Prairie Nocturne Read online

  “Don’t think I wouldn’t give a year off my life to be there. Really, but no. You’ve told me yourself how swank those evenings are, and I’m only the voice teacher. That’s no leg up at all on the roost back here,” she spoke from experience.

  “You’re going to be there, depend on it,” he decreed. “I know somebody you can show up with, it’ll look just fine. Don’t be a scaredy-cat, Susan. I’m enough that for both of us.”

  Her spirits shot up at the sudden chance to hear him in front of people. “If you’re that sure. When?”

  “Before I know it, almost. Friday.”

  “You’ll knock the ears right off them, I know you will.”

  “There’s something else.” He measured out the words. “J.J.’s booking me and Cecil a tour. Across the pond.”

  “That’s wonderful,” she said, sick underneath.

  “One end of Europe to the other, what he tells me. He’s not saying so, but I expect he wants to break me in on big audiences where nobody in this country can hear. Can’t exactly blame him.”

  “How long?”

  “That’s the catch. Half a year. I hate it like blazes, but J.J. claims that’s what it takes to cover the ground, over across.”

  “That sounds right.” In that instant, Bristol, Cologne, Brest, the tens and dozens of provincial stages where she had toured, came alight in her memory like a stained-glass window; and the greater halls, the leading cities, would be thrown open to his voice. “You have to write me from everywhere or you’re in for it,” she tried to sound full of anticipation.

  “That’s a ways ahead yet. Friday, though—”

  “You’re right, that’s almost in sight. Down to business, you. We’ll put off that session to save you for the evening,” she made the decision a voice teacher had to. “You feel perfectly ready to sing at the musicale, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say perfectly. But do I want a chance to let the songs out, Godamighty, do I ever.”

  “Party bunches, those can be uncomfortably close quarters.”

  That produced a significant silence at his end of the phone line; one more instance when she had hit the nail on the head in the dark. “Funny you say that,” he mustered after a bit. “Let’s just say I’m not overly comfortable with these sassiety shindigs, but I can swallow them.”

  “Bigger crowds,” she said as if speculating. “You told me back at the Broadwater that having the music stand took care of the nerves you had about those.”

  “That could have been truer.”

  “Monty, wait, you aren’t still bothered by having to face a genuine audience, are you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Often?”

  “Just about always. Susan, I get myself by the scruff of the neck and make myself face those audiences, okay? Did it before, every damned time, and I have to figure I can again. Question for you now,” his voice warmed. “Do you ever let a poor beat-up singing pupil alone?”

  “In this case, not until he’s perfect. You’re within a spoonful or so.”

  “Right. Try several shovelfuls. Susan? It’s only been a few days and I already miss you like everything. Any hope for the patient, you think?”

  She responded as if he was not the only one who needed steadying. “Cures like this always take a while.”

  After the silence that followed he said he had better get going on his daily constitutional or Strivers Row would be sending a search party for him, she said she had absolute mountains of work to do, and they hung up. Both of them were wet-eyed.

  * * *

  J.J. boiled into her office the next day.

  “What’s this about our Harlem letters?” He flung down her message. “ ‘Problem’ with them, what kind of all of a sudden ‘problem’? The color of our stationery, maybe?”

  “Insufficient recognition.”

  “Say that again?”

  “The Harlem collection deserves—what do you call it when you want notice for Monty or one of your other performers—push?”

  “Push it till it smokes, if that’s what you want,” he responded, crinkled with puzzlement. “I can help you pitch it to the newspapers some, if that’s what you’re after, but—”

  “I have to wonder, J.J., if your sense of push is working the way it should these days.” She had spent nearly all night thinking this through, and even so she found herself desperately having to ad-lib it all. “Scooping Monty out of the country before you put him in front of a real audience, for instance.”

  For a moment the impatient manager went still but alert, as if figuring out the crossfire she had him in. Then he moved to the side of her desk, leaning in a bit to deliver each sentence piece by articulated piece. “All right, Miss Duff. Feel free to tell me my business then, why don’t you. Where would you book a colored singer who has every right to have the heebie-jeebies after what’s happened to him?”

