“Langtry. Arthur.”
“Hmmmm. Unhuh. Right. That’s simple enough to remember, isn’t it? Now, do be careful. I can’t stay on any longer. You will come, won’t you? Look, you must come!”
Langtry averred that nothing could keep him away. He asked her if she remembered the photograph on which she’d written “To the Talamasca, with love, Stella! P.S. There are others who watch, too.”
“Of course I remember it. Look, I can’t talk to you about this right now. It was years and years ago, when I wrote that note. My mother was alive then. Look, you can’t imagine how bad things are for me now. I’ve never been in a worse jam. And I don’t know what happened to Stuart, really I don’t. Look, will you please come tomorrow night?”
“Yes, I shall,” said Langtry, struggling silently to determine whether or not he was being lured into some sort of trap. “But why must we be so circumspect about the whole arrangement, I don’t … ”
“Darling, look,” she said, dropping her voice, “it’s all very nice about your organization, and your library and all your marvelous psychic investigations. But don’t be a perfect fool. Ours is not a world of séances and mediums and dead relatives telling you to look between the pages of the Bible for the deed to the property on Eighth Street or whatever. As for the voodoo nonsense, that was a perfect scream. And by the way, we do not have any Scottish ancestors. We were all French. My Uncle Julien made up something about a Scottish castle he bought when he went to Europe. So do forget about all that, if you please. But there are things I can tell you! That’s just the point. Look, come early. Come around eight o’clock, will you? But whatever you do, don’t be the first one to arrive. Now, I’ve got to get off, you really cannot imagine how dreadful everything is just now. I’ll tell you frankly. I never asked to be born into this mad family! Really! There are three hundred people invited tomorrow night, and I haven’t a single friend in the world.”
She rang off.
Langtry, who had taken down the entire conversation in shorthand, immediately copied it out in longhand, with a carbon, and posted one copy to London, going directly to the post office to do it, for he no longer trusted the situation at the hotel.
Then he went to rent a tailcoat and boiled shirt for the party the following night.
“I am thoroughly confused,” he had written in his letter. “I had been certain she had a hand in getting rid of poor Stuart. Now I don’t know what to think. She wasn’t lying to me, I am sure of it. But why is she frightened? Of course I cannot make an intelligent appraisal of her until I see her.”
Late that afternoon, he called Irwin Dandrich, the socialite spy for hire, and asked him to have dinner at a fashionable French Quarter restaurant blocks from the hotel.
Though Dandrich had nothing to say about Townsend’s disappearance, he appeared to enjoy the meal thoroughly, gossiping nonstop about Stella. People said Stella was burning out.
“You can’t drink a fifth of French brandy every day of your life and live forever,” said Dandrich with weary, mocking gestures, as if to suggest the subject bored him, when in fact, he loved it. “And the affair with Pierce is outrageous. Why, the boy is scarcely eighteen. It really is so perfectly stupid of Stella to do this. Why, Cortland was her chief ally against Carlotta, and now she’s gone and seduced Cortland’s favorite son! I don’t think Barclay or Garland much approves of the situation either. And God only knows how Lionel stands it. Lionel is a monomaniac and the name of his monomania is Stella, of course.”
Was Dandrich going to the party?
“Wouldn’t miss it for anything in this world. Bound to be some interesting pyrotechnics. Stella’s forbidden Carlotta to take Antha out of the house during these affairs. Carlotta is simmering. Threatening to call the police if the rowdies get out of hand.”
“What is Carlotta like?” asked Langtry.
“She’s Mary Beth with vinegar in her veins instead of vintage wine. She’s brilliant but she has no imagination. She’s rich but there’s nothing she wants. She’s endlessly practical and meticulous and hardworking, and an absolutely insufferable bore. Of course she does take care of absolutely everything. Millie Dear, Belle, little Nancy, and Antha. And they have a couple of old servants up there who don’t know who they are or what they’re doing anymore, and she takes care of them, right along with everyone else. Stella has herself to blame for all this, really. She always did let Carlotta do the hiring and the firing, the check writing, and the shouting. And what with Lionel and Cortland turning against her, well, what can she do? No, I wouldn’t miss this party, if I were you. It may be the last one for quite some time.”
Langtry spent the following day exploring the speakeasies and the small French Quarter hotel (a dump) where Stella had taken Stuart. He was plagued continuously with the strong feeling that Stuart had been in these places, that Stella’s account of their wanderings had been the complete truth.
At seven o’clock, dressed and ready for the evening, he wrote another very short letter to the Motherhouse, which he mailed on the way to the party from the post office at Lafayette Square:
“The more I think about our phone conversation, the more I’m troubled. Of what is this lady so afraid? I find it hard to believe that her sister Carlotta can really inflict harm upon her. Why can’t someone hire a nurse for the troubled child? I tell you, I find myself being drawn into this head over heels. Surely that is how Stuart felt.”
Langtry had the cab drop him at Jackson and Chestnut so that he might walk the remaining two blocks to the house, approaching it from the rear.
“The streets were completely blocked with automobiles. People were piling in through the back garden gate, and every window in the place was lighted. I could hear the shrill screams of the saxophone long before I reached the front steps.
“There was no one on the front door, as far as I ever saw, and I simply went in, pushing through a regular jam of young persons in the hallway, who were all smoking and laughing and greeting each other, and took no notice of me at all.”
The party did include every manner of dress, exactly as Stella had promised. There were even quite a few elderly people there. And Langtry found himself comfortably anonymous as he made his way to the bar in the living room where he was served a glass of extremely good champagne.
“There were more and more people streaming in every minute. A crowd was dancing in the front portion of the room. In fact, there were so many persons everywhere I looked, all chattering and laughing and drinking amid a thick bluish cloud of cigarette smoke, that I could hardly gain a fair impression of the furnishings of the room. Rather lavish, I suppose, and rather like the salon of a great liner, actually, with the potted palms, and the tortured art deco lamps, and the delicate, vaguely Grecian chairs.
“The band, stationed on the side porch just behind a pair of floor-length windows, was deafening. How people managed to talk over it, I cannot imagine. I could not sustain a coherent train of thought.
“I was about to make my way out of all this when my eyes fastened on the dancers before the front windows, and I soon realized I was gazing directly at Stella-far more dramatic than any picture of her could possibly be. She was clad in gold silk-a skimpy little dress, no more than a remnant of a chemise layered with fringe, it seemed, and barely covering her shapely knees. Tiny gold sequins covered her gossamer stockings, and indeed the dress itself, and there was a gold satin band of yellow flowers in her short wavy black hair. Around her wrists were delicate glittering gold bracelets, and at her throat the Mayfair emerald, looking quite absurdly old-fashioned, yet stunning in its old filigree, as it rested against her naked flesh.