Bright Young Things Read online

  “Good morning, miss,” she said in a singsong English accent. “I‧m Milly, your maid.”

  “Good morning.” Cordelia sank back into her pillows and let her eyelids drift shut. Heaps of sun-streaked hair fanned out around her head. The elements of her dream were fading, although she believed they involved John, and that John was dead, and that she was somehow or other being chased. Her dream self had been wearing the same peach satin slip that she was wearing xnow, except it had been ripped and torn.

  “Coffee?” the girl persisted.

  “Thank you.” Cracking her right eye, Cordelia regarded the girl, and an unpleasant possibility occurred to her. “Where do you sleep?”

  “On the second floor … over the kitchen.”

  Cordelia nodded, relieved, for that was far enough away that she might not notice, later in the evening, when her mistress tried to leave the house without her brother accompanying her. That was the source of the anxiety that fueled her dream, she supposed—every inch of her was determined to meet Thomas, or Thom, or whatever his name was, but she feared that if Charlie found out, then he would insist on coming along, and that wouldn‧t be nearly as much fun.

  “Good. I was only curious. You can put the coffee over there.”

  As the maid crossed the floor and put the tray down on a little table, Cordelia draped an arm over her face and thought she might drift off again … but a swift, explosive sound from somewhere on the property brought a harsh end to her languor.

  The sense of dread that had pervaded her dream now returned.

  “What was that?” she demanded.

  Milly‧s shoulders rose upward toward her neck as though she were frightened.

  Cordelia threw back the covers and fastened an oat-colored linen robe around her body. She descended the main stairs two at a time. As she rounded the final landing and came onto the final flight, she heard another explosion, louder this time and much closer. She knew that sound. It was the sound of a shotgun. She had heard it often when Uncle Jeb was trying to scare coyotes.

  She passed through the pocket doors, beneath a strange mounted animal head, and into the ballroom. The filmy curtains that covered the south wall billowed with the breeze blowing through the open French doors, over the waxed dance floor. Cordelia stepped onto the stone verandah, which was composed of several levels connected with switchback flights of stone steps, each one decorated with carved stone balustrades and statuary.

  Outside the light was bright and white. Her eyes adjusted, and then she saw her father wearing a thick terry cloth robe, from which black pajama pants emerged over loafer-style suede slippers. He stood near the edge of the terrace, his back turned to her, and his figure framed by the rolling blues and greens of Dogwood‧s acres, a shotgun cradled under his arm. A little farther behind him, under the protective shade of the stone arch, Elias Jones sat on a canvas folding chair, his face pointed toward the distance, his eyes obscured by the shadow his hat brim cast. Jones was holding on to the end of a wire, which snaked along the ground toward a contraption just in front of her father‧s right slipper.

  “Pull!” yelled Darius, and Jones‧s hand flinched, and then a circular object was launched from the contraption and went soaring past the lower levels of the terrace and over the south lawn. Cordelia watched as her father lifted the gun, swung its long shaft to follow the trajectory of the pale object, and fired. The object exploded, and its parts fell on the grass below.

  The air filled with mingling odors of citrus and sulfur. Relieved that the shooting was benign, Cordelia sighed—apparently loudly enough to get the two men‧s attention.

  “Cord!” her father exclaimed once he had turned and seen her standing on the threshold from the ballroom. She smiled and walked toward his outstretched arms. It was strange to see him like this, in the daylight—those bursts of white in his sandy hair looked more aged than elegant, and though his broad, tan face was still handsome, there was something puffy and middle-aged about the wear around his eye sockets. He rested his hand on the back of her head and gave her a squeeze.

  “Jones, what can we do?” he called out jokingly. “I go away for a few days, and now she‧s sleeping till noon, just like Charlie. Soon she‧ll be as bad as her brother, and then I‧ll have no one to leave my kingdom to.”