  “Carnegie Hall. On November eleventh.”

  J.J. went back on his heels ever so slightly.

  “It would all fit,” Susan wouldn’t let him get in a word edgewise or otherwise, “the Harlem letters would have their fanfare at the Observance, your veterans would be there to be honored better late than never, Monty’s songs would be a natural, and Over There would gain push galore.”

  “You mean this? I don’t question that you want to do it, but can you?”

  “I know where the ears are located on those who can.”

  J.J. looked like a man who had been given a fast horse and a racetrack to go with it. His index finger came up and simply stood there, his mind so busy with her.

  “One thing,” she prompted.

  “Right. Have you spoken to Montgomery about this? Because I don’t want his hopes up and then—”

  “It should come from you. I haven’t said a peep to him about this.”

  * * *

  “I think it’s a leading idea,” Vandiver gave her notion his blessing at the planning session the next morning. “It does put us on a different footing with the Carnegie Hall people, however,” he informed the two of them across his desk with just enough chief executive sorrow at lack of perfection. “They take a radically different view”—he rubbed his thumb and fingertips together in the universal suggestive sign for money—“if it’s a performance rental rather than a benefit speaking event.”

  Susan sent her Well, then? gaze to the other person on her side of the desk. He returned her an appraising look, as though weighing where she fit in the Table of Elements. She’d felt vastly relieved when, for all she had heard about him from Wes, he walked into the office not seeming to know her from a potted plant. Even freshly shaved and pomaded, Phil Sherman had some of the grizzle of his redoubtable family line of generals and senators; he looked like he could take your head off in one bite.

  But he sounded as plummy as the runaway to Broadway that he was when he finally spoke up. “Maybe you missed your calling, Susan, if I may. Van puts the touch on all of us for the Observance every year, but it’s usually like going to church the second time in the same week. This has some ginger to it. Let’s count on our fingers first, though. One, you’re sure J.J. is game to book Monty into a show for our rather fancy but not that lucrative downtown benefit crowd? And two, Monty is thoroughly fit to be back onstage again?”

  “Absolutely, both of those.”

  “Then I’m in. Monty is an incredible talent, this could be a ripper of an event.” He shifted his gaze to Vandiver. “I’ll agree to be the producer if somebody with actual money will come up with the backing. I’m tapped out, Van—everything but my gold fillings is in Flo’s next show.”

  “We thought perhaps Major Williamson—”

  “I thought that’s what you thought.” He served them both a veteran backstager’s grin. “Serves Wes right for being out there with the cows instead of in here defending his back like a civilized man. He’ll be back in town when?”

  Two hours from now, Susan knew to the minute and also knew better than to say.
/>   “I’ll have Miss Cooper ring up his secretary and find out,” Vandiver took care of that. “So,” he delegated by habit, not skipping himself, “I’ll put a toe in the water with the Carnegie people. Susan, if you would be so good as to handle the speaking arrangements, work up the presentation of the Harlem letters, and so on. Phil, you’ll pull the rest of it together, bless you. Anything we’ve missed?”

  Sherman spread his hands. “That should cover it. All we need now is Wes, so we can clap him on the shoulder in congratulations on being the honorary chairman of the Observance and catch what falls out of his wallet at the same time.”

  Vandiver stepped out to instruct Miss Cooper, and Susan sat thinking ahead to Wes as she gazed out the window at the docked ships. As casually as an old flame, Phil murmured: “What time would you like me tonight?”

  She gave him a look barely short of a scalping.

  “Didn’t Monty get word to you yet?” he asked, furrowing up. “He put the arm on me to escort you to his musicale.”

  * * *

  Sunlight poured in the mullioned window, tendrils of vine shadowing onto her bedroom wall.

