When he could not spot the girl, but only her mother, Kit made one last run over the bare treetops of Walnut Street, flying at crop-duster’s altitude, and winged back toward the airport.
On the way, he dived through the low-hanging drift of yellowish smoke which was being blown by a west wind from the Hobart Metal Products plant across the center of the two downtown regions. He whipped the smoke into satisfying patterns and took a tum above the skyscrapers of Green Prairie and River City. They rose magically out of the factory smoke and stood above them in a single cluster at what seemed the heart of one great metropolis.
His last trick was a pass at the steel stack of the refining plant beyond the metalworks—a tall column topped by a flame which consumed waste gases and sent a horizontal smoke-trail of its own across the city. Not realizing that the blaze was self-illumined, Kit tried to extinguish it with his prop-wash much in the same way he had once diverted buzz bombs from their courses.
But after three passes at the flame he gave up and left both the stack and the plant foreman burning.
He drove back to town, played brilliantly for an hour and a half at squash with Freddie Perkman, took assorted baths and then, in a terry-cloth robe, went out in the solarium of the River City A.C. for his massage. The glass-enclosed summit of the skyscraper building furnished a three hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the cities, obstructed only here and there by the few taller structures. Kit, having just had an even better view from the air, didn’t even glance through the enormous windows of the square-sided roof garden. He lay down on a table and submitted to the attentions of the masseur, who had greeted him with, “Glad to see you in the club.”
“Had to come back, Taps; getting fat.”
“Taps” Flaugherty, accustomed to the truly overweight bodies of River City’s well-to-do, grinned at the near-perfect specimen on the table. “Can’t see an ounce, Mr. Sloan.”
“The scales can,” Kit grunted.
An hour and a quarter later, the red Jaguar took him home. At eight, precisely, he sat opposite his mother in the shadowy dining room of the Sloan mansion, gustily spooning soup.
“Have a good day, son?”
“Passable.”
“Any plans for the evening?”
“Thought I’d pick up Lenore Bailey “
That suited Mrs. Sloan for an opening. Her eyes fastened briefly on her hungry son and moved thoughtfully into the distances of the formal room where the gold rims of place plates gleamed from china racks, and cabinets of cut glass sparkled dully.
“You’ve seen a lot of the Bailey girl, lately.”
“Yeah.”
“Does that mean anything, Kit?”
He smiled at his mother. “Ask Lenore.”
She passed that up with a gesture that was partly disdainful and partly indulgent. She thought, with pride, that the Sloan men had always possessed a way with women. She was able to feel pride, not rancor, now that her husband was occupying a plot in Shadyknoll, with a thirty-foot obelisk to mark the grave of a great industrialist, banker and rakehell. Her son’s
“conquests,” as she thought them (though he rarely found himself obliged to use aggression), did not in her opinion belong in the same category as her late husband’s “vices.” There was the mitigating fact that Kittridge was an “irresistible young man”; her spouse had been an “old fool”; there was a further alleviating circumstance in the fact that morals, amongst smart young people, had changed. In sum, there was (though she did not admit it) the fact that her husband’s perennial blonde had driven Minerva half mad with jealous fury, while she found herself taking in her son’s amours an almost masculine and quasi-participatory interest.
“You in love with Lenore?”
“Hell, Muzz. I love ’em all—if they’re pretty. If they’re as pretty as she, I love double.”
“She’s an interesting girl.”
“How do you know?” he inquired with ample suspicion, and he said in the same breath,
“This is good soup.”
“You better not have any more. There’s roast beef—Yorkshire pudding—I knew you’d be famished.”
“How do you know so much about Lenore? She belong to some ladies’ aid—or something? You don’t see her in church much. She doesn’t go.”
“The girls that interest you, Kit, naturally interest me.” She sighed lightly. “I’m getting older every year….”
“Young and pretty and sexy!” He always said that when she said she was aging. It always pleased her.
“Nonsense! Homely as a Missouri mule and twice the size! No, Lenore isn’t someone I’ve seen lately. I do recall she used to attend St. Stephen’s when she was an awkward, adolescent girl. I’ve inquired. It’s very easy. After all, her father’s in the bank.”
“So he is! Never thought of it, really. So he is. Old—what’s it?—old Buzz—no! Beau Bailey. He’s cashier, or something….”
“That’s correct.” Mrs. Sloan tinkled a coronation hand bell and the soup was removed. A huge roast was carried in. Both mother and son helped themselves not to one, but three thick slices. “The girl’s not merely pretty as a movie star. She’s bright. Did some really good work in college. Science, I believe. I like a scientific-minded woman. Sticks to facts. Realist. No folderol.”
Kit grinned agreeingly. “She’s high up in the brains department. You want to know why water expands when it freezes, or all about hydrogen bombs—Lenore can tell you. Who wants to know, though?” He helped himself to pan-roasted potatoes.
“And quite good at athletics,” Minerva said.
“What is this? You’re talking about the woman I love—at the moment—as if she were something entered in a state fair.”
“She wouldn’t make a bad entry. And that’s what I mean, in a way.
“Not the old Kit-your-duty-is-grandchildren-supply, is it, Muzz?” He glanced up keenly.
“By God, it is!”
Minerva took a long look, a sad look, this time, at the Rhineland castles imbedded vaguely in panels of crimson wallpaper. “You,” she said, “are the greatest triumph of my life.
But my sorrow is—I have you alone, Kit. Just you. I desperately longed for a big family. We needed children. Our holdings—the businesses—”
This, as her son suspected, was not wholly true. A large number of offspring would have provided stewards for the Sloan interprises; but Minerva, after painfully bearing one child, had taken counsel with half a dozen obstetricians and gynecologists to make sure nothing so agonizing and humiliating as childbirth would happen to her again. “I am determined,” his mother went on, “that you shall make a suitable marriage and provide me with grandchildren to replace the little brothers and sisters I was never able to supply for you, Kit.”
“I know! But—”
“A day,” his mother said firmly, “is surely coming when you cannot temporize. You’re well over thirty, Kit, and I’m aging…” She looked away a third time, her large face working a little. “Besides—”
“Besides?” If there was to be a new element in this old discussion he wanted to know it.
“Do you know, Kit, the Adams girl tried to get money from me, again?”
“Lord! I wish I’d never seen that babe!”
“You did, though. A bit too much of her. If you had been married, Kit, she wouldn’t have hag the gall—or the public sympathy—” He laughed. “Isn’t that a shade unethical, Muzz? To advocate marriage as a cover for carnal sin?”