  Cordelia‧s eyes flickered toward Jones, briefly fearful that he would inform her father that she had in fact been out every night with her brother‧s entourage—although Darius had wanted her to be under Charlie‧s watchful eye, and so she had not technically done anything wrong. Then she remembered something else—how she had flirted yesterday on the green—and experienced something curious and for the first time. She‧d never before had a father to be protective of her and to frown on young men‧s intentions toward her, and suddenly she felt secretive about her interest in Thom and hoped that Darius hadn‧t heard of it.

  “Here,” Jones said, standing. “Take my seat, Miss Grey. I have things to see to, anyway.”

  “Yes, sit, my dear,” Darius said, and as Cordelia moved to the chair, he called after Jones: “Have them send us some fresh coffee, would you?”

  Jones did not acknowledge the request but simply closed the ballroom doors loudly as he left. Whether it was an accident or an expression of anger, Cordelia couldn‧t tell. Her eyes returned slowly toward her father, but his face showed no sign of perturbation, and when he spoke again, it was with such gentle affection that she decided he could not possibly know that she had told a young man—a stranger—to pick her up on the main road in only a few hours.

  “Toss me a few grapefruit, dear.” She followed the direction of his pointing finger, to the right side of her chair, and saw a crate full of pale yellow orbs. So that was the source of the citrus smell. She leaned over, took hold of a few, and threw them toward her father one by one.

  “Have you ever eaten grapefruit?” he asked as he caught the last of three.

  In movies she had sometimes seen svelte women eating half a grapefruit for breakfast, but she herself had never tasted one.

  “Lousy fruit. These come all the way from Florida.” Her father bent, placing the fruit in the contraption. “Ten dollars a crate.”

  “Ten dollars a …?” She couldn‧t believe he would use something that expensive for target practice, but she tried not to appear shocked.

  “Oh, don‧t worry, I won‧t bankrupt myself. I have a great excess of these because a special lady friend of mine was on the grapefruit diet. Never heard of that? It‧s when a woman eats grapefruit and melba toast for breakfast, grapefruit and olives for lunch, grapefruit and grapefruit for dinner.” He made a disgusted noise and spat. Then, as though he had just remembered the company, his brow rippled and he shot his daughter a sorrowful look. “You mustn‧t think that … this friend—that she could ever replace your mother. Dear Fanny.” He sighed. “How she would have loved this house. I only wish I‧d already made it, then, when I first knew her …” A storm passed through his features. “Then none of the bad things would have happened.”

  “You still love her?” Cordelia did not want to sound like it mattered to her, although of course it did. She had wondered that probably every day of her eighteen years.

  Darius closed his eyes, and some exquisite pain of long ago seemed to twist up the corners of his mouth. “Your mother had a very pure kind of beauty. She would have done anything I asked her. I was always pawning her things, borrowing from tomorrow to scrape by today. I thought I‧d live forever … I certainly thought she would.” When he opened his eyes, they looked particularly dark. “Yes, I still love her. But now I have you back, and it makes me feel I haven‧t lost her so completely.”

  Despite herself, Cordelia beamed. There was no way to reply to a statement as momentous as that, so she leaned forward and picked up the end of the wire that Jones had been holding on to. “Would you like me to …?”

  Her father grinned. “Thank you, dear. When I say ‘pull,’ you push that button.”

  “O
kay,” she said, leaning against the canvas back of the chair and crossing her long legs. Sleepiness was still blurring her at the edges somewhat, but it felt good to sit like this, with her father, before the day had shown her very much. The sun came out from behind a hazy cloud, making the steps below them and the lawns stretching out toward the orchards almost sparkle.

  “Anyway,” Darius went on, settling into a wide stance and propping the shotgun against his shoulder. “Florida is entirely crooked. You agree to a weekly shipment, and they won‧t let you out of it no matter how you scream and yell. So I have another four months of grapefruit, and no skinny broad around to eat them by the crate.” He shrugged indifferently. “Pull!”