  Their breathing having barely settled down from the first time, he was increasingly aware of the warm cup of her hand, already urging him to hardness again. In most of his waking moments all summer he had wished for just such a scrimmage of desire, but she seemed to be ahead of him in every way. Wes could not actually have said who led whom to this, but Susan was performing like an Amazonian guide on a mission. The sun playing on the disgracefully mussed bedding, their entwined bodies made a memory duplicate of their 1919 spell together, but this time as if caught in the hot light of an explosion.

  He managed to pause long enough in what they were at to ask: “You’re supposedly where?”

  “Mmmh?” She had to think for a second what she had told Vandiver. “Oh. Carnegie Hall.”

  “You rate it.”

  * * *

  Afterward, the surprise on her this time, he took her to supper at the dining room of the Brevoort Hotel. Quite possibly on the basis, it looked like to Susan, that this was the nearest palace he could think of. The headwaiter fussed them into place, chanted Monsieur and Madame while enthroning them at the nicely placed table which one glance at the cut of Wes’s suit evidently had entitled them to. Something was whispered in Wes’s ear that made him nod gravely, menus were conferred on them, and then they, like the other dining couples, were by themselves in the sea of ice-white tables. Glancing around at the murmuring class that obviously frequented here, Susan wondered how far back in history the rule ran that as the caliber of the family name goes up, the velocity goes down. Wes could be counted on to be the exception.

  “Too bad Montana doesn’t have a seacoast,” he was saying as if something should be done about that. Running a finger rapidly down the seafood side of the menu, he chose clams, specifying à la crème.

  She ducked her head to the menu, not fully trusting her expression in front of a man whose version of eating fish on Friday was clams prepared in cream. “I’m hopelessly carnivorous.” In French probably better than Wes’s and the waiter’s combined, she ordered loin of lamb, cooked à point, s’il vous plaît. “Back home we never ate the little dickenses, you know, or maybe you don’t,” she rattled on to Wes to be saying something. “Mutton, yes. Religiously. So to speak.” She didn’t want to babble at this, but words were not the surest part of her at the moment.

  Wes felt around under the draping tablecloth and pulled out a champagne bottle. “Louis informs me the only available wine is on the order of glycerine, but this isn’t bad.” He poured the sparkling liquid in their waterglasses. Susan was constantly astonished at the hiding places of alcohol in the public venues of New York.

  While they sipped and maintained a patchwork conversation, she kept on questioning what she had done back there in the sunlit bedroom even though the answer always was that she’d had to. A holding action: Wes himself doubtless had employed such a maneuver sometime or other, in whatever manual of arms men resorted to. That he had to be held, until Monty’s opening note resounded at Carnegie Hall, was nobody’s fault but fate’s, she was quite sure. Well, not that sure, really. But at least she had herself sorted out about the afternoon’s particular declension of fond, which she was relieved to find was the one that wears itself out naturally. She had launched into their bout of mutual want as if driven to prove something, and while it no doubt could be said better in French, proof was there to take its turn when the bedsheets cooled. The afternoon with Wes had not changed anything but her pulse rate.

  The soup course was bestowed before she gave in to curiosity:

  “Versailles-on-the-Hudson, here—is this safe for you?”

  He realized that she didn’t know—how could she—that the snoops and tattlers of his and Merrinell’s set were universally at summer places yet; for the gilded ilk, October brought the social season back to New York as inexorably as the tides of Fundy reversed themselves. Across the next ten days or so the pair of them could cavort around and around the ankle of Manhattan if they so pleased, then suddenly the Puritans would land again. Rather than go into all that, Wes gestured around at the palatial roomful of couples. “We’re nicely hidden in plain sight here. Snowshoe rabbits in a drifted field.”

  But Susan said, as if she knew more than that about the nature of camouflage, “Won’t they pick us out by the pink of our eyes?”

  He was about to laugh and hoist his glass with the remark that pink champagne was more likely a dead giveaway in such circumstances, when she said: “Pink is the color of guilt, isn’t it?”

