."
Nevada Smith fascinated Toni even more than Jonas did. As a little girl she had gone to as many of his movies as she could. He was everything anyone might have expected of him: the tall, rawboned, sun-wrinkled Westerner, probably seventy years old. He dressed like the movie cowboy he had been — more like William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy than like one of the singing cowboys.
Smith was a neighbor, with a ranch of his own not far away. The connection between him and the Cords was greater than that, but what it was was not apparent. Bat himself didn't know what it was.
Bat had explained who Robair was. Tonight he was a guest. He had come to Nevada from New York two days ahead of everyone else and had decorated the house for Christmas. A tree, which reached the ceiling, was strung with popcorn and hung with dried fruits and simple paper ornaments, no silvered glass balls, no colored lights. Complimented on it, Robair said that Nevada had helped him. It was amusing to think of those two old men solemnly stringing popcorn.
They sat down for dinner. A pair of ranch hands in white jackets served awkwardly.
When the wine was poured, Jonas rose and offered a toast. "To my daughter and my newfound son." He nodded at Nevada and Robair. "To old friends." He nodded at Toni and Angie. "And new. I'm happy we're all together."
After dinner the evening turned painful for Toni. Not knowing who would be there, she had come with small presents for Bat and his father but none for anyone else. Jo-Ann was in the same situation. So, for that matter, was Angie, though she seemed comfortable with it.
It was embarrassing to receive gifts from the hands of people you had just met — particularly such gifts as they were. Nevada Smith gave her a .30-30 Winchester lever-action carbine, telling her he would take her out and teach her to shoot before she left Nevada. The old man's innocence in giving such a gift was endearing and at the same time ominous — in that it meant he expected she would be spending a lot of time in Nevada.
Robair gave her a pair of tight, tapered blue jeans, a blue-and-white-checked wool shirt, and a Stetson hat: riding clothes. This, too, assumed she was not just a one-time guest.
Jonas Cord gave her a pair of handmade snakeskin Western boots. And a bracelet set with rubies and diamonds. For a moment she was tempted to say no, she couldn't accept it.
Bat gave her a silver and turquoise squash-blossom necklace.
Her father and stepmother, apart from disliking her being in Nevada and not in Florida for Christmas, had warned her that going out there implied a commitment. Apparently the Cords thought so, too. She was being treated like a Cord.
Jonas gave Bat a Porsche automobile, saying he ought to have one in the States, since he drove so well. He gave another one to Jo-Ann, telling her Bat would teach her to drive it. He gave a third one to Angie. They were identical, and they carried Nevada license plates: CORD ONE, CORD TWO, CORD THREE.
Toni had brought "the basic little black dress," this one of silk satin, supported by spaghetti straps, with a skirt ending exactly at her knees. The heavy silver squash-blossom necklace would be incongruous with the dress, but Bat wanted her to put it on. His father wanted her to wear his gift, too: the jeweled bracelet. She went to their room — and it was their room, not hers alone: another manifestation of the assumption behind her invitation — to leave the little string of cultivated pearls and don her extravagant new jewelry.