  The sudden loudness of his voice startled her, but then she regained herself and pushed the button. The machine launched the grapefruit into the sky, and her father followed its trajectory with the body of the shotgun. He pulled the trigger. A shot rang out, echoing against the stone arcade, and far off over the lawn, the fruit exploded in the air. That smell—as though a whole book of matches had been set aflame and then put out with orange juice—rose up again. His nostrils growing wide, Darius inhaled.

  “Smells like America,” he said grandly. “As I was saying: Never invest in Florida. Can you remember that? It‧s a snake-infested swampland.”

  The only investment Cordelia had ever considered was a one-way ticket to New York City, but she nodded anyway. “Never invest in Florida,” she repeated.

  “It‧s like the Australia of the Union. Entirely inhabited by crooks.” He cleared his throat and reloaded the gun. Before the thought could even take form in her mind, he went on: “And I know I seem like a crook to you, but believe me, I‧m not like most of them. I do things honorably, and I‧m not a violent man. I provide wealthy people with harmless spirits, good ones, imported from Europe through our neighbors to the north and south, and I am paid handsomely for the risk I take doing so. But I am not a criminal, and sooner or later I will have amassed enough wealth that I‧ll be able to go entirely into legitimate business. So don‧t let anyone tell you your daddy is a criminal, all right?”

  Besides churchgoing busybodies, no one minded much how Darius Grey made his money, at least Cordelia didn‧t think so, and many others regarded him with a kind of awe. But she did not want him to know how fervently she‧d always read newspaper articles about him, so she only said, “All right.”

  “All right. Now, would you like to learn how to use this handsome piece of equipment?”

  “Me?” she asked, already rising and trying not to appear frightened.

  The shotgun was heavier in her hands than she had expected, and when she tried to lift it, she became clumsy. He had been right about it being handsome, though—burled wood sidings and gold inlay detail—and she almost wished that Thom could see her now, looking like an outlaw in the picturesque sunshine.

  “Like this,” Darius said, gesturing how she should hold it. “Put the end there, against your right shoulder. Now, when you‧re ready, call ‘pull.’ Watch where the target is going, but don‧t waste time, got it?”

  “Yes.” Cordelia mimicked his posture of a few seconds before: her stance wide, her shoulders braced, her gaze focused down the length of the gun. She listened to her father shuffle back across the stone, and took a deep breath as he yelled, “Pull!”

  She had to pull hard on the trigger, and barely noticed which way the yellow fruit went. The gun kicked back, and she couldn‧t help but gasp at the force with which it met her shoulder. Meanwhile, there was a great cawing of pigeons as they emerged from a large bush somewhat off to the left of the fallen grapefruits on the south lawn.

  Big brown eyes wide, she turned to her father. “That wasn‧t very good, was it?” she said.

  Darius laughed, and smiled his toothy, charming smile at her. “You like the truth straight without no chaser, don‧t you?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “It wasn‧t very good.” He winked and patted her shoulder. “But you‧ll learn. It takes practice. And I don‧t have anywhere to be—do you have anywhere to be?”

  The awful thought darted through her mind that he might be hinting at a certain road, where a certain young man was planning to meet her in not so many hours. Darius‧s smile was in place, however, and after a few seconds passed, she wondered if she wasn‧t being a little paranoid.

  And so she offered a simple “no.”

  “Well, then, let‧s see if we can teach you.”

  She didn‧t improve immediately, but by the time they got to the bottom of the crate, Cordelia had managed to blow a few grapefruits out of the sky. Jones had never sent their coffee, but her father was being so attentive, so diligent in his instructions, that she didn‧t want to risk the growing sense of camaraderie between them by bringing up an unpleasant observation. After a while, he set the rifle down and said, “I think you‧re ready to learn how to shoot a pistol.”

  So they took the remaining grapefruits and lined them up on a low, whitewashed wall by the turquoise pool, and he showed her how to load the six-shooter. It felt heavier in her hand than she had anticipated, and before she could reconsider, she heard herself say, “Have you ever … used one?”

  “Used?” he laughed. “I think I take your meaning. No, no, of course not—I told you, my business is not a violent one. And anyway, I am far too important to carry my own gun.”

