Renée Hall had met Mrs. Harley and the child at the Tennysons’, where she had frequently been a guest for cocktails that winter. She had been brought there by a business friend of Katherine’s. She was pleasant and entertaining, and Katherine had been impressed with her clothes. She lived around the corner and didn’t object to late invitations and most men liked her. The Tennysons knew nothing about her other than that she was an attractive guest and did some radio acting.
On the evening when Renée first went to the Tennysons’, Deborah had been brought in to say good night, and the actress and the neglected child had sat together on a sofa. There was an odd sympathy between the two, and Renée let the child play with her jewelry and her furs. Renée was kind to Deborah, for she was at a time in her life when she appreciated kindness herself.
She was about thirty-five years old, dissipated and gentle. She liked to think of the life she was living as an overture to something wonderful, final, and even conventional, that would begin with the next season or the season after that, but she was finding this hope more and mote difficult to sustain. She had begun to notice that she always felt tired unless she was drinking. It was just that she didn’t have the strength. When she was not drinking she was depressed, and when she was depressed she quarreled with headwaiters and hairdressers, accused people in restaurants of staring at her, and quarreled with some of the men who paid her debts. She knew this instability in her temperament well, and was clever at concealing it—among other things—from casual friends like the Tennysons.
Renée had come to the house again a week later, and when Deborah heard her voice, she escaped from Mrs. Harley and flew down the hall. The child’s adoration excited Renée They sat together again. Renée wore a string of furs and a hat piled with cloth roses, and Deborah thought her the most beautiful lady in the world.
After that, Renée went to the Tennysons’ often. It was a standing joke that she came there to see the child and not the Tennysons or their guests. Renée had always wanted children of her own, and now all her regrets seemed centered in Deborah’s bright face. She began to feel possessive toward the child. She sent her expensive clothes and toys. “Has she ever been to the dentist?” she asked Katherine. “Are you sure of your doctor? Have you entered her in nursery school?” She made the mistake one night of suggesting that Deborah saw too little of her parents and lacked the sense of security they should give her. “She has eight thousand dollars in the bank in her own name,” Katherine said. She was angry. Renée continued to send Deborah elaborate presents. Deborah named all her dolls and her pleasures after Renée, and on several nights she cried for Renée after she had been put to bed. Robert and Katherine thought it would be better if they didn’t see Renée any more. They stopped asking her to the house. “After all,” Katherine said, “I’ve always felt that there was something unsavory about that girl.” Renée called them twice and asked them for cocktails, and Katherine said no, no thanks, they were all suffering with colds.
Renée knew that Katherine was lying and she determined to forget the Tennysons. She missed the little girl, but she might never have seen her again if it hadn’t been for something that happened later that week. One night she left a dull party early in the evening and went home by herself. She was afraid of missing telephone calls and she used a telephone-answering service. They told her that night that a Mrs. Walton had called and left a number.
Walton, Walton, Walton, Renée thought, and then she remembered that she had once had a lover named Walton. That would have been eight or ten years ago. She had once been taken to dinner with his mother, who was visiting from Cleveland. She remembered the evening clearly then. Walton drank too much and his mother had taken Renée aside and told her what a good influence she thought she was, and couldn’t she make him stop drinking and go to church oftener? Walton and she had quarreled over his drinking, in the end, Renée remembered, and she had never seen him after that. He might be sick, or drunk, or getting married. She had no idea how old he was, because the thirties were all jumbled in her memory and she could not tell the beginning of the decade from its end. She dialed the number. It was a hotel on the West Side. Mrs. Walton’s voice, when she answered, was the small, cracked voice of an old woman. “Billy’s dead, Renée,” she said. She began to sob. “I’m so glad you called. He’s going to be buried tomorrow. I wish you’d come to the funeral. I feel so alone.”
Renée put on a black dress the next day and took a cab to the funeral parlor. As soon as she opened the door, she was in the hands of a gloved and obsequious usher, ready to sympathize with a grief more profound and sedate than any grief of hers would ever be. An elevator took her up to the chapel. When she heard the electric organ playing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!” she thought she would have to sit down before she had the strength to see Mrs. Walton, and then she saw Mrs. Walton standing by the open door of the chapel. The two women embraced, and Renée was introduced to Mrs. Walton’s sister, a Mrs. Henlein. They were the only people there. At the far end of the room, under a meager show of gladioli, lay her dead lover. “He was so alone, Renée dear,” Mrs. Walton said. “He was so terribly alone. He died alone, you know, in that furnished room.” Mrs. Walton began to cry. Mrs. Henlein cried. A minister came in and the service began. Renée knelt and tried to remember the Lord’s Prayer, but she got no further than “… on earth as it is in Heaven.” She began to cry, but not because she remembered the man tenderly; she had not remembered him for years and it was only by forcing her memory that she could recall that he sometimes brought her breakfast in bed, and that he sewed the buttons on his own shirts. She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.
The three women left the chapel, helped by the obsequious usher, and rode down in the elevator. Renée said she couldn’t go to the cemetery, that she had an appointment. Her hands were shaking with fright. She kissed Mrs. Walton goodbye and took a taxi to Sutton Place. She walked down to the little park where Deborah and Mrs. Harley would be.
Deborah saw Renée first. She called Renée’s name and ran toward her, struggling up the steps one at a time. Renée picked her up. “Pretty Renée,” the little girl said. “Pretty, pretty Renée.” Renée and the child sat down beside Mrs. Harley. “If you want to go shopping,” she said, “I’ll take Deborah for a few hours.”
“Now, I don’t know whether I ought to or not,” Mrs. Harley said.
“She’ll be perfectly safe with me,” Renée said. “I’ll take her up to my apartment and you can call for her there at five. Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson needn’t know.”
“Well, maybe I’ll do that, now,” Mrs. Harley said. In this way, Mrs. Harley had begun an arrangement that gave her a few free hours each week.
WHEN RENÉE hadn’t come by half past ten that Sunday, Mrs. Harley knew that she wasn’t coming, and she was disappointed because she had counted on going to church that morning. She thought of the Latin and the bells, and the exhilarating sense of having been sanctified and cleansed that she always felt when she got up from her knees. It angered her to think that Renée was lying in bed and that only Renée’s laziness was keeping her from prayer. As the morning passed, a lot of children had come to the park, and now she looked for Deborah’s yellow coat in the crowd.