Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense Read online

  “Do you remember what Phyllis wore that night?”

  Nancy shook her head.

  “It was blue, I think. Blue thin stuff with flowers on it.”

  Nancy stiffened. “Yes, of course I remember now. It was a dress of mine. Mother had given it to her.”

  “Phyllis cried before the party. I always wondered why.”

  Nancy came across the terrace slowly, looking down at her tanned feet in rope sandals. “I teased her about the dress. Most of the girls knew it had been mine. We giggled.”

  Drops of rain, as big as pennies, spattered the terrace. Mike and Nancy gathered up the cocktail things and went inside. Nancy threw herself upon the yellow couch.

  “She paid me out with Johnnie Elder.” Nancy rolled over, picked up her glass, drank, and rolled on her back again.

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “He was the handsomest boy in town, all the girls were mad about his eyelashes, and I felt that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t pretty if he loved me. When a man proposes, you think he’s in love with you.” Nancy shuddered. “Women often call their own feelings love, Mike, when it’s just balm for sore pride. Or fear that they’ll be left behind. Probably I ought to be grateful to Phyllis, because Johnnie and I’d never have gotten along. But it was hell while it lasted.”

  Mike lit the fire. The room was cozy. And that was the last time, for many months, that they spoke of Phyllis.

  They became close friends. Mike went with the sleek Broadway and prosperous Greenwich Village crowds. These people, after her life in France, were the sort Nancy liked. She had no talent of her own, but an enormous appreciation and excellent taste. Along with the boarding-school inflection had gone her admiration for romance and rococo. She was a realist, a product of the period, yet sufficiently independent to disagree, when it pleased her, with popular taste.

  Mike soon fell into the habit of bringing her his short stories, asking for criticism and, more often than not, accepting it. They quarreled a lot, but these clashes were tonic to their friendship.

  They had other quarrels which were not so healthy. Nancy pretended to be tough, but she was actually as thin-skinned as an adolescent. The old wounds had never healed. The scar tissue was frail. Some careless word, forgotten as soon as Mike had spoken it, would cause her to turn upon him cruelly.

  Often Mike vowed never to see her again. But as suddenly as she had begun to brood, she relaxed, was herself again, tough, critical, merry, and tireless when there was any chance for fun.

  When Nancy was called away by her grandmother’s last illness, Mike realized that he had begun to depend upon her companionship. He wrote long letters, confessed that he found New York dull without her, outlined the plots of his new stories.

  The day her grandmother was buried, she called Mike and told him she’d arrive at Grand Central the next afternoon. She promised a surprise. Knowing Nancy, he thought she’d bought a Great Dane or dyed her hair. He bought himself a new suit, filled her apartment with flowers, and decided that he’d bury the hardboiled act and tell her sentimentally how much he had missed her.

  The surprise was Phyllis. Arm in arm, the girls confronted Mike. “She thought I ought to warn you,” Nancy told him, “but I wanted a glimpse of your face when you saw us together.”

  Both kissed him.

  Phyllis said, “I’m so happy, Mike. It’s like old times again, almost as if we were kids.”

  “It’s new times,” Nancy laughed. “Grandma always set us against each other, but, now she’s gone, the spell’s broken and we can be friends.”

  Mike felt that he did not understand women at all. He could not believe that their grandmother’s death had turned the girls’ lifelong loathing into love. “Whence springs this sudden affection for your dear cousin?” he asked Nancy when they arrived at the apartment and Phyllis had gone off to change her clothes.

  “Oh, Mike! If you only realized how deadly life is in that town. Fred and Fred’s family would drive me to arsenic if I had to dine with them more than once every five years, and poor Phyllis has to have dinner there every Sunday.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t because you want to show her how much better your life is than if you’d married Johnnie Elder?”

  Nancy turned scarlet. Mike was immediately remorseful. During her absence he had resolved to guard his tongue and her sensitivity. Instead of sulking, Nancy slapped his face.