  “Oh … of course.”

  By then she had become rather obsessed with shooting targets, and she wanted badly to show him what a quick learner she was. She assumed a solid stance, raised both arms, narrowed her eyes, and pulled the trigger. The first shot hit its target, exploding pink citrus all over the wall. But the next few were misses, and in the end she only managed to hit two. She turned toward her father, to see what he would say, but he wasn‧t even watching. A far-off look had come into his eyes, and he was gazing north.

  “That‧s enough, don‧t you think?” His tone had become low, almost weary. Her heart sank, and she wished that she could go back to a few minutes ago, when they had been joking and talking easily.

  She tried her best to smile, even though she was disappointed their first afternoon together was going to be cut short. “Yes—thank you for teaching me.”

  He put an arm around her shoulder and patted it. “You‧ve got a good eye. You‧ll make a fine shot soon.” Then he took the gun out of her hand, opened the chamber, and dropped the casings onto the pool deck. “You look sleepy, though. No more firearms practice when you‧re yawning like that.”

  “I wasn‧t yawning,” protested Cordelia, who had not thought she‧d shown any signs of fatigue—but he ignored her.

  “Aren‧t you sleeping all right? Isn‧t the bed comfortable?” he demanded as they began to walk back up the steps toward the house. “Whatever you need, just ask. I‧ll see that you get it.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” Cordelia‧s cheeks flushed. “But I‧m sleeping very well, thank you.”

  “Good! Good.” They had passed back through the white curtains and onto the vast dance floor, which, Cordelia realized for the first time, couldn‧t get much use in a house where most parties required guests to stay outdoors. “I hope I didn‧t bore you with talk of my business.” He paused, as if considering his words. The pocket doors were still open, and on the other side of the gleaming teak floor was the gloomy paneled space that had been her first glimpse of the house. “It‧s my hope you‧ll take an interest someday.”

  Cordelia‧s eyebrows shot upward with surprise. “I—I certainly would” was all she could think to say.

  “Good. In my business, you have to read people, and sometimes, you have to know when to let them go. An old associate, Duluth Hale, has been much on my mind these days. He was one of those I had to let go. He was a friend, and I let him get very close to my business, but he‧ll never be more than the personal bootlegger of middle-class college boys and the odd roadhouse.” Cordelia‧s brow furrowed, but she remained silent, listening. “He
seduced a socialite, and she married him to make her parents angry, and eventually they let him supply the White Cove Country Club, which they own, just so they wouldn‧t have to worry about her anymore.”

  “I read in a newspaper that you never go there—is that why?”

  Darius nodded.

  “Astrid and I went there for lunch yesterday. I‧m sorry—I wouldn‧t have gone if I‧d known.”

  “That‧s all right. Miss Donal is a very high-class young lady, and you should go wherever she takes you. The point is, you must be unsentimental and let go of deadweight, or else not kid yourself when one of your intimates cannot be trusted. You have that, I can tell—you know when to let go.”

  She swallowed and tried to look sincere and worthy of his compliments. It felt as though he‧d seen into her whole history—that he knew she had watched John Field flash by as she left Ohio, that she had stalked away from her oldest friend after a silly argument, the particulars of which she could not even quite remember. Her intention had never been to let go of deadweight, exactly—she had only done what she had to do—but then once she had, she‧d risen effortlessly. There was a sadness to this realization, but there was also the comfort of being so completely, so mysteriously understood.

  “Thank you.” Her voice was quiet, and this time she was voicing her gratitude for all he had given her, the many things great and small.

  “Now go put your head down, my dear,” he said. “You look like you might collapse from exhaustion. We are having dinner together as a family tonight. Six o‧clock. I‧ve had enough of you young people carousing without me.”

  “Oh, but …” Blood rushed to her face, and though she so wanted to tell her father that she would love to have family dinner, she felt that she must let nothing stop her from meeting Thom. “But I promised Astrid I would go to her mother‧s dinner party tonight.”