  Wes put his glass back down. “I’ve just hit town, so I’m running behind on the guilt issue.” Although, he caught himself at, he was staying conspicuously silent about his exegesis of Scotch Heaven. He gazed over at Susan to try to stroke away her mood. “I suppose we did heat up things to the color of blushes this afternoon. Just when I wanted to try to do better by you in one way, at least.” She leaned forward in listening attitude but tautly enough that he knew he needed to be on the mark with the phrasing of this. “Knowing you, I have to calculate that you’ll take yourself back to Helena as soon as you have Monty put right and the Observance out of the way.”

  “I ought to, yes.”

  “Don’t deprive us that way. Stay in New York. We’ve hardly been together at all this year. I don’t like the sound of ‘arrangements’ any better than I know you do, but something could be managed that would let you be on your own—take on pupils back here, why not—and we could just call it our way to be together.”

  “That’s a big step. If I were a certain someone, I’d call it a major step.”

  “That’s short of a yes. But I’ll take what I can get. I’ll break my back to set you up some way like that, Susan, if you’ll stay.”

  “I need some time to think about what all that would mean, Wes.”

  “Of course. Think it over from every direction of the compass, but I can’t see how you’d be worse off by trying me out on this.”

  The meals came.

  “Fair warning,” said Susan after an approving mouthful of lamb done just pink. “Your wife.” He went still. “Van is going to put the arm on you to coax her and her circle, he calls them, in on the Observance. He seems to think she hobnobs with the governor’s wife, among others. A slum relief committee together, is it, the Cardinal and some others thrown in?” Her face was perfectly straight.

  “You know how that is, committees make”—just in time he backed off from the cliff where the sign read “strange bedfellows.” Something like a chuckle came along with the realization that a conversation with Susan still was next thing to a blood sport. He could feel a stirring in his lately underused capacity of verbal thrust and parry. “Van knows how to turn a circle into a round number,” he polished that off. “I’ll see that Merrinell’s phalanx pitches in on the event, don’t worry.”

  “I wasn’t, particularly. Now I have a better surpris
e for you.”

  “Isn’t there a limit on them, in one calendar day?”

  “Monty’s first musicale, since.”

  “Already?”

  “And we’re going to it. We’re expected.”

  “Are we. When is this?”

  “Oh, around ten.”

  “Ten when?” Then it dawned on him, or whatever the noctural equivalent is. “Tonight?”

  “Of course tonight.”

  “I’ve been on a train practically forever, not to mention—” he did not have to cite their bedroom workout to have it active in both their awarenesses again. As Susan started to say something, he managed to beat her to it. “Of course I’ll come hear Monty, after everything the two of you have put into this summer. A musical interlude, just what the doctor ordered.” He sat back to compose himself for a moment. “I hope you’re not going to tell me next it’s at my house.”

  “Even J.J. wouldn’t pull anything like that, now would he. It’s what he calls ‘a Park Avenue do.’ Who did he tell me the people are, Baxters, Hatchers, Thatchers—voilà, Brewsters!”

  “Susan, this is pushing it. I do business with Howard Brewster, and Lord only knows who else like that will show up.”

  “Don’t fret, we’re not strolling in together. Phil Sherman is squiring me. You can make your appearance when you like, only don’t you dare miss any of the songs—Monty and I worked ourselves to the bone on them.”

  “That Phil. I’m going to have to keep an eye on him.”

  “Actually it was Monty’s idea. I still have never heard him sing in performance, you know.”

  “That’s purely silly,” he said as if just noticing that state of affairs. “Of course you need to be there, it’s only fair.” They both busied themselves with their food. When they were nearly done, Wes felt he should smooth this part of the evening away a bit more. “I’m sorry to have sprung that on you so quick, about wanting you to stay. Forgive me that, all right?”

  “All is forgive,” Susan resorted to a comic-tragic accent that could have got her hired on the spot at the Brevoort. She felt a last genuine pang for Wes, and what might have been if they had dined together here when she was in her Village days and he was unattached, but left that for the diary page to handle and went to fix her face for Monty’s musicale.