  • • •

  For the rest of mat season there was little emotion in their relationship. They fell back into an easygoing camaraderie, and gave themselves to the pleasure of entertaining Phyllis.

  Mike used his newspaper connections so that she could meet people whose names she had read in magazines about New York life.

  It was never difficult to find an extra man for Phyllis, and it was inevitable that she made conquests. But she never forgot that she was a married woman. That remote, untouchable quality, more than her beauty, was Phyllis’s greatest charm. Men felt that she was a prize almost beyond reach, that her favors were few, but, if given, would lead to ecstasy beyond imagining.

  To Mike Jordan the happiest nights were those when they dined at Nancy’s, sipped liqueurs or brandy, and he read aloud from the works of Jordan. He was at the dreary stage then, writing morbid little pieces about unpleasant people involved in sordid conflicts. Nancy listened attentively, a pencil and notebook beside her.

  Much of his later success, Mike admitted, he owed to her frankness and clarity. Phyllis never uttered a word except praise. Mike was an author, his work sacred.

  Phyllis had planned to stay in New York for two weeks. Her holiday stretched on and on, until Mike quit asking when she intended to go home. Fred Miller wrote and wired, and went so far in extravagance as to telephone twice a week. Phyllis had always a new excuse — the opening of a play, a fitting, a concert the like of which she would never have another chance to hear; and, finally, the Beaux Arts Ball.

  Phyllis was going with Mike, and his friend, Horace Tate, was taking Nancy. They had planned to go as characters out of Greek mythology. When Mike and Horace rang the bell of Nancy’s apartment that night, they were admitted by a masked Diana.

  Mike looked Nancy over critically. “You’re too skinny to be classical. Zeus would have exiled you.”

  Phyllis came in, unmasked, but dressed in a white tunic, bound in gold and with a bunch of golden grapes in her hair. Fred Miller followed, blowing his nose lustily.

  He grasped Mike’s hand. “Glad to see you again, Jordan. A lot of water’s flowed under the bridge since the last time we met. Getting to be quite famous, aren’t you?”

  “Fred surprised us,” Phyllis explained to him. “We were totally unprepared. I’m terribly sorry, Mike, that I can’t go with you.”

  “Haven’t time,” said Fred. “One of my clients has moved up to Boston but I’m still handling his business. Want to show him that I appreciate his loyalty.”

  Mike did not particularly like Fred nor care to see more of him, but he could not believe that anyone who lived in a dull, small town could be so indifferent to New York. He tried to persuade Fred to postpone his Boston engagement and let Phyllis go to the ball.

  “A businessman can’t do just as he pleases. You artists and Bohemians don’t seem to understand that we’ve got responsibilities. Sure, I could get a kick out of the city, too, but I’ve got to think of others, not just myself.”

  “Think of Phyllis,” Nancy said sulkily. “She’s been planning on this party for weeks.”

  Phyllis took Fred’s arm. “I’m going with my husband. But it won’t be for long. I’m coming back; I’m going to live in New York some day.”

  • • •

  And she did. The following September Fred drove their sedan, filled with suitcases and hatboxes, to New York. Phyllis must have worked hard to uproot a man whose life was woven so deeply into
the life of his home town. What emotion she must have spent, what tears, artifices, pleadings, and reproaches it must have cost her. Fred tried to make a brave show, as though the move had been forced upon him by the insurance company for which he worked. Since his father had represented the company for thirty-two years, they decently gave Fred a job in their New York office.

  At Phyllis’s cocktail parties Fred was always busy, filling glasses, passing hors d’oeuvres, fetching ice from the kitchen. Whenever he had a moment between duties, he would corner some unfortunate guest and try to prove that an insurance man was no less interesting than a second-string dramatic critic. His body seemed never to fit comfortably into Phyllis’s Victorian chairs. For she, knowing she could never afford anything like Nancy’s penthouse, had done wonders with a three-room suite in a remodeled house. Fred suffered shame because she had bought furniture secondhand.

  Mike had started to write his play, and since Phyllis knew the home-town background so well, he consulted her nearly every day. Out of her resentment of the townspeople who had pitied and patronized the music teacher’s daughter grew Mike’s most vivid characterizations. She had a gift for mimicry, and when she had the chance to strip others of their emotional veils she shed completely the pretty reticence with which she guarded her own secrets.

  They saw less and less of Nancy. In the beginning she had been splendid, generous in helping Phyllis furnish her apartment, never appearing at their door without gifts and gadgets, and putting on an apron to help with the serving when Phyllis gave her first party. No one could name the day when they had ceased to interest her. Perhaps it was Fred’s conversation. Mike was too self-absorbed to worry about anyone’s moods but his own. He did not see Nancy nor bother to telephone her until the play was finished.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said, when he finally called.

  “This is the resurrection. I’ve written a play.” As she did not hail this with a bravo, Mike’s heart sank. “I’d like to read it to you,” he said timidly.

  “Come up tonight,” she said. “How about dinner?”

  That was in the morning, and the rest of the day passed like a century in a mortuary. To pass the time he took a long walk, and since a blizzard was beginning to blow up, he arrived with a purple nose and frostbitten fingers.

  At dinner they chatted like long-separated school chums who had been living in different hemispheres.

  They had their coffee and Courvoisier in the living-room. Then Nancy stretched on the couch and said, “Let’s hear the play.”

  She seemed to accept his genius indolently, but he was as pleased as though she had compared him to Shakespeare. Now the writing of his play seemed a man’s job rather than a gesture of unholy impudence. While he read she lay quiet, her face expressionless, and only once, when he made a particularly neat point, caught his eye. Finally it was over. They heard the hiss of burning wood, the wind in the airshaft, the distant hum of the traffic.

  After a time Nancy said, “It’s good, Mike. Some of it is very good.”

  He skipped to the couch, leaned over to kiss her. “Do you really think so?”

  She turned away, unwilling to accept the kiss until she had finished telling him what she thought of his work. He might not, after all had been said, still want to kiss her.

  “Take a drink first.” She gave him three fingers of brandy. “It’s a good play, Mike, except for two things. Two very important things. One is the way you solve the problem for your characters. You make it too easy.”

  “But the tragedy demands —”

  “Tragedy, my eye,” she interrupted. “You’ve given it a happy ending. No one wanted that woman to go on living. You killed her because it was convenient. You were afraid to face the bigger problem of keeping her alive.”

  Mike’s silence seemed significant. Actually he had nothing to say. Presently he became solemn and remarked, “It’s a good point. I’ll think about it. What else?”

  “The girl.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t believe her. She’s always right, always the victim. She hasn’t enough guts and evil to make her human.”

  “Perhaps you don’t understand that sort of woman. There are females without evil in their hearts.”

  “Down in their secret souls,” Nancy retorted, “all women are vipresses.”

  “Apparently you judge every other woman by your own limitations.”

  “Thanks for telling me what you really think of me, Mike.”

  “Listen; I know this woman. A small-town woman, pretty and poor, surrounded by snobs.”

  “I know that woman, too. We come from the same town, Mike.”

  “You never knew the people. You were shut away, protected from the problems of the sordid citizens, the rich girl living in your castle behind the stone wall.”

  Nancy stared into the fire. “Perhaps I can’t judge this play at all, Mike. Perhaps it’s too personal. I’m all tied up in prejudices. You ought to get someone else to read it.”

  It was then that Mike made a grotesque mistake: “Phyllis has read it and she thinks it’s absolutely true to life.”

  “She would.”

  “Don’t be a vipress, Nancy.”

  She neither spoke nor stirred. In her greens and reds and golds, with the big hoops in her ears, she was like one of those haughty, rebellious duchesses that Goya loved to paint. Mike lost his temper, screamed, called her an egotist and a snob. Furious because his anger seemed trivial beside her aloofness, he gathered up his things, thrust the play back into his brief case, stamped out into the hall for his hat, coat, scarf, and rubbers. As he let himself out he looked back at her. She sat in the same position, hunched before the fire, staring as if in a trance into the flames.

  Three days later she left for Florida. When the season was over, she drove to Mexico. Through Phyllis, who got the news from her aunt, he learned that Nancy had taken a year’s lease on a house in Taxco.

  She had been right about the play. Mike heard the same criticism from his wisest friends, and in April he began to rewrite it. While he was working he thought constantly of Nancy. He felt that some measure of gratitude was due her, but he could never humble himself before Nancy nor beg her forgiveness.

  In June he sold the play, and spent the summer making further changes. It opened on the thirteenth of September and was immediately a hit.

  Gilbert Jones headed the cast, and at the party after the opening Mike introduced him to Phyllis.

  When Mike saw them together on the dance floor, he was reminded of that New Year’s Eve when she had danced so recklessly with Johnnie Elder. Excitement colored her cheeks. Above the flimsy black stuff that veiled her shoulders she was like a painting on ivory. She wore black jet earrings, fine old ones set in gold, an inheritance from her grandmother.

  She and Gilbert Jones danced together, drank together, laughed, teased, flirted, and forgot that there were other people at the party. Behind them, like a shadow, hovered Fred Miller. He had caught his annual cold earlier than usual, and he blew his nose constantly.

  Every woman at the party envied Phyllis. Gilbert wore his good looks like an advertisement of superior masculinity.

  He was not a fine actor. He was too handsome to play any part as well as he played Gilbert Jones. In Mike’s play he was cast admirably as a vain and selfish bachelor who had been for years the lover of the heroine’s mother. Gil loathed the part and the play, but it was a distinguished production and he could not have afforded to turn it down. He fancied himself a romantic rogue and believed that he would come into his own if he ever found a lush, heroic, swashbuckling part. He had a theory which he argued tirelessly whenever he found a listener. This weary and cynical world, Gil said, longed for escape into romance; the great play of the century would be three acts of capes and boots, duels and balconies.

  While Mike’s play w
as in rehearsal, its press agent, needing copy, sent out a paragraph about Gilbert Jones’s quest for the perfect romantic role. It was a typical press-agent blunder, for Mike’s play, which he had been paid to exploit, was anything but romantic escapism. The paragraph, printed by dramatic editors too bored to be careful, bore fruit. Gil received a flood of manuscripts by writers who agreed that the theater would be saved by swashbuckling romance. Most of the plays were too amateurish to bear reading, but finally one came in that fitted all of Gil’s requirements. It was about the Cavaliers who settled in Maryland. A schoolteacher in Moline, Illinois, had written it.

  Not long after Mike’s play had opened and royalties were pouring in, Gil asked Mike to read the swashbuckling script. Mike read it and laughed. He had better use for his money than investment in that rose-garlanded tripe.

  One day Phyllis came to see Mike. She said that Mike was shortsighted and stubborn, and that in refusing to put money in Gil’s play he was losing the chance of his life.

  “It’s kind of you to be so interested in my career,” Mike teased, “but I happen to be making as much money as I need, and I’m not interested in the financial end of show business.”

  “But you love the theater,” she said with pretty reproach. “I’ve often heard you say it needs a shot in the arm. Here’s your chance, Mike, not only to make a fortune for yourself, but to do something really important for the theater.”

  “Since when have you become a patroness of the drama, Mrs. Miller?”

  Suddenly angry, she cried, “Why do you always call me Mrs. Miller? You know me well enough to use my first name.”

  “I know why you’re out procuring for the drama, Phyllis.”

  “But it’s a great play. People are so tired of realism. Life is hard enough nowadays, with war and taxes and all; nobody wants to be reminded of it in the theater. They want escape.”